says a French writer of the time, "urged the people of Les Mines, Port Royal [_Annapolis_], and other places, to come and join the French, and promised to all, in the name of the Governor, to settle and support them for three years, and even indemnify them for any losses they might incur; threatening if they did not do as he advised, to abandon them, deprive them of their priests, have their wives and children carried off, and their property laid waste by the Indians."[99] Some pa.s.sed over the isthmus to the sh.o.r.es of the gulf, and others made their way to the Strait of Canseau. Vessels were provided to convey them, in the one case to Isle St. Jean, now Prince Edward Island, and in the other to Isle Royale, called by the English, Cape Breton. Some were eager to go; some went with reluctance; some would scarcely be persuaded to go at all.

"They leave their homes with great regret," reports the Governor of Isle St. Jean, speaking of the people of Cobequid, "and they began to move their luggage only when the savages compelled them."[100] These savages were the flock of Abbe Le Loutre, who was on the spot to direct the emigration. Two thousand Acadians are reported to have left the peninsula before the end of 1751, and many more followed within the next two years. Nothing could exceed the misery of a great part of these emigrants, who had left perforce most of their effects behind. They became disheartened and apathetic. The Intendant at Louisbourg says that they will not take the trouble to clear the land, and that some of them live, like Indians, under huts of spruce-branches.[101] The Governor of Isle St. Jean declares that they are dying of hunger.[102] Girard, the priest who had withdrawn to this island rather than break his oath to the English, writes: "Many of them cannot protect themselves day or night from the severity of the cold. Most of the children are entirely naked; and when I go into a house they are all crouched in the ashes, close to the fire. They run off and hide themselves, without shoes, stockings, or shirts. They are not all reduced to this extremity but nearly all are in want."[103] Mortality among them was great, and would have been greater but for rations supplied by the French Government.

[Footnote 99: _Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_.]

[Footnote 100: _Bonaventure a Desherbiers, 26 Juin, 1751_.]

[Footnote 101: _Prevost au Ministre, 25 Nov. 1750_.]

[Footnote 102: _Bonaventure, ut supra_.]

[Footnote 103: _Girard a (Bonaventure?), 27 Oct. 1753_.]

During these proceedings, the English Governor, Cornwallis, seems to have justified the character of good temper given him by Horace Walpole.

His att.i.tude towards the Acadians remained on the whole patient and conciliatory. "My friends," he replied to a deputation of them asking a general permission to leave the province, "I am not ignorant of the fact that every means has been used to alienate the hearts of the French subjects of His Britannic Majesty. Great advantages have been promised you elsewhere, and you have been made to imagine that your religion was in danger. Threats even have been resorted to in order to induce you to remove to French territory. The savages are made use of to molest you; they are to cut the throats of all who remain in their native country, attached to their own interests and faithful to the Government. You know that certain officers and missionaries, who came from Canada last autumn, have been the cause of all our trouble during the winter. Their conduct has been horrible, without honor, probity, or conscience. Their aim is to embroil you with the Government. I will not believe that they are authorized to do so by the Court of France, that being contrary to good faith and the friendship established between the two Crowns."

What foundation there was for this amiable confidence in the Court of Versailles has been seen already. "When you declared your desire to submit yourselves to another Government," pursues Cornwallis, "our determination was to hinder n.o.body from following what he imagined to be his interest. We know that a forced service is worth nothing, and that a subject compelled to be so against his will is not far from being an enemy. We confess, however, that your determination to go gives us pain.

We are aware of your industry and temperance, and that you are not addicted to any vice or debauchery. This province is your country. You and your fathers have cultivated it; naturally you ought yourselves to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Such was the design of the King, our master. You know that we have followed his orders. You know that we have done everything to secure to you not only the occupation of your lands, but the ownership of them forever. We have given you also every possible a.s.surance of the free and public exercise of the Roman Catholic religion. But I declare to you frankly that, according to our laws, n.o.body can possess lands or houses in the province who shall refuse to take the oath of allegiance to his King when required to do so. You know very well that there are ill-disposed and mischievous persons among you who corrupt the others. Your inexperience, your ignorance of the affairs of government, and your habit of following the counsels of those who have not your real interests at heart, make it an easy matter to seduce you. In your pet.i.tions you ask for a general leave to quit the province.

The only manner in which you can do so is to follow the regulations already established, and provide yourselves with our pa.s.sport. And we declare that nothing shall prevent us from giving such pa.s.sports to all who ask for them, the moment peace and tranquillity are re-established."[104] He declares as his reason for not giving them at once, that on crossing the frontier "you will have to pa.s.s the French detachments and savages a.s.sembled there, and that they compel all the inhabitants who go there to take up arms" against the English. How well this reason was founded will soon appear.

[Footnote 104: The above pa.s.sages are from two address of Cornwallis, read to the Acadian deputies in April and May, 1750. The combined extracts here given convey the spirit of the whole. See _Public Doc.u.ments of Nova Scotia_, 185-190.]

Hopson, the next governor, described by the French themselves as a "mild and peaceable officer," was no less considerate in his treatment of the Acadians; and at the end of 1752 he issued the following order to his military subordinates: "You are to look on the French inhabitants in the same light as the rest of His Majesty's subjects, as to the protection of the laws and government; for which reason nothing is to be taken from them by force, or any price set upon their goods but what they themselves agree to. And if at any time the inhabitants should obstinately refuse to comply with what His Majesty's service may require of them, you are not to redress yourself by military force or in any unlawful manner, but to lay the case before the Governor and wait his orders thereon."[105] Unfortunately, the mild rule of Cornwallis and Hopson was not always maintained under their successor, Lawrence.

[Footnote 105: _Public Doc.u.ments of Nova Scotia_, 197.]

Louis Joseph Le Loutre, vicar-general of Acadia and missionary to the Micmacs, was the most conspicuous person in the province, and more than any other man was answerable for the miseries that overwhelmed it. The sheep of which he was the shepherd dwelt, at a day's journey from Halifax, by the banks of the River Shubenacadie, in small cabins of logs, mixed with wigwams of birch-bark. They were not a docile flock; and to manage them needed address, energy, and money,--with all of which the missionary was provided. He fed their traditional dislike of the English, and fanned their fanaticism, born of the villanous counterfeit of Christianity which he and his predecessors had imposed on them. Thus he contrived to use them on the one hand to murder the English, and on the other to terrify the Acadians; yet not without cost to the French Government; for they had learned the value of money, and, except when their blood was up, were slow to take scalps without pay. Le Loutre was a man of boundless egotism, a violent spirit of domination, an intense hatred of the English, and a fanaticism that stopped at nothing. Towards the Acadians he was a despot; and this simple and superst.i.tious people, extremely susceptible to the influence of their priests, trembled before him. He was scarcely less masterful in his dealings with the Acadian clergy; and, aided by his quality of the Bishop's vicar-general, he dragooned even the unwilling into aiding his schemes. Three successive governors of New France thought him invaluable, yet feared the impetuosity of his zeal, and vainly tried to restrain it within safe bounds. The bishop, while approving his objects, thought his medicines too violent, and asked in a tone of reproof: "Is it right for you to refuse the Acadians the sacraments, to threaten that they shall be deprived of the services of a priest, and that the savages shall treat them as enemies?"[106] "n.o.body," says a French Catholic contemporary, "was more fit than he to carry discord and desolation into a country."[107] Cornwallis called him "a good-for-nothing scoundrel," and offered a hundred pounds for his head.[108]

[Footnote 106: _L'eveque de Quebec a Le Loutre_; translation in _Public Doc.u.ments of Nova Scotia_, 240.]

[Footnote 107: _Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_.]

[Footnote 108: On Le Loutre, compare _Public Doc.u.ments of Nova Scotia_, 178-180, _note_, with authorities there cited; _N.Y. Col. Docs._, X. 11; _Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_ (Quebec, 1838).]

The authorities at Halifax, while exasperated by the perfidy practised on them, were themselves not always models of international virtue. They seized a French vessel in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the charge--probably true--that she was carrying arms and ammunition to the Acadians and Indians. A less defensible act was the capture of the armed brig "St. Francois," laden with supplies for a fort lately re-established by the French, at the mouth of the River St. John, on ground claimed by both nations. Captain Rous, a New England officer commanding a frigate in the Royal Navy, opened fire on the "St.

Francois," took her after a short cannonade, and carried her into Halifax, where she was condemned by the court. Several captures of small craft, accused of illegal acts, were also made by the English. These proceedings, being all of an overt nature, gave the officers of Louis XV. precisely what they wanted,--an occasion for uttering loud complaints, and denouncing the English as breakers of the peace.

But the movement most alarming to the French was the English occupation of Beauba.s.sin,--an act perfectly lawful in itself, since, without reasonable doubt, the place was within the limits of Acadia, and therefore on English ground.[109] Beauba.s.sin was a considerable settlement on the isthmus that joins the Acadian peninsula to the mainland. Northwest of the settlement lay a wide marsh, through which ran a stream called the Missaguash, some two miles beyond which rose a hill called Beausejour. On and near this hill were stationed the troops and Canadians sent under Boishebert and La Corne to watch the English frontier. This French force excited disaffection among the Acadians through all the neighboring districts, and constantly helped them to emigrate. Cornwallis therefore resolved to send an English force to the spot; and accordingly, towards the end of April, 1750, Major Lawrence landed at Beauba.s.sin with four hundred men. News of their approach had come before them, and Le Loutre was here with his Micmacs, mixed with some Acadians whom he had persuaded or bullied to join him. Resolved that the people of Beauba.s.sin should not live under English influence, he now with his own hand set fire to the parish church, while his white and red adherents burned the houses of the inhabitants, and thus compelled them to cross to the French side of the river.[110] This was the first forcible removal of the Acadians. It was as premature as it was violent; since Lawrence, being threatened by La Corne, whose force was several times greater than his own, presently reimbarked. In the following September he returned with seventeen small vessels and about seven hundred men, and again attempted to land on the strand of Beauba.s.sin. La Jonquiere says that he could only be resisted indirectly, because he was on the English side of the river. This indirect resistance was undertaken by Le Loutre, who had thrown up a breastwork along the sh.o.r.e and manned it with his Indians and his painted and be-feathered Acadians. Nevertheless the English landed, and, with some loss, drove out the defenders. Le Loutre himself seems not to have been among them; but they kept up for a time a helter-skelter fight, encouraged by two other missionaries, Germain and Lalerne, who were near being caught by the English.[111] Lawrence quickly routed them, took possession of the cemetery, and prepared to fortify himself. The village of Beauba.s.sin, consisting, it is said, of a hundred and forty houses, had been burned in the spring; but there were still in the neighborhood, on the English side, many hamlets and farms, with barns full of grain and hay. Le Loutre's Indians now threatened to plunder and kill the inhabitants if they did not take arms against the English. Few complied, and the greater part fled to the woods.[112] On this the Indians and their Acadian allies set the houses and barns on fire, and laid waste the whole district, leaving the inhabitants no choice but to seek food and shelter with the French.[113]

[Footnote 109: La Jonquiere himself admits that he thought so. "Cette partie la etant, a ce que je crois, dependante de l'Acadie." _La Jonquiere au Ministre, 3 Oct. 1750_.]

[Footnote 110: It has been erroneously stated that Beauba.s.sin was burned by its own inhabitants. "Laloutre, ayant vu que les Acadiens ne paroissoient pas fort presses d'abandonner leurs biens, avoit lui-meme mis le feu a l'eglise, et l'avoit fait mettre aux maisons des habitants par quelques-uns de ceux qu'il avoit gagnes," etc. _Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_. "Les sauvages y mirent le feu." _Precis des Faits_, 85. "Les sauvages mirent le feu aux maisons." _Prevost au Ministre, 22 Juillet, 1750_.]

[Footnote 111: La Valliere, _Journal de ce qui s'est pa.s.se a Chenitou_ [Chignecto] _et autres parties des Frontieres de l'Acadie, 1750-1751_.

La Valliere was an officer on the spot.]

[Footnote 112: _Prevost au Ministre, 27 Sept. 1750_.]

[Footnote 113: "Les sauvages et Accadiens mirent le feu dans toutes les maisons et granges, pleines de bled et de fourrages, ce qui a cause une grande disette." La Valliere, _ut supra_.]

The English fortified themselves on a low hill by the edge of the marsh, planted palisades, built barracks, and named the new work Fort Lawrence.

Slight skirmishes between them and the French were frequent. Neither party respected the dividing line of the Missaguash, and a petty warfare of aggression and reprisal began, and became chronic. Before the end of the autumn there was an atrocious act of treachery. Among the English officers was Captain Edward Howe, an intelligent and agreeable person, who spoke French fluently, and had been long stationed in the province.

Le Loutre detested him; dreading his influence over the Acadians, by many of whom he was known and liked. One morning, at about eight o'clock, the inmates of Fort Lawrence saw what seemed an officer from Beausejour, carrying a flag, and followed by several men in uniform, wading through the sea of gra.s.s that stretched beyond the Missaguash.

When the tide was out, this river was but an ugly trench of reddish mud gashed across the face of the marsh, with a thread of half-fluid slime lazily crawling along the bottom; but at high tide it was filled to the brim with an opaque torrent that would have overflowed, but for the dikes thrown up to confine it. Behind the dike on the farther bank stood the seeming officer, waving his flag in sign that he desired a parley.

He was in reality no officer, but one of Le Loutre's Indians in disguise, Etienne Le Batard, or, as others say, the great chief, Jean-Baptiste Cope. Howe, carrying a white flag, and accompanied by a few officers and men, went towards the river to hear what he had to say.

As they drew near, his looks and language excited their suspicion. But it was too late; for a number of Indians, who had hidden behind the dike during the night, fired upon Howe across the stream, and mortally wounded him. They continued their fire on his companions, but could not prevent them from carrying the dying man to the fort. The French officers, indignant at this villany, did not hesitate to charge it upon Le Loutre; "for," says one of them, "what is not a wicked priest capable of doing?" But Le Loutre's brother missionary, Maillard, declares that it was purely an effect of religious zeal on the part of the Micmacs, who, according to him, bore a deadly grudge against Howe because, fourteen years before, he had spoken words disrespectful to the Holy Virgin.[114] Maillard adds that the Indians were much pleased with what they had done. Finding, however, that they could effect little against the English troops, they changed their field of action, repaired to the outskirts of Halifax, murdered about thirty settlers, and carried off eight or ten prisoners.

[Footnote 114: Maillard, _Les Missions Micmaques_. On the murder of Howe, _Public Doc.u.ments of Nova Scotia_, 194, 195, 210; _Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_, where it is said that Le Loutre was present at the deed; La Valliere, _Journal_, who says that some Acadians took part in it; _Depeches de la Jonquiere_, who says "les sauvages de l'Abbe le Loutre l'ont tue par trahison;" and _Prevost au Ministre, 27 Oct.

1750_.]

Strong reinforcements came from Canada. The French began a fort on the hill of Beausejour, and the Acadians were required to work at it with no compensation but rations. They were thinly clad, some had neither shoes nor stockings, and winter was begun. They became so dejected that it was found absolutely necessary to give them wages enough to supply their most pressing needs. In the following season Fort Beausejour was in a state to receive a garrison. It stood on the crown of the hill, and a vast panorama stretched below and around it. In front lay the Bay of Chignecto, winding along the fertile sh.o.r.es of Chipody and Memeramcook.

Far on the right spread the great Tantemar marsh; on the left lay the marsh of the Missaguash; and on a knoll beyond it, not three miles distant, the red flag of England waved over the palisades of Fort Lawrence, while hills wrapped in dark forests bounded the horizon.

How the homeless Acadians from Beauba.s.sin lived through the winter is not very clear. They probably found shelter at Chipody and its neighborhood, where there were thriving settlements of their countrymen.

Le Loutre, fearing that they would return to their lands and submit to the English, sent some of them to Isle St. Jean. "They refused to go,"

says a French writer; "but he compelled them at last, by threatening to make the Indians pillage them, carry off their wives and children, and even kill them before their eyes. Nevertheless he kept about him such as were most submissive to his will."[115] In the spring after the English occupied Beauba.s.sin, La Jonquiere issued a strange proclamation. It commanded all Acadians to take forthwith an oath of fidelity to the King of France, and to enroll themselves in the French militia, on pain of being treated as rebels.[116] Three years after, Lawrence, who then governed the province, proclaimed in his turn that all Acadians who had at any time sworn fidelity to the King of England, and who should be found in arms against him, would be treated as criminals.[117] Thus were these unfortunates ground between the upper and nether millstones. Le Loutre replied to this proclamation of Lawrence by a letter in which he outdid himself. He declared that any of the inhabitants who had crossed to the French side of the line, and who should presume to return to the English, would be treated as enemies by his Micmacs; and in the name of these, his Indian adherents, he demanded that the entire eastern half of the Acadian peninsula, including the ground on which Fort Lawrence stood, should be at once made over to their sole use and sovereign ownership,[118]--"which being read and considered," says the record of the Halifax Council, "the contents appeared too insolent and absurd to be answered."

[Footnote 115: _Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_.]

[Footnote 116: _Ordonnance du 12 Avril, 1751_.]

[Footnote 117: _ecrit donne aux Habitants refugies a Beausejour, 10 Aout, 1754_.]

[Footnote 118: _Copie de la Lettre de M. l'Abbe Le Loutre, Pretre Missionnaire des Sauvages de l'Accadie, a M. Lawrence a Halifax, 26 Aout, 1754_. There is a translation in _Public Doc.u.ments of Nova Scotia_.]

The number of Acadians who had crossed the line and were collected about Beausejour was now large. Their countrymen of Chipody began to find them a burden, and they lived chiefly on Government rations. Le Loutre had obtained fifty thousand livres from the Court in order to dike in, for their use, the fertile marshes of Memeramcook; but the relief was distant, and the misery pressing. They complained that they had been lured over the line by false a.s.surances, and they applied secretly to the English authorities to learn if they would be allowed to return to their homes. The answer was that they might do so with full enjoyment of religion and property, if they would take a simple oath of fidelity and loyalty to the King of Great Britain, qualified by an oral intimation that they would not be required for the present to bear arms.[119] When Le Loutre heard this, he mounted the pulpit, broke into fierce invectives, threatened the terrified people with excommunication, and preached himself into a state of exhaustion.[120] The military commandant at Beausejour used gentler means of prevention; and the Acadians, unused for generations to think or act for themselves, remained restless, but indecisive, waiting till fate should settle for them the question, under which king?

[Footnote 119: _Public Doc.u.ments of Nova Scotia_, 205, 209.]

[Footnote 120: Compare _Memoires, 1749-1760_, and _Public Doc.u.ments of Nova Scotia_, 229, 230.]

Meanwhile, for the past three years, the commissioners appointed under the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to settle the question of boundaries between France and England in America had been in session at Paris, waging interminable war on paper; La Galissoniere and Silhouette for France, Shirley and Mildmay for England. By the treaty of Utrecht, Acadia belonged to England; but what was Acadia? According to the English commissioners, it comprised not only the peninsula now called Nova Scotia, but all the immense tract of land between the River St.

Lawrence on the north, the Gulf of the same name on the east, the Atlantic on the south, and New England on the west.[121] The French commissioners, on their part, maintained that the name Acadia belonged of right only to about a twentieth part of this territory, and that it did not even cover the whole of the Acadian peninsula, but only its southern coast, with an adjoining belt of barren wilderness. When the French owned Acadia, they gave it boundaries as comprehensive as those claimed for it by the English commissioners; now that it belonged to a rival, they cut it down to a paring of its former self. The denial that Acadia included the whole peninsula was dictated by the need of a winter communication between Quebec and Cape Breton, which was possible only with the eastern portions in French hands. So new was this denial that even La Galissoniere himself, the foremost in making it, had declared without reservation two years before that Acadia was the entire peninsula.[122] "If," says a writer on the question, "we had to do with a nation more tractable, less grasping, and more conciliatory, it would be well to insist also that Halifax should be given up to us." He thinks that, on the whole, it would be well to make the demand in any case, in order to gain some other point by yielding this one.[123] It is curious that while denying that the country was Acadia, the French invariably called the inhabitants Acadians. Innumerable public doc.u.ments, commissions, grants, treaties, edicts, signed by French kings and ministers, had recognized Acadia as extending over New Brunswick and a part of Maine. Four censuses of Acadia while it belonged to the French had recognized the mainland as included in it; and so do also the early French maps. Its prodigious shrinkage was simply the consequence of its possession by an alien.

[Footnote 121: The commission of De Monts, in 1603, defines Acadia as extending from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degrees of lat.i.tude,--that is, from central New Brunswick to southern Pennsylvania.

Neither party cared to produce the doc.u.ment.]

[Footnote 122: "L'Acadie suivant ses anciennes limites est la presquisle bornee par son isthme." _La Galissoniere au Ministre, 25 Juillet, 1749_.

The English commissioners were, of course, ignorant of this admission.]

[Footnote 123: _Memoire de l'Abbee de l'Isle-Dieu, 1753_ (1754?).]

Other questions of limits, more important and equally perilous, called loudly for solution. What line should separate Canada and her western dependencies from the British colonies? Various principles of demarcation were suggested, of which the most prominent on the French side was a geographical one. All countries watered by streams falling into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi were to belong to her. This would have planted her in the heart of New York and along the crests of the Alleghanies, giving her all the interior of the continent, and leaving nothing to England but a strip of sea-coast. Yet in view of what France had achieved; of the patient gallantry of her explorers, the zeal of her missionaries, the adventurous hardihood of her bushrangers, revealing to civilized mankind the existence of this wilderness world, while her rivals plodded at their workshops, their farms, or their fisheries,--in view of all this, her pretensions were moderate and reasonable compared with those of England. The treaty of Utrecht had declared the Iroquois, or Five Nations, to be British subjects; therefore it was insisted that all countries conquered by them belonged to the British Crown. But what was an Iroquois conquest? The Iroquois rarely occupied the countries they overran. Their military expeditions were mere raids, great or small. Sometimes, as in the case of the Hurons, they made a solitude and called it peace; again, as in the case of the Illinois, they drove off the occupants of the soil, who returned after the invaders were gone. But the range of their war-parties was prodigious; and the English laid claim to every mountain, forest, or prairie where an Iroquois had taken a scalp. This would give them not only the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, but also that between Lake Huron and the Ottawa, thus reducing Canada to the patch on the American map now represented by the province of Quebec,--or rather, by a part of it, since the extension of Acadia to the St. Lawrence would cut off the present counties of Gaspe, Rimouski, and Bonaventure. Indeed among the advocates of British claims there were those who denied that France had any rights whatever on the south side of the St. Lawrence.[124] Such being the att.i.tude of the two contestants, it was plain that there was no resort but the last argument of kings. Peace must be won with the sword.

[Footnote 124: The extent of British claims is best shown on two maps of the time, Mitch.e.l.l's _Map of the British and French Dominions in North America_ and Huske's _New and Accurate Map of North America_; both are in the British Museum. Dr. John Mitch.e.l.l, in his _Contest in America_ (London, 1757) pushes the English claim to its utmost extreme, and denies that the French were rightful owners of anything in North America except the town of Quebec and the trading-post of Tadoussac.

Besides the claim founded on the subjection of the Iroquois to the British Crown, the English somewhat inconsistently advanced others founded on t.i.tles obtained by treaty from these same tribes, and others still, founded on the original grants of some of the colonies, which ran indefinitely westward across the continent.]

The commissioners at Paris broke up their sessions, leaving as the monument of their toils four quarto volumes of allegations, arguments, and doc.u.mentary proofs.[125] Out of the discussion rose also a swarm of fugitive publications in French, English, and Spanish; for the question of American boundaries had become European. There was one among them worth notice from its amusing absurdity. It is an elaborate disquisition, under the t.i.tle of _Roman politique_, by an author faithful to the traditions of European diplomacy, and inspired at the same time by the new philosophy of the school of Rousseau. He insists that the balance of power must be preserved in America as well as in Europe, because "Nature," "the aggrandizement of the human soul," and the "felicity of man" are unanimous in demanding it. The English colonies are more populous and wealthy than the French; therefore the French should have more land, to keep the balance. Nature, the human soul, and the felicity of man require that France should own all the country beyond the Alleghanies and all Acadia but a strip of the south coast, according to the "sublime negotiations" of the French commissioners, of which the writer declares himself a "religious admirer."[126]

[Footnote 125: _Memoires des Commissaires de Sa Majeste Tres Chretienne et de ceux de Sa Majeste Brittanique_. Paris, 1755. Several editions appeared.]