Huguenots

Sources

Early French Protestants. The migration of French Protestants to America was closely tied to the religious climate in France. The Edict of Nantes, promulgated in 1598 and revoked in 1685, guaranteed limited religious toleration for Protestants. Even before the Edict of Nantes, however, some individuals close to the government realized that Protestants might be in danger. As early as the 1560s French Huguenots looked to the New World as a potential area for settlement. Unfortunately, they chose places claimed by Spain and were thus seen as threats by the Spanish. In 1562 a small group built Charles fort on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina, but abandoned the site shortly thereafter. In 1564–1565, 900 Huguenots tried to establish a colony near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. They were discovered and routed by a Spanish fleet, thus ending French Protestant attempts to set up their own separate colonies. Those who came to America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after toleration was abolished, would join already ongoing English colonies.

Revocation. In 1589 Henry of Navarre, a Protestant, became a Roman Catholic and was then crowned Henry IV of France. That same year he tried to protect his Protestant subjects by giving them some limited freedoms through the Edict of Nantes, but French Protestantism was not really safe, especially after Henry died. During the seventeenth century Protestants faced growing restrictions and by 1675 outright suppression. Many had already converted to Roman Catholicism. Louis XIV brought an official end to French Protestantism when in 1685 he revoked the Edict of Nantes and sent troops to Protestant villages. Ministers were forced either to convert or leave. By the time Louis XIV died in 1715 there were few Protestants in France. Most had become Catholics, at least outwardly, while maybe some 160,000 fled—no official figures were kept. Emigrés went first to Protestant countries in Europe: German principalities, the Netherlands, and England. In these places the exiles found life hard and sometimes, as in England, encountered prejudice. Perhaps because of these problems, most of those who would migrate to America came from the Huguenot communities in England.

Northern Colonies. The Huguenots were not the first French Protestants to settle in the northern colonies. In New Amsterdam the first settlers had been Walloons, French speakers from what is now Belgium. A small number of families from the Channel Islands, which lie between France and England, had also come to New England. But the real French migration began after 1680. New England had perhaps 200 Huguenot men, women, and children in 1700. New York had a larger population, one capable of creating a French church, the Eglise Françoise à la Nouvelle York, in 1688. By 1695 there were about 800 French Huguenots in New York, some 300 of which probably lived in New York City.

Southern Colonies. As in the northern colonies, there were some small clusters of French speakers such as those in Manakin, Virginia, but the majority stayed together in larger groups. South Carolina provided a home for French Protestants in the South, and by 1697 there were 450 in that colony. About 45 percent lived in Charleston, and the rest populated three settlements in the countryside. Immigration to South Carolina was not an accident. The Carolina proprietors advertised their colony in pamphlets, boasting that “for salubrity of Air, Fertility of Soyl, for the Luxuriant and Indulgent Blessings of Nature, [travelers’ accounts] justly rendered Carolina Famous.” Perhaps it was this kind of tract, translated into French, that lured Pierre Giton to leave Germany with his mother, brother, and sister, and after stops in Amsterdam and London, board a ship for Charleston. South Carolina proved to be not quite the paradise promised. His mother and brother died of disease within a year and a half. The sister recalled “sickness, pestilence, famine, poverty,” and hard labor, yet in the end she survived and apparently prospered. The establishing of French churches in the colony must have helped to ease the transition from Europe to America.

Assimilation. The Huguenots were among the first ethnically discrete groups to migrate to the British colonies, but they did not keep their French identity for long. Those, such as Philip L’Anglois, who lived in Salem, Massachusetts, with few other Frenchmen around him, Anglicized their names: Philip L’Anglois became Philip English. In both New York and South Carolina, Huguenot cohesion had eroded by 1710. Both men and women married non-Huguenots and joined other churches, especially the Church of England. New Yorkers elected the wealthy Huguenot Stephen De Lancey assistant alderman as early as 1691. His family would become one of the most powerful in eighteenth-century New York, with James De Lancey serving as both a supreme court justice and lieutenant governor. In South Carolina some Huguenots such as Jean Boyd and Benjamin God in sat in the Commons House of Assembly, South Carolina’s house of representatives. In 1710 the merchant Isaac Masyck asked the colony’s governor to be his daughter’s godfather. By the time of the American Revolution, Huguenots were known by their French names, but in most other ways they were no different from English colonists.

Sources

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

Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).