A History of New Acadia

1755: The French fort, Fort Beauséjour is attacked by the British. After capturing the fort, the British discovered 300 Acadians. This convinced lieutenant-governor Lawrence (of Nova Scotia) to ask the Acadians (being the fourth person to do so) to swear allegiance to the British. They refused, and Lawrence decided to have them imprisoned. After pressure from the Admiral in Halifax, and also the Province of Massachusetts Bay, Lawrence decided it was in his interests to deport all of the Acadians.

Approximately 7,000 Acadians were then put on slave ships, and were designated to be deported to various places. The largest group, 1,200 total, were sent to Georgia, where they were allowed to settle a new town. These Acadians didn’t settle down quite as well as the others, for various reasons.

1763: By the end of the war, over 12,000 Acadians had been exported. The group of 1,200 in Georgia had found itself fractured by internal struggles, and saw about 500 of them leaving for Louisiana in ’61. A ship of 866 Acadians, one of the last deportation ships, was rejected entrance to Virginia, thanks to anti-French sentiment there. After considering sending them to England, they decided to let them go to Louisiana, where about 800 fellow Acadians had settled down in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

So, by the end of 1763, the Acadian population in Spanish Louisiana was about 1,600, with all of them centered in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

[FONT=&quot]1764: After much debate, the Acadians agree to move farther north, up the Mississippi. They set up a new city, along the Mississippi, by [OTL Osceola, Arkansas], and named it New Acadia. Their relationship with local native American tribes was relatively good.
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Just a very strange idea I got earlier. Researched this for two hours. Hope you like it. May continue it, but I get the strange feeling that the first reply to this will be screaming at me how impossible this is and that I should put a bullet in my brain or just never attempt AH again. >_>
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While I like the idea of an expanded area of francophone settlement in the Lower Mississippi Valley, your PoD doesn't make any sense. Not only were there no Spanish settlers in Louisiana in 1764, there wasn't even a Spanish governor yet. In the late 1760s-70s, the Spanish encouraged the Acadian refugees to come to Louisiana, since in the 35 years they ruled the colony, they only managed to bring in about 1,800 Isleños and 300-odd Filipinos as settlers, and many of those only came by threat of force.

It isn't a bad idea, though, and it does follow OTL. While a few Acadian families bacame wealthy enough to enter into the Creole planter aristocracy, most Acadians lost their land grants along the River and were forced further and further into the bayou as sugar production became more lucrative from 1795 onward.
 
Actually, the POD was a lot more Acadians being directly deported to Louisiana than OTL. I think I've nearly tripled their OTL population in Louisiana.
Didn't most of them end up in Louisiana anyway? I remember reading (found something on Google Books) that most of the Acadians expelled from their homeland briefly returned to France and milled around in port cities for a few years, before departing en masse for Louisiana. So how is your TL different from this?
 
Didn't most of them end up in Louisiana anyway? I remember reading (found something on Google Books) that most of the Acadians expelled from their homeland briefly returned to France and milled around in port cities for a few years, before departing en masse for Louisiana. So how is your TL different from this?

My point too... there was enough land to comfortably settle all 7,000 or so of them that arrived OTL 1764-1780ish, plus add a couple of thousand Spanish and the yearly dribble of Frenchmen that still came. Speeding that up just makes settlement thicker earlier, which would please either the French or the Spanish colonial gov'ts.
 
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