French Ambition and Acadian Labor in the Caribbean, 1762-1767”
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401 “Empire Ex Nihilo: French Ambition and Acadian Labor in the Caribbean, 1762-1767” Christopher Hodson, Northwestern University “Lost Colonies” Conference, March 26-27, 2004 (Please do not cite, quote, or circulate without written permission from the author) At the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, geopolitical equilibrium gave way to grotesque imbalance. Great Britain had become a leviathan, acquiring Canada, several key islands in the West Indies, Senegal in Africa, French possessions in the Mediterranean, India, and on the East Indian island of Sumatra, while crushing Gallic pretensions to the Ohio Valley. For Louis XV and his cast of ministers, utter defeat had raised the stakes of the imperial contest; Britain’s near-global dominance demanded a rapid, thorough response. The integration of France’s remaining overseas territories into a militant, economically competitive polity became the penultimate projet in a kingdom bursting with les hommes à projets.1 Draped in the rhetoric of progress, the plans that emerged from this hothouse of patriotism and personal ambition marked an extension of imperial authority unlike any France had ever seen.2 Mercifully, few of these bizarre proposals ever came to fruition. This essay, however, examines two that did. The first, a colony along the Kourou River in Guiana, failed in spectacular fashion only months after its foundation. Thousands of migrants died, and destitute survivors scattered throughout Europe and the Caribbean. The second, a smaller settlement on the northern coast of Saint Domingue, commenced early in 1764. It proved a disappointment, lapsing into obscurity over the next two years. Settlers died or filtered to greener, if equally fetid pastures in Louisiana. Both projects shared a unique trait. In the Caribbean, where the trade in African slaves thrived like few places on earth, these colonies were built by an unlikely workforce: Acadian refugees. 1 I have borrowed the term “hommes à projets” from the work of Robert Darnton, especially The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 78. 2 Prior to 1763, only a scattered few French officials envisioned the kingdom’s overseas possessions as an integrated “empire.” See Kenneth Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), 7. 402 These men, women, and children hailed from the tidal inlets of what had once been the French colony of Acadia, transformed into the British province of Nova Scotia by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. After living in uneasy coexistence with their would-be governors for forty years, they endured a remarkable misfortune as the Seven Years’ War opened. In the fall of 1755, the British military captured and deported seven thousand “neutral French,” scattering those who escaped their grasp deep into the wilderness. Fearful of their ability to recombine and commit what one Briton described as “some signal Mischiefs,” officials scattered the prisoners from Boston to Savannah, scandalizing the colonial governments charged with their maintenance.3 Assaults continued as the war progressed. Fresh from the conquest of Louisbourg in 1758, British troops captured three thousand Acadians on Ile St. Jean (now Prince Edward Island), most of whom had taken refuge from the initial forays of the 1755 deportation. Packed aboard leaky transports, these unfortunates were sent to seaports along the northern and western coasts of France.4 At the signing of the Treaty of Paris, ten thousand Acadians across the Atlantic littoral bided time in a kind of legal limbo. While officials in the British Empire had, in the words of Governor Francis Bernard of Massachusetts, “always considered these people as British subjects,” the expulsion had rendered such claims hollow.5 Like the Israelites “in Egypt, under Pharaoh, and in Babylon, under Nebuchadnezzar,” those held in Philadelphia could not say “whether we are Subjects, Prisoners, Slaves, or Freemen.”6 Many wanted reunion with France, but obstacles littered the path. Acadians in North America feared that Louis XV, whose debt had mounted, would neither “reclaim them as subjects…[nor] redeem them as captives.”7 For those already ensconced in French ports, an uncertain future awaited. From La Rochelle to Dunkerque, three thousand refugees lived on government charity and clung to promises of resettlement, they knew not where. 3 Boston Gazette, August 23, 1756. 4 See D.C Harvey, The French Régime in Prince Edward Island (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926); J.M. Bumsted, Land, Settlement, and Politics on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987); Earle Lockerby, “The Deportation of the Acadians from Ile St. Jean, 1758,” Acadiensis, vol. 27, no. 2 (1998), 45-94. 5 Francis Bernard to House of Representatives, January 1765, in Placide Gaudet, ed., Rapport Concernant les Archives Canadiennes pour l’année 1905, vol. II (Ottawa: 1909), 150-1. 6 Petition of Oliver Tibaudat, et al., to the Assembly of Pennsylvania, February 8, 1757, in Pennsylvania Archives, series 8, vol. 6, 4509-10. 7 Duc de Nivernais, “Mémoire sur les Acadiens,” 17 February 1763, London, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (hereafter AMAE), Correspondance Politique, Angleterre, vol. 449, 77. 403 By 1763, however, handwriting had appeared on the wall. Faced with a spendthrift crown bent on revenge, Caribbean projects loomed on the Acadians’ horizon.8 This essay treats the Acadians’ tropical misadventures as social manifestations of this radical moment in French imperialism and political economics. Like most colonial powers, France relied on enslaved Africans to create wealth. During the early eighteenth century, planters and merchants had little choice – efforts to induce Frenchmen to migrate had floundered, as had attempts to use engagés and prisoners, notably in John Law’s Louisiana.9 Amplified by the prescient antislavery thought of the Physiocrats, the outcome of the Seven Years’ War prompted many in the Francophone world to question the composition of their colonial population. If, as the politics of the day seemed to warrant, the crown took control of overseas development in response to the British threat, slaves were far too expensive. Prices had skyrocketed, and would rise by 1789 to over two thousand livres for a healthy African in the French Caribbean.10 Worse, a slave’s loyalty could be purchased or stolen along with the body, rendering Africans unreliable in time of war. With armed conflict woven into the fabric of past experience and expected in France’s near future, the idea of an “empire without slaves” – or, at the very least, an empire with fewer completely unfree workers than ever before – gained a brief hearing immediately after 1763.11 This, then, is a story of a world in which prosperous, acquisitive peasants actually replaced African slaves, working to their deaths in imperial experiments thousands of miles from their homes. As historians are now apt to tell us, displacement, movement, and interaction shaped all sorts of lives in all sorts of places in the Atlantic World – Irish servants in Williamsburg, Africans quantified in Barbados, British sailors impressed in 8 Acadians who took refuge in France were also employed in a settlement on the Falkland Islands, and were proposed as settlers for Corsica, Ile de France, Ile de Kerguelen, several agricultural colonies within France itself, and were even tapped to work in French mines. For a review of some of these projects, see Ernest Martin, Les exilés acadiens en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1936). 9 Peter Moogk, “Reluctant Exiles: Emigtrants from France in Canada before 1760,” William and Mary Quarterly 10 James E. McClellan III, Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue and the Old Regime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992), 53-4. 11 I have, of course, cribbed this term from Christopher L. Brown, “Empire Without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Era of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2 (April 1999), 273-306. For a good summary of French criticisms of slave labor that emerged during the 1780s, see especially Laurent Dubois, “’The Price of Liberty’: Victor Hugues and the Administration of Freedom in Guadeloupe, 1794-1798,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2 (April 1999), 363-392. 404 the taverns of Plymouth, the Greeks of Florida’s New Smyrna, and Acadians, hapless everywhere. Yet in this historiography, the effects of incessant motion – transnational identities, diasporic hybridity, and the like – often overshadow the forces that compelled it. Read in light of present-day multiculturalism, the sheer human diversity of the entire system has become mesmerizing and familiar. As NGOs, multinational corporations, and digitized bits of subversive information gnaw at the integrity of our political borders, scholars have found common cause with those who transcended the strictures of empire. In effect, we have found the early modern Atlantic World, and it is us.12 Models that privilege Atlantic movement and interaction, however, should not obscure coercion and commodification, even among once-peaceful groups from the wilds of Canada. Although removed from their “ancient habitations,” the Acadians’ tale is not one of simple expropriation. The refugees were, after all, given land in both Guiana and Saint Domingue. But the use of farmers like Acadians to satisfy the new French