Francis Parkman on Acadia

Historians of today debate whether and how to read the 19th century historian. For me the answer is simple--he's a wonderful storyteller and writer, and he was one of the first historians I read who was able to make the story of the struggle of France and England for North America come alive.

C. Vann Woodward writes,

The art of history as Parkman practiced it called for more than research and a report of the present on the past. He sought by creative imagination to bring the past to life. He tried to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time, events, and people he described, to become a sharer and a participant in the crises and adventures of which he wrote, and by that means to recapture the historical experience of actual participants as they perceived it. [Forward to DeCapo Press edition of Montcalm and Wolfe, republished 1984.]

But he also gives us insight into how an educated New Englander of the 19th century looked at history; his biases and passions are evident throughout. Again, Woodward:

In the romantic school the historian serves as judge as well as artist. He sits in judgment on the performance of cultures and nations as well as men in the crises they face. ... While some ambiguities are admitted, there is rarely much doubt about which side embodies the past, the old, the torpor, or "barren absolutism," and which the future, the new, the vitality, and liberty--crude though it be. France of the Old Order is pitted against Anglo-America and the chaotic future. Parkman's allegiances are quite clearly with the forces of "progress," and all things are judged from that standpoint. French absolutism, feudalism, and Roman institutions, magnificent and colorful as they were, are destined to go down before the Anglo-American forces of progress.

I want to give some passages illustrative of both these points.

Parkman on-line

France and England in North America

1. Pioneers of France in the New World

The voyagers proceeded to explore the Bay of Fundy, which De Monts called La Baye Francoise. Their first notable discovery was that of Annapolis Harbor. A small inlet invited them. They entered, when suddenly the narrow strait dilated into a broad and tranquil basin, compassed by sunny hills, wrapped in woodland verdure, and alive with waterfalls. Poutrincourt was delighted with the scene. The fancy seized him of removing thither from France with his family and, to this end, he asked a grant of the place from De Monts, who by his patent had nearly half the continent in his gift. The grant was made, and Poutrincourt called his new domain Port Royal. ...

Port Royal was a quadrangle of wooden buildings, enclosing a spacious court. At the southeast corner was the arched gateway, whence a path, a few paces in length, led to the water. It was flanked by a sort of bastion of palisades, while at the southwest corner was another bastion, on which four cannon were mounted. On the east side of the quadrangle was a range of magazines and storehouses; on the west were quarters for the men; on the north, a dining-hall and lodgings for the principal persons of the company; while on the south, or water side, were the kitchen, the forge, and the oven. Except the Garden-patches and the cemetery, the adjacent ground was thickly studded with the Stumps of the newly felled trees.

Most bountiful provision had been made for the temporal wants of the colonists, and Lescarbot is profuse in praise of the liberality of Du Monte [sic] and two merchants of Rochelle, who had freighted the ship "Jonas." Of wine, in particular, the supply was so generous, that every man in Port Royal was served with three pints daily.

The principal persons of the colony sat, fifteen in number, at Poutrincourt's table, which, by an ingenious device of Champlain, was always well furnished. He formed the fifteen into a new order, christened "L'Ordre de Bon-Temps." Each was Grand Master in turn, holding office for one day. It was his function to cater for the company; and, as it became a point of honor to fill the post with credit, the prospective Grand Master was usually busy, for several days before coming to his dignity, in hunting, fishing, or bartering provisions with the Indians. Thus did Poutrincourt's table groan beneath all the luxuries of the winter forest,--flesh of moose, caribou, and deer, beaver, otter, and hare, bears and wild-cats; with ducks, geese, grouse, and plover; sturgeon, too, and trout, and fish innumerable, speared through the ice of the Equille, or drawn from the depths of the neighboring bay. "And," says Lescarbot, in closing his bill of fare, "whatever our gourmands at home may think, we found as good cheer at Port Royal as they at their Rue aux Ours in Paris, and that, too, at a cheaper rate." For the preparation of this manifold provision, the Grand Master was also answerable; since, during his day of office, he was autocrat of the kitchen.

Nor did this bounteous repast lack a solemn and befitting ceremonial. When the hour had struck, after the manner of our fathers they dined at noon, the Grand Master entered the hall, a napkin on his shoulder, his staff of office in his hand, and the collar of the Order—valued by Lescarbot at four crowns—about his neck. The brotherhood followed, each bearing a dish. The invited guests were Indian chiefs, of whom old Memberton was daily present, seated at table with the French, who took pleasure in this red-skin companionship. Those of humbler degree, warriors, squaws, and children, sat on the floor, or crouched together in the corners of the hall, eagerly waiting their portion of biscuit or of bread, a novel and much coveted luxury. Being always treated with kindness, they became fond of the French, who often followed them on their moose-hunts, and shared their winter bivouac.

2. The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (mentions dealings between Fr. Gabriel Dreuillette, SJ, and John Winslow of Plymouth, another ancestor of mine).
3. The Discovery of the Great West (nothing about Acadia)
4. The Old Regime in Canada (not on-line)

Of La Tour's little kingdom at Cape Sable, with its rocks, fogs, and breakers, its seal-haunted islets and iron-bound shores guarded by Fort Loméron, we have but dim and uncertain glimpses. After the death of Biencourt, La Tour is said to have roamed the woods with eighteen or twenty men, "living a vagabond life with no exercise of religion." He himself admits that he was forced to live lik the Indians, as did Biencourt before him. Better times had come, and he was now commander of Fort Lomé, or, as he called it, Fort La Tour, with a few Frenchmen and abundance of Micmac Indians. His next neighbor was the adventurer Nicolas Denys, who with a view to the timber trade had settled himself with twelve men on a small river a few leagues distant. Here Razilly had once made him a visit, and was entertained under a tent of boughs with a sylvan feast of wild pigeons, brant, teal, woodcok, snipe, and larks, cheered by profuse white wine and claret, and followed by a dessert of wild raspberries.

On the other side of the Acadian peninsula D'Aunay reigned at Port Royal like a feudal lord, which in fact he was. Denys, who did not like him, says that he wanted only to rule, and treated his settlers like slaves; but this, even if true at the time, did not always remain so. D'Aunay went to France in 1641, and brought out, at his own charge, twenty families to people his seigniory. He had already brought out a wife, having espoused Jeanne Molin or Motin, daughter of the Seigneur de Courcelles. What with old settlers and new, about forty families were gathered at Port Royal and on the river Annapolis, and over these D'Aunay ruled like a feudal Robinson Crusoe. He gave each colonist a farm charged with a perpetual rent of one sou an arpent, or French acre. The houses of the settlers were log cabins, and the manor-house of their lord was a larger building of the same kind. The most pressing need was of defence, and D'Aunay lost no time in repairing and reconstructing the old fort on the point between Allen's River and the Annapolis. He helped his tenants at their work, and his confessor describes him as returning to his rough manor-house on a wet day, drenched with rain and bespattered with mud, but in perfect good humor, after helping some of the inhabitants to mark out a field. The confessor declares that during the eleven months of his acquaintance with him he never heard him speak ill of anybody whatever, a statement which must probably be taken with allowance. Yet this proud scion of a noble stock seems to have given himself with good grace to the rough labors of the frontiersman, while Father ignace, the Capuchin friar, praises him for the merit, transendent in clerical eyes, of constant attendance at mass and frequent confession.

With his neighbors, the Micmac Indians, he was on the best of terms. He supplied their needs, and they brought him the furs that enabled him in some measure to bear the heavy charges of an establishment that could not for many years be self-supporting. In a single year the Indians are said to have brought three thousand moose skins to Port Royal, besides beaver and other valuable furs. Yet, form a commercial point of view, D'Aunay did not prosper. He had sold or mortgaged his estates in France, borrowed large sums, built ships, bought cannon, levied soldiers, and brought over immigrants. He is reported to have had three hundred fighting men at this principal station, and sixty cannon mounted on his ships and forts; for besides Port Royal he had two or three smaller establishments.

Port Royal was a scene for an artist, with its fort, its soldiers in breastplate and morion, armed with pike, halberd, or matchlock, its manor-house of lgos, and its seminary of like construction, its twelve Capuchin friars, with cowled heads, sandalled feet, and the cord of Saint Francis; the birch canoes of Micmac and Abenaki Indians lying along the strand, and their feathered and painted owners lounging about the place or dozing around their wigwam fires. It was mediaevalism married to primeval savagery. The friars were supported by a fund supplied by Richelieu, and their chief business was to convert the Indians into vassals of France, the Church, and the Chevalier d'Aunay. Hard by was a wooden chapel, where the seignior knelt in dutiful observance of every rite, and where, under a stone chiselled with his ancient scutcheon, one of his children lay buried. In the fort he had not forgotten to provide a dungeon for his enemies.

The worst of these was Charles de la Tour. (pp. 8-11)

5. Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV

One might have sailed for days along these lonely coasts, and seen no human form. At Canseau, or Chedabucto, at the eastern end of Nova Scotia, there was a fishing station and a fort; Chibuctou, now Halifax, was a solitude; at La Hêve there were a few fishermen; and thence, as you doubled the rocks of Cape Sable, the ancient haunt of La Tour, you would have seen four French settlers, and an unlimited number of seals and seafowl. Ranging the shore by St. Mary's Bay, and entering the Strait of Annapolis Basin, you would have found the fort of Port Royal, the chief place of all Acadia. It stood at the head of the basin, where De Monts had planted his settlement nearly a century before. Around the fort and along the neighboring river were about ninety-five small houses; and at the head of the Bay of Fundy were two other settlements, Beaubassin and Les Mines, comparatively stable and populous. At the mouth of the St. John were the abandoned ruins of La Tour's old fort; and on a spot less exposed, at some distance up the river, stood the small wooden fort of Jemsec, with a few intervening clearings. Still sailing westward, passing Mount Desert, another scene of ancient settlement, and entering Penobscot Bay, you would have found the Baron de Saint-Castin with his Indian harem at Pentegoet, where the town of Castine now stands. All Acadia was comprised in these various stations, more or less permanent, together with one or two small posts on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the huts of an errant population of fishermen and fur traders. In the time of Denonville, the colonists numbered less than a thousand souls. The king, busied with nursing Canada, had neglected its less important dependency. [Footnote: The census taken by order of Meules in 1686 gives a total of 885 persons, of whom 592 were at Port Royal, and 127 at Beaubassin. By the census of 1693, the number had reached 1,009.]

Rude as it was, Acadia had charms, and it has them still: in its wilderness of woods and its wilderness of waves; the rocky ramparts that guard its coasts; its deep, still bays and foaming headlands; the towering cliffs of the Grand Menan; the innumerable islands that cluster about Penobscot Bay; and the romantic highlands of Mount Desert, down whose gorges the sea-fog rolls like an invading host, while the spires of fir-trees pierce the surging vapors like lances in the smoke of battle. ...

Some of the French were as lawless as their Indian friends. Nothing is more strange than the incongruous mixture of the forms of feudalism with the independence of the Acadian woods. Vast grants of land were made to various persons, some of whom are charged with using them for no other purpose than roaming over their domains with Indian women. The only settled agricultural population was at Port Royal, Beaubassin, and the Basin of Minas. The rest were fishermen, fur traders, or rovers of the forest. Repeated orders came from the court to open a communication with Quebec, and even to establish a line of military posts through the intervening wilderness, but the distance and the natural difficulties of the country proved insurmountable obstacles. If communication with Quebec was difficult, that with Boston was easy; and thus Acadia became largely dependent on its New England neighbors, who, says an Acadian officer, "are mostly fugitives from England, guilty of the death of their late king, and accused of conspiracy against their present sovereign; others of them are pirates, and they are all united in a sort of independent republic." [Mémoire du Sieur Bergier, 1685.] Their relations with the Acadians were of a mixed sort. They continually encroached on Acadian fishing grounds, and we hear at one time of a hundred of their vessels thus engaged. This was not all. The interlopers often landed and traded with the Indians along the coast. Meneval, the governor, complained bitterly of their arrogance. Sometimes, it is said, they pretended to be foreign pirates, and plundered vessels and settlements, while the aggrieved parties could get no redress at Boston. They also carried on a regular trade at Port Royal and Les Mines or Grand Pré, where many of the inhabitants regarded them with a degree of favor which gave great umbrage to the military authorities, who, nevertheless, are themselves accused of seeking their own profit by dealings with the heretics; and even French priests, including Petit, the curé of Port Royal, are charged with carrying on this illicit trade in their own behalf, and in that of the seminary of Quebec. The settlers caught from the "Bostonnais" what their governor stigmatizes as English and parliamentary ideas, the chief effect of which was to make them restive under his rule. The Church, moreover, was less successful in excluding heresy from Acadia than from Canada. A number of Huguenots established themselves at Port Royal, and formed sympathetic relations with the Boston Puritans. The bishop at Quebec was much alarmed. "This is dangerous," he writes. "I pray your Majesty to put an end to these disorders." ...

6. A Half-Century of Conflict

This unhappy people were in fact between two fires. France claimed them on one side, and England on the other, and each demanded their adhesion, without regard to their feelings or their welfare. The banditti of whom Mascarene speaks were the Micmac Indians, who were completely under the control of their missionary, Le Loutre, and were used by him to terrify the inhabitants into renouncing their English allegiance and actively supporting the French cause. By the Treaty of Utrecht France had transferred Acadia to Great Britain, and the inhabitants had afterwards taken an oath of fidelity to King George. Thus they were British subjects; but as their oath had been accompanied by a promise, or at least a clear understanding, that they should not be required to take arms against Frenchmen or Indians, they had become known as the "Neutral French." This name tended to perplex them, and in their ignorance and simplicity they hardly knew to which side they owed allegiance. Their illiteracy was extreme. Few of them could sign their names, and a contemporary well acquainted with them declares that he knew but a single Acadian who could read and write. [Moïse des Derniers, in Le Canada Français, I. 118.] This was probably the notary, Le Blanc, whose compositions are crude and illiterate. Ignorant of books and isolated in a wild and remote corner of the world, the Acadians knew nothing of affairs, and were totally incompetent to meet the crisis that was soon to come upon them. In activity and enterprise they were far behind the Canadians, who looked on them as inferiors. Their pleasures were those of the humblest and simplest peasants; they were contented with their lot, and asked only to be let alone. Their intercourse was unceremonious to such a point that they never addressed each other, or, it is said, even strangers, as monsieur. They had the social equality which can exist only in the humblest conditions of society, and presented the phenomenon of a primitive little democracy, hatched under the wing of an absolute monarchy. Each was as good as his neighbor; they had no natural leaders, nor any to advise or guide them, except the missionary priest, who in every case was expected by his superiors to influence them in the interest of France, and who, in fact, constantly did so. While one observer represents them as living in a state of primeval innocence, another describes both men and women as extremely foul of speech; from which he draws inferences unfavorable to their domestic morals, [Journal de Franquet, Part II.] which, nevertheless, were commendable. As is usual with a well-fed and unambitious peasantry, they were very prolific, and are said to have doubled their number every sixteen years. In 1748 they counted in the peninsula of Nova Scotia between twelve and thirteen thousand souls. [Description de l'Acadie, avec le Nom des Paroisses et le Nombre des Habitants, 1748.] The English rule had been of the lightest, -- so light that it could scarcely be felt; and this was not surprising, since the only instruments for enforcing it over a population wholly French were some two hundred disorderly soldiers in the crumbling little fort of Annapolis; and the province was left, perforce, to take care of itself. ...

The influences most dangerous to British rule did not proceed from love of France or sympathy of race, but from the power of religion over a simple and ignorant people, trained in profound love and awe of their Church and its ministers, who were used by the representatives of Louis XV. as agents to alienate the Acadians from England. ...

7. Montcalm and Wolfe (not on-line)

Here, Parkman portrays the Acadians as manipulated by the French clergy. Chapter 4, "Conflict for Acadia," and chapter 8, "Removal of the Acadians," are essential reading. It will take me awhile to transcribe them. Mark Radermacher discusses Parkman's interpretation and the response of other historians of the day in The Effect of "Evangeline" on the Interpretation of History in Nova Scotia.

From Parkman:

It was long since a project of purging Acadia of French influence had germinated in the fertile mind of Shirley. We have seen in a former chapter the condition of that afflicted province. Several thousands of its inhabitants, wrought upon by intriguing agents of the French Government; taught by their priests that fidelity to King Louis was inseparable from fidelity to God, and that to swear allegiance to the British Crown was eternal perdition; threatened with plunder and death at the hands of the savages whom the ferocious missionary, Le Loutre, held over them in terror,--had abandoned, sometimes willingly, but oftener under constraining, the fields which they and their fathers had tilled, and crossing the boundary line of the Missaguash, had placed themselves under the French flag planted on the hill of Beauséjour . Here, or in the neighborhood, many of them had remained, wretched and half starved; while others had been transported to Cape Breton, Isle St. Jean, or the coasts of the Gulf,--not so far, however, that they could not on occasion be used to aid in an invasion of British Acadia. Those of their countrymen who still lived under the British flag were chiefly the inhabitants of the district of Mines and of the valley of the River Annapolis, who, with other less important settlements, numbered a little more than nine thousand souls. We have shown already, by the evidence of the French themselves, that neither they nor their emigrant countrymen had been oppressed or molested in matters temporal or spiritual, but that the English authorities, recognizing their value as an industrious population, had labored to reconcile them to a change of rulers which on the whole was to their advantage. It has been shown also how, with a heartless perfidy and a reckless disregard of their welfare and safety, the French Government and its agents labored to keep them hostile to the Crown of which it had acknowledged them to be subjects. The result was, that though they did not, like their emigrant countrymen, abandon their homes, they remained in a state of restless disaffection, refused to supply English garrisons with provisions, except at most exorbitant rates, smuggled their produce to the French across the line, gave them aid and intelligence, and sometimes, disguised as Indians, robbed and murdered English settlers. ... (p. 138)

An entire heartlessness marked the dealings of the French authorities with the Acadians. They were treated as mere tools of policy, to be used, broken, and flung away. Yet, in using them, the sole condition of their efficiency was neglected. The French Government, cheated of enormous sums by its own ravenous agents, grudged the cost of sending a single regiment to the Acadian border. Thus unsupported, the Acadians remained in fear and vacillation, aiding the French but feebly, though a ceaseless annoyance and menace to the English. This was the state of affairs at Beauséjour while Shirley and Lawrence were planning its destruction. ... (p. 143)

New England humanitarianism, melting into sentimentality at a tale of woe, has been unjust to its own. Whatever judgment may be passed on the cruel measure of wholesale expatriation, it was not put in execution till every resource of patience and persuasion had been tried in vain. The agents of the French Court, civil, military, and ecclesiastical, had made some act of force a necessity. We have seen by what vile practices they produced in Acadia a state of things intolerable, and impossible of continuance. They conjured up the tempest; and when it burst on the heads of the unhappy people, they gave no help. The Government of Louis XV. began with making the Acadians its tools, and ended with making them its victims. (p. 166).