New England’S Outpost Acadia Before the Conquest of Canada 9780231887168

Table of contents :
Introduction
Contents
Table of Abbreviations
Errata
Chapter I. Noble Proprietors and Merchants Adventurers (1640–1670)
Chapter II. Acadians, Real and Unreal (1670–1710)
Chapter III. A Phantom Rule and “Neutral” Subjects (1710–1723)
Chapter IV. Counterfeit Suzerainty (1724–1739)
Chapter V. The Puritan Crusade and the Birth of a Policy (1740–1748)
Chapter VI. Government by Analogy and Rule of Thumb (1710–1749)
Chapter VII. Caught Between the Duellists (1749–1755)
Chapter VIII. The Great Disruption (1755–1756)
Chapter IX. “The Rights of Englishmen” (1749–1758)
Chapter X. Epilogue: The Legacies to Quebec (1759–1774)
Bibliographical Notes
Index

Citation preview

STUDIES IN HISTORY, ECONOMICS AND PUBLIC LAW E D I T E D BY T H E F A C U L T Y OF P O L I T I C A L S C I E N C E OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Number 293

NEW ENGLAND'S OUTPOST Acadia before the Conqueat of Canada

NEW ENGLAND S OUTPOST Acadia before the Conquest of Canada

BT JOHN BARTLET BREBNER, Ph.D. Sometime Edward Blake Scholar in the Univertiiy of Toronto and Casberd Exhibitioner in St Jokn,i Oollege, Oiford Aitittani Profeuar of Bi»tory in Columbia Univertiiy

N E W YORK

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: P. S. KING & SON, LTD.

1927

COPYRIGHT,

1927

BY T H E F A C U L T Y OF P O L I T I C A L S C I E N C E O F COLUMBIA U N I V E R S I T Y , N E W Y O K E

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

9a THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER AMD TO

MY FATHER PiUKNTS WHOSE SACRIFICES SNABLKD I I S TO MASS MY WAY

INTRODUCTION MY apology for another monograph on the Acadians is that I had no intention of writing one when I began to explore Nova Scotian history, but not finding what I sought, I found myself making a book almost without being aware of it. In teaching Canadian history I became curious as to what influence British experience with the Acadians might have had upon their administration of Quebec. The treaty for the cession of Canada echoed strongly that made for the cession of Acadie fifty years earlier, and the first Canadian governor was not only ordered to bear the Nova Scotian procedure in mind in erecting his judicial machinery, but had as well a former member of the Nova Scotian Legislature as his attorney-general. After considerable investigation it was revealed that Nova Scotian influence on Canadian practice was somewhat too nebulous to predicate any strong relation and that it was speedily eclipsed by insistent local problems. The results of that research, therefore, form only a sort of epilogue to this book. In the light of what happened in Quebec, however, the investigation of Nova Scotian history showed both analogies and differences which were interesting and significant in themselves and which had never been systematically discussed. Recognition of the failure in Nova Scotia of Great Britain's first attempt to govern in a colony a large number of Europeans who were alien in religion as well as in race, led to inquiry as to what her policy had been, what was done, and what influences brought about the lack of success. It became apparent that geographical conditions, the great conflict between England and France and between their North Amer7

8

INTRODUCTION

ican colonies, and, notably, the foreign policy of New England, had all played large parts. But there still remained the questions of the behaviour of the Acadians themselves and of their equivocal position as " neutrals " between two fires. This led to an examination of the whole history of Acadie and Nova Scotia up to the Seven Years' War. Such a procedure seems a little like going back to Adam to write the social history of a modern state, but it was rendered necessary by the fact that no history of Nova Scotia answered all my questions, both comprehensively and scientifically. The bibliographical note at the end of this volume will show that there is no lack of histories of Nova Scotia or of the Acadian people, and that many of the sources have been printed. Research of varying quality has been made into various portions of the history of Acadia, and the human tragedy, as always, has found many literary recorders. Having searched in most of these books before going back to the source materials, I found none suitable for my purpose, either because of omissions or, and this very frequently, because of the obscurity which arises from partisanship. Since the days of Raynal the expulsion of the Acadians has exercised human sympathies to the detriment of good historiography. What I haved tried to do here, therefore, is to tell summarily of the genesis and character of the Acadian people and of the strategic problem which grew up around their country in the seventeenth century; to explain the implication of New England in the affairs of the province and its peculiar results; to describe the early haphazard, and the later purposeful British administration of a colony where for forty years the garrison alone was English; to show how the wars of the mid-eighteenth century and the expedient policies of Great Britain and France fatally and selfishly involved the simple Acadians and brought about their expulsion; and,

INTRODUCTION

9

finally, to indicate how the history of Nova Scotia may have served as a precedent for Canada in the formal structure of its government and may have helped to bring about the adoption of a conciliatory policy toward the Canadians. Obviously such a scheme must result in some sacrifice of unity, but it is meant to provide an accurate and dispassionate account of a most complicated experiment, rather than to argue the virtues and vices of the Acadians or debate the policies of Great Britain, New England, France, and New France, which involved them. The story of the way in which Virginia came to be the model for a Nova Scotia which was in turn to be an example to the " republican " colonies of New England, of the actual methods by which the Acadians were governed, and of the relation of Nova Scotia to Canada, is here, I believe, recorded for the first time, and it has, of course, considerably influenced the synthesis of the whole history. That synthesis was, in general, determined from the sources before the secondary literature was sifted, and the controversial and contradictory character of the latter abundantly justified the procedure. It will be noticed that the story of the expulsion and dispersion of the Acadians is not included here. This is because the mere fact of the expulsion is sufficient for the purposes of this study, and because other students have investigated, or are at present working on the history of the expulsion, dispersion, and return of the Acadians. In the four years at Toronto, Ottawa, Oxford, and New York, during which I have been working on this subject I have incurred obligations too numerous to be acknowledged adequately here, not least of which has been the generosity of colleagues at the University of Toronto and at Columbia University who have helped me to find time for this study. At the Public Archives of Canada, Dr. Doughty and all his staff have many times done everything possible to

IO

INTRODUCTION

facilitate my reseach in their almost complete documentaryrecords of Nova Scotia, among the maps, and in the library. Other students working there, among them Professor A. L. Burt and Miss Jean Nichol, have been on the alert for material useful to me. Mr. Harry Piers, Curator of the Records at Halifax, has investigated and transcribed a doubtful document in the Tyrrell Papers. Miss E. P. Ranck of the Clements Library at Ann Arboj, under the Curator's direction, has reported on some manuscripts in the Shelburne collection. For thoughtful criticism and assistance I am greatly indebted to the late Professor H. E. Egerton and Professor Coupland at Oxford, to Professor MacMechan at Dalhousie University, and to Professors Fox, Green, and Schuyler at Columbia University, all of whom have gone over my material at various stages in its compilation, and the last of whom has helped me prepare it for publication. In this final task Professor Flenley of the University of Toronto has helped greatly in literary amendment and Mr. S. McKee, Jr., of Columbia University has shared the burden of preparing the proofs. One of my greatest debts is to Mrs. G. L. Beer for affording a quiet retreat for writing in New York. In threading the mazes of contradiction which characterize not only the secondary accounts but the sources of this history themselves, it is impossible that I have not made mistakes. I should be very grateful to those who might take the trouble of pointing them out. J . B. B. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, M A Y , 1 9 3 7 .

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

. .

7

. . •

15

CHAPTER I Noble Proprietors and Merchants Adventurers (1640-1670) C H A P T E R II Acadians, Real and Unreal (1670-1710)

37

C H A P T E R III A Phantom Rule and " Neutral " Subjects (1710-1723)

57

C H A P T E R IV Counterfeit Suzerainty (1724-1739)

83

CHAPTER V The Puritan Crusade and the Birth of a Policy (1740-1748) . . . .

104

CHAPTER VI Government by Analogy and Rule of Thumb (1710-1749) CHAPTER

. . . .

134

VII

Caught Between the Duellists (1749-1755)

166

CHAPTER VIII The Great Disruption (1755-1756)

. 303 11

12

CONTENTS FAG I

C H A P T E R IX " The Right» of Englishmen " (1749-1758)

234

CHAPTER X Epilogue: The Legacies to Quebec

(1759-1774)

264

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL N O T E S

276

INDEX

283

T A B L E OF A B B R E V I A T I O N S A.desC. D. C. B. Doc.Inid. M 371, etc. Mémoires

Archives des Colonies. Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Le Canada-Français, Documents Inédits. Miscellaneous Series, M SS. Room, Ottawa. Mémoires des Commissaires du Roi et de ceux de sa Majesté Britannique, etc N. S. Nova Scotia State Papers. N. S. Arch. Nova Scotia Archives. P. A. of C. Public Archives of Canada, Report P.R.O. Public Records Office (London). R. S. C. Royal Society of Canada, Transactions and Proceedings. 13

ERRATA Page 20, note 2, line 5. Supply missing " o " in "possession" and line 12, put comma after " Proceedings " Page 25, note 1, line 3. For " pp. 18-153 " read " pp. 18-53 " Page 52, line 3. Supply missing " i " in " possibilities " Page 69, line 3. To be consistent the 3rd word should be spelled " endeavoured " Page 77, line 13. The sign " & " should be inserted between " Proclamation " and " other ways " Page 85, note 1, line 1. For " Brown Ms " read " Brown MS.," Page 141, line 12. For " then " read " that " Page 161, note I, line 5. Substitute acute for circumflex accents on "avés avancé" Page 171, note I, line 5. " Hardwicke " Page 172, line 24. Delete extra " o " in " throughout "

CHAPTER

I

(1604-1670) NOBLE PROPRIETORS AND M E R C H A N T S ADVENTURERS EVER since the coming of European settlers, Nova Scotia has had a peculiarly troubled history, most notably, of course, in the days when Evangeline's people were driven from the land which they called Acadie and which, unfortunately for them, they had conquered as husbandmen but lost as Frenchmen, but also before and after that tragedy, whether in the wars between the English and French colonies or in their modern analogy, the conflicting tariffs of the United States and Canada. Unquestionably geographical character and situation have been the principal reasons for this fate, and never was their effect more obvious than during the first sixty years of the eighteenth century. It was the country's misfortune to be the eastern outpost and flank for both French and English in North America. It was the point at which, south of the St. Lawrence, the continent projected farthest east into the great fishing waters, and the small vessels which chose the northern route between Europe and the American colonies sheltered themselves as long as possible under these shores. The finger-like Isthmus of Chignecto points due east for over a hundred and fifty miles from the corner of the mainland, and north of it, Cape Breton Island stands like a stepping stone to Newfoundland, the final outpost. From the easterly tip of the Isthmus, the Nova Scotian peninsula twists at an acute angle toward the southwest, and, almost like a great coastal island, encloses between it and the mainland the long, narrow Bay of Fundy. is

i6

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

This continental cornice changed hands often in the seventeenth century and the possessor, French or English, always claimed some of the mainland as well as what is now the Nova Scotian peninsula. Whatever the boundaries were, the important consideration was that any Acadie or any Nova Scotia lay inside the angle between the St. Lawrence route to French Canada and the northern route to New England which branched off from it south of Newfoundland. While it would be dangerous to push the analogy too far, in their activities in America the French had at least seemed to reflect the geographical character of the broad, wellwatered country from which they came. They struck boldly inland, using the rivers and lakes as highways and trusting to them as lines of communication in the most extended explorations. Ultimately they conceived the grand design of ensuring for themselves freedom from English interference by setting up a cordon militaire, to extend along the St. Lawrence, Ohio, and Mississippi valleys from Cape Breton, the Gibraltar of the St. Lawrence, to New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico. The English, on the other hand, also in apparent harmony with what might be called their geographical matrix, had spread up and down the Atlantic coast and had gradually consolidated their possession of it from Spanish Florida north to the debatable land, now Acadie and now Nova Scotia according to the nation who possessed it. During the seventeenth century there was friction between the French and English colonies amounting, sometimes, almost to the proportions of a dress rehearsal of the final halfcentury of conflict. The latter, however, had its real origins in the clash which developed as the expansion of the English colonies carried adventurous men over the mountains which confined their settlements, to look down on the rich lands and resources pre-empted by their rivals. The refrain of eighteenth-century dispatches relating to America became, on the

NOBLE

PROPRIETORS

17

French side, "les empiétements des Anglais", and on the English, " the incroachments at the back side of our settlements." What happened was that the English, pushing north and west, were directly opposed by the southerly and easterly thrust of the French, and something like an intermittent battle-front moved backwards and forwards between them. The fixed pivot on which the motion hinged was Nova Scotia, captured by the English in 1710, and held continuously until the end of the struggle. Small wonder, then, that the rivals endeavoured to turn each other's eastern flank by securing it, nor was their avarice diminished by its position in the midst of the magnificent bank fisheries. That is not to say that Acadie had lacked its own attractions for adventurers. The land was almost completely wooded, not only with the straight, tall evergreens so much in demand for masts and spars, but with the most valuable hardwoods as well. Fur-bearing animals and edible game were at first abundant even on the peninsula, and the rivers which flowed from the north and west into the Bay of Fundy drained a district whose great richness in furs even eighteenth-century exploitation failed to exhaust. The many lakes and rivers almost rivalled the neighbouring seas in their supply of fish, and furnished as well several highways for canoe travel from the Bay to the Atlantic. The seashores provided a succession of superb harbours, practically all of which contained shallows for careening-grounds and beaches for drying fish. In general, agricultural prospects, except in one unique district, were not particularly tempting. Clearing the land was a serious task and farmers were suspicious of mischance in a country where winters were long and untimely frosts a doubtful factor to cope with. A peculiar natural advantage broke down prejudice, however, around the shores of the Bay of Fundy. Because of its length and narrowness, its tides were extraordinarily high.

i8

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

The meanest river, therefore, flowed into it between marshes of great fertility and of equable temperature. These, when dyked, provided cleared land hardly needing to be ploughed, and, when exhausted, might be restored by the simple expedient of letting in the spring floods. The native Indians at first did not raise any obstacle to settlement. They were few in number and, until their European supplanters fell out between themselves, they lived in peaceful, even in happy relations with the newcomers. The French pioneers from the beginning pursued successfully their customary policy of cultivating the friendship of the tribes by means of presents, intermarriage, and devoted missionary enterprise. The Indians thus became their natural allies in war. The neighbouring New Engländers, on the other hand,'had been disinclined even to regard the savages as possessors of souls to be saved, and had spent their energies in exterminating them. The consequences in the history of Nova Scotia were quite natural. The French were able to depend on the Indians for all kinds of assistance until their own failing resources prevented them from supplying trade articles and military stores; the English lived always in terror of the tribes until they could bribe them or, in the impotence of the French, overawe them. Both European peoples, it should be mentioned, frequently allowed the savagery of Indian methods of warfare to overcome their own more decent and civilised instincts. The qualities which won for Acadie its first European population were very slowly appreciated, and for almost a century and a half the land interested only small groups of adventurers and speculators. The early explorers came to it at the end of the fifteenth century, and its harbours attracted the fishermen who followed (and perhaps preceded) them to the banks. When the " green " fishery was succeeded by the dry, harbours and beaches and sunlight were much in de-

NOBLE

PROPRIETORS

19

mand, and these Nova Scotia as well as Newfoundland provided. With the dry fishery, also, came temporary settlement and contact with the Indians. The latter, in their eagerness to secure from their visitors the manufactured articles which they possessed, instituted the next stage in the development, a trade in furs. A s this grew in importance, fishing and trading ships were supplemented by semi-permanent settlement. The first Acadian colony was French and Huguenot, and its foundation rested on monopoly 1 in trade. It was begun by Sieur de Monts and Samuel de Champlain in 1604 on an island in Passamaquoddy Bay. The site was badly chosen, however, and the settlement almost perished of disease and inclement weather. Next year activities were transferred to perhaps the most charming and comforting spot in the Nova Scotian peninsula, now the Annapolis Basin, but by the first settlers named Port Royal. Here, for many miles almost parallel with the southern shore of the Bay of Fundy, a river flows southwest through a broad, gracious valley until it reaches the meadow lands and the natural harbour at its mouth. A settlement made on the right bank of the Basin, opposite Goat Island, prospered from the first and all seemed well. The colony itself had all the qualities necessary for success. In Champlain it had an officer who was restless and inquisitive but able and dependable. In Marc Lescarbot it had a hu1 Patent, Nov. 8, 1603, Archives des Colonies, Série C 11 A, vol. i, p. 78, et seq. ; translated, Nova Scotia State Papers, A series, vol. i, p. 1, et seq.; patent specifying boundaries and granting ten years' monopoly, Dec. 18, 1603, Mémoires des Commissaires du Roi et de ceux de sa Majesté Brittanique, etc. (Paris, 1755), tome i, pp. 147-8, ii, pp. 446-7; commission de Monts as Lieut.-General in Acadie, Jan. 29, 1605, A. des C., C 11 A i , ff. 58-61. The Nova Scotia State Papers are calendared in Public Archives of Canada, Report, 1894, and Archives des Colonies in various other Reports.

20

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

mane spirit who lent his talent to making life enjoyable as well as prosperous. Among other services, he composed a pageant with accompanying poetry which has the honour of being the first theatrical venture in North America, and in the pages of his history 1 one finds reflected his efforts to make pioneer life palatable. In Sieur de Poutrincourt Port Royal possessed an enthusiastic agriculturalist and a real lover of the new land. In the men of L a Rochelle it had financial backers who needed it in turn as the justification for their monopolistic privileges and the depot for their trade. Port Royal was founded, unfortunately, in an age when monopolies were the favours of capricious kings and when court intrigue dashed or raised high the hopes of merchants adventurers. In this instance an added source of conflict was the feud between Catholic and Protestant. There were intrigues and bargainings in Paris and divisions in the colony itself. Suddenly the confusion, in America at least, was ended by destruction. In 1 6 1 3 Captain Samuel Argall, on a semi-official free-booting raid from Virginia, completely destroyed the French settlements. Dispersion followed. Poutrincourt's son, Biencourt, with some companions, is said to have maintained a precarious existence in the woods.2 Jesuit missionaries and fur traders settled at the St. John River. 1 1

Lescarbot, The History of New France (3 vols., Toronto, 1907-14).

Certain and complete knowledge of French activity between 1613 and 1630 has not survived in sufficient quantity to corroborate this'. Biencourt married the daughter of de Pluvinel, riding instructor to Henry III, Henry I V , and Louis X I I I , and he is shown in a group during royal riding practice in de Pluvinel's academy in three prints in pssession of the Canadian Archives. A curious coincidence involving the family of another Acadian adventurer is that the 1625 edition of de Pluvinel's Manual on horsemanship was edited by one of his friends, Réné de Menou de Charnisay; see Hoefer, Nouvelle Biographie Générale, vol. 40, p. 524. Poutrincourt was killed in battle in France in 1 6 1 5 ; Murdoch, History of Nova Scotia, vol. i, pp. 59-61. See also Patterson, in Transactions and Proceedings Royal Society of Canada, 1896, sec. ii, p. 127, et seq.

NOBLE

PROPRIETORS

21

Traders and fishermen still came to the coasts, but it was obvious that Anglo-French rivalry had begun. For years the French grasp on the country was feeble and uncoordinated, although the Virginians did not exploit their success by settlement. They were content to destroy once the foothold gained by their rivals on the Atlantic Coast. Probably the possession of no part of America was the subject of so much debate as that of Acadie or Nova Scotia. It was debated on the grounds of prior discovery, prior settlement, and, with greatest futility of all, on the basis of limits defined in those royal charters whose authors concealed their ignorance of geography in the magnificent generosity of their concessions. Actually, of course, the problem was settled by measure of strength in the colonial wars of the eighteenth century. One of the most interesting, if least effective, episodes in the long conflict was the second, the colonization project of Sir William Alexander, later Viscount Stirling. It commenced, on paper at least, in 1621, eight years after the destruction of the first French settlements. Conceived in romance, born into a money-grubbing world, neglected by its parents and sponsors, prostituted to alien purposes, and suffered to die in futility, Alexander's scheme gave the country its lasting name and it began a tangle of claims and counter-claims whose snarls and ramifications extend to the present day. 1 Scotland had provided, in the person of James Stuart, a King for England, and one of his intimates and courtiers, Sir William Alexander, seized the occasion to extend even to the New World his country's expanding • fortunes. His 1 The Stirling Peerage Case is a romantic lost cause which periodically re-appears to delight the lovers of lost causes. The last large monument of recent claimants to the Stirling honours and heritage is The Earl of Stirling's Register, etc., 1615 to 1635 (Edinburgh, 1885).

22

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

fancy lighted on Acadie in America, and by a charter granted under the Great Seal at Edinburgh on Sept. 29, 1621, he was authorized to emulate New England and New France in the lands lying between Gaspe Bay and the Ste. Croix river, "quaequidem terrae praedictae omni tempore affuturo nomine N O V A E S C O T I A E I N A M E R I C A gaudebunt". Alexander was a poet,1 and in conception, at least, his project was generous and romantic. Naturally enough, it broke down in its actual (and particularly in its financial) operation. Highly expensive attempts to colonize in 1622 and 1623 were failures, although one group actually did reach the country and inspected it. In order to recoup his own losses and to contribute to the Royal treasury, Alexander, after securing a novodamus from the new King, Charles I, with his approval drew up a new scheme for colonization modelled on the Ulster baronetcies which repaired the Tudor expulsions in the north of Ireland. We are not concerned with the financial aspects of the plan, but with its colonial implications. The purchaser of a Nova Scotia baronetcy was supposed to translate his monetary transaction into a patriotic one by supplying money and settlers (later only money) to people the new province.2 Actually, for years the whole process was mere titlemongering and as such provoked the protest of " the small Barronis " of Scotland. Charles I, however, was glad to support it because he was entering on his period of government without the financial aid of Parliament, and Alexander 1

One of his poems is in Palgrave's Golden Treasury. See Royal Letters, Charters, and Tracts, relating to the colonization of New Scotland, etc., 1621-38 (Edinburgh, 1867) ; Patterson, " Sir William Alexander and the Scottish attempt to colonize Acadia," R. S. C., 1892, sec. it, p. 79, et seq.; Fraser, " Nova Scotia's Charter," Dalhousie Review, I, 4 (Jan., 1922), pp. 369-80; Macleod, "Lord Ochiltree's Colony," ibid., IV, 3 (Oct, 1924), p. 308, et seq.; Volume M 371 (British Museum Additional MSS. 14034, 19049, 27859, and Egerton 2395), Ottawa Archives, and N. S., A i . 2

NOBLE PROPRIETORS

23

would have been no Stuart courtier had he disdained a project which yielded ready money. Suddenly and somewhat spectacularly, between 1627 and 1632, Nova Scotia became involved in a curious complication of events, which involved the courts of England and France, the Nova Scotia baronets, a family of naval adventurers, and an interesting family of French residents in Acadie. The sailors were the brothers Lewis, David, and John Kirke, men whose birthplace was variously ascribed to Dieppe, to England, and to Scotland, but whose successful profession, at any rate, proved to be confident and vigorous naval raiding on behalf of England in North America. The Acadians were Claude de la Tour and his son Charles, the latter of whom claimed to have been in the country since the days of Biencourt, to have fled to the woods when Argall came, and to have been designated his heir in Acadie by Charles de Biencourt before his death. It is impossible to corroborate his story from the contradictory accounts of Champlain, Denys, and other contemporaries, but circumstances lead to the belief that the La Tours had a good basis in fact for their claim to be the resident representatives of France in Acadie. They made their headquarters at the southeastern end of the peninsula and had a port and establishment there, trading as well with the Indians of the mainland at such places as the mouth of the St. John River. The interweaving of such varied elements produced a notable confusion of interests which is not particularly germane to our purpose. A bare narrative will reveal the central thread of historical succession. It is important, however, to remember that, although Nova Scotia took its place among the pawns of international policy and diplomacy, its remoteness from Europe necessarily left a great deal of freedom to adventurers on the spot. The latter took advantage of European ignorance when possible, but they were in turn

24

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

the victims of high politics in Europe about which they knew little or nothing. If the consequences are exasperating or diverting to us now, they were exciting and mysterious and disturbing to the men in America who were immediately affected. In 1627 Richelieu attempted the reorganization of the French posts in America by creating the Company of New France. He purposed excluding the Huguenots from the enterprises in which they had taken so large a share, and knitting together in groups the French posts and settlements which were scattered between the Bay of Fundy and the upper St. Lawrence River. In the same year, however, war broke out between England and France, and the Kirkes set off to try to conquer the French domains in North America. Their movements during the next three years are not completely known, but they succeeded in their aims, even capturing Quebec. Moreover they worked in collaboration with Alexander and the King. In 1628 they assisted in establishing the first Scottish settlement on the old French site at Port Royal under Alexander's son. They also captured Claude de la Tour at sea, and, finally, in disposing of their conquests, they granted the lands south of the St. Lawrence to the founder of Nova Scotia. It was in 1629 that the tangle of events really commenced. T o begin with, an attempt to settle Cape Breton under Lord Ochiltree was frustrated by an officer in the service of the Company of New France, who swept off the colonists and sent them prisoners to France. The Port Royal colony at the Scots Fort had suffered severely during the winter and, although reinforced during the summer, seemed a precarious venture. Meanwhile its noble sponsor seems to have discovered two things: first, that success in colonization depended more on such qualities and experience as were possessed by men like the L a Tours than on paper projects;

NOBLE

PROPRIETORS

25

and second, that coming events in Europe might seriously prejudice the success of his colony. He revealed the results of his deliberations in the concession (with certain reservations to himself) of a large part of peninsular Nova Scotia to the La Tours, to be held by them of the Crown of Scotland as baronets of Nova Scotia. These negotiations took place in 1629 and 1630 and culminated in the enrolment of the two resident Acadians among their less deserving brother baronets.1 The prisoner, Claude, was sent back to Nova Scotia to associate his son with him in the new arrangement, but apparently he failed, and is said to have joined the Scots at Port Royal. In any event, Charles had good reason to assert his loyalty to France, to risk his future as a Frenchman, rather than in the service of England, and to claim that he had never considered the English overtures ; for on Feb. 1 1 , 1631, he was commissioned Lieutenant General of the French King in Acadie.2 While these rapid and complicated manoeuvres among the adventurers were going on, Nova Scotia had become involved in European diplomatic exchanges which explain in part the events in America. Louis X I I I wanted his American possessions again, and Charles I wanted Henrietta Maria's dowry. The treaty of Suza of September, 1629, had not secured 1

Nov. 30, 1629 (Claude) and May 12, 1630 (Charles) ; Royal Letters, etc., pp. 120-123, preface. The agreement for concession Oct. 9, 1629; P. A. of C., 1912, pp. 1 8 - 1 5 3 ; its formal ratification Apr. 30, 1630, M. 371, No. 32. 2

M. 381, Ottawa Archives (British Museum Lansdowne M S . 849), p. 3 4 ; memorial by John Crowne, Jan. 4, 1697-8, asserting that Charles I connived with Louis X I I I to effect this appointment. The career of Charles de la Tour is the subject of contradiction and controversy, which if entered upon here would require almost a separate monograph. Those interested are referred to the most recent opposed accounts ; E. Lauvrière, La Tragédie d'un Peuple (2 éd., 2 vols., Paris, 1926), and A. CouillardDesprés, En Marge de la Tragédie d'un Peuple (Bruges, n. d. [1925]). The account I have given is summary, though derived from the source material, and important only to preserve continuity.

26

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

either, and Charles, embarked on personal government in England, needed money badly. What more natural than that on June 12, 1631, he should suggest to Wake, his ambassador in France, that the gratuitous cession of Quebec and Acadie might provide the stimulus to loosen his brotherin-law's purse strings? It seemed so good an idea that he added to his original letter the necessary instruments and authority to receive payment of the dowry.1 Three weeks after he had communicated with Wake, a formal deed2 for the cession of Port Royal was sealed with the Great Seal of Scotland. On March 29th, 1632, the treaty of St. Germainen-Laye publicly confirmed the bargain.* In spite of these negotiations, Charles himself was quite unabashed in his contemporary assurances to Viscount Stirling and the Council for Scotland 4 that he had no intention of giving up his title to New Scotland and Canada and that he insisted on the baronetcy scheme and colonization going on, promising full protection. It is difficult to decide whether he hoped for a temporary evacuation or was merely a liar for raison d'état, but it is hard to explain away his statement of June 14, 1632, that Stirling " may have full assurance from us in verbo principis, that . . . we have never meaned to relinquish our title to any part of these cuntreyis ". One can be charitable and attribute his actions to the undoubted confusion of geographical knowledge and nomenclature. At any rate, France recovered her fort at Quebec, her depots and fishing stations on the St. Lawrence, and her province of Acadie ; while Stirling received an order for £10,000 on the Treasury, " nowayes for quyting the title ryght or possession of New Scotland or of any part thereof, 1

P. A. of C., 1884, pp. xi-xiv and Note D ; P. A. of C., 1912, pp. 18-53.

'N. S., A i , p. 32, July 4, 1631. * Mémoires, ii, pp. 5-10. 4

Royal Letters, etc., preface and passim.

NOBLE

PROPRIETORS

27

but onlie for satisfaction of the losses the said Viscount hath " ; and a docile Council for New England on April 22, 1635, granted him " all that part of the mainland in New England from St. Croix, adjoining New Scotland, along the sea to Pemaquid and so up the river to the Kinebequi [Kennebec] to be henceforth called the Country of Canada" \ The Scots at Port Royal disappeared from the scene in unknown fashion. They had undoubtedly been reduced by disease and Indian hostility, and it is possible that the survivors drifted away to the English colonies or returned home when, in 1632, the New French governor received the surrender of Acadie to France.2 The grand Scottish design had thus been reduced to the absurdity of baronets of Nova Scotia in Britain who had never seen their lands, but had performed the formalities of seisin by picking up the soil on a patch of the parade ground of Edinburgh Castle, which had been created Nova Scotia for the purpose, and to that of two active baronets in Nova Scotia, French by birth and in loyalty ! The Alexander adventure opened a highly complicated period in the history of Acadie and one in which political and personal vicissitudes almost obscured the fundamental circumstances. It is important, therefore, to remember that a 1 N. S., A i , p. 40. Pemaquid is here the name given to the Kennebec valley. See also N. S., A27, p. 110, et seq.

* There is a persistent legend that some of them were absorbed in intermarriage with the French. This is supported by the survival of Gallicized Scottish names like Mellanson, Kuessy (Kessie), Pesselet (Paisley) and Pitre. Cadillac is said to have seen two of them in 1635. The Acadian historian, Rameau, discusses the question and decides in favour of Mellanson only; Le Canada-Français, Documents Inédits (Quebec, 1888-91), III, pp. 135, 155-7, 193- This view is not supported by the Acadian genealogist, Gaudet, in his Notes to accompany the plan of the River of Port Royal at the end of volume i, Knox, Historical Journal of the Campaigns in North America (Toronto, 1914).

28

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

small number of unassuming French immigrants became firmly rooted in the colony at a time when flamboyant individuals fought and postured more conspicuously than they. Caution is necessary, moreover, in passing judgment on the leading adventurers. Some of them revealed a greater flexibility and opportunism in their allegiances than would be considered reputable today, and it is somewhat disconcerting to find men changing their outward profession of national or party or religious loyalty so blithely. The explanation lies in the temper of the times. Not only were there then many soldiers of fortune, but European nations were torn by internal civil and religious dissensions. There were abundant grounds not only for profound differences of party opinion, but for transference of allegiance. The careers of men like Monk, Conde, and Turenne furnished the proper measure for the behaviour of the Acadian adventurers. It seems useless to estimate it by our own standards, as has so frequently been done. On May 10, 1632, Isaac de Razilly was commissioned as Governor to take over Acadie, and he brought with him one Charles de Menou, Seigneur d'Aulnay de Charnisay, to serve as his lieutenant. During four active years (Richelieu and his Company of New France were vigorous and aggressive) the governor did a great deal for the colony and, most important of all, settled in it between one and two hundred permanent settlers. These, with only occasional small additions under later French commanders, were the ancestors of the Acadian people.1 When Razilly died in 1636, however, strife of a peculiarly bitter kind ensued between his lieutenant and Charles de la Tour. They were rivals for control of the lucrative fur trade, particularly that of the mainland, and they were almost egged on to war by an ignorant grant of Feb. 10, 163s, 2 which gave D'Aulnay the coveted north shore of the 'Rameau and Gaudet, op. cit., passim, and P. A. of C., 1905, vol. ii, appendix A, part iii. ' Mémoires, ii, pp. 495-6.

NOBLE

PROPRIETORS

29

Bay of Fundy, but not the depot at St. John, and L a Tour the peninsula, but not Port Royal. Razilly's chief station had been at L a Heve (on the Atlantic Coast), but D'Aulnay founded the new and lasting fort-site on the south shore of Port Royal. Thus the rivals each had as his stronghold the natural headquarters of the other. The feudal war which followed implicated Canada and Boston as well as Acadie and France. Its course was complicated and has been the subject of controversy ever since, and the attempts to make either one of the contestants a heroic patriot seem beside the mark. Each did his best to use Boston against the other, and the canny Puritans debated long and vigorously in order to make sure that their aid should preserve that kind of balance of power which weakens both enemies. In the course of the struggle, L a Tour managed to borrow money in Boston by mortgaging all his property to one Major Gibbons, and his wife conducted a successful suit there for breach of charter party, 1 neither a mean achievement. Ultimately, however, D'Aulnay discredited La Tour in New England and thereupon broke his strength in Acadie. Throughout the vicissitudes of the struggle, as recorded in the highly contradictory contemporary records, D'Aulnay tended to be eclipsed by the daring irrepressibility of his rival. The latter could be discredited in France and needed only to visit the Court to convince it of his patriotic probity. He could be honoured in Quebec by a salute of cannon and in Boston by a town meeting. Whatever his religious convictions may have been, he was able to adapt his outward profession to the varying environments of Paris and London, 'Bent, " T h e La Tours in Massachusetts Bay," Acadiensis IV, I, pp. 12-35 (Jan., 1904) ; T. Hutchinson, History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, 1628-1750, passim; Chapin, Privateer Ships and Sailors (Toulon, 1926), chap. vii.

3°

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

Boston and Quebec. He was alternately ruined and triumphant, but apparently did not know the meaning of defeat. The record of his rival is distinctly less spectacular. He, too, had his ups and downs, but they were mild in comparison. By seventeenth century standards there is no question as to who was the better man. Combat, however, did not decide the issue. Indeed by that test the advantage was D'Aulnay's, for in his rival's absence he captured Fort St. John with its stores and goods, and saw its heart-broken gallent defendress, Mme. La Tour, die a prisoner in his hands. The end of the struggle was accidental. One May day in 1650 D'Aulnay's canoe capsized on a sand-bar at L'Esturgeon, about five miles up the river from his fort, and he died of the resultant exposure. La Tour, alone on the field, took full advantage of his opportunity. In 1651 he secured a new royal patent as Governor and Lieutenant General in Acadie, and in 1653 he obtained personal control of the local situation by the simple expedient of marrying D'Aulnay's widow. By the combination of their interests most of the causes of disorder in the province were dissolved and, although the groom was about sixty years of age, the bride bore him five children. It is a reminder of the times and an addition to the portrait of the man, that his will provided that Catholic and Protestant educators should divide between them the custody and education of his children. While rivals fought and the fathers of Acadie conquered the river marshes for farm land, the province was once more involved in a European conflict. In 1654 L a Tour was ensconced at Fort L a Tour on the river St. John awaiting with some anxiety the attack of Emmanuel le Borgne, the chief creditor of D'Aulnay, who had already displayed his mettle by successful confiscatory attacks on Nicolas Denys, Governor of the south shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence for the Company of New France, on the settlement at L a

NOBLE PROPRIETORS

31

Heve on the Atlantic Coast, and on Port Royal. He had made plain his intention of repeating the process at the expense of the Proteus of Acadie. Relief came in a most surprising manner. Cromwell and the Commonwealth had decided to enlist forces in Massachusetts to capture the Dutch post at Manhattan. In June their little naval force lay in Boston harbour while the General Court pushed forward preparations for the quite congenial task. Then on June 20th a ship arrived with the depressing news of the conclusion of peace. Preparations were almost complete, it seemed a pity to allow the weapon in hand to rust for want of use, and therefore " it was conseaved that to spend a lytle tyme upon ye coast in lookeinge after ye ffrench might torne to some accompt." 1 Acadie was in no condition to resist assault and St. John, Port Royal, and Penobscot quickly succumbed. The " God of Battles" piety of the official report 2 can safely be ascribed to the combined fervour of the two Puritan commonwealths rather than to genuine gratitude for great obstacles overcome. Charles de la Tour was a captive, but he prompdy demonstrated that he could reap the whirlwind. He exhumed his Scottish title and his bargain with England's last possessor of Acadie, and went off with his captors to Commonwealth England to negotiate as best he might. His reliance lay in his self-confidence, his knowledge of his province, and the unlikelihood that England would herself undertake the colonization of the debatable land. His chief difficulty promised to be financial. All his goods were still mortgaged to 1

Capt John Leverett to Cromwell, July 4, 1654, Rawlinson MSS., A16, f. 52, in The Cromwell Papers, being original MSS., photostatic copies of the Rawlinson MSS. (Bodleian Library), and transcripts of Public Record Office (London), Series E. 403; in the MSS. Room, Ottawa. See P. A. of C., 1923, where these documents are printed or calendared. One confusing, but unimportant error is made in the financial accounts. 2 Rawlinson MSS., A18, f. 58.

32

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

Gibbons of Boston and he well knew that the Puritan administration in England would demand some recompense for the expenditures incurred in the expedition. In spite of this he was certain that, if he could count on a few undisturbed years in the Bay of Fundy, he could make his own fortune and satisfy his financial and political masters. With these circumstances and ends in view he proceeded to make a new bargain. He first sought and found a patron in Thomas Temple, " being nephew to ffines [Fiennes] then Lord Keeper ". The new partners next secured financial backing from the merchant, William Crowne. Lord Commissioner Fiennes and a committee of the Council then drew up for Cromwell terms for an agreement 1 which, when amended to include payment of £ 1 8 1 2 for military expenses, was re-drawn and formally concluded between L a Tour, Temple, Crowne, and the Lord Protector, July 14-16, 1656. 2 Under it the first three parties were to act jointly in carrying out the conditions of the grant. They were to give security for the £3379 of the Gibbons mortgage and the state account, all commodities were to be exported to the British Isles, the inhabitants were to be governed by the laws of England " so farr as the Condicon of the place shall admit ", and each year 'in token of his suzerainty, Cromwell was to receive twenty moose skins and twenty beaver skins.8 1

Report, May 29, 1656, N. S., A i , p. 47. * N. S., A i , pp. 52-63 ; Letters Patent as issued Aug. 9, 1656, M. 371, No. 12. * Anyone reading the solemn statement of their case made by the French boundary commissioners in 1755 might be pardoned for surprise at finding a record of Nova Scotia as held, among other considerations, for " vingt peaux de souret," Mémoires, ii, p. 513. The metamorphosis is the work of English clerks, however, for they transformed the "moose skins " of May 29, 1656, to " mouskins " in the agreement of July 14-16, whence it naturally became " mouse skinns " in the Letters Patent. After all, a mouse's pelt was hardly more bizarre as an incident of feudal tenure than the common peppercorn.

NOBLE

PROPRIETORS

33

It would be pleasant to record that Charles de la Tour after his many vicissitudes settled down to peaceful trading on the St. John and founded a dynasty to guide with understanding and strength the future activities of the growing body of settlers, whom by this time it is proper to call Acadians. Unwittingly, however, he had assisted in a manoeuvre which heralded later events. The inspiration " that to spend a lytle tyme upon ye coast in lookeinge after ye ffrench might tome to some accompt " was the prophetic warning of a New England interest in Nova Scotian affairs which was to grow steadily until it flowered in conquest and bore evil fruit in the great tragedy of the Acadian people. L a Tour's association with Temple and Crowne resulted in the handing over to New Englanders of the vague rights which went back to Sir William Alexander. L a Tour himself retired to the St. John for the unrecorded last ten years of his life. Thanks to his numerous offspring and to the small number of Acadian families in the mid-seventeenth century, many of the Acadians today can, if they will, trace back their ancestry to him. Except as a pure piece of historical detective-work, it is hardly worth while to unravel in detail the tangle of Nova Scotian affairs between 1656 and 1670, 1 and yet the story does reveal a thread of continuity in claims of English ownership which were cherished far into the eighteenth century. First of all, La Tour retired in favor of Temple and Crowne when they assumed responsibility for the Gibbons mortgage and promised him one twentieth of trade profits. Then Temple and Crowne fell out and divided their heritage, the 1

The story can be put together and fairly adequately corroborated from M. 371, M. 381, N. S., A i and 2, C. O. I, vol. 32, B. M. Additional MS. 11411. Murdoch, op. cit., i, chaps, xvi, xvii, provides some additional material and a number of the principal state papers are in the Mémoires, and in the Memorials of the English and French Commissaries concerning the Limits of Nova Scotia (London, 1755).

34

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

former receiving Nova Scotia south and west to the Machias River, and the latter what is now the part of Maine lying between that river and Muscongus Bay. " Honest Tom Temple " (he claimed that Charles I during his last moments on the scaffold had so described him) led a harassed life for fourteen years. He had to satisfy the Fiennes group and their successors in England, and after 1660, fight a longrange, and finally a personal campaign at the Restoration Court. He emerged in possession of Nova Scotia from a crowd of petitioners which included Thomas Elliot, a groom of the Bedchamber and agent of a group of Bostoners hostile to Temple; the Kirkes; the heiresses of Viscount Stirling; one Mark Harrison of Stepney, who actually received the governorship under Sign Manual; the inheritors of the Gibbons claims and of the claims for the costs of the 1654 expedition ; and Thomas Breedon, an agent for Boston traders. T o do this he had to clear his record of the Cromwellian taint and he endeavoured to do so by means of delightful apocryphal tales of the high esteem in which he was held by Charles I, and of how he nearly effected the latter's escape from prison and death. Meanwhile he had to get his supplies from Boston middlemen and steer a wary course be tween rival groups. The financial side of his dealings was exceedingly difficult and he often saw the profits of his trade disappear into the pockets of men who enjoyed the advantage over him of possessing ready cash or trade-goods. Not least of his troubles were the raids of D'Aulnay's creditor, Le Borgne, on the Atlantic coast. Somehow he triumphed and was with his heirs rewarded with the title of " perpetual Governours ". It would appear that his success was chiefly owing to the friendship and support of Viscount Say and Sele and Thomas Povey, both of whom belonged to the new commercial group in England who, in the seventeenth century, built up the structure of English oversea enterprise in

NOBLE

PROPRIETORS

35

the intervals of, or even during the domestic political strife in which they also took their part. Temple's triumph was short-lived, however, for Stuart diplomacy and subservience to French policy once more brought the restitution of Nova Scotia to France. The negotiations took almost two years and they revealed the geographical ignorance and international disagreement as to boundaries which were to last down to the time of the Seven Years' War. They also revealed the fact that Temple now saw the issue through New England eyes. He was even charged with robbery of the English by allowing Bostonians to trade directly with the Acadians and Indians. His visit to England had earned him approval in Boston, for he reported quite widely the vigorous and merry defence he had made of the New Englanders in conversation with Charles I I and before the Council. For over two years he argued against the cession and on one occasion even refused to make it to an accredited French emissary. Ultimately, on Jan. ioth, 1 6 7 1 , he reported the surrender, but even then he joined to his report a last protest against the geographical confusion over what was Acadie and what Nova Scotia, a confusion which to his mind resulted in the swallowing-up of the latter quite wrongly in the former. He retired to Boston and then to London, old and afflicted with " melancholly and the stone ", convinced that he was not only misunderstood but traduced at Court by Elliot and others. In 1674 there was reported the death of " Sir Thomas Temple, whom melancholy and griefe hath killed by his hard usage from Mr. Elliott". His heir was his nephew, John Nelson, who shared with another heir, John Crowne, the dormant rights which they traced back to 1621. Temple was the first Englishman to know Nova Scotia and appreciate its potentialities, and his career marks a turning point in the country's history, little as this was revealed in im-

36

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

mediate events. He and the New England merchants associated with him thought of the peninsula in terms of the fisheries (now rated first in importance), naval supplies, and the fur trade. His heir, John Nelson, was a person of considerable importance in America and possessed some of the qualities of a statesman. His adventures belong to the succeeding chapter, but it may be pointed out here that he rose above mere consideration for his own heritage to see the situation as an international one and to implore the Lords of Trade to make its issues clear. He could estimate the advantages which would derive to New England from possession of Nova Scotia and could see what a menace to the fisheries French occupation entailed. He and all New England had good reason to know the scourge of Franco-Indian raids. Yet his suggestion was moderate and equitable. He would have the St. George river (between the Penobscot and the Kennebec) the mutually guaranteed boundary, and he put forward the extremely sound plan of a delimitation of coastal waters for the fisheries.1 These schemes have a new sound in Acadian history. They are neither extravagant by international values nor a grandiose superstructure on the shaky foundations of an individual charter. They are the foundations of a foreign policy for New England as a whole and a policy which, with occasional intervals, can be traced down to the present day. 1

M. 381, No. 12. He thought the terms on which French fishermen operated off the coasts of England " a very good direction and example " for Nova Scotia.

CHAPTER

II

(1670-1710) ACADIANS, R E A L AND U N R E A L

IT was a waif among colonies which Hubert de Grandfontaine took over from Temple in 1670. There were three hundred and sixty settlers at Port Royal and perhaps another hundred, at the most, could be found in other parts of the colony. There had been, or still existed, settlements at halfa-dozen widely scattered points between Canso (Chedabucto) and the Penobscot. All had suffered raids and destruction from time to time and none had known more than ten or fifteen years of uninterrupted existence. The posts on the Atlantic side of the peninsula were fishing stations with only the most vague and temporary agricultural development. Down at Cape Sable a few settlers had established themselves more permanently and securely near the old fort of the L a Tours. The most successful farming colony was in the meadows around Port Royal, where a beginning had been made in building the dykes (aboiteaux) which were to characterize the cultivated area of the country almost exclusively for a century. Already, moreover, settlement had begun in the far more extensive marshlands about the Minas Basin and at the head of the Bay of Fundy on the south shore of the Isthmus. Between there and Pentagoet on the Penobscot, there was a gap broken only by the forts and trading stations on the St. John River. Fish and furs were stronger in their allure than farms, but those who sought them contributed very little to the strength of the colony. Ships and depots for supplies did not strike very deep roots in the country. Farms did, and it fell to the fanners to work out their fate in the fate of the land they had tilled and made their own. 37

38

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

W e have seen that it is possible that the Acadians were descended through the La Tours and their followers from some of the earliest settlers in the country. After 1632 their small company was supplemented by the settlers brought out by Razilly, and these again by sixty new arrivals under Grandfontaine. Doubtless the fishing craft from Canada or Newfoundland or France left an occasional man behind, but they and the fur-traders' vessels also afforded an escape from the rigors of the country. The feeble garrisons in the neglected colony were like subsidized groups of settlers and they occasionally augmented the population.1 Intermarriage with the Indians extended it still further. 2 Yet the Acadian people, who were to number over twelve thousand by the middle of the eighteenth century, could probably trace back their lineage to about two hundred and fifty original immigrants. Except during very brief intervals they received little continuous aid or protection from their mother country. They were truly a self-made people, and by the opening of the eighteenth century they were native to Acadie. They conquered it to provide themselves with sustinence. They were almost independent of the outside world. They knew little of and cared less for its problems and its politics. The only strong tie connecting them with Europe was their religion, kept alive and real by devoted priests. It happens that the direct descriptions which we have of these people are almost all of the middle of the eighteenth century or later, and almost all by soldiers little in sympathy ' A number of examples, French and English, will be found in Gaudet, Notes to Accompany the plan of the river of Annapolis Royal. ' T h e curious prophecy of a famous missionary to the Indians, Abbé Maillard, Feb. 21, 1753: "Je ne donne pas plus de cinquante ans dj ceux-cy [Micmacs] et aux Marichites [the two groups of Acadian Indians] pour qu'on les voye tellement confondus avec les François colons, qu'il sera presque plus possible de les distinguer " ; de Beaumont, Les derniers jours de Y Acadie (Paris, 1899), P- 8S-

ACADIANS,

REAL

AND

UNREAL

39

with than, or by civilians removed from them by thirty-five years of time and by a sort of Rousseau-ian glamour which converted them into " a People amongst whom the Golden Age . . . was apparent "- 1 If, however, these didactic descriptions be set aside as too arbitrary to be at all adequate in themselves, a quite reasonable picture of the people may be composed from the long record of their activities, a picture, moreover, which largely explains the part they played in history. 1

Brown MSS. (B. M. Add. MSS. 19069-19074), description by " Moses de Le Dernier". About 1791 Dr. Andrew Brown, a Scottish physician then in Halifax, became interested in the tragedy of the Acadians and gathered from the most varied sources materials for their history. His papers were discovered in an Edinburgh grocer's shop and sold by A. B. Grosart to the British Museum in 1852. They contain a number of copies of documents unobtainable elsewhere, a good deal of reminiscence by old men of times forty years earlier, and running comment by the Doctor. Obviously such material should be used with great caution except where corroboration is obtainable, and it is regrettable that since its discovery it has been drawn upon very freely and usually without any acknowledgement of its questionable value when unconfirmed. Naturally the dispatches of the resident English after 1710 are full of short descriptions of the Acadians, usually uncomplimentary. The French dispatches from Acadie, Louisbourg, and Quebec are almost as severely critical, as are the reports of both English and French military officers. In fact, an English governor, the Huguenot Mascarene, seems to have known them best and this through forty difficult years among them. The most dispassionate other accounts I have found are by a French engineer officer in 1751-2 (MS. Voyage du Sieur Franquet, Ottawa), and by an agent of the expulsion, the provincial surveyor, Charles Morris (to him internal evidence leads me to credit A Brief Survey of Nova Scotia, Royal Artillery Regimental Library, Woolwich, photographic copy, Ottawa). An amusing glimpse of the Acadians who lived under the shadow of the British fort at Annapolis and who intermarried with the garrison, will be found in Knox, An Historical Journal of the Campaigns in North America (edited by A. G. Doughty for the Champlain Society, Toronto, 1914), vol. i, pp. 94-6. Purged of its obvious poetic license, Sieur de Diereville's Relation du Voyage du Port Royal de I'Acadie (Rouen, 1708; Amsterdam, 1720; Quebec, 1885) is the best early description (1700) of the land and people.

4°

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

They were self-reliant French pioneers and it is important to remember that they were French, for their Gallic nature differentiated them from their English contemporaries in many respects. For one thing, they were Catholic, and for another, they were gay. They were not paragons of industry, nor did they produce as fruits of their civilization very much except their skilfully constructed dykes. They showed little passion for education, although their overburdened priests taught a few of them to write. They were craftsmen of a most practical kind, and equipped themselves not only for agriculture, but for fishing as well. The men were axe-men, builders, and carpenters, and even made some of their tools, although for metal they were dependent on Europe, Quebec, or New England. The women practised the complete round of household tasks to be expected in an almost isolated frontier colony. W e hear nothing, however, of decoration or design in their crafts except their love of color and their eagerness to obtain English scarlet cloth. In general, it may be concluded that they were completely competent in a practical way; blessed in the possession of a fertile and easily worked land,1 and therefore not ridden by a passionate industry; lacking stimulation and criticism from abroad; and content to live for generations much as their fathers had done. They had all the homely virtues—self-reliance, courage, practicality, thrift, sobriety, health, hospitality, social equality.2 marital fidelity, religious piety, and cheerfulness. It is •Two place-names, Paradis Terrestre (in the Annapolis Valley) and Cockaigne (on the isthmus of Chignecto) attest Acadian contentment with the land. •Theoretically, Acadie was partitioned into seigneuries, but this was little more than a formal concession to the French scheme of colonization in America. The system had not been brought to practical operation at the conquest in 1710 and mere fragments survived; see below p. 151, et seq. See also Ganong, R. S. C., 1904, sec. ii, pp. 32-3. Ten seigneurial grants of 1632-93 are copied in M 371.

ACADIANS,

REAL

AND

UNREAL

41

more difficult to list their vices. Doubtless they were frail as all humanity is frail, but most of the weaknesses credited to them were determined by alien standards. Franquet and other officers found them spiteful and tactless in conversation, but it is permissible to doubt whether these military gentlemen were familiar with the direct and unpolished diction which so often characterizes those close to the soil and especially frontiersmen. They were often accused of greed and avarice by the French and the English, but there were abundant excuses for that in their circumstances. Those in closer contact with Europe found them superstitious, but their priests in general seem to have been quite satisfied with their religious devotion. Quite the commonest charge against them was that they were lazy, too fond of holidays and frolics, unenterprising in their agriculture and dairying—" indifferent Husbandmen in general, and do no more labour than what necessity urges them t o " . Undoubtedly that criticism arose from a difference in point of view. The Acadians could get twenty bushels of wheat an acre, and cultivation did not " take up one-third of their time". Their cattle roamed in natural meadows, their orchards yielded remarkable apples, pears, plums, and cherries; and small fruits grew luxuriantly. Purchasers of their surplus came to them from Boston, from the resident garrisons, and later from Louisbourg. Their tastes were simple and their wants few. Until they aspired to European luxury, they were content to find their pleasures in sociable leisure. In addition, the Acadians have been called stubborn, stupid, suspicious, and contentious among themselves. That the last charge has some truth in it, the records of the English occupation attest,1 but in pioneer communities court costs are small and going to law is often a sort of social diversion. 1

See below, p. 139, et seq.

42

NEJV ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

The other charges (a French-Canadian gibe is "entêté comme un Acadien ") are not without foundation, but the treatment which the Acadians received from both British and French goes far to explain what outsiders chose to interpret as obstinacy, mistrustfulness, and even stupidity. The subsequent story of that treatment will reveal that the Acadians were the unwitting tools of France and England, Old and New, and that their stupidity, if one still wishes to call it that, lay in the fact that they were thrown into a contest for which they had neither liking nor training ; to which, in fact, they came trusting from past success in the one political manoeuvre which almost made certain their destruction. It is easy to see how such people satisfied themselves and aggravated outsiders. They could stand alone if not interfered with, and to be left alone was all they asked. They were concerned with their own well-being in their own land, they learned to expect little from France and to ignore the English as much as possible. For neither country were they inclined or trained to be actively " good " citizens. Y e t it was their fate to be the pawns in international and interreligious conflicts until the closing decades of the eighteenth century. This, surely, was a bitter destiny for an inoffensive people who could call themselves Acadians with all the pride and significance which are summed up in the "Je suis Canadien " of the French in Canada today. The Canadians did not change their land when they changed masters, but the Acadians, like the Huguenots, the English on St. Kitts, the American Loyalists, the Armenians, the European Turks, and the Asiatic Greeks, found in exile the destiny of the helpless minority. For forty years, except for very brief interruptions, France held Acadie and had the opportunity of building up the land and its people.1 She neglected the task just as the ' T h e principal sources for this period are A. des C., B, 1-32; C 11 A, 4-33; C 11 D, 1-7.

ACADIANS, REAL AND

UNREAL

43

British neglected it during the succeeding forty years. In fact, the best approach to understanding the history of this period is to regard Acadie as a back-water off the main -stream of American life, and the Acadians as recluses from i t This view is borne out by the separation of the settlements from the garrisons. From 1670 to 1701, the principal garrison (and seat of government) was either at Pentagoet or at one of the forts on the St. John River. After that date Port Royal was chosen only because it provided a snug harbor and a fort-position not so close to New England and in other ways easier of defence. Meanwhile the real inhabitants of the country were spreading their farms and " villages " up the river from Port Royal and along the very fertile marsh-lands of the Minas Basin and the Fundy shore of the Isthmus. A tiny minority were at the fishing stations between Cape Sable and Canso or living among the mainland Indians for the sake of the trade in furs. The truth of the matter was that in 1672 the military organizer of New France, Frontenac, had taken up his first ten years of duty in Canada and had begun the task of welding the French settlements together and winning over Indian allies. The duel between France and England for North America was about to start. The Canadian seigneuries were inspected and organized. Vigorous attempts directed from France were made to pull the colony together. Meanwhile, Acadie tended either to be ignored or to be carelessly and without justification thought of and given orders in the same terms as Quebec. The Canadian seigneuries had a way of being magnificent on paper and somewhat unimposing in fact. The Acadian seigneuries were equally vast and infinitely less practical. Canadian governors were cheerfully ordered to assume impossible responsibilities. The same process in neglected Acadie was positively grotesque. Most important •of all, it was almost as isolated from Canada as from France,

44

NEW ENGLAND'S OUTPOST

and its real neighbour was its intermittent enemy, New E n g land. The masters of small craft from Boston fished off its shores or daringly peddled manufactured wares about the settlements, much as their ancestors had done in the Spanish Indies a century before. Even French governors, desperate for lack of support, were occasionally involved, and strange bargains over foodstuff's, munitions, fish, furs, and shipping punctuated the border warfare. There is some truth in the anomaly that, once established in sufficient isolation, American colonies had a way of flourishing in inverse ratio to the amount of attention received from their mother countries. This, however, was not the case in Acadie, for neither could it preserve its isolation nor could it escape the persistent and extravagant advice of the home ministry. Its administration was supposed to be subordinate to that of Canada, but communication was difficult and it received plenty of advice direct from France. Unfortunately for the harassed governors, the advice and the means to carry it out were by no means commensurate, and the officials at home combined a fairly thorough ignorance of the country and of its real potentialities with a very active bureaucratic imagination. Thus both Canadian and Acadian governors were urged to preserve overland communications, although this was possible by routes available only to expert woodsmen and Indians, traveling light and fast. T h e slender garrisons in Acadie were to keep New England fishermen off the coast and New England traders from the Bay of Fundy. The mainland portion of the colony, distant as it was from the bases of supply, was to be a rallying ground for the forces of Indians and American French employed on the left flank of the attacks on the English colonies. Even by contemporary standards, Acadie was scandalously neglected, yet the command to economize is reiterated in the dispatches. I f we are to believe the tales they sent home

ACADIANS,

REAL

AND

UNREAL

45

about one another, governors and their officers were from time to time guilty of action dictated by personal ambition and profit, but the limits of their patience must have been reached under the frequently impossible demands made on them. How could they prevent the more adventurous youths from becoming coureurs de bois and becoming somewhat casual in their relations with Indian women, when at the same time they were their chief reliance in hazardous negotiations and adventures in the border forests? What action could be taken when they were ordered to rid the colony of a vigorous, competent, and determined Acadian lady whose charms disturbed the resident officers and lost the governorship for one of them? Above all, what could they do to control and use the Acadian population when its members withdrew to farms far from the forts and frontiers and declined to be greatly interested in high politics ? There is more than irony in the fact that in late September, 1710, a ship was dispatched from France with supplies to make the Acadian garrison secure, and that in mid-October the latter inevitably succumbed to an overwhelming English attack. 1 There were, in effect, two Acadies, each important in its own way. The one was the Acadie of the international conflict, the other the land settled and developed by the Acadians. They were almost separate geographical entities as well, and as such involved separate populations. Allowing for the fact that the garrison was sometimes at Port Royal, for our purposes the country might conveniently be divided at the River St. John. The eastern and southern shores of the Bay of Fundy were the home of the peaceful farmers; the 1 A. des C., B 32/2, f. 208 v. Examples of the perverse paternalism mentioned above will be found throughout the dispatches 1678-1710; e. g., A. des C., B 7, if. 159 et seq.; B 11, f. 19 v ; B 15, f. 10 v ; B 25-27; B 29/3, f. 214 v ; B 29/5, f. 449. A correspondence between Stoughton o f Massachusetts and Villebon of Acadie over the fisheries, 1698, P. R. O. Series C. 0. 5, 860, if. 68-71.

46

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

country between the St. John and the frontier settlements of New England and thence northward across the mainland to Canada was the field for the fur trade and the scene of the terrible warfare which involved the Indians in the rivalries of the Europeans. In this warfare, the agricultural population had no basic interest, although they suffered undeservedly from the counter-attacks. It was a French and Canadian affair rather than an Acadian one, and the distinction is in general justified, in spite of the fact that some of the coureurs de bois, métis, and irregulars in the raiding parties were recruited from the adventurous fringe of a sedentary population on the farm-lands. The aggressive policy was French or French-Canadian, the leaders of the parties were men like Castine from the disbanded Carignan Regiment, and even the Indians came from Canadian tribes as well as from the ones in and near Acadie. If that had not been the case and had the true Acadie not been remote from the conflict, it would be impossible to explain the growth and spread of the Acadians, The following figures are only approximately correct, but they give an idea of this process. In 1671 the population was 441 ; in 1679, 515; in 1683, 600; in 1686, 885; in 1693, 1009; in 1698,1100; in 1 7 0 1 , 1 1 3 6 ; in 1703,1244; in 1707,1484;and in 1714, 1773. 1 There was little immigration during these forty-three years and the quadrupling of the population is eloquent testimony to the fecundity of the Acadian stock. With the increase in numbers came the opening-up of new lands as young men sought farms to which they might take their brides. The Minas Basin and Cobequid Bay were the first new settlements, and dykes transformed their marshes into farm-lands. From there men made their way around Cape Chignecto into Beaubassin and the mouth of the Petitcodiac river as far west as Chepody. These settlements com1

Census of Canada, 1870-1, vol. iv, pp. 10-50.

ACADIANS,

REAL

AND UNREAL

47

municated with Port Royal by water for the most part, although there were difficult land-routes as well. A s a matter of fact, however, they easily and naturally tended to become separate and independent of the older settlement and they paid small attention to the government. They had no garrisons among them, there was enough land to enable them to disregard the rigidities of the seigneurial system, they were friendly with the Indians, remote from the English, and (beyond Minas) in most intimate touch with the scattered French settlements and depots in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. By 1701 the settlements up the Bay were larger than the one at Port Royal and as they grew steadily thereafter, it is proper to regard them as the real home-land of the Acadians. This was not very gratifying to the resident administration and garrison, however, particularly when they showed a marked impatience of control. As early as 1686 their independence was complained of, and in 1701 and 1704 it was reported of them that " they lived like true republicans, not acknowledging royal or judicial authority and even that they were prepared to accept English masters. These are obviously the exaggerated reports of disgruntled officials and should not be taken literally, but they corroborate what might be expected in these isolated communities. Intermittent warfare between France and England and between their colonies in North America developed during the last fifteen or twenty years of the seventeenth century. In America it had little to do even with contemporary European " rules of w a r " . The very distance from Europe resulted in all sorts of irregularities in declaration of war and conclusion of peace, and it is quite pardonable almost to ignore those formalities in considering what happened. An additional complication was that individuals or groups of individuals, English, French, and Indian, quite often conducted warlike operations without the concert of the Amer-

48

NEW ENGLAND'S OUTPOST

ican authorities, much less the European. This was not only the case along the land frontiers, but at sea as well, among the fishermen and traders. Thus the chronicle of the times is a confused record of raids on frontier villages, on trade depots, on Indian villages, and on formal fortresses; of fights between fishing vessels; of seizure of trading ships or looting of them; and finally, of semi-official piracy and privateering. Measured by humane values, two elements stand out from the confusion: the terrible attacks on the New England outposts and the brutal reprisals which were so inappropriately (but easily) directed against the defenceless villages on the Bay of Fundy. O f course, a considerable proportion of the warfare was between men who were concerned in direct rivalries of one sort or another. It is possible also to establish other less direct causal relationships which nevertheless involved considerable numbers of colonists in the horrors of war. A t the same time, it is difficult to suppress a feeling of pity for the innocent and almost unconcerned populations in both English and French colonies who lived in the terror and visitation of lacerating physical and mental tortures. When William o f Orange, as King of England, marshalled the Protestant powers of Europe against Louis X I V , the English colonists in America, also involved in war against France, woke to full realization of what the French had achieved in the heart of the continent. It was brought home to them forcibly that in spite of their protecting shield of friendly Indians, the French could and would strike from the trackless hinterland against precisely those thinly populated frontiers which were most difficult to defend. They had been prepared for an occasional skirmish at sea and they had grown accustomed to the easy security of their towns and settlements on the coast, but these sudden, swift thrusts brought a terror which was heightened by the impossibility

ACAD1ANS,

REAL

AND UNREAL

49

of predicting when and where they would occur. The eight years of King William's War (1689-1697) were a rude awakening, but out of them there grew a realization of a problem common at least to the northern colonies and one which needed common action for its solution. Frontenac was back in Canada and the rumor of his grand design of striking at once by sea and land served to bring together the first colonial conference and launch the first colonial attack on New France under Phips in 1690. 1 It is not necessary to enlarge upon the warfare here : the capture and relinquishment of Port Royal; the failure at Quebec; the massacres which began at Schenectady in 1689 and continued year by year until they almost threatened Boston ; the breathing space between 1697 and 1702 ; the renewal, and the disasters of Queen Anne's War, extending as they did from the Bahamas to Newfoundland and from the St. Lawrence to the heart of New England. When peace came in 1 7 1 3 England and the English in America had no excuse for not knowing the colonial issue. Yet in the twenty^five years of this bitter baptism very little had been achieved in rousing the continental colonies to united action, and their own share in bringing about the favourable terms of the Treaty of Utrecht had been extremely small. The moment for a union of the colonies under home control had come and gone with William III, the lesson of voluntary cooperation in America was not to be learned until the eve of the colonial révolution, and the French still enjoyed the advantage of a central control which, despite its glaring imperfections, counterbalanced for another forty-five years the overwhelming numerical superiority of the English. 1

W . D. Lighthall in two interesting papers demonstrates a remarkable continuity in English Colonial attempts against Canada in the seventy years before the conquest. The design he credits to the Anglo-Dutch in New York and he shows how little it was altered ; Antiquarian Journal (Montreal), 3rd ser., I l l , No. 5; and R. S. C., 1904, sec. ii, p. 265, et seq.

50

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

Acadie had suffered severely during these years. It lay nearest to the English colonies and could be reached by sea. Its outpost, Pemaquid, changed hands twice and was destroyed. From river to river the frontier was withdrawn eastward until it reached the St. John, and then the garrison came across the Bay to pin their faith on the harbour and the rebuilt fort at Port Royal. The attack on the province by Phips in 1690 had been an affair of pure pillage, and the absurd imposition of the oath to William and Mary was followed by resumption of French control in the following year. In 1696 and 1704 Colonel Church of Massachusetts harried and destroyed all the defenceless Fundy settlements, but did not try his strength against Port Royal. In 1707 two most amateurish and inglorious attempts with overwhelming numbers and resources were made against the fort there and dismally failed. The province was neglected by France and the settlers up the Bay paid the price of their independence. The debatable land was coming into its own. That it remained French so long was owing to the bravery and resource of its last governor, Subercase. His period of office, which began in 1706, was a refreshing relief from the weakness, self-seeking, and tale-telling which had characterized the Acadian administration for years. No one saw more clearly than he the needs of the colony in the existing situation, and no one put it more clearly and forcibly in dispatches to France. When the home authorities failed him. he entered on his almost unsupported campaign with vigor and ingenuity. He made Port Royal a very nest of privateers to prey on English shipping and he used the prizes to sustain his feeble garrison and fort. He practically gave up adventure on the mainland and set himself the most possible of doubtful tasks, the preservation of the capital fortress of Acadie. The rest of his province had to fare as best it could and in its isolation it reached the state summed

ACADIAN

S, REAL

AND

UNREAL

up in the submission to the English of the people of Chignecto, " estant délaissés, et destitués de toute assistance et forces suffisantes pour nous opposer et défendre." 1 The Phips expeditions to Acadie and Canada had been like premature discharges of a gun neither properly trained nor supplied with reserves of ammunition. The attack on Acadie was so overwhelming that it could not fail to succeed, and that on Canada might well have followed its example had Phips been as resolute and resourceful as Frontenac. As it happened, the French held Quebec and re-captured Port Royal without a struggle, and their only loss was the loot which Phips and his colonials combed painstakingly from the Acadian settlements. New England had been curiously confident and, after leaving a skeleton garrison at Port Royal, had waited until October, 1691, to send a governor. This was one Colonel Tyng and with him went two traders, Alden and Nelson. It was not inappropriate that they were captured at sea by the expedition from Quebec under Villebon, which was dispatched by Frontenac and which, without incident, resumed control of Acadie in November. The episode added a touch of irony to the new charter of Massachusetts, incorporating Acadie, which was brought out by Phips in 1692. 2 The trader Nelson was none other than John, the heir of Tom Temple and the possessor of the shadowy Stirling claims.3 He was a person of international importance in North America and a well-to-do and enterprising merchant and man of affairs. He had been on a mission to Quebec in 1682, and following that visit had been empowered by the 1

N. S., A 2, p. 210.

''Murdoch, i, p. 197. s

Biographical note, P. A. of C., 1926, pp. 431-2. Further details in Nelson's many memorials to the Board of Trade and Plantations, 1697-8, in M. 381; B. M. Stoive MS. 163, ff. 172-3; N. S., A 2, p. 173, et seq.; Mémoires de l'Amérique septentrionale, ou la suite des Voyages de Mr. le Baron de Lahontan (La Haye, 1704), p. 220, et seq.

52

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

French governor to issue licenses to New England vessels operating off the northern coasts.1 H e was thus the natural person to investigate the commercial possbilities of Acadie in 1691. Instead, he was hurried off to Quebec, where he found himself considered sufficiently important to balance all of Phips's reputed prisoners in an exchange. He was treated remarkably indulgently, and, as a member of Frontenac's own entourage, was more like a distinguished visitor than anything else. He even stood god-father at a christening. When New England denied that there were any French prisoners and the French ministry warned Frontenac not to be too lenient,2 his condition changed somewhat, and he ultimately sealed his fate by bribing two disgruntled French officers to warn New England of the impending atack on Pemaquid. The warning got through and temporarily saved Pemaquid, but Nelson's tools were caught, brought to Quebec, and shot before his eyes. He and Tyng and Alden were thereupon hurried off to France, where T y n g died at La Rochelle, Alden purchased his freedom for £1200, and Nelson was plunged into a dungeon at Angouleme, from which only his own ingenuity and perseverance and a bailbond of £15,000 secured him temporary liberty. This was during the negotiations for the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) and he used his freedom not only in representations on his own behalf, but in clear and statesman-like memorials concerning the situation in America. In them one hears little of the Stirling claims. In their place emerged clearly a policy for the continental colonies. As a merchant Nelson's first demand was for definition. In Europe there was colossal geographical ignorance, made more profound by the conflicting charters for North America which dated back to the Cabots. In the continental colonies 11684,

N. S., A 2, p. 162.

'A. des C., B 16/1, f. 103, April, 1692.

ACADIANS,

REAL

AND UNREAL

53

there was disunion, vigorous disagreement as to intercolonial boundaries, and a good deal of unprofitable rivalry. Nelson pleaded that the international frontier be clearly agreed upon and, modestly enough, suggested the river StGeorge. In the same spirit he urged a definite agreement as to the conditions under which New England fishermen might operate off the eastern coasts and on the banks. He even thought it possible that under such a neutrality as actually was effected by the treaty, there might be regulated intercolonial trade. There was an immense amount of moderation and common-sense in his proposals, and along with them he drove home the nature of the economic opportunities open to New England and Old in time of peace, in the fur-trade, the fisheries, and the exploitation of naval supplies. The Treaty of Ryswick, however, blandly ignored American problems by restoring the status quo ante and it was followed by more or less sincere instructions from both governments in Europe for the preservation of an amicable " neutrality" in America. These actions did nothing to settle the issues and the outbreak of war in 1702 brought them to the front again in still clearer form. 1 The colonial failures against Port Royal in 17014 and 1707 made it natural, moreover, for the colonists to appeal to England for aid. Their requests were now ably supported by Francis Nicholson,2 who had clear ideas of the necessity of colonial union and of a fight to a finish with France for North America. Quite naturally, he and the northern colonies were drawn together by common interest, and for several years he and they brought pressure to bear on the Lords of Trade. 1

There is an interesting series of contemporary memorials on America addressed to the Hon. Chas. Montague (later Earl of Halifax) in B. M. Egerton MS., gag, e. g., ff. 90-97 v, 119-122. Naval stores receive more emphasis than before. * In 1689 Lieut.-Governor of New York, in 1690 of Virginia, in 1692 of Maryland, and in 1698 Governor of Virginia.

54

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

H e had associated with him in his attempts to secure British assistance, a gentleman f r o m N e w

York,

named

Samuel

Vetch, w h o supported the request on behalf of important groups of N e w Y o r k and Boston citizens. 1

When

Great

Britain at last rose to the occasion and sent aid, V e t c h w a s accepted as a volunteer and commissioned as second in command to assist in securing cooperation f r o m N e w Y o r k . T h e classic plan of attacks first on A c a d i e and then on N e w f o u n d l a n d and C a n a d a had been revived.

Britain w a s

to provide most of the money, the arms and munitions, and naval aid, while the colonies were to supplement the British regiments with colonial levies and to attend to the securing of supplies.

In spite of appeals of urgency, nothing could be

managed in 1 7 0 8 , but the Americans were promised that the operations would be carried out in 1 7 0 9 . 2 therefore, went on apace and Massachusetts,

Preparations, Connecticut,

N e w Hampshire, and Rhode Island showed commendable enthusiasm in assuming the responsibilities assigned to them. T h e summer wore on, however, without the expected expedi1

He had been a Scotch refugee on the continent and came to England with William's armies in 1688, serving until 1697. He took part in the Darien expedition of 1698, went to New York in 1700, where he married Robert Livingstone's daughter, and in 1705 went to Quebec concerning an exchange of prisoners. On a charge of having indulged in illegitimate trade in arms and ammunition with the French he was fined £200 in Massachusetts. He vigorously denied his guilt and the affair blew over after 1706. See Wallace, Dictionary of Canadian Biography (Toronto, 1926). ' T h e memorial of the Massachusetts Legislature, Oct. 20, 1708, is a good summary of colonial troubles, hopes, and prayers; C. O. 5, 865, No. 16 (i) : " T h e Force of the Enemy is Chiefly bent against this Your Majesty's Province and Province of New Hampshire whilst we are a Barrier to ye others " ; " the very great Disadvantage... by reason of Port Royal remaining in the hands of the French... the Scituation whereof makes it a Dunkirk to us . . . for the Intercepting of all shipping... a fit receptable for Privateers . . . also to Annoy Our Fishery " ; followed by a request for its restoration " to Your Maj t i e s Obedience " and arguments as to its importance in trade in naval stores, and in the problem of security.

ACADIANS,

REAL

AND

UNREAL

55

tion from Britain making an appearance, and finally it was learned that the European situation had prevented its dispatch. There was naturally great disappointment and a noticeable loss of enthusiasm, but New England refused to give up. The privateers had been a great nuisance and renewed appeals for the Acadie and Canada expedition were sent to Nicholson " in Especiall manner referring to Port Royall, that Nest of Spoilers so near to us." 1 Yet the summer of 1710, too, wore on and colonial hopes grew dim. Suddenly and unexpectedly on July 15th, Nicholson and Vetch arrived in Boston with a flotilla composed of six naval vessels and transports containing a regiment of marines and the munitions. Massachusetts was electrified and set about re-creating the previous year's enthusiasm and reconstituting the colonial forces. Thanks to local discouragement and surprise, it was a slow task, and the expedition did not set sail until September 18th, too late to do more than attack Acadie. Thus it happened that brave Subercase looked out on Sept. 24th to see thirty-six sail lying in the basin of Port Royal, bearing, in addition to the British regiment, four colonial regiments raised in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, some thirtyfour hundred men (exclusive of naval and incidental personnel) to oppose the less than three hundred which he could only hold together by removing the canoes and thus checking further desertion. Against their artillery he had a ramshackle fort, six guns, and two mortars. Yet it was not until Oct. 16th that he yielded to the inevitable after seven days of artillery siege, during four of which three batteries of mortars fired on the fort from less than a hundred yards away. By his resistance he won honorable terms and 'Addingon (Dudley's secretary) to Popple (of the Board of Trade), October 26, 1709; C. O. 5, 865, No. 24. See also the petitions, ibid., e. g., No. 36 (xvi).

56

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

marched his two hundred and fifty tatterdemalions out of the fort with arms and baggage and " sill the honours of war " to surrender and be sent back to France. The contrast between them and the victors cannot greatly have increased the latter's self-esteem, but Acadie was theirs at last and they were in no mood to be self-critical. They fed the garrison, shipped it and some Acadians off to France, and sent Major John Livingston overland to Quebec to give Vaudreuil the news. They then memorialized Queen Anne, telling her of their success and of the town's new and unoriginal name, Annapolis Royal, and, leaving Vetch to hold the fort with two hundred marines and two hundred and fifty colonials, sailed away again on October 28th to the comforts and acclaim of Boston. Acadie had become Nova Scotia once more and had entered upon another forty years of neglect under a new set of masters.

CHAPTER

III

(1710-1723) A PHANTOM R U L E AND " NEUTRAL "

SUBJECTS

THE precipitancy with which the main body of the conquerors abandoned the scene of their conquest was a bad and true omen for the future, but it had reasons of policy as well. Nicholson and Vetch knew that the conquest of Acadie was merely a beginning and that, although nothing further could be done in 1710, next year an attempt would be made against Canada. The same consideration lay behind the dispatch of Major Livingston overland to Quebec. The purpose of the arduous journey which he undertook under the guidance of Castine (a famous border Acadian) was given out to be an attempt to secure the release of the prisoners from Deerfield, yet he really was engaged in a somewhat obvious spying out of the land, and hoped to bring back from Quebec information for the service of the next expeditionary force. 1 For the winter, Vetch, with two hundred regulars and two hundred and fifty New Englanders, was to hold the fort and in the spring meet Nicholson in Boston on his return from England with the forces for the Canada expedition. Neither present circumstance nor future prospect in Nova Scotia was promising. T o begin with, the fort itself was in wretched condition. It had suffered during the siege and its defences being almost entirely of earth-work construction, reinforced or revetted with timber, it required constant attention and repair to remedy the ravages of frost and 1 The journal of his highly adventurous and dangerous journey, N. S., A 3, p. 90, et seq.; see also ibid., pp. 21, 3 1 ; and Kenney (ed.), " A British Secret Service Report on Canada, 1711," Canadian Historical Review, I, 1 (Toronto, March, 1920), pp. 48-54. 57

58

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

moisture in the soil and of rot in the timbers. Neither the money nor the tools were available to make permanent improvements of brick or stone. T h e land near the fort was cleared of its trees, and the river, which was the only serviceable highway for bringing in logs and even firewood, quite early proved to be dangerous because it provided abundant localities for ambush. The local inhabitants were decidedly unfriendly. They and their priests, encouraged from Canada, Placentia (in Newfoundland), and France, conceived it to be their duty to harass their conquerors as vigorously as possible as long as the war lasted. 1 Those who lived immediately under the guns of the fort were fairly docile, but in the settlements up the river, and further east, there was naturally anything but affection for the English and the Bastonnais. T h e Indians, too, saw their opportunity and added the peculiar terror which their presence invariably introduced into American warfare. In 1 7 1 2 a band of Iroquois had to be brought in from New Y o r k for a time to meet them with their own technique and weapons. Under these circumstances the administration between the capitulation ( 1 7 1 0 ) and the peace ( 1 7 1 3 ) was somewhat insignificant and its prestige was diminished by the notorious failure of the Canada expedition in 1 7 1 1 . Superficially Nova Scotia profited a little from that disastrous adventure, for Vetch on his return from it secured not only supplies f o r Annapolis, but recruits as well, to replace the numerous losses by disease, Indian and Acadian ambushes, and desertion. Y e t on the whole the Acadians were justified in being contemptuous of the garrison for the first four or five years. Vetch himself soon became quite disillusioned about his 1 For evidence of French and Canadian encouragement see A. des C., B. 47, f. 1175; C ii A 45, f. 59; Documents Inédits, I, pp. 190-196. T h e French crown promised rewards, accounts for expenses were submitted to Quebec, and priests, Acadians, and Indians were implicated.

A PHANTOM

RULE

59

province. 1 Indeed, beyond the immediate precincts of the fort, it was not his unless he held it by the presence of soldiers, and even they were not unopposed. Throughout his letters can be traced, along with a clear appreciation of the importance of holding the country, a growing disappointment that its possession was so difficult and yielded so little satisfaction. T h e conquerers had arrived with a promise of a share in the conquered lands and permission to realize upon perishable plunder at once, although other plunder and proceeds were to await royal pleasure.2 T h e y had had some disagreement over the spoils and without waiting for royal allotment of lands had made somewhat extensive purchases of lands from the Acadians, purchases whose circumstances and general equity cannot be determined and may well be suspected, but which were recorded and attested in most imposing deeds. This early flurry in real estate soon died down and except for a few small holdings at Annapolis there was no actual settlement, thanks to the precarious condition of the occupation. It is true that a Huguenot member of the expedition, William Winniett, married an Acadian and established himself as a merchant, but in general, the Acadians still possessed Acadie. 8 1 H i s letter book, June, 1711 to October, 1713, is B. M. Sloane MS. 3607. For this period, in addition to N. S., A series, see Nicholson's Journal in Nova Scotia Historical Society, Collections, vol. i, pp. 59-104; Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Records, BI ( N e w Y o r k and New England 1702-1799), f. 158; Dartmouth MSS., Patshull, Bundle No. 1 ; Library of Congress, Am. B. 1709/10, Annapolis Royal 1710.

* Commissions and Instructions, Nicholson and Vetch, N. S., E 1, Nos. 1-3; E 7, Nos. 1-3. • One of the officers, Sir Charles Hobby, spent some hundreds of pounds on lands. He, perhaps because of a previously questionable reputation, collected at least seven separate testimonials as to his meritorious behaviour on the expedition, and these evidences of an uneasy conscience, rather than his landed estates, are his monument in Nova Scotian history. He embarked on trading ventures at Annapolis in association with John Adams of Boston, and there is some reason to believe that Vetch also had an interest.

6o

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

Not the least of the difficulties was quarrelling among the officers of the expedition. When they could think of nothing else to report of each other, they whispered " Jacobite ", a potent accusation in the last years of Queen Anne. 1 Their imbroglio is of little importance,2 except that partly from it must be drawn the portrait of Vetch, and he was not spared in the charges leveled against him by Nicholson, Hobby, George Vane the engineer, and others. Certainly he was not so dark as painted by them and equally certainly he did his best according to his lights for Nova Scotia. Yet though he burned brick for repairs and vigorously set about the hopeless task of making his fort defensible, he, like Nicholson, speculated in the clothing left over from the Canada expedition, and in one regard at least appears to have been enjoying unaccustomed opulence. His wife spent the winter of 1 7 1 2 - 1 3 with him, " doeing pennance", and for her reward he ordered all manner of things from England ranging from a " Diamond Ring of about £20 value" to a " Large Turky Carpett fine colours ". It seems impossible, however, to decide whether he overstepped the exceedingly loose contemporary standards of official financial probity.8 He could truly say that " the great Negotiations att home 1

Vetch, who admitted to a passion for " the newest and most reputed pamphlets", was therefore suspected by Nicholson, who deplored the arrival in America of this explosive material. ' Vetch reported, Nov. 20, 1712, that some " Jacobite " remarks by Vane so enraged Lawrence Armstrong at mess that he " broke a large Glass Decanter full of wine upon his head and had verry near sent him to the other world", Sloane MS. 3607, f. 25. The violence reported here is to be borne in mind in estimating Armstrong's later governorship. ' H e managed in 1711 to get the Acadians to accept in payment for services, etc., Massachusetts province bills in order to attach them to New England by bonds of interest. Apparently they did not regard them seriously, for in October, 1712, he congratulated the governor, council, and representatives of Massachusetts on the fact that he had only been able to buy in some ¿50 worth of some thousands issued. He later issued bills himself by proclamation. See Sloane MS. 3607, ff. 7, 23, 28v.

A PHANTOM

RULE

6l

. . . occasioned our being totally f o r g o t t " ; raising money through Boston by bills on timid American and English agents was a complicated process aggravated by the dictates of time and distance; and if, as Nicholson charged, he had " Scandalously Run away from this place when he should have staid to have made up his Accots with Me he at least ran straight to London, in 1714, where by much vigor and some downright lying he satisfied the Lords of Trade with his stewardship in spite of the presence of Hobby with him before the Board. 1 His proceedings and those of his deputies, Hobby and Caulfeild, 2 in administering Nova Scotia have some slight importance. Even with " a Garrison Composed of all the Mutineers of the seven Regiments from which they were Detached who have neither pay cloathing nor bedding and •were in great Danger to be without provisions theirs was a military government. No instructions had been given for a civil administration and beyond various attempts, successful and unsuccessful, to make the Acadians take the oath of allegiance, nothing much was done to provide one. During the winter of 1 7 1 0 - n , a court composed of four officers and two Acadians met twice a week to hear and settle disputes and to register the transactions in land. This was Vetch's work and, whether continuous in operation or not, must have been the precedent for a court maintained by Caulfeild in the winter of 1 7 1 3 - 1 4 to which, on the request of both parties, disputes might be referred. 3 Vetch in 1

Hobby fared poorly and there is a faint contempt of him discernible •even in the records of the Board, N. S., A 6, pp. 20, 65. Although after 1696 the central committee was the Board of Trade, its members often received the old designation, Lords of Trade. 'Hobby, July-November, 1 7 1 1 ; Caulfeild, winter 1711-12 and, for Nicholson, winter 1713-14. a Report by Paul Mascarene to Nicholson, Nov. 6, 1713, on the winter of 1710-11, N. S., A 4, p. 166, et seq.; Nova Scotia Archives, I (Halifax, 1869), pp. 10-11.

62

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

November, 1710, collected money contributions from the Annapolis settlements and through Lieut. Mascarene 1 even from Minas, with the contention that the habitants might thus show their gratitude for being spared pillage. Although Vetch apparently intended it to do so, this did not grow into a precedent, but its execution did occasion the beginning of a practice which marked the relations of governors and governed down to the days of the expulsion. W h e n Mascarene went to Minas, the people there asked that, because of the scattered nature of their settlements, they might be represented by a committee. T h e request was granted and the same procedure was the regular one thereafter. Y e t these are mere fragments for a structure of government, and slight foundation for the future. It is truer to see the period between October, 1710, and the arrival of Governor Nicholson in the spring of 1 7 1 4 to effect the agreement of the Treaty of Utrecht, as a time when something like a state of war existed except between the Annapolis habitants and the garrison; when seventy men could be killed or captured by the Indians on a single wood-cutting expedition not a dozen miles up the river; and when Vetch tried such various expedients for establishing a control as taking the priest f r o m the river off to Boston for a year or experimenting with a futile imitation of terrorism. 2 It would have been too much to expect a neat and effective system of government forthwith for N o v a Scotia, but the 1 This Huguenot engineer officer was quite the most winning figure in the garrison and is of considerable importance later in the story. A t tention is here drawn to his simple, soldierly, and patient correspondence with the unresponsive Board of Ordnance, Brown MS. 19070, ff. 34-69.

' T h e officer in charge of the massacred wood-party was ordered by Vetch to get assistance from the Acadians in the following fashion: " threaten them with severity & let the soldiers make a show of killing their Hoggs but do not kill any but you may let them kill some fouls but pay for them before you come away " ; Sloane MS. 3607.

A PHANTOM RULE

63

early disorganization was made worse by the insufficiency and even the conflict of the official instruments under which the existing administration functioned. T o begin with, the commissions and instructions of Nicholson and Vetch had been framed with little more than the conquest and a short military occupation in view. Matters were not improved when, on Oct. 20, 1712, Nicholson was commissioned as civil governor and later provided with instructions. The latter were " the same as are given by Her Majesty to all her Governours in America and proved to be almost totally unfitted for the province and out of harmony with the commission, dealing chiefly with the trade and navigation acts and referring to civil government only in instructions to Nicholson as to how to fill judicial offices which he had no powers to create! 1 Some reliance might have been expected to be laid on the articles of capitulation, but actually the French and English versions of these had not agreed, probably because of an attempt at subtle dealing on the part of the victors, by which they congratulated themselves that they were extending terms only to the garrison and the inhabitants of the banlieu of Port Royal, thus leaving the other Acadians at their mercy. They were saved from the embarrassment of discovering that they should have arranged for the surrender of the whole province by the pride of Subercase, which led him to attach the most generous description of his province to his signature when he issued a safe-conduct to the escort of the French prisoners, and this odd scrap of paper acquired an importance in subsequent boundary disputes which Subercase can never have anticipated.2 The articles of capitulation 1

Commission, N. S., E 7, No. 3 ; Instructions, Apr. 1, 1713, N. S., E 1, Nos. 4, 5• T h e capitulation, French and English, N. S., A 3, p. 15; its limited

application, ibid., pp. 21-4, 81-2; the safe-conduct, ibid., p. 50, in which Subercase described himself as governor from Cap Rosiers (Gaspe) to the Kennebec.

NEW ENGLAND'S

64

OUTPOST

had, however, at least made some provision for the disposal of the resident French. Those who lived near Port Royal were allowed two years during which they might withdraw, the Canadians and others one year, and those who chose to remain were to take the oath of allegiance. Vetch had found that practically all the residents remained, he was able to impose the oath on only fifty-seven heads of families, and they were threatened by the others. Neither Hobby nor Caulfeild had been certain enough of his position to make any further progress, and this most unsatisfactory situation remained after Vetch's departure for England in the autumn of 1 7 1 3 to straighten out the disputed Ordnance accounts. More formal and exact arrangements were to be expected in 1 7 1 4 following the dual ratification of the Treaty of Utrecht. By it, France retained Cape Breton and the islands in the River and Gulf of St. Lawrence, but relinquished to England Newfoundland, Hudson's Bay and " all Nova Scotia or Acadia, with its ancient boundaries, as also the city of Port Royal, now called Annapolis Royal, and all other things in those parts, which depend on the said lands and islands." The Acadians were not forgotten, for they were to have liberty " to remove themselves within a year to any other place, as they shall think fit, together with all their moveable effects ", and those who remained were " to be subject to the Kingdom of Great Britain " and " to enjoy the free exercise of their religion, according to the usage of the church of Rome, as far as the laws of Great Britain do allow the same." This stipulation, moreover, was emphasized and seconded by a royal letter to Nicholson of June 23, 1 7 1 3 , 1 which explained that the French King had been moved to clemency in freeing from the galleys such of his subjects as were serving there because of their dissent in religion, and that Queen Anne was therefore minded to show her appreciation by some favor towards his former subjects 1

N. S., A 4, p. 97; printed, Murdoch, op. cit., i, p. 333.

A PHANTOM

RULE

65

in Nova Scotia. Nicholson was bidden to allow those who remained in the country to retain and enjoy their lands and goods " as fully and freely as other our Subjects do " or to sell the same if they shall rather chuse to remove elsewhere ". Clear as was the intention of the letter, and definite as was the treaty, the Queen neglected to state a term for her permission of Acadian emigration. It might also be added here that there was complete absence of agreement as to what were the " ancient boundaries " of Nova Scotia. In possession, then, of his new commission, his unsuitable instructions, the treaty, and the Queen's letter, Nicholson finally made a visit to his province in the summer of 1714. In the meanwhile Newfoundland had been handed over to the English, and the governor, garrison, and inhabitants of Placentia had moved to Cape Breton Island, where France had determined to erect the fortress of Louisburg to be her protection for the St. Lawrence. 1 The officers there, sincerely or not, awaited the arrival of the Acadians as well, and when Caulfeild refused to let them go, addressed Nicholson himself, saying that two officers would arrive in August to notify the habitants that the French King was prepared to grant them lands on Cape Breton and to assist in the arrangements for their emigration. In addition, therefore, to his distaste for Nova Scotia, his rancour toward Vetch, and his determination to cut himself free from his governorship as soon as possible, Nicholson had the task of preparing himself for negotiation over the possible loss of the country's important indigenous population. The records of the affair seem to have survived complete,3 1 For a complete and well documented study of Louisbourg from 1713 to 1758 including its relations with Annapolis and Nova Scotia, see McLennan, Louisbourg (London, 1918). French dispatches relating to its foundation and the plans for Nova Scotia are A. des C., B 37/1, ff. 6o-6iv; B37/3, f. 2 i o v ; B 39/5, ff. 286, 298. 2

They are not calendared in P. A. of C., 1894 and their omission might

66

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

but it is difficult to decide how genuinely any of the parties to it were motivated, English or French officers, or Acadians. T h e last were assembled to hear what the French officers had to say, not only at Annapolis, but at Minas and Cobequid as well, and at all three points most of them (302 out of 355 heads of families) signed declarations of their willingness to go. Superficially, then, it seemed as if the Acadians were to transplant themselves to become the colonists of Cape Breton and Isle St. Jean (now Prince Edward Island), and the emissaries went away after publicly thanking Nicholson for the " civil, honest, and open " fashion in which he had acted. W i t h them and after them went a few Acadians to look over the lands to which they were invited while the remainder and their English masters settled down to await developments. T h e unreality of the situation gradually revealed itself. While the French emissaries were in the country they had formally requested that a year be allowed for the exodus, during which boats might be built and aid be secured from France to transport the goods and cattle. T h e y also asked for permission to sell what they could not carry. Nicholson and his council of officers, Caulfeild, Williams, and Aldridge, were quite willing to allow the greatest freedom and give full assistance to the French officers in meeting the habitants/ but they did not want to take the responsibility of granting the requests for facilitating the emigration, and, finding that no term was specified in the Queen's letter and that the " year " of the treaty had already elapsed, they replied that be significant of a desire to conceal British policy were not a group of other Nicholson papers, unconcerned with the policy toward the Acadians, also omitted. They are all to be found in N. S., A 5. 1 Not only the visiting officers, but the resident priests, took full advantage of this freedom and used every argument to induce the Acadians to withdraw, the general impression given being that the King of France and the religious authorities would be concerned now only with Louisbourg and the new settlements. Especially were they warned that if they took the oath to Great Britain they might not emigrate.

A PHANTOM

RULE

67

they must wait until the questions had been submitted to the Queen and her pleasure learned. Anne died in August, 1714, and that winter the Lords of Trade considered the situation for George I. They had Vetch to call upon for information, and on the strength of his arguments that the loss of the Acadians and their cattle would be ruin for the colony and strength to Louisbourg, and that, if they were retained, they might provide a shield against the Indians, they decided that the Acadians were to remain.1 It would be easy to indulge in a sermon on the text perfide Albion over that decision if there were not a number of other circumstances affecting the whole situation. Thus, while it is true that Nicholson used all the means at his disposal to prevent the emigration, it is equally true that, had the Acadians wanted to go and the French assisted in their departure and prepared to receive them, he and the garrison would have been quite unable to retain them.2 The real determinant in the situation was that the Acadians, having inspected the new lands and the beginnings of serious military occupation of the gulf islands, decided that they were far better off where they were. They did not like the lands or the climate and they did not relish pioneer life anew. They had not been much troubled by French government in the past, they would not be troubled by the feeble British one in the future. They would try to continue their bucolic existence and ignore the politics of the European world. Small wonder, then, that the Governor of Louisbourg reported in September, 1715, that they were very slow and loath to leave their old lands and that they seemed to want new lands where mere ploughing would assure an abundant harvest.8 1 See N. S. Arch., I, pp. 5-7 ; N. S., A 4, p. 246 ; A 5, pp. 13, 21, 27, 150, 157; A 6, p. 81.

• The evidence of the Annapolis priests supports this, Documents Inédits, II, pp. 6-7. 'A.

des C., C n B i , f. 123; corroborated C 11 A 35, f. 106.

Two

68

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

French protests to England and Nova Scotia could only be half-hearted under the circumstances and, once it was learned that England had decided to keep the Acadians, France preferred peace to a struggle to secure them.1 Both countries needed a breathing-space after war; Britain, if Walpole's career be taken as a criterion, not only welcomed peace, but was determined to preserve it, and France found that Louisbourg swallowed up the funds which might be used to provide a fleet to move the Acadians. Moreover there were felt to be certain obvious advantages in having a large and firmly-established French population in a country of the tactical importance of Nova Scotia. Nor need their agricultural support be relinquished, for it was just as easy to drive cattle across the Isthmus of Chignecto from the upper settlements as down to Annapolis. Indeed, as the Beaubassin settlements grew, they became a dependable French base of supplies. Finally, even in times of peace, boundary disputes could go on, and from the beginning the French contention that only the peninsula had been surrendered was argued against the British claim to have linked up Nova Scotia with the other colonies. This dispute had little significance at first, for Vaudreuil failed to attract Acadians to the St. John River just as Costebelle failed to draw them to Cape Breton, but years later a fort and a vigorous patriot priest almost created a new French Acadie at the northern end of the Isthmus. For the time being, however, it was neither French nor British policy which settled the issue, but the decision of the Acadians themselves. The Indians, too, objected to Cape Breton on the ground that they would Acadian reports on the new lands, N. S., A 5, pp. 81, 109. For the situation at Isle St. Jean see Harvey, The French Regime in Prince Edward Island (New Haven, 1926). Most of the Acadians who emigrated returned to Caulfeild's régime. 1

A. des C., B 37/3, p. 837; Doc. Inéd., I, p. 195; P- A. of C., 1899

Supplement, pp. 499-500.

A PHANTOM

RULE

69

quickly exhaust its game. The French, therefore, philosophically accepted the advantages they could draw from the situation and endeavored through the priests to keep alive among both Acadians and Indians a devotion to France which might prove of service when the time came to reconquer Acadie. The Acadians flourished as never before, managing their local affairs among themselves and from time to time using Government as a sort of neutral arbiter.1 The process of settling down in Nova Scotia was distributed over about fifteen years, f i r s t of all the Board of Trade had to reach some sort of decision as to what its policy was to be. Then the governors and lieutenant-governors had to learn by a system of trial and error what equilibrium could be established between that policy and actual conditions, with regard to the Acadians, the Indians, Louisbourg, and New England. There were a few clashes and these had pretty much to be resolved by the forces on the spot. The Indian W a r of 1722-26, for instance, involved a number of attacks not unassisted by the French, on settlements, on individuals, and on trading and fishing vessels. Then with a growing French fishing fleet at Louisbourg and a vigorous New England one at the mouth of the Gut of Canso, there was bound to be friction and occasional conflict. The working out of a compromise as to the number, character, and activities of the French priests among the Acadians and Indians was a particularly difficult affair. They were naturally suspected and not without reason, and yet the garrison could not pretend to do much to control them. The matter of the oath of allegiance was, of course, the greatest problem, because the English wanted the Acadians to become " good subjects " and the Acadians wished at all costs to be excused the necessity of declaring themselves or being involved in international war. A few of the incidents of the general settlement require attention. 1 The details of administration of the Acadians and of the civil government of the colony are the subject of Chapter V I below.

7°

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

It was not until 1 7 1 9 that British policy was defined and that a special set of governmental instructions for Nova Scotia was framed. The first arrangements had been makeshift and erratic. After Nicholson's commission of 1 7 1 2 , Vetch earned the governorship by his vigor before the Board of Trade in the winter of 1 7 1 4 - 1 5 . 1 He did not even go out to the province, however, and as Nicholson also had left it, Caulfeild had had to carry on until his death, March 2, 1 7 1 7 , not only alone, but fatally involved financially by the complexities and irregularities of the actions of his superiors and with his credit practically destroyed. The accounts with the Board of Ordnance and with the regimental agents, and the dealings in the " Canada " clothing must have presented an amazing tangle in England, but they hardly excused the scandalous neglect under which Caulfeild labored to a debtridden death.2 Only then did the situation seem urgent and a beginning was made of the new regime with the appointments as governor, of Colonel Richard Philipps, and as lieutenant-governor, of Captain John Doucett.8 The latter went out at once to the province, arriving in October, and set about vigorously putting things in order and reporting shrewdly to Philipps. The new governor was no fool and he intended to know precisely what his task might be and what his relation to the Board of Trade. While Doucett laboured and reported, Philipps remained in England gathering information and arranging for a set of instructions fitted to his responsibility. They were forthcoming with a new commission in the summer of 1719. 4 1

Jan. 20, 1714/5, N. S., E 7, No. 4.

•Caulfeild's letter-book, 1713-1717, Nova Scotia Archives, II (Halifax, 1900), pp. 1-50. Nicholson seems to have been quite unprincipled in his speculations in clothing and in his general spoliation of the colony. « Commissions, Aug. 17, 1717 and May 25, 1717, N. S., E 7, Nos. 5, 7. * N. S., E 7, No. 7 ; E 1 No. 6. Doucett's letters will be found (abstracted) in N. S. Arch., II, pp. 51-4 and in N. S., A 8, 9. In the latter

A PHANTOM

RULE

71

The Board of Trade had been quite busy over the problem of Nova Scotia. Reports had been coming in from New England of Indian attacks on the fisheries at Canso, where finally an expedition from Boston had swept away the French stations and established English control by force. 1 Various colonial governors were now urging the establishment of forts on the American frontiers and it was certain that a beginning would have to be made in learning something about the geography of the debatable land and in opening boundary negotiations with the French. In fact the time had come for a general reckoning and in it Nova Scotia was considerably involved.2 In broad outline, the plan immediately adopted was as follows! The troops at Placentia and Annapolis were formed into a regiment which it was intended to raise to ten companies (815 officers and men) under Philipps's command. The companies were to be distributed over the new English possessions, six at Annapolis and Canso, three at St. John's (Newfoundland), and one at Placentia, and Philipps was to be governor-in-chief with lieutenant-governors in Newfoundland and Acadia. A s was to be expected in the eighteenth century under the commission-purchase and command-proprietorship system of the day, the companies never rose tc full strength and the result in general was a not wholly satisfactory combination of military command and civil government, similar in character to, if less effective than, the methods employed by the United States in the Caribbean and in Central America in recent times. two volumes are also the proceedings of the Board of Trade and Philipps's dealings with it. Biographical notes on Philipps, Murdoch, op. cit., i, p. 361; D. C. B., p. 320. ' This whole incident is described in McLennan, op. cit., chap. iv. The monument of this house-cleaning is the great report on the plantations in America of Sept. 8,1721 (B. M. King's MS. 205) printed, Brodhead & O'Callaghan, Documents relative to the colonial history of the State of New York, V , p. 591, et seq. 1

72

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

The next problem to be dealt with was that of colonisation and that involved a f o r m of government guaranteeing to colonists " the rights of Englishman f o r , as Philipps justly said in requesting proper instructions, " few or none . . . will care to settle where there is no f o r m of civil government to protect them." F o r reasons which are not entirely clear, none of the colonisation schemes brought before the Board was carried out by them, although one at least, sponsored by Coram of London Foundling Hospital fame, seemed promising enough on paper. There were many of these schemes, but what seems to have happened is that the number of N e w Englanders involved in them made the Lords of Trade delay. Not only was there the doubtful question as to the possession of the lands beyond the Kennebec to be considered, but the whole problem as to whether N o v a Scotia should be permitted to become an annex of New England. Probably the clue to the Board's action may be found in the great report on the colonies of 1 7 2 1 , from which it is obvious that the Lords of Trade were considerably worried by the independence of some of the colonies and were arriving at a plan for coordinated home control of t h e m — " R o y a l Government". Their examination of the colonies separately and their general discussions of policy were not only thorough, but well thought-out, and the section entitled " In relation to the Government of the Plantations " contained some very significant comment. They observed that " the L a w s and constitutions of Y o u r Majesty's Colonies are copy'd from those of Great Britain, but fall short of them in many particulars " , notably in the complete alienation f r o m the Crown of " not only the Soil but likewise the Dominion or Government of several Colonies." T h e results of this state of affairs included independence, disobedience, and refusal to assist in the defence of neighboring colonies, conditions which contrasted unfavorably with those obtaining

A PHANTOM

RULE

73

in the French possessions. They therefore recommended the resumption by the Crown of all the proprietary governments, and the creation of a single superior government over all the continental colonies from Nova Scotia to South Carolina, consisting of a " Lord Lieut, or Captain General", assisted by a permanent council made up of two or more representatives from each plantation. It was quite in accordance with these views of policy that no proprietary grant of Nova Scotia could be considered. There remain to be explained the antipathy to New England and its curious result in the Nova Scotian constitution, its modeling on that of Virginia. The report again provides a clue. The government of Massachusetts was disapproved o f : " the unequal Ballance of their Constitution having lodged too great a power in the Assembly, this Province is, and is always likely to continue, in great disorder . . . on all Occasions they affect too great an Independence on their Mother Kingdom ". That of Virginia was approved of, in that Charles I " took the Government into his own hands, and settled such Laws and Constitutions in that Province as were agreeable to those of this Kingdom. Accordingly the Nomination and Appointment of the Governor, as well as the Council (which consists of twelve persons) is in Your Majesty ". Perhaps a further indication of the temper of the Board and an analogy for Nova Scotia lie in the proposal to resume royal control of the unsatisfactory Carolinas, reuniting North Carolina to Virginia so that under its exemplary government " these Mischiefs should be redressed ". At any rate, the proposals to interpret the Massachusetts charter so as to include Nova Scotia were repudiated, Nova Scotia became a " royal government" and to its governors the Virginian laws and constitution were formally recommended as a model. Thus the expansion of New England to incorporate Nova

74

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

Scotia was formally checked and it seems probable that general disapproval lay behind the discouragement of the New England schemes for colonization. It was unfortunate for all concerned, perhaps even the Acadians, that when immigrants were flocking to the American colonies in large numbers, some of the stream was not diverted to Nova Scotia. After all, however, for fifty years after the conquest even the neighboring New Englanders were content with fish, furs, trade, and timber and, accepting it as a fact that the Roman Catholic and therefore undesirable Acadians had secured the best lands, took no trouble to discover whether this was true, or themselves attempt pioneer settlements. The tide had set westward and the new frontiersmen were so engaged with their common task of dealing with the inland French that they were likely to ignore the Acadians as long as they were not troublesome. And the Acadians were not troublesome except when they became involved in the schemes of Quebec or Louisbourg, or were suspected of conniving at the exploits of the Indians against the English. As early as 1 7 1 9 the Lords of Trade had accepted the idea that Nova Scotia was not to be, at least at once, a colony of Englishmen,1 and they had thereby placed themselves in an 1 A curious by-product of their investigations and comparison of English colonies with French was the proposal to subsidize intermarriage with the Indians. Philipps was instructed to " give all possible encouragement to intermarriages " and endow each white man or woman who complied, with £10 sterling and fifty acres of land free of quit-rent for twenty years. In this way the friendship of the Indians might be won and the country be populated. Although there is no trace of these rewards ever having been claimed, the recommendation reappeared in a scheme of colonisation drawn up by the Board at the request of the Privy Council, June 7, 1727, N. S., A 17, p. 122, et seq.) again in 1729, N. S., A 18, p. 24; and, becoming a conventional item in the governor's instructions, did not disappear from them until 1763. In the report of 1721 it was suggested that " it might be for Your Majesty's Service, that the said Instructions be extended to all the other British Colonies". See Brebner, " Subsidized Intermarriage with the Indians," Canadian Historical Review, March, 1925.

A PHANTOM

RULE

75

equivocal position so far as the Acadians were concerned. As we have seen, they denied them the privileges of the Treaty of Utrecht and Queen Anne's bounty, and now their problem was as to what should be done with them. At first that seemed obvious. They should simply take the oath and gradually be made into English subjects. But Britain's first attempt1 at governing a large number of alien European colonists was not to be an easy task. The Acadians were not politically-minded and they were hard to move. Moreover, through the priests and in contact with Louisbourg, they were given a policy quite congenial to them which was vigorously kept alive until it became their political nature. They refused to take the oath unless it was qualified, in the early days, by admission of their rights to emigrate, and later, by a grant of exemption from military duty. Confronted by this refusal the Board of Trade was never able to decide to force on them the alternative of taking the oath or leaving the country. This lack of courage and principle was one of the threads later to be woven into the Acadian tragedy. Postponing, then, to a later chapter, discussion of the civil constitution of Nova Scotia, there remain to be considered the attempts of Philipps and his deputies to carry out the new policy, up to the time of the former's relinquishment to his subordinates of a colony which even his Welsh energy and shrewdness had been unable to cajole into conformity with the plans made for it. Poor Caulfeild had seized upon the occasion of his proclamation of the accession of George I to attempt to make the whole body of Acadians take the oath. He and his officers indulged in a good deal of military and convivial ceremony themselves, and he hoped to carry the thing through with a rush, not only at Annapolis, but at Minas, Beaubassin, and 1

Jamaica, New York, and various island conquests are not overlooked here, but none provides a real precedent.

7

6

NEW ENGLAND'S OUTPOST

St. John as well. He was uniformly unsuccessful, being met at Annapolis by the request that the right of emigration with all their goods be admitted, and at the upper settlements by refusal on the ground that they wished to return to French rule.1 The Indians and the one Frenchman seen at St. John also refused. When Doucett came out in 1717 he was properly scandalised by the non-allegiance of the habitants, and he, too, tried his hand at coercing them. He drew up oaths for their signature, but received in reply a document which unlearned hands had made so dirty that he apologized for sending it home. In it the habitants said that unless the garrison could protect them from the Indians they dared not take the oath, but that if that protection could not be provided, they could go so far as " to take an oath, that we will not take up arms either against His Brittanic Majesty, or against France, or against any of their subjects or allies". 2 Doucett wrote home for instructions and took interesting countermoves himself. He tried to argue the correctness of his policy with the governor of Louisbourg, who pointed out that the Acadians had been prevented from emigrating; he wrote to Vaudreuil at Quebec asking him to tell the Acadians that it was all right for them to become British subjects and to inform those who chose to stay that the two Crowns were in firm alliance; and he wrote home asking for presents to secure Indian friendship. Meanwhile he went on negotiating fruitlessly with the priests. In May, 1718, the Lords of Trade reached the conclusion that severe measures could hardly be taken with the Acadians, but that if they remained 1 These attempts were made during the winter of 1714-5, see Doc. Ined., I, pp. 110-113, 155-171; N. S., A 5, pp. 155-8, 168-174; N. S. Arch., I I , pp. 12-13.

*N. S., A 8, p. 183, et seq. This is, I believe, the first appearance of the later famous Acadian " neutrality ". For Doucett's negotiations and report, see ibid., pp. 175-193; A 9, passim; and N. S. Arch., II, pp. 51-3.

A PHANTOM

RULE

77

recalcitrant they might be debarred from the privilege of fishing and from other privileges of good subjects. Doucett tried this procedure, but except at Annapolis could do little to make it effective. When Philipps came out in 1720 there was a real trial of strength. Through Doucett he had learned of the scandalous condition of the fort and garrison, 1 and he had Mascarene meet him in Boston to arrange for repair of the defences. The activity which followed was calculated to diminish a little the justifiable Acadian contempt of their masters.2 Philipps carried with him explicit instructions to invite the Acadians: In the most friendly manner by Proclamation otherways, as you shall think fit, to submit to your Government & Swear Allegiance to His Majesty, within the space of four months from the Date of Such Your Proclamation, upon which condition they shall enjoy the free Exercise of their Religion, and be protected in all their Civil & Religious Rights & Liberties so long as they shall behave themselves as becomes good subjects. The " year " of Utrecht had elapsed long ago, and if any refused the oath and emigrated, they were not to be allowed to take away their effects or to destroy property (already solicitude for the dykes). Those who refused and remained were to be punished by prohibition of fishing and other civil privileges until His Majesty's pleasure was known.3 Philipps was shrewd, determined, and vigorous, and he spent the whole of the summer of 1720 in negotiating for the 1 The troops were so near mutiny that arms were issued only to the guard, and the fort was in ruins, N. S. Arch., II, pp. 53-4.

' N. S., A 11, passim. An excellent report on Nova Scotia in 1720 by Mascarene is in N. S. Arch., I, pp. 39-44. 3 Instructions, articles 11-13. Deferring action "till pleasure known" went on for thirty-five years and ended in Lawrence's taking matters into his own hands and transporting the Acadians.

7«

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

best possible understanding with the habitants which would not involve their emigration. When he first came and began to act in his brusque and authoritative fashion " they were indeed very much surprised at the arrival of a Chief Governor which they never expected, often saying that Person was not born ". He at once (Apr. 20) issued his proclamation regarding the oath, and the response was obviously intended to sound him out. The Annapolis priest, Pere Justinien, took up the task of defending his parishioners, calling on the governor " at the head of Fifty lusty young Men, as if he meant to appear formidable." The Acadians of the Annapolis River began to cut a road through the woods to Minas and were ordered to stop. The Indians gathered and asked questions about the relations between England and France. Word went off to the priests at Minas and Chignecto and they, too, became spokesmen for their people. There was even a disagreement about the membership of the Annapolis representative committee. Altogether on the French side there was an undisguised air of tentative violence, which was met by Philipps with an unyielding and confident air, little justified by his circumstances. The Acadian stand resolved itself into a refusal to take the oath, a declaration of their determination to go off to the French islands rather than do so and expose themselves to the attacks of the Indians, and the unnecessary request that they might send two deputies to Isle Royale (Cape Breton) for consultation.1 1 Because of confusion between old and new series calendars, Philipps's report (May 26) and its enclosures are scattered about in N. S., A 11. Parts of this material are printed, N. S. Arch., I, pp. 16-62; Doc. Ined., I, pp. 120-30, II, pp. 5-10; and the minutes of the newly constituted Council of Nova Scotia are printed, N. S. Arch., I l l (Halifax, 1908), pp. 1-15. The governor of Louisbourg actually provided the Acadians with a sort of primer of question and answer to assist them in maintaining the desired attitude.

A PHANTOM

RULE

79

Within a month Philipps could sum up the situation in a dispatch. He could not make the Acadians take the oath, prevent their emigration, or even keep them from destroying their homesteads and the retaining dykes as they went. He did manage to awe them into stopping work on the Minas road and he sent home the deputies " with smooth Words, and promise of enlargement of time while he wrote to London for instructions. He sent off a proclamation to Newfoundland to invite the few settlers there to come and occupy the farms he expected to see evacuated. He recommended to the Lords of Trade, meanwhile, that in order to retain the Acadians they should modify the oath so as to require armed services only against the Indians. For the latter he urged the traditional technique of presents, but supplemented it with the request that the expedient of 1 7 1 2 be revived by the stationing in the province of two hundred Mohawks. This crisp summary and the succeeding dispatches in which Philipps very clearly told the Board what problems were involved in Nova Scotia and how they might be met, received scant and inadequate attention at home from the confused and leisurely Lords of Trade. They passed on Phillips's letters to the Lords Justices and corresponded with the Secretaries of the Departments, sent Philipps much advice and told him of their expectations, sent off an emissary to argue boundaries with the French, and were unable to provide him with maps. The blight of delay and neglect was about to descend upon the luckless land again, this time from its British masters. There was recommendation of this, and question asked about that, and long delays for trans-oceanic correspondence about something else, and all the while nothing definite was done. It was to be feared that the Acadians would never make good subjects under the influence of Louisbourg and of their priests, but their emigration would be destructive to the colony and an aggrandizement to the

8o

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

French, and therefore until there was a large garrison in Nova Scotia, or English settlement, they should not be pressed to the alternative of taking the oath or leaving. It is easy to estimate the effect of this futility on a man like Philipps. He could read the signs, and after three years during which his dispatches grew pessimistic to the point of suggesting restitution of Nova Scotia to the French, he left the country for home. He had not been inactive. He had secured promises of fidelity from the habitants of Annapolis and Minas for so long as they should remain under the British Crown. He got hold of a sloop to go up the Bay and protect traders from looting and destruction and give the administration a little prestige. He and the Council investigated the attacks which had occurred up the Bay and, while they suspected both Acadians and priests, they knew that the real agents were the Indians whom they (and in some degree, the French) were unable to control. They had tried to win them over by presents, but their purchasing agent was a rogue and even the poor goods he did provide were swallowed up without effect. The worst attacks were in the neighbourhood of the New England fishing stations at Canso, and their importance to Philipps as compared with that of the Minas Basin is revealed in the dispatch in 1720 of the second in command, Major Lawrence Armstrong, with a detachment to set up a small post there. The troops were warmly welcomed by the fishermen, and under the leadership of one Henshaw of Boston, the latter undertook the responsibility of housing and maintaining them. A year later when Armstrong got sick leave, Philipps himself sought out his only large group of English subjects and, after a survey of the province, settled at Canso. It was a much less salubrious spot than Annapolis, but there he remained until his departure in 1723, the main garrison, however, continuing to be stationed at Annapolis. 1 1

The Indians were encouraged and given supplies from Louisbourg,

A PHANTOM

RULE

8l

He left behind him a curious situation. The Acadians had returned to their farming, and their apathy in politics became strengthened. They were unusally prosperous, for not only could they work for English wages at Annapolis, but they could sell their produce to the garrison, to Boston traders, and to Louisbourg. The trails from the Bay of Fundy to the Atlantic and to the Gulf of St. Lawrence were worn until they grew to be roads. The farms covered more and more of the " intervales " and deeper roots were struck in the soil. The Indians were somewhat of a nuisance and involved the habitants in difficulties with the English, but their visitations and activities were an intermittent, and apparently necessary evil. The fort at Annapolis fell once more into decay and the troops almost became civilians. They intermarried with the Annapolis folk, built themselves houses, dug gardens, and quarrelled among themselves.1 There was fairly continuous trade in the Bay, and the English village under the guns at Annapolis had its small warehouses and seem genuinely to have regarded the English as their enemies. In 1722 they even ventured on naval exploits against them in a captured vessel. Philipps organized the fisherman to deal with them and punished them severely, N. S., A 15, p. 198, et seq. Ultimately a vague sort of peace was patched up with fresh presents and as a result of a more correct policy directed from France and Louisbourg. 1 Mascarene's letter book, 1721-5, B. M. Add. MS. 19070 (Brown MSS.), provides an excellent picture of the times. One of the engineer officers seems to have been insane and caused a lot of trouble until this was realized and, after a prodigious effort, he was induced to go home. By a coincidence, surely unique in the annals of crime although not bearing repetition here ( N . S., A 13, p. 143), he was discovered to have written a series of letters traducing the governor and other officers. Mascarene behaved very patiently and humanely in this affair although his own department and accounts were badly involved by his subordinate's inefficiency. He seems to have been the person who finally persuaded the man to go home. Later, the chaplain had to be sent home for refusal to give up illicit relations with another man's wife. N. S. Arch., Ill, pp. 75-6.

82

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

and petty merchants and publicans.1 The most notable of them, William Winniett, even earned a severe reprimand from the Council for his independent behaviour and was ordered to apologize to the governor. The real life of the English province, however, centered about the Canso fisheries. There New England was exploiting the principal advantage gained for her in 1 7 1 3 , and there, in rivalry with the Cape Breton fisheries, she was slowly developing a competition, too slightly supported, which was to make Nova Scotia her own frontier again and involve it so deeply in her interests as to initiate a new and intense period in her history. 'These men were an embarrassment because of their almost inevitable trade in contraband.

CHAPTER IV (1724-1739) COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

THE absentee governor was a fairly common phenomenon of British colonies in the eighteenth century and, so long as affairs went quietly in his province, he ran small danger of being ordered to take up his charge in person. Under the system of the day he was entitled to the assistance of a lieutenant governor, who in his absence reported direct to the home authorities, but through whom he himself kept in touch with affairs. Thus Richard Philipps, although he was governor of Nova Scotia for thirty-two years, cannot be regarded as having been unduly negligent in that he spent only two periods, comprising in all less than five years, at his post in his government. He had given up an old regiment to become colonel of the new Nova Scotian one and he naturally thought of himself as its proprietor, with the remunerative office of governor of Nova Scotia as some compensation for the unsatisfactory disposition and composition of his troops. Those were the days of Walpole's peace, of Newcastle's bureaucracy, and of " quieta nott tnovere." Small wonder, then, that after one attempt to make Nova Scotia a model colony, the imposing local problems, the lack of interest and support at home, and the general inclination to let sleeping dogs lie, combined to consign the province to a sort of official limbo where questions difficult of solution remained unsolved and were ignored as much as possible. One result in Nova Scotia was some confusion among Philipps's deputies, a confusion which was increased during 83

84

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

the time when Canso was the seat of the resident authority and when, for convenience, the senior officer at Annapolis was made lieutenant governor of the garrison. This inevitably led to friction between the two men and that is its only historical importance. For convenience, therefore, the periods of office of the senior authorities are recorded here. Governor of Nova Scotia 1717-1749, Colonel Richard Philipps, resident in Nova Scotia, 1 7 2 0 1 7 2 3 and 1729-1731; Lieutenant Governors, Captain John Doucett (of Annapolis Royal) 1717-1726 (obit. Nov. 19), Major Lawrence Armstrong (of Nova Scotia) 1725-1739 (obit. Dec. 6), Major Paul Mascarene (President of the Council) 1740-1749. Alexander Cosby, a relative of Philipps through his first wife, was commissioned lieutenant governor of the town and fort of Annapolis and took office on October 20, 1727. 1 He and Armstrong were at outs from earlier days and in 1732 he withdrew from the Council meetings at Annapolis and was suspended " until pleasure known." He was cited variously in the Council minutes as " President", " Lieutenant Governor ", and " Governor " and his appointment evoked protest from the other officers to the Board. He had one of the grants at Canso, was interested in the fisheries and trade with Boston, and possessed or laid claim to lands and houses near Annapolis as well. From his suspension until his death, Dec. 27, 1742, his only share in the civil administration was as an embrassassment to it, and, his military duties being 1 Two other relatives of Philipps who shared in his fortunes in Nova Scotia were Ensign Erasmus James Philipps (in the Regiment) and Thomas Cosby, the commissary of the garrison. Philipps made A. Cosby President of the Council in spite of Mascarene's protests on the ground of seniority ( N . S. Arch., Ill, pp. 172-3) probably to check Armstrong when he returned in 1731. He thoroughly distrusted the latter and took every precaution to avoid giving him any basis for complaints against him to the Board of Trade, letter to Newcastle, July 27, 1731, N. S., A 20, p. 92.

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

85

negligible, he occupied himself with the activities of a civilian resident. Soon after Cosby died, Mascarene asked unsuccessfully to be made lieutenant colonel of the regiment and lieutenant governor of the province, explaining that it would " reunite the Command of the Regiment, this Garrison and the Civil Governor of this Province in the absence of the Col° and G o v which by being heretofore lodg'd in different hands has for these many years been the occasion of many disputes prejudicial to the peace and well being of this Infant Colony," but the disputes had not reverberated sufficiently in Whitehall and Mascarene got no compensation for his added responsibilities until after his retirement from the province. 1 For over twenty years events in Nova Scotia were of almost no importance to the outside world. A t Canso there were some fifty fishing " rooms ", or shore allotments for the erection of racks for drying fish, and as many as two hundred vessels annually cleared with fish for Europe. Y e t there was almost always trouble there with the Indians and, as it was known that they got their supplies from the French, a good deal of futile correspondence went on between Nova Scotia and Louisbourg. There were no English settlements on the Atlantic Coast and only petty and temporary Acadian ones until Cape Sable was rounded and the farming districts 1 Brown Ms. 1 9 0 7 1 , f. 4 0 V . A t Armstrong's death an aged and almost blind civilian, John Adams, was senior councillor and should have become President of the Council. By a unanimous vote the office was given to Mascarene. Poor Adams retired to his beloved Boston and reported to the Lords of Trade on the wickedness of the garrison and the hardness of his treatment. To the Duke of Newcastle also he told his story and how he had appealed to the king " and said if you have done well by the House of Jerubable then Rejoice ye in Abimelech and let Abimelech Rejoice in you ", N. S., A 35, p. 9. N. S. Arch., II and III, are the chief printed sources to supplement the manuscript state papers, 1720-1742. A memorial of Philipps (Murdoch, op. cit., ii, p. 13) may have been the reason for Mascarene's failure to secure salary as lieutenant-governor.

86

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

began. Then came Annapolis with its ill-disciplined soldiers and the little merchant group. The latter gentlemen were a thorn in the side of the administration both because of their liability to tempt the Indians to pillage and outrage, and because of their bland fashion of ignoring inconvenient regulations and even international boundaries. Their interest lay in laws of supply and demand rather than of trade and navigation, and, if Louisbourg would buy salt and sell West Indian merchandise, they went to Louisbourg to sell and buy. If Acadians up the Bay would sell wheat and, in addition to cloth, food-stuffs, and tools, would buy guns and powder, guns and powder they got. The traders often fell foul of the government and were occasionally haled before the governors, but they knew that they were a convenience and that an apology would be the only punishment awarded them. Thus it occasions small surprise to find the authorities at Annapolis making use of the Bay traders to carry messages to the upper settlements, although a few days before the same merchants may have been the subject of severely worded reprimand for contemptuous behaviour by dealing in contraband. It was truly said of Nova Scotia that it possessed a " Mock Government." The habitants led relatively peaceful lives and between the propaganda of their priests and the hollow commandments of their governors developed a curiously unpolitical character. France really had nothing to offer them, Britain could deprive them of little. They clung, therefore, to their farms, to whatever metallic currency they could hoard, and to their " neutral" status. Only two issues could and did disturb them, the free exercise of their religion and the form of their oath of allegiance. Both of these questions were chiefly agitated under the governorship of Armstrong and required either the vigour of Philipps or the commonsense of Mascarene for solution. Armstrong was an unfortunate choice as lieutenant gov-

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

87

ernor of Nova Scotia. H e was a brooding, moody man whose dark speculations found vent in violent action. He made pitiful attempts to preserve an appropriate official dignity and, quite naturally under the prevailing circumstances, this was easily and often wounded by the behaviour of his subordinates or that of the merchants, the French priests, or the Acadians. His mind was full of plans and suspicions and he was fated never to realize how irreconcilable with actual conditions, within and without Nova Scotia, his aspirations were. The wise and humane Mascarene seems never to have fallen out with him and was often his trusted agent, but even he seems to have found most congenial the duties which took him away from Annapolis. He would conduct investigations up the Bay, reach out toward the Indians through the Acadians, whose language he spoke fluently, and he it was who represented Nova Scotia in the grand peace negotiations with the Indians in 1 7 2 5 and 1 7 2 6 whereby New England and Nova Scotia made presents and won an uneasy truce. Armstrong was particularly troubled by the French priests, who seemed to him to be a focal point in the problem of making the Acadians " g o o d " subjects, and throughout his tenure of office he tried to establish an effective control over them. It was, of course, a hopeless situation which had been created by the Treaty of Utrecht. Quebec and Louisbourg superintended the provision of religious leaders for Frenchspeaking British subjects. The priests were not subjects of Great Britain, and they would have been unusual men if they had been able to be politically neutral. Some of them did manage almost to purge themselves of political interest and, although at first they thereby earned French disapproval, later the French government adopted an entirely correct attitude, which lasted at least during times of peace. Armstrong had a violent disagreement with Abbé Bréslay of the

88

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

Annapolis River, despoiled his presbytery, and drove him terrified to the woods. He summoned other priests before the council when irregularities occurred in their parishes and questioned them to learn whether they had been concerned in the offences of their parishioners. A s will be seen later, however, the history of ecclesiastical affairs in the province is a mass of contradictions, and none is greater than the report of a priest whom the obsessed Armstrong later evicted from the country, that the governor not only allowed the Catholics free exercise of their religion, but did not prevent the English and the military officers from being present at the Catholic services on " jours de solemnxtez." 1 The oath of allegiance also troubled him severely and he made valiant efforts to secure from the Acadians the vow which he felt it was their duty to take to the British Crown. The Abenaki war made the problem seem particularly urgent and he wrote home for instructions. He also tried ineffectively, soon after his arrival at Canso in 1 7 2 5 , to pin down the governor of Louisbourg to an understanding. The peace negotiations with the Indians were drawing to a close when he finally made his way to Annapolis in September, 1726, and he seized the occasion to summon the Council and unfold his plan for the imposition of the oath.2 He called before him the local Acadian deputies, giving them a copy of the oath they were to take, and allowing them four days in which to make up their minds. The oath, which was obviously of Armstrong's composition, ran as follows: 1 Report from Canada to France, October 8, 1733, A. des C., C 11 A 59/1, f. 159* See N. S., A 16, pp. 128, 201; ibid., A 17, pp. 45, 58; Doc. Ined., I, p. 175; N. S. Arch., I l l , pp. 124-5, 128-30. Examples of Armstrong's exaggerated language: " The French that I have to deal with are a perfidious, head-strong, obstinate and as conceited a crew as any in the world", N. S., A 20, p. 101; and a remarkable bull " we shall never be safe or secure so long as they are permitted to be Snakes in our Bosoms that would Cutt our throats on all Occasions" (Dec. 2, 1725).

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

89

[We] Do Solemnly swear by the Great name of the ever-living God, that from Hence forward we will be faithfull and true Subjects to his Sovereign Majesty George of Great Britain France and Ireland King now our most Gracious Sovereigne Master who has granted us the same Priviliges and Liberties of His Majesty's Naturall Subjects of Great Britain and Ireland we do therefore Promiss with all submission and obedience to behave ourselves as Subjects of so good and great a King and Crown of Great Britain Which we swear ever to be faithfull to, Protesting that neither the threats nor Promises of any powers whatsoever nor the hopes of Absolution from any in Holy Orders of what name or distinction soever shall prevail with us to violate this our Solemn Oath. On Sunday, Sept. 25th, 1726, Armstrong, the Council, and the garrison met the local habitants "at the fflag Bastion" for the purpose of administering this oath, and the lieutenant governor made a short speech. The Acadians then asked that the oath be read in French and this was done. Their next request was disturbing, " that a Clause whereby they might not be Obliged to Carry Arms might be Incerted ". Armstrong affected to treat this as ridiculous, " it being Contrary to the Laws of Great Britain y' a Roman Catholick Should Serve in the Army, His Majesty having so many faithful Protestant subjects first to provide for," but even so ingenious an explanation failed to comfort the habitants, who continued to demand the clause of exemption. Thereupon, " the Governor with the Advice of the Council Granted the Same to be written upon ye Margent of the french translation in order to gett them over by Degrees." 1 The Acadians had won again, and had further confirmed for themselves (though not for the Lords of Trade) their contention that they were " neutral." 1 The note did not appear on the version sent to England, and I have been unable to discover it elsewhere.

9°

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

Not content with his Annapolis experiment alone, Armstrong determined to attempt imposing the oath elsewhere as well, and for this purpose selected some of his junior officers. Ensign Philipps went to Beaubassin early in 1727, only to be met by a flat refusal of the oath on the grounds that " there was no Encouragement for their taking the Oath & that the Inhabitants of Annapolis Royal that had already signed were worse treated than ever they were before." In their formal reply they went so far as to say " nous voulons tousjours estre fidels a Nostre Bon Roy de France." Captain Bennett met almost the same treatment at Minas, although the habitants there promised not to comit any act of hostility. He reported that in his opinion they were " to a man Intirely disaffected to the Government of Great Britain." Armstrong could do nothing except place a trade embargo on the province and complain to the Duke of Newcastle and to the Board of Trade that anti-monarchical traders from Boston (with whom Alexander Cosby was implicated) were encouraging the habitants in their obstinacy. The summer of 1727 was a troubled one, being marked by considerable friction with the Annapolis merchants over their trade up the Bay and the quality of the provisions for the garrison. The Acadians everywhere were uneasy. Moreover, the Council had fallen below a quorum and Armstrong filled it up with four officers. This resulted in a squabble between the military and the civilians over seniority. Altogether Armstrong had succeeded in creating an ominous atmosphere in his province. On Sept. 7th, 1727, he called the Council and informed them that he had just heard indirectly of the death of George I and the accession of George II. " I t was therefore agreed & Resolved that as the day was far Spent the Remaind' of it Should be employed to Solemnize the death of that most Excellent & Glorious prince in the most decent manner."

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

91

Next day they cast off their formal gloom and drew up a proclamation of the new King and " very cheerfully & Readily Subscribed the Same." The Council and the garrison spent the following day in taking the oaths of allegiance, and on the twelfth, Armstrong announced that coincident with the proclamation of George II throughout the province, he would again attempt to impose the oath, beginning on the Annapolis River. By this time, he had succeeded in infecting his council with a sterner attitude toward the Acadians and they were now prepared to assist him in a show of strength. Once again he failed. At Annapolis it was a confused and tempestuous business. The habitants actually nerved themselves to the holding of a meeting, as a result of which they refused the oath except on condition of their old treaty privileges, in particular a sufficient number of priests, and exemption from bearing arms. This decision, signed by seventy-one Acadians and presented by their three deputies resulted in violent verbal assaults on the emissaries and finally in their being imprisoned in irons. The whole Annapolis settlement, which seems to have been wavering, became excited and subsequently united under their devoted and persecuted priest to protest against Armstrong's actions in Great Britain. On both sides tempers were nearing the breaking point. The Annapolis failure, however, did not prevent the governor from attempting a further venture. He raised £100 and chartered a vessel on which he sent the regimental adjutant, Ensign Robert Wroth, with a detachment of soldiers to proclaim George I I throughout the province and invite the habitants and Indians to take the oaths. This time display and finesse were to be used to gain his ends. Wroth seems to have been a happy-go-lucky individual, and in his report he revealed considerable pleasure in the ceremonial assemblies,

92

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

speeches, proclamations, toasts, and volleys of arms. Proclaiming George II went very well, but the oath was another matter, and in order to get the Acadians to take it, Wroth cheerfully accepted the conditions they appended. At Chignecto (Beaubassin) he signed a declaration of their old treaty rights and exemption from bearing arms, and practically the same procedure was followed at Minas and Piziquid. He did not visit Cobequid, but sent a proclamation to be nailed to the church door. On November 13th he made his report to the surprised Council, told them in reply to their questioning of his concessions, that he had done what he thought was best " for the Good of His Majesty's Service and was no doubt innocently disappointed when the Council " after Some debate Voted that the Said Articles & Concessions are unwarrantable & dishonourable to His Majesty's authority & Government & Consequently Null & Void & that the Livf Governor of the province be desired not to Ratifie & Confirm the Same." Somewhat inexplicably, the Council considered that merely by their action they had eliminated the conditions imposed by the Acadians and that the latter might now be considered entitled to the " Libertys & Privileges of English Subjects ". The trade embargo was lifted forthwith. Whatever Armstrong may have thought of this method of settling difficulties by simply declaring them settled, the fact remained that he had succeeded in stirring up the province very thoroughly, and the repercussions were sufficient to break into the somnolence of official London. Once again, just as ten years before, the Lords of Trade and Philipps began to consider what should be done with Nova Scotia. Once again there were proposals for colonization. Once again they involved New England. Once again Philipps received new instructions and came out to settle affairs in his grand manner. Once again he was deprived of the hope

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

93

of governing English colonists and left to his own resources to establish control over the Acadians. Practically all that Nova Scotia proper received after two years' activity at home was a highly imposing heraldic device to serve on a provincial seal. Early in the summer of 1729 Philipps set out to attempt to galvanize his province into becoming behaviour by sheer effort of will. He enjoyed the advantage of being welcomed by almost all the groups in the province, the Canso fishermen, the garrison at Annapolis, and the habitants, at least of the Annapolis Valley. He used this advantage very wisely and went about the business of restoring order after Armstrong's chaos with complete assurance and prompt action. A t Canso in June, 1729, he found 250 vessels and between 1500 and 2000 men employed in catching and curing fish, and he wrote home enthusiastically that he thought the fisheries there contributed more to British customs revenue than the produce of any other province except Virginia. He looked forward to his visit to Annapolis with confidence, for he had word from the Acadians there that they were prepared to accept any terms of submission he might impose. Something of the enthusiasm of ten years before marked his reports and by the time the fisheries broke up in mid-October, he had cleared up most of the local difficulties and planned welcome reforms for the next year. A f t e r a difficult voyage he reached Annapolis in November and was most cordially received. He at once confirmed Abbé Bréslay in the parish and utilised the resultant enthusiasm to secure from all the habitants over sixteen years of age an unconditional oath of allegiance. " Indeed ", he wrote " I have had no occasion to make use of threats or compulsion nor have I prostituted the King's honour in making a scandalous capitulation in his name", thus reflecting on the behaviour of Wroth. The oath he administered ran as follows : Je Promet et Jure sincèrement

94

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

en Foi de Chrétien que Je serai entièrement Fidelle, et Obéirais Vrayment sa Majesté Le Roy George le Second, que je Reconnois pour le Souverain Seigneur de la Nouvelle Ecosse et de L'Acadie. Ainsi Dieu Me Soit en aide. It was signed by one hundred and ninety-four persons, and witnessed by Abbé Bréslay. This success was surprising enough, but in September, 1730, he reported even more startling achievements. " By good management, plain reasoning and presents ", he had secured the cheerful submission of the Indians and had thereby removed the chief excuse behind which the habitants of the Bay settlements had refused to take the oath. He thereupon set about securing their allegiance and proudly reported his complete success, adding that there awaited him at Annapolis " fifty straggling Families " to make his roll complete.1 T o support his statement he sent home the oaths administered, together with the subscriptions in all of about eight hundred heads of families, representing at his computation of five to a family, about four thousand persons, " a formidable Body, and like Noah's Progeny spreading themselves over the Face of the Province." 2 He explained his success by " the good likeing they have to my Government in comparison of what they experienced afterwards ", and he wrote at length about the joy and unanimity with which he had been welcomed and with which his wishes had been obeyed. He had shown quite remarkable energy and determination in his movements about the province and there is no doubt but that he achieved what he did by cultivating a personal prestige among the Acadians through vigorous 1 On N o v . 26th he reported " there remains now not more than five or six scattering familys on the Eastern Coast to compleat the submission of the whole Province, whom I shall call upon in the Spring." a T h e subscriptions f r o m Annapolis ( 1 9 3 ) , the B a y Settlements (583), and the stragglers ( 1 9 ) up to N o v . 26, 1730 provide the total here.

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

95

assured action, and by convincing them that their land was under the eyes of Great Britain and that an end had been put to temporizing.1 Viewed soberly and in relation to events of the previous twenty years, however, the fact of having secured the unqualified allegiance of all the Acadian population in less than a year, which Philipps reported, was in the nature of a miracle, and as such it has since been subjected to critical investigation. The submission of the Annapolis valley group seems quite credible, for they had been in intimate contact with their English masters from the beginning, and they had the best of assurances in the action of Philipps that their most cherished right, the free exercise of their religion, would not be interfered with. After fourteen months during which their beloved pastor had been forced to hide in the woods and they, forbidden to succour him, had been unable to practice their religion or even, as they said, to gather two or three together to pray to God, Philipps had set all right again and earned their gratitude so completely that they actually petitioned him to administer to them the oath.2 No evidence exists to cast doubt on the unqualified character of their allegiance, and, on the whole, it must be taken for granted that Philipps told the truth about his success with them. His success up the Bay, on the other hand, seems quite too sweeping to be true. No doubt the habitants there would be moved by the submission of the Indians and reassured by the 1 The records of Philipps's visit are in N. S., A 18, 19, and an extensive selection printed in P. A. of C., 1905, vol. ii, appendix D.

' The language of this petition is completely convincing, P. A. of C., 1905, vol. ii, appendix D, pp. 72-4. It was signed by 158 heads of families. They revealed the fact that they had put Armstrong's persecution of Breslay with his attempts to impose the oath to conclude that they were to be Anglicized in religion as well as allegiance. This was an old fear going back at least to 1713, see Murdoch, op. cit., i, pp. 336-7.

96

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

actions which served as a guarantee for Philipps's promises concerning their religion, but their record for fifty years had been one of sturdy independence and even of contempt of government. Why should they change suddenly and surrender completely to the will of one man, however imposing ? The answer seems to be that they did not, and that Philipps lied roundly in his report of this unqualified submission. He admitted 1 after his first glowing report, that the oath administered " to the Main Body of the Inhabitants up the Bay " had been varied from the Annapolis form, the reason being " their boggling at the word, Obey, as being of too large a signification ", but he did not add what we have many reasons to believe to be the truth, that he had in addition given a verbal promise of exemption from bearing arms.2 It is useless to look for the explanation in his dispatches or in the Minutes of Council. The latter report his return from the upper settlements about May 16th with a complete submission except for " Seventeen of those of Chignictou who persist in their obstinacy in refusing to Conform to his Majesty's Orders " and " Nineteen familys at Chickpoudy [Chepody] that had not taken y* Oath of Fidelity to his Majesty ". The instruments of the submission, the promises of free exercise of religion and enjoyment of property rights, are regularly mentioned. Yet when Philipps boasted of his unqualified success at Annapolis he apparently determined that he should report similar successes elsewhere, and by his ingenuity and address he somehow managed to secure subscriptions to an oath, which, on paper at least, was not modified by conditions. Almost certainly, however, he did this 1

To Secretary Popple of the Board, Nov. 26, 1730, with whom and the Board he had an amusing correspondence over his French grammar and composition in framing the oath, N. S., A 19, pp. 153, 157, et seq. 2

The oath up the Bay ran " Nous Soumettrons Véritablement à Sa Majesté " instead of " Obéirai Vrayment." Philipps considered the change insignificant.

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

97

only after considerable negotiation and by a solemn verbal promise that the habitants should never be called upon for military service. Probably the royal assurances which he bore with him that, the oath taken, they should not be interfered with in their religion nor disturbed in their property, eliminated any remnant of inducement for the Acadians to emigrate. 'When he personally added a third promise, no real opposition remained and the signing took place. It would be interesting to know just how he managed to avoid the written concession, but it is probably safe to assume that i: was by verbal adroitness and calculated hauteur. The best evidence that he lied to the home authorities is that the governors who succeeded him deplored, but took for granted, the fact that the Acadians had been promised exemption from military service. 1 Corroboration is to be found in the fact that most Englishmen thereafter spoke of them as " the Neutrals " or " the neutral French The Acadians themselves, although they could produce no admission thereof from the astute Philipps, subsequently maintained that the promise had been made to them, and actually the Governor's mendacity was somewhat controverted by the foresight of two priests, who on April 25, 1730, subscribed a certificate for the future use of the habitants, to the effect that Philipps had promised the residents of the Minas region " that he exempts them from bearing arms and fighting in war against the French and the Indians, and that the ' E x a m p l e s : Mascarene in 1748, to Shirley, N. S. Arch., I, pp. 158-60; same to Cornwallis in 1749, P. A. of C., 1905, II, Appendix A , p. x i v ; Cornwallis in 1752 speaks of "General Phillip's Conditions," ibid., Appendix C, p. 55; a futile search for record of the truth at Hopson's direction in 1753, ¡bid., pp. 57-8. M. Placide Gaudet collected a most comprehensive array of Acadian documents in the volume referred to, but they are exasperatingly arranged and imperfectly edited. * E . g., Knox, op. cit., passim; The Journal of Captain William Jr. ( N e w York, 1896), passim.

Pott,

98

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

said inhabitants have only accepted allegiance and promised never to take up arms in the event of a war against the Kingdom of England and its Government." In spite of efforts by interested persons to suppress it, this final corroboration for a compelling assumption survived until 1755 and was then, thanks to the inquisitiveness of the principal New England agent of the Acadians' expulsion, copied in his journal. Again it disappeared, to come to the surface momentarily for the industrious Dr. Brown, and it was only reproduced for the historical vindication of the Acadians' just claims late in the nineteenth century. 1 The importance of making it clear that, except for the Annapolis group, the Acadians did not ever accept the duties incumbent on ordinary British subjects is quite obvious, both in justice to them and in order to estimate the character of the British administration. If " the Main Body of the Inhabitants " had changed their minds and surrendered their confirmed diplomatic advantage, their subsequent behaviour would earn from readers of their history the same condemnation and bewilderment it aroused in the Board of Trade. The members of that Board, gulled as they were by Philipps, command less sympathy than the Acadians, who after 1730, as before, regarded themselves as a privileged non-combatant group in spite of their being placed fatefully between the 1 The Journal of Lt.-Col. John Winslow, N. S. H. S., Collections, iii, pp. 1 1 1 - 1 1 2 ; this extract reprinted and annotated, P. A. of C., 1905, II, Appendix B, pp. 24-5. Dr. Brown's copy " taken from the original in 1755 ", probably by another participant in the expulsion who translated it for Winslow, Isaac Deschamps, Brown MS., 19073, f. no. See also Casgrain, "Eclaircissements sur la Question Acadienne," Le Canada-Français, I, pp. 431-2 and passim; Richard, Acadie (edited and enlarged by H. d'Arles, 3 vols., Boston and Quebec, 1916-21), II, chap. vii. The Acadians themselves had apparently lost track of the certificate in Cornwallis's day (1749-52), because they produced copies of Wroth's concessions to them in 1727, P. A. of C., 1905, II, Appendix N, pp. 299-300.

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

99

European rivals in America. They may have been unenlightened in their policy, but they were at least consistent, and, as will be seen, they lived up remarkably faithfully to their conception of their position. Aside from a general inspection of the province and a search for possibilities in it which might be capitalised to arouse the interest and active support of the Board of Trade, Phillipps's main task had quite naturally to be this imposition of the oath of allegiance, and we have seen how his dexterity enabled him to send home proofs of an apparently complete victory. He had, however, by his original and a supplementary set of instructions, been involved somewhat in a new policy for the Northern Colonies which had an indirect effect on Nova Scotia. This concerned the supply of masts and spars for the Royal Navy. It is, of course, well known that the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century awakened England to the problem of securing naval supplies at a time when even the jealously watched stands of English oak were failing and when events on the Continent made uncertain and expensive, if not precarious, the securing of timber and other naval stores from the Baltic. Quite naturally America was thought of to repair the lack and to provide within the English mercantile system a substitute for " the Sound of Denmark ". The "mast fleets" began to make their annual sailings across the Atlantic, subsidies were offered for the production of hemp, flax, and potash, and from the Baltic provinces not only was special seed secured, but at considerable expense clever foreigners were brought out to teach the colonists how to produce pitch, tar, and turpentine in the most efficient manner. It had not taken long for the shrewd New Englanders to realize what an excellent source of revenue their forests afforded, and in the first quarter of the eighteenth century they gradually built up the new industry. Quite character-

IOO

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

istically, however, they behaved like all pioneer lumber-men by " skimming the cream " of the woods. There were no roads where there was mast-timber, consequently rivers were in demand, and when along the shores of these only the trees that would almost topple into the water were cut, it took a surprisingly short time to despoil a large area. A f t e r 1713, therefore, when the French and Indian menace was removed, the progress of the timber operators north-east from rivermouth to river-mouth became somewhat alarming, and in 1728 the Board of Trade took action. It was seriously embarrassed by the unresolved boundary conflicts arising from old and new provincial and individual charters, and along with Philipps it sent out Colonel David Dunbar to survey the territory between New England and Nova Scotia and reserve to the Crown a sufficient amount of the good timber lands. He was to carry out the same duties in cooperation with Philipps in Nova Scotia, indeed his first activity was planned to be there.1 Dunbar, however, was already interested and involved in colonisation and land schemes in partnership with London capitalists and when, on his arrival in New England he made the first moves toward the fruition of these plans, he became deeply involved in the maze of Massachusetts politics. When he moved up the shore he found many timber-cutters at work who resented his office and resisted the execution of 1 The documents relating to his appointment and duties are grouped under June 27, 1728, N. S., A 17, pp. 210-227. On Dec. 12, 1727 he was commissioned "Surveyor General of his Majesty's Woods on the Continent of America ", and after some Privy Council meetings in the spring of 1728, his instructions were issued on June 13, 1728. By Royal salary warrant of June 25, 1728 his additional special role was reflected in his title of " Surveyor of Our Lands within the Province of Nova Scotia ". After the first reports by him and Philipps, they were issued with additional instructions, Mar. 25, 1730, N. S., E 1, Nos. 8, 9, and on Apr. 22, 1731 with a still further set, ibid., Nos. io, 11. General correspondence, N. S., A 17-20, passim.

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

IOI

it by denying his right to act within the limits of this or that charter-grant. In his difficulties he appealed to the Lords of Trade, but as they themselves had little or no authoritative information about the limits of the northern grants, they could give him scant help and he soon learned that he must fight his own battles. This timber policy and the accompanying schemes for settlement belong to the domestic history of New England, but they had some effect in Nova Scotia. In the first place no regular settlement might be proceeded with either between the Penobscot and the Ste. Croix, or in Nova Scotia proper, until 100,000 acres of reserves had been set aside in the former area and 200,000 in the latter. The scanty number of potential settlers (at this period from the upper Rhine and Switzerland) were not directed to Nova Scotia for a number of reasons, but among them figured the fact that neither Dunbar nor his deputies set aside the Nova Scotian reserve. The 1 7 3 1 instructions were an attempt to remedy this situation by allowing lands in Nova Scotia to be opened up for settlement as Dunbar gradually built up his naval reserve. Since, however, Philipps's instructions for settlement were cast in terms only of townships of 100,000 acres and sections of desirable and unoccupied land of that area were remote from the garrisons, neither he nor his successors could conscientiously invite settlers, even had they been prepared for the attendant problems.1 Altogether, the timber policy of 1728 and the project for a complete survey of Nova Scotia both proved to be more of a nuisance than a benefit. Dunbar and his deputies were too busy on the mainland to pay much attention to the peninsula. A deputy surprised Philipps by turning up at Canso at the end of the 1730 season, between 1732 and 1734 a survey was made of the Annapolis River, and next year a beginning was made up the Bay. Occasion1

This obstacle in 1735, N. S. Arch., I l l , pp. 327-8.

102

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

ally some one remembered the schemes of 1728-31, but in general there was little occasion to be reminded of them. Colonists did not come, and the real problem was of modifying the Acadians' distrust of alien surveys sufficiently to allow for certainty in the bounds of the occupied lands and equity in the division of those newly occupied by their expanding population. When Philipps went away, then, in the summer of 1 7 3 1 and Armstrong, back from England, took his place, very little real change had been effected in the colony. Canso was still only a summer fishing station, though a highly important one, the Annapolis garrison relapsed after the short excitement into its slumbrous humiliation, the large portion of the Acadians was still " neutral ", and no English or Protestant settlers came. Moreover Armstrong was not really changed or chastened except in so far as he was older, in poorer health, and more melancholy. He seemed to have learned little from the Breslay affair and almost immediately became embroiled in a futile disagreement with two of the priests. He quarrelled with Cosby and with the latter's father-in-law, William Winniett. He showed no more imagination than before in his estimate of the Acadians. For years his dispatches consisted of reiterated alarms and complaints of all sorts as his desire for action to dignify his position and his charge continued to conflict with his practical impotence. It could not have been a congenial task even for a stolid, placid person to have been resident authority in Nova Scotia under the Board of Trade in the thirties, but for a man of the erratic temper of Armstrong it grew to be an impossible one. Even his garrison was now one of old men, his officers shunned him, quarrelled with him, or even left the Province on doubtful and indefinite leave of absence. Small wonder, then, that on Dec. 6, 1739 he was discovered in his quarters lying on his bed in his own blood, having killed himself with his sword.

COUNTERFEIT

SUZERAINTY

103

Feeble old John Adams reported the " Surprising and Melancoly Death" two days later, and said: "It hath been Observ'd that Governor Armstrong has been for a long time frequently Afflicted with Melancholy fitts, the Consequence of which none ever Suspected till they found him Dead on Thursday 6th Instant. On whose Body, Maj Cosby Lieut. G o v of the Garrison, having Ordered the officers to Sitt, they Brought in their Verdict Lunacy." It was the only merciful gesture they could offer to the memory of their unfortunate commander to spare him the shame and disgrace of an unqualified verdict of suicide.1 l

T h e tedious annals of petty disputes and continuous futility have been deliberately compressed here. Quite typical examples of Armstrong's regime are his report of June 10, 1732 and the associated papers, N. S., A 20, p. 174, et seq., ibid., and A 21, passim. These involved one dispute with priests, and another occurred in the summer of 1736, N. S., A 24, passim. Certain aspects of the provincial administration under Armstrong appear in Chapter VI, but the curious can find printed extracts and abstracts from the MSS. materials for this period in the three volumes of Nova Scotia Archives; P. A. of C., 1894, pp. 78-92; and here and there among the Acadian papers collected by Gaudet in P. A. of C., 1905, vol. ii.

C H A P T E R

V

(1740-1748) T H E P U R I T A N C R U S A D E A N D T H E B I R T H OF A P O L I C Y A F T E R Cornwallis came out to take over Nova Scotia in 1749, Paul Mascarene, who had succeeded Armstrong, retired to his " fine brick house in Boston " amongst his children and " numerous offspring of grand children " to pass the remainder of his days in quiet and peace. In 1752 he sent off his son to London to seek his fortune, and equipped him with letters of introduction to those of his friends whom he thought had survived the interval of his forty years' absence. In one of these letters to an old army friend, Colonel Ladeveze, he sums up for us his situation in the forties and the policy which he adopted toward the Acadians. " I was then ", he wrote, " in a Fort capacious enough but whose works neglected in time of peace were all in ruins and instead of five hundred men requisite at least to mann it I had butt one hundred, twenty or thirty whereof were utter Invalides, of ten or a dozen of Officers not above two or three who had ever seen a gunn fir'd in anger and who for the most part were tainted by Republican principles", and adding, "by confining some of my officers I brought them att least to obey." Of the habitants and their behaviour during the French attacks of 1744-5 he could say " I us'd our french Inhabitants with so much mildness administerd Justice so impartially and employ'd all the skill I was master of in managing them to so good purpose" that a French expedition, two thousand strong, was unable by threats and cajoling to induce more than twenty of them to take up arms. 1 1

104

Brown MS.,

19071, f. 61.

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

These two statements provide a very fair picture of his stewardship. His position was in some ways similar to that of his old adversary, Subercase, and like him, Paul Mascarene did not see much efficacy in complaints and repining. The thing to do was to wrestle with and work into its most useful form the raw material at hand. He set himself, therefore, to rouse and train and discipline his elderly warriors, to repair as best he could, handicapped by insufficiency of funds and lack of materials, the most serious breaches in his fort, and to reach a practical understanding with the Acadians. He seems to have been in many ways very different from other contemporary officers. He possessed real judgment, a power of seeing situations clearly, of analysing them simply, and of making shrewd and practicable recommendations for their solution; and yet he revealed the gentleness, reasonableness, and patience, which military men can seldom afford to practise. He was the antithesis of Armstrong. When, in 1 7 2 1 , other officers fumed and counselled immediate vigorous action with the unfortunate Washington, they failed, and Mascarene, whose own position with the Board of Ordnance was most involved, wrote home, " we . . . Intend to Use all the tenderness with Lieu' Washington Consistent with Our Duty to Your Hon 6 '* Board ", and after months of patient negotiation got him quietly out of the country. 1 His various military reports and other dispatches reveal his qualities quite clearly. His very accuracy gave them their emphasis, for extravagance and exaggeration were superseded by a command of facts, and this without any harangue on what must obviously have been the difficulties of securing them. Even in dealing with such a tangle as that of the days immediately after the conquest, he somehow managed to report the salient facts without unfairness or involving himself in the disputes. Lest he seem to have been the complete paragon of military 1

Brown MS., 19071, f. 57V, et seq.; see above p. 81, note I.

106

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

virtues, it is as well to point out that probably his very judiciousness, humanity, and tendency to see the arguments for both sides, were the qualities which both condemned him and made him resign himself to the obscurity of the Annapolis garrison, with a very small tincture of greater fame in his negotiations with the Indians and in New England.1 In his dealings with the Acadians his first effort was to carry out his civil and military offices as properly as he might in accordance with his orders, but his second was to make the Acadians accommodate themselves as satisfactorily as possible both to those orders and to the facts of their situation. He, of course, knew the issue better than they, and during his administration he quietly and steadily strove to work out a structure of government which should be a fair working compromise between what he was expected to do and what could be done profitably and equitably for the unpolitical habitants. Thus his letters to them and dealings with them were firm and decided, but he always went to some pains to explain the reasonableness and desirability of what he commanded. Probably it would be a mistake to claim that he had any deep affection for this people, but unquestionably he understood them well and had a real appreciation of their attitude and point of view. Although he was himself an exiled Huguenot, educated at Geneva, and a firm supporter of the Protestant faith, he was not intolerant either of the priests in general or of the faith of the Acadians. He was willing to proselytize, if possible, but by example and persuasion, not force. Briefly, he was conciliatory, but correct. It would be easy 1

For a picture of him as a most lovable old man in Boston, busy with his children and grand-children, relatives and friends, and revealing a not unattractive personal pride in his own health, social standing, and temper, and in the quality either of his new horse-furniture or of the chessmen he asked of his son and which he hoped would compare with Sir Harry Frankland's " very neat sett, Ivory and E b o n y s e e his letter-book in Brown MS., 19071.

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

107

to argue from his own actions and dispatches that his conciliation was purely opportunistic in view of his fear of war and French attacks, but that would be entirely unfair to the record of his administration as a whole or to what we know of the man. There was no question in his mind of where his first duty lay and he was prepared to consider all practicable means (and conditions made these few) to fulfil it, but he was addicted neither to violence or duplicity and he had a genuine concern for the strange population which the irrational fortunes of war had committed to his charge. His quite remarkable success is as good evidence as any of the soundness and recognized fairness of his dealings.1 By 1740 the issues between France and England in North America and between their colonies had, after a long period of comparative quiescence, once more become defined. Louisbourg was now a fortress and naval base second only in importance to Quebec and perhaps its equal in strength, and, what was more important in times of peace, it was the centre of a strong and growing fishing industry which overshadowed its English rivals whether at Canso or on the Gulf shores of Newfoundland. If war came, the decaying blockhouses at Canso would provide neither adequate protection for the fishermen there nor a base for operations against their enemies. There was no aid nearer than Annapolis and practically nothing there. Neither garrison nor fort could withstand any strong assault and the grip of the administration on the Acadians depended on little except Mascarene's personal influence and prestige. Thousands of the habitants lived quite outside effective control of the military and in the •His official correspondence is, of course, in the State Papers, but a good deal of it and of local correspondence has been printed (with a biographical note) in N. S. Arch., I, pp. 105-164; the entire letter book 1740-42 is abstracted in N. S. Arch., II, pp. 130-165, and the commission book for the same period, ibid., pp. 233-249; the reasonable tone of his whole correspondence being most convincing.

io8

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

course of thirty years had built up easy and natural communications with the French island fortress. They had little political enthusiasm f o r its possessors, but it provided a regular market f o r their products and they had worn roads across the Isthmus of Chignecto by which these were transported to the vessels on the other side. T h e Indians, like the Acadians, were still under French missionaries and were a factor to be considered, both as a military menace in themselves and as a complicating element in their possible influence on the habitants. Such were the local problems on the northeastern coast and yet they could not be viewed apart from the general situation, but must be thought of as a whole, in somewhat the same terms as the rivalries and fort-building on the inland frontiers in upper New Y o r k , to the south of the Great Lakes, and in the Ohio country. Walpole's peace had been welcome and had lulled colonial enmities, but war between England and Spain in 1 7 3 9 was ominous, and a general uneasiness began to be noticeable in America. Governors began to ask questions and make reports to London or Paris, the military and naval possibilities were anxiously canvassed, Indian allies were courted with renewed anxiety, and the civilian colonists were reminded of their situation and of their possible duties. On the whole, the shrewdest observers in America expected war and, as many of them knew from experience that Europe and even the F a r East were likely to seem more important to the home administrations than their own colonies, they looked about them to discover what steps must be taken in the event of open conflict, and what resources they themselves possessed to cope with problems which were certain, f o r a time at least, to be left to their almost unassisted efforts. A s we shall see, the effect, so f a r as N o v a Scotia was concerned, was that New England suddenly awakened again to her own interest and made the Nova Scotian frontier her frontier, and the

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

problem of what should be done with the Acadians a New England problem. Mascarene had been living on the shores of the North Atlantic, at Annapolis, Canso, and Placentia, for thirty years, and Boston was the centre of his world. A s he told his son, he had soon grown weary of London on his last visit there, but in Boston he had found a wife, and there his children grew up. When, therefore, he took up his charge in 1740 and estimated his strength in the province, nothing was more natural for him than to think of the New England capital as his chief reliance in case of trouble. He usually sent his dispatches by way of ships sailing from there, and when, in 1741, he discovered a congenial spirit and encouraging qualities in William Shirley, the new governor, he fell into the habit of sending his reports unsealed so that the latter might see for himself what conditions were and amend or supplement the arguments and statements which went to acquaint the Board of Trade with Nova Scotian affairs. There is no need to provide a portrait of Shirley here. For fifteen years he was the most vigorous, ambitious, and active English governor in America, and he devoted all his energies and persuasive powers to the creation of colonial cooperation which, supported by British aid, should destroy once for all the menace of the French. To do this he had not only to preach his general doctrine day in and day out among the most influential men in America, but he had to convince and rouse to resolute action the controllers of policy in England as well. The more one examines his achievements, the more clearly it appears that although he enjoyed important home assistance in effecting them, the initiative and main driving power were of his own creation from North American materials, and that native strength and ambitious character engaged the necessary support by their obvious promise and merit. This was the man who, while Governor

110

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

of Massachusetts, read Mascarene's able reports. He knew what Canso meant, and what Louisbourg, he had heard the leading Massachusetts citizens tell of the frontier raids of the last war, and he knew that from a hostile Nova Scotia not only land, but maritime forces could and would strike at New England. Nova Scotia, he and they decided, must become New England's ward. Their ardour, be it said, was not diminished by the great religious revival which had swept over the Northern Colonies, and during the last ten years had created an evangelical and militant Protestantism which looked askance at " Popery " and echoed across the years the sentiments of Cromwell and the New Model Army. War over the Austrian succession broke out in Europe in 1740, and for the next four years men in America watched for the arrival of the ship that should bring news that France and England had come to grips again. Mascarene was particularly uneasy about Canso and scarcely less so about Annapolis, and he seems to have concluded that he must concentrate his efforts on the latter place, while he sacrificed seventy or eighty soldiers in the ramshackle buildings at the former. In 1743 he received some encouragement in the arrival of a few new engineers and artificers sent out by the Board of Ordnance, but they brought neither brick nor stone for permanent repairs and he could secure almost none of either locally. Nevertheless he set to work to make what temporary restoration he might and renewed his efforts to retain the confidence and at least the neutrality of the habitants. In Shirley lay his real confidence and to him and New England interest he looked for effective aid if trouble broke upon him and Nova Scotia. France declared war on England on March 15, 1744 (N. s.), and England reciprocated on April 9th (M. J.). Unfortunately for Nova Scotia and New England, Louisbourg heard of it in late April, whereas Boston had to wait

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

III

until June 2nd to make its declaration. When the Governor of Louisbourg, therefore, decided to open hostilities by destroying the Canso station and sent Du Vivier there with a little fleet and about a thousand men, the arrival was a complete surprise. No effective resistance could have been afforded them anyway, but it was disconcerting to have the initiative so completely in the hands of the French. There it remained, however, for a full year, a year which was a most anxious one for Mascarene, and during which he managed to retain control of his fort only through a combination of personal courage, New England aid, poor French leadership, and the honest neutrality of the vast majority of the Acadians. A sketch of the events of the war is necessary before attention is directed to its influence on the course of Nova Scotian history. News of the capture of Canso alarmed Boston and confirmed the unofficial reports that war had been declared. Up in Annapolis there had been an inexplicable panic in the middle of May on the strength of a rumour that a party of French and Indians were up the River. All the officers and soldiers moved from their houses in the town into the fort with their families and goods, and the seventy women and children remained for some days in those cramped quarters until they could be put aboard three small vessels from Boston which had brought almost definite news of the war and which carried them off to safety. The new engineers and artificers now set to work in earnest and, with the active assistance of the local Acadians, timber was cut and the fort hastily patched up. The hundred soldiers began to realize that they must at last practise their profession, and discovered to their alarm that many of their muskets would not fire. The black-smith and armourers thereupon also ceased to be civilians. On the first of July the Acadians suddenly withdrew and thus signalized the arrival of three hundred Indians

1 X 2

NEW ENGLAND'S OUTPOST

sent down from Louisbourg. This party bottled up the garrison, but beyond that and causing a little early panic had very little effect, being entirely unaccustomed to or suited for regular siege operations. Their surprise attack having failed, they prowled about and burned some houses, annoyed the garrison by bursts of fire, and in their skirmishings taught the commander and his officers where their weaknesses lay and what near-by buildings they must destroy as possible cover. T h e welcome arrival of two officers and seventy auxiliaries from Boston proved to be a final discouragement and the Indians withdrew to Minas. Shirley had begun to live up to Mascarene's expectations of him and to his own idea of the importance of Nova Scotia. " T h e Massachusetts Galley " went back to Boston and returned with a further forty men before Mascarene had to resist a second and much more serious attack in late August. The captor of Canso, Du Vivier, had got together a small detachment of officers and regulars from Louisbourg and had assembled between six and seven hundred Indians at Minas, whence he and his forces marched overland to summon Port Royal to surrender. Like its predecessor, this expedition lacked artillery and a sufficient stiffening of siege troops, and it, too, had to content itself with harassing fire and small raids. Du Vivier made a most interesting attempt to remedy this set-back by negotiation. Under flags of truce he explained to Mascarene and his officers that he would soon be assisted by " a Seventy, a Sixty and a Fourty gunns Shipps, mann'd one third above their compliment, with a transport with two hundred and fifty more of regular troops with Cannon, mortars and other implements of warr " , and he suggested, as that in those circumstances they could not hope to hold out, they might meanwhile have a truce. As an added inducement he pointed out that he was willing to make the most generous final terms, which he would not ask to have

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

concluded until the ships were in the Basin, but that if they refused and were conquered after the arrival of reinforcements, there could be no alternative to becoming prisoners of war. Mascarene suspected that this proposal was more than an attempt to secure personal glory from the conquest and refused to consent to treat, but he could not withstand the officers, who in detailed negotiation almost brought about what Du Vivier secretly hoped for, serious dissension in the garrison. Finally, and oddly enough, to the great relief of the common soldiers as well as to Mascarene, negotiations were broken off. Hostilities began again, " to which they [the men] express'd their assent by three chearfull Huzzas ", and the enemy becoming " more and more contemptible to the Garrison", the final damper to their hopes was administered by the arrival from Boston of fifty Indians, who at once displayed their mettle in a skirmish. The French force very promptly withdrew, only a few days too early to welcome three naval vessels which had at last come to their support. The commander of this naval armament was so nonplussed by the absence of the land force that he, too, withdrew, having given no immediate indication of his presence to the garrison, although he did capture two vessels carrying stores from Boston to them. So ended 1744. After these experiences and the narrow escape from loss of the province, Mascarene and his Council, remembering their principal assistance, thenceforth quite frankly committed themselves to the care of Shirley and New England, and were not rejected. During the quiet winter of 1744-5 great schemes were afoot and in Massachusetts, at least, men were agreed that something must be done to repair the loss of Canso, to diminish or eradicate the threat to the fisheries and to all communications which was created by an unopposed Louisbourg, and to take measures to prevent three or four thousand Acadians from becoming hostile troops.

U4

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

In this atmosphere Shirley was quite in his element. He fanned the coals of apprehension until they burst into a flame of enterprise which kindled Massachusetts and New Hampshire as never before. The destruction of Louisbourg became his goal and he knew from his correspondence with the home authorities that he might attempt it if he could secure a sufficient force in America. In addition he was authorized at least to ask for the cooperation of the naval vessels on the American station, and although ultimately he embarked on the expedition without certainty of their support, his own reputation and the imposing character of his expeditionary force were sufficient to secure it, and thereby contribute very largely to his chances of success. The men of New England, amateur soldiers though they were, went off on their daring adventure with a high fervour, which was not only military, but both acquisitive and religious as well. With them went their ministers, and as they journeyed and fought they prayed and sang hymns, but their leaders were sea-captains, fishermen, and traders, who knew what prosperity would attend them if they could destroy the enemy's Gibraltar. Militant business and militant Protestantism went forth to war and they marvelously succeeded. An estimate of their adventure, of the risks they took, the assistance and the good luck they had, the bravery they showed, and the weaknesses of their enemy, is not required here, but a whole-souled tribute from one of the naval officers who saw their feat while he marvelled at their peculiarities, will furnish a good memorial. I do assure Your Grace that whatever Sneers have by volatile and unthinking people been Ludicrously cast upon the Dissenters in New England on account of their stiffness in opinion their Morals and behaviour, is farr from being so dissolute and disorderly, as is too common in others of his Majesty's Subjects, and I must own their merit appears in a high light with me, for

THE

PURITAN

CRUSADE

X i

-

thus cheerfully carrying into execution almost to the utter ruin of their Province, an Enterprise by which they have contracted a debt, never to be got over without the assistance of their Mother Country. This was high praise from an English naval officer, and it was followed by an at least equal tribute to Shirley and a recommendation that he be appointed governor of the conquered fortress. 1 The victory saved Annapolis at least from attack in 1745, for an expedition of Canadians and Indians under Marin was recalled to Louisbourg after a few very feeble efforts near the fort. Yet it quite naturally brought about vigorous French and Canadian action to counterbalance it, and now in the minds of their strategists Acadian cooperation was not only desired, but almost, and quite unwarrantedly, taken for granted. This expectation and the disappointment of it throw a good deal of light on the behaviour of the English as well as the French during the next two years. In the spring of 1746 word was spread about the French settlements in North America that France was going to strike with her full strength and, with Canadian assistance, meant not only to reconquer Louisbourg and Acadie but attack Boston as well. The rumour was true, and at midsummer an armada under the Due d'Anville, which represented about half the naval strength of France, set out for America. A t the same time the gallant and competent de Ramesay went down from Canada with six hundred troops to the head of the Bay of Fundy to be ready for assistance before Louisbourg or Annapolis, as the case might require. Here also were 1

Warren to Newcastle, Nov. 23, 1745, N. S., A 25, pp. 223-246. An excellent description of Louisbourg affairs, 1744-48, is in McLennan, op. cit., and the actual activities are provided with the colonial background in Osgood, The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century (4 vols., New York, 1924) iii, part ii, chap xvi, part iii, chaps, i, iii, iv. For Shirley, see Wood, William Shirley (New York, 1920), and Lincoln, The Correspondence of William Shirley (2 vols., New York, 1912).

t

!6

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

gathered Marin, the Abenaki fighting forces, and the Micmacs, with their stirring and patriotic leader, the Abbé Le Loutre. Nor was England content merely to defend her conquest. In the American colonies a huge contingent had been raised to attack, in cooperation with a strong British force, the centre of French power in Canada. Yet all these portents came practically to naught. By a quite extraordinary sequence of disasters—storm, pestilence, the death of the leader, and the suicide of his successor—the French naval and military expedition was so reduced that its only impact on America was the short existence of a despair-ridden camp at uninhabited Chebucto, the inoffensive visit of two naval vessels to Annapolis, and the return of the remnants to France. 1 Fear for the safety of Quebec caused the dispersal of the French, Canadian, and Indian forces at Beaubassin before they had done more than carry out a neat and effective surprise attack, by boats from Baie Verte (on the north side of the Isthmus), on some English naval and military forces which were at Port Lajoie on Isle St. Jean. The British expedition, which under General S t Clair was to have attacked Quebec, never set sail, and the American contingents (except for the three regular regiments) were ordered disbanded. It was a strange collapse of a threatened engagement in America between the fullest resources of France and Great Britain, and no one was more grateful than Mascarene, the destruction of whose petty fort might have been a very slight incident in the great clash. His patron, Shirley, was not so well pleased, for the great movement which he had begun in 1745 could well, in his eyes, have gone on to its logical conclusion in 1746, whereas now it was robbed of momentum and would be difficult to accelerate again.2 1

The journal of this second Armada is in Doc. Inêd., I, pp. 40-108.

'Shirley even lost some of his faith in Mascarene, saying that he was " indifferent about pursuing the Advantageous Turn ", C. O. 5, 901, f. 71 v.

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

II7

At the end of the year, so far as Nova Scotia was concerned, a new and troublesome element had been added to the local problems. De Ramesay had been on his way to Quebec when word was received of the arrival at Chebucto of the remnants of the French fleet, and this necessitated his return. The utter ruin of the hopes reposed in the fleet, however, left him unemployed. He moved over to Annapolis, but Mascarene had been further reinforced by two hundred and fifty men from the forces in Massachusetts, and de Ramesay did not feel justified in attempting a siege without artillery after an attempt at naval cooperation had miscarried. He withdrew, therefore, to Minas, and thence to the head of Chignecto Bay, where he proposed to winter and provide a rallying point for the Indian allies and a depot for their supplies. Meanwhile, Massachusetts and New England generally had exploded in a perfect paean of devout thanksgiving for the destruction of the great French fleet and, in spite of the disappointment over the failure of the Quebec expedition, determined at least to make sure of Nova Scotia. Five hundred additional troops, therefore, went to the province in the autumn and Mascarene seized the occasion to raise a counter to de Ramesay by sending them to Minas in December to winter there and impress the Bay habitants. His idea was sound enough, but there was no fort to receive them and they had to be quartered in houses scattered along two and a half miles of the settlement at Grand Pré, and here they were attacked and defeated by de Ramesay's forces in February. It was a most remarkable feat of arms. The Canadians and Indians, in the depth of winter, made their way through almost trackless country on snow-shoes, pulling their supplies after them on improvised sleighs. The journey and preparations took almost three weeks, but the attack was both a complete surprise 1 and a complete success, 1

Noble had some warning from the habitants, but thought an attack quite impossible because oi the season.

n 8

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

being launched in the early hours of the morning in the middle of a thirty-hour snowstorm. A f t e r thirty-six hours fighting, the surviving nucleus of about three hundred and fifty English and the little group of French (about two hundred and fifty) were quite exhausted by their efforts in the deep snow, a truce was arranged, and, on capitulation, the English were allowed to withdraw to Annapolis with full honours of war. The absence of de Ramesay, the wounding of his substitute, de Coulon, and the withdrawal of the Indians explain the mildness of the terms, but the English had suffered severely and the victory was considered by the French to give them by conquest Acadie north and east of Annapolis. Some time had to be spent in burying the dead and attending the wounded, and during the necessary fraternization, Bastonnais and Canadiens discovered likable human traits in each other to their mutual surprise and edification.1 Three months later in the North Atlantic, Admirals Anson and Warren had the luck to engage with superior strength a French expedition of naval vessels, merchantmen, and transports on its way to strengthen and supply Nova Scotia and Canada. Their victory was a practically complete one and the vessels were converted to British service, the soldiers went to British prison camps, and the arms and other supplies for Canada and Acadie entered British magazines. 2 No notable engagements took place between then and the This is the story of the so-called " Massacre of Grand P r e ". T h e English killed were at least 5 officers and 60-70 men, the French and Indians 7-10. Four excellent Canadian accounts are in Doc. Ined., II, pp. 10-79, and Charles Morris's Brief Survey (see above p. 39, note 1 ) gives an English one. The Indians in the first attacks killed many men in their beds and seem to have been utterly ruthless—" when the English made any Resistance the enemy gave no Q u a r t e r . . . this is Observable of all the Men we lost 20 only were kill'd with Gun Shot wounds, 30 of the Dead were in no Condition to make any Resistance, but were in a most inhumane manner chopt to Pieces in their Cabins." 1

' See Anson to Stone, May 28, 1747, C. O. 5, 901, ff. 124-124 v.

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

119

conclusion of peace at Aix-la-Chapelle in April, 1748. By its terms, to the astonishment, grief, and disgust of the English colonies, the status quo ante was the settlement for America, and Louisbourg was handed back to the French. 1 Few men in England could appreciate the effect in Massachusetts of that act. It came on top of the disappointment of their enthusiasm for the Quebec expedition of 1746, it followed on the financial exhaustion of the province, and its blight extended all through New England and even beyond its borders. It was true that £235,000 healed the financial wounds, but mere money could not bring back the dead to life, restore the mained and sick, or assuage the dismay which followed the collapse of high hopes. Perhaps the best demonstration of the resilience and determination of Shirley can be found in the fact that he refused to be daunted by the surrender of his conquest, but kept flying his banner with its battle-cry " Canada est delenda." Turning now to consideration of the effect of these events on Nova Scotia, we can trace the genesis of New England's Acadian policy, and one of the most important elements in the situation was the presence as missionary to the Micmacs of an impetuous, untiring, and single-minded priest, Jean Louis Le Loutre. 2 It is a little odd that a priest, rather than a soldier, should have been the person on the French side most closely bound up with the policies affecting the Acadians, and there were other priests in the country who equalled or surpassed Le Loutre's period of service there, 1 The abominable climate, disease, rum-drinking, and unrest among the colonial regiments made the English regular naval and military officers write home discouragingly about the place, but the effective determinant with the treaty plenipotentiaries was bargaining for other territory and in particular for the return to England of Madras. See Due de Broglie, La Paix d'Aix-la-Chapelle (Paris, 1892).

* I am indebted to Professor N. McL. Rogers for a digest of an unpublished paper of his on Le Loutre.

120

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

yet because of his activities he became, for both English and French, the personification of French designs, military as well as religious. Unfortunately the incongruity of his close association with military affairs has tended to overshadow his basic motive, which was unquestionably religious. Convinced that the Acadians and Indians were about to be exposed to an Anglicization which would include direct or indirect proselytism and perhaps the exclusion of their former spiritual ministrants, he decided that the most effective counter-move would be assistance to the French forces in the hope of a re-conquest of Acadie or, failing that, the creation of a new Acadie protected by French arms, in which the persecuted might find sanctuary and to which he might by argument or less pacific means urge others for their souls' salvation. Endow an indomitable and personally courageous man with such direct and unequivocal designs and turn him loose in the forties and fifties in Nova Scotia, and the obvious result will be that the French will avail themselves to the utmost of his services and even compromise his cloth, and the English will not only ascribe all their troubles to him and accuse him of all baseness and duplicity, but will in their matter-of-fact way put a price on his head as well. This was precisely what happened. He reached the province in 1 7 3 8 and was on good terms with the administration until 1744, when his Indians attacked Annapolis and he summoned it to surrender. For the next two years he was continuously used by the French in their efforts to recapture Acadie, and when these failed he went to France. Successful only on his third attempt to return, after two short detentions in English prison camps, he got back to Nova Scotia in 1749 and became the leading spirit of the " French " Acadie north of the Isthmus of Chignecto. A s he made no secret of his hostility, the English naturally heard much of his activities, and gradually a most uncomplimentary legend grew up around his name among them, the

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

121

accusations ranging from the charge that he taught his Indians that it had been the English who crucified Jesus, to the very general belief (almost certainly untrue) that he had plotted the particularly treacherous murder under flag of truce of an Englishman who had been very successful in dealing with the Indians. The combination of fervent priest and fanatic patriot in the avowed leader of the Indians who spread terror in Nova Scotia had its inevitable result in exaggerated vilification, and when the Abbé was captured for the third time in 1755, he was most carefully guarded and kept safe in prison until the end of the Seven Years' War. 1 He had not been tilting at the wings of a windmill when he laboured against the threatened winning over of the Acadians and the Indians to the English side and perhaps to Engglish religious persuasion. War made not only Mascarene and Shirley, but the Lords of Trade as well, pause to consider what could be done to insure against the potential menace of alien subjects. O f them all Mascarene was the only one to take an even moderately optimistic view. He had been very favourably impressed by the almost universal refusal of the Acadians in 1744 to take up arms against the British. Their behaviour was very little less exemplary in the next three years, even in the Minas region. Chignecto was more of a thorn in the flesh and there the influence of the French was strong enough to win the active allegiance of a few Acadians, but in 1747 it could be said that in general the habitants were determined to fight for neither side. Under these circumstances, Mascarene's optimism, which had been harshly criticized by his Council and which Shirley thought might result in " danger of too much tenderness towards 'em [the Acadians] on his part, and perhaps vigour on theirs ", 2 1

An interesting anecdote told by Knox, op. cit., i, p. I47n.

To Newcastle, Feb. n , 1745/6, N. S., A 28, p. 16. See also Minutes of Council in N. S., B 3; their report in 1745, N. S., A 27, p. 211; and a letter of Secretary Shirreff, March, 1745, C. O. 5, 901, f. 12. 3

j22

NEW ENGLAND'S OUTPOST

was largely justified, and it is regrettable that he was unable to modify the official policy more than he did. That policy, of course, had its roots in the old dilemma between the risk of retaining a large body of alien subjects, presumably sympathetic with France and her colonies, and the aggrandizement of those colonies by their members and by their hostility to the English if they were transported. The direct solution by the removal of the habitants had quite naturally been proposed frequently since the days of Tom Temple.1 In 1 7 1 0 it received a new twist when it was suggested that those who " come over to the Protestant Religion " would be excepted from an expulsion.4 Again and again, the really sound policy of introducing British and other Protestant colonists had been put forward, but without success. The Lords of Trade had never solved the dilemma, and from time to time they fell back from their exploration of it to conclude that the administration was not strong enough to oblige the Acadians " either to pay due acknowledments to your Majesty's Government or to quit the country It was a policy of the purest expediency, marred from 1714 by the refusal to let the Acadians go, by the admission of them to a qualified oath,3 and by the expressed intention to impose the alternative on them when the Governor of Nova Scotia should consider himself strong enough to do so.4 During the war-scare of 1743 the Board evidently delved in the archives, for they produced a report to the King which echoed their past recommendations very clearly. After re1

1658-9, N. S., A 1, pp. 90, 109.

' Council of War to Queen, Oct. 14, 1710, N. S., A 3, p. 38. * Of this the Board of Trade was kept in ignorance, although they were frequently informed of the Acadian stand. * Some illustrations of. this policy: May 30, 1718, N. S., A 9, p. 69; the report of Sept. 8, 1721, Brodhead and O'Callaghan, op. cit., V, p. 591; representation by N. S. Council, Sept. 1720, N. S., A 12, p. 104; Lords of Trade to Philipps in reply, Dec. 28, 1720, N. S. Arch., I, p. 58.

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

123

hearsing the situation they observed: " It is absolutely necessary for Your Majty's Service, That these French Inhabitants should be removed; For it is not to be expected, That They will ever become good Subjects to Yo^ Majesty; And there is all the Reason in the World to apprehend, That upon any Rupture between the two Crowns, They may openly declare in favour of France." Even the accretion of strength by their joining the other French colonists they decided would be " a much less Evil, than suffering Them to remain where They are ". 1 It was all very well to make such a recommendation and to plan to fill the empty farms with " good subjects ", but the mere cost and labour of removing ten thousand people would have given the Privy Council good reason to pause had their proposal been followed by action. It was not. In spite of the practical difficulties and the failure to determine a home policy before the war, the success at Louisbourg bred a confidence among the leaders there which made them revive the idea of transportation. Warren, Shirley, and even Mascarene played with the idea, and Knowles, the governor of Louisbourg, in a letter to Newcastle casually mentioned the plan and ventured to hope that if it were decided upon, the King would do him the honour of letting him command the expedition.2 The assumption lying behind these proposals was that the instruments for the removal were at hand and that the moment of victory was a good occasion for introducing more promising subjects. A report by Mascarene to Shirley, Dec. 7, 1745, summarizes his position and gives as practical a view as any, although one still much more humane than those held by the others. 'From the version in C. O. 5, 4; a slightly different one, Aug. 23, 1743, N. S., A 26, p. 13. *N. S., A 29, pp. 42, 114. See also P. A. of C., 1905, II, Appendix C, pp. 38-48; N. S., A 27, pp. 200, 211, 223.

124

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

I have look't upon them as grafted in the Body of the British Nation, as an unsound limb indeed and therefore to be nurtur'd and by time and good care to be brought to answer the purposes expected from them; first to become Subjects and after that good Subjects; which I have represented might be effected in some generations by good usage and by removing some impediments, to witt the influence of the French att Cape Bretton and that of the Missionaries which have been suffer'd to remain amongst this People and which hitherto it has been reckon'd dangerous to attempt to drive away, as it has been a Question, how farr the Treaty of Utrecht was binding in that case, which certainly cannot be resolv'd here. If from other Views new measures are to be taken and these Inhabitants can be remov'd and good Protestant Subjects transplanted in their room; nothing can be of greater advantage to the Brittish interest in general and to that of the Northern Colonies in particular and especially to that of this province. H e went on to point out that his objections to the scheme were based on the uncertainty of interpretation of the Treaty of Utrecht, the accretion of strength to the French, and the cost and difficulty of removing a population which he estimated at 20,00o. 1 W e must turn to Shirley to discover the gradual crystallization of policy. T h e down-right sailors scattered from Louisbourg on various duties without even having removed the French from Isle St. Jean, much less N o v a Scotia; the Board of Trade fell into the habit of treating Shirley as the authority on most of their American problems, and Mascarene and his Council committed themselves to his care. Shirley, as he told Newcastle in 1 7 4 7 / regarded the N o v a Scotian province as " the most important to the Crown of any upon this Continent", and to a considerable degree upon his own responsibility he worked away at plans for its security. 1

This figure seems much too high, 10,000 would be nearer.

P- 247. ' Feb. 27, 1747, C. O. 5, 901, f. 99v.

N. S., A 27,

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

125

Communications were good during those days and there was a three-cornered correspondence between Newcastle, Shirley, and Mascarene. Thus they shared information as to affairs both within the province and without; Newcastle (and his successor the Duke of Bedford) being opposed to the removal of the Acadians on the grounds of expense; 1 Shirley being inclined to wall them off and break up their solidarity by occupation of the Isthmus, transportation of some, and settlement of Protestants among the others; and Mascarene clinging to his idea that if Louisbourg and Canada would leave the Acadians alone, they would do their best to be loyal even if they would not fight—" they acknowledge it is their Interest to remain under the British Governm'.2 Apparently some of the Louisbourg talk about expulsion reached the French, and being supported by the removal of the habitants of Cape Breton, it was used to alarm the Acadians just at the time when rumours of the D'Anville armada were current. Newcastle therefore authorized Shirley to issue a proclamation to reassure them " that there is not the least Foundation for any apprehension of that nature; But that on the contrary, It is His Majesty's Resolution to protect, and maintain all such of Them, as shall continue in their Duty and Allegiance to His Majesty, in the quiet and peaceable Possession of their respective Habitations, and Settlements and that they shall continue to enjoy the free exercise of their Religion." He went on in his letter to say that the proclamation would have been signed by the King had not 1

E. g., Shirley's proposals of April and July, 1747 and the observations of Newcastle and Bedford thereon, C. O. 5, 901, ff. 123, 136, 151, 152. 2 To Townsend, June 30, 1746, Brown MS., 19070, f. 92 v. The behaviour of the Acadians supports Mascarene's view. They refused to aid Du Vivier except with supplies in spite of his threats, and defended themselves convincingly before the Council, see N. S. Arch., I, pp. 134-9, 151-7. The Annapolis habitants were working on the fort there in 1746 and receiving supplementary rations from Mascarene, N. S., A 29, p. 24.

I2Ô

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

word arrived of the disaster at Grand Pré, which seemed likely to implicate the habitants and that therefore it was left to Shirley " to make such a Declaration in His Name, as you shall be of opinion, the present Circumstances of the Province may require." Shirley took advantage of this latitude to draw up a proclamation which, translated and printed, was distributed among the French with good effect. It promised them all that Newcastle had stipulated except free exercise of their religion.1 Shirley explained to Bedford that he had purposely omitted this because he did not interpret the Treaty of Utrecht to guarantee it, and because Mascarene agreed with him that religion was the chief medium of French influence and that the omission would not cause uneasiness. Bedford approved his proclamation and the omission, but repeated that the King still had no intention of depriving the Acadians of the free exercise of their religion.2 What was in Shirley's mind? Fundamentally, presumably, he wanted to get rid of the French in America, but that scheme failed in 1746 and until it could be revived his immediate objectives were the Gulf and Bank fisheries, control of peninsular Nova Scotia, development of its natural re1 P. A. of C., 1905, II, Appendix C, pp. 47-8. It was this document which offered £50 for the delivery to Mascarene of Le Loutre as a prisoner.

* May 10, 1748, N. S., A 32, p. 97. Shirley's explanation Oct. 20, 1747, N. S., A 31, p. 55, et seq. It seems to have escaped notice that the proclamation was Shirley's idea, not Newcastle's, for in 1746 on his own responsibility he had sent to Mascarene a previous printed letter in French to be distributed to the habitants. It assured them that they need not fear dispossession or expulsion so long as they behaved themselves, and that he would use his best offices with the Crown on their behalf. The Council approved the letter Sept. 29, 1746 and ordered its distribution, N. S., B 3, p. 259, et seq. It seems to have had a most reassuring effect on the Minas Acadians, Mascarene to Newcastle, Jan. 23, 1747, N. S., A 30, p. 22. For one thing when de Ramesay in late 1746 tried to get them to organize to repel the Noble expedition, they refused ; Mascarene to Shirley, Jan. 23, 1747, C. O. 5, 901, f. 102.

THE

PURITAN

CRUSADE

127

sources (naval timber particularly), and above all such a firm grip on the northeastern corner of the continent south of the St. Lawrence as should remove it as a menace or base of operations against the Northern Colonies. These designs brought him squarely against the problem personified in the Acadians and there is no question but that he found it almost impossible to rid himself of the conviction that they would aid French invaders. He looked at the situation as the French and Canadians saw i t — " the most practicable Step the Enemy can attempt . . . seems clearly to be their rendring themselves Masters of Nova Scotia." 1 He apologized to the Secretaries of State for his insistence on the necessity for the preservation of Nova Scotia, which he regarded as of infinitely more consequence than the reduction of Crown Point, and he bombarded them with his proposals. He had thought of military expulsion of the habitants beyond the boundaries, but gave up because it would entail a guerilla campaign in a wooded country which would confine the English population to garrisons and perhaps starve them out. It would also give the French five or six thousand fighting men. Moreover (and here not only the views of Mascarene, but the behaviour of the Acadians obviously had had their effect), considering the Treaty of Utrecht and their long settlement and improvement of their lands, it would hardly be " just usage ". Their claim to neutrality was of course illegal, but it had long been recognized and " it may perhaps be deem'd too rigorous a Punishm' for their behaviour grounded on such a Mistake, to involve the innocent with the Guilty in the 1 C. O. S, 901, f. 3 v. For our purpose an insufficient amount of Shirley's correspondence is printed in Lincoln, op. cit., i ; in P. A. of C., 1905, I I ; and in N. S. Arch., I. It is to be found in manuscript in N. S., A 26-34, and (many of the most important pieces) in C. O. 5, 901. Here the picture of Shirley's policy is drawn chiefly from the time of its definition in 1746, particularly May-August, and from a critical summary of Nov. 21, 1746, C. O. 5, 901, f. 77, et seq.

128

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

Loss of their Estates, and the Expulsion of their Families out of the Country ". " Some allowances may likewise be made for their bad Situation between the Canadians, Indians, & English, the Ravages of all which they have felt by turns in the Course of the War ", being " continually plac'd between two fires." Finally, depopulation would follow for some time—" What Number of Families can be propos'd to begin a Settlem' in the Country, after the Expulsion of the french Inhabitants, with Safety against the Indians ? " 1 Yet all this was negative. What positive plan had he to offer? He thought of transportation of the habitants to France or the English colonies, but this was impracticable on the grounds of expense. He turned, therefore, after many trials and suggestions to what seemed to him an effective and workable scheme.2 He would drive out de Ramesay's forces from Chignecto and build a strong fort at Baie Verte to secure the Isthmus even from the Gulf. He would fortify Chebucto (Halifax) harbour and station three hundred men there, and put block-houses and detachments of one hundred and fifty each at Grand Pré and Canso. Secure then from French influence or attack, he would sort out the Acadians, " removing the most obnoxious " to other English colonies, and fill their places with Protestant New Englanders, Swiss, Germans, or Ulstermen. A general pardon would extend to all who would take the oath. Civil government might then be introduced. The fire of the Puritan crusaders had also inflamed him, for he thought that " after a short term of Years " the public exercise of Roman Catholicism might be discontinued. He would go further—by " removing the Romish Priests out of the Province, and introducing Protestant English schools, and French Protestant Ministers, 1

Extracts from letter to Newcastle of Nov. 2i, 1746.

' A p r . 28, 1747, C. 0. S, 901, f. 120, and previous correspondence.

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

I2Ç

and due encouragement given to such of the Inhabitants, as shall Conform to the Protestant Religion, and send their Children to the English Schools, the present Inhabitants might probably at least be kept in Subjection to his Majesty's Government, and from treasonable correspondence with the Canadians ; and the next Generation in a great measure become true Protestant Subjects; and the Indians there soon Reclaim'd to an entire dependence upon and subjection to his Majesty." With subsequent minor modifications such was the plan of New England's leader for the securing of Nova Scotia, and to it he clung up to the eve of the expulsion in 1755. It seems by the standards of today severe and intolerant, but in a century of raison'd état, in the middle of a great war, and judging by contemporary religious intolerance in France and elsewhere, or even by the trading in " souls " at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, it was almost humanitarian in character. If this is so, much of the credit is Mascarene's, who converted Shirley, who in turn converted Knowles, the governor of Louisbourg. Writing even in the depression following the defeat and death of Noble, Mascarene was able to say " I do not think it an Easy thing to ridd our selves of all this People, and Cannot think it could be in Justice answer'd without farther proofs of their delinquency in general, or positive Orders from home, but however on the fair pretence of pursuing our Enemies much might be done to humble them, and punish those who might be found to have favour'd the Enemy—there must be a great force to bring this to pass." Two weeks later he wrote in much the same vein to the effect that " after a good purging of the bad, a good number of the Inhabitants may in process of time be brought to make good Subjects, at least they might be transplanted into some other province, whereby we might keep up the Number of our Inhabitants, & prevent the French from

I 3

o

NEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

increasing theirs at our C o s t " 1 This may seem like mere opportunism, but it was the sort of argument calculated to move Shirley and Knowles, and if put in effect would have the least disturbing effect on the loyal Acadians. When one turns to the reception of all these plans in England, there is little enough altruism to be found, and yet Mascarene's idea, that without massacre or expulsion the Acadian problem of Nova Scotia might be solved, provided the determining factor. By the time it reached the high deliberations of the Privy Council it had been pruned of the considerations of humanity which had undoubtedly engendered it, but the " practical " arguments which had been brought to its support were sufficiently convincing. Thus we find Shirley reminded that the King did not intend to deprive the Acadians of the free exercise of their religion and expressly forbidden to expel even the habitants of Chignecto and replace them with New Englanders. The explanation of this policy is not very noble, it is that the Acadians were to be, at least for the moment, retained and reassured so that French influence should not seduce them. Any expulsion would alarm the whole population and make them apprehensive of the same fate, and would rob the proclamation of 1747 of all effect. " His Majesty therefore, upon the whole, thinks it right to postpone any Thing of this kind, for the present; tho' His Majesty would have you consider, in what manner such a Scheme may be executed, at a proper Time, and What Precautions may be necessary to be taken, to obviate the Inconveniences that are apprehended from it." 2 The Privy Council was open to conviction if conditions changed, and wanted to be prepared for any event. 1C.

O. s,

901,

ff.

103,

107

v.

* It is to be noted that this proviso concerns only the securing of the Isthmus, not a general expulsion, which never became part of the home policy. Newcastle to Shirley, Oct. 3 , 1 7 4 7 , C. O. 5, 9 0 1 , ff. 1 5 7 - 8 V .

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

T o the request for a scheme of establishing Protestants in the room of some of the Acadians, Shirley was only too glad to accede. Since 1746 he had been employing as surveyor in Nova Scotia, Capt. Charles Morris, and he forthwith ordered him to select and indicate on proper maps suitable sites for the introduction of 1420 Protestant families. This number is an indication of the quite too grandiose scale of his whole plan and was chosen as being two hundred more than the estimated number of families up the Bay. He put forward and supported Morris's suggestions that six settlements might be made in the Annapolis Valley and south of it without disturbing the habitants greatly, and that the urgency of putting in four settlements at Minas and nine at Chignecto justified taking over the improved marsh-lands from the Acadians and removing the latter to uncultivated uplands which they should receive in exchange. Realizing that English settlers would not remain in a colony where there was no civil government, he himself drew up a scheme for one on the model of Massachusetts, and on Feb. 18, 1749 he incorporated again his well-worn arguments in a letter to the Duke of Bedford, and supplied him with his own constitutional invention and Morris's neat and detailed plan for the settlements.1 In all this there was little that was new, except the inclusion of a proposal for the encouragement of proselytism by bounties. It was merely the Shirley policy made definite and worked out in detail for the specific purpose of securing the Isthmus of Chignecto and for the general one of "improving" the province. Moreover, although the colonial administrators in England were glad to have Shirley's ideas and such exact information as was provided by him and Morris, with the relinquishment of Louisbourg to •Letter, N. S., A 33, p. 136; plan of government, Lincoln, op. cit., i, pp. 472-7; Morris's plan with its accompanying maps, P. A. of C., 1912, Appendix H.

NEW

132

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

France they felt themselves necessarily committed to the creation of some new fortress of their own to balance its strength on the Atlantic.

Probably the fact that D'Anville

had chosen it as a refuge caused them to select as a site, Chebucto, which, because of its magnificent harbour, Mascarene had recommended thirty years before 1 and which had commended itself

forcibly to other observers since then,

particularly during the recent war.

All through 1748 plans

were being made for the change in the character of the British hold on Nova Scotia and, as will be shown in a succeeding chapter, in 1749 a new governor came out to Chebucto to make a new kind of a province, armed with instructions which showed very plainly, although in somewhat altered form and application, the direct influence of the ideas which had been emanating from Shirley and New England. In Nova Scotia where these plans were only vaguely known by Mascarene, at most guessed at by the agents of France, and unknown to the Acadians, the year of the peace was somehow ominous.

A small detachment of New England troops had

replaced the force ejected by de Ramesay and had built themselves a block-house at the southern extremity of the Minas Basin.

The Shirley letters of 1746 and 1747 had had the

calculated effect, as had had the scrupulous payment to the Minas habitants

for their services and provision of supplies

in the winter of 1746-7.

Mascarene could report in May,

1747, that the great mass of the population was constant in its 1 He strongly recommended it again in a very serious report on his province to the Board of Trade, Oct. 17, 1748. In this report he repeated his objections to the removal of the Acadians and suggested that Roman Catholic priests be provided (in lieu of the French ones) " w h o should have at heart the promoting the British Interest, at least preferably to the French." H e thought too that French protestant ministers " might in time wean these People from the Bigottry they have for the Romish Religion." N. S., A 32, p. 231, et seq. Shirley borrowed a good deal from this letter for his of Feb. 18, 1749.

THE PURITAN

CRUSADE

133

fidelity, and this in spite of the fact that de Ramesay had followed his victory by issuing a proclamation to them to the effect that they were once more subjects of France. The Acadians had treated him as they treated Mascarene and refused to take up arms, although it is permissible to believe that about Chignecto they were a little more accomodating in their relation to the French forces among them. Yet the lull in 1748 gave a false sense of security. The French were back in Louisbourg again, and in Quebec and Paris they were planning how they might reconquer Acadie and debating vigorously the probable value to them of the Acadians in such an effort. Next year Halifax was to rise in counter-poise to Louisbourg, but, as well, Le Loutre was to return to America and from a new " French " Acadie west and north of the peninsula and, protected by French forces on the Isthmus, he was to harass and annoy with his Indians, not only the new settlers on the east coast, but the disinterested Acadians as well. By persuasion, religious and patriotic appeal, and, failing these, by force, he was going to try to withdraw the habitants to the new territory. Once again, between two powers who wished to use them for their own ends, this luckless people were to be disturbed, and become embroiled in affairs which they detested. Their role was to be that of the football in an international match.

CHAPTER

VI

(1710-1749) G O V E R N M E N T B Y A N A L O G Y AND R U L E OF T H U M B

BEFORE turning to the history of the province under the new dispensation for Nova Scotia, it seems convenient to describe the scheme of government for the colony and to outline the methods by which the administration exercised control over the strangers who differed from it so importantly in tradition, language, law, and religion. Here we are not greatly concerned with the formalities of the constitution which the Board of Trade provided as a sort of mould for the province, for this proved neither adequate nor appropriate, but with the actual fashion in which Government functioned. W e have seen how the home authorities planned to purge Nova Scotia of the possible taint of New England republicanism and to make it conform to the character of the more admirable Virginia. In evidence of these intentions, Philipps in 1719 received along with his own commission and instructions, a copy of " H i s Majesty's Instructions to His G o v of Virginia." The policy, moreover, was made a continuous one, for, as new instructions went to Virginia, copies seem to have been sent to Nova Scotia, as well as copies of Virginian legislation. The governors of Nova Scotia were more or less compelled, also, to perpetuate the imitation because of the inadequacy of their own instructions, and one gathers from the records that the " Earl of Orkney's Instructions for the Government of Virginia " must have been thumbed almost to destruction by the perplexed soldiers who were faced by the duties of civil administration and judicial action under the peculiarly difficult local circumstances. 134

GOVERNMENT

BY

ANALOGY

135

Many a time when unforeseen problems arose, the governor adjourned the Council for a day or two, while he retired to delve in the Virginian folios. The fundamental difficulty underlying the governmental problem from 1 7 1 0 to 1749 was that the inhabitants of the province were debarred by their religion from assuming political duties of a legal and regular sort. They could not take the oaths under the Test and Corporation Acts which were required of every official and active citizen in England, and which were actually in force among the officers in Nova Scotia. They could not, therefore, elect or serve in a legislative assembly. This difficulty had not been foreseen when Philipps received his instructions and it was not resolved before 1749. There was a heavy weight of tradition and precedent which lay dead upon the governors' commissions and instructions and prevented them from becoming less " the same as are given by Her Majesty to all her Governors in America" and more precisely adapted to the needs of a unique colony. Thus Philipps in 1 7 1 9 was commanded to act in all things by his commission or instructions or orders from home " and according to such reasonable laws and statutes as hereafter shall be made and assented to by you with the advice and Consent of our Council and Assembly of our said Province hereafter to be appointed." 1 His instructions asked for a report on the proper number for the membership of an assembly and forbade him to enact any laws until it should be created.2 This was quite unreasonable and yet it was not amended. Even his Council was to consist of twelve, with twelve names in reserve, and yet it subsequently proved quite difficult to secure the attendance of the quorum of five. Actually, beyond his powers as military commander, the resident governor possessed little executive 1

N. S„ E 7, No. 7.

' N. S., E 1, No. 6, articles 9, 10.

I36

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

power except that with the advice and consent of the Council he could direct settlement and make land grants. He was therefore thrown back on article ten of the instructions which read: " I n the mean time till such a Governm' [by Council and Assembly] shall have been Established You will receive herewith a Copy of the Instructions given by His Majesty to the Govern r of Virginia, by which you will conduct yourself, till His Majesty's further pleasure shall be known, as near as the Circumstances of the Place will admit in such things as they can be applicable to, and where you are not otherwise directed by these Instruct"-5." These basic instructions for the erection of civil government were not usefully altered in the period under discussion and the home authorities never seem to have troubled themselves much about how the Acadians were to be treated except during the short periods of their spasmodic interest in the oath of allegiance. It was not to be expected that Englishmen and New Englanders, anxious to have specific legislation to meet local problems, would not from time to time agitate for some kind of an assembly. The Board of Trade between 1726 and 1 7 3 1 seriously considered empowering the Governor and Council to legislate, but nothing came of it in the confusion over the timber reservations, which produced three sets of governmental instructions during those years. Armstrong was very much concerned over the problem, and through Philipps infected the Board of Trade, but he could suggest nothing more practical than that an assembly be composed of representatives of the summer population of Canso fishermen. At Canso he had a real problem of government on his hands until another expedient was adopted, for as he said, without some form of government " the best man on Earth [in another letter " an Angle from Heaven " ] cannot manage and gov» them He kept pressing for some arrangement and l

N. S., A 16, pp. 162, 166 (1725).

The Council sat at Canso in August

GOVERNMENT

BY

ANALOGY

137

definite policy and extended his view to include the issue in its relation to the Acadians, even suggesting that some of them be included in an Assembly, but that did not commend itself as possible to the Board and in 1741 the whole question seems quietly to have been dropped with the observation that the Protestant population was too small for an Assembly and that there was little even for the Council to do. 1 The main burden of government was thus thrown on the shoulders of the resident governor with the advice of his Council. He had certain limited powers of action deriving from his military command, but as we have seen in the case of Cosby and Armstrong, even these could be circumscribed by rivalries. He had neither legislative council nor legislative assembly. He had the laws of Virginia. This situation goes far to explain the length and detailed character of the governors' dispatches home, for an order from the Board was something very like special legislation for the province and filled an occasional serious gap in the fabric of government. Obviously, however, a province of complex problems like Nova Scotia could not depend for its entire administration on military authority, on the laws of another colony, and on the long-delayed and often ignorant orders of the Board on the other side of the Atlantic. Two expedients, therefore, were discovered and allowed to subsist. In the first place governors met emergencies, and, as time went on, chronic and September, 1725, and government was at other times carried on by an unconstitutional group of the summer residents known as " The Justices of the peace and a Committee of the people at Canso." It settled harbour squabbles and provided rough and ready order among the busy fishermen; N. S., B 1, p. 35, el seq.; A 16, p. 166; N. S. Arch., II, pp. 86-7. The problem was the avoidance of an appearance of military government and Philipps and Cosby improvised arrangements which should not offend the tender seasibilities of civilians; N. S., A 16, p. 64. 1

N. S., A 25, p. 105. Armstrong's early representations, ibid., A 16, pp. 128-162 (1725); A 17, p. 122 (1726); A 20, pp. 101, 174 (1731-2); that to include Acadians, A 21, p. 94 (1732).

138

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

problems, by issuing proclamations with the approval of the Council. These mandatory laws, for they became that, were very rarely annulled by the Board of Trade. In the second place, Philipps discovered in April, 1 7 2 1 , that the Governor and Council of Virginia by law formed the supreme court there, called the General Court. He suggested that the Virginian precedent be followed in Nova Scotia and, after Mr. Secretary Shirreff had drawn up some minutes on the subject, on April 20, 1 7 2 1 , the Council ordered that until the civil constitution should be settled along English lines, the Governor and Council should constitute a court which should sit at Annapolis on the first Tuesday of February, May, August, and November, " Which Court to have the same Style and Cognizance of all matters and pleas brought before them and power to give Judgment and award—Execution thereupon, by the same manner of proceedings as the General Court so called of Governor and Council has in Virginia, and practices at this time In this way some of the handicaps were overcome by a tacitly accepted system of mandates and case law and the Council received needed assistance. Their business was very wide. Days of public thanksgiving had to be proclaimed for the providential escapes of Hanoverian monarchs from rebellion, conspiracy, and shipwreck. Quarantine had to be improvised when the " Two Brothers " came in from Boston " where the small-pox is very breif ". Measures had to be taken to secure seed-grain in time of shortage, or to distribute the available supplies when some settlement was in danger of famine. The vexed problem of the relation of French silver currency to Massachusetts bills was another worry. The be1

N. S. Arch., I l l , pp. 28-9. See also Chisholm, " Our First Common Law Court," Dalhousie Review, I, I, pp. 17-24 (April, 1921). The minutes of Council are N. S., B series, and for 1720-36 they are printed in N. S. Arch., III.

GOVERNMENT

BY

ANALOGY

139

haviour of the traders, the condition of the dykes, the upkeep of roads, these and a host of administrative details demanded and received attention. Matters of policy were debated, and decisions made, such as that for the death of an Indian hostage in 1724. 1 Occasionally a little colour and romance varied the tedious round of their business. Mysterious strangers would enter the province and their tales of themselves were most entertaining to the officers, as is revealed in the care of their recording in the Council minutes. One time three French gentlemen, presumably of the noblesse, turned up from Quebec, having made their way to and down the St. John, to Beaubassin, Minas and Annapolis. They had killed their Indian guides on suspicion of treachery. T w o of them reported that they had been incarcerated in the Bastille, the one for unknown reasons, the other " on Some Acco* of Amours for that he had been a Very Wilde Youth ", the third said that he had been sent to New Spain " on Acco* of a Duel". All three were trying to get to France. At first the Council were exemplary and stern and suspicious of their being spies, but the romantic stories so stirred them that they sent them to Boston to take ship.2 Yet most of the time the meetings were dull and serious, and the Councillors must have cursed the day which called them to be judges. The arrangement for four sessions a year proved to be merely touching optimism. They met several times a month, and after April, 1744, every Monday, with frequent adjournments which extended the sittings over several days. Not only did they have a good deal of business affecting necessary regulations for peace and order, but their own real-estate operations produced a good deal of litigation. The affairs of the Acadians required still more time 1 N. S. Arch., Ill, p. 57. carried out

I do not know whether the sentence was

* N. S. Arch., Ill, pp. 106-10, 113-14.

140

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

and infinitely laborious investigation, and page after page of the minutes was given up to recording their disputes. Murray, later in Quebec, found the Canadians " in general of a litigious disposition ". Armstrong, in an exaggerated description of the Acadians anticipated the difficulties of the former by thirty years—" a Litigious Sort of people and so ill natur'd to one another, as Daily to Encroach upon their Neighbours propertys, which occasions Continual complaints "- 1 The Acadians gradually developed the habit of bringing their difficulties to the Council and the practice grew so regular that one Acadian would plead for another almost like a lawyer.2 This was a great change from their turning to their priests or deputies for decisions, though these practices seem to have survived a long while in the pettier disputes, and as late as 1741 Mascarene was asked, but refused, to settle a case himself.3 Without, then, asserting that anything like all the civil disputes in the province were settled by the Council Court, yet a large amount of such business was patiently and, so far as one can gather, competently dealt with. There had to be frequent proclamations and instructions to the habitants on the more important niceties of procedure, such as the production of witnesses and the presence of both parties to a suit before the Court. Records were often missing, sometimes illegible, and occasionally a treasured scrap of paper dating back to the French regime disappointed its possessor by being useless to support his claims. The chief civil business naturally centred about land-holdings, particularly as the population grew and found the old settlements somewhat cramped, but there were endless disputes about other affairs as well—rights of hay and wood cutting; duties of 1

1731, N. S., A 20, p. 101.

* E. g., N. S. Arch., I l l , p. 209.

»N. S. Arch., II, pp. 151-2.

GOVERNMENT

BY

ANALOGY

141

dyke, fence, bridge, and road repair ; questions of inheritance, of the alteration of rents, and of contracts; and quarrels over the damage done by straying cattle. It is not possible to state comprehensively what sort of law ran in the court, for cases were of four possible kinds, i. e., between two English parties, or two Acadians, or between English and Acadians, or where either English or Acadian offended against the provincial proclamations. Thus the language of the warrant in the case of Timothy Macqueen who "Died Intestate & reputed Insolvent " smacked very much of the Inns of Court, but where the Acadians were concerned it was then of ordinary intercourse, and the decisions were based on commonsense interpretation of what could be discovered of past custom. Just as in Canada later, recourse was had to the civil law to which the habitants were accustomed, the Coutume de Paris/ and the practice was well summed up by Mascarene in a letter of instruction to Alexander Bourg, a servant of the government at Minas : " The Council have made it a rule to follow the Antient laws & Customs established with the Inhabit'* in judging of their suits & shall continue so except where such would Affect the rights of the Crown or be repugnant to the Laws of Great Britain ". 2 This very practical policy commended itself most forcibly to the Acadians and earned the approval of recourse to its operation." Naturally the Council Court had to exercise criminal jurisdiction as well, and before it came cases of theft, assault, arson, murder, libel, bastardy, adultery, and the like. The 1

See N. S., A 20, p. 174; N. S. Arch., I l l , p. 237.

1

AT. 5. Arch., II, pp. 151-2 (1741).

* An interesting testimony of the Abbé de Miniac to the Director of the Seminary of Quebec, Apr. 26, 1744 : " Les juges sont éloignés, et quoique fort judicieux, Peu instruits de la coutume de Paris qui est içi suivie," quoted by Casgrain, Le Canada-Français, I, p. 116, note 1.

142

NEW ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

more serious of these crimes worried the councillors considerably, for they were not empowered to award or administer the death penalty, and occasionally they found themselves in legal waters too deep for them. In the case of the minor, Isaac Provender, who attempted to murder the deputy surveyor, Edward Amhurst, by burning the house down over hishead, they were completely at a loss and sought advice in New England. Even when this was learnedly provided, they did not feel secure and referred the case home.1 Appropriate punishments, also, were not easily awarded. There was a jail and short terms of imprisonment, with or without the ball and chain, could be imposed. Usually, however, some public manifestation of guilt was wanted and this was often provided in the brutal public whipping at the cart's tail, and in one case sentence of ducking was awarded to a libelling woman, but remitted at the request of the plaintiff. T h e best example of confidence in public punishment was in thesentence on Robert Nichols, Armstrong's servant, convicted of assaulting and offering violence to him, which read: The Punishm* therefore Inflicted on thee is to Sitt upon a Gallowes three Days, half an hour each Day, with a Rope about thy Neck and a paper upon your Breast Whereon shall be Writt in Capitall Letters A U D A C I O U S V I L L A I N And afterwards thou art to be Whipt at a Carts tail from the Prison up to the Uppermost house of the Cape & from thence back again to the Prison house Receiving Each hundred paces five Stripes Upon your bare Back with a Catt of Nine tails and then thou art to be turn'd over for a Soldier. From time to time the burden imposed on the councillors by the large amount of business, particularly judicial, which so occupied their time, irked them to the point of protest. The irascible and independent trader, William Winniett, w a s made a councillor on the occasion of Philipps's second visit: 1N.

S., A 24, p. 145; B 2, pp. 119, 137.

GOVERNMENT

BY

ANALOGY

143

in 1729. For a while he attended meetings fairly regularly, but he soon grew weary of the expenditure of time and began to send excuses. As time went on, these grew more and more threadbare until they had reached the insulting climax of " in case he had time he would Come otherways not", and he was suspended. In other colonies the monetary reward in fines and costs was sufficient to make judicial office a desirable perquisite, but in impoverished Nova Scotia this was not the case. In 1 7 3 1 , Cosby and the Council settled the fees to be the same as in Massachusetts,1 but even this regulation apparently improved the situation very little, for in February, 1733, Mr. Secretary Shirreff complained of the expense and trouble he experienced " in giving daily attendance upon the plaintiffs and defendants at his office, and in Searching the Records and other papers upon file." His complaint was taken seriously and he submitted and had approved a table of fees for search, and for other duties, to serve " untill the Same be Settled from home or farther advice from New England or Rather Virginia to which this Government is Refer'd." 2 There is no record of disallowance of this scale, which was very modest in its charges, and presumably it continued to exist, although the Lords of Trade refused to allow a set of fees to be paid in the formalities of land grants.3 On the whole it seems safe to presume that the Council performed its very laborious services for little or no remuneration, and it is greatly to their credit that under those circumstances they took such pains as they did to do their duty as well as men could.4 'N. S. Arch., Ill, p. 188. ' N. S. Arch., Ill, pp. 273-4. ' Nov. 2, 1732, N. S., A 21, p. 73. * There were a number of special appointments held by members of the English group, such as Naval Officer and Collector of Customs, but their activities were so spasmodic and petty and their jurisdiction so vague as to make it unnecessary to record them here.

I44

HEW

ENGLAND'S

OUTPOST

Had Nova Scotia been a colony which attracted settlers, the Council would have been kept very busy with the task of land-granting. As it was, even with the damper on such activity created by the Dunbar commissions and instructions, a considerable amount of the Council's time was taken up with the examination and approval of title-deeds. Procedure was complicated by the fact that the desirable lands were held by Acadians for the most part or, in the case of those in Annapolis Town, belonged to dead or departed officers like Hobby. Search of title under those circumstances was a long-drawn-out business and it resulted in a number of queer provisional grants and titles which might amuse lawyers today, but whose making perplexed the councillors.1 From time to time, too, enquiries came from the heirs of the officers of 1 7 1 0 for rents and estates whose very existence had been forgotten. Expectations from the rich relative who was believed to be a large property-owner in Nova Scotia, must invariably have been disappointed. The large grants which were expected to follow the setting aside of timber-lands failed to materialize because no one came to settle the proposed townships, even after George Mitchell and Edward Amhurst, Dunbar's deputies, made their surveys on the Bay shores. The only grant made and taken up was one to Major Cope and associates for the working of a colliery on the Minas shores of the Chignecto peninsula.2 Even this implied only a sketchy settlement and special concessions were made in the matter of quit-rents and the planting of colonists, " Eighteen pence Sterling for every 'One of the pleasant duties was the setting aside on petition of the officers in 1734 of "the Small Incloser Adjoyning to the Governors Garden and y e White House ffield " to " be Reserved and sett apart for ever for them and their successors and all Other Gentlemen who may please to contribute to the Expence of making the said Encloser a Bowling Green And Reparing and ffencing the same. N. S. Arch., Ill, p. 295. •Minas is an English corruption, it would seem, of let Mines.

GOVERNMENT BY ANALOGY

145

Chalder " of coal excusing the patentees these duties. The company was in operation only from 1731 to 1733, when it defaulted on wages and was wound up.1 In 1732 a number of township grants were made in Dunbar's territory, and Mascarene went off to Boston for Armstrong and the Council to invite settlers for similar ones in Nova Scotia, but nothing came of it. The Acadians had the good cleared lands, the New Englanders complained of a penny an acre quit-rent, and there was no large group forthcoming who would build up their own community. In 1759 when settlers did come into Nova Scotia, two old grants of 1736 to groups of Nova Scotian councillors were discovered and annulled, faint echoes of a moment of optimism.2 The local schemes for settlement, puny as they were, were no more successful than the highly elaborated plans which were dangled before the Board of Trade by professional colonizers from America and London who hoped to secure financial assistance or carve out property for themselves.8 Quite naturally the land problem was one which most affected the habitants, and by a new policy in 1729 Philipps 1

N. S. Arch.,

I l l , pp. 179-80, 227-30, 288-9.

' S e e the Minutes of Council for 1 7 3 2 ; N. S. Arch., II, p. 1 2 0 ; N. S., B 2, p. 96, et seq., A 24, p. 7 1 , et seq. T w o grants of 50,000 acres in 1736, N. S., A 24, p. 7 1 , annulled 1759, N. S., B 9, p. 239. T h e councillors had on their own initiative associated all the English functionaries they knew as proprietors with them. 5

Coram, the London philanthropist, was the most notable English promoter, and his plans were very practical; see N. S., A 23, pp. 89, 1 1 5 , A 24, p. 2. Samuel Waldo of Massachusetts was another, N. S., A 27, p. 103. Dunbar relates him to the seventeenth century in an interesting w a y : " Mr. Waldo & His party being sensible of the weakness of their title [in the disputed territory between Kennebec and Penobscot] have lately purchased an additional one, w