Montcalm and Wolfe: The Riveting Story of the Heroes of the French & Indian War (14 page)

The number of Acadians who had crossed the line and were collected about Beauséjour was now large. Their countrymen of Chipody began to find them a burden, and they lived chiefly on Government rations. Le Loutre had obtained fifty thousand livres from the Court in order to dike in, for their use, the fertile marshes of Memeramcook; but the relief was distant, and the misery pressing. They complained that they had been lured over the line by false assurances, and they applied secretly to the English authorities to learn if they would be allowed to return to their homes. The answer was that they might do so with full enjoyment of religion and property, if they would take a simple oath of fidelity and loyalty to the King of Great Britain, qualified by an oral intimation that they would not be required for the present to bear arms.
⁴
When Le Loutre heard this, he mounted the pulpit, broke into fierce invectives, threatened the terrified people with excommunication, and preached himself into a state of exhaustion.
⁵
The military commandant at Beauséjour used gentler means of prevention; and the Acadians, unused for generations to think or act for themselves, remained restless, but indecisive, waiting till fate should settle for them the question, under which king?

Meanwhile, for the past three years, the commissioners appointed under the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to settle the question of boundaries between France and England in America had been in session at Paris, waging interminable war on paper; La Galissonière and Silhouette for France, Shirley and Mildmay for England. By the treaty of Utrecht, Acadia belonged to England; but what was Acadia? According to the English commissioners, it comprised not only the peninsula now called Nova Scotia, but all the immense tract of land between the River St. Lawrence on the north, the Gulf of the same name on the east, the Atlantic on the south, and New England on the west.
¹
The French commissioners, on their part, maintained that the name Acadia belonged of right only to about a twentieth part of this territory, and that it did not even cover the whole of the Acadian peninsula, but only its southern coast, with an adjoining belt of barren wilderness. When the French owned Acadia, they gave it boundaries as comprehensive as those claimed for it by the English commissioners; now that it belonged to a rival, they cut it down to a paring of its former self. The denial that Acadia included the whole peninsula was dictated by the need of a winter communication between Quebec and Cape Breton, which was possible only with the eastern portions in French hands. So new was this denial that even La Galissonière himself, the foremost in making it, had declared without reservation two years before that Acadia was the entire peninsula.
²
“If,” says a writer on the question, “we had to do with a nation more tractable, less grasping, and more conciliatory, it would be well to insist also that Halifax should be given up to us.” He thinks that, on the whole, it would be well to make the demand in any case, in order to gain some other point by yielding this one.
³
It is curious that while denying that the country was Acadia, the French invariably called the inhabitants Acadians. Innumerable public documents, commissions, grants, treaties, edicts, signed by French kings and ministers, had recognized Acadia as extending over New Brunswick and a part of Maine. Four censuses of Acadia while it belonged to the French had recognized the mainland as included in it; and so do also the early French maps. Its prodigious shrinkage was simply the consequence of its possession by an alien.

Other questions of limits, more important and equally perilous, called loudly for solution. What line should separate Canada and her western dependencies from the British colonies? Various principles of demarcation were suggested, of which the most prominent on the French side was a geographical one. All countries watered by streams falling into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi were to belong to her. This would have planted her in the heart of New York and along the crests of the Alleghanies, giving her all the interior of the continent, and leaving nothing to England but a strip of sea-coast. Yet in view of what France had achieved; of the patient gallantry of her explorers, the zeal of her missionaries, the adventurous hardihood of her bushrangers, revealing to civilized mankind the existence of this wilderness world, while her rivals plodded at their workshops, their farms, or their fisheries,—in view of all this, her pretensions were moderate and reasonable compared with those of England. The treaty of Utrecht had declared the Iroquois, or Five Nations, to be British subjects; therefore it was insisted that all countries conquered by them belonged to the British Crown. But what was an Iroquois conquest? The Iroquois rarely occupied the countries they overran. Their military expeditions were mere raids, great or small. Sometimes, as in the case of the Hurons, they made a solitude and called it peace; again, as in the case of the Illinois, they drove off the occupants of the soil, who returned after the invaders were gone. But the range of their war-parties was prodigious; and the English laid claim to every mountain, forest, or prairie where an Iroquois had taken a scalp. This would give them not only the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, but also that between Lake Huron and the Ottawa, thus reducing Canada to the patch on the American map now represented by the province of Quebec,—or rather, by a part of it, since the extension of Acadia to the St. Lawrence would cut off the present counties of Gaspé, Rimouski, and Bonaventure. Indeed among the advocates of British claims there were those who denied that France had any rights whatever on the south side of the St. Lawrence.
¹
Such being the attitude of the two contestants, it was plain that there was no resort but the last argument of kings. Peace must be won with the sword.

The commissioners at Paris broke up their sessions, leaving as the monument of their toils four quarto volumes of allegations, arguments, and documentary proofs.
²
Out of the discussion rose also a swarm of fugitive publications in French, English, and Spanish; for the question of American boundaries had become European. There was one among them worth notice from its amusing absurdity. It is an elaborate disquisition, under the title of
Roman politique,
by an author faithful to the traditions of European diplomacy, and inspired at the same time by the new philosophy of the school of Rousseau. He insists that the balance of power must be preserved in America as well as in Europe, because “Nature,” “the aggrandizement of the human soul,” and the “felicity of man” are unanimous in demanding it. The English colonies are more populous and wealthy than the French; therefore the French should have more land, to keep the balance. Nature, the human soul, and the felicity of man require that France should own all the country beyond the Alleghanies and all Acadia but a strip of the south coast, according to the “sublime negotiations” of the French commissioners, of which the writer declares himself a “religious admirer.”
¹

We know already that France had used means sharper than negotiation to vindicate her claim to the interior of the continent; had marched to the sources of the Ohio to entrench herself there, and hold the passes of the West against all comers. It remains to see how she fared in her bold enterprise.

1
See the numerous papers in
Selections from the Public Documents of the Province of Nova Scotia
(Halifax, 1869), pp. 1-165; a Government publication of great value.

2
The oath was
literatim
as follows: “Je Promets et Jure Sincerement en Foi de Chrétien que Je serai entierement Fidele, et Obeierai Vraiment Sa Majesté Le Roy George Second, qui [
sic
] Je reconnoi pour Le Souvrain Seigneur de l’Accadie ou Nouvelle Ecosse. Ainsi Dieu me Soit en Aide.”

1
Description de l’Acadie, avec le Nom des Paroisses et le Nombre des Habitants,
1748.
Mémoire à présenter à la Cour sur la Necessité de fixer les Limites de l’Acadie,
par l’Abbé de l’Isle-Dieu, 1753 (1754 ?). Compare the estimates in
Censuses of Canada
(Ottawa, 1876).

2
La Jonquière à l’Évêque de Québec,
14
Juin,
1750.
Mémoire du Roy pour servir d’Instruction au Comte de Raymond, commandant pour Sa Majesté à l’Isle Royale
[Cape Breton], 24
Avril,
1751.

1
See
Appendix B
.

2
Public Documents of Nova Scotia,
173.

1
See
Ibid
., 174, where the answer is printed.

2
Cornwallis to the Board of Trade,
11
Sept
. 1749.

1
La Jonquière au Ministre,
9
Oct
. 1749. See
Appendix B
.

2
Resumé des Lettres lues au Travail du Roy, Mai,
1750.

3
In 1750 nine captured deserters from Phillips’s regiment declared on their trial that the French had aided them and supplied them all with money.
Public Documents of Nova Scotia,
193.

4
Le Ministre à Desherbiers,
23
Mai,
1750;
Ibid
., 31
Mai,
1750.

1
Mémoire du Roy pour servir d’Instruction au Comte de Raymond,
24
Avril,
1751.

2
Lettre commune de Desherbiers et Bigot au Ministre,
15
Août,
1749.

3
Longueuil au Ministre,
26
Avril,
1752.

4
Bigot au Ministre,
1749.

5
Dépêches de la Jonquière,
1
Mai,
1751. See
Appendix B
.

1
Prévost au Ministre,
12
Mars,
1753;
Ibid
., 17
July,
1753. Prévost was
ordonnateur,
or intendant, at Louisbourg. The treaty will be found in full in
Public Documents of Nova Scotia,
683.

2
Prévost au Ministre,
16
Août,
1753.

3
Ibid
., 22
Juillet,
1750.

4
Le Ministre au Comte de Raymond,
21
Juillet,
1752. It is curious to compare these secret instructions, given by the Minister to the colonial officials, with a letter which the same Minister, Rouillé, wrote ostensibly to La Jonquière, but which was really meant for the eye of the British Minister at Versailles, Lord Albemarle, to whom it was shown in proof of French good faith. It was afterwards printed, along with other papers, in a small volume called
Précis des Faits, avec leurs Pièces justificatives
which was sent by the French Government to all the courts of Europe to show that the English alone were answerable for the war. The letter, it is needless to say, breathes the highest sentiments of international honor.

1
L’Isle-Dieu,
Mémoire sur l’État actuel des Missions,
1753 (1754 ?).

2
Longueuil au Ministre,
27
Avril,
1752.

3
Cornwallis to the Bishop of Quebec,
1
Dec
. 1749.

4
Daudin, prêtre, à Prévost,
23
Oct
. 1753.
Prévost au Ministre,
24
Nov
. 1753.

5
Mémoire à présenter à la Cour,
1753.

1
Roma au Ministre,
11
Mars,
1750.

2
Mémoires sur le Canada,
1749-1760.

3
Bonaventure à Desherbiers,
26
Juin,
1751.

4
Prévost au Ministre,
25
Nov
. 1750.

5
Bonaventure, ut supra
.

6
Girard à
(
Bonaventure ?
), 27
Oct
. 1753.

1
The above passages are from two addresses of Cornwallis, read to the Acadian deputies in April and May, 1750. The combined extracts here given convey the spirit of the whole. See
Public Documents of Nova Scotia,
185-190.

1
Public Documents of Nova Scotia,
197.

1
L’Évêque de Québec à Le Loutre;
translation in
Public Documents of Nova Scotia,
240.

2
Mémoires sur le Canada,
1749-1760.

3
On Le Loutre, compare
Public Documents of Nova Scotia,
178-180,
note,
with authorities there cited;
N.Y
.
Col
.
Docs
., X. 11;
Mémoires sur le Canada,
1749-1760 (Quebec, 1838).

4
La Jonquière himself admits that he thought so. “Cette partie là étant, à ce que je crois, dépendante de l’Acadie.”
La Jonquière au Ministre,
3
Oct
. 1750.

5
It has been erroneously stated that Beaubassin was burned by its own inhabitants. “Laloutre, ayant vu que les Acadiens ne paroissoient pas fort pressés d’abandonner leurs biens, avoit lui-même mis le feu à l’Église, et l’avoit fait mettre aux maisons des habitants par quelques-uns de ceux qu’il avoit gagnés,”
etc.
Mémoires sur le Canada,
1749-1760. “Les sauvages y mirent le feu.”
Précis des Faits,
85. “Les savauges mirent le feu aux maisons.”
Prévost au Ministre,
22
Juillet,
1750.

1
La Vallière,
Journal de ce qui s’est passé à Chenitou
[Chignecto]
et autres parties des Frontières de l’Acadie,
1750-1751. La Vallière was an officer on the spot.