REFUGEES, ESPECIALLY FRENCH CATHOLICS WITHOUT FUNDS FOUND CHILLY RECEPTION HERE

(First of two Articles)

by Dickson J. Preston

Longfellow made the Acadians immortal with his tragic poem about Evangeline and her lost love. But to Talbot Countians in 1755 they were just a bunch of ragtag, unwanted enemy refugees, to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible.

A sloop carrying 181 of them anchored in Oxford harbor December 8, 1755, and the captain unceremoniously dumped them on the wharf, gruffly telling them he had no more provisions to give them. As far as he was concerned, they could starve.

Then he sailed away, leaving them to the tender mercies of a group of people who hated everything they stood for. In an English colony which was overwhelmingly Protestant in religion, they were French and Catholic. What was even worse, they were penniless, and the provincial government at Annapolis had made no financial arrangement for then. So hard cash was going to have to be laid out to keep them from starving, if anybody could be found who cared.

The refugees from French Canada could not have arrived in Maryland at a worse time. England and France were in a state of undeclared war, and things were going badly for the English colonists in America. In July 1755 had come word of General Braddock's terrible defeat at Fort Duquesne, during which only young Col. George Washington of Virginia had shown military skill. All along the frontiers, the French and Indians were on the attack, murdering settlers, burning forts and houses, capturing livestock and carrying off scalps as trophies of war.

In the wake of this disastrous news a wave of rumors had swept through Maryland that Roman Catholics were plotting to stir up an insurrection among Negro slaves, capture the colony, and turn it over to Catholic France.

The Governor's Council was told in July that there had been "tumultuous Meetings and Caballings among the Negroes" and that some Roman Catholics had "misbehaved in such a manner in some counties as to give his Majesty's Loyal Subjects just Cause to fear an Insurrection." It asked justices in each county to report whether any such goings-on had occurred in their area. If the rumors were true, they were to arrest the plotters; if false they were to arrest whoever was spreading them.

Such tales were "old hat" in Talbot County, where "plot" charges against Catholics had been spread ever since 1689. The Talbot County Board of Justices replied that there was no evidence of Negro "Caballings" nor Catholic misbehavior. As for Catholic priests, the justices pointed out that there were none in the county and hadn't been for many years.

However, at least one influential Talbot Countian disagreed. Edward Lloyd III, a member of the Governor's Council and the wealthiest landowner on the Eastern Shore, wrote to his half brother, James Hollyday, who was studying law in London, that the situation was "dangerous."

According to Lloyd, there were at least 300 slaves along the Wye River "that may be called Roman Catholics...I say dangerous because some of my slaves have lately said they expected that the French would soon set them free." Lloyd wanted Hollyday to report the situation to Lord Baltimore when he next dined with him.

In the midst of this hysteria, the Acadians arrived--French, Catholic, stubborn about it and without funds.

They were there through no fault of their own. Their only "crime" had been that they refused to give up their loyalty to France and swear allegiance to the English king. Ever since the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which awarded Acadia to Great Britain, the English had been trying without success to get the French settlers there to become British subjects. The name had even been changed to Nova Scotia (New Scotland) to give the region a British flavor.

But nothing worked, and in the summer of 1755 English Governor Charles Lawrence resolved to solve the "Acadian problem" once and for all. With London's approval, he rounded up more than 6,000 of them, put them aboard vessels, and shipped them off to the English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard.

About 900 arrived at Annapolis aboard five ships December 1, 1755. Nobody knew what to do with them. Governor Horatio Sharpe, who had agreed to let them come in, was off in New York attending an intercolonial council of war. The Acadians themselves asked to be treated as prisoners of war, but this was refused because England and France were not yet legally at war, which was declared the next year.

Against the advice of Colonel Lloyd, who wanted them kept under restraint, the Council majority voted to let them go "at large and to their own liberty." Council President Benjamin Tasker decided to scatter them around the colony; he sent one shipload to the Patuxent River, one to the Wicomico, one to Baltimore, one to Oxford, and kept one in Annapolis.

So the 181 men, women and children were dumped down at Oxford on December 8, their legal states uncertain, their attitude unrelentingly hostile, their homes destroyed, their possessions gone, their language and religion foreign, and with no provision made to furnish them with clothing, shelter and food.

To Talbot Countians they undoubtedly were a miserable collection of beggars. But they were not. In Acadia before their uprooting, they had been sturdy farmers of French peasant stock, with comfortable houses, barns, livestock, chickens and good annual crops of wheat, flax and hemp.

"They were an honest, hard-working, sober and virtuous people," an English officer who took part in their exile wrote of them. "Rarely did quarrels arise among them...I have never heard of marital infidelity among them." The men spent the short summer working their farms and the long winters hunting, trapping, and cutting wood for fences and fuel. The women and girls were experts at carding, spinning, weaving, and making garments from the plentiful furs.

Most of those who reached Oxford were of a few closely interrelated families. Five of the family heads were brothers named L'Andre (later Anglicized as Landry), sons of Abraham L'Andre and his wife Marie, who had lived at the Acadian settlement called Pisiquid.

Their ancestors had been in North America far longer than the forebears of the proud Talbot Countians who looked down their noses at the refugees. Rene L'Andre, the family founder, had migrated to Acadia from France with his new bride, Berrine, in 1640, when the Eastern Shore was a wilderness inhabited only by Indians and wild animals. The five brothers, Abraham, Charles, Rene, Alexandre and Pierre, were the original Rene's great grandsons.

In addition, there were eight other family groups named L'Andre or Landry, undoubtedly descendants of Rene. A list of the Oxford arrivals compiled by Janet B. Jehn in "Acadian Descendents" includes a total of 81 persons, many of them children, named Landry. Other families were named LeBlanc, Bigeos, Braux, Babin, Douairon, Clemenceau, and Simonet.

At Oxford, one man at least was moved to action by compassion for their plight. Henry Calister, factor (merchant) for the English shipping firm of Faster Cunliffe & Sons, was shocked at their condition. He used his own funds to provide them food and clothing, and immediately started trying to find temporary shelter for them. The grateful Acadians later wrote Governor Sharpe that they would have died of hunger if it hadn't been for Calister. "We can say with truth that he has saved our lives " they said.

According to Colonel Lloyd, he also helped out despite his disapproval, ordering his Oxford storekeeper to pay Callister five pounds sterling a week for their subsistence "in order to prevent their starving or being too heavy a burden on the town of Oxford."

But Lloyd was furious when Callister, seeking shelter for the refugees, hired young Jeremiah Banning to take a boatload of them up to Wye River and deposit them at the Lloyd plantation. Banning dropped off a few at the Rich Neck estate of Matthew Tilghman and more at Philemon Hambleton's Martingham, but about 50 were saddled on Lloyd. He was afraid they would be there all winter, for the weather was "very sharp and the sloop froze up in the river." If so, he wrote angrily to Hollyday, it would cost him an additional 12 pounds a week to feed them.

Other Talbot Countians were even tighter with their purse strings. Rev. Thomas Bacon preached a sermon on "charity" at Whitemarsh Church Sunday, Dec. 14, and a collection was taken up "for the relief of the poor, distressed exiles of Acadia." But. he reported sadly, it turned out that his personal contribution was three times as large as that of his entire congregation.

NEXT: What happend to the Acadians.