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A.J.B. Johnston
The Overlooked Importance of the Turning Points
before Quebec 1759
(Note: The author originally developed this paper for a
conference held in London, England in September 2009.
The conference was entitled: “1759 Revisited:
The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective”.)
There are few things more difficult to alter or uproot than
a well-established narrative. Once a story or a point of view is
embraced by a culture it becomes deeply embedded. It is often
easier to alter the world around us – its mountains and wetlands,
for example – than to change the world in our heads. Explosives
and bulldozers can sweep away or create new landscapes yet no
evidence or reasoning seems to be able to re-write certain
favoured mindscapes. We humans are apparently like the ducks
and geese studied by psychologist Konrad Lorenz; once we’re
imprinted with something, we hang on to it for dear life.
My aim in this paper is to question one particular long-established historical narrative: that the 1759 siege of Quebec was
a supremely important turning point in Canadian history. I take
exception to that judgement because if we accept it then an unarticulated corollary is that what happened in the Maritime
Provinces of Canada before 1759 was of negligible – read limited, regional – importance and interest. From the second line of
the call for papers for the 2009 conference held in London, England to mark the 250th anniversary of the fall of Quebec, I quote:
“It [the 1759 siege of Quebec] marked the beginning of the end
of the French Empire in North America and led to a fundamental reshaping of British attitudes and policies towards their American colonies.” The part that sticks in my craw is the wording:
“the beginning of the end”. To be sure, that idea isn’t anything
new; it simply sums up the historical consensus of the past couple of centuries. Yet just because a narrative is embedded doesn’t make it true, does it?1
Please don’t get me wrong. For the French colony along
the St. Lawrence River and the hinterland world dependant on
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the metropole at Quebec, the British victory and French defeat of
1759 was huge. It was an empire-shattering turning point, though
the participants in the battle of Sainte-Foy and the battle of the
Restigouche the very next year would have begged to differ. My
perspective is that there were other French-settled parts in what
we now think of as Canada and for at least some of those areas
the outcome on the Plains of Abraham was not such a big deal.
My focus in the rest of this paper is on the Maritime Provinces
but let us also acknowledge that beyond today’s Canadian borders there were also French settlements in Louisiana and along
the Mississippi River Valley. All three areas were theoretically
dependent on Quebec and its colony along the St. Lawrence
River, though the communication and transportation realities of
the era meant that there was relatively little contact between the
theoretical métropole and its outlying colonies. For the Maritimes, its life-scattering and life-shattering turning points took
place between 1755 and 1758. And those events, in my opinion,
had much more far-reaching consequences on its landscape and
human populations than what happened on or soon after the battle on the Plains of Abraham.
Of course, it is entirely possible that you think that what
happens or happened in the Maritimes is not now and never has
been of much consequence. If so, you are not alone. Judging by
the relatively small number of pages or minutes of screen time
generated on the history of the Maritimes in so-called national
history books or television history productions, the easternmost
part of Canada exists primarily as a sort of prelude or occasional
counterpoint to the real national narrative that unfolds in Ontario
and Quebec. But here’s hoping that you are open to some contrarion thinking and that you might come to see that the Maritimes and its history has some merit and interest.2
For the Maritimes, the fall of Quebec in 1759 had little
impact other than to confirm the imperial transition already well
under way. I repeat: already well under way. In the Maritimes, the
turning point, or to be more accurate, the turning points in the
plural, had taken place between six and fifty-four months before
James Wolfe set sail from England, before British troops climbed
up the slopes of Anse au Foulon and before the marquis de Mont-
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calm ventured out from behind the fortifications of Quebec to
meet his destiny. I am referring to the Acadian Deportation and
the 1758 siege of Louisbourg.
What is typically described in the singular as the Acadian
Deportation – though it involved several different forcible removals over a period of seven years – had begun in the summer
of 1755.3 Over the span of several months, roughly 6,000 Acadians were transported to the Anglo-American colonies in three
different operations from two different regions of Nova Scotia
and a portion of today’s New Brunswick. There were more removals in 1756 and 1757 and then the largest single mass deportation, this time to France, occurred in 1758. That involved
transporting about 3,000 Acadians from Ile Saint-Jean (Prince
Edward Island), nearly half of whom perished en route.4 The removals continued up to and including1762, when a last contingent sent from Halifax was refused by Massachusetts and sent
back. In total, out of slightly more than 14,000 Acadians living
in the Maritimes in early 1755 approximately 10,000 (or 71 per
cent) were forcibly removed by New England and/or British soldiers. The other 4,000 avoided the soldiers coming for them by
hiding in the wilderness or by making their way to Canada (Quebec). It would be primarily some of those escapees who would resettle in the Maritimes in the mid- to late 1760s, though some of
the deported also came back, in comparatively smaller numbers.
In some areas, especially those depopulated in 1755, entire communities were utterly destroyed in a scorched earth policy. In
other instances, such as at Louisbourg or on Ile Saint-Jean (Prince
Edward Island), the policy was to leave buildings standing for
later settlers, who the authorities hoped would not be neutral or
pro-French but either British or at least Protestant. I’ll come back
to these later settlers in a moment.
As for the 1758 siege of Louisbourg, despite the fact that
in the survey text books it is usually summarized in a couple of
sentences or a paragraph at most, it involved a huge British military force: a combined army and navy of more than 27,000 combatants, or slightly larger (that’s right, larger) than the combined
expedition sent to Quebec in 1759. After a seven-week siege it
ended in late July, with every French soldier and sailor – some
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A view from the British lines late in the 1758 siege of Louisbourg.
(provenance unknown)
8,500 – transported back to France. More importantly, so were all
the French civilians on Ile Royale (Cape Breton Island) shipped
off, except for those who fled to the woods or got away in a small
boat. It is not possible to be precise about the civilians transported away from the island – Louisbourg and the dozen or so
other French communities where dozens or hundreds of people
were living – because there had not been a detailed census since
1752. Nonetheless, a rough estimate of the civilian population
removed from Cape Breton Island in 1758 would be a minimum
of 6,000.
Thus, between the two turning point events, the Acadian
Deportations of 1755-58 and the 1758 fall of Louisbourg, the
British removed (or caused to flee) virtually the entire Frenchspeaking population in what today are three Canadian provinces
of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. That
represented nearly thirty thousand individuals in total – that’s
right, nearly thirty thousand – a cataclysmic upheaval by anyone’s standards. Not counting the soldiers and sailors, perhaps
as many as twenty thousand Acadians and French civilians who
were living in the region in 1754 were no longer there by the end
of 1758. The consequences of what happened in Canada after the
fall of Quebec in 1759 would not match that human upheaval.
Granted, some Acadians would come back beginning in the
1760s, but it was only a relatively small percentage of those
driven away. Never again would they be in anything like a ma-
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jority situation except in certain small areas. Yet even though
nothing so severe happened in Canada (Quebec) at or after the
fall of Quebec, it is the battle on the Plains of Abraham that is embedded in the Canadian narrative as the “beginning of the end”.
As an aside, the loss of Louisbourg also had an important
impact on the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet, long-time allies of the
French. After Louisbourg was taken by the British there was a
sizeable migration of Mi’kmaq to Newfoundland and henceforth
the Aboriginal population in the Maritimes would no longer have
missionaries dedicated to them, a relationship they had known
for decades.
Earlier I raised the question of the later settlers, the nonFrench and non-Catholic settlers that the British authorities had long
hoped for. Those settlers did come to the Maritimes in great numbers: first the Planters in the 1760s and then the Loyalists in the
1780s. It was the prior removal of the Acadians and the prior dismantling of the French regimes on Cape Breton and Prince Edward
Islands that made it attractive to them to come to the Maritimes.
Those turning points, to repeat, happened in 1755-1758 not 1759.
If historians of Quebec, the former French colony of
Canada that saw an outmigration of soldiers, officials and some
leading citizens following the Conquest, can talk about that part
of New France having been decapitated5, what term should one
use to describe the much larger and much more profound cataclysm that occurred in the Maritimes between 1755 and 1758?
Grand Dérangement or Great Upheaval is the expression Acadians have come to use for the collective experiences of their ancestors, yet the term is not usually applied to the total dismantling
of the French colonial presence that took place in 1758. Maybe
a candidate term for the massive change in the region between
1755 and 1758 might be “a total uprooting” or déracinement
total? Or “scattering”, or “elimination” or “dismantling”? Whatever term one prefers, what unfolded in the Maritimes was, to repeat the term used twice already, cataclysmic; and far more of a
turning point for that region than anything that happened in connection with the fall of Quebec in 1759.
So how come what happened to the Acadian communities
and to Louisbourg and its French colonies of Ile Royale (Cape Bre-
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ton Island) and Ile Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island) does not loom
larger in the national narrative, the way the drama on the Plains of
Abraham does? First off, the answer is in the question: if you have
to ask why something is not in the national narrative then you
haven’t grasped how national narratives work. What goes around
comes around. Or to give it a green twist, historians, especially those
individuals or collectives who write national histories, are often
among the most ardent of recyclers. A less glib answer is that the decoupling of the two big events – the Acadian Deportation and the
removal of the French regimes – has the effect of downplaying their
inter-connected reality and combined impact. They are presented
in the survey texts as being disconnected, in geographic space and
in time, when in fact they were very much part and parcel of the
same imperial imperative of the British from 1749 onward.
Let’s take a quick look to see how we arrived in this situation. I begin with a text that was in widespread use when I was
an undergraduate, the then several times reprinted general history
called Dominion of the North. Its author was Donald Creighton,
one of the most eminent English Canadian historians of the 1950s
and 1960s. In a first passing reference to the Acadian Deportation
Creighton gives the event a rather long sentence, the end of which
reads: “... and when for the last time they refused, he [Charles
Lawrence] collected the astounded and bewildered people and
shipped them off to other English possessions.” Eleven pages later
the historian provides a second long sentence on the Acadian Deportation, offering that the people had “rather harshly... but on the
whole, providentially... been removed en masse from their farms
in 1755.”6 And that was all the reader learned about that event.
When Creighton turned to the fall of Louisbourg in 1758, he
wrote: “Worst of all, Louisbourg was captured in that same summer of 1758.”7 That’s it, twelve words. Nothing about the size or
importance of the place that fell or the colony of which it was the
capital. For all the reader might guess, Louisbourg was a blockhouse or small fortification in the woods. Nothing to hint at the
drama or impact of its siege; just a minimalist acknowledgement
that it happened. Creighton then turned to the narrative he knew
better and clearly loved to recount, the 1759 campaign against
Quebec. Not surprisingly, he devoted several pages to the 1759
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event, and even included the lines of dialogue exchanged when
Wolfe’s troops were climbing the cliff to reach the Plains of Abraham. The approach worked well with readers, no doubt, treating
the long imperial contest between Britain and France as if it all
came down to a final showdown on the Plains of Abraham and
we are there as witnesses. It conjured up connotations, consciously or not, of the fifth act of a Shakespearean drama or maybe
a “high noon” Hollywood western. Just to follow through on the
Shakespearian angle; if Quebec 1759 was the heart of Creighton’s
pre-Confederation drama then what happened in the Maritimes
between 1755 and 1758 was the equivalent of offstage noises.
It would be nice to think that Creighton’s lack of interest
in turning points other than Quebec 1759 was particular to him,
the author of the Laurentian thesis of Canadian history in which
the St. Lawrence River is presented as the determining axis of
the nation’s development and history. Alas, Creighton’s narrative
arc has largely continued, though there have been definite improvements in some areas of the history of the Maritimes. One
improvement is in the number of paragraphs or pages national
history authors now give to the Acadian Deportation. That event
(or those events) now receives much more space than Creighton
gave it, and no one anymore suggests that the episode was “providential” but rather a tragedy on a massive scale. Unfortunately,
from my perspective, the Acadian Deportation is often still
treated as a bit of a one-off, separate from the founding of Halifax and re-founding of Louisbourg, the establishment of forts like
Lawrence, Beauséjour, Edward and Gaspareaux and the settling
of Lunenburg, and the fall of Fort Beauséjour and Louisbourg,
whereas I see all those events as inter-connected.
With regard to the 1758 siege of Louisbourg, its place in
the national narrative has improved only slightly since
Creighton’s time. (I admit my bias and make no apology. 8) In
Origins, Canadian History to Confederation, R. Douglas Francis,
Richard Jones and Donald B. Smith give the capture of Louisbourg a full paragraph in a section entitled “France’s Reverses in
1758”, a paragraph in which they get the number of participants
right but essentially imply that Louisbourg’s role was as an avantposte of Quebec.9 Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, in their
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History of the Canadian Peoples, Beginnings to 1867, also provide a short paragraph on the 1758 siege, in which they get the
number of French defenders significantly wrong, and then they
offer that “there was little that people in Louisbourg could do
other than keep the British engaged long enough to prevent a
campaign against Quebec that summer.”10 Once again, the basic
idea seems to be that Louisbourg existed not for its own economic and strategic reasons but to keep the enemy away from
Canada and its capital, Quebec. Neither book uses the expression ‘Guardian of the Gulf of St. Lawrence’, yet that seems to be
the underlying idea. From my vantage point, Louisbourg was not
any kind of Guardian of the Gulf. The more I studied the documents of the first half of the 18th century, the more the very idea
of a guardian of the gulf seemed a figment of people’s imaginations. It pre-supposes either that Louisbourg’s cannons covered
the gulf – which is ludicrous – or that its warships – practically
non-existent before 1757 and 1758, and in those two years they
were hemmed in by the Royal Navy – controlled the seas, which
was almost as ludicrous. Yet the concept of Louisbourg as the
“guardian” of Quebec and its river – and therefore of only fleeting, secondary importance as an outpost of Quebec – lives on,
like all embedded myths. As such, it does a serious disservice to
the importance of the history of the Maritimes in the 18th century.
The best of the recent national history texts – insofar as
its treatment of the 1758 siege of Louisbourg and making a link
between that event and the Acadian Deportation phase that happened right after – is J.M. Bumsted’s The Peoples of Canada, A
Pre-Confederation History.11
Realistically, I don’t ever expect to see the 1758 siege of
Louisbourg start to match the word count given to the 1759 siege
of Quebec. The events leading up to and on the Plains of Abraham
are too embedded and the Maritimes are too peripheral for many
in central Canada to ever allow that to happen. But I don’t think
it is too much to hope that historians writing about the mid-18th
century transition from a French empire to a British empire should
acknowledge 1) that the first region to feel those effects was the
Maritimes, and 2) that that transition occurred between 1755 and
1758. Rather than the beginning of the end, the 1759 capture of
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Quebec should more accurately be described as the middle of the
end for the French imperial dream in North America.
1
Background on the “1759 Revisited” conference, including its programme,
is available at http://americas.sas.ac.uk/events/events.php?id=5770.
2
One well-known example of the way in which the history of Atlantic
Canada gets relatively little coverage in comparison with what happened in
Quebec and Ontario is the CBC television production, with companion books,
entitled “Canada: A People’s History”. More on that production can be found
at the http://www.cbc.ca/history/.
3
The author of this paper attempted to provide a comparative overview of the
Acadian Deportation in a recent article: “The Acadian Deportation in a Comparative Context: An Introduction,” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, Vol. 10 (2007), pp. 114-131. That piece also exists in French,
translated by Robert Pichette, and is published as “La Déportation acadienne
dans un contexte comparatif : une introduction”, Les Cahiers de la Société
historique acadienne, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2009), pp.1-28.
4
Earle Lockerby, Deportation of the Prince Edward Island Acadians (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 2008).
5
See for instance the debate on “The Conquest – Incident or Catastrophe” in
K.A. MacKirdy, J.S. Moir, Y.F. Zoltvany, Changing Perspectives in Canadian
History, Selected Problems (Don Mills, ON: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1967), pp.
46-63.
6
Donald Creighton, Dominion of the North, A History of Canada (Toronto:
Macmillan, revised edition, 1967 [1944]), p. 137, p. 148.
7
Creighton, Dominion of the North, p. 140.
8
I am the author of a number of books and articles on the history of
Louisbourg, the most recent of which was Endgame 1758: The Promise, the
Glory and the Despair of Louisbourg’s Last Decade (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2007).
9
R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones and Donald B. Smith, Origins, Canadian
History to Confederation, fifth edition (Thomson Nelson, 2004), pp. 137-138.
10
Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, History of the Canadian Peoples,
Beginnings to 1867 (Vol. 1, third edition. Toronto: Perason Education Canada,
2002), p. 162.
11
J.M. Bumsted, The Peoples of Canada, A Pre-Confederation History (Don
Mills: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 178.
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