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A Letter from Carolina, 1688: French Huguenots in the New World
Molly McClain and Alessa Ellefson
| IN 1686 a small group of French Protestants crossed the Atlantic to seek refuge in the British colony of Carolina. They settled along the banks of the Santee River, forty miles north of Charleston, South Carolina. Many of them had been substantial merchants and landowners in France before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes deprived them of their religious liberties. They developed a modest plantation in Carolina, but they held out little hope for making a great fortune. "In leaving Europe," a member of the colony wrote, "we still had our heads full of great lands and other extravagances that were not in season. But the truth is that we have become wiser, contented with a small house of twenty-five feet, built out of wood in the Carolina fashion" and enough land to "give us what we need to eat. We will leave the greater projects to others."1 |
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A remarkable six-page letter by that Huguenot émigré, written in French and dated May 18, 1688, sets down the ambitions and experiences of French immigrants to Carolina. Addressed to Agnes van Wassenaer Obdam, a close friend of the Dutch stadhouder, William, Prince of Orange, and his wife, Mary, it remains preserved among recently cataloged papers in the archives of Twickel Castle in the Netherlands. The letter supplies insight into the motivation for the French migration to the British colonies in America. It also illustrates the experiences and personal preoccupations of a people who left few written records of their encounter with the New World.2 |
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The Huguenot exodus from France was one of the largest population movements in early modern Europe. An estimated two hundred thousand people departed France from 1680 to 1710. It was, according to one historian, "the third largest one-shot migration in early modern Europe after the expulsion of the Jews and the Moriscos from Spain in 1492 and 1609, respectively."3 The refugees fled their homeland to escape harassment, threats of violence, and the suppression of Protestant worship. During the 1680s King Louis XIV ordered the billeting of French soldiers in Protestant households. In 1685 he revoked the Edict of Nantes (1598), a decree that had granted France's Protestants freedom of worship under limited conditions. Huguenots who refused to convert to the state religion faced imprisonment, torture, and possible death. For many the only option was escape. They left behind family members, land, and often considerable wealth to seek safety in England, Ireland, the Netherlands, North America, and the Cape of Good Hope. |
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Agnes van Wassenaer Obdam (1636–98), a Dutch noblewoman, was active in organizing relief efforts for French Protestants. She was the daughter of Jacob, Baron van Wassenaer Obdam, a Dutch admiral, and his wife, Agnes van Renesse van der Aa. On their deaths she and her brother Jacob inherited considerable properties in the Netherlands, including Huis Ten Dorp, the estates of Wardenberg and Gerenstein, and Huis Zuidwijk in Wassenaar. Van Wassenaer Obdam never married but lived near her brother in a house on the Kneuterdijk in The Hague. Her wealth and relative independence allowed her to play a prominent role in Dutch society. She corresponded with Sophie, Electress of Hanover, and befriended Princess Mary of Orange, later Queen Mary II of England, whom she served as a maid of honor. Her brief autobiography reveals her to have been intelligent and unconventional. Impatient with gallantry and uninterested in the pursuits traditionally assigned to women, she was well educated, physically active, and gifted with considerable artistic talent. An early illness from which she never fully recovered led Van Wassenaer Obdam to, as she put it, "equip myself with strength of mind" and "busy myself" with a variety of pursuits, including the aid of Huguenot women. She founded the Société de la Haye, a charitable organization that aided unmarried and widowed refugees.4 |
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Van Wassenaer Obdam's papers in Twickel Castle contain several references to the Huguenot cause. The collection includes a brief memoir of her December 18, 1693, speech before the Société de la Haye as well as two letters from A. D. L. V. de Cramahé, a female member of the Chastaigner family who fled France after 1685. These letters, dated from Dublin in 1697, reveal the author's gratitude to Van Wassenaer Obdam for her continued interest in their lives: "There is nothing I wouldn't want to do to show you my respectful gratitude ... The winter seems very harsh to me compared to those when I often had the honor at The Hague of paying you my respects." She added that her only consolation was the company of "Monsieur and Madame de la Barouère in the sufferings of the Refuge. The Peace [of Ryswick] does not leave us any hope of ever seeing the end of it."5 |
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The author of the letter to Van Wassenaer Obdam was a gentleman who came to Carolina in 1686 with either a wife or another family member. His acquaintance with Alexandre Thesée Chastaigner, sieur de L'Isle (d. 1707), suggests that he was from La Rochelle, a seaport on France's Atlantic coast and a Huguenot center. He described the length of the journey to the plantation of Paul Bruneau, sieur de Revedoux, as "about the distance between Cramais to the bridge of stone," referring to the Chastaigners' chateau, Cramahé, located five miles southeast of La Rochelle. He and Van Wassenaer Obdam also had friends in common; he mentioned in the letter the business failures of Revedoux's father, Arnaud Bruneau, sieur de La Chabociere, "whom you ask me news of" and confirmed Élie Boudinot's marriage. Moreover he was sufficiently well acquainted with Van Wassenaer Obdam to have visited her country home. He had hired a French servant named Califon who "told me, Madam, that he had served you for a long time as a farmer and that he was the father of a little boy who I have seen as your lackey. It seems to me that I have also seen him at your place," perhaps referring to her country house, Zuidwijk, in Wassenaar.6 He signed the letter with an ornate set of initials, but his identity remains a matter of speculation. He may have been L'Isle's brother, Henri Auguste Chastaigner, sieur de Cramahé, who fled with him to Carolina. The existence of letters from another member of the Chastaigner family among Van Wassenaer Obdam's correspondence offers some support for this interpretation. The brothers escaped from France to the Netherlands, where a stable network of institutions existed to furnish French-speaking refugees with support. From there they traveled to London and obtained letters of naturalization before embarking on the voyage to Carolina. |
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Though the author came from a privileged background, he did not feel his status exempted him from hard work, compassion, or responsibility for others. He complained little about the conditions of life in Carolina, though he was realistic about the hardships that settlers faced. He greatly missed the luxuries of European life, particularly French bread and wine, but he accepted that they were no longer part of his life. He did not judge those who left the colony for an easier life in New York or Boston. Instead he valued the sense of community that shared work and adversity often brings. He respected the native population, appreciating their generosity and their right to increase the prices they set on goods as scarcity created greater demand. He also showed the Christian virtues of compassion and mercy in his treatment of poor settlers, "the miserable ones," who arrived without land or wealth. He expressed no bitterness toward those pamphlet writers who had promoted Carolina as a New World paradise but warned those who were considering the voyage to prepare themselves for hard work and the possibility of disappointment.7 |
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The author arrived in Carolina at a time when the number of French settlers in the colony was beginning to increase rapidly, from 60 to 80 people in the period 1680–85 to 330 to 350 in the period 1685–90. Ships brought passengers from England, France, the Netherlands, and the Caribbean islands. More than 65 percent of the immigrants from France came from urban areas, nearly one-third from the ports of Dieppe, Le Havre, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux. Others came from Île-de-France, the Loire Valley, and Dauphiné, a mountainous region in southeastern France. Families traveled together, many of them with young children, carrying commodities that would help them get a start in the New World, such as a "bundle of wrought yron" or "two chests of vine plants." Frequently, they traveled with families from the same town. The Huguenot gentry, interrelated by marriage, had often known one another for generations. Immigrants endured a difficult voyage across the Atlantic and arrived in Charleston to find a small coastal community with limited wealth and few resources.8 |
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Settlers faced a series of challenges in Carolina. Judith Giton, a twenty-year-old woman born in Languedoc, wrote one of the few known letters describing the experiences of the early colonists. She lost her elderly mother to "spotted fever" on the voyage to America. Eighteen months after their arrival, her eldest brother, Pierre, died, "not being fitted to the harsh work to which we were exposed." She and her remaining brother, Louis, "have seen ourselves, since our departure from France, in every sort of affliction; in sickness, pestilence, famine, poverty, very hard work." Penniless, she married a shoemaker, Noé Royer. She wrote, "I was in this country a full six months, without tasting bread, and whilst I worked the ground, like a slave." She attributed her survival to God who "surely gave us good grace to have been able to withstand all sorts of trials." A similar account was supplied in 1687 by a French Huguenot in Boston who described the experiences of two young men recently arrived from Carolina: "In the first place, they say, they have never before seen so miserable a country, nor an atmosphere so unhealthy. Fevers prevail all the year, from which those who are attacked seldom recover; and if some escape, their complexion becomes tawny, like that of the two who have arrived here, and who are pitiable to behold."9 |
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Carolina offered the opportunity to participate in the construction of a new province. The colony was founded after 1660 when the newly restored King Charles II granted a vast tract of land to eight noblemen, including the Duke of Albemarle, the Earl of Clarendon, the Earl of Craven, and Lord Ashley. These eight Lords Proprietors planned an agricultural colony in which great landlords and their tenants would cultivate commodities such as rice and tobacco. The terms of the Fundamental Constitutions of 1669 reflected their vision of a feudal society, mandating that land be divided into counties of 480,000 acres. Each county would contain eight 12,000-acre seigniories belonging to the eight proprietors, eight 12,000-acre baronies granted to a hereditary nobility, and four precincts (each with six 12,000-acre colonies) to be planted by freemen. It is estimated that the proprietors and their agents granted almost 715,000 acres between the Santee and Savannah rivers in the decades after 1670.10 |
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Huguenots formed distinct communities in three areas: Charleston, the Orange Quarter, and the Santee. Charleston attracted merchants and urban artisans such as goldsmith Nicholas de Longuemare Jr., who had arrived in Carolina in 1685 with his father, also a goldsmith. Other refugees, particularly rural artisans, settled in the Orange Quarter, a few miles up the Cooper River. Many of them were weavers and yeomen who had emigrated from Île-de-France and Beauce. Gentry families, meanwhile, settled the region south of the Santee River. Though they became a provincial elite engaged in plantation agriculture, they retained close ties with the merchant elite of Charleston.11 |
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The 1688 letter from Carolina is the only known account of the founding of the Santee settlement. In early 1687 the author and a group of colonists sailed northeast along the Carolina coast from Charleston to the Santee River. They settled on or near lands acquired by La Chabociere in what would become the parish of Saint James Santee by two acts of 1706 and 1708. The letter describes the challenges faced by the early settlers. The weather was severe, "with almost continuous rains," and most members of the group suffered from malarial fever. Once-wealthy landowners lived in "a cabin like that of savages." They ate coarse "Carolina bread" and made do without the "pleasures of life like wine, European wheat, and fruit." But they did not starve. Indian traders, possibly Santee or Congaree, sold them deer, fish, and game at low prices. The author marveled that food "cost us so little ... I have had deer for less than a French sol or two and four or five Indian roosters for the same price. The Indians make us pay for it a little more at this time, but one can still say that we have them for almost nothing."12 |
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Shortly after the establishment of the colony, families such as the Bruneaus and the Gaillards began building their own plantations, trading, and buying and selling land, just as they had done in France. La Chabociere planned to deforest a portion of the three thousand acres that he had acquired from the proprietors and sell the timber to Caribbean planters. Jean Boyd of Bordeaux established a winery. It was also thought that "silk will succeed very well." Many skilled silk workers from Lyon, Tours, Gaillard, and Nîmes had fled France for England and the Netherlands, though few of them made their way to Carolina. "All those who know this commerce hope for much from it and Monsieur Gaillard ... who has been amongst us for two months, thinks that it is a sure way" to increase the colony's wealth. "He is not the only one," the author wrote. "There is a Frenchman who hopes before three or four years to produce some for more than a thousand pistoles per year. He already has more than ten or twelve thousand mulberry trees in that view."13 |
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To some extent the author anticipated the commitment to labor-intensive crops such as rice and cotton that later would dominate the plantation economy along the Santee. He noted that Revedoux owned slaves: "He is a little more advanced than we are. He has three Negroes and a Negress which are a considerable possession in the country." Though slavery was condemned as inhumane by seventeenth-century Protestant authorities, few Huguenots had any moral qualms about the practice. By the mid-eighteenth century, Revedoux owned personal property valued at £4,500 (Carolina) and nineteen slaves worth £3,620 (Carolina). In 1688, however, relatively few settlers could afford such investments. The author continued, "We do not have any and I do not even know whether we will ever have some." He did not foresee the rapid expansion of the African population after 1695, when rice and cotton cultivation finally took hold in Carolina.14 |
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The author also emphasized the sociability of life in Carolina, the frequent visits to neighboring plantations, and the agreeable nature of the colonists. "We can even treat our friends," he wrote. "We had five or six of them here yesterday. Monsieur de Revedoux was one of them and two Perdriaux ladies from La Rochelle." Revedoux was a gentilhomme, a member of the French lower provincial nobility, who had been driven from his family château of La Chaboissiere, ten miles south of Poitiers. The Perdriaus, meanwhile, were among the twenty-five wealthiest shipowners in La Rochelle before being forced into exile. In 1682 Margueritte Perdriau fled the Île de Ré with her husband, Daniel Huger, and their children. Huger, a tax collector in Loudun, became a successful planter on the Santee River. The author supplied them with entertainment suitable to their quality: "We offered them a good meal of the game that our Indians furnished us with." He added that he saw his neighbors quite often because Revedoux lived only two miles away, an hour-long journey by road.15 |
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Seventeenth-century Europeans would not have found it strange to imagine French gentlemen hosting dinner parties in the Carolina wilderness. In fact this degree of civility was what many gentlemen had been led to expect. Wealthy Huguenots had been lured to Carolina by the hope of gaining large estates and recovering their social status. Promotional literature produced in French by the Lords Proprietors of Carolina advertised the possibility of acquiring manorial estates with judicial privileges at low prices or even as a gift. The Nouvelle relation de la Caroline, printed in The Hague around 1686, described how land could be acquired by headright, grant, or direct purchase. The pamphlet dwelled on the advantages of English law, local self-government, and easy naturalization, and it implied that prosperity might lead to the acquisition of a barony. It even assured its readers that newcomers would find houses to rent. Glowing accounts of the colony's mild climate, fertile soil, and peaceful natives appeared in pamphlets such as Suite de la description de la Carolline and Plan pour former un éstablissement en Caroline.16 |
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The promotional literature, however, did not mention the backbreaking work that it would take to build the colony. The author noted, "To tell you the truth, the country is not at all like it was depicted." The promotional literature revealed "only ... the good side and hardly ever talks about the difficulties that one endures in establishing oneself. Yet that difficulty is great when the place is new and so little peopled as Carolina is." He added, "that is what puts off people who come here."17 |
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New York and Boston attracted many immigrants who could not tolerate the prospect of hard physical labor in Carolina. The author mentioned the loss of wealthy refugees such as Boudinot, who had married a wealthy widow, Susanne (Papin) d'Harriette, in London in 1686. Together they set out for Carolina, hoping to establish themselves in trade. Boudinot, however, "was displeased when he saw that the result did not correspond to his hopes. He has gone to New York ... about which they say much good." The Thauvet sisters left at the same time to join their brother in New Rochelle, New York. According to the author, sixty people accompanied these two families. The only ones that he regretted losing were "a few families from the Île de Ré who are very honest people."18 |
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The author took some pains to explain what kind of person was best suited to life in the colony. He must have anticipated that Van Wassenaer Obdam would circulate his letter among Huguenots living in the Netherlands. He cautioned well-to-do émigrés who were seeking to find either wealth and leisure or an outlet for their ambition:
If this country were such as I want it to be or even such as I hope it will become, I would use all my efforts to attract my friends here. But I would be sorry to invite anyone who afterwards would have reason to regret his decision. This country is neither for those who have many goods, nor for those who want to lead an easy life, nor for those who have nothing. It is good only for those who still have some belongings, who want to work, who are resolved to suffer and who prefer peace to anything else.19
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The first generation of Huguenot émigrés to the Santee survived the malarial fevers that threatened them with lassitude and even death. They raised crops, slaughtered animals, bartered with Native Americans, and traded with colonists in New York and the West Indies. They acquired land, if not great baronies, which they passed on to their children and grandchildren along with gold buttons, handkerchiefs, and lace cravats.20 They also created a network of people with whom they could talk and pray, French speakers who reminded them of their social identity as Protestant gentlemen and gentlewomen. |
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The pattern of sociability created by the first generation of Huguenot planters lasted into the eighteenth century. In 1700 John Lawson traveled up the Santee River to view "a colony of French Protestants." He found seventy families "who live as decently and happily, as any Planters in these Southward parts of America." He described the French as "a temperate industrious People" who had brought few worldly goods with them but still managed to outstrip their English neighbors, adding, "'Tis admirable to see what Time and Industry will (with God's Blessing) effect."21
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[fol. 1] From our plantation on Santée in Carolina this 18 May 1688.22 |
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Since you are willing to take an interest in the life we lead here, it is only right for me to render you an account and to give you a little detail about it. I will start from the voyage that we made to this place of which I have sent you a drawing. We left [with] seven or eight French, the principles being Monsieur de Revedoux23 and Boyd of Bordeaux.24 We came upon this river to find a proper place not only for those French people already in the country who were not yet established, but also for those who could come and join us. We found what we were looking for, a place elevated upon a beautiful river, with a beautiful vista, fresh air, good waters, and the finest land in Carolina. Very happy at our discovery, we went back to find our friends and we resolved upon making the same trip but by land, in order to know the place better. We did it by foot and, although we were people very little accustomed to such efforts and to the necessity of sleeping in the middle of the woods several days in a row during the month of February, we managed this affair easily, very happy with our voyage and resolved to go as soon as possible to establish ourselves there. |
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We left in the last days of March of last year, about fifty people all men, the women being unsuited to the difficulties one had to endure. We had to start by cutting trees and by giving us space since the new town that we wanted to start was just a large wood full of beautiful and tall trees. There, a sail from a boat was our first house and the earth our bed. A cabin like that of savages, reasonably made out of a plant common in the area and very clean at that (which we call palmettes), was our second house. We lived in it with a great deal of discomfort for five months in a row. Finally, we built a little wooden house that seemed to us a palace. It was small but rather comfortable and we found ourselves very at ease in it. We lived this way all last summer which was rather severe with almost continuous rains and fevers that were commonplace. Monsieur de l'Isle25 succumbed to it at various times but his bouts were small. As for me, I had twelve violent ones in a row which weakened me a great deal. The exhaustion that I suffered during the trip was, I believe, the only cause of it. Since then, we have all been very well and, as for me, I have never felt so good. |
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We spent all of last summer in company. In a country as new as this one, we wanted to get to know the inhabitants before keeping our distance and exposing ourselves to their insults. But these [fol. 2] savages are all kindness and timidity and, far from having to fear them, they serve us extremely well. They furnish us with game and fish in abundance. The deer, especially, and the Indian roosters have not been lacking since we arrived here and we have them for almost nothing. The deer is much smaller than in Europe but tastes better. The meat is whiter and easier to separate and very good either boiled or in a stew. And they are so abundant that we have had for ourselves about sixty and more than eighty Indian roosters, at least as good and as fat as those from Europe. We ate well all last winter. It is restoring, without telling of a few other sorts of game and very good fish that comes from time to time and which help us much to live. Without that we would have suffered much in a place so lonely and far from commerce, where we could not bring anything without much pain and expense, and they cost us so little, especially in this trade, in which I have had deer for less than a French sol or two and four or five Indian roosters for the same price. The Indians make us pay for it a little more at this time, but one can still say that we have them for almost nothing. The price will rise as the number that will diminish because of us, which is bound to happen, but by then we will do without it easily. We have livestock, we will have good poultry, a good garden and with that one can live. We are experiencing it presently. |
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We have left the place intended to be the town. We have a house built in a very agreeable place where we have established a plantation.26 We have some livestock and are living there, thank God, pretty well. We can even treat our friends. We had five or six of them here yesterday. Monsieur de Revedoux was one of them and two Perdriaux ladies from La Rochelle, with the husband of one of them whose name is Huger.27 We offered them a good meal of the game that our Indians furnished us with. We see each other quite often, Monsieur de Revedoux is not two miles from our plantation [in margin: about one hour by road], that is about the distance between Cramais to the bridge of stone. We have closer neighbors with whom we get along very agreeably. Our colony totals twelve to thirteen families, all French, all refugees, all honest people. We live together simply, without boredom, and with much intelligence.28 We have amongst us a Swiss gentleman from Venay by Lausanne, a very honest man, and a friend of ours. He has quit the service of Holland where he was and about which he was not happy. He is not sorry to be here. There are few amongst us who regret being here. |
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To tell you the truth, the country is not at all like it was depicted. When one writes an account, one commonly embellishes the subject in order to appeal to the reader, and one almost always provides flattering portraits of distant countries. At least, one only reveals the good side and hardly ever talks about the difficulties that one endures in establishing oneself. Yet that difficulty is great when the place is new and so little peopled as Carolina is and that is what puts off people [fol. 3] who come here. One needs determination to surmount the first difficulties and not everyone has that since, a little while ago, a considerable number of our newly arrived French abandoned us, that was the sole reason. Monsieur Boudinot29 and his family are among them. It is true that he married Madame d'Ariatte [D'Harriette] the widow. And since he had formed an advantageous idea of Carolina, and he had planned to build a considerable trade, he was displeased when he saw that the result did not correspond to his hopes. He has gone to New York which is another district of this new world at about two hundred leagues from here with more people, a lot colder and about which they say much good. But I always fear the surprise and I would very much like to get to know it in order to make up my mind. I regret Monsieur Boudinot. He seemed to me as an honest man and of good company. The Mesdames Thauvet30 made the same decision. They had come to Carolina before us and were part of our new settlement. But while they were working at it they learned that their brother who had been in the Islands had left and that he was in New York with a few Negroes that he had rescued. They yielded to his request to join him. They have left for that [place]. We have seen sixty other people leave with those two families for the same region; that was to be little regretted excepting a few families from the Île de Ré who are very honest people. This is not yet all. We are on the brink of losing a man whose departure we will feel much more. It is Monsieur de Verciant31 of whom I want to speak. He did not want to join our little society and he bought close to Charleston a place that would quite please me. The house is pretty and quite comfortable, and the plantation is extensive and rather well situated and he lived there rather calmly but, in general, he is not content with the place. He felt unwell last year. He has not found it to be as worthwhile as he had thought and his relations are now making him find it disagreeable, so dangerous is it to over praise what would please us. |
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As for me, I am not adamant about this country. It is neither as beautiful as they told us nor as advanced. I find it a little lower and humid. At least in the summer the mosquitoes are troubling and the summer would be quite hot and even unhealthy if they are all like the last one. After all, life here is without refinements and we lack many of the things that one considers elsewhere as being among the niceties of life. Despite that, I believe this place is fit for those who, like us, having very little, just want to live in peace. If this country is not pretty everywhere, there are some cantons, including this one where our little colony is located, that could not be more agreeable. Almost everyone who has seen it agrees. In our case, we have for our plantation a location which I am very happy about. It is a place above our beautiful river, the view is wide, the shore is beautiful and covered with great trees that are green eight months in the year, at least, a lot of air and very good water. If the mosquitoes are troubling, it is mainly for the new arrivals and at the first clearing. We keep them at bay by making more clearings and I hope that next year we will have few, besides one gets used to it. As for the rains in the summer and the sicknesses which comes with them, I [fol. 4] find them most unfortunate, but the oldest inhabitants assure us that it is not so every summer and that the past was quite extraordinary. I wait with impatience to find out myself by experiencing it. I do not doubt that hotter weather will be all that we will find here that is harsh. But for the hot and cold, I do not see such a great difference between the climate of this canton and that of the Languedoc. The two winters that I have passed here have been cold but beautiful and dry and the other seasons, except for the summer, are so beautiful that I would never wish for a better climate with the exception of that season only. |
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Besides, if we do miss a few things that one sees elsewhere as the conveniences and pleasures of life like wine, European wheat, and fruit except for peaches, figs and blackberries that are here in abundance, one can hope that time will provide the rest. The wheat of Europe is not common, I admit, but many people do without easily. Although the wheat of Spain that is used to make Carolina bread is coarse and unpleasant at first, one gets used to it. I eat it like any other, particularly when it is mixed a little with fine white flour from Europe which makes it more delicate. That is how we use it. The neighboring countries furnish us with it at a price that is not excessive. There are even some people here who harvest it. I have eaten some bread that was rather good and quite a few people hope that it will come in the future. As for the wine, we are still trying. And if it works, as I see the likelihood it might, this country will change in a very short time and, from the barren place that it is, could become one of the most agreeable places in all America. The vines grow naturally and give grapes that, although small and wild, can be eaten. We also have other considerable hopes for the establishment of this country here, silk and rice. For the rice, one cannot succeed. It requires a warm and humid place and this one is so. But it is a thing that can only be done at great expense and only rich people could undertake it. Silk will succeed very well also but a great investment is required because of the need for large houses. All those who know this commerce hope for much from it and Monsieur Gaillard,32 who has given me the letter that you have done me the honor of writing to me and who has been amongst us for two months, thinks that it is a sure way and expects to make a very good trade here. He is not the only one. There is a Frenchman who hopes before three or four years to produce some for more than a thousand pistoles per year. He already has more than ten or twelve thousand mulberry trees in that view. |
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These are, Madam, the hopes of these great planters. I do not know whether they are well-founded. As for us, we only want to spend the rest of our lives [fol. 5] calmly and one does not need such great dreams for that, not even the shortest ones for the tranquility of life, and to renounce at an early hour our ambition and our vanity, as this land, more than any other, requires from us. In leaving Europe we still had our heads full of great lands and other extravagances that were not in season. But the truth is that we have become wiser, contented with a small house of twenty-five feet, built out of wood in the Carolina fashion, but which is comfortable, with twelve or fifteen acres of land that will suffice us to give us what we need to eat. We will leave the greater projects to others. Monsieur de la Chab[ociere],33 whom you ask me news of, has not succeeded in his. They seemed well thought out and a sawmill for construction wood that he had in mind when he arrived should not have provided him with less than a thousand or twelve hundred pistoles of revenue every year. He had brought with him, in that view, some carpenters to build it and the things that would be necessary but the death of the contractor has toppled all of his projects. And for the more than five hundred crowns that he had advanced for his plans, I think that he has received only a moral lesson that will always be useful in life. God, without doubt, who has deprived us of our goods and of the pleasures of life because we had abused them, does not want wealth to expose us again to the same abuses and to the same effects of his wrath. Monsieur de la Chab[ociere] is near Charleston in a plantation that Monsieur [Revedoux], his son, had bought in his first trip through this country. He abandoned it on the first day to join him who is on that river and our quite close neighbor. He is a little more advanced than we are. He has three Negroes and a Negress which are a considerable possession in the country. We do not have any and I do not even know whether we will ever have some. We have French servants. I have taken one in three days ago who came in this canton to find work. His name is Califon. He told me, Madam, that he had served you for a long time as a farmer and that he was the father of a little boy who I have seen as your lackey. It seems to me that I have also seen him at your place. He arrived in a rather sad state, leaving a master who had left him only the shirt that he was wearing. It already has been two and a half years that he is in the country. I will keep him if he does his job well. They have told me that he worked well. It is something to be able to be of help to the miserable ones. That is the greatest pleasure that I offered myself in coming here, and if some of our poor French people come here, as I think [fol. 6] that it will happen, we will not be useless to them. Those who come and join us will find their way well paved. They will also find on arriving a place to live, some cattle and other amenities that make the burden of settling much lighter to bear. If this country were such as I want it to be or even such as I hope it will become, I would use all my efforts to attract my friends here. But I would be sorry to invite anyone who afterwards would have reason to regret his decision. This country is neither for those who have many goods, nor for those who want to lead an easy life, nor for those who have nothing. It is good only for those who still have some belongings, who want to work, who are resolved to suffer and who prefer peace to anything else. |
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Molly McClain is an associate professor of history and chair of the Department of History at the University of San Diego. Alessa Ellefson is a graduate of the University of San Diego. The authors are grateful to the board of the Twickel Foundation for granting access to seventeenth-century manuscripts preserved at Twickel Castle. Special thanks to archivist Aafke Brunt for her excellent catalog and kind assistance. The authors very much appreciate the comments and suggestions made by S. M. Can Bilsel, Cynthia Caywood, Juliana Maxim, and the anonymous readers for the William and Mary Quarterly. They also thank J. C. Bierens de Haan for directing them to the archive at Twickel. A project-based university professorship from the University of San Diego supplied the financial support to pursue this project.
Notes
1 Unknown author to Agnes van Wassenaer Obdam, May 18, 1688, in inventory no. 334, fol. 5, Twickel Castle Archive, Delden, Netherlands. Dates are given in Old Style, except that the year has been taken to begin on January 1 instead of March 25. The entire translated letter is reprinted on pages 387–94. In the French version, available on http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/Apr07/mcclain.html, original punctuation has been maintained, but the spelling of French words has been modernized and the abbreviations extended.
2 The Huguenot experience in North America has been the subject of a considerable body of scholarship, much of it focusing on the issue of assimilation. Scholars have characterized French Protestants, fairly or unfairly, as so-called good immigrants. They assimilated into the English-speaking colonies, lost their foreign mannerisms but retained their cultural heritage, and became economically productive members of British society. For this interpretation, see Samuel Smiles, The Huguenots: Their Settlements, Churches, and Industries in England and Ireland (New York, 1867); Charles W. Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration to America, 2 vols. (1885; repr., Baltimore, 1973); Arthur Henry Hirsch, The Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina (1928; repr., Hamden, Conn., 1962). Jon Butler also focused on assimilation, though he described the group in less laudatory terms than earlier historians (Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society [Cambridge, Mass., 1983]). Recent works on the Carolina Huguenots have focused on their distinct identity as merchants and traders. J. F. Bosher challenged Butler's assimilation thesis, arguing that many Protestants retained ties to international trading networks established by Huguenots as early as the sixteenth century. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke produced a detailed study showing the continued membership of Carolina Huguenots in distinctive communities. Finally, R. C. Nash showed that the fortunes of Charleston Huguenots were founded on trade and shipping, not agriculture. Though few of them had international business connections, they were merchants, not planters and slave owners as Butler had assumed. See Bosher, "Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 52, no. 1 (January 1995): 77–102; Van Ruymbeke, "From Ethnicity to Assimilation: The Huguenots and the American Immigration History Paradigm," in From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America, 1550–1750, ed. Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton (Brighton, Eng., 2001), 332–42; Nash, "Huguenot Merchants and the Development of South Carolina's Slave-Plantation and Atlantic Trading Economy, 1680–1775," in Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, ed. Van Ruymbeke and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia, S.C., 2003), 208–40; Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 2006). See also Amy Ellen Friedlander, "Carolina Huguenots: A Study in Cultural Pluralism in the Low Country, 1679–1768" (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1979); Friedlander, "The Huguenots and the Historians: Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina," Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, no. 94 (1989): 1–13.
3 Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, "Minority Survival: The Huguenot Paradigm in France and the Diaspora," in Van Ruymbeke and Sparks, Memory and Identity, 6.
4 Inventory no. 338, Twickel Castle Archive (quotations); A. J. I. van Schaik, "Agnes van Wassenaer Obdam (1635–1698)," in Heren van stand: Van Wassenaer 1200–2000: Achthonderd jaar Nederlandse adelsgeschiedenis, ed. H. M. Brokken (Zoetermeer, Netherlands, 2001), 263–66. Queen Mary II's personal letters to "Mademoiselle d'Obdam" were published in Mechtild Bentinck, ed., Lettres et mémoires de Marie reine d'Angleterre, épouse de Guillaume III (The Hague, Netherlands, 1880).
5 Inventory nos. 331–37, Twickel Castle Archive. For more information on the Huguenots in Ireland, see Albert Carré, L'Influence des Huguenots Français en Irlande aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, France, 1937); C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough, and J.-P. Pittion, eds., The Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an Emigration (Dublin, Ireland, 1987); Raymond Pierre Hylton, "Elites and Assimilation: The Question of Leadership within Dublin's Corps du Refuge, 1642–1740," in Vigne and Littleton, From Strangers to Citizens, 427–34.
6 Unknown to Van Wassenaer Obdam, May 18, 1688, in inventory no. 334, fols. 1–2, Twickel Castle Archive.
7 Ibid., fols. 3–5.
8 Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 2: 171 (quotations); Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, "The Huguenots of Proprietary South Carolina: Patterns of Migration and Integration," in Money, Trade, and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society, ed. Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks (Columbia, S.C., 2001), 32, 37; Nash, "Huguenot Merchants," 208.
9 Slann Legare Clement Simmons, ed., "Early Manigault Records," Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, no. 59 (1954): 27 ("spotted fever"); Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 2: 393 ("In the first place"). Judith Giton's letter was written to another brother who apparently was serving in the Elector of Hanover's army. She had at least one son by her first marriage, John Royer. She married her second husband, Pierre Manigault, around 1699 and died in 1711, leaving two children by him, Gabriel and Judith.
10 Meaghan N. Duff, "Creating a Plantation Province: Proprietary Land Policies and Early Settlement Patterns," in Greene, Brana-Shute, and Sparks, Money, Trade, and Power, 2, 13.
11 Samuel Gaillard Stoney, "Nicholas de Longuemare, Huguenot Goldsmith and Silk Dealer in Colonial South Carolina," Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, no. 55 (1950): 38–69; Van Ruymbeke, "Huguenots of Proprietary South Carolina," 38.
12 Unknown to Van Wassenaer Obdam, May 18, 1688, in inventory no. 334, fols. 1–2, 4, Twickel Castle Archive. In time the Huguenots established close trading relationships with inland tribes. In 1716 a trading post, financed by the provincial government, was erected in Jamestown under the direction of Barthelemy Gaillard. In 1733 two hundred Catawba visited the low country to trade with planters named Butler and St. Julien, despite legislation that penalized settlers for buying from unlicensed Indians operating outside a designated trading area. See Hirsch, Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina, 195; Edward McCrady Gaillard, "A Brief Outline of My Family Background," Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, no. 82 (1977): 85–93; James H. Merrell, The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), 56, 85. See also Joel W. Martin, "Southeastern Indians and the English Trade in Skins and Slaves," in The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521–1704, ed. Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser (Athens, Ga., 1994), 304–24.
13 Unknown to Van Wassenaer Obdam, May 18, 1688, in inventory no. 334, fol. 4, Twickel Castle Archive.
14 Ibid., fols. 3, 5. A table displaying French Protestants' interest in slaveholdings can be found in Hirsch, Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina, 177–78. Jon Butler suggested that "Huguenots outstripped their English neighbors in acquiring slaves through about 1745" (Butler, Huguenots in America, 121). For the increase of rice and cotton cultivation in Carolina after 1695 and the related growth of the African population, see Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 36.
15 Unknown to Van Wassenaer Obdam, May 18, 1688, in inventory no. 334, fol. 2, Twickel Castle Archive.
16Suite de la description de la Carolline (Geneva, Switzerland, 1685); Plan pour former un éstablissement en Caroline (The Hague, Netherlands, 1686); Nouvelle relation de la Caroline par un gentil-homme françois arrivé, depuis deux mois, de ce nouveau pais (1686), in Friedlander, "Carolina Huguenots," 83–84.
17 Unknown to Van Wassenaer Obdam, May 18, 1688, in inventory no. 334, fols. 2–3, Twickel Castle Archive.
18 Ibid., fol. 3.
19 Ibid., fol. 6.
20 "Wills of South Carolina Huguenots," Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, no. 10 (1903): 47.
21 John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina; Containing the Exact Description and Natural History Of That Country ... (1709), http://rla.unc.edu/archives/accounts/lawson/lawson.html.
22 In this English translation, capital letters are used to begin each sentence. Periods are placed at the ends of sentences instead of dashes, colons, or no punctuation at all. Punctuation is altered within sentences if needed to clarify meaning. Paragraph breaks are added. The spelling of place names has been modernized. Manuscript folios appear in brackets.
23 Paul Bruneau, sieur de Revedoux, left France with his father, Arnaud Bruneau, sieur de La Chabociere, and his nephew Henri. They obtained letters of naturalization in England, dated Mar. 20, 1686. La Chabociere also managed to obtain a grant of three thousand acres of land from the proprietors of Carolina. He and his son then entered into a contract with Josias Marylan, seigneur de La Forcet, to build a sawmill in Carolina. They soon left England, arriving in the colony in 1686 (Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 1: 284, 285 n. 2).
24 Jean Boyd, a Scottish merchant from Bordeaux, arrived with his wife, Jeanne Berchaud, a native of La Rochelle with connections among its merchant elite. They brought with them three children and bundles of grapevines, intending to establish a winery in Carolina. In 1687 Boyd received a grant of 626 acres from the proprietors. Wine making, however, never became more than a casual enterprise among Carolina Huguenots. Boyd entered into Carolina society, serving as a second-rank member in the 1692–94 assembly. See Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 2: 138; J. W. Fortescue et al., eds., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series: America and West Indies (1899; repr., Vaduz, Liechtenstein, 1964), 12: 397 (item no. 1,346); Butler, Huguenots in America, 97, 106; Matthew Glozier, The Huguenot Soldiers of William of Orange and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688: The Lions of Judah (Brighton, Eng., 2002), 137.
25 Alexandre Thesée Chastaigner, sieur de L'Isle, and his brother, Henri Auguste Chastaigner, sieur de Cramahé, participated in the settlement of the canton. The Chastaigners were a distinguished family of Protestants with contacts among the urban bourgeoisie of La Rochelle. L'Isle fled France with three brothers, one of whom was captured, flogged, and imprisoned for twenty-seven months before being banished from France. L'Isle and Cramahé made their way to London, where the former was denizened on Mar. 5, 1685/6. In September 1686 the brothers received a grant of three thousand acres from the proprietors. They arrived in the colony shortly thereafter. L'Isle's wife, Elizabeth Buretel, joined them. Among the earliest documents relating to the Santee settlement is an Apr. 5, 1687, warrant under the name and seal of Governor James Colleton, by virtue of which two hundred acres of land were surveyed and laid out for Henry Augustus Chastaigner and Alexander Thesée Chastaigner on the Santee in April 1693. A grant for the same was issued Mar. 12, 1698/9. By 1693 L'Isle was a member of the Carolina assembly and his brother appeared on the Governor's Council. See Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 1: 283–85, 285 n. 2; Thomas Gaillard, "Immigrants from 1690 to 1700," in "Copious Extracts by the Committee on Publication from the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina, and Their Descendants," Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, no. 5 (1897): 16; Hirsch, Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina, 220; Fortescue et al., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 12: 239 (item no. 842).
26 Jamestown, which had been named by the proprietors long before it was built, never became a major settlement. The river was given to freshets and the climate was poor. Moreover its location was unsuited to inland trade, and it was too far from Charleston to attract foreign goods. The author moved to a place above the river, perhaps farther east toward Mazyck's Ferry on the south Santee.
27 The "two Perdriaux ladies" were related to Pierre and Lewis Perdriau, leading Charleston merchants. Margueritte Perdriau left the Île de Ré with her husband, Daniel Huger (1651–1711), and their children. Huger, a tax collector in Loudun who became a successful planter on the Santee, was also a devout believer, prefacing the family record that he kept on the flyleaf of his French Bible with an invocation to God whose "chastisements hath been mixed with wonderful mercies," who had preserved them "from the persecutors of thy Gospel." He was buried at his plantation, Wambaw, in Craven Co. His widow married Philippe L'Jandro (Gendron) at Santee and died in 1717. The Hugers' first child, Margaret (1678–1740), married Governor Nathaniel Johnson in 1704. Their son Daniel Huger Jr. ranked among the richest gentlemen in Carolina in 1754. See Wm. H. Huger, ed., "Paper Describing the First Generations of the Huger Family in South Carolina," Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, no. 4 (1897): 11–19; Hirsch, Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina, 225, 232; William H. Smith, comp., "Huger Family Record," Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, no. 72 (1967): 36–37.
28 "Intelligence" may refer to the colonists' practicality and cleverness in managing their affairs. It also may refer to news, suggesting that the colonists were not isolated from current events.
29Élie Boudinot came from the town of Marans-en-Saintonge, located eleven miles northeast of La Rochelle. See Baird, History of the Huguenot Emigration, 1: 288 n. 6, 298.
30 Their brother, André Thauvet, from the island of Marie-Galante, had joined Jacob Leisler in the Huguenot colony at New Rochelle in New York. He was married to a sister of Benjamin Faneuil, a merchant of La Rochelle and Rotterdam who was involved in trade with Leisler and Leisler's future son-in-law Jacob Milborne. See David William Voorhees, "Jacob Leisler and the Huguenot Network in the English Atlantic World," in Vigne and Littleton, From Strangers to Citizens, 325. See also Georgana Klass Willets, "The Children of Andre Thauvet and Suzanne Faneuil," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 117, no. 2 (April 1986): 87–89.
31 James Mantell Goulard de Vervaut received a grant of three thousand acres from the Lords Proprietors on Dec. 7, 1686. See Fortescue et al., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 12: 298 (item no. 1,043).
32 Joachim Gaillard (b. 1625) of Montpellier, Languedoc, and his wife, Esther Paperel of Lyon, were early settlers. Their son Barthelemy became a surveyor and, with two other men, laid out Jamestown at the Santee settlement in 1706. See Fortescue et al., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 12: 451 (item no. 1,456); Gaillard, Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina 82: 85–93. A list of early Huguenot settlers along the Santee can be found in [Daniel Ravenel, comp.], "Liste des François et Suisses": From an Old Manuscript List of French and Swiss Protestants Settled in Charleston, on the Santee and at the Orange Quarter in Carolina Who Desired Naturalization Prepared Probably about 1695–6 (1868; repr., Baltimore, 1968). This 1697 naturalization list names 356 refugees (200 adults and 156 children).
33 La Chabociere had left London with a plan to build a sawmill and to deforest a portion of the three thousand acres that he had acquired from the proprietors. Bermuda shipwrights needed wood for their vessels and Caribbean planters needed wood for the fires that boiled their sugarcane. After the failure of his project, he abandoned his son's plantation near Charleston, which had been purchased during the latter's first trip to Carolina, and joined Revedoux at Wanthee near Jamestown. His will, signed on Nov. 20, 1694, suggests that he suffered a stroke, "which left a great numbness over the entire left part of my body, which has greatly enfeebled all my limbs." He commended his soul to God and bequeathed his three thousand acres to his son. See Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina 10: 37–41.
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