Abstract
Between 1675 and 1690, from 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots fled their native France to escape Louis XIV’s final attempt to extirpate Protestantism from his lands. These refugees initially settled in the nearest Protestant sanctuaries available to them, namely Geneva, Brandenburg-Hesse, the Netherlands, and England. But as prospects dimmed for returning to France, many sought new homes for a permanent exile. These second migrations took Huguenot refugees far from their native France and Europe to places as remote as South Africa, Russia, and South Carolina. In these new and permanent homes, the Huguenot refugees and their descendants experienced significant cultural and religious changes. Some of these alterations proved to be relatively innocuous. French weavers, chamey-dressers, and silversmiths became, for example, American (or British) farmers. But other changes proved more problematic. Huguenots who left France to preserve their religious tradition became Anglicans, Presbyterians, even Baptists. Men and women who had fled religious persecution profited from a slavery that victimized others. Is it possible that the commemoration of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes will stimulate a scholarship that makes sense of these and other anomalies in the history of French Protestantism?
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Reference
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Daniel Ligou, “La peau de chagrin (1598–1685),” in Robert Mandrou et al., Histoire des Protestants en France (Toulouse, 1977), 118–22. The expulsion of the Moors from Spain constituted early modern Europe’s other major forced migration. For a general histo of religious refugees see Frederick A. Norwood, Strangers and Exiles: A History of Religious Refugees (Nashville, 1969 ).
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The best description of the Carolina promotion literature still is found in Hope Frances Kane, “Colonial Promotion and Promotion Literature of Carolina, 1660–1700,” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1930). Also see Gilbert Chinard, Les réfugiés Huguenots en Amérique (Paris, 1925), 62–63.
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Based on a survey of Warrants for Land in South Carolina, 1672–1711,ed. A. S. Salley, Jr., and R. Nicholas Olsberg (Columbia, S.C., 1973).
On the New England patterns see Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New Yoric, 1970), 71, and Charles S. Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (New York, 1971), 13–16, 18–20, 56–62. For Pennsylvania patterns see James T. Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A. Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1972), 42–70, and Mary Maples Dunn and Richard S. Dunn, eds., The Papers of William Penn (Philadelphia, 1981), 2: 630–35.
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The subject of occupational change in America has produced a large and often disputatious literature, nearly all of it on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For an introduction to the problem see Stephan Themstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 ( Cambridge, Mass., 1973 ).
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Based on an analysis of Huguenot estates found in the Estate Inventories, 1736–65, South Carolina Archives, Columbia, S.C., as interpreted in light of colony-wide patterns described in Richard Waterhouse, “South Carolina’s Colonial Elite: A Study in the Social Structure of a Southern Colony, 1670–1760,” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1973 ).
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca and London, 1966), 109–110, 201. Also see Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves. aux Antilles françaises, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Guadeloupe, 1974), and Antoine Gisler, L’esclavage aux Antilles françaises (17e-19e siècle) (Fribourg, 1965).
On early South Carolina economic development and slaveholding see Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 3–34.
On the relationship between slavery and South Carolina economic development see ibid. and Converse D. Clowse, Economic Beginnings in Colonial South Carolina, 1670–1730 ( Columbia, S.C., 1971 ), 69–138.
On slavery in South Carolina and elsewhere see Wood, Black Majority,and Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975). Morgan describes a similar paradox in the evolution of freedom and slavery in eighteenth-century Virginia.
Robin D. Gwynn, ed., A Calendar of the Letter Books of the French Church of London from the Civil War to the Restoration, /643–1659,Huguenot Society of London, Publications,54 (1979): 2–26.
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The most recent discussion of the Dutartre affair properly places it in its broader intellectual and religious context: David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: From Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 172–75. Also see Butler, Huguenots in America, 119–20, and the single contemporary description on which all secondary accounts are based: Alexander Garden, Take Heed How Ye Hear (Charleston, 1741 ), 29–38.
For miscellaneous references to these funeral practices see A. S. Salley, ed., Register of St. Philip’s Parish, 1720–1758 ( Columbia, S. C., 1971 ).
Ligou and Joutard, “Les Déserts (1685–1800),” in. Mandrou, Histoire des Protestants en France, 189–215. On political as well as religious thought elsewhere in the diaspora see two works by Elisabeth Labrousse: Bayle, trans. Denys Potts (New York, 1983), and “The Political Ideas of the Huguenot Diaspora (Bayle and Jurieu),” in Church, State and Society under the Bourbon Kings of France, ed. Richard M. Golden (Lawrence, Kan., 1982 ), 222–83.
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Butler, J. (1988). The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and Huguenot Migration to South Carolina. In: Golden, R.M. (eds) The Huguenot Connection: The Edict of Nantes, Its Revocation, and Early French Migration to South Carolina. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idées/International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 125. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2766-7_4
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