A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland

by John Mack Faragher

Overview

"Altogether superb: an accessible, fluent account that advances scholarship while building a worthy memorial to the victims of two and a half centuries past." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In 1755, New England troops embarked on a "great and noble scheme" to expel 18,000 French-speaking Acadians ("the neutral French") from Nova Scotia, killing thousands, separating innumerable families, and driving many into forests where they waged a desperate guerrilla resistance. The right of neutrality; to live in peace from the imperial wars waged between France and England; had been one of the founding values of Acadia; its settlers traded and intermarried freely with native Mìkmaq Indians and English Protestants alike. But the Acadians' refusal to swear unconditional allegiance to the British Crown in the mid-eighteenth century gave New Englanders, who had long coveted Nova Scotia's fertile farmland, pretense enough to launch a campaign of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. John Mack Faragher draws on original research to weave 150 years of history into a gripping narrative of both the civilization of Acadia and the British plot to destroy it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393328271
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/17/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	592
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

John Mack Faragher is the Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of History and American Studies at Yale. He is the author of many books on American history, including a biography of Daniel Boone that received a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Editorial Reviews

"The Acadians’ doomed struggle for survival, recounted by the author in painstaking, even exhaustive detail, takes on the aura of inevitability as though the outcome had been inscribed by the gods on Olympus."

New York Times - William Grimes

"[A] fascinating account…recommended for anyone with a general interest in Colonial American history."

Houston Chronicle - James D. Fairbanks

"Faragher’s meticulous scholarship recovers the history of a people deliberately targeted for extinction in the British-American conquest of North America. He gives us in vivid detail both the calculated cruelty of the conquerors and the enduring humanity of the people who survived this American exercise in ethnic cleansing. This is a major work."

Edmund Morgan

"Painstakingly researched, at once poignant and hard-hitting, this tragic history of mass expulsion and dispersion of a people from their homeland demands the attention of every American citizen."

Seattle Times - Skye K. Moody

Frontier historian Faragher (Daniel Boone, 1992, etc.) sheds new and revealing light on a shameful campaign of 18th-century ethnic cleansing. Apart from Longfellow's Evangeline and The Band's song "Acadian Driftwood," Faragher notes, there seem today to be only scattered folk memories and scholarly considerations of the removal of the French-speaking Acadians from their homeland. The event merits attention, not least because, perhaps more than any other colonial people of the New World, the Acadians acclimated to their surroundings along the Atlantic coast of Canada and became Rousseauvian natural men of a kind that would make Boone envious. "Intermarrying with the native M'kmaq people of the region," Faragher writes, "the Acadians forged an ethnic accord that was exceptional in the colonial settlement of early North America." In part out of deference to their independence-minded native kin and in part to keep out of harm's way, the Acadians held to a studied neutrality. It did not help; both England and France demanded that they swear allegiance to their respective crowns, a requirement the scorned, illiterate peasants repeatedly evaded throughout the 17th and early 18th centuries. Following fresh hostilities between the warring colonial powers, English officials in Canada hatched a plan in 1745 to remove the Acadians and resettle Nova Scotia with loyal English-speaking Protestants. An enlightened governor failed to put the plan into effect, but on leaving for England for medical treatment he was succeeded by a man all too willing to see the Acadians go. Faragher takes care to name the guiltiest of the bureaucrats and soldiers involved as he describes what happened next: the forcedremoval, in the autumn of 1755, of nearly 7,000 Acadians, a thousand or more of whom died in transit to other colonies, and the onset of a long guerrilla war that claimed the lives of many British soldiers as well. Altogether superb: an accessible, fluent account that advances scholarship while building a worthy memorial to the victims of two and a half centuries past. Agent: Gerard McCauley/Gerard McCauley Agency Inc.

Kirkus Reviews