Hugh Mason Wade was born in New York City on 3 July 1913 and died in his seventy-third year at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire on 6 January 1986. For the majority of his adult life he had worked to understand Canada, more especially French Canada, both Acadia and Quebec.

His father, Alfred B. Wade, was also born in New City in December 1874. On 3 June 1907 he married Helena Mein, of Philadelphia. It was a “mixed” marriage: Alfred was an Episcopalian and Helena a Roman Catholic. Their four children were raised in the Catholic church; their three...

Writing in 1976, Carl Berger chose not to discuss French-Canadian writing in his account of twentieth-century Canadian historians. “The two language traditions have, in historical thought . . . occasionally touched and intersected but in general have been preoccupied with the backgrounds to two ... different ‘nations’”.¹ Berger’s judgment stands. With few exceptions, Canadian historians have respected the cultural divide between the historical traditions of Quebec and those of English-speaking Canada.

Two historians from the United States have not: Francis Parkman in the nineteenth century and Mason Wade in the mid-twentieth. Both made Quebec and its inhabitants the object of...

Mason Wade’s monumentalThe French Canadians 1760-1945was published in 1956. He then began to work on yet another major study, “The French in North America,” which, though completed, would never be published. An important part of this manuscript dealt with the Acadians of the Maritime Provinces. Mason Wade decided in the early 1960s to transform his Acadian section into a major book, which he provisionally entitled “The Maritime Melting Pot.” This book, like theFrench Canadians,was to cover the broad survey of Maritime development, from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth. A...

After the warnings you have received against American encroachment and cultural invasion, it is with some trepidation that I, as a damned Yankee, ormaudit Bastonnais,venture some observations on French Canada, following after the eloquent statements you have heard today from the most authoritative spokesmen of Quebec and Acadia. When I learned the task that had been assigned to me in this Institute, and the distinguished speakers who were to precede me, I concluded that my anti-climactic function was to be a burnt offering if any friction should develop between the views of Quebec and Acadian spokesmen, or rather...

As early as the summer of 1756 it became evident that the expulsion of the Acadians and their dispersal among the English seaboard colonies was not working out as Governor Charles Lawrence and Chief Justice Jonathan Belcher of Nova Scotia had anticipated. While he learned that the Acadians were returning ‘by Coasting from Colony to Colony’, Lawrence issued another circular to the ‘Governors of the Continent’:

... as their success in this enterprise would not only frustrate the design of his Government in sending them away at so prodigious an expense, but would also greatly endanger the security of the...

From its known beginnings, the Acadian region was the scene of interaction between French and English, and French and English had been living together there under British rule for half a century when New France finally passed into British hands in 1760 with the Capitulation in Montreal. This past has done much to shape the present, and so must be summed up here, before entering upon the detailed history of the later period with which this work is chiefly concerned. Whether or not the Vikings made an early settlement at Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland, ocean-going fishermen from France and Britain had...

Overshadowed by the massive influx of Loyalists in 1783 and 1784, the earlier pre-Loyalist immigrants from the American colonies tend to be the forgotten people of Maritime history. They were not as many in number, but they set an enduring stamp on the region which was noted in the 1830s by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, “the old stock comes from New England, and the breed is tolerably pure yet, near about one half apple sauce, and the other half molasses, all except to the Eastward where there is a cross of the Scotch.”¹

Acadia had long been “New England’s Outpost,” as...

The coming of some 35,000 Loyalists to the Maritime Provinces had even more drastic effects upon the English-French society which had been slowly developing in the region since 1713 than did the arrival of some 6,000 of them in the old Province of Quebec. The arrival of the Loyalists did not create, as it did in Quebec, an Anglo-French society in the Maritimes. There was already one there. It did, however, make permanent the alteration in the balance between French and English in the Maritimes which had resulted from the deportation of the majority of the Acadians in 1755. In...

In the most emotional and condemnatory review ofThe French-Canadians, 1760-1945,Richard Arès, S.J., gave a bit of advice to Mason Wade. He suggested reflection on the wisdom of Plato, that one must seek the truth with one’s whole soul. The most thorough research and the most brilliant intellect were not sufficient to truly understand a community. To do so one had to get into the very skin of a people. Moreover, in the words of Arès: “ll faut y mettre un peu, peut-être aussi beaucoup de son coeur. À l’oeuvre de Mason Wade, il aura précisément manqué un peu...