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an ACADIAN EXILE article
Cultures
of Acadiana |
Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, March 30, 1999
Pennsylvania exiles faced bleak chapter in Acadian history
by Jim Bradshaw
Gov. Robert Morris of Pennsylvania made quite clear what he thought of the Acadians sent to him. He called them "scorpions in the bowels of the country."
His Pennsylvania exiles began arriving in the Delaware River about Nov. 18, 1755. The first group of 450 exiles was transported on the sloops Hannah, Three Friends , and Swan. Most of them were sent to Bucks, Chester, Lancaster, and Philadelphia counties.
It has not been a pleasant trip. One of the Acadians sent to Pennsylvania recalled later, "We were so crowded on the transport vessels that we had not room for even our bodies to lay down at once, consequently were prevented from carrying with us proper necessities."
According to to Carl Brasseaux's book, "The Founding of New Acadia," "The banishment to Pennsylvania constitutes one of the bleakest chapters in Acadian history. As in Maryland, the exiles faced social ostracism, governmental oppression, and the threat of assimilation. By closing ranks against these common threats, The Acadians preserved their cultural integrity; but by vigorously defending their group boundaries, the exiles further aroused their already hostile neighbors.
"The Pennsylvania Acadians, like their Maryland counterparts, faced economic deprivation," Brasseaux continues. "Bowing to public opinion, the provincial government chronically neglected the exiles. Denied adequate administrative support and lacking the skills and resources to compete individually in the local economy, the exiles were forced to seek employment from an area businessman. Few jobs were proffered by Pennsylvania merchants, and the Acadian population was reduced to a miserable existence in which starvation and epidemic diseases were commonplace."
In 1858, William B. Reed, as part of a series called "Contributions to American History," wrote a treatise called" The Acadian Exiles or French Neutrals in Pennsylvania," which largely defeated the British government and population of Pennsylvania.
Reed wrote in response to notes accompanying the 1853 publication of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, "Evangeline," alleging that the Pennsylvania government,"... to relieve itself of the charge such a company of miserable wretches would require to maintain them, proposed to sell them with their own consent; but when this expedient for their support was offered for their consideration, the neutrals refused it with indignation, alleging that they were prisoners, and expected to be maintained as such, and not forced to labor."
Reed says that "No Pennsylvanian ca read this remarkable statement of what is assumed to be an historical fact, without a blush deeper than any other imputed misdeed excites. .... To show that it is utterly without foundation is the object of his little essay; in which only incidentally do I mean to speak of that familiar tale of sorrow - the exile of the Acadian Neutrals in 1755."
Reed does acknowledge, "It was certainly an unpropitious time for French Roman Catholics to come to these Puritan or Protestant colonies. It was the day of natural as well as of unreasonable excitements. It was the time when an Indian and a Frenchman were looked on with equal horror. It was the day when the actual association did exist, and when within three hundred miles of Philadelphia and two from New York, French and Indians were advancing in victorious array. General Braddock was defeated in July, 1755, and every English settlement on the seaboard trembled for its existence. The English language and the Reformed Religion, for a time, seemed to be in danger all over the world, in America and in India. This was the actual state of things, and yet it may well be doubted whether even the hostile Frenchman oh those days had not worse designs attributed to them than they deserved. "May God,' writes a gentleman in Philadelphia, after the panic had subsided, 'be pleased to give us success against our copper-coloured cannibals and French savages, equally cruel and perfidious in their natures."
He continues, that "...what our terrified and excited ancestors...knew and were made to know of Frenchman and French Papists, is very clear from the exaggerated public documents and messages of the Colonial governors, who found no language strong enough wherewith to stir the sluggish liberality of the Assemblies, who raised money grudgingly, even when most frightened; or from pulpit oratory, never more acrimonious that then; or from rumors as this, which I cut from a Philadelphia paper of September 1755, a short time before the Roman Catholic exiles arrived, under date of Halifax.
"A few days since the three Frenchman were taken up and imprisoned on suspicion of having poisoned some wells in this neighborhood. They are not tried yet, and it's imagined if they are convicted thereof, they will have but a few hours to live after they are once condemned."
Even nature conspired against the Acadians, according to the Reed account.
"It may be that the public mind was not a little excited by what seemed to be supernatural warning - an earthquake, which in the early part of November, 1755, went round the world, devastating European cities, and at least startling those in America," he wrote. "The shock of an earthquake, the advent of a shipload of Roman Catholics, and the news, utterly groundless as it must have been, which I find in the newspapers of the very day the exiles came , that the Indians and French had attacked Lancaster, prepared for them a sorry welcome."
The Pennsylvania governor was dismayed when the exiles arrived. He wrote on Nov. 22, 1755 to Johnathan Belcher, chief magistrate of New Jersey: "I am truly surprised how it could ever enter the thoughts of those who had the ordering of the French Neutrals, or rather Traitors and Rebels to the crown of Great Britain, to direct any of them into these Provinces, where we have already too great a number of foreigners for our own good and safety. I think they should have been transported directly to old France, and I entirely coincide with your honor that these people would readily join with the Irish Papists, &c., to the ruin and destruction of the King's Colonies."
When the exiles arrived in Pennsylvania, Gov. Morris placed them under guard and refused to allow them off of the British ships until he convened a special session of the provincial assembly to decide what to do with them. But, according to Brasseaux, "Efforts to maintain in the Acadians in isolation quickly proved untenable. Nov. 24,1755, Governor Morris, acting upon a physician's report regarding deplorable health conditions as well as the outbreak of disease aboard the ships, urged the colonial legislators to provide temporary quarters for the French Neutrals. The assembly responded on the same day by directing the sloops' commanders to land their human cargoes on Province island, where the exiles would be housed and fed at public expense. The assembly adjourned on Nov.25 after reimbursing Anthony Benezet, descendant of French Huguenots, for 'blankets, shirts, stockings, and other necessities,' given the exiles, at the request of several assemblymen, during the detention period aboard the sloop."
But the Acadians could not be kept on Province Island indefinitely at public expense. Brasseaux relates that in February 1756, "...the legislators directed James Pemberton, a leading Quaker, to draft legislation providing for the exiles' dispersal throughout the easternmost counties - Philadelphia, Bucks, Lancaster, and Chester."
The act was signed by Gov. Morris on March 5, 1756.