Massachusetts and the Acadians

Abstract

HE Acadians' story has been told many times, but usually the tale ends with their expulsion from Nova Scotia in 1755. After the Treaty of Utrecht in I713 transferred Acadia, or Nova Scotia, from France to Great Britain, the French inhabitants stubbornly refused to take an unqualified oath of allegiance to the English Crown or to become Anglicized. These French Neutrals, as they were called, clung to their customs and language, to their religion and priests, and British officials came to suspect them of giving aid to raiding parties of Indians and Canadian French.' When the long conflict with French Canada was resumed in the I750's, Nova Scotia's British governor, Charles Lawrence, decided to solve the Acadian problem by deporting all ten thousand of the Neutrals and scattering them in the other British colonies in North America.2 What followed was one of the largest forced migrations in American history. The sad tale of how these people were driven from their homes, their property confiscated, their families divided, and the lot of them crowded on ships and sent off to live in hostile English communities has aroused the sympathy and indignation of generations of historians; but relatively little attention has been paid to the Acadians after they reached their destinations on the mainland.3 Their experience in Massachusetts is a case in point.