Canada’s Strange and Forgotten Civil War

“Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?”

― Thomas Mann

One mistake of our modern historical understanding is to think the colonial empires of Europe always held strong centralized authority over all of their colonies. In truth, the American colonies often functioned as semi-independent nations, founded by private organizations and operated under the authority of their respective Kingdoms, but with separation between themselves and their populations with wildly different aims, which sometimes came into conflict over issues like territory and religion. Maryland for example was founded by the Calvert family as a haven for Catholics and was largely personally controlled by them for most of the 17th and 18th centuries, while Pennsylvania was an experiment by the Quakers to create a land of religious equality. Even within the same small state, different colonies might operate independently of each other, such as in Massachusetts. Plymouth Colony, founded by the Separatist Pilgrims on the Mayflower, and Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded by later Puritans, operated independently of each other, with their own governors until 1691, throughout which time several other independent colonies such as Saybrook rose and fell in the same region. This is all to say that our view of the American Colonies as unified lands under the firm grasp of their home nations is highly anachronistic. One such example which highlights all of this, the highly autonomous personal governance, and lack of the home country’s involvement, is the Acadian Civil War, a bizarre and largely forgotten conflict which all began over a mistake.

Essentially, due to oversights by King Louis XIII, two separate men, with the same first name, were given governorship over the same lands in Acadia at the same time. Charles de Saint-Etienne de la Tour, a Protestant, had his base in present day New Brunswick at Saint John, while his enemy Charles de Menou d’Aulnay ruled from Port-Royal across the Bay of Fundy in what’s now called Nova Scotia. The first few years of this conflict largely consisted of back-and forth naval battles, raids, and blockades against each other, with la Tour having somewhat of an upper hand with the support of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, fellow Protestants to whom he granted much more lenient fishing and logging rights. This was until Easter of 1645, when d’Aulnay made a surprise attack on Saint John while la Tour was away in Boston. One of la Tour’s several wives made a valiant defense in his absence, but the fort was captured and she was later killed alongside the others there. This seemed to put a decisive end to the conflict, and la Tour exiled himself in Quebec for several years. Just as the War had begun however, it was ended by a random mistake, when d’Aulnay died in 1650 from a boating accident. La Tour returned triumphantly, being granted back his Governorship by France in 1653, and marrying d’Aulnay’s widow, Jeanne Motin, but, in another twist of fate, la Tour’s dominion was ended just a year later, when his former allies, the English, invaded Acadia for completely unrelated reasons involving French Privateers and the first Anglo-Dutch War. La Tour died in 1666, dispossessed of all his power, in another ironic twist, one year before the Treaty of Breda, which returned Acadia to the French, and perhaps would have returned him to power.

The history of Acadia for the next century remained equally as chaotic. Under restored French control, Acadia was initially nominally governed by Emmanuel Le Borgne de Belle-Isle, and his son Alexandre, who married la Tour’s daughter Marie, but from 1674 to 1678 the land was again thrown into a period of chaos when it was conquered by the Dutch, initially by one man named Jurriaen Arnoutsz, and then by the Dutch West India Company, effectively in name only. From 1678 to 1710 the territory remained somewhat stable apart from a few brief conflicts and takeovers by the English, but in 1710, as part of Queen Anne’s War, Acadia was permanently conquered by the English and wholly renamed to Nova Scotia. Many of the French Acadians were openly dissatisfied with this outcome and hostile to their new rulers, which led to an expulsion and genocide in the mid 1700s which targeted all Acadians, even those who remained neutral. Several thousand Acadians died during this time, and those who survived were scattered across the Americas in exile, most notably those who wound up in Louisiana, forming the basis of the modern Cajuns. Among these exiles were my own 8th great-grandparents, Marguerite Girouard and Alexandre Guilbeau, along with all their children. This couple was on a ship called the Pembroke, which in 1755 was set to deport them to North Carolina, but in the only successful large escape attempt of the expulsion, the Acadians seized control of the ship. Being separated from the other ships by bad weather, and largely outnumbering the English soldiers, the Acadians revolted, taking the Pembroke back up the Saint John River, and burning it, having narrowly avoided recapture. Marguerite and Alexandre spent the rest of their days in Quebec, the former unfortunately dying in a smallpox outbreak in 1757. Their son, my 7th great-grandfather Grégoire Guilbeau, who had also escaped on the Pembroke at only around 5 years old, settled in Yamaska, where my ancestors continued to live for the next 3 generations, eventually immigrating to Leelanau, Michigan, in the 1800s, and then to Oregon in the 1930s.

Marguerite Girouard’s mother was Marie Madeleine Le Borgne, daughter of the aforementioned Governor Alexandre Le Borgne and his wife Marie la Tour, the daughter of Governor la Tour and Jeanne Motin, the widow of d’Aulnay, making the primary subject of this strange forgotten war my 11th great-grandfather, which is how I first discovered the topic. It is strange to think of, how quickly time moves, how many triumphs and tragedies proliferate history and are largely forgotten, even by the descendants of those involved, within a few generations, despite their very existence hinging upon them. If this war had gone another way, la Tour remaining in exile or not marrying Jeanne Motin, or if the weather had been different on the day the Pembroke left port, or a billion other things, I would not exist and be writing this. One last thing to note, is that Governor la Tour was also a gateway ancestor, that is a colonial ancestor with a confirmed descent from nobility and royalty. His mother was Marie Amador de Salazar. This family line goes back to Jean Salazar, a mercenary of the Hundred Years War and an Écorcheur, or flayer, who travelled with de Villandrando, the infamous “Emperor of Pillagers”. Jean later fought alongside Joan of Arc at the Siege of Orleans and loyally followed her throughout her battles and at Charles VII’s Coronation at Reims Cathedral. He fought in several more important French conflicts throughout the 1400s and married Marguerite de la Trémoille, daughter of Georges de la Trémoille, the Count of Guînes and Grand Chamberlain of France to Charles VII. Through Georges the family can be traced throughout the French nobility to the first Duke of Bourbon and thus to the crusader King Saint Louis IX and many other Kings in Western Europe up to that era.