Who Remembers Acadia?
Submitted by Fredrica Givan
to the ACADIAN-CAJUN-L@rootsweb.com
"The Acadians Desolate" was published in 1899, and its author, Pascal Poirier, stated his purpose by writing: "This retrospective glance is essential to a clear understanding of the work of regeneration begun at Memramcook." It is this 'retrospective glance' of Poirier's that I will post. Note: Senator Pascal Poirier (1852-1933), was the first Acadian senator, and the youngest Canadian senator at age 41. His home was in Shediac, NB.
Following is the comment of the Editor of the, 'New Brunswick Magazine' (1899) accompanying the article.
"Hon. Senator Pascal Poirier's work, "Le Pere Lefebvre et L'Acadia", has reached a third edition in the French language, it is still unknown to a large number of the English readers of the magazine ('The New Brunswick Magazine', pub.1899). The translation of an extract from it which Senator Poirier has furnished for this number will therefore be read with both interest and pleasure. The picture of the condition of the Acadians is a striking one, and the translation, while faithful to the original text, is admirable for its forceful English."
Senator Poirier's begins by writing:
"Just here, it will be interesting to pause for a moment, and having made known him who came to save the Acadians, show who and what, in 1864, these Acadians were. This retrospective glance is essential to a clear understanding of the work of regeneration begun at Memramcook."
My note: In 1864, Father Lefebvre arrived in New Brunswick and according to Richard Wilbur in his book, "The Rise of French New Brunswick", he states that this arrival,'opened a new and vigorous chapter in Acadian history. Father Lefebvre was sent from Les Peres de St. Croix in Monteal to revitalize a small college at Memramcook in the southeastern corner of New Brunswick. Wilbur writes, "From Memramcook would go forth new leaders who became the front-line fighters in the cultural battles that raged over the next three decades."
However, this article is not of those battles, but rather a glance backward ....before Lefebvre
"The Acadians Desolate", by Senator Pascal Poirier
"At the time of his departure from Quebec, Father Lefebvre's knowledge of the country to which he was going and of its people was restricted to the meagre information laconically given him by the bishop of St. John. The news of an existence of a group of French Acadians in New Brunswick had come to his order as a vertiable revelation, such as would be the discovery of an ancient city found fifty feet under ground, and brought to light by excavations. True, there had been some talk of the Acadians of other days, an inoffesive little people who had been snatched in time of peace from their hearths, despoiled of their property, crowded together in the holds of sailing vessels, and dispersed over many seas to perish; but the world remembered them only as it might remember a long trail of blood, seen some tranquil evening in the heavens for a brief space, and then hidden forever by dense black clouds; as it might remember a noted ship-wreck, fragments of which are found long after the disaster floating upon the deep; as it remembered, because of the 'voice heard in Rama,' the children of Juda put to death by the order of Herod the cruel. The excess of their misery had astonished the world, and then the silence of forgetfullness settled over their tomb, the great silence of death.
It was believed that they were annihilated for all time. In Longfellow's beautiful, "Evangeline", published in 1847, their contemporary history is sketched thus:
"Only along the shore of the mournful and misty Atlantic
Linger a few Acadian peasants, whose fathers from exile
Wandered back to their native land to die in its bosom."
M. Rameau de Saint-Pere, who perhaps had done more than all other writers to make known to forgetful France her lost colonies in America, wrote in 1859, in the preface of a book which was a revelation, not only to European readers but to ourselves:
"Who remembers Acadia?"
It was not only in the United States and France, however that the Acadians were believed to be a people of the past, completely destroyed; even in our sister province, Quebec, the best-informed and most sympathetic writers entertained the same opinions. In the introduction of his work on the second centenary of the foundation of the Quebec diocese (1874), M. Chauveau, speaking of the Acadians, wrote in set terms that, even then, their existence was almost ignored in the province of Quebec; and M. Bourassa, in the prologue to his Acadian romance, "Jacques et Marie," published in 1864, tells his readers, "Providence has allowed the Acadians to disappear."
According to all appearances, such was, and such should have been the case.
From the time of the cession of their country to England by the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713 the Acadians seemed to be a people fatally doomed. Everything the English undertake against them, even under the most favourable conditions, as, for instance, the seige of Louisbourg in 1745, succeeds beyond all hopes; everything that France, Canada and the Indians, the missionaries attempt for the salvation of Acadia turns to her loss. The very virtues of the Acadians, - their peaceable disposition, their love of labour, their economical habits, their sentiment of honor, their scrupulous observance of their word once given, the sacredness of their oaths, all become for them so many ambushes, serve their enemies as pretexts for oppressing them, precipitate the cataclysm that was to engulf them. War and peace they find equally disasterous. Up to 1864, their history would justify a thousand times over, in the eyes of Mohammedans, the law of fatality: Kismet, it was written!
One clause of the Treaty of Utrecht grants them a year in which to dispose of their effects and retire to Fench territory. The governors of Annapolis, and then those of Halifax, twist this clause until it becomes an inextricable tangle in which the poor Acadians are caught. When in 1755, they finally escape from it, despoiled as is a fly fallen into a spider's web, it is to be sent to their death.
In 1746, Louis XV equips a formidable fleet which he sends with an army of debarkation under the command of the Duke d'Anville, to re-conquer the lost province. Terrible tempests disperse and break up the fleet. With the remnants, gathered together at Chibouctou (the Halifax of today), it is thought possible to take Port Royal. A rendezvous is arranged at this point with the Indians who were to take part in the assault. Another storm assails the reduced fleet off Cape Sable and disperses it. The English vessels complete the work of destruction.
The flower of Canadian chivalry, three hundred officers and soldiers, under the command of deVillers, set out in the depth of winter, and after transversing on snow-shoes a distance which would appear incredible were it not vouched for, fall upon a detachment of five hundred and twenty-five English cantoned at Grand-Pre, kill one hundred and thirty of them, and force the remainder to surrender at discretion.
The Acadians, despite pressing solicitations followed by threats of death, preserve a scurpulous neutrality; and because of their oath, refuse to join the Canadians for the purpose of driving the English out of their country. Mascarene, the governor of Annapolis, gives them due credit for their action when, in a letter to the Lords of Trade, he writes: "Had the Acadians not remained neutral, this province would have been lost." This however does not prevent his successors, Lawrence, among others, from imputing to the Acadians as a crime their not having warned the English of the Canadians' arrival, or from making this lack of warning a pretext for confiscating their property.
Abbe le Loutre represents to this flock, with considerable reason, it must be admitted, that it is quite justifiable for them to shake off by every means in their power the yoke of British power, a power illegally constituted so far as they are concerned. He draws some by persuasion and more by force within Fort Beausejour, on French territory, hoping with their assitance victoriously to repel the invaders. The Acadians, believing themselves still bound by the oath of neutrality, notwithstanding its repudiation by the governors of Halifax, refuse to fire upon the English soldiers.
Far from placing to their credit this exaggerated sense of honour, Lawrence makes their neutrality one of the capital charges against them; and, like the Man of Sorrows against whom the Jews could establish no seditious act, they are none the less, in consequence of this charge, doomed to die.
A certain number of Acadians, about six thousand in all, succeed in escaping the banishment of 1755, and proceed to form new villages on the island of St. John (Prince Edward Island) in French territory. Three years later, when the crops flourishing in the fields promise a goodly harvest, General Amherst and Admiral Loscawen suddenly fall upon them: destroy crops and dwellings, and, in violation of the law of nations, carry off the poor farmers and disperse them again.
The treaty of Paris (1763) which cedes to England, Canada and all of New France, interrupts, all over the world, hostilities between the two great powers and their subjects. All over the world; yes, save in Acadia where private oppression succeeds to official perscution.
Article 37 of the capitulation of Montreal(1760), proposed by Vandreuil, stipulates that no Frenchman remaining in Canada shall be afterwards transported to England or to English colonies. Amherst writes on the margin: "Granted, except as regards the Acadians."
There is a similar restriction to article 54 which proposes that "the officers of the militia, the militiamen, and the Acadians who are prisoners in New England, be sent back to their lands. - "Granted except as to the Acadians."
Poor Acadians! Persecution pursues them even in exile. The most solemn treaties, that of Utrecht, in 1713, that of Paris 1763, assure them of no protection, give them no respite. If certain clauses appear to favour them, these clauses are afterward ignored, and the great persecution holds its way.
Even the United States war of independence - to which Canadians owe the act of 1774, abolishing the test oath, and re-establishing, with liberty of war ships, French laws in civil matters - turns against them and serves as a pretext for despoiling them, for the last time let us hope, of their lands at Minoudie, at Gedaique, at the River St. John, so as to provide for the loyalists of Boston. Always the Bostonians, and always fatality!
Yes, the war waged against the Acadians was all the more implacaby furious because it rested on no positive ground of justice, but rather marked the infamy of its authors. "Conceived by a plundered (Craggs)", says Mr. Richard in his ,'Missing Links in a Lost Chapter of American History', "the expulsion of the Acadians by Lawrence in 1755, had plunder for its object." And as always happens in such cases, the robbers had no peace of mind until they caused their victims to disappear or made it impossible for them ever to reclaim their stolen property.
Then came Atkins, still more odious, perhaps, than Lawrence. The later committed the crime; the former justified it. Of the martyrs whom the governor had made, the archivist attempts to make criminals. It is for those whom history has slandered that the poet has said: "In the crime, not the scaffold, there lies all the shame." Lawrence erected the scaffold for the Acadians, Akins wished to dower them with the shame as well.
At the date of the treaty of Paris (1763) there was no longer an Acadia; nor, alas! were there Acadians. Cape Breton, New Brunswick and Prince Edwad Island had been successively ceded to England; and the Acadians, having fallen into the cowardly, odious ambuscade of 1755, 'the great trouble,' as they still call it - these defenders of the faith never coined a term of hatred to designate their persecutors - had been first imprisoned, then robbed, and finally scattered to the four winds of heaven to be annihilated.
"Scattered like dust and leaves when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean."
They were dead, in the estimation of those nationalities who had taken their places and their property; and they themselves ignored whether they were ever again to enjoy national assistance. Those who had returned from their exile, and others who, long hidden in the woods, had succeeded in surviving their privations and escaping their executioners, sought, now that the treaty of Paris ceded everything to England, and that they were too unfortunate to be feared and too poor to be robbed, isolated localities not far from the scenes where they had formerly found happiness and peace - sought such localities in order to live, and above all to die, there. Thus did the first Christians hidden in subterranean Rome timidly emerge upon learning of the death of a Nero or a Catligula.
There is a tradition to the effect that three of the vessels in which they had been huddled floundered in mid-ocean. In any case, a careful calculation establishes the fact that not fewer than 8,000 of them perished in the vessels' holds, in the prisons, in the depths of the forest - died of hunger, cold, privations, ill teatment, despair.
Those among them who survived in 1763, the date of the Treaty of Paris, were scattered through all the New England colonies and elsewhere - in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Haiti, Guiana, St. Domingo, Corsica, in English prisons, and some in France at Granville, Saint-Malo, Boulogne, Rochelle, Brest, and Belle-Isle-en-mer. A certain number of them succeeded, after incredible privations and hardships in traversing the forests, in reaching, some Louisiana; others, Canada.
In order to kill them off more effectively, to render more impracticable their return to Acadia, care had been taken, when they were placed on board the English transports, to separate the members of the same family; and this, despite the entreaties of the mothers and the despair of the children.
As a result of this action, their first care on being restored to liberty in foreign lands was to prosecute a search in every direction for their wives, their children, their brothers. In such endless searching they would surely find a thousand occasions to die from misery and discouragement, and none would return to Acadia to reclaim their filelds and cattle. Such was the cruel calculation of their despoilers.
They numbered in 1755, all Acadia, according to M. Rameau, about eighteen thousand, nine years later, as shown by a memoir to the Lords of Trade, dated March 22nd, 1764, Governor Wilmot could find only one thousand, seven hundred and sixty-two! And these were for the most part, women and children in the lowest depths of misery. Some families hidden away in the forests of the Island St. John, (Prince Edward Island), and others along the Northumberland Straits, are not mentioned in Winslow's Memoir. He believed them either banished or dead. The exact estimate of the population in 1764, is rather that of the census, institued at the request of the Massachusettts Historical society, two thousand six hundred souls.
An official census, taken in 1767, gives only 1265 Acadians for all the Maritime Provinces; 1068 in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and 197 in Isle St. Jean. This decrease, of more than half the total population, taking place after the treaty of Paris (1763) and the re-establishment of universal peace, and notwithstanding the return of a certain number of the banished, throws a hideous light on this persecution without end or intermission.
Thus, in 1767, the whole race, with the exception of 1,265 persons, had disappeared; the peaceable Acadian people had been consigned to the tomb; and total suppression had apparently overtaken those whom Lawrence, in his report to the Lords of Trade, styles "inveterate enemies of our religion."
Henceforward the despoilers might feel at ease; their work was consummate; French Acadia whose very archives had been, or were about to be destroyed, was surely dead: finis Acadie.
My purpose in recalling the events of 1755, is not to evoke revolting memories that cluster around our disappearance from among the peoples; still less to rouse sentiments of enmity against our persecutors of that period.
Mr. Richard has undertaken to prove - unfortunately it is the least authoritative portion of his masterly work - that the spoilation and expulsion of the Acadians occurred without the assent of the British cabinet, that the governors of Halifax and their greedy hangers-on are alone accountable therefor. Better so; better that we may without bitterness cast our glances upon the august sceptre that rules us.
The age was different from the present one, the fraternity of peoples which Christ had proclaimed was not at that period recognized all over the world; and religious intolerance was everywhere the law of rulers. Even the best were not wholly free from its influence. Of all our enemies, those who wrought us the most evil were the Puritans of New England, the Bostonians. They hated us intensly, for love of God, because we were Catholic; and for love of England, because we were French.
Hatred does not ordinarily engender love, unless on the heights of Calvary or in the hearts of saints; and our people did not entertain for the Bostonians any special predilection. Yet those Puritans, slandered almost as much by us as we were by them, were a great and sturdy race. Persecuted in England on account of their religious beliefs, they became in their turn, in America, the persecutors of those who did not pray after their fashion.
Their religion was always austere, sometimes fierce, but they were profoundly religious. They believed, with the letter of the Gospel, that they were obliged to take Heaven by violence. Their laws were assuredly Draconian, but none save strong, energetic souls could have framed such a code, could above all have so vigorously carried it out in practice. The Bible - because they had no authority competent to detach the spirit that 'giveth life' from the letter that 'killeth' - became in their hands an instrument of ferocity. No; they are not lovable, these puritanized Pilgrims, nor sympathetic; they are even thoroughly ridiculous with their absurd observance of 'blue laws' and their belief in witchcraft; but their faith was profoundly sincere and one can but bow his head before the austerity of their life. They possessed moreover, that impassioned love of freedom for which since the beginning of the world, God has seemed to reserve such magnificent rewards.
When I see these colonists, with William Pepperell, shopkeeper of Kittery, at their head, set out for Louisbourg with as much religious enthusiasm and as little military discipline as characterized the Crusades going to Palestine; and when I consider how easily, notwithstanding every likelihood of the opposite event, the great French fortress fell into their hands, I grow pensive, considering on which side, as between them and Louis XV, called the Well-Beloved, the God of armies took His stand.
-Pascal Porier 1899
Pascal Poirier : Senator - writer- lawyer
He was born Feb. 15, 1852 at Shediac, NB, to parents, Simon Poirier and Henriette Arsenault. He was educated at St. Joseph's College, Memramcook, where he received his BA in 1872.
He was called to the bar of Quebec in 1877 and that of New Brunswick in 1887, and practised law in Shediac. He was postmaster of the Canadian House of Commons from 1872 until his appointment in 1885 to the Canadian Senate; he was the first Acadian to become a Canadian senator.
He was a man of broad interests and he worked unceasingly for the betterment of his fellow Acadians. For his contribution to the survival of the French language in Acadia he was created, 'Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur', 1902.
In 1899 he was elected to the F.R.S.C. (Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada). He contributed historical papers to the society's 'Transactions' and was the author of several books, among them:
'L'Origine des Acadiens', 1874
Le Pere Lefebvre et l"Acadie 1898
Le Parler Franco-Acadien et ses Origines 1928
In 1879 he married Anna, sister of Alphonse Lusignan, and in 1917 he married Mathilde Casgrain. Pascal Poirier died on Sept. 25, 1933 in Ottawa.
Document ID acwho - Uploaded 1 Decembre 1998
