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On me God’s son suffered awhile.
Therefore I, glorious now, rise under heaven, and
I may heal any of those who will reverence me.
(The Dream of the Rood, 83-86)
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THE WORD rood is from the Old English word rod or pole. More specifically, it means crucifix or the cross of Jesus Christ. Later, in the middle ages, the word alternately referred to a large crucifix surmounted on the rood screen or rood beam of a church. If you find someone today who has heard of the word, it is this latter meaning they are familiar with.
However, it should not be lost on the reader that among Christians in the British colonies, no doubt the original term was still known and in use.
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IN THE EARLY MORNING hours of November 20, 1755, the schooner Leopard anchored in the Severn River outside of Annapolis, Maryland. Aboard were 178 Acadians, part of a still larger group of 11,500 that had been violently ripped from their homes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island in Canada at the hands of the British military a month earlier. (The total population of Acadians at the time was believed to have numbered slightly over 14,000.) After forty-five years of the Acadians pledging their neutrality where France and England were concerned, the British had had enough. The Acadians were rounded up, their homes burned, their livestock destroyed, and their belongings confiscated. They were tossed onto ships in October of 1755 and taken by force to the British colonies – Boston, Charleston, and other locations along the colonial seaboard. Later groups were taken to France and England. History has coined a number of terms in reference to this act of 18th century ethnic cleansing – The Great Upheaval, The Expulsion, and, as the Acadians called it – Le Grand Dèrangement.
The Acadians on the Leopard were shortly joined by other ships that also landed in Annapolis so that the Acadian population of 900 swelled to greater numbers than those living in the town at the time. They were housed in large warehouses near the harbor on Duke of Gloucester and Hanover Streets. Ill-clad, feverish and sick, and devoutly Roman Catholic, the local populace shunned them. Charles Carroll of nearby Carrollton Manor and a Catholic himself did what he could, but he was restricted at nearly every turn by the authorities, as were other local Catholics. The spring of 1756 the Maryland legislature levied a further tax on Catholics in order to be sure they had no funds available to help the Acadians. Later, the refugees were accounted for through a census, and local officials followed their movements at all times.
While the Acadians were feared and exiled largely because they were Catholic, and British attempts to proselytize them through intermarriages and education in Acadia had been unsuccessful, in the colonies they suffered not only for their faith but also because they were French. It mattered not that the Acadians did not think of themselves as French, nor that they had roots in Acadia back a hundred years and more. It helped not that five months before in July of 1755 British war hero General Edward Braddock suffered a humiliating defeat and his own death in the Battle of the Monongahela. The backcountry had afterward been overrun with French and Indians, refugees from forts and outlying settlements on the frontier poured toward Baltimore Town, and Marylanders prepared for war. Rumors circulated, fear was fomented, and even tales of the Acadians joining the French on the border to further help the war effort, and that at the request of the Roman Pontiff, were believed.
Nonetheless, local officials had to deal with the Acadian Neutrals as they came to be called. They had no wish for them to beg in the streets. They had no desire for their communities to be overrun by people merely trying to survive, and each colony was left to deal with the problem as they saw fit. So, it was decided that the 900 Acadians landing in Maryland would be dispersed throughout her territory. Some were sent to the Choptank River (Oxford.) Others were sent to the Patuxent River and Lower Marlboro, Upper Marlboro, and Port Tobacco. Still, others were taken to the Wicomico River and Princess Anne. The French Neutrals on board the Leopard were split between Annapolis and Baltimore Town (present-day Baltimore, Maryland).
In Baltimore Town, the Acadians were given the Edward Fottrell house. The first two-story and brick home in Baltimore Town, Fottrell had abandoned it two years previous to return to England. Acadians took possession of the unfinished house, routed the pigs from the premises, and promptly erected a chapel in one of the lower rooms. Despite the use of the house, however, the surrounding populace was anything but hospitable to the refugees. Some worked in local taverns and on the wharf. Weary and spent, they lived on the margins of society with few options to better themselves. They were hated for being Catholic. They were despised for being French.
It is into this world that our tale begins – as wholesale ethnic cleansing has decimated one populace, as war begins to rage amidst another, and as the French and British fight for control of a new and promising continent that must, ultimately, decide its own destiny.