A Contemporary View of the Acadian Arrival in Maryland, 1755

Abstract

HE forcible removal of the Acadians from their lands in Nova Scotia has been immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, Evangeline, and the struggles of these Neutrals to reunite their scattered families and to establish new homes in the American colonies have received frequent comment. Not so well known is the reaction of citizens of the colonies to the arrival in their midst of the hundreds of exiles, the displaced persons of the New World, who were natural objects of suspicion as subjects of the French king, enemies of His Majesty King George II, and liable to become spies. The opinion of one prominent citizen was voiced in Colonel Edward Lloyd's letter to James Hollyday, dated December 9, 1755, only a few days after the appearance on the scene of four vessels carrying more than nine hundred of the Acadians to the shores of Maryland. A member of the Governor's Council since i743, Colonel Lloyd lived at his plantation, House, on Wye River in Talbot County. He wrote to Hollyday, bachelor owner of Readbourne in Queen Anne's County and private attorney to Lord Baltimore, who had gone to England on business in 1754 and was still in London at the end of the following year. Lloyd's letter is a clear presentation of the case for treating the Acadians as prisoners of war and against allowing them to settle in Maryland; and it provides details of the action taken by Benjamin Tasker, president of the Council (and acting governor), and of the methods adopted to alleviate the actual suffering caused by the severe weather. Colonel Lloyd vigorously opposed a too friendly reception of the Neutrals-not least because they were ardent Roman Catholics, and their arrival coincided with a strong anti-Catholic feeling in the colony-but he contributed money each week to provide food for them. It is apparent that Lloyd wished Hollyday to present his view of the Acadian matter in the proper places in England; there is even a specific direction for seeing Mr. Calvert when he