Sir Charles of Halifax

Brigadier-General Charles Lawrence (14 December 1709 - 19 October 1760) was a Canadian colonial administrator, military officer and soldier. He was a veteran of the First Anglo-Mikmaq War and the Fifth Anglo-French War. During his career, he served as seventh Governor of the Province of Nova Scotia.

Lawrence's administration governed the Acadian Peninsula between 1753 and 1760, during which time the first Anglo-Quebecois War began and was concluded, the French diaspora was expelled from Acadia and the country was colonised, martial law was imposed throughout the territory and the fifth Anglo-French War was concluded. During his tenure, he oversaw the mass deportation and killing of the Mikmaq tribes and the French diaspora of the Provinces of Acadia & Nova Scotia and granted the land seized from the French colonists to 8,000 British families who's patriarchs served in the British Army during the conquest of what is today, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.

His armies conducted ethnic cleansing campaigns against the French diaspora and the Mikmaq tribes in the Province of Nova Scotia, resulting in 6,000 deaths among the French population and the deportation of 11,000 to the Metropole of the Kingdom of France and the Territory of Louisiana in the Kingdom of Spain, and during the conquest of the Fortress of Louisbourg, which deprived the French fleet of naval supremacy in the St. Lawrence river valley and exposed the French Empire's capital, Montréal, to unimpeded naval invasions.

Personally, Charles fought alongside domestic forces during the Fifth Anglo-French War and the First Anglo-Mikmaq War, precipitating the subjugation of the Mikmaq tribes to the authority of the Crown and the destruction of the French diaspora of Acadia; the latter operation saw the country's French, male population reduced to naught during an extended campaign of guerrilla warfare, the French diaspora's barns and crops burned, their livestock slaughtered and their children and women deported en masse to their homeland or the former French territory at the mouth of the Mississippi river. He led the Third Division of the British Army of North America during the conquest of the Fortress of Louisbourg, depriving the French Fleet of strategic control of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and exposing the capital of the French Colonial Empire, Montreal, to naval invasion. Later, he coordinated the settlement of the diaspora known as the 'New England Planters,' the veterans of the conquest and their families, numbering 8,000 families in total, to the Province of Nova Scotia.