"A Bondage So Harsh": Acadian Labor in the French Caribbean, 1763-1766

At the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, geopolitical equilibrium gave way to grotesque imbalance. Great Britain became a leviathan, acquiring Canada, several key islands in the Caribbean, Senegal in Africa, French possessions in the Mediterranean, in India, and on the East Indian island of Sumatra, while crushing Gallic pretensions to the Ohio Valley. Across the triumphant empire, news of the rout sparked rounds of drunken celebration among some, while others quietly speculated that Christ's millennial reign would soon begin. For Louis XV and his cast of ministers, however, defeat provoked sober reflection and hard-edged reasoning. Britain's newfound dominance demanded a rapid, inventive response. The integration of France's remaining overseas territories into a muscular, vibrant polity became the ultimate projet in a kingdom bursting with les hommes à projets.¹

Ensconced in the rhetoric of progress, the schemes that emerged from this hothouse of patriotism and personal ambition promised an extension of imperial authority unlike any France had ever seen.² Few of these proposals ever came to fruition. This essay, however, examines two that did. The first, a colony on the Kourou River in Guiana, collapsed in spectacular fashion only months after its foundation in 1763. Disease and starvation killed thousands of migrants, sending destitute survivors fleeing to Europe or elsewhere in the Caribbean. The second, a smaller settlement on the remote northern coast of Saint Domingue, was constructed early in 1764. It proved a disappointment, lapsing into obscurity over the next two years. Most of its residents died or filtered to greener if equally fetid pastures in Spanish Louisiana. Both projects shared a unique trait. In a region where African slavery thrived as nowhere else, the settlements were manned, in full or in part, by an unlikely workforce: Acadian refugees.

These men, women, and children had been through a great deal. During the mid-seventeenth century, their ancestors had been recruited to settle Acadia, a colony to the northeast of Massachusetts Bay. Along the tidal basins of the Bay of Fundy, the newcomers forged economic, political, and marital bonds with the local Mi'kmaq, traded with both Bostonian and canadien merchants, and built an intricate system of dikes to wall seawater from rich farmland near the shoreline. Government was weak. No seigneurial regime existed, rents went unpaid (and, generally, unmentioned) and the yeoman who could produce a legal title to his land was a rare find. Practiced with various degrees of devotion, Catholicism linked Acadians to each other, the Jesuit order, and the metropolis. Since the nineteenth century, generations have echoed (albeit in kinder language) Francis Parkman's characterization of the Acadians as a "simple and ignorant peasantry," but new research has recovered a complex society—primarily agricultural, Catholic, and French, yet scored by multiple divisions of rank, wealth, and political allegiance.³ Such vibrancy meant little to Louis XIV. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht gave Acadia to the British, who named the province Nova Scotia and set up a garrison at Annapolis Royal to lord over two thousand Acadian subjects. Forty years of coexistence followed, during which the Acadians skirted oaths to Hanoverian monarchs, proclaimed political neutrality, enjoyed stunning demographic increase, and otherwise made themselves the bane of their new rulers. Like that of the Irish, the situation of these Catholics in a Protestant empire might have endured forever, had not imperial conflict intervened.

In the fall of 1755, on the cusp of the Seven Years' War, a combined force of British regulars and Massachusetts volunteers received orders from Nova Scotia's invasion-wary lieutenant governor to remove the entire Acadian population—fifteen thousand souls—from his province. They proceeded with brutal efficiency, capturing seven thousand civilians and chasing those who escaped deep into the wilderness. Fearful of the Acadians' ability to recombine and commit "some signal Mischiefs," officials wedged them aboard rented transports and shipped them to cities from Boston to Savannah, scandalizing the cash-strapped provincials charged with their maintenance.⁴ The onslaught continued as the Seven Years' War progressed. In 1758 British troops overran some three thousand Acadians...