An Unsettled Conquest

The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia

Geoffrey Plank

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780812218695
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812207101
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The former French colony of Acadia—permanently renamed Nova Scotia by the British when they began an ambitious occupation of the territory in 1710—witnessed one of the bitterest struggles in the British empire. Whereas in its other North American colonies Britain assumed it could garner the sympathies of fellow Europeans against the native peoples, in Nova Scotia nothing was further from the truth. The Mi'kmaq, the native local population, and the Acadians, descendants of the original French settlers, had coexisted for more than a hundred years prior to the British conquest, and their friendships, family ties, common Catholic religion, and commercial relationships proved resistant to British-enforced change. Unable to seize satisfactory political control over the region, despite numerous efforts at separating the Acadians and Mi'kmaq, the authorities took drastic steps in the 1750s, forcibly deporting the Acadians to other British colonies and systematically decimating the remaining native population.The story of the removal of the Acadians, some of whose descendants are the Cajuns of Louisiana, and the subsequent oppression of the Mi'kmaq has never been completely told. In this first comprehensive history of the events leading up to the ultimate break-up of Nova Scotian society, Geoffrey Plank skillfully unravels the complex relationships of all of the groups involved, establishing the strong bonds between the Mi'kmaq and Acadians as well as the frustration of the British administrators that led to the Acadian removal, culminating in one of the most infamous events in North American history.

Chapter One

New England and Acadia

The Region and Its Peoples, 1689–1704

IN the spring of 1690, when Acadia was still part of the French Empire and Annapolis Royal was still known by its original name, “Port Royal,” a volunteer army from Massachusetts attacked. Some of the soldiers and officers who participated in the expedition were familiar with the Acadian village because they had visited before in friendlier times. Indeed one of them, John Nelson, had long worked as a merchant in Acadia and still maintained a warehouse in the village of Port Royal.¹ The military action marked the climax of a period of steadily worsening relations between the New Englanders and the French imperial authorities, and it helped inaugurate a new pattern of relations in the Bay of Fundy region.

From 1689 onward, warfare between the English and French Empires increasingly disrupted regional patterns of trade, diplomacy, and social interaction. The outcome and consequences of the New Englanders’ siege indicate many ways in which the politics of the region was about to change. Nonetheless, old habits died hard and, in addition to providing evidence of change, the events of 1690 also reveal much about the ways the peoples of the region interacted earlier in the seventeenth century.

The period from 1689 through 1704 was a time of transition in the lands surrounding the Bay of Fundy. Large-scale imperial affairs affected regional politics more directly, but the local peoples—the Acadians, the Mi’kmaq, Acadia’s colonial officials, and the New Englanders—retained a great deal of autonomy in conducting their relations. The authorities in New England, in particular, shaped their policy toward Acadia without specific direction from London.

The seizure of Port Royal in 1690 represented New England’s most concerted effort to participate on the English side in the Anglo-French war that had begun in Europe in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution in 1688. That war began in part because France supported James II, the deposed Catholic king of England. Therefore, especially in the early years of the conflict, many of the English interpreted the struggle as a battle for the crown and believed that several elements of the English polity that had been affected by the recent revolution, including the balance of power between the king and parliament and the religious settlement in England, would be jeopardized if France won the war.²

Many colonists had similar fears. Prior to his overthrow, James II had consolidated English colonial government from Maine to New Jersey within a unitary “Dominion of New England.” He and his appointees within the Dominion government had abolished several colonial assemblies and directed the colonists in New England to accept and support the activities of the Church of England. The Glorious Revolution resulted in the overthrow of the Dominion in 1689, and cast into question the legitimacy of all the English colonial administrations, whether they had survived the upheavals of the revolution or not.³ A French victory in the ensuing war might have overturned the revolutionary settlement in America as well as in England, and many colonists concluded that the outcome of the imperial conflict would determine the fundamental structure of their religious and political lives.

Nonetheless, to understand the actions of the New Englanders in the Bay of Fundy region it is not enough to place them in a transatlantic imperial context. England’s newly installed king and queen, William and Mary, had not yet decided to grant legitimacy to the new colonial administrations in New England that had been established as the result of a local uprising in the spring of 1689. Partly as a result, until 1691 the provisional government of Massachusetts met only silence when it asked the authorities in England for permission to take military action against the French. The New Englanders were left to pursue their own strategies, and therefore their actions often reflected regional and local concerns.

The complex regional dimension of the conflict revealed itself in the results of the siege of Port Royal. The New Englanders succeeded in taking the French fort, but almost immediately thereafter the project collapsed in apparent disarray. While ostensibly maintaining that they wanted to hold Acadia, the New Englanders plundered the countryside and alienated the local people. Then they left the province unguarded, and within weeks the French military returned. The project failed in large part because the men who organized the campaign differed in their aims. Some of the promoters of the expedition wanted to lay the groundwork for profitable postwar relations with the Mi’kmaq and the Acadians, while others sought only to punish them for their alleged complicity in recent attacks against New England. This disagreement reflected rifts in New England society. Religious, economic, and cultural constituencies within the colonies struggled with each other over the direction of intercolonial relations, and one result of their disagreements was a pattern of abrupt changes in policy, most dramatically reflected in 1690 by the abandonment of Port Royal.

This chapter examines cross cultural relations in the Bay of Fundy region from the 1690 expedition through the turn of the eighteenth century. A complex web of relations, marked by both animosity and interdependence, had long linked the peoples of Acadia with each other and with New England and New France. Tensions had been building in the region since the 1670s, but many aspects of the Mi’kmaq/Acadian/New Englander relationship had their origins in even earlier times. Indeed, the unique way the Mi’kmaq interacted with European colonists was derived in part from their collective experience in the sixteenth century, when fishermen from several European nations first visited their shores.

The period from 1690 through 1704 marked the end of an era of uneasy accommodation. The Mi’kmaq and the French colonial administration were increasingly antagonistic to the presence of New England fishing vessels and merchant ships in Acadia’s waters. The New Englanders responded angrily to the new restrictions, but rather than simply wishing to oust the French government and conquer Acadia, especially after 1690 most New England colonists wanted to hold the peoples of Acadia at an ever-greater distance. Growing hostilities and a gradual escalation of violence, informed in part by moralistic Puritan doctrines of warfare, drove the peoples of the region apart. The period from 1690 through 1704 was the last time that New Englanders acted independently in formulating their policy toward Acadia, and in contrast to later periods, when other groups of English-speakers were involved in the relevant debates, the New Englanders could not sustain any long-term effort to conquer Acadia and made no effort to incorporate its peoples into the life of the English Empire.

On May 9, 1690, seven hundred New Englanders in warships and transports arrived at Port Royal, the French colonial capital of Acadia.⁴ The next morning, using a local Catholic priest as an intermediary, Sir William Phips, commander of the New England expedition, entered into negotiations with Louis-Alexandre des Friches de Meneval, the governor of Acadia, and the two men quickly came to terms on a capitulation agreement. Meneval surrendered himself, his fort, and his garrison into the New Englander’s custody. Though Phips refused to provide written guarantees, he orally agreed to allow the surrendering troops to march out of their fort fully armed, and to arrange for their transportation to Québec. He also promised to allow the local Acadian villagers to remain in their homes and continue to practice the Catholic faith. But the situation deteriorated within minutes of the conclusion of the negotiations. Brawls erupted between the men of the two armies, and soon the New Englanders decided to disarm the garrison and take the officers and troops into custody. Some of the French soldiers would be imprisoned in Boston for years.⁵ Soon thereafter the New England soldiers received permission to loot. In a systematic operation they fanned out across the countryside, robbed the local farmers’ houses, killed livestock, and dug up gardens. They stripped and destroyed the major buildings in the fort and showed particular enthusiasm in desecrating the chapel. Eventually they pooled their plunder and divided the proceeds.

After the New Englanders began destroying the local farmsteads, Phips ordered the French-speaking inhabitants of Port Royal to swear allegiance to King William and Queen Mary. According to the official report of the proceedings they complied happily, “making great acclamations and rejoicings.”⁶ If there is truth to this description of the Acadians’ reaction, their happiness probably reflected relief. Though the looting continued after the villagers had sworn allegiance to the English monarchs, the tender of the oath was accompanied by a promise that the violence would end.⁷ Phips also asked the Acadians to choose their own leaders. The inhabitants of Port Royal selected an officer of the old French garrison, Charles La Tourasse, to serve as the “president” of a new governing council, and six prominent Acadians to round out the council and take the title of “magistrate.” Phips instructed the new president and magistrates to obtain oaths of allegiance from Acadians living in outlying regions, and to disarm and arrest any “Frenchmen” whom they identified as “enemies of the English Crown.”⁸ Then the New England soldiers returned to work stripping the village and demolishing the fort, and when they had finished Phips departed with his fleet, leaving no garrison behind.

After Phips left, none of the residents of Acadia were willing to fight for the interests of New England. La Tourasse immediately petitioned the French imperial authorities to reappoint him as one of their own.⁹ His wish was granted. A few days after the New Englanders left, a French officer arrived with five soldiers, took down the English flag, and reclaimed Port Royal on behalf of France, without facing any local resistance. By the summer of 1691 the colony had a new French governor, Joseph Robinau de Villebon.¹⁰ Villebon directed the repair of the fort at Port Royal and placed a small garrison there, but he established his base of operations across the Bay of Fundy on the St. John River in present-day New Brunswick. He did so not to facilitate the concerns of government among the Acadians—as late as 1697 only eight Acadian families lived on the St. John—but because the location served him strategically in the ongoing war against New England.¹¹

Opponents of the Massachusetts government cited this sequence of events as proof that the New Englanders were unfit to govern themselves, to say nothing of a conquered colony. The temporary seizure of Port Royal had cost a great deal of money and achieved almost nothing.¹² Prior to the expedition the Massachusetts authorities had claimed that they intended to conquer and retain Acadia, but after the fall of Port Royal the army’s actions seemed poorly designed for achieving that result. The soldiers and officers had antagonized the local people and then abandoned them, without making any substantial effort to supervise their activities in the future.

Unquestionably there was incompetence in the way the campaign had been carried out. The entire project had been planned in haste and its leaders may have been overly optimistic. Not only did they plan to conquer Acadia, they also intended to take the larger French settlements on the St. Lawrence River later in the year. Before the fleet left Boston one supporter of the campaign argued that the “great part of the French people,” both in Acadia and along the St. Lawrence, would welcome the New Englanders as liberators.¹³ Such hopeful expectations may have led the some of the expedition’s commanders to misinterpret the Acadians’ readiness to swear allegiance to William and Mary, and to place excessive trust in the villagers’ chosen leaders.¹⁴ But the larger problem facing the New Englanders was that they did not agree among themselves on their aims. The men who had taken the most prominent role in garnering political support for the military campaign were merchants and fishermen with longstanding connections to Acadia. Though they had wanted to oust the French colonial government, these men had long enjoyed profitable relations with the Acadians and the local Algonkian peoples, and they hoped that their profits would increase after the inhabitants of the region formally acquired the status of English subjects. But other participants only wanted vengeance against the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq. They had no interest in maintaining good relations with them, and indeed many of them did not want to grant the Catholic Acadians or the Mi’kmaq admission to the English Empire.

Phips almost certainly belonged to the second group.¹⁵ He was from Maine, born in a rough-hewn house on the edge of what was then New England’s settlement frontier. Though he had few social graces and could barely read or write, through a combination of extraordinary ambition and luck he had risen to prominence in various circles within the English Empire. Phips had made a fortune as a privateer and treasure hunter in the Spanish Caribbean, and in 1687, after several years of searching, he found La Concepción, the most valuable shipwreck discovered in the seventeenth century. He brought such large quantities of precious metals from the ship back to his sponsors in England that according to some historians he altered the relative value of specie and currency in the kingdom. His rewards included a knighthood, granted by King James II in the summer of 1687, but in many ways Phips remained a child of New England’s backwoods.

As a native of eastern Maine he was conscious of the violent resistance Algonkian warriors had offered against the encroachments of New Englanders, and he associated all northern Algonkian peoples indirectly with the Acadians.¹⁶ In 1689 the fighting in Maine had escalated, and Algonkian warriors burned the New England settlement at Pemaquid. Phips, like most of his contemporaries, believed that the action had been timed to coincide with the start of the imperial war. Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin, a man born in France living among the Algonkians near Maine, figured prominently in the New Englanders’ thinking. Though Saint-Castin lived far from the centers of Acadian settlement, seventeenth-century New Englanders did not draw sharp distinctions between varieties of French colonists. Saint-Castin’s alleged participation in the northern Algonkian attack suggested that the “French” generally (a category that to New Englanders included the Acadians) were accomplices...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 New England and Acadia: The Region and Its Peoples
• 2 The British Arrive: The Conquest and Its Aftermath
• 3 Anglo-Mi’kmaq Relations, the French, and the Acadians
• 4 Anglo-Acadian Relations, the French, and the Mi’kmaq
• 5 Ile Royale, New England, Scotland, and Nova Scotia
• 6 The French, the Mi’kmaq, and the Collapse of the Provincial Government’s Plans
• 7 The Acadian Removal
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments