I didn’t post last week. There was too much going on. Jess and I had a soirée to celebrate our wedding last fall. Unlike another couple’s wedding party this past week, no Venetians were pissed off, but no A-list celebs attended either. Nearly 200 family and friends were there to celebrate our relationship and our newly built family. It was a truly joyous occasion. I danced my tail off.
On the heels of the soirée, I took a five day road trip with my kids to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. I travelled over 1,000 miles Friday alone. Nova Scotia factors mightily in Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World by Maya Jasanoff, the book I’m finishing for book club this Wednesday. The area also looms large in my own family history. On this trip, my kids and I visited the Grand Pré National Historic Site the area where my Acadian forebears were forcibly removed from their farms by British soldiers in the mid 18th century Grand Derangement.
It was an affecting reflective experience to face the origins of an unspoken source of generational family trauma. The museum was respectful and moving but the story of the Acadians claim to the land as being their true ancestral home rang hollow. It’s important to note that the Acadians were settlers who were forced to move by other settlers from a land that neither of which had the right to claim as theirs. That said, the story is an awfully sad one.
I didn’t know my surname (Thibodeau) was Acadian until I was in high school and the late great Kerouac tour guide and teacher, Roger Brunelle pointed it out to me. He might as well have told me I came from the sun since I didn’t know where Acadia was or what Acadian meant. Learning the full story has taken a very long time for me to discover. I knew there was a connection to New Orleans, and Cajun culture was a derivation of the name Acadian over the years. I didn’t know that in the diaspora which occurred over eight years, thousands of Acadians were shipped out, their farms burned so they couldn’t return. Some went into hiding. Many ended up being taken in as refugees in the American colonies and Britain and France. A huge group of them were sent from France down to resettle in New Orleans. I knew none of this before last week.
In anticipation of this trip I began researching the Thibodeau strand of my family tree down its Acadian roots. Turns out I’m a direct descendant of two men who were imprisoned in Grand Pré for a month in 1755 before being sent off the land (in their case to Maryland and Pennsylvania). It was moving to seeing their names scrawled in the list of prisoners—misspelled Tibodo by the British scribe.
Jess picked up a book in Halifax called Acadian Driftwood: One Family and the Great Expulsion by Tyler LeBlanc.
LeBlanc traces the story of the diaspora through the individual stories of his ancestors experiences, of evading capture, of being held on prison ships, on being sent to foreign lands. I started reading it but had to stop because I was blurring the information with the stories of the refugee British loyalists after the American Revolution that Jasanoff tells in her Liberty’s Exiles. I’ll get back to Acadian Driftwood though and write more in a future post.
I also came down with a pretty nasty cold while I was in Halifax. So my energy has been low. I wanted to write something this week if only to keep to my self set schedule. Trouble is, I didn’t get much reading done on Liberty’s Exiles or anything else.
I’m about two thirds through the Jasanoff book and am enjoying it so far. Jasanoff is an academic sort of writer, but the story is gripping. Like they say, history is written by the victors—Jasanoff pulls back the curtain of differing perspectives in the American revolutionary era. It’s also interesting to see the American patriots as bullies and thugs toward their own countrymen. I learned New York City and Charleston and East Florida were all safe havens for tories leading up to and during the war. How the loyalists effected the rise of the British Empire and the creation of Canada. It’s interesting to know that the American Revolution was referred to at the time as a Civil War in Briton.
She touches on the stories of black loyalists who were promised freedom to fight for Britain fared after the British evacuated. Similarly the story of the Iroquois nation and other native groups who allied with the British but became afterthoughts in the post war reshuffling.
Given that Nova Scotia was a common landing spot for refugees, Jasanoff even tells a version of the story of the Acadian removal a generation before. The book is a moving and humane treatment of what happened to a group of people who sort of fell through the cracks of history.
She builds an argument that loyalists and patriots were after the same sort of autonomy and self determination. Their only major difference was the idea of swearing allegiance to a King—of literal loyalty to the crown. Something that our American forefathers chafed at losing the power of and fixed the levers of government to favor a select group to rule. This tension in the balance of power, between the people and the state is still at play in the dynamics of our country.
Britain learned from the unrest and the influx of refugees from America helped shape and create the state of Canada as an independent liberal constitutional monarchy, as opposed to the democratic republicanism under threat today in America. Her perspective is so compelling and compassionate towards the loyalists and the pivot of the British government I sometimes have wondered if No King is the exact right message for today’s anti-Trump protests. Meaning, Trump could never be a king in a full sense. Maybe it’d be more appropriate to chant: No Dictators. No Autocrats. They don’t have the same simple clarion ring as No King.