Geoffrey Plank - An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia

An Unsettled Conquest

Early American Studies

Daniel K. Richter
Director

McNeil Center for Early American Studies,
Series Editor

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The British Campaign Against the Peoples of Acadia

GEOFFREY PLANK

Published with the help of the

Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund,
University of Cincinnati,

and a grant from the McNeil Center
for Early American Studies

Copyright 2001 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First paperback edition 2004

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Plank, Geoffrey Gilbert

An unsettled conquest : the British campaign against the peoples of Acadia / Geoffrey Plank

p. cm. (Early American Studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index

ISBN 0-8122-3571-1 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-8122-1869-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. AcadiansNova ScotiaHistory18th century. 2. Micmac IndiansNova ScotiaGovernment relations. 3. Micmac Indians Nova Scotia-History18th century. 4. Nova ScotiaHistory To 1763. 5. AcadiaColonization. 6. Great BritainColoniesNorth AmericaAdministrationHistory18th century. 7. Nova ScotiaEthnic relations. I. Title.

F1038 .P59 2000

For Ina and Sonja

1
New England and Acadia: The Region and Its Peoples

2
The British Arrive: The Conquest and Its Aftermath

3
Anglo-Mikmaq Relations, the French, and the Acadians

4
Anglo-Acadian Relations, the French, and the Mikmaq

5
Ile Royale, New England, Scotland, and Nova Scotia

6
The French, the Mikmaq, and the Collapse of the Provincial Governments Plans

7
The Acadian Removal

Principal Acadian settlements at the time of the British conquest, 1710. Smaller Acadian communities, closely tied to their Algonkian neighbors, inhabited the St. John valley and the southern peninsular coasts.

Pivotal new settlements and missions, 17101755.

ANYONE approaching Annapolis Royal by water in 1725 would have first noticed the fort. By contemporary European military standards Fort Anne was a modest structure, often in disrepair, but it was situated on a high point on the rivers edge downstream from the main settlement, and above it flew a large Union Jack flag. The fort served as the center of government for British Nova Scotia. During the spring of 1725 soldiers energetically patrolled the periphery of Fort Anne. Gunners manned the cannons at the corners of the earthworks and scouts kept a watch in every direction. The British were at war with the Mikmaq, the local native people, and especially in late May the men in the fort feared that they were vulnerable to a siege.

Continuing up the river, rounding a bend, and approaching the village, the traveler would have encountered a strikingly different prospect. Most of the civilian inhabitants of Annapolis Royal were Acadians, descendants of colonists from France. Nova Scotia had been a French colony (known as Acadia) before the British seized it in 1710, and very few English-speaking settlers had arrived since the conquest. And though the Mikmaq fought the British, they were not at war with the Acadians. During the Anglo-Mikmaq war most of the inhabitants of Annapolis Royal went about their business much as they had before the fighting started, and the villagers might have appeared from a distance as a people at peace with the world. But that impression would have changed if our hypothetical visitor had arrived on May 22 and looked toward the base of the fort on the side facing the center of the village, where a man hung suspended by his wrists in chains. The British authorities had put him there in Order to terrify the other Inhabitants [of Annapolis Royal] from Clandestine Practices of betraying the English Subjects into the Indians hands.

The man in chains was a local Acadian merchant named Prudent Robichaud, and he was hardly an inveterate enemy of the British colonial government. The councilmen (most of whom were military officers) heard reports that Robichaud had entertained a Mikmaq visitor in his house, and they punished him as a warning to the rest of the Acadian community to stay away from their Mikmaq-speaking neighbors.

Robichauds experience illustrates several problems intrinsic to the putative British conquest of Acadia in the first half of the eighteenth century. The Acadians and the Mikmaq had lived side by side for more than one hundred years before the British took nominal sovereignty over the province. A web of friendships, family ties, and commercial connections linked the Mikmaq and the Acadians, and the pattern of interaction they had established proved resistant to change.

From 1710 through the 1750s the British colonial governors and the council of Nova Scotia consistently sought to sever the ties that bound the Mikmaq to the Acadians. The provincial authorities believed that separating the two groups would establish peace in the region; increase the political power, cultural influence, and economic position of English-speakers in Nova Scotia; and assist the government in its ongoing effort to recruit Protestant, English-speaking settlers. But from the time of the conquest at least until the late 1750s, British officials in Nova Scotia faced a set of interrelated problems in trying to accomplish their goals. They could not recruit English-speaking settlers without more forcefully asserting their authority over the land and its inhabitants. Given the weakness of their military position, they were seldom able to impose their will unilaterally. But when they sought the assistance of Mikmaq-speakers or Acadians, close associations between members of the two communities disrupted efforts to deal with them separately. Furthermore, the French imperial authorities retained considerable influence in the region, especially after the establishment in 1714 of a new French colony on Cape Breton Island, or Ile Royale. The French presented the British with constant competition for the allegiance of the Mikmaq and the Acadians.

During the Seven Years War in the late 1750s, several of the difficulties confronting the British would be alleviated, at least partially. The French military would be expelled from the area and Nova Scotias provincial government would direct an operation to seize and relocate most of the Acadians, successfully separating them from the Mikmaq.