p. 8 | THE ACADIANS by Charles Morris

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 19, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 46.

THE ACADIANS.

By Charles Morris

IN the year of Braddock's defeat, 1755, an event of the greatest historical interest took place in a far-distant locality. During Queen Anne's War, the English had captured the peninsula called by the French, Acadia, now known as Nova Scotia. During the later war, the French peasants of this district naturally favored their countrymen. Believing that they were acting as spies, and aiding the French with secret information, the English authorities conceived the cruel resolution of removing them all from their homes, and scattering them in lands afar. This pitiless plan was carried out with ruthless severity. The Acadians were lured to the ports, treacherously seized, placed on shipboard, and sent away over the seas. Their houses and barns were burned, their lands confiscated. Some of them escaped to Canada; some were sent to Louisiana; the land which had been their home for a hundred years was given to others; the whole community was broken up.

In the end many of the wanderers, after years of hardship in foreign lands, made their way back to Acadia, which they still fondly remembered as their birthplace and home. The sufferings of these poor fugitives, most of them innocent of any crime but that of French descent, have continued to excite the warmest sympathy, and Longfellow has immortalized their hard fate in his pathetic poem of Evangeline. War had stories of much greater horror to tell, but it has few that have appealed so strongly to the pity of mankind, and the fate of the Acadians is not likely to ever pass away from the romantic annals of human wo.—Prof. Chas. Morris.