A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland

John Mack Faragher draws on original research to weave 150 years of history into a gripping narrative of both the civilization of Acadia and the British plot to destroy it. In 1755 New England troops embarked on a “great and noble scheme” to expel 18 000 French-speaking Acadians (“the neutral French”) from Nova Scotia killing thousands separating innumerable families and driving many into forests where they waged a desperate guerrilla resistance. The right of neutrality; to live in peace from the imperial wars waged between France and England; had been one of the founding values of Acadia; its settlers traded and intermarried freely with native Mkmaq Indians and English Protestants alike. But the Acadians refusal to swear unconditional allegiance to the British Crown in the mid-eighteenth century gave New Englanders who had long coveted Nova Scotias fertile farmland pretense enough to launch a campaign of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale.