alternatehistory.com

This a reboot of my old timeline about a world where there is no Acadian deportation. In the two years since I abandoned it I believe to have perfected my writting and research skills and I decided to give it another go.

The Bullet of Providence: An Acadian Timeline 2.0

Chapter I: The French Neutrals


Never had humanity seen anything like the series of conflicts which, throughout the beginning and the middle of the 18th century, opposed France and Great Britain. Four continents and three oceans, as well as many seas and islands, where the theaters of this titanic duel between London and Versailles. Many where the nations, peoples and communities who were trapped in its crossfire. Among their ranks there was a community of French speaking catholic peasants dwelling close to the Atlantic coast of what will one day become Canada (1). Many names where used to designate those folks: the Mikmaqs called them the People of Algatiq, the people of the site of encampment, for the British they came to be known as the French Neutrals but we prefer the name given to them by the French, which also happen to be the one they themselves preferred and today prefer: the Acadians.


During her first century the history of Acadia and of the Acadians was, admittedly, quite unremarkable. Founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1604 Acadia was but one of the many European settler colonies who arose in the Western Hemisphere during the 16th and 17th century, her denizens trying to find in the New World the prosperity that had eluded them or their ancestors in the Old. Some found such riches through the fur trade with the Mikmaq tribes who surrounded them, but most ended up remaining peasants and had to content themselves with larger lands to cultivate then those their ancestors possessed in France. Thus they lived, their numbers growing as they cultivated, did commerce and claimed more and more lands from the forests that surrounded them. The raids and counter-raids launched by the governors and officers send by their metropolis and by their English opponents affecting them only marginally.


All that changed in 1713 when the War of Spanish Succession reached its conclusion in Utrecht when the great powers signed the treaty of the same name. Among its clauses was the session of Acadia and the Isle Saint-Jean (2). Those territorials’ gains placed the British Colonial Office in front of a conundrum: they established a perfect base for a future amphibious British attack toward Québec but also made Great-Britain the first colonial power to have a foreign but culturally European on its hands. Furthermore, London was acutely aware that they needed the Acadians to labour the land, do commerce and keep their new colony solvent. Thus, an arrangement was found: the Acadians would be allowed to retain their language and religion and dispensed of helping the British forces against the French in the future but will otherwise be British subject. They would, in effect, be neutrals.



Acadia following the Treaty of Utrecht (some of the military base and fortress where only build later)

For 30 years this arrangement held as the death of the Solar King brought a kind of detente to the relations between London and Versailles. Such a happy state was not, however, to endure: as the relations between the two great powers grew tenser again and the gap between the populations and wealth of New France and the 13 Colonies grew wider and wider officials at the French Ministry of Navy (3) decided that France needed to use all the cards she had to survive in North America. Through the years France had managed to retain a foot in the door in Acadia through the clerics she sent there, although she usually advised them to be neutral, in appearance at least, to prevent their expulsions. All that changed with the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession: acting under instructions from Versailles the Catholic Clergy in the region began to rouse the Acadians and the Micmac’s against the British.


At their head was Father Jean-Louis LeLoutre, a missionary sent to the Mikmacs who commanded in person the pro-french forces in the first round of a long duel that would ravage the region for more than 10 years.



Father Louis LeLoutre

At the head of 250 Acadian militiamen and 150 French naval infantrymen he took and burned the port of Canso in 1744 before turning toward the center of the British administration of the colony: Port-Royal. Unfortunately for him, his two attempts at taking to town meet with failure; the combat style of his Micmac’s and Acadians militias was not adapted to siege warfare. The tide keep turning against LeLoutre and his forces through 1745 and 1746 as an expedition from New England took the strategic fortress of Louisbourg while a French fleet coming from Brest and commanded by the Duke D'Anville suffered huge losses at sea and seemingly ended any of hope for France to retake Port-Royal. The French resistance was not, however, extinguished as most of its partisans retreated north-east, toward the Mi’kmaq territories, where British attempt to pursue them where fruitless. From there they kept launching raid, most notably against the important Acadian settlement of Grand-Pré, where the events led to an open battle during witch 300 pro-French fighters routed 500 British regulars, thanks to the effect of surprise and the bad weather condition (4).




The Battle of Grand-Pré
As the War of Austrian Succession drew to end the French attempt at reconquering Acadia had seemingly failed, a failure that seemed to be confirm by the upholding of the status quo ante bellum by the Treaty of Aachen (1748) (5). That it was not so was due to the hardening of the British policies toward the Acadians and the Micmac’s as many in the British army and administration considered the arrangement that followed the Treaty of Utrecht that had been broken and the news of the Jacobite Rising of 1745 had stirred the anti-Catholics in the region. Those hardliners quickly found a leader in Charles Lawrence, Lieutenant in the 45th foot, who arrived in Canso in 1747. An ambitious and brilliant man Lawrence quickly raised the ranks, becoming a Major by 1749. His administrative talents where only equalled by his hatred of the French-speaking catholic population of the British colony. It was under is influence that the governor of Nova Scotia, Edward Cornwallis (6), made, for the first time a concerted effort to populate the region with anglo-saxon protestant settlers. In 1749 3 000 men’s, women’s and children’s were brought from Great-Britain and founded the towns of Halifax and Dartmouth, an event who incited fear and angers among the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq’s. Hearing tidings of those developments LeLoutre returned in Acadia, he had spent the last years concerting with the French colonial officials, and made ready to plan what he had never dared during the last decades: a revolt truly based on the Acadians and the Micmac's and not simply using them as a auxiliaries or diversions for the regular French forces. Nevertheless, LeLoutre had learnt from his former failures and changed his strategy: painfully aware that no French expedition was forthcoming he had changed his strategy: instead of trying to wrest Acadia from the British he would attempt to deprive them of the Acadians. Using the recent events he advocated for the Acadians to migrate toward French-controlled New-Brunswick and the Isle Saint-Jean (7), therefore powerfully reinforcing them in the event of a British assault, convincing between a quarter and a third. The reaction of the British was swift and decisive, Acadian where forbidden to bring any money, livestock or any other kind of riches with them and order was given to arrest ''Mosses'' (8) and bring his supporters back to the folds. The series of armed clashes know to history as Father LeLoutre war had begun.


Charles Lawrence and Edward Cornwallis
(1) It might seem that I have just murdered a bunch of butterflies here but I hope to be able to make the case that the buterflies will remain, at first, confined enough to what we know today as the Maritimes Provinces for something looking like OTL Canada to exist.
(2) Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
(3) Responsible for the colonies in those days.
(4) Februarys in Atlantic Canada tend to not be optimal for European style of warfare and 1747 was no exception.
(5) The Treaty that ended the War of the Austrian Succession.
(6) Famous for his great victory at Camden and his great defeat at Yorktown.
(7) OTL and actual Prince-Edward Island
(8) The code name given to LeLoutre, fairly clever one too IMO.
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