“A Standing Affliction to Us”: The LeBlancs, Acadian Refugees in Concord, 1756–1760

By Thompson Dasher, park ranger at Minute Man National Historical Park; retold here in our own words.

A sight from a lonely fort

In the autumn of 1755 Captain Ephraim Jones of Concord, Massachusetts, was far from home. He had joined the Massachusetts provincial forces as a surveyor that year and was posted to a cold, windswept fort on the coast of what is now New Brunswick. Looking out over the Baie Verte, he saw something he found deeply unsettling, and wrote to his wife, Alice, on October 7:

"The French people are Great Numbers of them on board the vessells in order for Transportation, and it is thought they will be sent to New England, but Nothing Certain Can at present be Known in the affair."

He was watching Acadian refugees forced onto British ships for deportation to other colonies, Massachusetts among them — for the Acadians, the breaking up of their culture.

Why the Acadians were expelled

The Acadians were French-speaking colonists who had lived on the Acadian peninsula — today's New Brunswick and Nova Scotia — since the early 17th century. Much of Acadia had been nominally British since 1713, but its people had never submitted. They feared settlers from Britain and New England would take their land, hurt the local economy and damage their relationships with the Abenaki and Mi'kmaq peoples.

• 1749: Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre, a French missionary, stirred the Acadians and their Indigenous allies to rebellion.
• The next year the French built Fort Beauséjour on the Isthmus of Chignecto, which joins New Brunswick to Nova Scotia. The British built a fort nearby, and a stand-off followed.
• 1754: war broke out in the Pennsylvania backcountry. After a year of setbacks, the ministry approved Massachusetts Governor William Shirley's plan to take Fort Beauséjour. Nearly two thousand New Englanders joined, Jones among them, many hoping for new land.
• June 1755: Fort Beauséjour fell after a two-week siege.

The Acadians had been allowed to stay neutral and keep their land and Catholic faith. Now Nova Scotia Governor Charles Lawrence demanded an unconditional oath to King George II, with no guarantee of worship, property or trade with Native peoples. They refused; Lawrence ordered them detained and deported. Over the following months ten thousand Acadians lost their land and livestock and were shipped off with only what they could carry — an operation historians have compared to more recent ethnic cleansing.

The LeBlancs come to Concord

Refugees sent to Massachusetts reached Boston Harbor in November, were kept aboard for nearly a month, then divided among the towns. Concord was assigned a family of thirteen:

• Claude LeBlanc, 45, and his wife Judique (Benoit), 42, married in 1738 at Pisiguit, near Grand-Pré — a farming settlement and breadbasket of 18th-century Acadia;
• their eleven children, aged one to seventeen.

Pisiguit had been targeted early in Le Loutre's War, so the LeBlancs may already have been uprooted once. They probably reached Concord around the new year of 1756, to a cold welcome.

"A standing affliction to us"

Their care fell to the selectmen: Benjamin Brown, James Chandler, Andrew Conant, John Jones and James Barrett, later a militia leader. The poor-relief budget did not cover refugees, so townspeople supplied the family and were repaid by the province later.

Their list of the family's ages, health and ability to work anglicised the names: Claude became "Cloud White", Judique "Juda", Marie "Mary", Jean-Baptiste "John", Rose "Ruth" and Isabelle "Abigail" — whether from misunderstanding or mockery is unknown. The record called the family "very shiftless", Claude infirm and unfit for hard labour, and the children small and helpless: "a standing affliction to us". Towns like Concord routinely "warned out" people who could not support themselves, and the family's Catholic faith made Protestant neighbours hostile.

Children taken, and a petition

Some towns bound out refugees to work for local families — and some, Concord included, took children from their parents to do it. A General Court measure to suspend the practice failed.

In April 1756 the LeBlancs and eight other refugee families from Chelmsford, Oxford, Concord, Worcester, Andover and Waltham petitioned Governor Shirley. Losing their homes, being brought to Massachusetts and being separated, they wrote, were nothing next to watching their children taken away before their eyes; they would rather give up body and soul than lose them. They did not refuse to work, provided the work fed their families, and they begged the governor to end the practice.

The General Court formed a committee, which recommended that the towns' selectmen or overseers stop binding them out for now, provide a house for each family so it could stay together, and help those able to work find work at a reasonable price. The refugee families had reached the top of a society that saw poor relief as a burden — a real act of agency, if a small victory.

Counting the cost

In late 1757 Judique gave birth to a son, Simeon. About the same time the records suggest one child died: the youngest daughter, Isabelle ("Abigail"), appears on the selectmen's list of June 1757 but on none after it — though the town's record-keeping may simply have been careless.

On December 26, 1757, the selectmen reported 28 weeks of support at 29 pounds, 5 shillings, then 16 more weeks at 16 pounds, 10 shillings — some 46 pounds requested from the province in less than a year. Unsure the province would pay so large a sum, they asked to be freed from "this Trouble" as soon as possible. The family was not moved, and stayed two more years. The selectmen's account of February 27, 1759, from the previous April:

That was a large sum beside other towns: Medway's account for a family of nine over roughly the same period came to £5 8s.

Leaving Concord

In May 1760 the Secretary ordered the family moved to Boston. The selectmen hired a team and driver to carry the LeBlancs and their few belongings down the Bay Road. They had just been given 60 pounds of salt pork, a bushel and a half peck of beans, a bushel and 30 quarts of rice, two bushels and 15 quarts of corn, and salt, hog's fat and milk — all they could count on through the "hungry gap", when the last harvest had run out and the next had not come.

They probably lived in Boston until the war ended with the Treaty of Paris in February 1763. The refugees could neither all stay nor all go home, and were sent to France, Quebec or Haiti — French, but strange to them. A 1763 "List of the French who desire to go to old France" names Claude as head of a household of twelve, with five sons and six daughters, suggesting Judique died between 1760 and 1763.

After that the trail mostly goes cold. A 1767 register of l'Assomption parish suggests Isabelle had not died in 1757 at all, but had gone back to Nova Scotia and married François LeBlanc very young — one of the few to return to Acadia, though not to her old home. What became of Claude and most of the other children is unknown.

The diaspora

The exodus became the Acadian Diaspora, across North America, the Caribbean and Europe; the Acadians kept their identity and never forgot Le Grand Dérangement. Stories like the LeBlancs' fed the tragedy Longfellow's Evangeline made famous, but their agency is often overlooked: the family lost a mother, yet fought to stay together.

Sources

• National Park Service, Minute Man National Historical Park, "'A Standing Affliction to us:' French Acadian Refugees in Concord," by Thompson Dasher. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-standing-affliction-to-us-french-acadian-refugees-in-concord.htm
• The article's sources: Ephraim Jones's letter (New England Historic Genealogical Society); Fred Anderson, Crucible of War (2001); the Saint-Charles-des-Mines parish record (Library and Archives Canada); the Massachusetts State Archives' records of the French Neutrals (Concord's lists, accounts and letters, the General Court order, the petition, Medway's account, the 1763 list); and the Arichat parish records.
• The petition's date is April 13, 1756 in the article's text and source list; one of its endnotes gives 1757.
• The petition and the historian's comparison are paraphrased; the 18th-century letter, town records and account are quoted as written. Rewritten in hubnx's own words.