Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

quered Quebec later in the war, many Acadians were seized and shipped
as defeated prisoners of war to Halifax, where they were forced to work on
the roads.
Only in Maryland, where Catholics were not unknown monsters, were the
Acadians treated with courtesy and kindness in the Americas. They were
voluntarily housed in private homes, and were able to find work and build
homes in Baltimore.
Many Acadians had voluntarily emigrated to Prince Edward Island,
and by 1755 four thousand former Acadians had settled there. Upon the
final British capture of Louisbourg and Prince Edward, the British deported
them all to France, two of the ships sinking with seven hundred Acadians
aboard.
A few of the Acadians managed to hide successfully in the woods of
Nova Scotia, and there they teamed up with dissident Indians to wage
guerrilla war upon their tormentors. Two hundred of them were rounded
up by January 1756 and shipped to South Carolina. The prisoners managed
to take over the ship and sailed to Canada, where they became privateers
for the French. After the .war in America was over, however, the
British captured this community and carried off the inhabitants as prisoners
to Halifax.
Charles Lawrence's defiance of the king's order not to expel the Acadians
went unpunished. Shortly afterward, war between England and
France broke out officially, and Lawrence only seemed to be a premature
patriot.
The tragedy of the poor Acadians was not over, even with the end of
the war in America in 1760. By 1761, Jonathan Belcher, Jr., now lieutenant
governor of Nova Scotia, professed to miss the Acadians. Who could now
repair the dikes? Yet when Acadians began to drift back to Nova Scotia,
their very presence changed Belcher's mind and he and the Council expelled
them once again. Unfortunately, they were deported to Massachusetts,
which refused to receive the five shiploads of Acadians and sent
them back again.
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