ABSTRACT
While Catholics had been part of the Maryland population from the first settlement of 1634, Massachusetts was a bastion of anti-Catholicism through to the nineteenth century. Yet the largest single Catholic influx into the colonies occurred in Massachusetts in 1755-6 when Acadians from Nova Scotia, refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, were expelled southwards. Though many of them later travelled on to become the Cajuns of Louisiana, while they were in New England they found their freedom to worship severely restricted. The 'gentleman . . . much affected by their sufferings' to whom Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780), later governor, refers, was himself.
