New foes emerge against Cornwallis statue
Somewhere in Halifax, a large statue honouring British commander Edward Cornwallis — founder of the historic port city — is gathering dust.
In a move that made international headlines, city council ordered the statue cut from its downtown pedestal and hauled away this winter amid a heated debate over Cornwallis’s role in a bloody conflict with Nova Scotia’s Indigenous people in the mid-1700s.
Local resident Beth Anne MacEachen says the statue should never have been erected in the first place.
“He didn’t deserve that type of notoriety,’’ she said. “To celebrate him is not what we should be doing.’’
But the source of MacEachen’s disdain for Cornwallis extends beyond his sordid deeds in Canada. Cornwallis, as it turns out, was no friend of Scottish Highlanders, many of whom would later emigrate to Nova Scotia, which is Latin for New Scotland.
“I don’t think Nova Scotians realize that what happened with the Mi’kmaq was part of a second wave of Cornwallis’s cruelty ... It wasn’t taught in school,’’ said MacEachen, a descendant of Scottish immigrants and president of the Scots North British Society, based in Halifax.
“If they knew about Cornwallis and what he did to their great, great, great grandparents (in Scotland) ... then more people would be up in arms about this monument.’’
Almost a third of Nova Scotia’s residents can trace their roots to Gaelic-speaking settlers from the islands and Highlands of Scotland, according to the provincial government’s Office of Gaelic Affairs. To this day, about 2,000 residents still speak Gaelic and the language is taught at the Gaelic College in St. Anns.
Still, it’s a safe bet most Nova Scotians have no idea what Cornwallis did before he founded Halifax with a group of settlers and soldiers in June 1749.
“He, as a figure, is not someone I would want to celebrate, knowing my history,’’ said Allan MacMaster, member of the legislature for the Cape Breton riding that shares its name with the Scottish city of Inverness.
MacMaster, whose ancestors came from the Highlands to Nova Scotia in the early 1800s, says the British had engaged in the systematic “ethnic cleansing’’ of Gaelic Highlanders for hundreds of years, and Cornwallis was part of that deadly drive.
In 1745, four years before Cornwallis arrived in Halifax, he was dispatched to Scotland to help crush a rebellion led by Contractors removed the statue of Edward Cornwallis, a controversial historical figure, in a city park in Halifax on Jan. 31.
Roman Catholic Scottish leader Charles Edward Stuart, later known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.
And on April 16, 1746 — 272 years ago Monday — British soldiers killed as many as 2,000 Jacobite warriors in a decisive battle at Culloden.
But the killing wasn’t over. British troops pushed farther into the Highlands to hunt for fleeing rebels.
Cornwallis led 320 soldiers to “pacify’’ an area of northwestern Scotland. Properties were looted and burned, livestock was driven off, crops were destroyed and some Jacobite families were burned alive in their homes.
“They had full permission to plunder, burn and destroy through the western part of the Highlands — the part of Scotland where many of the ancestors of the people of (Nova Scotia’s) Inverness County and Antigonish County and eastern Pictou County come from,’’ MacMaster said.