Expulsion of the Acadians (1755): The Great Upheaval

The expulsion of the Acadians, known in French as the Grand Dérangement or Great Upheaval, was the forced deportation of French-speaking Acadians from Nova Scotia and neighbouring lands by British authorities between 1755 and 1764. Around 10,000 to 11,500 people were shipped away, their homes burned and families often separated. The expulsion took place during the French and Indian War, and its survivors and their descendants shaped communities from Atlantic Canada to Louisiana.

Background: the Acadians and their land

French settlers began arriving in Acadia, roughly today’s Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, in the early 17th century. By the 1750s the Acadians were a distinct people of farmers and fishers. They were known for building dykes, called aboiteaux, that turned the salt marshes of the Bay of Fundy into rich farmland, and they had close ties with the Mi’kmaq.

In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht gave mainland Nova Scotia to Britain, but most Acadians stayed. British governors repeatedly asked them to swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown. The Acadians agreed only on condition that they would not have to bear arms against France or its Native allies. Around 1730 many took an oath on that understanding, and they became known as the “French Neutrals”.

France still held Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) with the fortress of Louisbourg, and Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island). After Britain founded Halifax in 1749, tension grew in the borderlands, where French officers and the missionary Jean-Louis Le Loutre encouraged resistance to British rule.

Causes of the deportation

In June 1755 a British and New England force under Robert Monckton captured Fort Beauséjour on the Chignecto isthmus, and found around 270 Acadians among its defenders. For Lieutenant Governor Charles Lawrence this confirmed his view that the Acadians could not be trusted.

Lawrence and his council again demanded an unconditional oath. When Acadian delegates refused, the council decided on 28 July 1755 to deport the entire population. Historians also point to another motive: the Acadians’ fertile farmland was wanted for Protestant settlers from New England and Europe. The decision was made by the colonial government in Halifax with support from Massachusetts governor William Shirley, without specific orders from London.

What happened

The deportation began in the late summer of 1755. At Grand-Pré, the largest Acadian settlement, Lieutenant Colonel John Winslow summoned the men and boys to the parish church of Saint-Charles-des-Mines on 5 September and announced that their lands and livestock were forfeit to the crown and that they would be removed. Similar operations took place at Pisiquid, Annapolis Royal and Chignecto.

Over the following months troops loaded families onto transport ships, often overcrowded and poorly supplied. Villages and farms were burned so that people could not return. Families were sometimes split between different ships and never reunited.

About 6,000 to 7,000 Acadians were deported in 1755 alone. They were sent to British colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia, where they were often unwelcome. Virginia refused to accept its share, and about 1,100 Acadians were sent on to England, where they were held in port towns until 1763 and then moved to France.

Many Acadians escaped into the woods, fled to Île Saint-Jean or Quebec, or fought alongside the Mi’kmaq. Some, such as the resistance leader Joseph Broussard, known as Beausoleil, carried on raids against the British for years.

Key people

• Charles Lawrence, lieutenant governor and later governor of Nova Scotia, who pushed the council to order the deportation and directed it from Halifax.
• John Winslow, a Massachusetts officer who carried out the removal at Grand-Pré. His journal, which records the announcement in the church and the loading of the ships, is one of the main sources for the expulsion.
• Robert Monckton, the British officer who captured Fort Beauséjour and oversaw deportations in the Chignecto region.
• Joseph Broussard (Beausoleil), an Acadian militia leader who resisted the British with Mi’kmaq allies, was later imprisoned and in 1765 led a group of exiles to Louisiana.
• Jean-Louis Le Loutre, a French missionary to the Mi’kmaq who encouraged resistance to British rule and urged Acadians to move into French-held territory before 1755.

Most of the people affected left few written records of their own. Much of what is known about their experience comes from petitions sent by exiles to colonial governments, parish registers and the reports of officials in the places where they landed.

The second wave (1758–1764)

After the British captured Louisbourg in 1758, the deportations spread. About 3,000 Acadians from Île Saint-Jean were shipped directly to France. In December 1758 two transports, the Duke William and the Violet, sank in the Atlantic, and several hundred people drowned. British troops also burned Acadian settlements along the Saint John River and the Petitcodiac, as shown in Thomas Davies’s 1758 view of the burning of Grimross.

Roundups continued until 1764, when Britain allowed Acadians to settle in Nova Scotia again in small groups if they took the oath of allegiance.

By the numbers

Consequences: the Acadian diaspora and the Cajuns

Exiled Acadians spent years searching for family members and a place to live. Some returned to the Maritime provinces after 1764 and settled on new land, as their old farms had been given to New England “Planters”. Others went to Quebec, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, the French Caribbean or France.

Louisiana, which passed from France to Spain in 1762–1763, became the most important refuge. Beausoleil Broussard arrived with about 200 Acadians in 1765, and in 1785 seven ships carried about 1,600 Acadians from France to Louisiana. Their descendants, mixing with other French-speaking and local populations, became the Cajuns, a name derived from “Acadien”. Louisiana later passed to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

Legacy

The expulsion became central to Acadian identity. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline (1847), about a young woman separated from her fiancé at Grand-Pré, made the story known across the English-speaking world.

In 2003 a royal proclamation issued in the name of Queen Elizabeth II acknowledged the hardships and suffering caused by the deportation, without a formal apology, and designated 28 July as an annual Day of Commemoration of the Great Upheaval from 2005. In 2012 the Landscape of Grand-Pré was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Whether the expulsion should be called ethnic cleansing is debated among historians; many modern scholars use the term.

Timeline

• 1713: The Treaty of Utrecht gives mainland Nova Scotia to Britain.
• c. 1730: Many Acadians take an oath of allegiance on the understanding they will stay neutral.
• 1755, 16 June: Fort Beauséjour surrenders to the British.
• 1755, 28 July: The Nova Scotia council decides to deport the Acadians.
• 1755, 5 September: Winslow announces the deportation at Grand-Pré.
• 1755, October–December: The first convoys of exiles sail.
• 1758, December: The Duke William and the Violet sink with Acadian deportees.
• 1764: Acadians are permitted to resettle in Nova Scotia under conditions.
• 1785: About 1,600 Acadians sail from France to Louisiana.
• 2003, 9 December: A royal proclamation acknowledges the Great Upheaval.

Why it matters

The Great Upheaval was one of the largest forced removals of a population in colonial North America. It destroyed a society, but the scattered Acadians rebuilt their communities, and their story remains central to the identity of Acadians in Canada and Cajuns in Louisiana.