It included the modern Canadian Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, along with part of the US state of Maine.

[10] As a result, the British sought to eliminate any future military threat posed by the Acadians and to permanently cut the supply lines they provided to Louisbourg by removing them from the area.

Along with the British achieving their military goals of destroying the fortress of Louisbourg and weakening the Mi'kmaq and Acadian militias, the result of the Expulsion was the devastation of both a primarily civilian population and the economy of the region.

Today Acadians live primarily in eastern New Brunswick and some regions of Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Quebec and northern Maine.

They also worried that signing the oath might commit male Acadians to fight against France during wartime and that it would be perceived by their Mi'kmaq neighbours and allies as an acknowledgement of the British claim to Acadia, putting villages at risk of attack from the Miꞌkmaq.

According to historian Stephen Patterson, more than any other single factor – including the massive assault that eventually forced the surrender of Louisbourg – the supply problem brought an end to French power in the region.

[10] On November 17, 1755, George Scott took 700 troops, attacked twenty houses at Memramcook, arrested the remaining Acadians and killed two hundred head of livestock to deprive the French of supplies.

[36] In April 1757, a band of Acadian and Miꞌkmaw partisans raided a warehouse near Fort Edward, killed thirteen British soldiers, took what provisions they could carry and set fire to the building.

In December 1757, while cutting firewood near Fort Anne, John Weatherspoon was captured by Natives—presumably Miꞌkmaq— and was carried away to the mouth of the Miramichi River, from where he was sold or traded to the French, taken to Quebec and was held until late in 1759 and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, when General Wolfe's forces prevailed.

[40] The following year, March 1758, there was a raid on the Lunenburg Peninsula at the Northwest Range (present-day Blockhouse, Nova Scotia) when five people from the Ochs and Roder families were killed.

In April 1756, Major Jedidiah Preble and his New England troops, on their return to Boston, raided a settlement near Port La Tour and captured 72 men, women and children.

[49] En route to the St. John River Campaign in September 1758, Monckton sent Major Roger Morris of the 35th Regiment, in command of two men-of-war and transport ships with 325 soldiers, to deport more Acadians.

[49] Colonel Robert Monckton led a force of 1,150 British soldiers to destroy the Acadian settlements along the banks of the Saint John River until they reached the largest village of Sainte-Anne des Pays-Bas (Fredericton, New Brunswick) in February 1759.

[58][f] Monckton was accompanied by New England Rangers led by Joseph Goreham, Captain Benoni Danks, Moses Hazen and George Scott.

[58] Contrary to Governor Lawrence's direction, New England Ranger Lieutenant Hazen engaged in frontier warfare against the Acadians in what has become known as the "Ste Anne's Massacre".

[59] The leader of the Acadian militia on the St. John river, Joseph Godin-Bellefontaine, refused to swear an oath despite the Rangers torturing and killing his daughter and three of his grandchildren in front of him.

[64] After the French conquered St. John's, Newfoundland on June 14, 1762, the success galvanized both the Acadians and the natives, who gathered in large numbers at various points throughout the province and behaved in a confident and, according to the British, "insolent fashion".

They marched to Fort St. George (Thomaston) and unsuccessfully laid siege to the town, and raided Munduncook (Friendship) where they wounded eight British settlers and killed others.

[74] In the first wave of the expulsion, most Acadian exiles were assigned to rural communities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and South Carolina.

More worryingly for the British authorities, some Acadians threatened to migrate north to French-controlled regions, including the Saint John River, Île Royale (Cape Breton Island), the coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Canada.

[78] For four long winter months, William Shirley, who had ordered their deportation, had not allowed them to disembark and as a result, half died of cold and starvation aboard the ships.

Almost 1,000 died when the transport ships Duke William,[94] Violet, and Ruby sank in 1758 en route from Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island) to France.

[96] The most serious resettlement attempt was made by Louis XV, who offered 2 acres (8,100 m2) of land in the Poitou province to 626 Acadian families each, where they lived close together in a region they called La Grande Ligne ("The Great Road", also known as "the King's Highway").

[100] Because of the good relations which existed between France and Spain, and because of their common Catholic religion, some Acadians chose to take oaths of allegiance to the Spanish government.

[105] According to historian John Mack Faragher, the religious and ethnic dimensions of the Expulsion of Acadians are in addition to, and deeply connected with, the military exigencies cited as causes for the Removals.

It also empowered British authorities to seize all "popish" property (Church lands) for the crown and barred Catholic clergy from entering or residing in the province, as they wanted no repeat of Le Loutre and his type of war.

Shirley, who in part was responsible for the Removals, according to historian Geoffrey Plank, "recommended using military force to expel the most 'obnoxious' Acadians and replace them with Protestant immigrants.

Grenier writes that Faragher "overstates his case; his focus on the grand dérangement as an early example of ethnic cleansing carries too much present-day emotional weight and in turn overshadows much of the accommodation that Acadians and Anglo-Americans reached.

Acadie was not Armenia, and to compare Grand-Pré with Auschwitz and the killing fields of Cambodia is a complete and utter trivialization of the many genocidal horrors of contemporary history.

[121] In December 2003, Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, representing Queen Elizabeth II (Canada's head of state), acknowledged the expulsion but did not apologize for it.