HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

One morning in August, redcoats fanned out across the province, taking entire families into custody, burning farms and crops, and killing livestock. Falling in the middle of two centuries of intermittent warfare, this grand derangement, or great upheaval, didn’t take place in Boston or even in Massachusetts. But Boston bore responsibility for the acts carried out in its name, and Boston would host the “French Neutrals,” the human byproducts of the purge that we remember as the expulsion of the Acadians who were confined in our city for nearly a decade.

Please check out the transcript and full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/197/

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• French neutrals in Massachusetts; the story of Acadians rounded up by soldiers from Massachusetts and their captivity in the Bay Province, 1755-1766, by Pierre Belliveau
• Lowe, Richard G. “Massachusetts and the Acadians.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 25, no. 2, 1968
• The history of the province of Massachusetts bay, from 1749 to 1774, by Thomas Hutchinson
• Diary of John Thomas, surgeon in Winslow’s expedition of 1755 against the Acadians, by John Thomas
• Boston (Mass.). Record Commissioners. Records relating to the early history of Boston
• “A Great and Noble Scheme”: Thoughts on the Expulsion of the Acadians, by John Mack Faragher
• Selections from the Public Documents of the Province of Nova Scotia, By Nova Scotia Commissioner of Public Records, Thomas Beamish Akins
• Return of French Neutrals, 1761 January
• Report of a Committee respecting of French People, 1760-61
• Letter from a Concord surveyor who witnessed the expulsion
• Our header image is a detail from the 1758 watercolor A View of the Plundering and Burning of the City of Grimross, by Thomas Davies

Longfellow’s Evangeline is a book that did more than any other work in English to draw attention to the plight of the Acadians who were removed from their homeland in the Grand Derangement. As the curators of what is now known as the Longfellow House/Washington’s Headquarters National Historic site point out:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow began writing the “idyl in hexameters” which would become Evangeline in November of 1845, shortly after the birth of his second child. He was a respected professor who had been teaching foreign languages at Harvard for almost ten years, and a published author and translator fluent in many European languages, classical Greek, and Latin. He had recently married his second wife, the wealthy and beautiful Fanny Appleton, and the two were living in the impressive Cambridge mansion known locally as the Craigie House.

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie tells the story, in unrhymed verse, of the young and beautiful Evangeline and the noble Gabriel Lajeunesse, childhood friends living in Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia. The two are members of a peaceful farming community that embodies all the values of virtuous rural life held dear by the Victorian audience for whom the poem was written. They are engaged to be married, but are almost immediately separated when their entire community is forced into exile. Following the harrowing scene of their ejection, Evangeline spends the rest of her life traveling throughout North America, hoping to be reunited with her one true love. Only after many years of fruitless searching does Evangeline find Gabriel, on his deathbed. After a moment of mutual recognition, Gabriel dies, held by Evangeline as she thanks God for bringing them together one last time. The poem concludes with the assurance that the two lovers, are buried side by side, together for eternity, with Evangeline’s devotion to be celebrated in the land of their birth forever.

While I personally find it boring and hard to read today, in his own time, Longfellow’s Evangeline was a cultural phenomenon. It went through six printings in the first six months, selling out time and again and putting tens of thousands of copies into print. The poem’s success cemented Longfellow’s reputation and fortune, and it helped reintroduce the saga of the Derangement into American popular history.

Two decades after the crisis of loyalty that led to the expulsion of the Acadians, war would break out again. In her talk “Interpreting Neutrality during the American Revolution in the Northeast Borderlands,” Darcy Stevens of the University of Maine will examine what neutrality looked like in the same region that had been wracked so recently by the Grand Derangement. Here’s how the MHS describes her talk:

Rebellion, neutrality and loyalty existed on a spectrum that inhabitants in the Borderlands of Maine and Nova Scotia moved along throughout the war. Likewise, British and American officials’ interpretations and acceptance of neutrality was malleable. Examining neutrals, rebels, loyalists, New England Planters, Wabanaki, and Acadians in the Borderlands reveals factors which impacted personal decisions and official policy about neutrality. Recognizing the complexity of neutrality restores agency to individuals and suggests a new terrain for assessing revolutionary actors as they were buffeted by wartime change.

The virtual event begins at noon on August 20. It’s free, but advanced registration is required to get access to the connection details.