Genetics of the Acadian People
Dr. Carl A. Brasseaux
Center for Acadian Studies
University of Louisiana-Lafayette
Delivered at the Community Health Event
Genetics of the Acadian People
9 August 1999
at a Symposium at McNeese State University
in Lake Charles, LA
For nearly four centuries, the Acadian extended family and the group cohesiveness that it engendered have played a pivotal role in the community's formation, preservation, and continuous adaptation to ever-changing environmental pressures. The extended family's role as a social catalyst is seen quite clearly in the formation of a shared identity in the French colony established along the Bay of Fundy during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Between 1604 and the mid-1630s, Acadia was populated by small numbers of Huguenot adventurers. These French frontiersmen were supplanted in the mid-1630s by immigrants recruited by the colony's new, Catholic-controlled proprietary administration.
Most of these new recruits were drawn from a remarkably compact geographical region in northwestern Poitou province. At least 55 percent-and possibly 70 percent-of Acadia's seventeenth-century immigrants were natives of either the Centre-Ouest provinces of Poitou, Aunis Angoumois, and Saintonge or the province of Anjou, in an adjacent geographical region. All of these ancien régime provinces were located southeast and east-southeast of Brittany. Forty-seven percent were drawn from the La Chaussée area alone. At least twenty-two of the fifty-two families listed in the 1671 census of Acadia-42.3 percent of the total-were drawn from the estate of Charles Menou d'Aulnay, acting governor of Acadia for most of the proprietary period. Because of the highly circumscribed world of seventeenth-century French peasants, it is hardly surprising that significant numbers of the immigrants were allied by marriage before leaving the mother country. Historian Naomi Griffiths notes that "Nine or ten early families had been allied by marriage before migrating from France to Acadia."
The approximately 350 French immigrants of the 1630s constituted the nucleus of Acadia's early colonial population. Because of this core group's remarkable cohesiveness and fecundity, their demographic dominance persisted despite the trickle of French immigrants into Acadia between 1671 and 1713, In 1671, the La Chaussée-area families constituted between forty and fifty-four percent of the total Acadian population, depending upon whether or not those probably recruited in the Aulnay estate/Loudun area are included in the total. By the twentieth century, their descendants had come to constitute between eighty and ninety percent of the total Acadian population in the Canadian Maritimes, and a corresponding proportion of Louisiana's Acadian population.
Family alliances were of crucial importance to the creation of a new frontier society, for the "interrelated families assimilated all immigrants through intermarriage." Intermarriage between the recently established and immigrant populations was facilitated because both groups shared a common regional language and socio-economic background: Approximately 77 percent of Acadia's French immigrants had derived from the laboureur class, the highest rung in France's peasant society.
Because French immigration slowed to a trickle after 1654, the dominance of the original families remained intact, as the descendants of the founding families of the 1630s continuously intermarried over four successive generations. As the colony expanded, satellite communities were routinely established by five-to-ten families bound together by blood ties. In the satellite communities, the original pattern of community formation repeated itself as immigrants married into more established families. As a consequence, by the 1670s, the entire community was interrelated to such an extent that Acadian society had come to constitute a single, large clan.
Close family ties were instrumental in allowing the Acadian families to unite against common challenges. For example, in order to reclaim and farm the area's coastal marshes, the richest farmlands along North America's upper Atlantic coastline, the community had to build a highly complex dike system that required communal labor to build and maintain. The strengthening of social bonds within the community permitted the Acadians to weather armed warfare between armies of indentured workers mobilized by rival colonial officials as well as internal disputes generated by disputed land boundaries. It also permitted the Acadians to weather the British occupation of the colony from 1654 to 1670 and to close ranks whenever dealing with colonial officials-both French and British. Colonial administrators discovered to their dismay that, when burdened with grain and firewood quotas to support the local garrison, the Acadians closed ranks and used techniques they had employed in France to protect their interests against avaricious noblemen, specifically utilizing procrastination, subterfuge, and other forms of passive resistance to foil or disrupt unpopular policies.
The Acadian strategy was successful because the French and British garrisons were almost completely dependent upon the colonial population for food, firewood, and other necessities. In addition, the success of this resistance was bolstered by the fact that the Acadian population easily outnumbered the 500-man garrison dispersed throughout the colony. Numbering only about 350 in 1654, the remarkably prolific Acadian population had grown to 1,450 in 1701, to 7,598 in 1737, and to 12,000-18,000 in 1755-all despite a fifty- percent infant mortality rate.
The Acadian strategy regarding colonial security was far less successful. Because the colony changed hands ten times between 1605 and 1713 and because the local Native American group, the Micmac tribe, was allied with France, the Acadians insisted upon a policy of neutrality. Following Britain's permanent acquisition of the colony in 1713, Acadian neutrality made colonial authorities increasingly uneasy, in part because of the explosive growth of the French-speaking population, in part because of increasing French military activity along Nova Scotia's borders, and in part because of destructive Micmac incursions into Nova Scotia in 1750. In addition, the British government and colonists openly coveted the Acadians' lands. The matter reached a climax in 1754, when Major Charles Lawrence became acting governor of Nova Scotia. A professional soldier who had most recently served on Nova Scotia's western border strengthening the colony's defenses against the growing French military threat, Lawrence was preoccupied with the vulnerability of the colony he now commanded. And, in Lawrence's mind, the internal threat posed by the Acadians had to be crushed by means of what we would now call ethnic cleansing.
During the summer and fall of 1755, approximately 5,400 Acadians were uprooted from the principal settlements along the Bay of Fundy and dispersed among the British seaboard colonies. Deportations continued on a smaller scale in subsequent years, and, by 1760, it is estimated that approximately 6,000 Acadians had been sent into exile. (Most of the remaining Acadians fled into the Canadian wilderness, where thousands died during the first winter.)
Fate was not much kinder to those Acadians sent into exile. Conditions aboard the British transport vessels were comparable to those aboard slavers during the Middle Passage, and, once in captivity in the British seaboard colonies, the exiles endured horrific conditions because they were treated as prisoners of war without the privileges customarily accorded prisoners-of-war. As they were technically British subjects, they were denied food, shelter, and clothing. Large numbers of exiles consequently died of exposure, malnutrition, and disease. Typhus and smallpox, the twin scourges of the eighteenth century, were unknown in the Acadian homeland, but in the stagnant confines of transport vessels, these infectious diseases were particularly lethal.
During the period of Acadian wanderings that begin in 1763 and continued until the late-1780s, this scenario was repeated as the exiles succumbed to malnutrition, exposure, and disease at each new port of call during their quest for a refuge in the West Indies, South America, Europe, St. Pierre and Miquelon, the Falkland Islands, and, ultimately, Louisiana. As a consequence, fifty years would pass before the Acadian population worldwide would reach 12,000, the minimal estimate of the pre-dispersal population. It is hard to overstate the demographic impact of the Grand Dérangement; Canadian demographers estimated in the late 1970s that the size of the modern Acadian population is approximately 16 percent of what it would have been if the Grand Dérangement had not taken place.
Despite the physical and emotional trauma endured by the exiles during the dispersal and the subsequent period of wanderings, the Acadians' spirit remained unbroken because the exiles drew upon their familial networks for mutual support. Although Acadian extended families were broken up by the 1755 diaspora, exiles found themselves surrounded by relatives when they reached distant, unfriendly shores.
These fragmented family networks were still clearly in evidence when the first Acadian exiles reached Louisiana in 1764 and 1765. The first large group of Acadians arrived unannounced at New Orleans around late February 1765. This group was composed of the survivors of the Acadian resistance movement that had organized armed paramilitary bands to resist British efforts to eradicate the thousands of refugees hiding in present-day New Brunswick. Most of the earliest Acadian immigrant households were complex, often multi-generational. Households headed by healthy young males often included widowed grandmothers or mothers-in-law, siblings, particularly spinster sisters, and orphans. These multigenerational households survived, and eventually thrived, because they reestablished in Louisiana traditional Acadian communal work details, communal harvest, communal butcheries, neighborhood dances, and other forms of cooperative social interaction based upon the extended family.
The 1765 immigrants clearly viewed Louisiana as a haven in which the Acadians could reconstruct their shattered society. In instructions to a retired French military engineer assigned to establish the colony's first large group of Acadian immigrants along Bayou Teche, the two leaders of Louisiana's bipolar government directed the establishment of a village at "the most suitable site" where "these new colonists wish to be reunited." Refusing to await necessary governmental authorization, the immigrants began writing relatives all over the world, inviting them to join in the establishment of a sanctuary they called New Acadia. Their letter writing campaign produced dramatic results, for approximately 3,000 exiles made their way to the bayou country from Maryland, Pennsylvania, and France between 1766 and 1785.
Upon arrival in Louisiana, Acadian immigrants usually settled in family units. In depositions given before land office officials in the early nineteenth century, Acadian exile Claude Broussard indicated that, once they had received land grants, Acadian family groups settled on a centrally located tract of land, erected "villages" of temporary shelters, and then cooperatively set about the task of clearing home sites and fields on each others lands. When the subsequent arrival of other immigrants made it impossible for their children to obtain grants on adjacent tracts, the original families moved on as family units to vacant lands were the different generations could enjoy residential propinquity. In the late eighteenth century, these transient family units typically consisted of newly reunited relatives or, more commonly, the middle-aged children of the settlers in the original Acadian sites. By establishing family clusters in new settlements, the exiles were continuing a process that they had employed in Canada. New settlements were consequently dominated by familial networks that quickly absorbed the trickle of immigrants who subsequently sought to make their homes on adjacent lands.
The social hierarchy on the lower Louisiana frontier, Louisiana's forced inheritance laws, and the topography of the early settlement sites encouraged the traditional Acadian custom of marrying within the group, a practice called endogamy by anthropologists. Although the Acadians were-and long remained-the demographically dominant group in their original settlement sites, they were by no means the only settlers there. The typical frontier settlement was located along a waterway, and the component population included white Creoles and French immigrants, who, because of their wealth and elevated social status, constituted the local elite; the Acadians, who occupied the bottom rung of white society; free persons of color, composed primarily of individuals of mixed racial background who enjoyed virtually all of the economic rights of whites, but none of the social prestige and who thus constituted a buffer between the white and black communities; and black slaves. In white society, class boundaries were fluid in the sense that they permitted upwardly mobile individuals to become part of the elite, while simultaneously allowing downwardly mobile persons to sink to the depths of the level of the yeomanry, a class dominated in most rural settlements by the Acadians. The feudalistic trappings of white Creole society dictated that marriages be arranged inside-rather than across-class lines. Hence, upwardly mobile Acadians quickly formed alliances with Creole families, while downwardly mobile white Creoles took Acadian spouses. Because women were-and remain-the principal transmitters of culture, Acadians remained the culturally dominant group in the lowest rung of white society.
Social pressure for endogamy was continuously reinforced by Louisiana's forced heirship laws and topography. Acadian immigrants routinely received land grants measuring four to eight arpents frontage by forty arpents depth. Forced heirship, which remained in effect in Louisiana from colonial times to the 1990's, mandated the equitable division of estates among surviving heirs. As a consequence, within two generations, the pioneers' long and narrow land grants were transformed into slender ribbons of land too narrow to farm. Although the properties stretched from the banks of streams, along which all pioneers were settled, to the swamps, only the natural levees on the frontlands were generally free from flooding. Hence, many colonial farmlands became densely settled "line villages" populated by extended family members. This pattern is seen today most clearly along Bayou Lafourche.
Formation of these family villages lining the waterfronts of south Louisiana's principal streams began almost immediately upon the Acadians' arrival. Extant ecclesiastical church records for the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas bear testimony to this. Because church policy forbade unions between first, second, and third cousins, many closely related prospective Acadian brides and grooms were required to pay for dispensations. It is indeed significant that Acadian exiles and their children account for 60 percent of all dispensations for consanguinity issued by the Catholic Church in all of Louisiana (the Louisiana Purchase territory), West Florida, and East Florida for the period 1786 to 1800. That figure rises to approximately 66 percent if one omits the last three months of 1800. Twenty-three percent of the applicants were first cousins; 56 percent were second cousins; and 17 percent were third cousins. To put the number of Acadian dispensations into perspective, one must note that in 1810, when the first Federal decennial census of Louisiana was compiled, Acadians constituted approximately 1/7th of the population of the Territory of Orleans, a much smaller geographic region which encompassed most of the present state with the exception of the Florida Parishes, numbering about 5,000 of the 34,065 enumerated.
All of the Acadian applications for dispensations were granted, and all were justified on the same grounds, despite notable differences between the applicants' ages and point of origin. On August 24, 1795, for example, an applicant seeking to marry his second cousin testified under oath that "in the Parish of Iberville it is publicly known that most of the neighbors are relatives." In another from 1796, the applicant maintained that "Almost all of the inhabitants of Iberville are Acadians and related so it is difficult to marry someone who is not related." Applications indicate that the situation was no different in other predominantly Acadian districts. In the Lafourche region, a 1796 Assumption Parish applicant maintained that "most of the parishioners [in Assumption] are related." In an 1800 application from the Lafourche village of Valenzuela, the prospective bridal couple was identified as "Acadians who are all related." An Opelousas gentleman in 1797 seeking to marry his second cousin justified the union on the grounds that "The district is settled by Acadians who are all related so that it would be impossible to marry anyone not related." Finally, an 1800 a resident of St. Martin Parish of the Attakapas District, justified his marriage to his second cousin by noting that "the [family] is very large and comprise a great portion of the parish. Almost all are related."
The mechanics of Acadian endogamy are readily evident in the statistics below: An analysis of all extant Acadian marriage records for south-central and southwestern Louisiana indicates that 77 percent of all Acadian unions were endogamous, but there are important gender differences. Only 68 percent of all Acadian brides took Acadian grooms; 89 percent of all Acadian grooms, however, took Acadian brides. These patterns had important implications for the community's survival. Because of the mother's acknowledged role as the principal transmitter of culture, it was the grooms' selection of Acadian spouses that ensured the group's survival, while the surprising number of exogamous marriages (marriages outside the community) by Acadian brides resulted in the rapid assimilation of smaller groups with whom the exiles came into contact.
This pattern of marital alliances persisted for the balance of the colonial period. From 1785 through 1803, 80 percent of all Acadian marriages were endogamous. Eighty-three percent of the period's 157 Acadian grooms took Acadian brides, while 76 percent of the 176 Acadian brides married within the community.
Acadian marital patterns changed significantly over the course of the ensuing decades in response to the Acadians' rapid assimilation of rival groups, changing perceptions of outsiders regarding Acadian identity, the virtual collapse of the south Louisiana economy in the wake of the Civil War, and the widening social and linguistic gulf between working-class Acadians and the white elite. Acadian assimilation of other groups through the maternal lines blurred group boundaries, making the tracking of marital alliances along ethnic lines particularly problematic for historical researchers, especially between 1850 and 1900 when the area's population increased geometrically. This problem is compounded by the fact that outside observers by the time of the Civil War came to apply the term Cajun (an Anglo corruption of Acadien ) all poor French-speakers in rural, southern Louisiana.
The erroneous perceptions of outsiders notwithstanding, group boundaries did divide the region's various Francophone communities; indeed, these boundaries persist to the present. But the harsh realities of the postbellum period did much to transcend the differences dividing the groups. In the wake of the Civil War, thousands of white yeomen were dispossessed, and Acadians found themselves reduced to tenantry, working shoulder to shoulder with Francophone tenants of other backgrounds. Because of their reduced circumstances and the increasingly negative Cajun stereotypes promulgated by the local and national media, Cajuns of all backgrounds found themselves reduced to the status of "white trash." These circumstances made it inevitable that intermarriage between Acadians and members of the region's non-Acadian Francophone community would become commonplace by World War I.
The south Louisiana marriage records bear this out. Between 1855 and 1860, marriages between persons with Acadian surnames constituted 57 percent of all marriages involving local Acadians. Fifty-six percent of all Acadian brides took an Acadian husband, but it is noteworthy that an additional 33 percent married non-Acadian Francophones. In 1900, 45 percent of all marriages involving Acadians were between Acadian partners; an additional 31 percent of these Acadian brides married non-Acadian Francophones. Larger numbers of Acadian grooms continued to marry within the community, but, for the first time in 1900, they exceeded their female counterparts in the proportions taking spouses in the non-Acadian Francophone community (35% to 31% for the women).
This trend accelerated in the early twentieth century as the Acadian community was subjected to increasing pressures to Americanize, especially through the state's mandatory, English-only educational system. This is reflected in the marriage records for St. Landry Parish, which during this period was a political bellwether because its population so accurately reflected in microcosm the state's population as a whole. Between 1920 and 1940, only 32 percent of Acadian brides and only 30 percent of all Acadian grooms selected a spouse with an Acadian surname. Exogamous marriages to individuals with non-Acadian surnames outnumbered endogamous unions, as 42 percent of Acadian brides and 40 percent of Acadian grooms married across the increasingly irrelevant ethnic boundaries originally dividing the exiles' descendants from their French-speaking neighbors.
As a result of exogamous marriages, those boundaries were being fundamentally redrawn by the late twentieth century. In a case of life emulating art, the myopic postbellum vision of travel writers and commentators has become reality in most of Acadiana, particularly in the area's metropolitan areas. Although notable cultural differences persist between the Acadians and non-Acadian French remaining in isolated rural communities on the northern and southern fringes of Acadiana, the two groups have merged, creating in the process a new synthetic amalgam. The most visible products of which are Cajun music and cuisine. The modern manifestations of both are unquestionably products of the twentieth century.
Despite these changes, the Acadian extended family system, though weakened by the increased mobility of community members and the demands of modern life upon two-income households, remains the cohesive element undergirding the society's modern evolution. The long-term health of this institution, however, is doubtful. Communal harvests, communal butcheries, and neighborhood dances-events that frequently brought extended family members together-are distant and rapidly fading memories. Yet, in most Cajun families, extended families continue to come together on a fairly regular basis. Over the last half-century, Cajun matriarchs have held extended families together by insisting that all family members gather for Sunday dinner at their homes. But most of these grandmothers are now in their seventies and eighties, and it remains to be seen whether their Baby Boomer daughters will take up the torch and continue this time-honored tradition. If they do not, then it is certain that the Acadian extended family-like its counterpart in mainstream American society-is doomed to extinction, and extended family members can expect to meet one another as strangers at weddings and funerals of relatives they have never really known.
For more reading:
The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765-1803
By Carl Brasseaux. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.
Acadian to Cajun: Transformation of a People, 1803-1877
By Carl Brasseaux. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1992.
Scattered to the Wind: Dispersal and Wanderings of the Acadians, 1755-1809
By Carl Brasseaux. Lafayette, LA: The Center for Louisiana Studies, 1991.
The Acadians: Creation of a People
By Nancy Griffiths. Toronto: McGraw Hill-Ryerson, 1973.