Expulsion of The Acadians - Historical Comparisons

Historical Comparisons

The Expulsion of the Acadians has been compared to similar military operations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The French carried out expulsions in Newfoundland in 1697 when they occupied the British portion of Newfoundland during Pierre d'Iberville's Avalon Peninsula Campaign, burning every British settlement and exiling the inhabitants. One historian compared the Acadian Exodus to the retreating Russians who burnt their own lands before Napoleon's invasion, and compared the British expulsions to General Sherman's destruction of everything in his path as his army marched unchallenged across Georgia during the American Civil War. Another historian compared the expulsions to the fate of the United Empire Loyalists, who were expelled from the United States to present-day Canada after the American Revolution. Another deportation was the Highland Clearances in Scotland between 1762 and 1886. Another North American expulsion was the Indian Removal of the 1830s, in which the Cherokee and other Native Americans from the South-East United States were removed from their traditional homelands.

John Mack Faragher compared the expulsions to contemporary ethnic cleansing. Naomi E. S. Griffiths and A.J.B. Johnston wrote that the event is comparable with other deportations in history, and did not consider it to be ethnic cleansing. In From Migrant to Acadian, Griffiths writes that "the Acadian deportation, as a government action, was a pattern with other contemporary happenings." A.J.B. Johnston wrote that the evidence for the removal of the Acadians indicates the decision makers thought the Acadians were a military threat, therefore the deportation of 1755 does not qualify as an act of ethnic cleansing. Since the expulsions continued after the Siege of Louisbourg (1758), Johnston said that it was a cleansing, but not an ethnic cleansing because the persecutors cared much more about religious adherence than about ethnicity. Acadian historian Maurice Basque writes that the term "'genocide'... does not apply at all to the Grand Derangement. Acadie was not Armenia, and to compare Grand-Pre with Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia is a complete and utter trivialization of the many genocidal horrors of contemporary history."