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The problem, then before the Council on which lay the heavy responsibility of holding the Province, was what to do with them. Only if the Acadians had taken an outright oath of allegiance and then aided the enemy, could they have been charged with treason; until they do so, they could not. And as they were not openly allied with the French they could not be dealt with as enemies-at-war. Failing then to have them acknowledge themselves as British subjects, the Councils feared that they would, by necessity, continue to be a menace to the safety of the Province and that they must be either exterminated or removed, if British rule were to be made safe. That in effect was the stand taken by Lawrence and his Council and over the decision in favor of removal have centered the controversies of the Expulsion. Did their presence really constitute such a menace that only their expulsion would remove it? Or was their alleged menace the sole object of their removal? Fortunately these and similar questions are beyond the ken and outside the sphere of the local historian, who is interested only in the factual relation between the decision to remove and what happened in the locality whose story he is trying to tell. The plan of Morris, too, involved something more than just getting them out of the Province. The Acadians if they had been ordered to would probably have gone, though unwillingly, to Cape Breton or to St. John’s Island or across the Missaquash. Their going there, however, was regarded by the British as equally dangerous as it would have swelled and strengthened the ranks of their enemies and been an added inducement to the French to attempt a re-conquest of Acadia. Back |
