they were heralded, how they arrived, how they were treated here in Philadelphia.
The first intimation in a popular form, of the intention to drive the Acadians from their homes, is in a letter from Halifax, dated August 9th, and printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette of the 4th September, 1755, the day before the memorable 5th of September, Col. Winslow’s « day of great fatigue and trouble, » when the meeting was held in the church at Grand Pre, and the doom was told. (Haliburton, vol. i, pp. 335, 338). It is as follows, and is very characteristic: —
« We are now upon a great and noble scheme of sending the neutral French out of the Province, who have always been secret enemies, and have encouraged our savages to cut our throats. If we can effect their expulsion, it will be one of the greatest things that ever did the English in America, for by all accounts, that part of he country they possess is as good land as any in the world; in case, therefore, we could get some good English farmers in their room, this Province would abound in all sorts of provisions. »
Between this date and the arrival of the exiles, I had no precise reference to the subject, though but little intermission of the inflammatory appeals to national and sectarian antipathies. It may be that the public mind was not a little excited by what seemed to be supernatural warning — an earthquake, which, in the early part of November, 1755, went round the world, devastating European cities, and at least startling those in America. The shock of an earthquake, the advent of a ship load of Roman Catholics, and the news, utterly groundless as it must have been, which I find in the newspapers of the very day the exiles came, that the Indians and French had attacked Lancaster, prepared for them a sorry welcome.
On the 19th and 20th of November, 1755, three sloops, the Hannah, the Three Friends, and the Swan, arrived in the Delaware, with the neutrals on board. They had cleared from Halifax. One of them, say the newspapers of the day, came up to town, but was immediately ordered down again. How the authorities at first received them can only be gathered from the Executive records, nothing of the action of the Assembly having survived or being accessible but its meagre journal. The Governor was Robert Hunter Morris, of whom it may at least be said that he had had his full share of those deplorable squabbles with the popular representatives which William Pen left as a continuing legacy to his family and successors. Governor Morris’s government had had also to encounter the trial of actual war close at hand. The arrival of the Neutrals seems to have thrown him into a state of terrible alarm ; and on the day the first cargo of Neutrals arrived, he thus wrote to Governor Shirley, having previously laid the matter before the Council :
« I wrote your Excellency a few days ago by Mr. Benzill, who, I hope, will find you safe at New York, since which two vessels are arrived here with upward of three hundred neutral French from Nova Scotia, who Governor Law-
