When French Settlers Were the Victims of Ethnic Cleansing in North America

by John Mack Faragher

Mr. Faragher is Arthur Unobskey Professor of American History at Yale University. He is the author of A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland (W.W. Norton, 2005).

In December of 2003 the Canadian government announced that Governor-General Adrianne Clarkson, the Queen's representative in Canada, had signed a Royal Proclamation acknowledging responsibility for "the decision to deport the Acadian people" from the British province of Nova Scotia in 1755, and regretting the "tragic consequences."

The story of the Acadian deportation is not pretty. During the late summer and fall of that year, troops acting under the authority of colonial officials systematically rounded up approximately seven thousand French-speaking, Catholic Acadians. They were crowded into the holds of transport vessels and dispersed in small groups throughout the British North American colonies. Many families were separated, some never to meet again. Another eleven thousand Acadians escaped into the woods and spent years as homeless refugees. At least three thousand were captured and sent to France, while others took up arms in guerrilla resistance. The campaign against the Acadians, which lasted until the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, claimed thousands of lives. Acadian property was plundered, their communities torched, their lands seized. After the war many of the surviving Acadians returned to the Maritimes, but not to their old farms on the Bay of Fundy, which in the meantime had been granted to English-speaking, Protestant settlers. Most of the surviving Acadians created new communities in what would become the province of New Brunswick, while several hundred others migrated to French Louisiana and became the ancestors of today's Cajuns.

Why did this happen? What offense had the Acadians committed? They had refused to take an unconditional oath of allegiance, insisting on remaining neutral in the violent and destructive imperial warfare between the colonial empires of Great Britain and France. They were willing to swear loyalty to the British crown, they declared, but only with the inclusion of a condition: "that we will take up arms neither against his Britannic Majesty, nor against France, nor against any of their subjects or allies." British colonial authorities tactily agreed to those terms for nearly forty years, and the Acadians became known as "the neutral French." But in 1755, on the eve of what would prove to the climactic war with the French in North America, British authorities used Acadian neutrality as the pretext for their expulsion.

A dispatch written in August 1755 by an anonymous correspondent in Nova Scotia and published in the British colonial press suggested larger motives. It is worth quoting in full. "We are now upon a great and noble Scheme of sending the neutral French out of this Province, who have always been secret Enemies, and have encouraged our Savages to cut our Throats. If we effect their Expulsion, it will be one of the greatest Things that ever the English did in America; for by all the Accounts, that Part of the Country they possess, is as good Land as any in the World: In case therefore we could get some good English Farmers in their Room, this Province would abound with all Kinds of Provisions." This amounts to a frank acknowledgement that the expulsion of the Acadians was a classic episode of ethnic cleansing.

Compare the dispatch with the statement issued by a United Nations Commission of Experts, convened by the Secretary General in 1992 to investigate the violent conflict in the Balkans. "Ethnic cleansing," the commissioners concluded, "is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. To a large extent, it is carried out in the name of misguided nationalism, historic grievances, and a powerful driving sense of revenge. This purpose appears to be the occupation of territory to the exclusion of the purged group or groups." This definition could have been drawn from a study of the expulsion of the Acadians. Ethnic cleansing always has this dimension—one ethnic or religious group clearing away another by violent and terror-inspiring means, eager to seize their lands and possessions. Ethnic cleansing is nearly always a process of dispossession followed by repossession.

The Acadians were never compensated for the losses incurred in what they called le Grand Dérangement—the Great Upheaval. Nor was there any official acknowledgement that they had been wronged. The British government, as well as several generations of historians, defended their expulsion as a "cruel necessity" in the war against France. But like many modern ethnic cleansing operations, the one aimed at the Acadians was carried out by officers of the government in accordance with a carefully conceived plan that had been years in the making, and included the seizure and destruction of Acadian records and registers, the arrest and isolation of community leaders, and the separation of men from women and children.

The universal condemnation of ethnic cleansing by world opinion during the 1990s made it difficult to defend any longer what had been done to the Acadians. For more than a decade Acadian leaders sought an official apology from Queen Elizabeth. The Royal Proclamation issued at the end of 2003 was something of a compromise, not an apology exactly, but an acknowledgement of responsibility for the deportation. Euclide Chiasson, president of the Société Nationale de l'Acadie, which represents Acadian political and cultural groups throughout Canada, welcomed it nonetheless. "We finally have a document that recognizes the events surrounding that very sad part of our history," he told a press conference. Now, he said, "it's not only Acadian history, it's Canadian history."

It was also American history. But it would have been hard to know that from reading newspapers in the United States, where the Royal Proclamation got practically no coverage. In the United States the history of the Acadian expulsion is known—if known at all—through Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Evangeline," which impressed several generations of Americans with its tale of Acadian suffering and survival. But the poem offered no hint of the important role Americans played in the removal. We ought to know the story of le grand dérangement better, for colonial Americans were the most prominent players in the planning and execution of the ethnic cleansing of the Acadians.

The scheme was first proposed by William Shirley, the colonial governor of Massachusetts. It was authorized by the Nova Scotia Governor's Council, largely made up of men from Massachusetts. The campaign was executed by Yankee troops and Yankee officers, men fired by a burning hatred of the Catholic French. The Acadians were transported in Yankee vessels, with Yankee crews and captains, provisioned by Yankee merchants. And after the war the Acadian homeland was resettled by families from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. New Englanders were the principal schemers and beneficiaries Acadian removal, making this as much a part of the history of American expansion as the western movement of settlers beyond the Appalachians and across the Mississippi, a movement that also involved the removal of many peoples.

The British and Canadian government have now acknowledged their responsibility for the wrong done to the Acadians. The role of New Englanders as the perpetrators in this episode of ethnic cleansing suggests that Americans ought to reflect on the larger context of our national history.