Expulsion of the Acadians

The Expulsion of the Acadians occurred when Great Britain attempted an ethnic cleansing of French-speaking Catholic inhabitants of an area of the eastern seaboard historically known as Acadia between 1755 and 1764. Acadia included the modern Canadian Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, along with part of the US state of Maine. The expulsion occurred during the French and Indian War, the North American theatre of the Seven Years' War.

Of an estimated 14,100 Acadians, approximately 11,500 were deported, of whom 5,000 died of disease, starvation or shipwrecks. Their land was given to settlers loyal to Britain, mostly immigrants from New England and Scotland. The event is largely regarded as a crime against humanity, though the modern-day use of the term "genocide" is debated by scholars. According to a 1764 census, 2,600 Acadians remained in Nova Scotia at that time, having eluded capture.

In 1710, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the British captured Port Royal, the capital of Acadia. The 1713 Peace of Utrecht ceded the territory to Great Britain while allowing the Acadians to keep their lands. Reluctant to sign an unconditional oath of allegiance to Britain, over the following decades some participated in French military operations and helped maintain supply lines to the French fortresses of Louisbourg and Beauséjour. As a result, the British sought to eliminate any future military threat posed by the Acadians and to permanently cut the supply lines they provided to Louisbourg by removing them from the area.

Without differentiating between those who had remained neutral and those who took up arms, the British governor Charles Lawrence and the Nova Scotia Council ordered all Acadians to be expelled. Prior to 1758, Acadians were deported to the Thirteen Colonies (first wave of the expulsion). Later they were transported to either Britain or France (second wave of the expulsion). Acadians fled initially to Francophone colonies such as the uncolonized northern part of Acadia, Île Saint-Jean (now Prince Edward Island), and Île Royale (now Cape Breton Island) in Canada. A significant number of those who were deported to Britain and France would then migrate to Spanish Louisiana, where "Acadians" eventually became "Cajuns".

Along with the British achieving their military goals of destroying the fortress of Louisbourg and weakening the Mi'kmaq and Acadian militias, the result of the expulsion was the devastation of both a primarily civilian population and the economy of the region. Thousands of Acadians died in the expulsions, mainly from diseases and drowning when ships were lost. On July 11, 1764, the British government passed an order-in-council to permit Acadians to return to British territories in small isolated groups, provided that they take an unqualified oath of allegiance. Today Acadians live primarily in eastern New Brunswick and some regions of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Quebec and northern Maine. American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow memorialized the expulsion in the popular 1847 poem, Evangeline, about the plight of a fictional character, which spread awareness of the expulsion.