Grudging Charity Cares For Acadian "Pests"

(Second of two Articles)

by Dickson J. Preston

All 181 Acadian refugees from French Canada who landed at Oxford December 8, 1755, were devout Roman Catholics, loyal subjects of King Louis XV, and members of large families with many children.

All three characteristics made them unwelcome in the eyes of the Protestant, French-hating Talbot Countians who were stuck with caring for them.

They spoke no English and their family names--L'Andre, LeBlanc, Bigeos, Braux, Babin, Douairon, Clemenceau, Simonet--clogged up the throats of their grudging hosts. Even worse were such given names as Etienne, Jacques, Pelagie, Mathurin, Baptiste, Ursule, Firmin, Brigitte and Hyacinthe, which Talbot officials couldn't even pronounce, much less spell correctly.

Nevertheless, somebody had to feed and clothe them, and shelter had to be found for them at once. The winter of 1755-6 was a bitter one, with heavy snows, and ice clogging up all the creeks and coves.

Henry Callister, Oxford merchant, took perhaps more credit than he deserved for his single-handed efforts in their behalf. On Christmas Day, 1755, he sent Anthony Bacon of London, a brother of Rev. Thomas Bacon of Whitemarsh Church an address to be presented to King George II asking for their relief. In a letter accompanying it he said:

"Nothing yet has been done for them by the public...Nobody knows what to do; and few have charity for them. I see no one interested in them but myself...The aversion we have to their principles as Papists, seems to have destroyed the seeds of charity in us."

And in January Callister wrote a lengthy letter to Maryland Governor Horatio Sharpe, who had been out of the colony when the Acadians arrived, telling of the "extraordinary" trouble and expense he had gone to in helping them, and enclosing an itemized bill for which he expected to be reimbursed.

He complained to Gov. Sharpe about the opposition to his efforts by Col. Edward Lloyd, who had wanted the Acadians to be treated as prisoners of war and kept under restraint but said nothing about the fact that Lloyd was contributing five pounds sterling a week toward their support.

As a matter of fact many other persons in Talbot, Queen Anne's and Dorchester counties, despite their distaste for "Papists," had given Acadian families shelter on their estates.

\By January 17, Callister reported, all but five of the 27 families had been "placed in good houses for the winter," and most of them were in good health. "There's on an old woman dead In Dorset (Dorchester County), aged 87." A boatload which he had sent up to the Wye River estate of Colonel Lloyd all had been lodged, but be did not know at what houses.

Among those recorded as having helped the refugees in the three counties were Matthew Tilghman, Philemon Hambleton, P.C. Blake, Rev. Bacon, Thomas Browning, Jacques Tilghman, Michael Hacket, Jean Caile, Charles Brown, Guill Goldsborough, Mrs. Sarah Black, Pollard Edmondson, David Robinson, Edward Niel, David and Simon Jones, Samuel Chamberlaine, Mrs. Marguerite Lowe, Thomas Wilson, Col. Joseph Ennalls, Careille Daly, Robert Howe and Edward Tilghman, in addition to Colonel Lloyd and Callister himself.

It was a sizable list, and representative of the leading families, of the area.

Some had been taken in by Roman Catholic families, but the Governor's Council, suspicious of pro-French "plots," soon ordered Catholics to be prohibited from having any contacts with the Acadians. Callister reported he had called back one family "from the house of a Papist," and that those still lodged at "Papist" houses could easily be distributed among Protestants in Queen Anne's County.

Those originally sent to Somerset County were far worse off than those at Oxford. There they received a complete rebuff and were "obliged to betake themselves for shelter to the swamps, now and a long time full of snow, where they sicken and die."

Governor Sharpe ran into a stone wall when he tried to get money from the General Assembly to repay Callister and others for out-of-pocket expenses. On March 16, 1756, he presented Callister's bill to the lower house, which debated it and decided to do nothing about it. Eventually it appears that the governor paid Callister out of his own funds.

Sharpe also fought a losing battle to get the Assembly to vote money for Acadian relief. The tide of anti-French and anti-Papist feeling in Maryland was too high. He appealed to the House to heed the "plight of these unfortunate French neutrals" and even sent a copy of an act passed by the Pennsylvania legislature as a model. But the stubborn Marylanders refused to vote any money for such a purpose.

Instead, the Assembly in May passed an act pointing out that it was the governor of Nova Scotia who had saddled the colony with the Acadians in the first place. It declared that although Maryland, "out of compassion," had permitted them to land "in order that they might earn their living by their own labor and industry," some through "obstinacy" refused to support themselves and their children.

Therefore the county commissioners were empowered, if they saw fit, to treat the Acadians as objects of charity just as they treated their own poor. Children whose parents could not or would not support them were to be "suitably apprenticed." No Acadian was to be permitted to travel more than ten miles from his place of residence.

Under this less then generous arrangement, several of the refugee families in Talbot County applied to the County Justices for relief. They were in desperate straits.

Abraham L'Andre, one of five L'Andre brothers in the group, was typical. At the age of 44, in hostile country where it was difficult to find work, he had a family of 12 to support. At least six of them were children under ten; and if the record is right, his wife Marguerite was pregnant--a son Joseph is listed as having been born "in Maryland" in 1756 or 1757. According to Talbot Court records, the Justices voted to give him 750 pounds of tobacco (about six pounds sterling, or $30). They voted similar amounts to his brother Charles, who had three small children and his father and mother, "very antient people," under his care; his brother Peter (Pierre); his nephew Firmin; and his cousins Joseph and Etienne Bigeos, whose name went down as "Bujiale" in the record book.

Even this small charity infuriated many Talbot Countians. In February 1757 they complained to their representatives in the assembly that the "wretched Acadians" were "going from house to house begging," and that their Papism and their attachment to France, along with their "natural resentment of the treatment they have met with," made it unsafe to keep them in Talbot County.

"We therefore pray," their petition said, "that you will use your endeavors in the assembly to have this pest removed from among us."

Eventually these uncharitable Talbot Countians got their wish. By one means or another the "Pests" removed themselves to Louisiana, where they became once more the solid citizens they had been in the first place, and where their Catholicism was an asset, not a curse.

Rene L'Andre, one of the five brothers who were the backbone of the Oxford group, died June 3, 1781, in Donaldsonville, Ascension Parish Louisiana. His nephew Joseph, the Talbot-born son of Abraham L'Andre, fought with a militia group in the American Revolution and thereby made his dependants eligible for the DAR. Francois, son of Alexandre L'Andre, in 1788 had an estate of six arpents (a land measurement peculiar to Louisiana) and owned 50 barrels of corn, five head of cattle, four horses and 13 dogs.

Many of the women who had been small girls during the bad time in Talbot County met and married Acadian sweethearts in Louisiana and established sturdy families which would contribute much to American life.

Today their descendants are known as "Cajuns," and there are more than 500,000 of them scattered among the 50 states. Most are still Catholics, and many still speak French; but they are none the less good Americans for that.