Jim Bradshaw: A Broussard who overcame much adversity

Amand Broussard, the son of Joseph “Beausoleil” Broussard and Agnes Thibodeau, was just 11 years old when his father led a band of Acadian exiles to south Louisiana. He’d seen much trouble even at that youthful age, and was going to see much more.

His father and his uncle Alexandre and their families managed to escape into the forests of old Acadie at the time of the exile in 1755. They launched a guerrilla campaign in which Joseph, a sharpshooter and militia captain, “took a heavy toll of English soldiers sent into the area to capture refugees,” according to Acadian historian Bona Arsenault.

But Joseph and his family also paid a heavy toll. More than 600 of the Acadians hiding in the Miramichi River area died of starvation and a “horrible contagion” in the winter of 1757.

They were reduced to eating “the leather of shoes, carrion, and some even the excrement of animals.” Even the strong-willed Joseph and Alexandre began to give up hope as they faced the lack of food, threat of Indian attack, and English assaults against their little strongholds.

In desperation, Joseph and Alexandre, along with Jean Basque, Simon Martin, Jean Bourg and Michel Bourg, took their families to the British Fort Cumberland. They hoped to cut a deal with the English rather than die of hunger. There was no deal to be made. The Acadians were imprisoned at Halifax until 1763, when the Treaty of Paris ended the war between France and England.

The shooting stopped, but the Acadians remained without a homeland. Young Amand and his parents were among hundreds of Acadians who wearily boarded boats in 1764 to go to the French West Indies.

They were disappointed again; they could not stay in those humid islands. It was too hot for people accustomed to the Canadian climate. They sailed again, this time for Louisiana, where Joseph led his family and friends to new homes in the Attakapas district.

Just months after settling on Bayou Teche, both Joseph and Agnes, and many other new settlers who had survived so much, were felled by an epidemic that swept through their struggling settlement. The orphaned Amand lived with his 17-year-old brother Claude until, at the age of 16, he married Helene Landry. There was more sorrow and trouble. She died in childbirth the following year, leaving young Amand with a son, Joseph.

Amand persevered. By 1792 he’d become an affluent cattleman and planter, owning land on both sides of the Teche. He built a roomy Acadian-style house on the east side of the bayou near Loreauville, where he and his second wife, Anne Benoit, reared Joseph and 13 children of their own.

That house, built about 1790, still stands. In the late 1970s it was barged down the bayou to a site on East Main Street in New Iberia, then was later moved to the recreated village of Vermilionville in Lafayette.

Amand fought twice for the American cause. He took part in a campaign by Gov. Bernado de Galvez in 1779 in support of the American Revolution, and continued to be active in the militia afterward. Then, at age 58, he served as a private in Baker’s Regiment of the Louisiana Militia
in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812.

When he died in January 1818 at the age of 64, his succession showed that Amand had moved from penniless orphan to a man of substance. He owned six substantial tracts of land and his main plantation included not only his house but a separate kitchen, at least two barns, a schoolhouse and schoolmaster’s residence, a cotton mill, and a blacksmith shop.

Amand’s widow, Anne Benoit, lived in the old family home until her death in September 1830.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.