"Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,—
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that watered the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?"
So asked Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic 1847 poem, "Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie."
His answer was fittingly grim. "Waste are those pleasant farms and the farmers forever
departed, scattered like dust and leaves." The story of the Acadians, the French colonists
who in 1606 established themselves in present day Nova Scotia, that is prior to Jamestown,
prior to Plymouth, warrants better understanding for several reasons.
For one, this great upheaval, this movement, this attack on the French Acadians after almost
150 years of living there in Nova Scotia really qualifies as the first state-sponsored ethnic
cleansing on the continent. Now in the early 1990s the United Nations Security Council
created a commission of experts to explain exactly what ethnic cleansing is, and here's
how they defined it. "Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic
or religious group to remove by violent and terror inspiring means the civilian population
of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. To a large extent
it is carried out in the name of misguided nationalism, historic grievances, and powerful
driving sense of revenge. This purpose appears to be the occupation of territory to the exclusion
of the purged group or groups."
The term definitely fits in this particular case. The British expulsion of the Acadians
was a question of policy; it was thought about and designed for years. It was authorized
and advanced by the highest leadership in England. It was conducted with ruthless efficiency
in the effort to separate husband and wife and parents and children, as the Acadians
were torn from the land that they had settled but then also scattered all the way from Nova
Scotia all the way down to Louisiana so that their way of life was utterly eradicated.
Why did this happen after almost 150 years of settlement of the French Acadians?
Well for one thing, there's the natural British and French antipathy. The British
were the ones who took it away from people who had originally been French. There was
also the fact that the Acadians flouted convention; they lived sort of outside the perimeter of
state authority for a long time. They also flouted social convention by intermarrying
with and living with the native Mi'kmaq. The Mi'kmaq were the native nation that
already lived in the Nova Scotia region at that time.
At the heart of the action, though, was the simple fact that they had created a wealthy
and prospering life and the British had guns and it was easier for the British to raid
where it had been easier for the Acadians to trade, and so the British took what the
Acadians had. This was a devastating event obviously for the Acadians, but it started
a longer trend, a trend of ethnic cleansing that continued on the continent.
When I say it was a devastating event, approximately 55 percent of the Acadians lost their lives
in the removal from this area as they were scattered all along the continent from Nova
Scotia all the way down to Louisiana. It may have been the first of its kind, the state-sponsored
action, but it certainly wasn't the last. In the following centuries you see, particularly
in the 19th century in the era of Indian removal, the same process done again by the state because
it could, taking private property out of the hands of private individuals and moving it
to other private individuals simply because the state had the power to do so. And it was
in the state's interest to make sure that the property was in the hands of its supporters
and citizens.
The removal era includes a number of military actions that relocated and decimated dozens
of native nations. Perhaps the best known is the Cherokee Trail of Tears in 1838 and
1839, which caused the lives of somewhere between a quarter and third of the entire
Cherokee population. There are a couple of conclusions we can draw about this. The first
is that the long tradition of state-sponsored theft, removal, and cultural obliteration
that has existed in North America since this time. It's part of the fabric of U.S. history.
In fact, it predates U.S. history. And the fact the British had this by virtue of theft
really starts the U.S. story in the colonial era with this kind of action. Though ethnic
cleansing would reach its peak later in U.S. history, it sort of begins the whole story.
The unsettling fact of the scale and size of the action, the fact that it took place
over really the entire continent when you think of how far the Acadians were scattered
and that it wiped out over half of them, really speaks to the fact that the kind of frontier
thesis we see out of Frederick Jackson Turner, the kind of manifest destiny we see out of
latter-day supporters of the notion of U.S. exceptionalism, really doesn't apply in
this case, because in this example, in this particular issue—ethnic cleansing—the
United States is not exceptional, and even its colonial history is not exceptional. It
is a part of a larger world trend of atrocities against human rights.
There is a second reason that the Acadian story is important, and in some ways I think
it's the more important of the two reasons. Not only did it start a trend of ethnic cleansing,
but it also marked an end to what could be an alternate history that could have developed.
The Acadian example offers a different picture of how North America might have looked if
this tragic event hadn't taken place. Over 150 years, the Acadians developed a culture
based not on conflict and conquest, but on mutual respect and accommodation and interaction
among different peoples. In other words, it was a culture based on trade and not raid.
The Acadians interacted with, intermarried with the local Mi'kmaq, shared their religion.
They developed a syncretic religion that combined elements of both cultures. They developed
a language that combined elements from both cultures. And in fact the name "Acadia"
is partially taken from the French and partially taken from the Mi'kmaq. What's more, the
peaceful Acadians grew wealthy because of their adherence to a policy of free trade
across national and ethnic boundaries. They weren't special revolutionaries in any way.
They were basically just semiliterate farmers, but they understood that they were on the
border of imperial authority. They had, in other words, the area in which to move in
a kind of autonomous way, and so they took advantage of this fact by offering free trade
without all of the inconvenience of tariffs and regulations that came with the mercantilist
policies of either Britain or France.
So they moved rum, and they moved furs and food and finished products and all sorts of
things through their economy to various groups that they traded with and thus became very
prosperous. With this prosperity grew an almost organic notion of individual rights. They
realized that they were doing this for themselves. They were working and they were seeing the
benefits of this, and so, essentially, they didn't recognize the right of any government
to take their stuff that they were creating there. At different points in time over this
150-year period the area was sometimes considered to be part of England and sometimes considered
to be part of France, and they didn't really recognize either one. They insisted on a policy
of neutrality with either of these powers and other powers as well.
They side-stepped officials who wanted them to state their allegiance either to Britain
or to France or to pay taxes to either one of those. In a sense, they were de facto revolutionaries
ahead of their time. They weren't looking for independence; they didn't articulate
it this way. They just wanted to be left alone in their peaceful homes doing their peaceful
things peacefully with all of the people they were interacting with. These unsophisticated
people managed to articulate the belief that because they were doing this for themselves—they'd
exercised rights they had recognized their own liberty—that continuing to do so was
their birthright and that other powers didn't have the authority to come in and take that
away from them.
By common-law right they recognized what they made was theirs. The same arguments would
lead the British colonies in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. But as I
said, they didn't push their independence—the Acadians—they were just looking to be left
alone. The sad thing is they weren't. In 1755 the British decided to accept the flourishing
Acadian community no longer. They effectively destroyed this alternate vision of how North
America could have unfolded, how its history could have been told. So a French community
of up to 18,000 people—intermarried with and part of also the local Mi'kmaq culture—was
forcibly removed and scattered again from Nova Scotia all the way down to Louisiana
with the sole purpose of taking the property that had been Acadian and redistributing it
to British individuals and also to eradicate the very way of life that they had developed
so that literally they could not come back together anywhere else on the continent.
What we have here then is proof that the North American story wasn't written in stone in
1492;it wasn't written in stone in 1607. There was a different way that the story could
have gone if tolerance and trade could lead to generations of peace and prosperity, if
people had acted more like the French Acadians and less like the nationalistic British. I
recommend John Mack Faragher's A Great and Noble Scheme as an excellent work on the subject
if you would like to know more.