The Acadian Diaspora

Late in 1755, an army of British regulars and Massachusetts volunteers launched one of the most ambitious and cruel military campaigns in North American history. Storming through the province of Nova Scotia, they captured 7,000 civilians—French-speaking Catholic settlers known as Acadians—while scattering an equal number into the wilderness of eastern Canada, where British patrols would hunt them for three more terrifying years.

In the end, more than 10,000 Acadians were seized, herded into the holds of Anglo-American vessels, and sent into exile during the late 1750s. Over the next three decades, Acadian refugees were scattered to Anglo-American cities from Boston to Savannah, the coasts of South America, the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the Falkland Islands, and the bayous of Spanish Louisiana, an endless exile memorialized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 poem Evangeline.

Historian Christopher Hodson of Brigham Young University explores the Acadian diaspora, interweaving the dramatic stories of its perpetrators and survivors with the wider history of 18th-century imperial conflict.

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