2 - Exile and Opportunity

Summary

The forced migration of French-speaking Acadians, Wabanaki tribes, and Loyalist refugees have rarely been considered in relationship with one another. Yet their principal movements centered on the Northeastern Borderlands of North America (bounded by Nova Scotia, Maine, and Quebec), and their interconnected movements spiked from the 1750s to the 1830s. This comparative assessment shows that while each of these coerced mobilities had distinctive qualities, large-scale population movement was the most basic foundation of colonialismss. Acadian, Loyalist, and Wabanaki movements shaped one another and were often associated with violence and trauma. At the same time, mobility offered opportunities and could nurture resilience. The legacies of forced migration in the Northeastern Borderlands during an early period of sustained warfare persist today, especially in the legal cases, artwork, and collective memory of Wabanaki people, who still live in their traditional homeland.

Sustained warfare and violence triggered multiple forced migrations across the Northeastern Borderlands of North America during its first two centuries of colonialism. Diverse Indigenous communities as well as varied settler groups relocated throughout this multinational region as a result of direct force and due to overlapping voluntary and semi-coerced impulses to relocate. The multiple mobilities of Algonquian-speaking Wabanaki individuals and communities, French-speaking Acadians, and English-speaking Loyalists in the second half of the eighteenth century have almost always been treated in isolation from one another, which risks overemphasizing the uniqueness of each movement. A comparative assessment focused on their common presence in modern-day northern New England, the Canadian Maritimes, and Quebec reveals these movements to have been deeply imbricated with one another and demonstrates that moving under pressure was a quotidian experience in this borderland. As every chapter in this volume shows, mixed mobility shaped by both coercion and choice was a defining feature of the long age of wars and revolutions from the 1750s to the 1830s. At the same time, mobility is fundamental to the human condition and underlies colonialism, generally, and the transatlantic slave trade, in particular. The groups, region, and events analyzed in this chapter have value as a case study and also merit attention because the conflicts showcased here over boundaries, mobility, and sovereignty remain pressing in our increasingly interconnected world.

The Wabanaki homeland formed the easternmost part of the Northeastern Borderlands. In the 1750s, the borderlands stretched across rival British and French claims to places intermixed with Indigenous communities that extended at least to contested Haudenosaunee (also identified as the Iroquois or Six Nations) territories in the Ohio Country and around the Great Lakes. This large region included multiple Indigenous polities that increasingly (but not always) acted in solidarity. Its numerous colonies were generally at odds with one another (even when they shared a European sovereign), and they were internally divided among settlers, government officials, and land speculators. British and French imperial and colonial leaders struggled to control their own subjects and Indigenous groups almost as much as they warred with one another. Myriad cross-cutting interests fueled constant conflict and triggered dramatic forced migrations of several kinds.¹

The foundational coercive migration in the region displaced Indigenous individuals, communities, and polities. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the Wabanaki people responded to the growing crisis of colonialism with such skill that its four major tribes still maintain officially recognized control over some portion of the pre-colonial Wabanaki homeland today.² Although this territory is now vastly reduced, and the struggle against colonialism remains deeply challenging, recent legal decisions in Canada and the US point to a potent twenty-first-century Indigenous revitalization that draws directly on historical experiences, legal precedents, and diplomacy during the age of wars and revolutions.

The southern edge of the Wabanaki homeland in this era began in the Kennebec River Valley of Maine, roughly the northern ecological limit required for traditional sedentary agriculture. One of the Wabanaki’s most important creative adaptations to colonialism modified and expanded traditional practices of seasonal mobility. Another key innovation was alliance-building to thwart genocide. These strategies changed over time and included advantageous as well as traumatic relationships with Euro–American newcomers. As the historians Emerson Baker and John G. Reid stressed in a major revisionist assessment, “there was a crucial weakness in the non-native hold on the Northeast,” where the “strategic acumen of native polities” limited the speed and sweep of colonialism.³

The Wabanaki Confederacy purposefully responded to growing threats upon its homeland and serves as a helpful introduction to these First Nations. The confederacy’s four main groups from west to east are the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet (Wulstukwiuk), and Mi’kmaq. The core homelands of the first pair are marked on the landscape by the rivers and bays that bear their names today, while the territories of the latter two are highlighted on the Maritimes inset map (Map 2.1). The geographically central pair share many qualities, as well as neighboring territories on Passamaquoddy Bay and the W∂last∂kw River (the Saint John River in English, a translation of its French colonial name), while the two more distant groups had more distinct local experiences that sometimes led to inter-tribal conflict.⁴

Map 2.1 The Loyal British Atlantic, ca. 1775–95. The Northeastern Borderlands region was the destination for the majority of Loyalist refugees from the American Revolution.

Source: Map based on Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan, eds., The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto, 2012)

The earliest lasting colonial settlements in the region were by French speakers around the Baie Française (Bay of Fundy), who came to call themselves Acadians. Partly due to the modest number of male-dominated settlements in the early seventeenth century, Acadian relationships with neighboring Wabanaki people were often positive, and included some intermarriage and spiritual syncretism. When France ceded peninsular Acadia to Great Britain in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the status of Acadians in the new British colony of Nova Scotia was ambiguous. A limited British presence and sparse settlement by English speakers led weak colonial rulers to accommodate Acadian persistence. This detente would be shattered when British and French hostilities emboldened Nova Scotia and Massachusetts officials to forcibly remove Acadians in 1755.⁵

After the Seven Years War (1756–63), imperial and colonial authorities hoped to swiftly resettle the rich farmlands that had been emptied of Acadians with voluntary migrants from southern New England. To encourage resettlement, Nova Scotia’s government provided transportation, provisions, and generous purchase terms. Governor Charles Lawrence further assured migrants that they would enjoy Protestant religious freedom outside the Church of England and that a legislature would belatedly be created for the colony. Roughly eight thousand “Planters” took advantage of these opportunities in the Acadian deportation zone, but this migration waned after 1768 as ongoing Acadian and Indigenous resistance contested new settlement from southern New England. Modest additional migration from Yorkshire, Highland Scotland, and by German speakers from Central Europe completed the colonial presence in Nova Scotia prior to the arrival of huge numbers of Loyalists in the early 1780s.⁶

The Northeastern Borderlands region was the most important destination for Loyalist exiles from the American War of Independence. More than 60,000 individuals who were loyal to the British Empire left what became the United States, a much greater proportion of refugees, relative to the total US population, than would flee from the French Revolution.⁷ Nova Scotia received about 32,000 new settlers and Quebec some 14,000, a major influx of English speakers in both provinces that especially transformed Nova Scotia (see Map 2.1). For the majority of Loyalist refugees, the solution to British capitulation in 1783 lay in its North American acquisitions in two previous wars. Loyalist exile led directly to the creation of the new province of New Brunswick out of mainland Nova Scotia in 1784 and of Upper and Lower Canada from the former province of Quebec in 1791. Loyalist forced migration and colonial state formation were fundamentally fused and perpetuated the symbiosis of mobility and colonialism.⁸

Loyalists who fled rebel tyranny gave powerful voice to their suffering, and the creation of new British North American provinces promised them a fresh start with just compensation for their abuse. However, this familiar characterization relies too heavily on a Loyalist view and a self-congratulatory imperial reassessment in the wake of military defeat. Loyalists who moved north did not arrive in the wilderness, as is still too often asserted. Loyalist recourse to the Northeastern Borderlands rested upon the deportation and dispossession of Acadians and Wabanakis, practices that had surged since the 1750s. The American War of Independence was the immediate cause of Loyalist exile, of course, but the fuller meaning of their mobility built upon the steady expansion of colonial order in the borderlands.⁹

The interconnections of Wabanaki, Acadian, and Loyalist mixed mobilities are revealingly united in the figure of John Allan, whose colonial leadership in the Wabanaki homeland rested in large part on his own multiple forced migrations. He had been born in 1747 in Edinburgh Castle, where his family took refuge from a rebellion in Scotland. At the start of the American Revolution, he was a prosperous settler with Acadian tenants in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, where he served several terms in the legislature. When Allan, as a Patriot, fled west to safety in August 1776, he left behind five children, a wife (who would be imprisoned), a farm (later burned), livestock, and other property (confiscated). Allan was a two-time refugee, a strong opponent of Loyalists, and a patron of Acadians, as well as an exploiter of both their labor and their improved lands. He championed Wabanaki claims even as his work accelerated their dispossession.¹⁰ While Indigenous individuals, bands, and even whole tribes strategically withdrew and were forcibly expelled as colonial intrusion surged, they continued to use many sites in their occupied homeland. Allan noted that “many [Wabanaki] families have been known to reside for months [on the coast] without being seen by the white Inhabitants.” His lengthy report of 1793 ended by emphasizing that “Indians are not subject to, or amenable to any power; they have been always viewed as a distinct Body, govern’d by their own customs & manners, nor will they ever tamely submit to any authority different from their own.” Seasonal and riverine mobility, traditional practices modified in the colonial crucible of forced migration, sustained Indigenous sovereignty in the Northeastern Borderlands. As the ethnohistorian Micah Pawling concludes about Wabanaki vitality, the colonial state never completed its conquest because it “struggled to hit a moving target” in this multinational region.¹¹ Closer scrutiny of forced migrations in the Wabanaki homeland reveals how Indigenous, Acadian, and Loyalist mobilities shaped one another and changed the Northeastern Borderlands during the age of wars and revolutions.

Mobility, Coercion, and Opportunism in the Wabanaki Homeland

Mobility can be compelled, but it is also deployed to avoid adversity and seek opportunity. As the colonial presence grew stronger in the Northeastern Borderlands after 1750, the overlapping, competing, and complementary migrations of Wabanakis, Acadians, and Loyalists revealed continuities that fused together forced, voluntary, and ambiguous movements. The First Nations held unquestioned power almost everywhere along the northeastern seacoast (and even more so in the interior) at the midpoint of the eighteenth century. Tribal cooperation and allegiances were sought by colonial and imperial authorities who conformed to Native expectations about the proper conduct of nation-to-nation diplomacy and even land ownership.¹² In 1750, there were no substantial English-speaking settlements east of the Kennebec River until one arrived at the British pales in Nova Scotia around Annapolis Royal (formerly the French outpost of Port Royal) and the brand-new naval base at Halifax. This was not a landscape of stable colonial farming communities. Rather, it hosted a changing cast of fishing settlements and small river-based forts and truck houses with nearby homesteads (many with squatters who settled beyond the reach of the law). The colonial presence was so uncertain here that the town founders of Machias sought legal recognition from both Massachusetts and Nova Scotia in 1763.¹³

The formal framework for Wabanaki–British relations in this era was a set of treaties negotiated in Boston and Annapolis Royal from 1725 to 1727. These treaties closed the Fourth Anglo–Wabanaki War, also known as Dummer’s War. This critical regional conflict was one of the few wars with no European analogue in a century of near-constant warfare that started in 1675. As a result, it is little studied by historians of Euro–American empires and nations. Nonetheless, its painstakingly negotiated resolution was pivotal for those who lived in the Northeastern Borderlands. Treaty conferences involved officials from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Nova Scotia as well as “several Tribes of the Eastern Indians,” principally identified as the Norridgewock (on the upper Kennebec), Penobscot, St. Johns (often used by the British for the Maliseet as well as the Passamaquoddy in this era), and Cape Sable (one of many Mi’kmaq communities). Although this fundamental agreement was reaffirmed continually at least through the Treaty of Peace and Friendship negotiated at Halifax in 1760, its meaning sparked sharp disagreements.

Loron Sauguaaram (Laurent Sagourrab), who served as a key Penobscot negotiator for more than three decades starting in 1720, poignantly clarified the Indigenous interpretation of the word “submission,” which appeared in the printed treaty but had not been part of the oral diplomacy. Sauguaaram explained, “do not hence infer that I acknowledge thy King as my King, and King of my lands. Here lies my distinction – my Indian distinction. God hath willed that I have no King, and that I be master of my lands in common.”¹⁴ Indigenous rights secured in these treaties remain at issue in contemporary lobstering disputes that have pitted the Canadian Supreme Court against the provincial governments of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and led to anti-Indigenous violence in 2020.¹⁵

Impending imperial conflict on the eve of the Seven Years War emboldened leaders of Massachusetts and Nova Scotia to implement ethnic cleansing policies in 1755 to enhance their power in the Wabanaki homeland. On November 3, 1755, Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips issued a proclamation that awarded “premiums” for Penobscot men, women, and children brought to Boston as captives for enslavement, with lesser sums being granted for their scalps. A recent painting by the Penobscot artist and historian James E. Francis recreates the Phips Proclamation in paint, and reclaims it to testify that Wabanaki mobility helped the tribe to triumph over the genocidal goal of the 1755 law (Figure 2.1). Francis appropriates and transforms the Phips Proclamation by relegating the government broadside to the background, superimposing a red human figure upon it, and then emblazoning a single Penobscot word that translates as “we walk on eternally” across the surface on the diagonal. The word appears in blood-red paint that drips down the text of the broadside.¹⁶

Figure 2.1 James E. Francis, We Walk On; Eternally (2020), Collections of Maine Historical Society.

The second ethnic cleansing campaign begun in the Wabanaki homeland in 1755 is more widely known today. The infamous Grand Dérangement mobilized provincial and British soldiers in a carefully planned effort to decimate generations-old Acadian settlements in Nova Scotia. The systematic campaign eventually removed nearly 13,000 people, more than half of them to other British mainland colonies in 1755. After imperial wars were officially declared, another nearly 6,000 Francophones were deported to France between 1758 and 1778. Based on a close reading of the United Nations’ 1994 definition of ethnic cleansing and an analysis of various factors (such as premeditation, sustained commitment of significant resources, high mortality among exiles, seizure and destruction of community records, burning of the built landscape), the historian John Mack Faragher judges the Acadian deportation to be “the first state-sponsored ethnic cleansing in North American history.”¹⁷ The initial round-up and expulsion of Acadians followed the June 1755 defeat of French forces at Fort Beauséjour, the strategic point on the isthmus that connected Nova Scotia to mainland North America and that delineated British and French land claims. Nova Scotia Governor Charles Lawrence and his council authorized the deportation the following month without support from imperial officials, and by the end of the year, thirty-six transport ships, mostly owned by Boston-area merchants, had removed French speakers from the major Acadian settlements at Chignecto (surrounding Fort Beauséjour, now rebranded by the British as Fort Cumberland), Minas Basin (with the large community of Grand Pré at its center), and Annapolis Royal. The initial expulsion of 7,000 Acadians to other British mainland colonies was a stunning opening salvo, but only hinted at the scope and duration of the long Acadian expulsion. The initial deportations of 1755–57 triggered some immediate counter-migration back to Nova Scotia as well as the flight of about 4,000 Acadians out of Nova Scotia to adjacent French colonial possessions. Self-preserving flight may have been a matter of choice but was far from voluntary, a type of movement under duress long familiar to these French speakers’ Wabanaki neighbors.

British military success in 1758, following the capture of the fortified town of Louisbourg on Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) as well as at Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island), led to the direct deportation of some 3,500 people to France. Acadian deportation declined in the postwar period (see Map 2.2), but chain migrations initiated in 1755 created a web of Acadian mobility across the Atlantic, with especially large numbers returning to Nova Scotia or venturing to Saint-Domingue and New Orleans. The last major movement in the three-decade-long expulsion was of 1,624 Acadians from France to Louisiana in 1785.¹⁸ For Acadians forced from Nova Scotia, as well as for Indigenous communities across the Northeast, motives to migrate ranged from life-threatening coercive violence to quasi-voluntary mobility to seek more promising opportunities. Crucially, the genocidal campaigns against both groups failed, but the trauma they unleashed remain rallying points for the collective memory of contemporary Acadian and Wabanaki people.

Map 2.2 Acadian deportation and migration, 1763–67. Acadians were directly deported to France, starting in 1758. Related transatlantic chain migrations flourished in the 1760s and revived during and after the American Revolution.

Courtesy of Stephen J. Hornsby and the Canadian-American Center, University of Maine

The Acadian deportation of 1755 closed one phase of a regional guerilla war that had pitted French speakers and Wabanaki allies against the British since 1749. Yet even after the French defeat in North America in 1760, the Wabanaki nations remained autonomous and forcefully asserted their sovereign rights. In response to royal direction, Nova Scotia Lieutenant Governor Jonathan Belcher Jr. acknowledged the Mi’kmaq free exercise of Catholicism, land possession, and the right to hunt, fowl, and fish unmolested across nearly all the northern coast from Canso to the Bay of Chaleurs.¹⁹ This recognition of Mi’kmaq rights and power in 1762 reflected British colonial and imperial limitations in the Wabanaki homeland in spite of success against France.

The Seven Years War also opened the way for an aggressive British advance into Penobscot territory when Massachusetts built Fort Pownall on the western shore of Penobscot Bay in 1759. Joshua Bailey was among the 100 men from southern New England who participated in the three-month construction crew, and his journal attests that the project aimed to displace Wabanaki power. When he reached the site, their first task was to set the “‘bounds’ … between the nations.”²⁰ Bailey was confident that Massachusetts Governor Thomas Pownall, the expedition’s leader and the fort’s namesake, would subdue the Indians. While en route at another fort, Bailey reported that an Indigenous scalp was brought in by James Cargill, who had led a massacre of twelve Penobscots at Owl’s Head in July 1755. Initially jailed for that killing spree, Cargill was released and promoted to militia captain when the Phips Proclamation declared war on the Penobscots four months later.

Like most British forts strung along the coast of the Northeastern Borderlands, the modest Fort Pownall combined multiple functions. Direct military operations were rare from such lightly staffed outposts. While they threated force, such sites most effectively advanced colonialism as centers of regulated Indian trade and as stimulants to colonial settlements. When Massachusetts Governor Francis Bernard acquired a personal interest in the region, after the legislature granted him Mt. Desert Island, he charged Joseph Chadwick with determining the most optimal route for a road from Fort Pownall up the Penobscot River to Quebec City in 1764. Chadwick relied on the Wabanaki for assistance, but they were reluctant to lead him into the interior. Indeed, they were so “jealous of their country being exposed by this survey” that a two-day “fray” erupted among Penobscots, several of whom refused to guide him beyond the major community at Penawabskik (modern-day Indian Island), some forty miles upriver from Fort Pownall. The remaining guides forbade Chadwick from using surveying equipment, explaining, “when they were among Englishmen they obeyed their commands and now best way you do obey Indian orders.” Chadwick did not reach Quebec, but he learned about the Wabanaki transportation infrastructure, especially that the Penobscot River allowed swift communication that connected the St. Lawrence, Kennebec, and St. John River systems.²¹

The situation at Fort Pownall in September 1767 underscores the tentative claim that the British had in the Wabanaki homeland even after the Seven Years War. Returning from a visit to look after the governor’s interests at Mt. Desert Island, Thomas Goldthwaite, the fort’s commander, found a dangerous situation. Livestock had been killed, and local colonists fled to the fort for protection. Goldthwaite warned that the Indians had “never been so open and daring in their insults.” They were emboldened because large numbers of Wabanaki from the tip of Nova Scotia to the outskirts of Quebec City had traveled to the Penobscot to assert their control over twelve rivers in the region. Among them was a St. Francis Indian named Philip, who claimed to carry a letter from British Indian superintendent William Johnson in New York. Philip promised to return the next day with the letter and 300 Indians, and Goldthwaite prepared for an attack.²²

The small party that arrived with Philip the next day did not launch an assault, but what they said upset Goldthwaite. The Penobscot leader Espequeunt had just returned from a two-week stay in Canada, where he had met with a French gentleman who spoke of yet another European war. A Penobscot woman named Osa, who had Goldthwaite’s confidence, assured him that the Penobscots did not plan to war immediately, but she confirmed that they were upset about the growing British presence and colonists “hunting and settling upon their Rivers.” Philip became the scapegoat for these tensions, and the Penobscots reaffirmed their commitment to the British in the resonant terms of the 1760 treaty between the Mi’kmaq and Nova Scotia, to “peace and friendship with us.” Nevertheless, Goldthwaite feared the Wabanaki; his garrison was weak, and the Penobscots knew it.²³

The Wabanaki Confederacy, which took shape gradually around 1700, endured into the early 1870s, and was reconstituted a century later, mitigated colonial dispossession.²⁴ Importantly, the confederacy extended beyond the four Algonquian-speaking Wabanaki groups to include several other First Nations and linked them to additional inter-tribal alliances. Especially significant were adjacent Indigenous groups to the south and west who had been forced off their land by rapid settler expansion up the fertile valleys from the Hudson to the Kennebec rivers. Many Abenaki, who had been pushed out of what are now Vermont, New Hampshire, and southern Maine, resettled along the St. Lawrence River in Catholic mission communities such as St. Francis (Odanak) and Bécancour (Wôlinak), where they participated in the Indigenous confederation of the Seven Nations of Canada. These communities had strong ties with Algonquian-speaking Odawas (Ottawas), who joined the Wabanaki Confederacy from their homeland around Lake Huron. The confederacy also bridged the Algonquian–Iroquoian linguistic divide with its triennial convention at the Catholic Mohawk community of Kahnawake (near Montreal), which, of course, had its foundation in Haudenosaunee traditions. While much of Wabanaki life revolved around family bands and clans that structured tribes and nations, larger confederacies were necessary to resist colonialism.

The extraordinary testimony given by an Indigenous person to Thomas Goldthwaite at the Penobscot Bay outpost of Fort Pownall in 1771 offers a tantalizing glimpse into how Indigenous–imperial alliances, warfare, and enslavement connected the Northeastern Borderlands to the continental interior. This man’s natal community was among the Mataugwesauwacks, far to the west of Lake Superior, and he had been taken in battle by enemies of his people and “sold for a Slave as is the Custom.” He was then exchanged among multiple native groups before being owned by a master of the Widauwack nation, who “had intercourse with the French.” Next, he was sold into military service to fight with the French in 1759 at the Battle of Quebec, where he met Penobscot warriors. He ended up being baptized as a Catholic, marrying a Penobscot woman, and in 1771 described his extraordinary journey to Goldthwaite, who, in turn, shared the information about large martial groups on the North American plains with his military superiors.²⁵

The trajectory of this Indigenous informant who married into the Penobscot nation was made possible, in part, by the integrative function of the Wabanaki Confederacy. As John Allan, a key Indian agent on the contested Maine–New Brunswick border, explained two decades later, Wabanaki “correspondence & intercourse” stretched from Canada [Quebec] to the “Mickmack Country.” Thanks to the “very easy conveyance by the Lakes, rivers and Streams,” a “natural propensity for roving,” and “universal” intermarriage from the Miramichi River to St. Francis (Odanak), “an Indian can hardly be found past 30 years of age but is acquaint’d and known within this circle.”²⁶ Colonial assaults on the Wabanaki had raged almost continuously since the 1670s, yet their networks and traditional practices of mobility sustained them in their homeland.

The American Revolution and Intensifying Colonial Mobilities

When the American War of Independence began in April 1775, the Northeastern Borderlands immediately drew strategic attention. Most English-speaking colonists in the Wabanaki homeland had ambivalent attitudes toward the conflict far to the south, and Indigenous nations held the balance of power between the Kennebec River and Halifax. Goldthwaite surrendered Fort Pownall’s artillery to British naval forces and would soon become an ardent Loyalist. Nonetheless, he convincingly defended his actions to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which had few options other than to rely on him as the sole colonial authority in the Penobscot Bay region. John Lane, an Indian negotiator sent there by the Provincial Congress, reported invaluable assistance from Goldthwaite and was especially optimistic about a local meeting that “gave me the greatest assurance” of being able “to engage the St. François tribe” as rebel allies. Some fifteen years after its founding, Fort Pownall clung to a tenuous colonial toehold.²⁷

Just after Lane’s visit, Maine militia destroyed the fort to prevent the British from occupying it. Most of its former inhabitants resettled on the nearby eastern shore of Penobscot Bay at Majabigwaduce (also known as Bagaduce and Penobscot, and, after the war, Castine), where the community’s status as Patriot, Loyalist, or neutral was uncertain.²⁸ That the militia leader who destroyed the fort was James Cargill, who had spearheaded anti-Indian violence in the region since the 1750s, must have given Penobscots grave concerns about a future Patriot order.²⁹ Continental Army forces under Benedict Arnold had begun their trek up the Kennebec River to Quebec City with five Penobscot guides, and rebel privateers attacked British ships and communities around the Bay of Fundy, even burning the remains of Fort Frederick at the mouth of the Saint John River, and seizing three small British naval vessels at Machias. This triggered the October 1775 destruction of Falmouth (modern-day Portland), the largest city in the Eastern District of Massachusetts, as Maine was known at the time. Long before the Declaration of Independence, the Northeastern Borderlands suffered significant violence, severe food shortages, roiling uncertainty about political allegiance, and intensified forced migration.

The first notable Loyalist outmigration from Maine followed the bombardment of Falmouth by the Royal Navy and the subsequent plundering of the city’s rubble by rebel militia from neighboring towns. Suspicion and abuse from all sides was more than many Loyalists could bear. Eighteen of them had pledged to Governor Thomas Hutchinson to work against “indecent reflections on the Administration” in February 1774, only to learn that he was about to depart Massachusetts for London, where he would live in exile for the rest of his life. When the letter from his Falmouth supporters was found in his country house by rebel plunderers over a year later, the Provincial Congress published it to expose the “pernicious conduct” of Falmouth Loyalists. With the destruction of their town two months later, many fled to Boston, now administered by Governor-General Thomas Gage. Then, when the British evacuated Boston in March 1776, most Loyalists there departed for Halifax, the staging ground for lasting British control of New York City from September 1776 to November 1783. The Loyalist diaspora from Maine began early, and, like prototypical refuge movements, included multiple migrations.³⁰

The critical period from 1774 to 1776 brought repeated Wabanaki requests for better access to trading opportunities, sharp limits on new settlement, and the placement of resident Roman Catholic priests with the tribes. The capstone of these negotiations came when the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and representatives of the Maliseet and Mi’kmaq Nations held a conference that produced the Treaty of Alliance and Friendship at Watertown on July 19, 1776, which marked the first recognition of US independence by any sovereign nation.³¹ The lead Wabanaki negotiator, Maliseet chief Ambroise (Bear) Saint-Aubin, would prove a staunch Patriot ally until his death in 1780. He was joined by two other Maliseet signers as well as signers from seven Mi’kmaq bands, among whom the treaty proved especially divisive.

As Patriot forces hurriedly prepared for an anticipated battle for control of New York City in August 1776, lead Massachusetts negotiator James Bowdoin felt confident about the Wabanaki alliance. He wrote to General George Washington that he expected to raise a regiment of 500 Indians and 250 Americans, who would receive equal pay, as per the terms of the treaty. Even though Penobscots had not been signatories, Bowdoin felt that they were the strongest of the Wabanaki allies, and “looked upon themselves to be one people with us.” To raise these troops, Massachusetts sent negotiators to the four Wabanaki tribes as well as to tribes at St. Francis. Indigenous enlistments never met Patriot expectations in terms of sheer numbers. Still, it is worth noting that warriors were sent from a range of places: three Mi’kmaq communities (one from distant Gaspé) and one Maliseet had left for New York City from the treaty conference itself. They were joined by seven Penobscots in October, even though their guides on the disastrous Arnold Expedition (two of them wounded and three imprisoned) had not been paid for their service. This handful of warriors and the hope for more remained so critical to General Washington that on the eve of his famous crossing of the Delaware River, he wrote to the Maliseet and Passamaquoddy Nations urging them to keep the “chain of friendship” and to communicate to the Mi’kmaq to do the same.³²

The situation on the Penobscot River, however, was not as secure as Bowdoin and Washington hoped from afar. Rumors of an overland British attack from Quebec, and Massachusetts’s attempts to remove settlers from above the head of tide in deference to Penobscot sovereignty sparked local fears. The settler Jeremiah Colburn was opposed to leaving the land above the falls that he had improved since 1774, and he also called for the creation of a joint unit of Penobscot and settler rangers, not out of a sense of common cause but because Indians were “in no means to be trusted alone.” Meanwhile, Penobscots demanded better access to coastal hunting areas because a possible British attack from the north made them “afraid to go back in the Limits of Canada as we use to do.”³³ The war intensified Massachusetts’s dependence on Wabanaki allies, which, in turn, increased conflict between settlers and their distant government. Animosity among settlers also spiked as they accused one another of loyalism, particularly by trading with the British for desperately needed provisions in defiance of rebel prohibitions.

Local conflict intensified when a large British force landed on the eastern shore of Penobscot Bay at Majabigwaduce in June 1779 and began to build Fort George. British expansion into the Wabanaki homeland was a direct response to the Franco–American alliance in the American War of Independence that had brought a French fleet and troops to Rhode Island the previous summer. This was a major turning point, especially for Wabanakis, many of them French-speaking Catholics, who had struggled internally about their allegiance in the Anglo–American civil war. At key Indian conferences with all four major Wabanaki groups at Machias and Passamaquoddy in summer 1778, the US Superintendent for Eastern Indians, John Allan, reported on the westward movement of many bands from the Saint John River to Machias, and on the strong commitment of Indigenous nations on the St. Lawrence to attack the British. In short, Allan felt that “the Indians are prodigiously roused, thro’ every Tribe” by the Franco–American alliance, “war seems to be the Cry from all Quarters.”³⁴

The large British force in the region quickly secured support from settlers through an amnesty proclamation that reached far-flung coastal towns that were well-integrated by sea. Fort George was initially staffed by 450 troops from the 74th Regiment, primarily raised in the Scottish Highlands, and another 200 of the 82nd Regiment, raised at Lanarkshire, in and around Glasgow. They would be joined in 1782 by Brunswick and Anspach-Bayreuth troops from continental Europe. The Hanoverian tone of colonization in the Northeastern Borderlands continued with the diverse armed forces at Fort George.³⁵

Dr. John Calef, who had lobbied the British government for more robust colonization on the Penobscot since the mid-1760s, moved to the region as a Loyalist refugee about a year before British forces arrived. Meanwhile, his fellow Penobscot land speculator, John Nutting, carried Secretary of State George Germain’s orders to create a new colony from the Penobscot to St. Croix Rivers to General Henry Clinton in New York. This colony of New Ireland, in the heart of the Wabanaki homeland, was to offer a haven for “distressed American subjects,” who had been abused “by the violence of the rebellious rulers in the revolted provinces.”³⁶ Massachusetts responded to the British advance in the borderlands with remarkable speed, raising a large force of thirty-seven ships and as many as 3,000 men, who arrived in Penobscot Bay in late July, just five weeks after the British. The Penobscot Expedition’s effort to defeat the British utterly failed and has even been described as the worst US naval loss prior to Pearl Harbor. The rag-tag rebel armada fled upriver from British naval reinforcements, destroyed their own ships in the chaotic retreat, and then fled on foot back to southern New England, many supported by Penobscot guides who took them on an interior route to the Kennebec River. The Patriot retreat was dependent on the Penobscot Nation, and rebel General Solomon Lovell noted that Wabanaki assistance was conditional. “I found myself obliged to promise them a truck house on [the] Kennebec River which was the first Article they insisted.” This led to the re-establishment of Fort Halifax as a trading site, where the Recollect priest Juniper Berthiaune would later be assigned by the French consul. Several Penobscot bands relocated there for winters during the war, a return to a vital part of their homeland that had been devastated by the Norridgewock Massacre in 1724.³⁷

Fort George and New Ireland remained a British stronghold throughout the war, effectively challenging rebel authority on the coast to its west in a contact zone that suffered harrowing violence. The closest study of loyalism in this region judges persecution by Patriots to have been the major spur to overt loyalism and concludes that Penobscot-area Loyalists wielded effective counter-revolutionary violence with British support from the fort.³⁸ To the east, the rebels were even weaker. Patriot John Allan and his Wabanaki allies held out in increasing isolation at Machias, especially once the British overcame some initial hesitancy and actively recruited Wabanaki allies. Allan’s foil in Nova Scotia was Michael Francklin. As a former Mi’kmaq captive, Francklin possessed considerable cultural knowledge; as an influential Halifax merchant and landowner who had served as lieutenant governor, he also had resources. Charges of corruption and financial reversals had diminshed his status, but as a French and Mi’kmaq speaker, Francklin was well positioned once he was named Indian Superintendent for Nova Scotia in 1777. He also benefitted from the assistance of two able partners on the Saint John River: Captain Gilfred Studholme and Father Joseph-Mathurin Bourg. Studholme oversaw the construction of Fort Howe near the mouth of the river in 1777–78. The fort would host major Wabanaki conferences in 1778 and 1780. Bourg, who was equally crucial to Francklin, was an Acadian who had been deported at the age of eleven in 1755. He had lived in Virginia, England, and France before moving to Quebec in 1772, and in 1774 he began serving as a Catholic missionary in British Nova Scotia. At the 1778 conference, Father Bourg threatened Maliseets and Mi’kmaqs with excommunication if they allied with the rebels. Allan believed that generous British diplomatic gifts, a pardon for past support of the rebels, and the “spiritual threats of the priest” combined “to stagger the most zealous [Wabanaki] for America.”³⁹

While the war went well for the British across the Northeastern Borderlands after 1777, and New Ireland succored Loyalist refugees, the debacle at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781 triggered a sudden collapse in popular support for the war in Britain and ended Lord Frederick North’s ministry. This stunning reversal would be matched and even exceeded in Loyalist eyes by the terms of the peace treaty two years later. British diplomats granted generous concessions to the rebels to limit French spoils. Loyalists were appalled by Article V of the treaty, with its tepid assurances that Congress would try to limit the abuse of Loyalists by state authorities and local mobs. Loyalists and soldiers at Fort George were thunderstruck that the St. Croix River, some 130 miles to their east, had been established as the boundary between the US and the remaining provinces of British North America. What had been the point of their military success and of the brief colonial experiment of New Ireland?

The refugees who had settled near Fort George during the war suffered forced migration once again. Most of them headed to an analogous location on the east side of Passamaquoddy Bay, and in doing so they relocated from the Penobscot homeland to that of the Passamaquoddy tribe. The basic geography of this area was so little understood by Euro–Americans that disputes over the international border would continue into the 1840s.⁴⁰ Although wartime allegiances were highly contingent, the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy more consistently committed themselves to the Patriots than had their Maliseet and Mi’kmaq brethren in the Wabanaki Confederacy. The vigor of Machias as a Patriot–Wabanaki stronghold helped to ensure that postwar Loyalist settlements would have to be farther east in more-certain British terrain. Just like Loyalists who moved east during and after the war, many Passamaquoddy and Maliseets migrated west to collaborate with John Allan. In doing so, they shared the forced migration route of Nova Scotia rebels such as Allan himself, who spent most of the war at Machias and later settled on Treat Island in western Passamaquoddy Bay.

The agents sent by Loyalists from Fort George to locate a new site for their postwar settlement infuriated Allan, who insisted that the place that they selected was not on the eastern side of the St. Croix River, as named by Samuel Champlain in 1604 and referenced in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Those who left New Ireland founded the town of St. Andrews, soon the seat of Charlotte County, New Brunswick, some sixty miles west of scattered older colonial settlements at the mouth of the Saint John River. The newcomers raised about sixty houses at St. Andrews by January 1784, which increased to three hundred by year’s end. Famously, some of the buildings had been taken apart in New Ireland, shipped to the new settlement, and stand there today, forming part of local historical memory that still commemorates Loyalist “Landing Day” of October 3, 1783.⁴¹

The bulk of the new migrants to St. Andrews arrived in a sudden burst from May to November 1783. The British government supported them with land grants, building supplies, and provisions, which went to loyal refugees and provincial soldiers, and to individuals in disbanded British military units who chose to stay and pursue the opportunities of colonial society. Those from Fort George organized in two groups: the Penobscot Association with 649 Loyalists, and the 74th Association with 205 individuals connected to the British soldiers who chose not to return to Scotland. The Loyalist refugees were overwhelmingly women and children (only 12 percent were adult men), and even the military group was a notably domestic migration, with 39 percent women and children.⁴² Out of nearly 11,000 total Loyalist settlers in the new province of New Brunswick in the final provisioning account of November 1785, the 1,940 individuals at Passamaquoddy were the second-largest concentration, essentially on par with those in the newly incorporated city of Saint John and its immediate environs. Given a total prewar New Brunswick population of about 3,000 colonists, plus another 2,000 or so Acadians on the margins of British society, Loyalist refugees lastingly transformed what had been mainland Nova Scotia.⁴³

St. Andrews was built on the site of Qonasqamkuk, long a principal settlement of the Passamaquoddy, who defended their homeland. The Wabanaki Confederacy held a conference on Passamaquoddy Bay on November 6, 1783, to oppose the emergent postwar order. Allan demanded that US and Massachusetts officials support their wartime allies. Yet, when an Anglo–American commission resolved the matter in the 1790s with the active assistance of Robert Pagan, a former Falmouth merchant and Loyalist who had moved to Fort George during the war and became a prominent leader at St. Andrews thereafter, the commission ignored the Passamaquoddy claims. As Passamaquoddies noted at the Wabanaki Confederacy conference in November, the arrival of Loyalists and decommissioned British soldiers left them “to submit & take our chances on the lakes & streams above” the bay. The current seat of the Passamaquoddy tribal government at Sipayik (Pleasant Point, Maine) is a direct result of their forced dislocation from what became St. Andrews.⁴⁴

The War of 1812 included a return of British military control to Fort George on the Penobscot River as well as to Moose Island (Eastport, Maine), just below Sipayik on the western side of Passamaquoddy Bay, where the British remained until 1818, three years after the treaty ending the war had been negotiated. The contest to control the region always included active roles for Wabanakis. When a Euro–American war loomed once again in 1839, this time over rival claims by Maine and New Brunswick to lucrative timber stands on the upper Saint John River, the Wabanaki mobilized in ways that they had honed for centuries to blunt the impact of colonialism. Noting that he did so on behalf of his whole tribe, Penobscot Lieutenant Governor John Attean requested that Indian funds controlled by the Maine government “send two delegates to Quebec to prevail on the Indians in that quarter to remain neutral in the present disturbances between the Provinces and this State.” Two months earlier, as part of the same conflict, fifteen Maliseet men from New Brunswick had petitioned the Maine legislature to support the relocation of their family bands to part of their homeland now in Maine. The Maliseet petitioners were “driven by the barbarity of the British from our settlement on the St. Johns River,” likely the Tobique Reserve about 100 miles north of Fredericton. They hoped to secure at least 500 acres on the Moose River, where it enters the western side of Moosehead Lake, over 200 miles to the west. The petitioners had support from settlers in the nearby town of Monson, yet the legislature rejected the Maliseet request in 1839. Their ties to the area persist – in 2013, the Kineo Band of Maliseets initiated an unsuccessful request for Maine state recognition, renewing their bid in 2020.⁴⁵

Mixed Mobilities and Fixed Borders in the Wabanaki Homeland Today

The long struggle to define boundaries and to firmly fix groups to places in the Wabanaki homeland continues to the present. The Maine Indian Land Claims Act of 1980 remains actively contested, and the implications of a Canadian tribunal’s 2017 decision in favor of Madawaska Maliseet land claims are still unfolding. Both relied heavily on treaties and related developments during the age of wars and revolutions. Maliseet success before the tribunal hinged on land set aside for them in a 1787 New Brunswick survey that sought to accommodate Loyalist and Acadian settlement on the upper Saint John River. For Penobscots, crucial legal precedents lay in treaties with state authorities in 1796, 1818, and 1833 (all in violation of the federal Non-Intercourse Act of 1790) that severely diminished the tribal homeland of the 1750s. Meanwhile, the Passamaquoddy position in 1980 was bolstered by their recently rediscovered 1794 treaty with Massachusetts, negotiated when the river that formed the international boundary between the US and British North America (both in non-ceded Wabanaki territory) had not been definitively established.⁴⁶

The age of wars and revolutions from the 1750s to the 1830s brought intensive forced migration to the Northeastern Borderlands. Acadians, Loyalists, and Wabanakis all moved under pressure in this time and place, and their paths frequently intersected and affected one another. While mobility was often linked to trauma, it also offered opportunities. This is especially clear in the case of Loyalists with their powerful imperial sponsor; yet Acadian and Wabanaki mobility was also more than just a badge of victimhood and conquest. The Grand Dérangement was a brutal violation, but Acadians did not succumb to it as a final solution. The strongest concentration of Acadian settlement in the Northeast today lies along the transnational Saint John River and in coastal New Brunswick, including the francophone city of Moncton, ironically named after British General Robert Monckton, who led brutal anti-Acadian campaigns. For Wabanaki individuals and communities, mobility was a refashioned traditional practice to weather the onslaught of colonialism. Migration helped Wabanaki people avoid genocide. Penobscot nation member James E. Francis’s powerful aforementioned painting We Walk On; Eternally (Figure 2.1) announces Wabanaki people as an increasingly forceful presence in the public life of the Northeastern Borderlands today.

When the artist Fitz Henry Lane visited Fort George in the 1850s, local residents no longer called their town Bagaduce, Majabigwaduce, or even Penobscot. Those names had been rejected after the Revolutionary War as too tainted by loyalism and Patriot military failure. As James Parker explained in a July 4, 1796, oration, those names would “never form an honourable trait in the history of our country” and needed to “be rescued from dishonor” so that “history not be ashamed to admit it within her pages.”⁴⁷ The town’s postwar name of Castine commemorated the early French colonial presence in the area, especially that of Baron de Saint-Castin, who had arrived on the Penobscot in 1670 and became an influential settler and trader, and whose adoption by the Penobscots and marriage to a tribal member helped him to become a cross-cultural leader. Nearly two centuries after Saint-Castin’s arrival, Lane painted a local landscape that shows Castine from the perspective of Fort George and documents the presence of two Penobscot women, dressed in Victorian style, selling baskets to an Anglo–American woman (Figure 2.2). As the scene suggests, Wabanaki basket makers continued a traditional cultural practice and drew upon new artistic and commercial means to help sustain their people in transformed circumstances. Penobscots maintained a seasonal presence at Majabigwaduce, camping on the cove just below the fort in order to harvest sweetgrass for future use and to sell baskets made the previous year. Lane’s friend John Stevens noted seeing five Penobscot family camps at the cove in September 1852.⁴⁸

Figure 2.2 Fitz Henry Lane, Castine, Maine (1856), detail. Oil on canvas, 53.66 × 85.09 cm (21 1/8 × 33 1/2 in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Maxim Karolik, 64.437.

Photograph © 2024. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Exile and suffering are resonant dimensions of forced mobility, yet they can mask how migration, even when under duress, can also lead to opportunity. Large-scale human movement was the fundamental engine of colonialism, and perhaps no group on the planet has escaped its ever-widening impact. Voluntary and coerced migration combine along a broad spectrum, and mixed mobilities flourished with extraordinary intensity in the Wabanaki homeland starting in the 1750s. A comparative perspective on forced migrations in this region highlights that refugees were far from unique or exceptional. Rather, they were quotidian figures whose movements and actions helped to create the modern world, and who remain a familiar presence in a world distressed by war, economic inequality, and climate change.

The Acadian deportation at the start of the Seven Years War, and their decades-long movement throughout the Atlantic world, and the Loyalist diaspora during and after the American War of Independence are usually set at a distant remove from one another, and they have almost never been considered in the context of Wabanaki mobility, even though the Acadians, the Loyalists, and the Wabanaki shared a stage in the Northeastern Borderlands. Their situations were never the same, indeed their interests often directly conflicted, yet the strength of national and imperial claims in the nineteenth century has obscured the deeply colonial calculus that shaped their interconnected mobilities. Everyone who engaged colonial societies understood their world to have been created from the rewards and consequences of the physical movement of large population groups across local, regional, and Atlantic spaces. This was a world on the move, and those who lived in colonial settings had to migrate as circumstances demanded and allowed. They did so with a keen strategic sense that mobility involved losses, risks, and opportunities.