Louis MOUTON
Grand Derangement

From Steven Cormier's Acadians in Gray

acadiansingray.com

Appendices/ Mouton

Brothers Pierre, Salvator, and Louis and their families escaped the British roundup at Chignecto in 1755 and fled to Restigouche on the Gulf of St. Lawrence shore, where Louis married a sister of brother Salvator's wife in October1760. With them was Jean dit Neveu, or the Nephew, son of older brother Jacques, whose family had gone to South Carolina. The Moutons' refuge at Restigouche did not last long. In the summer of 1760, after the fall of Québec City the previous autumn and Montréal earlier that year, the British attacked the fortification at Restigouche, the last French stronghold still standing in North America. The French and Acadians at Restigouche held out until autumn, when they were compelled to surrender to overwhelming force. Pierre Mouton died in the fighting, but Salvator and Louis survived and became prisoners of war. The British held them in Fort Edward, overlooking the abandoned Acadian settlement at Pigiguit, until the end of the French and Indian War, while their wives, children, and nephew lived nearby. British officials counted Salvator and Louis and perhaps Jean dit Neveu at Annapolis Royal in 1763, where they probably were working as laborers. Later that year or in 1764, they may have ended up at Halifax with hundreds of other Acadians whom the British had been holding there for years.

When the war with Britain finally ended, the Moutons in Nova Scotia had a serious dilemma on their hands. The Treaty of Paris of February 1763 stipulated in its Article 14 that persons dispersed by the war had 18 months to return to their respective territories. In the case of the Acadians, however, this meant that they could return only to French soil. Chignecto was no longer French territory. British authorities refused to allow any of the Acadian prisoners in the region to return to their former lands as proprietors. If Acadians chose to remain in Nova Scotia, they could live only in the interior of the peninsula in small family groups and work for low wages on former Acadian lands now owned by New Englander "planters." If they stayed, they must also take the hated oath of allegiance to the new British king, George III, without reservation. They would also have to take the hated oath if they joined their cousins in the St. Lawrence valley. After all that they had suffered on the question of the oath, no self-respecting Acadian would consent to take it if it could be avoided. Some Halifax exiles chose to relocate to Miquelon, a French-controlled island off the southern coast of Newfoundland. Others considered going to French St.-Domingue, today's Haiti, where Acadian exiles in the British colonies, including Moutons, already had gone, or to the Illinois country, the west bank of which still belonged to France, or to French Louisiana, which, thanks to British control of Canada, was the only route possible to the Illinois country for Acadian exiles. Whatever their choice, they would not remain in old Acadia. So the Moutons in Nova Scotia gathered up what money they could and prepared to leave their homeland.





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