Montcalm and Wolfe — Chapter 4, Part 3

[Footnote 108: On Le Loutre, compare _Public Documents of Nova Scotia_, 178-180, _note_, with authorities there cited; _N.

Y.

Col. Docs.

_, X.

11;

_Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_ (Quebec, 1838).

] The authorities at Halifax, while exasperated by the perfidy practised on them, were themselves not always models of international virtue.

They seized a French vessel in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the charge--probably true--that she was carrying arms and ammunition to the Acadians and Indians.

A less defensible act was the capture of the armed brig "St. François," laden with supplies for a fort lately re-established by the French, at the mouth of the River St. John, on ground claimed by both nations.

Captain Rous, a New England officer commanding a frigate in the Royal Navy, opened fire on the "St. François," took her after a short cannonade, and carried her into Halifax, where she was condemned by the court.

Several captures of small craft, accused of illegal acts, were also made by the English.

These proceedings, being all of an overt nature, gave the officers of Louis XV.

precisely what they wanted,--an occasion for uttering loud complaints, and denouncing the English as breakers of the peace.

But the movement most alarming to the French was the English occupation of Beaubassin,--an act perfectly lawful in itself, since, without reasonable doubt, the place was within the limits of Acadia, and therefore on English ground.

[109] Beaubassin was a considerable settlement on the isthmus that joins the Acadian peninsula to the mainland.

Northwest of the settlement lay a wide marsh, through which ran a stream called the Missaguash, some two miles beyond which rose a hill called Beauséjour.

On and near this hill were stationed the troops and Canadians sent under Boishébert and La Corne to watch the English frontier.

This French force excited disaffection among the Acadians through all the neighboring districts, and constantly helped them to emigrate.

Cornwallis therefore resolved to send an English force to the spot; and accordingly, towards the end of April, 1750, Major Lawrence landed at Beaubassin with four hundred men.

News of their approach had come before them, and Le Loutre was here with his Micmacs, mixed with some Acadians whom he had persuaded or bullied to join him.

Resolved that the people of Beaubassin should not live under English influence, he now with his own hand set fire to the parish church, while his white and red adherents burned the houses of the inhabitants, and thus compelled them to cross to the French side of the river.

[110] This was the first forcible removal of the Acadians.

It was as premature as it was violent; since Lawrence, being threatened by La Corne, whose force was several times greater than his own, presently reimbarked.

In the following September he returned with seventeen small vessels and about seven hundred men, and again attempted to land on the strand of Beaubassin.

La Jonquière says that he could only be resisted indirectly, because he was on the English side of the river.

This indirect resistance was undertaken by Le Loutre, who had thrown up a breastwork along the shore and manned it with his Indians and his painted and be-feathered Acadians.

Nevertheless the English landed, and, with some loss, drove out the defenders.

Le Loutre himself seems not to have been among them; but they kept up for a time a helter-skelter fight, encouraged by two other missionaries, Germain and Lalerne, who were near being caught by the English.

[111] Lawrence quickly routed them, took possession of the cemetery, and prepared to fortify himself.

The village of Beaubassin, consisting, it is said, of a hundred and forty houses, had been burned in the spring; but there were still in the neighborhood, on the English side, many hamlets and farms, with barns full of grain and hay.

Le Loutre's Indians now threatened to plunder and kill the inhabitants if they did not take arms against the English.

Few complied, and the greater part fled to the woods.

[112] On this the Indians and their Acadian allies set the houses and barns on fire, and laid waste the whole district, leaving the inhabitants no choice but to seek food and shelter with the French.

[113] [Footnote 109: La Jonquière himself admits that he thought so.

"Cette partie là étant, à ce que je crois, dépendante de l'Acadie."

_La Jonquière au Ministre, 3 Oct.

1750_.

] [Footnote 110: It has been erroneously stated that Beaubassin was burned by its own inhabitants.

"Laloutre, ayant vu que les Acadiens ne paroissoient pas fort pressés d'abandonner leurs biens, avoit lui-même mis le feu á l'Église, et l'avoit fait mettre aux maisons des habitants par quelques-uns de ceux qu'il avoit gagnés," etc. _Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_.

"Les sauvages y mirent le feu."

_Précis des Faits_, 85. "Les sauvages mirent le feu aux maisons."

_Prévost au Ministre, 22 Juillet, 1750_.

] [Footnote 111: La Vallière, _Journal de ce qui s'est passé à Chenitou_ [Chignecto] _et autres parties des Frontières de l'Acadie, 1750-1751_.

La Vallière was an officer on the spot.

] [Footnote 112: _Prévost au Ministre, 27 Sept.

1750_.

] [Footnote 113: "Les sauvages et Accadiens mirent le feu dans toutes les maisons et granges, pleines de bled et de fourrages, ce qui a causé une grande disette."

La Vallière, _ut supra_.

] The English fortified themselves on a low hill by the edge of the marsh, planted palisades, built barracks, and named the new work Fort Lawrence.

Slight skirmishes between them and the French were frequent.

Neither party respected the dividing line of the Missaguash, and a petty warfare of aggression and reprisal began, and became chronic.

Before the end of the autumn there was an atrocious act of treachery.

Among the English officers was Captain Edward Howe, an intelligent and agreeable person, who spoke French fluently, and had been long stationed in the province.

Le Loutre detested him; dreading his influence over the Acadians, by many of whom he was known and liked.

One morning, at about eight o'clock, the inmates of Fort Lawrence saw what seemed an officer from Beauséjour, carrying a flag, and followed by several men in uniform, wading through the sea of grass that stretched beyond the Missaguash.

When the tide was out, this river was but an ugly trench of reddish mud gashed across the face of the marsh, with a thread of half-fluid slime lazily crawling along the bottom; but at high tide it was filled to the brim with an opaque torrent that would have overflowed, but for the dikes thrown up to confine it.

Behind the dike on the farther bank stood the seeming officer, waving his flag in sign that he desired a parley.

He was in reality no officer, but one of Le Loutre's Indians in disguise, Etienne Le Bâtard, or, as others say, the great chief, Jean-Baptiste Cope.

Howe, carrying a white flag, and accompanied by a few officers and men, went towards the river to hear what he had to say.

As they drew near, his looks and language excited their suspicion.

But it was too late; for a number of Indians, who had hidden behind the dike during the night, fired upon Howe across the stream, and mortally wounded him.

They continued their fire on his companions, but could not prevent them from carrying the dying man to the fort.

The French officers, indignant at this villany, did not hesitate to charge it upon Le Loutre; "for," says one of them, "what is not a wicked priest capable of doing?"

But Le Loutre's brother missionary, Maillard, declares that it was purely an effect of religious zeal on the part of the Micmacs, who, according to him, bore a deadly grudge against Howe because, fourteen years before, he had spoken words disrespectful to the Holy Virgin.

[114] Maillard adds that the Indians were much pleased with what they had done.

Finding, however, that they could effect little against the English troops, they changed their field of action, repaired to the outskirts of Halifax, murdered about thirty settlers, and carried off eight or ten prisoners.

[Footnote 114: Maillard, _Les Missions Micmaques_.

On the murder of Howe, _Public Documents of Nova Scotia_, 194, 195, 210; _Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_, where it is said that Le Loutre was present at the deed; La Vallière, _Journal_, who says that some Acadians took part in it; _Dépêches de la Jonquière_, who says "les sauvages de l'Abbé le Loutre l'ont tué par trahison;" and _Prévost au Ministre, 27 Oct.

1750_.

] Strong reinforcements came from Canada.

The French began a fort on the hill of Beauséjour, and the Acadians were required to work at it with no compensation but rations.

They were thinly clad, some had neither shoes nor stockings, and winter was begun.

They became so dejected that it was found absolutely necessary to give them wages enough to supply their most pressing needs.

In the following season Fort Beauséjour was in a state to receive a garrison.

It stood on the crown of the hill, and a vast panorama stretched below and around it.

In front lay the Bay of Chignecto, winding along the fertile shores of Chipody and Memeramcook.

Far on the right spread the great Tantemar marsh; on the left lay the marsh of the Missaguash; and on a knoll beyond it, not three miles distant, the red flag of England waved over the palisades of Fort Lawrence, while hills wrapped in dark forests bounded the horizon.

How the homeless Acadians from Beaubassin lived through the winter is not very clear.

They probably found shelter at Chipody and its neighborhood, where there were thriving settlements of their countrymen.

Le Loutre, fearing that they would return to their lands and submit to the English, sent some of them to Isle St. Jean.

"They refused to go," says a French writer; "but he compelled them at last, by threatening to make the Indians pillage them, carry off their wives and children, and even kill them before their eyes.

Nevertheless he kept about him such as were most submissive to his will."

[115] In the spring after the English occupied Beaubassin, La Jonquière issued a strange proclamation.

It commanded all Acadians to take forthwith an oath of fidelity to the King of France, and to enroll themselves in the French militia, on pain of being treated as rebels.

[116] Three years after, Lawrence, who then governed the province, proclaimed in his turn that all Acadians who had at any time sworn fidelity to the King of England, and who should be found in arms against him, would be treated as criminals.

[117] Thus were these unfortunates ground between the upper and nether millstones.

Le Loutre replied to this proclamation of Lawrence by a letter in which he outdid himself.

He declared that any of the inhabitants who had crossed to the French side of the line, and who should presume to return to the English, would be treated as enemies by his Micmacs; and in the name of these, his Indian adherents, he demanded that the entire eastern half of the Acadian peninsula, including the ground on which Fort Lawrence stood, should be at once made over to their sole use and sovereign ownership,[118]--"which being read and considered," says the record of the Halifax Council, "the contents appeared too insolent and absurd to be answered."

[Footnote 115: _Mémoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760_.

] [Footnote 116: _Ordonnance du 12 Avril, 1751_.

] [Footnote 117: _Écrit donné aux Habitants réfugiés à Beauséjour, 10 Août, 1754_.

] [Footnote 118: _Copie de la Lettre de M. l'Abbé Le Loutre, Prêtre Missionnaire des Sauvages de l'Accadie, à M. Lawrence à Halifax, 26 Août, 1754_.

There is a translation in _Public Documents of Nova Scotia_.

] The number of Acadians who had crossed the line and were collected about Beauséjour was now large.

Their countrymen of Chipody began to find them a burden, and they lived chiefly on Government rations.

Le Loutre had obtained fifty thousand livres from the Court in order to dike in, for their use, the fertile marshes of Memeramcook; but the relief was distant, and the misery pressing.

They complained that they had been lured over the line by false assurances, and they applied secretly to the English authorities to learn if they would be allowed to return to their homes.

The answer was that they might do so with full enjoyment of religion and property, if they would take a simple oath of fidelity and loyalty to the King of Great Britain, qualified by an oral intimation that they would not be required for the present to bear arms.

[119] When Le Loutre heard this, he mounted the pulpit, broke into fierce invectives, threatened the terrified people with excommunication, and preached himself into a state of exhaustion.

[120] The military commandant at Beauséjour used gentler means of prevention; and the Acadians, unused for generations to think or act for themselves, remained restless, but indecisive, waiting till fate should settle for them the question, under which king?

[Footnote 119: _Public Documents of Nova Scotia_, 205, 209. ] [Footnote 120: Compare _Mémoires, 1749-1760_, and _Public Documents of Nova Scotia_, 229, 230. ] Meanwhile, for the past three years, the commissioners appointed under the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle to settle the question of boundaries between France and England in America had been in session at Paris, waging interminable war on paper; La Galissonière and Silhouette for France, Shirley and Mildmay for England.

By the treaty of Utrecht, Acadia belonged to England; but what was Acadia?

According to the English commissioners, it comprised not only the peninsula now called Nova Scotia, but all the immense tract of land between the River St. Lawrence on the north, the Gulf of the same name on the east, the Atlantic on the south, and New England on the west.

[121] The French commissioners, on their part, maintained that the name Acadia belonged of right only to about a twentieth part of this territory, and that it did not even cover the whole of the Acadian peninsula, but only its southern coast, with an adjoining belt of barren wilderness.

When the French owned Acadia, they gave it boundaries as comprehensive as those claimed for it by the English commissioners; now that it belonged to a rival, they cut it down to a paring of its former self.

The denial that Acadia included the whole peninsula was dictated by the need of a winter communication between Quebec and Cape Breton, which was possible only with the eastern portions in French hands.

So new was this denial that even La Galissonière himself, the foremost in making it, had declared without reservation two years before that Acadia was the entire peninsula.

[122] "If," says a writer on the question, "we had to do with a nation more tractable, less grasping, and more conciliatory, it would be well to insist also that Halifax should be given up to us."

He thinks that, on the whole, it would be well to make the demand in any case, in order to gain some other point by yielding this one.

[123] It is curious that while denying that the country was Acadia, the French invariably called the inhabitants Acadians.

Innumerable public documents, commissions, grants, treaties, edicts, signed by French kings and ministers, had recognized Acadia as extending over New Brunswick and a part of Maine.

Four censuses of Acadia while it belonged to the French had recognized the mainland as included in it; and so do also the early French maps.

Its prodigious shrinkage was simply the consequence of its possession by an alien.

[Footnote 121: The commission of De Monts, in 1603, defines Acadia as extending from the fortieth to the forty-sixth degrees of latitude,--that is, from central New Brunswick to southern Pennsylvania.

Neither party cared to produce the document.

] [Footnote 122: "L'Acadie suivant ses anciennes limites est la presquisle bornée par son isthme."

_La Galissonière au Ministre, 25 Juillet, 1749_.

The English commissioners were, of course, ignorant of this admission.

] [Footnote 123: _Mémoire de l'Abbée de l'Isle-Dieu, 1753_ (1754?

).

] Other questions of limits, more important and equally perilous, called loudly for solution.

What line should separate Canada and her western dependencies from the British colonies?

Various principles of demarcation were suggested, of which the most prominent on the French side was a geographical one.

All countries watered by streams falling into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi were to belong to her.

This would have planted her in the heart of New York and along the crests of the Alleghanies, giving her all the interior of the continent, and leaving nothing to England but a strip of sea-coast.

Yet in view of what France had achieved; of the patient gallantry of her explorers, the zeal of her missionaries, the adventurous hardihood of her bushrangers, revealing to civilized mankind the existence of this wilderness world, while her rivals plodded at their workshops, their farms, or their fisheries,--in view of all this, her pretensions were moderate and reasonable compared with those of England.

The treaty of Utrecht had declared the Iroquois, or Five Nations, to be British subjects; therefore it was insisted that all countries conquered by them belonged to the British Crown.

But what was an Iroquois conquest?

The Iroquois rarely occupied the countries they overran.

Their military expeditions were mere raids, great or small.

Sometimes, as in the case of the Hurons, they made a solitude and called it peace; again, as in the case of the Illinois, they drove off the occupants of the soil, who returned after the invaders were gone.

But the range of their war-parties was prodigious; and the English laid claim to every mountain, forest, or prairie where an Iroquois had taken a scalp.

This would give them not only the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, but also that between Lake Huron and the Ottawa, thus reducing Canada to the patch on the American map now represented by the province of Quebec,--or rather, by a part of it, since the extension of Acadia to the St. Lawrence would cut off the present counties of Gaspé, Rimouski, and Bonaventure.

Indeed among the advocates of British claims there were those who denied that France had any rights whatever on the south side of the St. Lawrence.

[124] Such being the attitude of the two contestants, it was plain that there was no resort but the last argument of kings.

Peace must be won with the sword.

[Footnote 124: The extent of British claims is best shown on two maps of the time, Mitchell's _Map of the British and French Dominions in North America_ and Huske's _New and Accurate Map of North America_; both are in the British Museum.

Dr. John Mitchell, in his _Contest in America_ (London, 1757) pushes the English claim to its utmost extreme, and denies that the French were rightful owners of anything in North America except the town of Quebec and the trading-post of Tadoussac.

Besides the claim founded on the subjection of the Iroquois to the British Crown, the English somewhat inconsistently advanced others founded on titles obtained by treaty from these same tribes, and others still, founded on the original grants of some of the colonies, which ran indefinitely westward across the continent.

] The commissioners at Paris broke up their sessions, leaving as the monument of their toils four quarto volumes of allegations, arguments, and documentary proofs.

[125] Out of the discussion rose also a swarm of fugitive publications in French, English, and Spanish; for the question of American boundaries had become European.

There was one among them worth notice from its amusing absurdity.

It is an elaborate disquisition, under the title of _Roman politique_, by an author faithful to the traditions of European diplomacy, and inspired at the same time by the new philosophy of the school of Rousseau.

He insists that the balance of power must be preserved in America as well as in Europe, because "Nature," "the aggrandizement of the human soul," and the "felicity of man" are unanimous in demanding it.

The English colonies are more populous and wealthy than the French; therefore the French should have more land, to keep the balance.

Nature, the human soul, and the felicity of man require that France should own all the country beyond the Alleghanies and all Acadia but a strip of the south coast, according to the "sublime negotiations" of the French commissioners, of which the writer declares himself a "religious admirer."

[126] [Footnote 125: _Mémoires des Commissaires de Sa Majesté Très Chrétienne et de ceux de Sa Majesté Brittanique_.

Paris, 1755. Several editions appeared.

] [Footnote 126: _Roman politique sur l'État présent des Affaires de l'Amérique_ (Amsterdam, 1756).

For extracts from French Documents, see Appendix B. ] We know already that France had used means sharper than negotiation to vindicate her claim to the interior of the continent; had marched to the sources of the Ohio to entrench herself there, and hold the passes of the West against all comers.

It remains to see how she fared in her bold enterprise.

Chapter 5