The Acadian Exiles

Newspaper
Year
1888
Month
10
Day
10
Article Title
The Acadian Exiles
Author
----
Page Number
3
Article Type
Language
Article Contents
THE ACADIAN EXILES It is unnecessary to repeat the history of the dark days of the old Acadians who had made of the Nova Scotia wilderness the fairest spot which labor, love, piety and content every transformed from trackless wild. It is known by every intelligent person. For a century they had been tossed back and forth on the hard hands of hate and war between English intolerance and French indifference. Loyal in feeling, sentiment and faith to their mother-land across the sea, they did well and nobly to remain the neutrals they were; and that attitude required greater bravery and fortitude than open rebellion against their English conquerors. Scanning the whole history of this inhuman crime against a whole people, while one cannot but thrill with indignation against the actors in their cruel exile, there must come into every honest heart as hateful a contempt for the cowardice of France in deserting her helpless children in their misery as contemptuous hatred for the English brutality whose pitiful insults were more heart-rending than downright massacre. Of the surpassing tragedy these brief facts may be recalled. According to the decrees of the Council of Halifax, in the summer of 1755, that the Acadians should be deported to Southern American colonies and their estates and buildings, and cattle and vessels forfeited to the crown, they were deluded into gathering simultaneously at several rendezvous under the pretence of receiving a royal proclamation, His Excellency being desirious that each of them should be fully satisfied of His Majesty’s intentions. They were instantly surrounded by soldiery and treated as prisoners of war. A British detachment and fleet destroyed the villages, and churches on the Chignecto Basin and the Petticodiac river, sweeping up many prisoners and meeting with some sharp fighting. Moncton destroyed Shediac, Ramsheg, and other towns on the gulf coast; Murray gathered up the Acadians about Windsor, and to the east; and Hanfield put the Annapolitans on shipboard, except a few who escaped to the woods. Winslow collected 1,923 persons at Grand Pré and embarked them, and burned 255 houses; 276 barns and 11 mills.” Over 7,000 Acadians of these peaceful valleys were robbed of their entire earthly possessions and chipped like hogs in pens to foreign and hostile shores. That those who escaped might starve, the firebrand was used for months, and every vestige of habitation and garnered stores destroyed. Families were separated, aged men and women died of fright, hundreds of hearts were literally broken. No pen has ever told, none can ever depict, the agonies of this exile. There is not its parallel in the history of civilized or savage races. Well might the actors in this infinite tragedy destroy their infamous official records, as they did at Halifax. Well might the noble romancist, Hawthorne, who sought this field for a greater tale than that of “The Scarlet Letter,” refuse in horror at the very threshold of his investigation to go further. And well might the master signer, Longfellow, into whose hands Hawthorne dumbly placed his pathetic notes, sing his immortal measures through “Evangeline,” but forever refuse to set his eyes upon the accussed spot lest his very heart should break of indignation and pity.