Expulsion of the Acadians, or the Great Upheaval

Starting in 1755, the French-speaking Acadians were expelled from what’s now the Maritime provinces of Canada and northern Maine, with many of them eventually winding up in Louisiana. But there's much more nuance to the story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
have one of those topics that listeners have been asking

(00:21):
us to cover for our entire time hosting the show.
And when I say that, our list of listeners submitted
suggestions is more than twelve hundred topics long, this one
is number twenty eight on there, so one of the
very first things stuck on there this um. When I

(00:43):
was reading this, I was like, I don't understand what
that means, because it made me realize that I don't
do lists the way you do. They don't chronologically add
to the bottom. They just get shoved wherever. For me,
So I was like, what does twenty eight mean? Did
she waited by number of requits? My short list is
definitely stuff shoved wherever there's a whole, because I'll delete

(01:05):
something once I have have done the episode, and then
when I have another thing that goes onto the list,
it'll just go into that hole. But yeah, that particular list,
the most recent things are at the bottom. As a
side note, we've been getting a lot of questions lately
about how to suggest topics for that list, and the
answer is just dropping in an email. Yeah, you don't

(01:27):
need to do a ton of research. A couple of
sentences saying who the person is probably or what the
topic is probably helps, But like we we don't need
a ton of additional stuff besides that, just drop it
in an email anyway. So we are finally going to
talk about the expulsion of the Acadians, which Acadians you
refer to as Le Grand Dara or the Great Upheaval.

(01:50):
So the one sentence version of this is that starting
a seventeen fifty five, the British expelled the French speaking
Acadians from what's now the maritime ovinces of Canada and
northern Maine, particularly the area around Nova Scotia, and a
lot of them eventually wound up in Louisiana. So that
one sentence uh encapsulates the heart of a lot of

(02:13):
basic write ups about this, but it really leaves out
a lot, and it's really normal for quick write ups
to leave out some nuance. Like our episodes of this
show are generally thirty to forty minutes long, they don't
address every conceivable detail of a thing. But in working
on this, I found some of the gaps between the

(02:35):
quick write up in the more thorough treatment to be
particularly huge. Like the British. A lot of the British
with this, we're really colonists from Massachusetts. They technically, yes,
we're British, but that's not really what comes to mind
when somebody says that the British did something. Brief summaries
of all this also tend to mention the Megama basically

(02:59):
in passing just saying that they were the Acadians allies,
but colonial officials attitudes towards the Megama were a big
part of this too. So basically this was both a
lot worse and a lot more complicated than a lot
of the little one pagers on it really suggests, and
in a more dramatic way than I have usually encountered

(03:19):
when working on the show. The gap is large. Um So.
This region of northeastern North America that came to be
known as Acadia has been home to First Nations and
Native American peoples for thousands of years. This includes the
Algonquian speaking people's living in what's now Canada and northern Maine,
particularly the nations that established the Wabanaki Confederacy in about

(03:43):
sixteen forty, But in terms of European claims to this land,
that has been in dispute almost since the first Europeans arrived.
John Cabot claimed it for the English in four and
Jacques Cartier claimed it for the French in fifteen thirty four.
It's unclear who started calling this region Acadia and why.

(04:04):
In some accounts it was Giovanni di Veronzo in four,
and he was naming it after the pastoral poem Arcadia
by Jacobos and Nazarro and others, it came from a
suffix in the Megama language that means place of abundance.
And there are also some researchers who say that it
might really be both the Vernzo's Arcadia morphed into Acadia

(04:27):
and English or Acady and French, as Europeans started picking
up words from a language that was already being spoken
in the area. European fishers and trappers started visiting Northeast
North America long before establishing permanent colonies. Then, in sixteen
o three, King Henry the fourth of France gave Pierre
do Augua de Mont a monopoly over the region's fur

(04:49):
trade and named him Governor of arc D. The following year,
Samuel Champlain founded the colony of La Cadie, on an
island near the mouth of the Sanquix River today is
on the border between the US and Canada. This whole
effort did not go very well. Of the seventy nine
men who arrived on the island, sixty developed scurvy during

(05:10):
the first winter, and thirty five died. Some of the
survivors of that first winter went back to France, and
the rest moved to what they named Port Royal on
the Annapolis Basin and what's now Nova Scotia. Their hope
was that the winters would be milder there. Um That
probably did not help all that much, but this did

(05:32):
become one of the first permanent European settlements in North America.
More people started arriving from France in about sixteen ten,
and soon Akady was growing into a distinctly separate colony
from France's other colonial ventures in Northeast North America. A
trade jargon had already developed thanks to those earlier trappers

(05:54):
and fishers, and the jargon drew from French, Bosque and
Algonquian languages, as well as signs and gestures. The colony
also survived its earliest years thanks to the help of
the indigenous people in the area, particularly the Megama. The
Megama taught the colonists methods for hunting, fishing, and foraging,
and for using local natural resources, which helped the colonists

(06:16):
live through subsequent winters. The Megama also directly provided food
and other support. The Megama and the French colonists became
trading partners and allies, with the Megama calling on the
French to aid in their defense as early as sixteen
oh seven. Since the vast majority of the French colonists
were male, most of the marriages that took place in

(06:38):
the colony's earliest years were between frenchmen and Megama women.
English colonists from Virginia attacked the settlement at Port Royal
and destroyed the settlement in sixteen thirteen, but the colonists
survived and they rebuilt it. Many of the colonists who
arrived in Acadia in the sixteen twenties were from coastal France,
some of whom were fleeing unrest and violence that we're

(07:01):
going to circle back to in just a bit. They
brought with them the knowledge of how to drain swamps
and marshes to turn them into farmland, and this turned
out to be extremely useful around the Bay of Fundy,
which the French call Bay Fan says. The Bay of
Fundy is known for its dramatically high tides, and new
arrivals from France started building a system of dikes, channels,

(07:24):
and gates at various places around the bay. The water
would drain out of the marsh during low tide, and
then these dikes and gates would keep it from coming
back in during high tide. The system became known as aboiteau,
although originally that term described just the channels specifically. This
took an enormous amount of time consuming collective work, requiring

(07:47):
the labor of essentially everyone in the colony to build, maintain,
and expand that collective work has been cited as one
of the reasons why Acadian communities were particularly close knit,
and it took years before marsh would become a farmable land,
which obviously had its own ecological consequences. However, the end
result was extremely productive of fertile farmland all around the

(08:10):
bay in what's now Nova Scotia. And New Brunswick, as
well as in parts of Prince Edward Island in the
Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Acadians grew crops and planted orchards,
and their apples, in particular, became renowned all through northeastern
North America. In addition to making it possible for the
colony to really thrive, converting these wetlands into farmland meant

(08:32):
that the Acadians didn't have to clear a lot of
forests for that purpose. Over time, they turned roughly eight
thousand hectares of marsh into farmland. That's about thirty square
miles or eighty square kilometers, but they cut down only
two hundred hectares of forest that's less than one square
mile or two square kilometers. That meant that for the

(08:55):
most part, the Acadians were using land that other people weren't,
so they aren't making huge encroachments into Megama's territory to
try to build the colony. This is one of the
reasons that the relationship between the Megama and the Acadians
was generally one of mutual accommodation and trade rather than
becoming something a lot more adversarial. Another was that in

(09:18):
a lot of ways, the Acadians were left to their
own devices. Many but not all of them were devoutly Catholic,
and there were often Catholic missionaries who tried to convert
the Bingama population. Most of the Megama converted to Catholicism
in the first half of the seventeenth century, but the
Catholic Church as an institution just didn't have a lot
of power or influence over people's everyday lives in the colony,

(09:42):
and there wasn't a huge focus on forcing Megama religious
observances to conform to Catholic standards from Europe. Also, France
used a scenurial system to distribute land. Most people were
tenants who paid dues to the signior, who also allotted
the land, but in a Hedia this often was not
enforced very strictly. At some points, nobody was really collecting

(10:06):
the rent or enforcing the land titles at all. And
this was especially true as the colony repeatedly switched from
being under French to being under British control. We'll get
into the reasons for that shortly. It really went back
and forth between the two nations over and over, so
in a lot of ways, the colonists just had to

(10:26):
work things out for themselves without a lot of oversight
or bureaucracy or pressure from colonial officials to dramatically expand
the colony or change how they were dealing with their
indigenous neighbors. We should note though, at times there were
still violent conflicts between French colonists and indigenous people, including
the Megama, and as was the case in the rest

(10:48):
of the America's European introduced diseases were absolutely devastating to
the Megama and the other First Nations and Native American
people's in what is now Canada and Maine, especially in
the six teenth and seventeen centuries. So we mentioned at
the top of the episode that Britain and France had
each claimed this region long before any of these colonists arrived,

(11:10):
and disputes between these two nations played a central role
in the development of this colony. We will get to
that after a quick sponsor break. Years ago, we talked
about the frequency with which um England and France were

(11:32):
at war, and two different listeners made two different websites
to basically put in a year and find out whether
England and France were at were with each other uh.
In terms of what we were talking about today. A
place we can start with that is that from sixty
seven to sixte England and France were at war. A

(11:52):
lot of the fighting in this was playing out at
sea in Europe, and during this the predominantly honestant city
of LaRochelle sided with England, so France le siege to it.
That was one of the conflicts that drove people to
leave coastal France and go to North America instead. This
conflict spilled over into the colonies as well. English forces

(12:16):
started capturing French colonial territory, including Quebec in sixty nine.
Scottish colonists who arrived in Acadia during all of this
called it Nova Scotia or New Scotland. New France was
returned to French control two years later under the Treaty
of Saint germains on Ley. After this, France started trying
to build up the population of its colonies, including Acadia,

(12:39):
which had the potential to act as a buffer between
the rest of New France and the British colonies to
the south. There was during this wave of migration after
the sixteen seven to twenty nine war that people from
coastal France really started arriving in Acadia, and much larger
numbers than draining more of the marshes into farmland. A

(13:00):
lot of people arrived as indentured workers, so they were
paying for their passage with about five years of mandatory
contracted labor to the colony. Over time, the new arrivals
from Europe started including more women, so the number of
inner marriages between the colonists and the Megamas slowly started declining.
But Megamon knowledge and customs continued to influence the culture

(13:24):
of Acadia, which was also bringing in influence from other
newly arriving colonists, mostly from France, but also from England,
Ireland and Spain. Even as new colonists were arriving from France,
Acadia remained relatively isolated from Europe and from other French
colonies in North America. Instead, the Acadian's biggest trading partner

(13:44):
was Massachusetts, which the Acadians referred to as Nozamile's enemy
or our friends the enemy. Under the Treaty of Whitehall
in six six, also known as the Treaty of American Neutrality,
England and France agreed that if they went to war
quote their colonies in America should continue in peace and neutrality.

(14:05):
That did not last long, though. Two years later, England
allied with the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the
Austrian Habsburgs to go to war against France and what
was known as the War of the Grand Alliance or
the Nine Years War. The American arm of this war
was known as King William's War, fought between the French

(14:25):
colonies of Canada and the British colonies of New England
and each of their indigenous allies in the United States.
This is sometimes called the first of the French and
Indian Wars. On May nine, six nineties, Sir William Phipps
set sail from Boston for Acadia, arriving ten days later,
sacking Port Royal and demanding an oath of allegiance from

(14:47):
the French colonists. He tried to do the same in Quebec,
but was not successful there. Meanwhile, French colonists and their
allies attacked parts of New York and Massachusetts. As all
this was happening, Massachusetts increasingly saw the relationship between the
Acadians and the Megama as a threat. British colonists in

(15:08):
New England thought that the trade with the Acadians was
strengthening the Megama, who they saw as their enemy, and
that together the Megama and the Acadians were a danger
to British interests in the entirety of the Americas. So
in sixteen ninety six, Massachusetts outlawed its trade with Acadia.
The colony also passed legislation that empowered white citizens to

(15:30):
form companies to fight against the Megama, and they set
a bounty on Megama scalps. King William's War ended a
year later with the Treaty of Riswick in six seven
that returned Acadia to France, but once again this did
not last long. The War of the Spanish Succession, also
known as Queen Anne's War, started in seventeen o one,

(15:51):
and that lasted for the next twelve years. Even though
Massachusetts had outlawed trade with Acadia, that trade had continued
only gally, and by about seventeen o four there was
less and less tolerance for it from Massachusetts. One prominent
figure in this illicit trade was Scottish soldier Samuel Vetch,

(16:11):
who was able to scout out the area in New
France while on a diplomatic mission from Boston to Quebec.
He was ultimately put on trial and convicted for his
illegal trade with Acadia, but while he was in England
appealing his conviction, he started promoting the idea that England
should conquer New France entirely, including removing all the Acadians

(16:35):
from what the British were now calling Nova Scotia. Vet
wrote a lengthy treatise about all of this, which was
very well received in the court of Queen Anne. British
forces captured Port Royal again in seventeen ten. The British
changed its name to Annapolis Royal and Vetch became its
first governor. A year later, the Wabanaki Confederacy and some

(16:57):
Acadian allies lay siege to the fort at Annapolis Royal,
now called Fort am. The War of Spanish Succession ended
with the Treaty of You Trecked in seventeen thirteen. Under
this treaty, France seeded the peninsular part of Acadia, now
called Nova Scotia, to England. France retained other parts of Acadia,

(17:18):
including what's now New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Under
the Treaty of You Trecked, the Acadians had the option
to relocate to French territory or to be considered British subjects.
This kind of treaty language really wasn't unusual. When we've
talked about the history of the southwestern US, we have
often talked about similar provisions in the Treaty of Guadalupe

(17:40):
Hidago that ended the Mexican American War. Most recently, similar
treaty provisions were a big part of our episode on
the Dreyfus affair. So while some Acadians did move to
French territory after all of this and the immediate aftermath
of this war, it just wasn't a huge priority to
try to resettle everybody, really for totally practical reasons. It

(18:03):
wasn't like the British authorities could just flip a switch
and replace all of the French colonists with British ones.
And the British knew that their garrisons could not survive
the winter if everybody just abandoned this colony and all
the work that was associated with maintaining it. The Acadian
colonists were also the ones who knew how to operate
and maintain all these dikes and canals that had transformed

(18:26):
this region into fertile farmland, so at first, the French
speaking colonists who left Nova Scotia were primarily the ones
who had the closest ties to France or to the
French colonial government. Generally, though, most people just stayed put. However,
British authorities in Nova Scotia wanted assurance that these French

(18:47):
speaking Catholics would be loyal to Protestant Britain. Lieutenant Governor
Thomas Caufield, who was acting as governor while Vetch was
away from the colony, started trying to get the Acadian
leaders to sign an oath stating that they would maintain
quote a true allegiance to His Majesty King George as
long as they were in Lacka d or Nova Scotia.

(19:09):
The oath stated that they could leave at any time,
taking their household goods with them, so like these treaty
provisions about how the colonists could either move to French
territory or become British subjects, these kinds of loyalty oaths
were also pretty typical for the time, but this became
a huge sticking point for the Acadians. For the most part,

(19:31):
the Acadians who were remaining in Nova Scotia were willing
to sign a loyalty oath to Britain. They were not, though,
willing to take up arms against the French or against
their Megama or other indigenous allies. So for years British
authorities kept pressing Acadian representatives to sign an unconditional loyalty oath,

(19:53):
and for years the Acadians refused to do that. Governor
Richard Phillips arrived in Nova Scotia in seven teen twenty
and met with the Acadian representatives to press this issue
of the loyalty oath. At this point, tensions were escalating
between the British colonies and the Megama, and the Acadians
threatened to ally with the Megama, although they didn't ultimately

(20:14):
carry through with this threat in an official way. The
conflict between the New England Colonies and the Megama led
to an all out war between the British and the
Wabanaki Confederacy from seventeen twenty one to seventeen twenty five.
As that was happening, on August one, seventeen, Governor Phillips
issued a proclamation forbidding contact between the Acadians and the Megama.

(20:37):
By seventeen thirty, which was seventeen years after the Treaty
of you Trek, British authorities and Nova Scotia still had
not gotten the unconditional loyalty oath that they wanted, and
according to written accounts, the governor finally agreed to just
exempt the Acadians quote from bearing arms and fighting in
war against the French and the Indians, and the said

(21:00):
inhabitants have only accepted allegiance on the promise never to
take up arms. But while other people documented this conversation,
this was not a formal commitment that the governor made
to the colonists and writing. Even so, around this time
the British started referring to the Acadians as the neutral French,
and this verbal agreement started off a decade of at

(21:23):
least relative calm and prosperity for the colony and continued
cooperation between the colonists and the Magma. That changed when
you guessed it, England and France went to war again,
and we're going to talk about that. After we first
paused for a sponsor break, the War of the Austrian

(21:50):
Succession started in seventeen forty in North America. It became
known as King George's War, with British colonies and their
indigenous allies fighting French colonies and their allies from the
Wamanaki Confederacy. France had established a port and a fortress
at Louisbourg and Cape Breton Island, and that was to
replace the port that had lost under the Treaty of Utrecht.

(22:14):
Britain lay siege to this fort, capturing it in seventeen
forty five, and France considered this such a huge loss
that in the negotiations for the Treaty of a la
Chapelle in seventeen forty eight, France seated other territory to
get Louisbourg back. This war also renewed concerns about the
loyalty of the Acadians in both Nova Scotia and Massachusetts.

(22:37):
The Acadians generally had very large families and comparatively very
low infant mortality, so they easily outnumbered British colonists in
Nova Scotia. This also renewed fears that the Acadian trade
with the Megama was strengthening the Magma fighting force, who
the British regarded as an enemy. Governor William Shirley of
Massachusetts found these connections between the Acadians in the Megama

(23:00):
to be particularly threatening. He was convinced that the Acadians
were secretly still loyal to France, and that at any
moment they might ally with the Megama and wage war
against New England. And although most of the Acadians did
try to remain neutral, there were some who took up
arms to fight with France. There with one of its

(23:22):
first nation's allies. I just reinforced Shirley's whole idea that
all of the Acadians were a huge threat. On October
twenty one, seventeen forty seven, Shirley issued a proclamation saying
that any Acadians who remained loyal to Britain would be protected,
but anyone who colluded with England's enemies or assisted in

(23:44):
attacks on New England troops would be prosecuted as traitors.
This war ended in seventeen forty eight, and in seventeen
forty nine Britain started trying to boost its population in
Nova Scotia so the British colonists wouldn't keep being so
heavily outnumbered by the neutral French. At this point there
were about twelve thousand Acadians scattered around British territory, and

(24:07):
as the British population increased, some started to leave for
places that were under French control. This did not necessarily
go well for them, though, French officials resettled many of
them in forested areas that were totally unlike the land
that they knew how to work, and they didn't really
want to make unconditional loyalty oaths to France any more
than they had to Britain. Edward Cornwallis became Governor of

(24:30):
Nova Scotia in seventeen forty nine. Shortly after his arrival,
he established the city of Halifax. He violated a treaty
with the Megama to do this. A lot of what
he did, honestly was violating treaties with the Megama. This
fed into a war which was known as Father Le
Loutre's War, and that once again pitted Britain and France

(24:53):
against one another, each with their indigenous allies. Also, as
kind of a side note here, Cornwallis had been an
off sir in the British Army during the Jacobite Rising
of seventeen forty five, and a lot of the Scots
who were in Nova Scotia had shown up there after
the Highland clearances. So like these two relocations of people

(25:14):
are kind of connected together in a way that crosses
the whole Atlantic Ocean. During this war that Tracy just referenced,
England built Fort Lawrence in Nova Scotia and France built
Fort Beege right across the river in New Brunswick. Cornwallis
offered a bounty on Megama scalps, and some Acadians allied

(25:35):
with the Megama against the British. All of this bolstered
the opinion of Massachusetts Governor William Surely that the French
Neutrals in Nova Scotia were threatening the British colonies as
a whole. Cornwallis had also been tasked with securing the
Acadians unconditional loyalty, as so many other governors had tried

(25:56):
to do before him, But in seventeen fifty one, the
Massachusetts legisla Cher petitioned the king to do something different,
which was completely removed the Acadians from Nova Scotia. The
Crown did not take up this proposal. Cornwallis did not
succeed in getting an unconditional loyalty oath and then eventually,
in seventeen fifty four, Charles Lawrence was appointed governor of

(26:19):
Nova Scotia, and he and Shirley started working together to
actively plan to remove the Acadians. That year, yet another
war began between England and France, with their colonies in
North America once again going to war along with their
indigenous allies. This one is known as the French and
Indian War or the Seven Years War, even though it

(26:41):
actually lasted for at least nine years. It followed France's
expansion of its colonies into the Ohio River Valley, conflicting
with British expansion into the same region. A lot of
the wars that we've already talked about our groups together
collectively as the French and Indian Wars, but this one
specifically is also known the French and Indian War. So

(27:03):
even though the Acadians no longer outnumbered British colonists in
Nova Scotia during the Seven Years War, authorities in both
England and New England regarded them as a serious threat.
This idea that they were secretly French and we're going
to become traders was reinforced when Massachusetts troops under Colonel

(27:23):
John Winslow took Fort Beausejour and found about two hundred
and fifty Acadian militia there. At least some of these
were refugees who had taken shelter at the fort and
had been pressed into its defense. But to the Massachusetts force,
this was evidence that the Acadians as a whole, we're
just waiting for the right time to take up arms

(27:44):
and fight for France. Working with Governor Shirley of Massachusetts,
Governor Lawrence of Nova Scotia decided to deport all French
neutrals from the colony on July. In his words, the
plan was quote to divide them ang the colonies, where
they may be of some use, as most of them
are strong, healthy people. As they cannot easily collect themselves

(28:07):
together again, it will be out of their power to
do any mischief. On August nine, an anonymous person in
Halifax wrote quote, 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 affect their expulsion,

(28:29):
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. I like

(28:50):
how they give no credit to the people's knowledge, and
they're just like, the land is great, We'll go in
and do great, great things with it. Yeah, anonymous person
and Halifax, the land was already abound with all kinds
of provisions that the Acadians grew. Ye. Governor Shirley raised
a regiment to aid Governor Lawrence, later ordering them to

(29:13):
quote take an eye for an eye, in short, a
life for a life if the Acadians fought back. On
September five, seifty five, Colonel John Winslow, who was leading
this regiment, summoned all men from the region to Grand
pre Church, with men including boys ages ten and up.
Once they were gathered, he informed them that quote your

(29:35):
land and tenements, cattle of all kinds, and livestocks of
all sorts are forfeited to the Crown, with all other
your effects, savings, your money and household goods, and you
yourselves to be removed from this province. British regulars and
Massachusetts militia rounded up families at gunpoint and took them

(29:55):
to transports that had been hired from Boston, some of
which were really slaves ships. They surrounded churches during Sunday
services to capture everyone who was inside. They burned homes
and farms and settlements, and broke through the dikes so
that anybody who escaped would not have anything to return to.

(30:16):
This also meant that people had no way to support
or feed themselves before the transports actually set sails, so
a lot of the people who were being expelled were
malnourished before their journey even started. Some of the Acadians
fought back aggressively against all this. Joseph Broussarne, also known
as Basil, had been fighting against British incursions into Acadia

(30:38):
for decades. He and his brother Alexandra had become particularly
famous or infamous, depending on which side you were on
during Father la Lutre's War. After escaping from Fort Beausejour,
which the British had renamed Fort Cumberland, Basil harassed the
British around the Bay of Fundy from a small privateering
vessel avoiding explos for years. I read one account that

(31:03):
said that they escaped from the fort by digging their
way out with spoons and knives, but I could not
find that confirmed anywhere besides that one account. Regardless, it
seems like a pretty daring escape. Transports started leaving Nova
Scotia on October seventeen fifty five, and so by that
point some people had been on board the ships for weeks.

(31:23):
Troops had also not put any effort into keeping families together,
so in many cases people had family aboard other transports
that were bound for other colonies and they just never
saw them again. Since the whole idea was to break
up the Acadian population into small enough groups that they
would not be a threat, transports made multiple stops all

(31:44):
along the East coast, dropping off a few hundred people
at a time. Often local authorities had not been consulted
about any of this and had no way to house
or feed these people who were arriving with only what
they could carry. Thousands of people died during voyage or
shortly after arriving at their destination. They died due to starvation, disease,

(32:05):
and even drowning. Many who survived wound up being forced
into indentures to pay their way in a place that
they had not even wanted to go in the first place.
All this happened really without a lot of oversight from
the British government. In London. Governor Lawrence had written to
the Board of Trade about the issue of the Acadians,
and the Board had been kind of vague in its response.

(32:28):
Lawrence did not send another communication on the matter until
after he had started removing the Acadians. A letter from
Sir Thomas Robinson in London that recommended a more moderate
approach was also delayed in transit, and it got to
North America after the removal had already started. This first
phase of removal in seventeen fifty five involves less than

(32:50):
half of the Acadian population in British territory, but removals
and deportations continued throughout the Seven Years War, with Acadians
being dispersed through British terror tory or deported to France.
British forces captured Louisbourg in seventeen fifty eight and deported
about thirty one hundred Acadians, but an estimated sixteen hundred

(33:10):
forty nine died of drowning or disease. In seventeen sixty two,
the city of Boston turned away a transport that was
carrying about fifteen hundred Acadians, arguing that Massachusetts had already
absorbed enough of the neutral French people also fled in
the face of the removals, making their way to French
territory or taking refuge with the Megama or other indigenous people.

(33:33):
The Seven Years War ended with the Treaty of Paris
in the seventeen sixty three, and by that point an
estimated ten thousand of about fifteen thousand Acadians had been
removed from what's now Canada, but thousands of them had
died as a direct result of the removal, and many
of those who died were infants and children. It's unclear

(33:55):
how many of the Megama were killed during the Seven
Years War, but the deportation of the accade Medians and
the end of a French colonial presence in North America
affected them as well, since it meant that the Megama
lost a major trading partner and ally. Along with other
First Nations in the region, multiple bands of Megama signed
treaties with Britain in the seventeen sixties. Those are known

(34:16):
as the Halifax Treaties. Megamon efforts to have the terms
of those treaties enforced and respected have continued through to today. Yeah,
there were huge headlines about uh Megama efforts to keep
to have their fishing rights respected, like as recently as
last year, probably into this year. It's also outside the

(34:39):
scope of this podcast, but obviously like the Megama then
faced the same issues that the other Indigenous people of
Canada faced after Britain to control, including things like the
residential schools that we've talked about, all of those types
of things. After the war was over, Acadians all over
British territory and in France started petitioning for permission to

(35:01):
return to Nova Scotia, and some of them ultimately did,
but by the time they arrived, colonists from New England,
including loyalists who had supported Britain during the American Revolution,
had mostly taken over all the Acadian farmland. Returning Acadians
generally wound up with less advantageous, less further land that
was farther away from the Bay of Fundy. Acadians also

(35:25):
continued to migrate from the places they'd been removed to
or deported to after the war was over. They were
trying to reunite with others or just find a place
to settle into the early nineteenth century. If you look
at a map of the Acadian removal and the migrations
that followed, there are a lot of arrows leading from
Nova Scotia down the East coast to the Caribbean, South

(35:46):
America and the Falkland Islands, and back and forth across
the Atlantic Ocean. The most well known population of Acadian
descendants today is the Cajun population of Louisiana. Louisiana had
been under French control until seventeen sixty two, and it
still had a large population of French speakers, although by

(36:06):
the time most of the Acadians started arriving there, it
had become Spanish territory. Most Acadians arrived in Louisiana between
seventeen sixty five and seventeen eighty five. That included about
sixteen hundred people who arrived from France after being deported
to France. So while there were some people that like
made their way through the continental US to get to Louisiana,

(36:29):
a lot of people had traveled across Ocean's first Beausol
and his family eventually arrived in Louisiana, and they were
welcomed as heroes there. Today, the Cajun ethnic group includes
people who were descended from the Acadians, as well as
people from other immigrant groups who assimilated with the Cajuns
in and around Louisiana after arriving there. The Acadian population

(36:53):
of Canada's maritime provinces in northern Maine didn't start to
approach its pre removal levels until the teen thirties and forties.
The idea of Acadian as an ethnic identity really started
to coalesce around this time, with more Acadians entering politics
to represent Acadian interests, and in eighteen forty seven, poet

(37:15):
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow introduced the Acadian deportation so a lot
of the rest of the English speaking world who did
not already know about it through his long poem Evangeline.
This poem was incredibly popular and also spread the awareness
of this beyond the English speaking world, as it was
translated into at least thirteen different languages within about a

(37:37):
decade of its first being published. They were also multiple
fully illustrated editions of this poem, although in general they
were illustrated by people who had never been to Acadia
and they didn't really know what it looked like or
how Acadians had historically dressed. They sort of created an
image of Acadia that was not really like that. Evangeline

(38:02):
tells the story of two lovers separated by the deportation.
It is very romanticized, and as you probably guess from
Tracy describing the visual depictions, it was also not in
terms of wording, particularly historically accurate. But it did really
establish the idea of who the Acadians were in the
popular consciousness in places that had not been directly involved.

(38:25):
It was also adapted into plays and films, including the
nineteen thirteen Canadian film of Angeline, which is cited as
Canada's first feature length film. There are also multiple monuments
to the Acadian deportation that incorporate a statue of the
character of Evangeline, and streets, squares and other landmarks are
made for her. During the Acadian expulsion, Acadian's face discrimination

(38:48):
and persecution and hardship really regardless of where they were taken,
and that really continued for Acadian communities in the Northeast,
and for Cajun communities in Louisiana and the generations that
followed this, both Cajuns and Acadians faced negative stereotypes, including
the idea that they were ignorant, and then this was
compounded by compulsory education laws, including in both Louisiana and Maine,

(39:14):
that specified that schools be taught only in English when
most of the children in these communities spoke French. More
recent efforts to encourage French speaking and bilingual education in
these communities have unfortunately also focused more on French as
it would probably be spoken in Paris, rather than French

(39:35):
as it is spoken in Acadian and Cajun communities, which
are like to distinctly different dialects of French. Yeah, I
definitely have known Canadian friends who have referenced um their
Parisian French class by that wording like it is it

(39:55):
is not our colloquial French's Parisian French. In the United States,
some of the perception of Cajun started to shift after
World War Two. About twenty five thousand Cajuns in the
US served in either the military or the civil service,
including as translators. This led to increasing awareness of Cajun
cuisine and culture, and although there were still plenty of stereotypes,

(40:18):
the level of stigma decreased somewhat. In nineteen fifty five,
the first feature film was produced that had an Acadian script,
and that was called Lesaboto. On December nine, two thousand three,
Queen Elizabeth the Second issued a royal proclamation marking July
twenty of each year starting in two thousand five as
quote a day of commemoration of the Great Upheaval. This

(40:41):
statement acknowledged that thousands of people had died, but it
was not an apology, and it noted that the proclamation
did not quote constitute a recognition of legal or financial
responsibility by the Crown. This followed more than a decade
of campaigning spearheaded by Warren parent of Louisian uh. Tracy
did not find any real acknowledgement from Massachusetts in any

(41:04):
of her research. No, and the idea that Massachusetts was
a big part of this something I found fairly late
in my research and I was like, what, Jim, excuse um,
I'm so glad you did this one. Thanks. I'm glad

(41:24):
it took such a long time. It's a lot to
unravel because there are one cajillion conflicts, some of which
all have the same name, and there hasn't always been
the most honest accounting of how things played out, which
I know when I have tried to look at this
history before, I have gotten very frustrated by it. Just

(41:46):
been like I'm closing this book and moving on. So
it's tricky. Yeah, we'll probably talk more about that on
Friday till then. Have listener mail from Bethany. Bethany wrote, Hi,
Holley and Trace. I just wanted to pop in and
say hi. I live in central North Carolina and I
passed kud Zoo literally every day. I'm so desensitized to it.

(42:09):
I didn't realize how much I see every day until
listening to this episode. I was telling my husband about
the episode. He's from Michigan and the villainous reputation, and
he agreed that one of the first things they heard
about when they came here were the horrors of kud
Zoo and why it should be avoided. He said there
could be dead bodies in there. I'm intrigued by all

(42:31):
the positive uses for kud Zoo and keep mentioning tidbits
of knowledge to my co workers and family. They're all
surprised that there is some good in kud Zoo. I
even have kudzoo bugs occasionally. I live in a small
subdivision that backs up to the woods, so every once
in a while the back porch columns are covered in
the diny little guys. We only moved into this house
in January, and I had to google these tiny critters,

(42:54):
even though I only moved a few miles from my
previous home. Tracy, I think I live in the same
general area where you grew up. I also do not
like the taste of fresh green beans and prefer canned
any day, although I now suffer through them coated in
balsamic vinegar or some other sauce in an effort to
get my kid out to eat them. Bethany, thank you

(43:16):
so much, Bethany. For folks who were like, what is
she talking about with the green beans, I think it
was when we did our episode on canning, I talked
about how we grew and home cans pretty much all
of our vegetables when I was a kid um and
I consequently overwhelmingly the green beans that I ate were canned,
and when I was presented with fresh green beans during

(43:39):
the growing season. I was like, I don't this does
not taste right to me. I do not like it.
I would say, since doing that episode, I have found
some creative ways to eat fresh green beans. But if
I'm still just gonna have regular green beans as a
side dish, I probably wanted to come out of a
can fascinating. So thank you again Bethany for sending that email.

(44:02):
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(44:28):
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