July 31st—Lawrence’s instructions to Monckton, Winslow, Murray and Handfielil about the deportation—Proofs of his cruelty.

At length the deportation was now officially decided, even as to the manner in which it was accomplished. One would think that Lawrence forthwith wrote to the Lords of Trade. This time at least the duty was pressing, imperative. Quite true; yet he did no such thing. In his letter of July 18th, given above, he had gone as far as he deemed prudent. The main point now was to gain time. If the deportation were accomplished easily, without grave disturbance, the bold game he was playing would probably be won. The Home Government would shut their eyes to an accomplished fact, though they could not do so to a mere project. Lawrence did not write to the Lords of Trade till three months later, when the deportation, though almost completed, was as yet unknown to them, and when he was urged by them to write and explain the obscure hints of his letter of June 28th. Is this not a new proof that he was trying to deceive them, that he was fencing with them, that his letters of August 1st, 1754, June 28th and July 18th, 1755, were so many steps in a clever scheme of duplicity organized and matured long ago ?

He must make haste; he had not a moment to lose. The deportation must be done and over before the middle of October, before lie could receive an answer from the Lords of Trade to his letter of June 28th. These latter, if they were quick about it, could let him have an answer about the beginning of October; and if at that date the deportation was not being executed, if this answer blamed him and ordered him to desist from his projects concerning the Acadians of Beausejour, his position would become extremely embarrassing. How could he proceed with the deportation of all the Acadians of the province, if he were blamed for the mere intention to banish those who had less claims on the indulgence of the Government? Lawrence fully realized the enormous distinction the latter would draw between those who dwelt in the province and the refugees of Beausejour, and the still greater distinction between deportation as he was going to carry it out and a banishment that would have left each of the banished free to go where he pleased. The latter might be dangerous, though in some respects excusable; the former was an unprecedented crime which left an indelible stain on the national flag.

Nor were Lawrence’s fears of a disagreeable and early reply unfounded. About this time, the Secretary of State, frightened at the disguised projects of Lawrence, as expressed in his letter of June 28th, was dictating a reply full of alarm, which arrived too late to save a whole people from the hateful plot a monster had hatched against their corporate existence. But, before considering this important letter, which reflects so much credit on its author and is so consoling for the sons of the victims and for all mankind, let us follow Lawrence in his preparations and in the consummation of his undertaking.

Two days only after the official decision that the Acadians be deported, on July 31st, Lawrence addressed the following letter to Colonel Monckton, Commandant at Beausejour. I give it in full despite its length : for it helps greatly to an understanding of the events that ensued and of Lawrence’s sentiments.

“The Deputies of the Acadians of the Districts ol Vanapolis, Mines and Vigiguit, have been called before the Council and have refused to take the oath of allegiance, whereupon, the council advised and it is accordingly determined that they shall be removed out of the Country, as soon as possible, and, as to those about Beausejour, who were in arms and therefore entitled to no favor, it is determined to begin with them first ; and, for this purpose, orders are given for a sufficient number of transports to be sent up the Bay with all possible dispatch for taking them on board, by whom you will receive particular instructions as to the manner of their being disposed of, the places of their destination, and every other thing necessary for that purpose.

“In the meantime, it will be necessary to keep this measure as secret as possible, as well to prevent their attempting to escape, as to carry off their cattle etc., etc., and, the better to effect this, you will endeavour to fall upon some stratagem to get the men, both young and old—specially the heads of families—into your power, and detain them till the transports shall arrive, so as they may be ready to be shipped off; for, when this is done, it is not much to be feared that the women and children will attempt to go away and carry off the cattle. But, lest they should, it will not only be very proper to secure all their shallops, boats, canoes, and every other vessel you can lay your hands upon; but also to send out parties to ail suspected roads and places from time to time, that they may be thereby intercepted. As their whole stock of cattle and corn is forfeited to the Crown by their rebellion, and must be secured and applied towards a reimbursement of the expense the Government will be at, in transporting them out of the country, care must be had that nobody make any bargain for purchasing them under any colour or pretence whatever; if they do the sale will be void, for the inhabitants have now no property in them, nor will they be allowed to carry away the least thing but their ready money and household furniture.

"The officers commanding the Fort at Pigiguit and the garrison of Annapolis have nearly the same orders in relation to the inhabitants of the Peninsula. But I am informed those will fall upon ways ami means, in spite of all our vigilance to send off their cattle in the island of St. Johns (Prince Edward Island) and Louisburg (which is now in a starving condition) by the war of Tatmagouche. I would, therefore, have you, without loss of time, send thither a pretty strong detachment to beat up that quarter and to prevent them. You cannot want a guide for conducting the party, as there is not an Acadian at Beausejour but must perfectly know the road.

“When Beausoleil’s son arrives, if he brings you no intelligence which you can trust to, of what the French design to do or are doing upon the St. John river, I would have you fall upon some method of procuring the best intelligence by means of some Acadian you dare venture to put confidence in, whom you may send thither for that purpose.

“As to the provisions that were found in the stores at Beausejour, the 832 barrels of flour must be applied to victual the whole of the Acadians on their passage to their place of destination, and, if any remain, after a proper proportion is put on board each Transport, it will be sent to Lunenburg for the settlers there.

“It is agreed that the Acadians shall have put on board with them one pound of flour and half a pound of bread per day for each person, and a pound of beef per week to each, the bread and beef will be sent to you by the Transports from Halifax: the flour you have already in store.

"I would have you give orders to the Detachment you send to Tatmagouche, to demolish all the houses, etc., etc., they find there, together with all the shallops, boats, canoes or vessels of any kind which may be lying ready for carrying off the inhabitants and their cattle, and by these means the pernicious intercourse between St. John’s island and Louisburg and the inhabitants of the interior part of the country, will in a great measure be prevented.’’

On the 8tli of August lie wrote him again:

“The Transports for taking off the Acadians will be with you soon, as they are almost ready to sail from hence, and by them you shall hear further, and have particular instructions as to the manner of shipping them, and the places of their destination.

“I am hopeful that you will, in the meantime, have accomplished the directions you had in my last with regard to the Acadians. As there may be a deal of difficulty in securing them, you will, to prevent this as much as possible, destroy all the villages on the north and northwest side of the Isthmus that lay any distance from Fort Beausejour, and use every other method to distress as much as can be, those who may attempt to conceal themselves in the woods. But. I would have all care taken to sare the cattle, and prevent as much as possible the Acadians from carrying off vr destroying the cattle.”

These letters are a revelation of Lawrence’s character; his soul leers through them in all its naked hideousness. Did he reflect for an instant on the sufferings he was about to inflict? Was there a struggle in his mind, were it only for a moment ? Not a trace of it appears. Does the wolf that tears and rends the lamb think of the pain he is making his prey endure? Does the cat, while prolonging the mouse’s life for the instruction of its offspring in the predatory art, or simply for the wanton exercise of its own agility, reflect on the tortures of its quarry? Like the wolf, like the cat, Lawrence was glutting his hunger, or rather slaking his thirst for wealth, and like them he was deaf to the agonizing cries that would assail him.

Two days only had elapsed since the resolution of the council had officially decided on the deportation, and Lawrence had already ordered from Boston and other places the transports he needed; he had already written to the commanding officers at Annapolis and Pigiguit, giving each of them minutely detailed instructions, in which all contingencies were provided for with satanic skill. Once more it is evident that everything had been pre-arranged long ago, and that Lawrence was making haste to forestall the answer of the Lords of Trade.

I 4e reader must have noticed m the foregoing letters how solicitous Lawrence is about the cattle. In the first his instructions recur to them six times, and twice in the second. This is really remarkable ; this insistence gives rise to suspicions. The thing might pass unobserved, if it were an isolated fact, but it is quite otherwise. It is linked with other facts of the same kind and much graver, and thus acquires considerable importance. Loose links are useless ; rivet them together and they may form a strong chain, bard to break. With such a chain is Lawrence bound to the pillory of history whence he can never escape.

Human nature is a very complex thing. Both good and bad instincts are found commingled in varying degrees of intensity in one and the same person, making him the battle-field of long, violent, and sometimes perpetual conflict, the issue of which is very various. His efforts under the influence of religion and education develop the good and stifle the evil that is in him. No one can entirely escape the action of the environment in which he lives and in which his character lias been formed. Good instincts will spring up in his soul, as it were, in spite of him, if they have been stimulated by example. The cruellest, the vilest of men, though he may never rise to heroism, will occasionally be swayed by some noble feeling—even if it only flash across his brain—which lifts him for the nonce above the brute. This is the rule; Lawrence is the exception. You may search in vain, throughout his entire career, for one single act, one single phrase, one single word that might lead you to suppose he was amenable to pity. Was he, then, a being inferior to the order of outlaws and assassins ? I know not; but this much is certain : he was mastered by a passion that had stifled whatever good instincts he may once have had. Of a most humble origin he had reached, while still young, a high position; he wanted to rise higher still; he wanted a high social standing and, for this, wealth was needed. The cattle of the Acadians was, as I will shortly demonstrate, the means he had long since fixed upon and was now pursuing unblushingly, but still with consummate prudence and craft. The baneful influence of his vile project had stamped out every vestige of good feeling, if indeed he ever had any. Else, how could he have given Monckton that infamous order about separating the women and children from their husbands and fathers? I would fain be mistaken in my reading of this passage; but, surely, it can mean only that the men, young and old, were to be arrested and detained until the arrival of the transports, on which they were to be then embarked and sent off first of all; “so that they may be ready to be shipped off; for, when this is done, it is not much to be feared that the women and children will attempt to go away and carry off the cattle.” Any doubt that may still remain as to the meaning I attribute to this passage of Monckton's instructions, seems to be completely dispelled by the instructions sent to Handfield: “Upon the arrival of the Transports, as many of the inhabitants as can be collected, particularly the heads of families and young men are to be shipped on board of them at the rate of two to a ton.” Besides, this tallies exactly with the general advice (see above, page 60): “to use every other method to distress them as much as can be.” The coarsest cattle-raiser and the ignorant Indian drover of the South America Pampas aie kinder to their herds than was Lawrence to the Acadians. This is the man Parkman would force us to admire; and, the better to succeed in this achievement, he has omitted everything that might discredit him and set him in his true light. He carefully avoids producing this letter or any of its essential parts. He sums it up in four lines, cutting in two, by a process that is familiar to him, the sentence I have just analyzed. Thus he takes all the sting out of it. Let the reader judge; this is Parkman’s mutilated summary: “Lawrence acquainted Monckton with the result and ordered him to seize all the adult males in the neighborhood; and this, as we have seen, he promptly did.”

What motive could Lawrence have had for so barbarous an order? Was he afraid that the confusion consequent upon the gathering together of many families might permit some of them to escape with the cattle ? This is the only explanation I can offer, and besides he himself has set at rest all doubt on this point. Prince Edward Island was only a short distance from Beausejour; he thought it would be possible for the Acadians to transfer thither such cattle as they might manage to save; and he would not run any risk with regard to the cattle, were it even necessary, in order to secure them, to separate for life wives from their husbands, children from their parents. As he willed the end, wealth, he also willed the means: he must have every head of cattle. But if pity found no place in Lawrence’s own heart, he could gauge pretty correctly the feelings of others. He knew that, after the departure of their husbands, fathers and brothers, those wives and children in tears, plunged in despair and in mortal anguish, could never have the presence of mind or the will to run away with the cattle.

Winslow at Grand Pre, Murray at Pigiguit, Hand-field at Annapolis, received the same orders as Monckton at Beausejour. Lawrence had begun with these last because, said he, these deserved no favor. Pretty favoi indeed, to be whelmed m the same disaster eight days later! One is forcibly reminded of the angler’s considerateness in kind old Lafontaine’s fable: “With what sauce would you like to be eaten? said be to his captive fishes.” If in this Lawrence was humane, I hasten to give him credit for it, as it is the only case where lie betrays a semblance of commiseration. The fact of the matter is this: he knew that his transports would not all arrive at the same time, and that, owing to the distance, he could operate at Beausejour a week or a fortnight earlier before its being known in the settlements of the Peninsula.

In his instructions to Murray, Winslow and Hand-field, he enters into fuller details:

“You will,” says be to Winslow, "allow five pounds of flour and. one pound of pork for seven days to each person. You will have from Boston vessels to transport one thousand persons, reckoning two persons to a ton.

“Destination of the vessels appointed to rendezvous in the Basin of Mines:

“To be sent to North Carolina, such a number as will trans port five hundred persons or thereabout.

“To be sent to Virginia, such a number as will transport one thousand persons.

“To Maryland, such a number as will transport five hundred persons, or in proportion, if the number should exceed two thousand persons,”

We have not, in the instructions to Murray and Monckton, the destination of the Pigiguit and Beausejour Acadians. The instructions to Handfield, Commandant at Annapolis, are the following:

“To be sent to Philadelphia., such a number of Vessels as will transport three hundred persons.

“To be sent to New York, such a number of vessels as will transport two hundred persons.

“To be sent to Boston, such a number of vessels as will transport two hundred persons, or rather more in proportion to the Province of Connecticut, should the number to be shipped off exceed one thousand persons.”

Lawrence’s calculation fell far short of the reality. The total number of persons deported by Winslow at Grand Pr6, exceeded three thousand; at Annapolis, it reached sixteen hundred and fifty.

“You must proceed,” he continues, “by the most rigorous measures possible, not only in compelling them to embark, but in depriving those who shall escape of all means of shelter or support by burning their houses and destroying everything that may afford them the means of subsistence in the country.”

And to Murray he writes: “If these people behave amiss, they should be punished at your discretion; and if any attempt to molest the troops, you should take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; and, in short, life for life, from the nearest neighbor where the mischief should be performed.”

One can hardly refrain from concluding that Lawrence fairly revelled in cruelty. Everything seems to have been calculated to make the lot of his victims as wretched as possible. All those commandants had full scope. With Murray, this was no light matter. But Lawrence did not stop there. The better to emphasize what he meant, he supplemented this freedom of action by instructions inviting them to unutterably barbarous deeds: “life for life, from the nearest neighbor.” At Beausejour. the order was clear, to seize the men and ship them off first, the women and children afterwards.

to different destinations far distant from each other. In the other settlements the order is not so clear. The instructions do not state that the men must he shipped separately, they merely say that as many persons as possible must be arrested, especially the heads of families and the young men, to be shipped off on the arrival of the first transports. There is here no doubt a slight difference in the wording; but it is very far from an indication that members of one family should be put on board the same ship. Elsewhere than at Beausejour it was practically impossible for the women and children to run away with the cattle; hence there was less object in insisting on separation between men and women. When Lawrence did insist on that separation lie can have had, it seems, no other motive than cruelty: for it was his interest to favor the reunion of families in order to allay discontent, agitation and murmurings., Sj prevent desperate resistance and to facilitate for his victims the acceptance of so cruel a lot.

Again, was it in order to make their condition more pitiable that he destined the inhabitants of one locality to different ports, far distant from each other? Besides the father, mother and children, the immediate family dwelling under the same roof, there were the married brothers and sisters and their children, the uncles, nephews and cousins, all bound by ties of kindred which the separation was to sever; there were the neighbors and friends living in the same district, whose acquaintance or intimacy, especially in an agricultural country like Acadia and among a sociable, genial peasantry like theirs, was the chief charm of life and often an indispensable help in the bearing of life’s burden. Apart from humanitarian motives—since Lawrence was inaccessible to these—waft it not his interest to unite the families of one locality, so that they might cling together and thus obviate those continual journeys from place to place in search of a father, mother, brother or sister, journeys which did not cease till thirty-two years after this fatal year? Could he hope that families mourning an absent father or son could be kept in the land of their exile, or take any interest in life, or become useful subjects? What was to be hoped for from dismembered families, suffering from the direst want, sighing over the not less cruel lot of relatives rudely snatched from their hearths and transported they knew not whither? Not daring to exterminate them by the sword, did Lawrence intend to kill them by grief? Such cruelty outstrips all flights of fancy, and the memory of these woes, which no one can fully realize unless he has been forced thereto by the oft-told fireside recital, still brings to my eyes, after more than a century, tears which I cannot restrain.

Does not this total absence of kindly feelings, or rather this premedicated cruelty, afford, of itself, overwhelming presumptive evidence that his grievances were fabricated with a view to some project of enrichment? Nothing could stop so ferocious a man. All suppositions shameful to his memory he has made possible; and, as his interest could lie in one direction only, there it is that we must seek it, and there it is that have found it.

It would be a mistake to suppose that Parkman reproduces those iniquitous instructions I have quoted of Lawrence to Murray. It would also be a mistake to believe that his work contains a single reference to the destination of the transports. On the contrary he has omitted all such references and has done his best to let his readers infer that the deportation was accomplished humanely. By his constantly recurring efforts to falsify history he has, so to speak, become an accomplice after the fact, and in this capacity he will affix to his name a part of the scorn with which the authors of this crime are visited.