The Acadian Tragedy by Francis Parkman. Concluded.

THE ACADIAN TRAGEDY BY FRANCIS PARKMAN. CONCLUDED. Winslow had, indeed, some cause for anxiety. He had captured more Acadians since the 5th, and had now in charge nearly five hundred able bodied men with scarcely three hundred to guard them. As they were allowed daily exercise in the open air, they might by a sudden rush, get possession of arms, and make serious trouble. On the Wednesday after the scene in the church, some unusual movements wore observed among them, and Winslow and his officers became convinced that they could not safely be kept in one body. Five vessels, lately arrived from Boston, were lying within the mouth of the neighboring river. It was resolved to place fifty of the prisoners on board each of these, and keep them anchored in the Basin. The soldiers were all ordered under arms, and posted on an open space beside the church and behind the priest's house. The prisoners were drawn up before them, ranked six deep, the young unmarried man, as the most dangerous, being told off and placed on the left to the number of a hundred and forty one. Captain Adams, with eighty men, was then ordered to guard them to the vessels. Though the object of the movement bad been explained to them they were possessed with the idea that they were to be torn from their families and sent away at once; and they all in great excitement refused to go. Winslow told them that there must be no parley or delay; and as they still refused, a squad of soldiers advanced towards them with fixed bayonets, while he himself laying hold of the foremost young man commanded him to move forward. “He obeyed, and the rest followed, though slowly, they went off praying, singing, and crying, being met by the women and children all the way (which is a mile and a half) with great lamentation, upon their knees, praying." When the escort returned, about a hundred of the married men were ordered to follow the first party, and, "the ice being broken," they readily complied. The vessels were anchored at a little distance from the shore, and six soldiers were placed on board as a guard. The prisoners were offered the King's rations, but preferred to be supplied by their families, who it was arranged, should go in boats to visit them every day; and "thus," says Winslow, "ended this troublesome job." He was not given to effusions of feeling, but he wrote to Major Handfield: "This affair is more grievous to me than any service I was over employed in." Murray sent him a note of congratulation. “I am extremely pleased that things are so clever at Grand Pre, and that the poor devils are so resigned. Here they are more patient than I could have expected for people in their circumstances, and what surprises me still more is the indifference of the women, who really are, or seem quite unconcerned. I long much to see the poor wretches embarked, and our affair a little settled, and then I will do myself the pleasure of meeting you and drinking their good voyage." This agreeable consummation was still distant. There was a long and painful delay. The provisions for the vessels which were to carry the prisoners did not come, nor did the vessels themselves, excepting the five already at Grand Pre. In vain Winslow wrote urgent letters to George Saul, the commissary, to bring the supplies at once. Murray at Fort Edward, though with less feeling than his brother officer, was quite as impatient of the burden of suffering humanity on his hands. “I am amazed what can keep the transports and Saul. Surely our friend at Chignecto is willing to give us as much of our neighbors’ company as he well can." Saul came at last with a ship-load of provisions, but the lagging transports did not appear. Winslow grew heartsick at the daily sight of miseries which he himself had occasioned, and wrote to a friend at Halifax: “I know that they deserve all and more than they feel, yet it hurts me to hear their weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I am in hopes our affairs will soon put on another face, and we get transports, and I rid of the worst piece of service that ever I was in. After weeks of delay seven transports came from Annapolis, and Winslow sent three of them to Murray, who joyfully responded: "Thank God, the transports have come at last. So soon as I have shipped off my rascals I will come down and settle matters with you, and enjoy ourselves a little." Winslow prepared for the embarkation. The Canadian prisoners and their families were divided into groups answering to their several villages, in order that those of the same village might as far as possible, go in the same vessel. It was also provided that the members of each family should remain together, and notice was given them to hold themselves in readiness. “But even now," he writes, "I could not persuade the people I was in earnest'' Their doubts were soon ended. The first embarkation took place on the 8th of October, under which date the diary contains this entry: " Began 'to embark the inhabitants, who went off very solentarily [sic] and unwillingly, the women in great distress, carrying off their children in their arms; others carrying their decrepit parents in their cart, with all their goods; moving in great confusion, and appeared a scene of woe and distress." Though a large number embarked on this occasion, stilt more remained; and as the transports slowly arrived, the dismal scene was repeated at intervals, with more order than at first, as the Acadians had learned to accept their fate as a certainty. So far as Winslow war; concerned, their treatment seems to have been as humane as was possible under the circumstances; but they complained of the men, who disliked and annoyed them. One soldier received thirty lashes for stealing fowls from them; and an order was issued forbidding soldiers or sailors, or pain of summary punishment, to leave their quarters without permission, “that an end may be put to distressing this distressed people." Two of the prisoners, however, while trying to escape, were shot by a reconnoitering party. At the beginning of November, Winslow reported that he had sent off fifteen hundred and ten prisoners in nine vessels, and that more than six hundred still remained in his district. The last of these were not embarked till late in December. Murray finished his part of the work at the end of October, having sent from the district of Fort Edward eleven hundred persons in four frightfully crowded transports. At the close of that month sixteen hundred and sixty-four had been sent from the district of Annapolis, where many others escaped to the woods. A detachment which was ordered to seize the inhabitants of the district of Cobequid failed entirely, finding the settlements abandoned. In the country about Fort Cumberland, Monckton, who directed the operation in person, had very indifferent success, catching in all but little more than a thousand. LeGuerne, missionary priest in the neighborhood, gives a characteristic and affecting incident of the embarkation. "Many unhappy women, carried away by excessive attachment to their husbands, whom they had been allowed to see too often, and closing their ears to the voice of religion and their missionary, threw themselves blindly and desperately into the English vessels; and now was seen the saddest of spectacles, for some of these women, solely from a religious motive refused to take with them their grownup sons and daughters." They would expose their own souls to perdition among heretics, but not those of their children. When all, or nearly all, had been sent off from the various points of departure, such of the houses and barns as remained standing were burned, in obedience to the orders of Lawrence, that those who had escaped might be forced to come in and surrender themselves. The whole number removed from the province, men, women, and children, was a little above six thousand. Many remained behind; and while some of these withdrew to Canada, Isle St Jean, and other retreats, the rest lurked in the woods or returned to their old haunts, whence they waged for several years a guerrilla warfare against the English. Yet their strength was broken, and they were no longer a danger to the province. Of their exiled countryman, one party overpowered the crew of the vessel that carried them, ran her ashore at the mouth of the St John, and escaped. The rest were distributed among the colonies, from Massachusetts to Georgia, the master of each transport having been provided with a letter from Lawrence addressed to the governor of the province to which he was bound, and desiring him to receive the unwelcome strangers. The provincials were vexed at the burden imposed upon them, and though the Acadians were not in general ill-treated, their lot was a hard one. Still more so was that of those among them who escaped to Canada. The chronicle of the Ursulines of Quebec, speaking of these last, says that their misery was indescribable, and attributes it to the poverty of the colony. But there were other causes. The exiles found less pity from kindred and fellow-Catholics than from the heretics of the English colonies. Some of them, who had made their way to Canada from Boston, whither they had been transported, sent word to a gentleman of that place, who had been befriended them that they wished to return. Bougainville, the celebrated navigator, then aide-de-camp to Montcalm, says concerning them: "They are dying by wholesale. Their past and present misery, joined to the rapacity of the Canadians, who seek only to squeeze out of them all the money they can, and then refuse them the help so dearly bought are the cause of this mortality." Many of the exiles eventually reached Louisiana, where their descendants now form a numerous and distinct population. Some, after incredible hardships, made their way back to Acadia, where, after the peace, they remained, unmolested, and, with those who bad escaped seizure became the progenitors of the present Acadians now settled in various parts of the British Maritime Provinces, notable at Madawaska, on the upper St. John, and at Clare, in Nova Scotia. Others were sent from Virginia to England, and others again after the complete conquest of the country, found refuge in France. In one particular the authors of the deportation were disappointed in its results. They had hoped to substitute a loyal population for a disaffected one, but they failed for some time to find settlers for the vacated lands. The Massachusetts soldiers, to whom they were offered, would not stay in the province, and it was not till five years later that families of British stock began to occupy the waste fields of the Acadians. This goes far to show that a longing to become their heirs had not, as has been alleged, any considerable part in the motives for their removal. New England humanitarianism, melting into sentimentality at a tale of woe, has been unjust to its own. Whatever judgment may be passed on the cruel measure of wholesale expatriation, it was not put in execution till every resource of patience and persuasion had been tried and failed. The agents of the French court, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, had made some act of force a necessity. The government of Louis XV. began with making the Acadians its tools, and ended with making them its victims. *Haliburton, the source from which writers on the removal of the Acadians have drawn most of their information, but who knew Winslow’s journal only by imperfect extracts erroneously states that the men put on board the vessels were sent away immediately. They remained at Grand Pre several weeks, and were then sent off at intervals with their families.