APPENDICES VIII
In the notes to the edition of Mr. Longfellow’s Poem of Evangeline, published in London in 1853, I find the following statement. Speaking of the Acadian exiles, the annotator says :
« One thousand arrived in Massachusetts Bay, and became a public expense, owing in a great degree to an unchangeable antipathy to their situation, which prompted them to reject the usual beneficiary but humiliating establishment of paupers for their children. They landed in a most deplorable condition at Philadelphia. The government of the colony, to relieve itself of the charge such Company of miserable wretches would require to maintain them, proposed to sell them with their own consent ; but when this expedient for their support was offered for their consideration, the neutrals refused it with indignation, alleging that they were prisoners, and expected to be maintained as such, and not forced to labor. »
No Pennsylvanian can read this remarkable statement of what is assumed to be an historical fact, without blush deeper than any other imputed misdeed excites, and as certainly will Pennsylvanians feel some solicitude to know if it be true or not. To show that it is utterly without foundation is the object of this little essay, in which, only incidentally do I mean to speak of that familiar tale of sorrow — the exile of the Acadian neutrals in 1755. On reading the note which I have quoted my first desire was to know how far Mr. Longfellow was responsible for it, and a Cambridge friend, of whom I made the inquiry, assured me that the poet disavowed all knowledge of it, the notes having first appeared
