Huguenots

HUGUENOTS

HUGUENOTS. The term "Huguenot," of unknown origin, was first applied to French Calvinists during the religious struggles of the sixteenth century. Henry IV granted religious toleration to his Protestant subjects by the Edict of Nantes (1598), but Louis XIV revoked it in 1685. During periods of persecution, approximately 300,000 French Protestants fled to Prussia, Switzerland, Holland, England, and the Dutch and English colonies. Fewer than 3,000 Huguenot refugees arrived in America before 1710. In America, the label Huguenot came to refer more broadly to French-speaking Calvinists, whether French, Swiss, or Walloon.

Attempted Huguenot settlements in Florida and South Carolina in 1562 and 1564 failed. In 1623, Huguenots, largely Walloons, settled New Amsterdam. Peter Minuit, the first director general of New Netherland, was a Walloon, and Jean Vigne, the first white child born on Manhattan Island, was French and probably Huguenot. Fort Orange (Albany), Kingston, and New Paltz in New York were Huguenot settlements. Some 200 or 300 Huguenot families came to Boston after Louis XIV's Dragonnades, which persecuted Protestants by billeting unruly soldiers in their homes.

After 1685, increasing numbers of Huguenots came to America, settling in Rhode Island, in Hartford and Mil-ford in Connecticut, and in New Rochelle, New York. They mingled with other settlers in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, where they were called Dutchmen and confused with German settlers. In Virginia, the first of the "French Protestant Refugees," as the name appears officially in Virginia records, was Nicholas Martiau. He arrived before 1620 and is the earliest known Virginia ancestor of George Washington. The shipload coming to of Manakintowne on 23 July 1700, and two more shiploads in the same year, made up the largest single settlement of Huguenots in America. King William Parish was set aside for them, but this group with its local church and pastor was absorbed into the Church of England. The parishioners soon intermarried with the English people of the colony.

Huguenots began coming to South Carolina in 1670, played a large part in the settlement of Charleston in 1680, and by 1687 had established four settlements largely or wholly French: Jamestown on the Santee River, the "Orange Quarter" on the Cooper River, Saint-John's in Berkeley County, and Charleston. In 1732, 360 French-Swiss Protestants settled Purysburg on the Savannah River, and in 1764 the last French colony was founded, New Bordeaux in Abbeville County.

Traditionally, historians have emphasized the rapid assimilation of the Huguenots into American society, linguistically, religiously, and economically. The most recent interpretations are more circumspect. While the Huguenots did indeed learn English, conform to Anglicanism, and contract exogamous marriages, such behavior may better be described as acculturation, in that Huguenot values influenced the evolution of the dominant Anglo-American culture. The process of assimilation may also have been more gradual than earlier historians believed. Huguenots transacted public business in English but continued to use French in private correspondence through most of the eighteenth century. Among merchant families, exogamous marriages served to maintain and expand their place within the Atlantic commercial network known as the Protestant International. Calvinist religious practices persisted despite conformity, giving a low-church tone to the Church of England.

The late nineteenth century witnessed a revival of Huguenot ethnicity as exemplified in the creation of Huguenot heritage societies and the adoption of a Huguenot flag (a Maltese cross and dove against a blue background). In Charleston at the end of the twentieth century, Huguenot descendants continued to take pride in their Huguenot church, the only one still in existence in America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bosher, John F. "Huguenot Merchants and the Protestant International in the Seventeenth Century." William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 52 (January 1995): 77–102.

Butler, Jon. The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Van Ruymbeke, Bertrand. "The Huguenots of Proprietary South Carolina: Patterns of Migration and Settlement." In Money, Trade and Power: The Evolution of South Carolina's Plantation System. Edited by Jack P. Greene, Rosemary Brana-Shute, and Randy J. Sparks. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

Leslie Choquette

James Elliott Walmsley

See also New Amsterdam ; Walloons .