Conceived in Liberty (138 page)

The grand genocidal design for eradication of the Acadians from the land they had built was now under way. By a ruse the Acadian men were assembled together, and were then suddenly denounced as rebels by the authorities and taken prisoner without warning. All the land, the cattle, and the corn of the Acadian people were confiscated by the Crown: only ready cash and furniture could be removed from the province. All the Acadian villages and many farms and homes were burned and destroyed by the British troops, who also used every possible method to flush out any Acadians hiding in the woods. In Posiquid, the British troops arrogantly quartered themselves in a Roman Catholic church and took the precaution of ordering the Acadians to furnish them with provisions before rounding them up. To ensure submission, the young male prisoners were coercively separated from their families.

The massive expulsion of the Acadians began in early October 1755, and ship after ship, separating families and friends, conveyed the unfortunates
to all parts of the hemisphere. Shortly after the expulsion began, Lawrence received the king’s order
not
to molest the Acadians. Reasoning as the typical bureaucrat, Lawrence rationalized his disobeying the king’s order: once begun, even if in error, the expulsion process could not be reversed! By the end of the year, over six thousand Acadians were deported and their property confiscated or destroyed. A remnant remained hiding in the woods. Some of the ships were decimated by smallpox. The Acadians were shipped to Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, with Lawrence instructing their governors to dispose of the refugees in such a way as to prevent them from remaining together as a people. In some of the colonies, the younger Acadians were conscripted as indentured servants for a few months.

Typical of the cold treatment of the Acadians in the American colonies was that of South Carolina, where about a third of the Acadians were sent. They were immediately thrown into custody. Soon after, they were compulsorily dispersed, quotas being sent to all of the parishes of the colony. Finally they were given permission to go where they wished, the bulk of them deciding to migrate to French Canada.

Pennsylvania’s treatment of the hapless refugees was particularly ill-natured, and was capped by bitter attacks by Pennsylvania’s Governor Robert Hunter Morris and New Jersey’s Governor Jonathan Belcher (father of Nova Scotia’s pliable chief justice). Morris and Belcher raised the alarm about an imminent, giant subversive Roman Catholic conspiracy in the colonies’ midst—an unholy potential alliance of Acadians, Irish, and German Catholics. All these groups were attacked by the governors as “rebels and traitors”; besides, the colonies had “too many strangers” already. Only the generosity of the Quakers made the lot of the coercively dispersed Acadians at all tolerable.

New York led in seizing Acadian youth and forcing them into the bondage of indentured service. All the men were placed under arrest and dispersed by quota among the various districts in the province. Massachusetts received over one thousand Acadians, many filtering down through the wilderness from Nova Scotia. A tract of land was set aside for Acadians in Worcester, but when many began to move to Boston, the city’s selectmen expelled them to the outlying districts. Virginia expelled all of its Acadians, most of whom moved to French Louisiana.

Some Acadians who had left voluntarily for New Brunswick, made the mistake of asking for readmission to Acadia. Granted the permission, they were promptly placed in vassalage in Nova Scotia or deported to France and England. Also unfortunate were the fifteen hundred who ended up in supposedly hospitable Quebec. There, however, they were treated cruelly, robbed of their remaining possessions by the French commander, and allowed virtually no food. Many died from smallpox. After the British conquered
Quebec later in the war, many Acadians were seized and shipped as defeated prisoners of war to Halifax, where they were forced to work on the roads.

Only in Maryland, where Catholics were not unknown monsters, were the Acadians treated with courtesy and kindness in the Americas. They were voluntarily housed in private homes, and were able to find work and build homes in Baltimore.

Many Acadians had voluntarily emigrated to Prince Edward Island, and by 1755 four thousand former Acadians had settled there. Upon the final British capture of Louisbourg and Prince Edward, the British deported them all to France, two of the ships sinking with seven hundred Acadians aboard.

A few of the Acadians managed to hide successfully in the woods of Nova Scotia, and there they teamed up with dissident Indians to wage guerrilla war upon their tormentors. Two hundred of them were rounded up by January 1756 and shipped to South Carolina. The prisoners managed to take over the ship and sailed to Canada, where they became privateers for the French. After the war in America was over, however, the British captured this community and carried off the inhabitants as prisoners to Halifax.

Charles Lawrence’s defiance of the king’s order not to expel the Acadians went unpunished. Shortly afterward, war between England and France broke out officially, and Lawrence only seemed to be a premature patriot.

The tragedy of the poor Acadians was not over, even with the end of the war in America in 1760. By 1761, Jonathan Belcher, Jr., now lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, professed to miss the Acadians. Who could now repair the dikes? Yet when Acadians began to drift back to Nova Scotia, their very presence changed Belcher’s mind and he and the Council expelled them once again. Unfortunately, they were deported to Massachusetts, which refused to receive the five shiploads of Acadians and sent them back again.

By the end of 1755, then, the first phase of the French and Indian War had ended. British and Virginian attacks on Fort Duquesne had been smashed, as indeed had all the aggressive expeditions against the French except the campaign against Fort Beauséjour in New Brunswick, a victory followed by the expulsion of the entire peaceful French population of Nova Scotia. Despite determined and continued efforts by the French to preserve the peace, war between England and France officially broke out in the spring of 1756.

A new phase of the war had begun. England and France were now formally embarked on the Seven Years’ War, waged in Europe and in the overseas colonies in the East and the West. In America, Governor Shirley, in command of the English forces, concentrated on the northern frontier with New France in New York. The two main areas of conflict were on Lake Ontario in the west, and the Lake George-Lake Champlain area north of Albany. But Shirley had his troubles at the two English western forts of Oswego and Ontario, which were wracked by disease, lack of provisions, lack of money for soldiers’ pay, and near mutiny and mass desertions. Under Shirley, supplies to the forts had bogged down. Graft abounded in connection with the army’s contracts, especially in the circle of Shirley’s friends.

On the other side, the best new asset was the brilliant new commander in New France, the Marquis de Montcalm. In a sparkling maneuver, Montcalm captured and destroyed Fort Ontario and Fort Oswego in mid-August 1756. The British had now been driven from the entire Lake Ontario region, and this success now induced many Iroquois as well as other western
Indian tribes to join the French side. At about the same time, Shirley was replaced as commander of American forces by the Earl of Loudoun, who soon sent Shirley packing out of the country in disgrace. The Earl, however, did little better than Shirley. During the 1757 summer campaign, while the Earl was mobilizing a huge force of fifteen thousand men for an assault on Louisbourg (an assault that he had to abandon), Montcalm swept down, and captured and destroyed Fort William Henry, the English stronghold at the southern tip of Lake George.

Loudoun had his troubles on the American homefront as well. New Yorkers, particularly in New York City and Albany, strenuously objected to Loudoun’s compulsory quartering of English troops in their private homes. The Pennsylvania militia bill was finally driven through, but the New Jersey Assembly sturdily refused Loudoun’s demand that it draft one thousand men for the war effort. New Jersey was a colony with heavy Quaker influence, and it was not and would not be part of the theater of war. Thus self-interest, pacifist philosophy, and a natural instinct for liberty all combined to resist a draft. Instead, New Jersey offered a handsome bounty for voluntary enlistments. Quaker justices of the peace, indeed, used their position to persuade recruits not to join up and even imprisoned them on fictitious charges until their military outfits had gone. Desertions from the army were frequent and generally went unpunished.

In 1756 and 1757, the French, having repulsed the attacks of the English under the great generalship of Montcalm, were able to take the initiative and to win signal victories on Lake Ontario and on the upper New York frontier. In the meanwhile, a grave and fateful turn of affairs was under way in Britain itself. With the war, especially in America, going badly, England again faced the choice of retreating or redoubling its efforts. It chose charisma and William Pitt, the half-crazed arch warmonger of them all.

In malevolent contrast to his confreres, Pitt was the harbinger of a modern war leader. Other European statesmen were content to fight for limited objectives and to indulge in an unedifying but at least a not fatally destructive jockeying over the balance of power. But Pitt, in his appetite for power, plunder, and imperial glory, was satisfied with nothing less than total victory, pursued by total mobilization and an all-out drive to crush the enemy without quarter. His particular interest for many years had been the eradication of New France. Backed by the London merchants and financiers eager for conquest and plunder, and by the English masses swayed by his imperialistic demagogy, Pitt rode to power in late 1756. After some faltering in early 1757, Pitt finally agreed to add Cumberland’s desire to pursue the war in Europe to his own plans for colonial conquest. Pitt was then firmly ensconced as virtually absolute war dictator by July 1757. A chastened Newcastle stayed to lend his important support as prime minister.

From the time that Pitt and his unlimited war took hold, the doom of New France was strategically inevitable. Already critically short of provisions, the French in America were soon faced with an overwhelming— and ever-increasing—disadvantage in men and resources. All Montcalm could do—which he did superbly—was to hold on as long as he could and hope for peace to be made in Europe.

At the end of 1757, Loudoun was succeeded as commander-in-chief by General James Abercromby, and Pitt proceeded to mobilize overwhelming numbers against the French. The British were to pay for arms and ammunition, and partially pay the expenses of the colonial troops. Even so, during the summer campaign of 1758, the French won their last great victory. Led by Abercromby, a huge force of over six thousand regulars and nine thousand American troops marched on Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga), the French bastion at the southern tip of Lake Champlain. On July 8, the French met this giant force with only slightly more than three thousand men, but again cut the English force to ribbons. The event was greatly aided by the stupid generalship of Abercromby, who repeatedly hurled his unfortunate troops into volleys of frontal fire.

So large was the British force, however, that this proved but a temporary setback to their plans. In complete command of the sea, a British fleet of forty ships carrying a land force of over ten thousand men (the vast bulk of them British regulars) and a sea force of at least as many, meanwhile laid siege to Louisbourg. The French defenders, scarcely six thousand strong, were soon forced to capitulate. The British celebrated their victory by expelling the entire French population from Cape Breton Island. Shortly afterward, at the end of August, Colonel John Bradstreet, commanding a force of over three thousand, found little trouble in swamping a Fort Frontenac guarded by a hundred men. The loss of this key French fort on the northern side of Lake Ontario cut communications between Canada and the Ohio Valley.

General Abercromby was promptly removed from overall command, and succeeded by General Jeffery Amherst, the victor at Louisbourg. The obvious next step was the recapture of Fort Duquesne and thus of the Ohio Valley. Paving the way for this was an agreement with the Delaware and Shawnee Indians, who had been conducting raids on the Pennsylvania frontier. Cheated of their lands by the walking purchase, these Indians had been further scandalized by the Albany Convention Treaty of 1754. In this treaty, the Iroquis, vaguely and tenuously overlords of the Ohio Valley tribes, were easily persuaded to sign away to the British all the Ohio Valley lands, which were utterly remote from their control or genuine concern. Finally, under the influence of Israel Pemberton and the Quakers, Pennsylvania concluded a peace agreement with the Indians in October 1758, relinquishing Pennsylvania’s entire claim to the Ohio lands west of the Alleghenies. The road was now paved for General John Forbes’ expedition
against Fort Duquesne with a force of about six thousand men, the majority colonial militia. Again the French defenders were hopelessly outnumbered, having no more than one thousand men. Even though the Virginia route to Duquesne had already been built by Braddock, Forbes decided to hew a new road from Pennsylvania. The issue could not be in doubt, however, and at the end of November the retreating French destroyed Fort Duquesne. The fort was soon rebuilt by the British and fittingly renamed Fort Pitt.

With all the main French positions west and east captured—except for Fort Niagara—and enjoying absolute command of the sea, the British at the start of 1759 were in a firm position to strike into the Canadian heartland. Montcalm, commanding about ten thousand men and low on provisions, confronted the prospect of opposing five times that number, and knew that he could only concentrate his forces in the heartland and hope for a general peace. He was, however, beset by troubles both from a governor who had no conception of the danger and dreamed absurdly of retaking Lake Ontario and even Fort Pitt, and from a corrupt and venal statist bureaucracy in Canada.