Lawrence's persecution—Its effect—Complaints to justify the deportation collected in the Archives—Order not to quit the province under pain of military execution for the families of delinquents.

It was all the easier for Lawrence to be tyrannical and cruel because he was naturally so violently prone to such behavior that he persecuted his fellow-countrymen of Halifax and his German co-religionists of Lunenburg, when it was his interest to stand well with them. From the Acadians, on the other hand, lie had nothing to fear; and if, as seems likely, he had already planned their deportation, it became his interest to drive them to acts of insubordination in order to give a semblance of justice to the execution of his project.

Nor is it at all difficult to follow every step Lawrence took as he matured his decision. This decision was come to in or about July, 1754, when it was known that Hopson was not to return and that he, Lawrence, was to succeed him. Hitherto he had laid no charges against the Acadians ; he had even gone the length of begging those who had emigrated to return; and, to all appearances, he had not indulged in excessive rigor. Now, however, comes a complete change. On the 1st of August he addresses to the Lords of Trade a letter filled with accusations, concluding thus: “ they have the best lands in the Province, it would be better that they were away.” His resolution is taken. Persecution begins. Hopson, as we have seen, bad ordered the officers to treat Acadians in all cases exactly like the other subjects of His Majesty, and not to take anything from them by force or without a voluntary agreement on their part as to prices. Lawrence’s first act after his letter of August 1st was to revoke the just and humane orders of Hopson, and—a circumstance worth noting —this iniquity was consummated on August the 5th, four days after the letter just referred to. Here is the order, bearing the above date, addressed by him to Captain Murray, Commandant of Fort Edward, at Pigiguit. Similar orders were sent elsewhere:

"You are not to bargain with the Acadians for their payment; but, as they bring in what is wanted, you will furnish them with certificates, which will entitle them to such payments at Halifax as shall be thought reasonable. If they should immediately fail to comply, you will assure them that the next courier will bring an order for military execution upon the delinquents.”

In another letter to the same, dated 1st of September following, we find this: "No excuse will be taken for not fetching in firewood, and if they do not do it in proper time, the soldiers shall absolutely take their houses for fuel.” This was over and above the military execution.

As always happens when the documents have not the desired tendency, these letters are not to be found in the volume of the Archives. Haliburton, who reproduces them, adds:

“The requisitions which were occasionally made of them were conveyed in a manner not much calculated to conciliate affection, and when they were informed by Captain Murray, that unless they supplied his detachment with fuel military execution would follow, they were not slow to notice the difference between the contracts of Government with the English and the compulsory method adopted towards them.”

With reference to the same orders Philip H. Smith says:

“Murray was in command of a handful of men at Fort Edward (now Windsor), and like other upstart despots, laboring under an abiding sense of his own importance clothed with absolute authority over life and property, and secure in the fact that French evidence would not be received against him, he was not likely to he at a loss for a pretext to display his authority.”

These orders, as may he readily supposed, provoked discontent; but they were obeyed everywhere except at rigiguit, and even in this case there was no refusal, merely delay until the inhabitants should receive an answer to their representations addressed to the Governor.

This incident would seem unimportant, since the people declared that, if their demurrer were not favorably received, they would obey. This is what Murray himself wrote to Lawrence:

“All the affair of the Indians or inhabitants taking up arms is false, for M. Deschamps told me this morning that, in conversation with some of the Acadians, he told them what Daudin (the priest) had said, they were astonished and declared that they had no intention ever to take up arms, for, if at the return of the party from Halifax, they were ordered to bring in the fuel, notwithstanding their representations, they were resolved to obey."

A great fuss was made about this disobedience, which in reality was no disobedience at all, since the Acadians made the execution of these orders depend on the Governor's answer. At most it was a short delay. Was the right of complaint by petition, one of the basic rights of British freedom, non-existent for them? In the name of the most elementary common sense, was it not fitting to grant them the slender satisfaction of waiting till the answer came? Surely, any man with the faintest spark of kindliness would have done this; nay, I feel confident that Lawrence himself, in spite of his ferocity, would have waited, had he not intended to exasperate them by his severity, to make trouble and thus create pretexts for deporting them.

But he would brook no delay. The following order-in-council, refusing to entertain their petition, left them no time to obey and summoned to Halifax five of the principal citizens together with Abbe Daudin their missionary.

“The Council having taken the same into consideration, were of opinion and did advise that the commanding officer should be instructed to repeat his orders to bring in the firewood upon pain of military execution. And it was likewise resolved that Mr. Daudin and five of the principal of the said inhabitants should be ordered to repair immediately to Halifax to give an account of their conduct.”;

Captain Murray ordered five of the principal inhabitants to appear before him. viz., Claude Brassard, Charles Le Blanc, Baptiste Galerne, Jacques Foret and Joseph Hubert. “As they had the impudence,” said Murray to Lawrence, “to ask me to show them your instructions, I turned them out of the house.” Daudin and these five inhabitants were taken to Halifax, escorted by Captain Cox, Lieutenant Mercer, Ensign Peach, and a strong detachment of soldiers.

After a week’s detention the laymen were released; but Daudin was kept prisoner till an occasion should offer for sending him out of the province. The documents here given by the Compiler are not sufficient to afford a clear notion of Daudin's part in this affair. The charge was that he had used disrespectful language towards the authorities, that the insubordination of the inhabitants dated from his return from Annapolis. Daudin produced a written defence which was not deemed satisfactory. It does not appear in the volume of the Archives.

Murray, reporting to Lawrence his conversation with Daudin, said:

“Daudin said to me that he was ignorant of the representation made by the inhabitants until Monday morning. That I hail taken a very wrong step in not consulting him before I acquaint ed you of the affair, which, if I had. he would have brought the inhabitants in a very submissive manner to me, but, instead of that, I had sent a Detachment to you who was a man the inhabitants personally hated, and disliked your Government so much, they could never be easy under it, having treated them so harshly when amongst them.”

This would seem to show that Daudin had known nothing of the resolution of the inhabitants till after they had formed it; that, on the contrary, he would have been ready to use his influence in bringing them to obey the Government’s orders; and that he merely objected to Murray’s proceedings. The last part of the above quotation is probably what constituted the “ disrespectful language toward the authorities.” Lawrence was not likely to forgive so personal an offence.

I gather, moreover, from all the foregoing incidents, that the Acadians expected Murray would present their petition to the Governor in the usual way, without attaching to this step nor to their momentary suspension of work more importance than was proper; that, instead of doing so, Murray confided the petition to a detachment of troops, thus giving an exaggerated idea of the affair and exposing the Acadians to fresh severity from Lawrence: and they were evidently in mortal terror of this despot.

Such is the conclusion deduced from the sole testimony of the accuser. This is one of those rare cases in which we might have been allowed to study both sides of the Daudin incident, since Daudin produced a written defence; but this defence is wanting in the volume of the Archives, which also omits the petition of the Acadians. With such one-sided testimony it is impossible either to exonerate or to condemn Daudin. We must, however, bear in mind that in Captain Murray, as will be proved later, we have the most inhuman of all the officers in Lawrence’s clique. Murray was a great hand at making much ado about nothing, and this seems to have been a case in point.

Another incident that occurred eight months after the one I have just related is inserted here, in spite of its futility, because it will serve to show that, in culling from the volume of the Archives, I neglect none of those documents that might militate against the Acadians and their submissive spirit. Under date of the 27th of the following May, 1755, Lawrence wrote to Murray informing him that he had been advised by Major Handheld of Annapolis that three French soldiers from Beaus^jour were in the Mines district, ostensibly as deserters, in reality to seduce the inhabitants and urge them either to take up arms or to leave the province:

“I would have you issue a Proclamation offering a reward of twenty pounds sterling to whomsoever shall discover when any one or more of these pretended deserters maybe apprehended. You will publish this Proclamation by means of the Acadian Deputies, and you must assemble them for that purpose and inform them . . . that if any inhabitant either old or young should offer to go to Beausejovr, or to take arms, or induce others to commit any act of hostility upon the English. or make any declaration in favor of the French, they will be treated as rebels, their estates confiscated, and their families undergo immediate military execution.

“I desire also that you will immediately publish a, Proclamation offering a reward of twenty pounds sterling to an> person that will apprehend and bring Joseph Dugas of Cobequid, or any or more of the couriers who arrived at Beausejour on the 5th May instant with letters for Le Loutre. also the same reward for apprehending the couriers who arrived at Beausejour the evening of the said 5th May with letters for said Le Loutre from Mines and Pigiguit.”

The information Lawrence had received might be true or false, we have no means of knowing which; but, as the volume of the Archives reports no later proceedings with regard to these proclamations and the possible results thereof, I am inclined to think that the whole story was a groundless rumor. Not is there anything surprising in that, since the events that led Lawrence to write were supposed to have occurred in the immediate neighborhood and in the jurisdiction of Captain Murray himself, whereas the information came from Annapolis at the other end of the province. At any rate these events are of no real importance, except inasmuch as they prove that Lawrence’s rule had become so oppressive and so odious that the French were renewing their attempts to make the Acadians emigrate.

And yet the above facts must have been the gravest that could be trumped up, since they are the only ones that occasioned governmental interference, or at least the only ones that figure in the volume of the Archives. Thus—incredible as it may seem—these are the only facts on which the reader can base his judgment as to whether or not the deportation was justifiable. Barring the refusal to take an unrestricted oath, there is not, up to the very deportation itself, one single other incident that might, by any constructive process, be twisted into a pretext therefor. Would any man in his senses maintain that such petty incidents, trifling in themselves and devoid of all general significance, could constitute adequate, motives for inflicting upon a whole people a chastisement that implied the accumulation of all human ills? In the Pigiguit incident the only culprit was Lawrence himself. His order’s upsetting the equitable regulations of Hopson were unjust and barbarous. He ought at least to have allowed them the right to make respectful remonstrance, especially when they had declared that they would obey directly if their petition was rejected, and when Lawrence was informed of this by Murray himself. In the case of the French soldiers coming to seduce them, the Acadians could not be blamed unless they listened to their proposals. Seductions of this kind, but much more serious, were not lacking during ihe war from 1744 to 1748, and we know how inoperative they were. If such motives could justify Lawrence’s conduct, he might have found still stronger ones against the Germans of Lunenburg, and perhaps against the colonists of Halifax, though in both these instances his government was far more equitable. The fact is, a despot can always find means to justify any act ot cruelty; and we read of no other people who, if situated as the Acadians were, would have borne such injustice and so much provocation with so little unruliness.

It will be remembered that Cornwallis, after exhausting many subterfuges to prevent the departure of the Acadians, finally took refuge in the passport ruse. Events are there to prove that his promise was nothing but a subterfuge, and now we have Lawrence carrying ferociousness to the extent of threatening with military execution the families of those who should leave the country.

As the list of subterfuges is a long one, I may be allowed to summarize them thus:

1st subterfuge (Vetch)—You shall not depart before Nicholson’s return.

2nd “ (Nicholson)-You shall not depart till after such and such points shall have, been decided by the Queen.

3rd “ (Vetch)—You shall not depart in English vessels.

4thi “ (Vetch)— “ “ “ “ “ French “

5th “ (Vetch)—You cannot procure rigging at Louisburg.

6th “ (Vetch)—You cannot procure rigging at Boston.

7th “ (Vetch)—You shall not depart in your own vessels.

8th “ (Philipps)—You shall not make roads to departby-

1730—Restricted oath accepted.

1749—Your oath was worthless.

9th “ (Cornwallis)—You shall not depart this autumn.

10th “ (Cornwallis)—You “ “ “ till after you have sown your fields.

11th “ (Cornwallis)—You shall not depart without passports.

After this last subterfuge, they now were prisoners, kept in their country in spite of themselves, herded like a lot of cattle awaiting the batcher’s pleasure. Does not this afford strong presumption that, when Lawrence wrote the Lords of Trade, “it would be better that they were away,” he, shall not in view a free exodus but a deportation such as really took place?