USA > Rhode Island > Washington County > Narragansett > South county studies of some eighteenth century persons, places & conditions in that portion of Rhode Island called Narragansett > Part 2
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Huguenot Influence in Rhode Island
matized by the logic of Calvin, who may be styled the Apostle to the intellectual; and wherever wetrace the in- fluence of his teachings, whether in discipleship, under the skies of antique France, or in the revolt of modern New England, we recognize the workings of Renais- sance scholarship and Calvinistic thoughtfulness, as in the reactionary types which to-day are reproached as cultivating a mere intellectualism, or even as Pagan, by those religionists who jealously profess a more full- blooded creed, and engage in a heartier worship. But though the French Calvinist, by his moral elevation, represented the most dignified type of French charac- ter, he was not of the school thus indicated by the poet of Puritan antecedents :
"Severe and smileless, he that runs may read The stern disciple of Geneva's creed."
Like the Puritans, the Huguenots sang psalms, and werediligent Bible students. Like them, they chose the names of their children from the Scriptures rather than from the calendar of saints of doubtful associations. The analogy of their sufferings under the Bourbon Ahasuerus with those of the Jews of old time, as re- lated in the Book of Esther, was constantly present with them, and no name was oftener given to their daughters than that of the Jewish heroine. The name of Samuel, the early called, was so often used among them in pious memory of youthful devotion as to provoke the scorn- ful notice of their opponents. But, unlike the New Eng- landers, they cultivated the amenities of life, in cheery and kindly social observances, in delicacy and refine- ment of manners, and in taste for music and the arts.
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South County Studies
In engraving, ceramics, painting, and sculpture, and in the walks of science, scholarship, and literature, they furnished examples of exceptional ability and skill. While civil war was raging, in 1574, the theatres of La Rochelle were frequented, as those of Paris were in the Reign of Terror, more than two hundred years later. And the play which divided the attention of the Ro- chellese with the interests of the war was the work of a Huguenot woman, afterwards known in the long history of a desperate strife as the heroic Duchesse de Rohan. Creeds and systems cannot extinguish race characteristics, and these Puritans of France kept Christmas and Easter, used a ritual, and in exile readily conformed to the Church of England, who numbers on her long list of worthies some of their most valued sons.
One distinction between the fugitives of La Ro- chelle and the Pilgrims of Leyden cannot be overlooked - the former fled from persecution in its severest form; the latter did not; and, praiseworthy as was that mo- tive of their departure from Holland which prompted them to preserve and transmit their English national- ity, the Puritan emigrants cannot command those deeper sympathies which respond to the story of the Huguenot exiles.
The merciless fate that banished the fugitive from his home and country pursued him, in various forms of misfortune, in his flight to distant refuges. England and Holland afforded peaceful asylums. But treachery undermined Coligny's colony in Brazil, and Spanish and Portuguese hostility completed its ruin. The Flo- ridian colony was soon extinct in the blood of those Spanish massacres which the tourist learns to asso-
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ciate with the antiquity of St. Augustine. By the tri- umph of the Jesuits, the heretic was expelled from Acadia and Canada; and France was arrested in the career of colonial empire. In her Protestant population she possessed her most valuable material for the work of colonization. The Huguenots were of the prosperous class that emigrates only under the stress of some ex- traordinary motive, such as was supplied by the pur- suit of liberty of conscience. But this means of escape was denied to them; for the persecution long rife in the kingdom was finally carried into the far Antilles; and the Huguenot, already an emigrant for his faith to these remote dependencies of the French crown, be- came a fugitive to the English colonies. By a system which illustrated the irony of cruelty, the Protestants were now sent in forced emigrations to the Antilles, transported like convicts to be sold into peonage to the Roman Catholic planters. As in the history of the In- quisition, which mocked the hopes of the converts to its terrors with a pious death, inflicted on them as peni- tents, and not as heretics, so among the Huguenot vic- tims the recanting and the constant were shipped to- gether from French ports to a fate more dreaded than even the slavery of the galleys, of which Victor Hugo has given so fearfully vivid a picture in his recital of the sufferings of les forçats. Only in escape from the tor- tures of the West Indies to the haven of the nearest Protestant country could the hunted exile find security. And here, too, his unhappy destiny awaited him in the earlier experiences of his settlement in our Eastern, Middle, and Southern colonies, for the fever of Carolina, the savages of the New Netherlands and of Massa- 2 11 ]
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chusetts, where they were incited by Jesuit craft to the Oxford massacre, were deadly foes. No more touching story is written in our colonial annals than that of the sorrowing exiles of New Oxford, homeless for the sec- ond time, departing in tears from their church in the wilderness, and from the graves of their dead.
But in Rhode Island, the retreat of the persecuted, and in Narragansett, the seat of the friendly tribe that welcomed the exiled founder of the colony,- here, as- suredly, the wanderer must find repose. It was not so. Even here he tasted again of the bitterness of exile, and once more took up the burden of his griefs, a homeless man.
The cause of his expulsion from the little territory, of which our local tradition relates that he chose it for its fertility, as hoping to find in it an Eden of fruitful- ness and peace, was, according to the researches of the late Elisha R. Potter, one of those disputes over con- flicting land titles which so often sowed thorns in the path of our pioneers. The designing Atherton Com- pany, through its London agents, secured these unsus- pecting emigrants as settlers of territory which nearly ten years before had been parcelled out by the Rhode Island Assembly to the proprietors of East Greenwich, under which name the new township was already known. More than forty-five families left London to sail for New England in 1686. The leader of the ex- pedition was a nobleman, and among the emigrants were the pastor and the physician of the future colony. Its annals are short and simple indeed, for in five years the settlement was broken up and almost every family had left Rhode Island.
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The members of the Atherton Company had ob- tained their large Indian grants partly by means of frauds, which led Roger Williams (who refused to interpret for them, on their first coming into Narra- gansett as representatives of Connecticut) to denounce their greed for land, as "one of the gods of our New England, which the Eternal will destroy." The various colonial and individual claims to the Narragansett lands were still pending, while the claimants awaited the decision of the Crown, when the refugees entered this doubtful region as settlers. They were first assigned to a tract six miles square, lying west of Wickford, the Newbarry Plantation, probably so called after Walter Newbarry, a Rhode Island member of the Council of Governor Andros. But it was rejected by these emi- grants from the Rochellese seaboard as lying too far from the ocean, and another site was occupied, then, as now, principally included in East Greenwich and still identified as Frenchtown, where the excavations made for nine of their temporary habitations may still be traced, chiefly grouped about the spring, around which they planted their orchards and vineyards.
And now we pause on the eve of their settlement to consider the character of the new surroundings in which they found themselves, after nearly a twelve- month of the homeless journeyings of exiles. Two centuries from the crowded years of the ancient civili- zation of France! Two hundred years from the brief story of the American colonization ! We go back to the rude beginnings of our colonial life, to find it confronted in strangest contrast, by the finest qualities of Euro- pean maturity. In 1686, Roger Williams had been
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dead but three years. Louis XIV was yet to live nearly thirty years to see the injury wrought to his kingdom by his unrighteous enactment. James II was in the first year of his short and turbulent reign, during which, under the administration of his colonial representa- tives, the early names of the townships in the King's Province were temporarily changed, in petty conform- ity to that arbitrary policy which was arrested by the New England Revolution of 1689. The political state of Narragansett was so wretched that Kingstown, in consideration of the disturbances of the country, had lately obtained the remission of her tax. Her chosen deputies to the Assembly had for several sessions re- fused to serve. All these troubles arose from the strife of colonial jurisdictions, and from the conflicting claims to individual holdings. Both Connecticut and Massa- chusetts were territorial claimants in Narragansett; the latter colony having formally annexed Westerly to her County of Suffolk. The disputed land claims in Narragansett, as set forth by Roger Williams eight years earlier in a quaintly graphic paper, were no fewer than fifteen. Ten years had passed since King Philip's War, but the country had not yet recovered from the devastation wrought by the attacks of the Indians and the quartering of the troops of the United Colonies. Bull's Block-house, and the other burned buildings of the settlers, had not been replaced; and the agriculture of the Narragansetts had ceased with the destructive blow suffered by the tribe in the battle of the Great Swamp Fort. The unsettled state of a country, the own- ership of which had been long and hotly disputed, and which finally had been the seat of Indian war-
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fare, as well as of border frays, may be indicated by the fact that the date of 1686 is still eighteen years earlier than that of the pilgrimage made in 1704 by the resolute Madam Knight, from Boston to New Haven, passing through Narragansett, and meeting in the course of her undertaking with such difficulties and dangers as embellish this journey of two hundred miles with more adventures than a woman would now encounter in making the tour of the world. "The French doctor," mentioned by her (Dr. Pierre Ayrault, of the Frenchtown settlement), figures in her narrative as nearly the only reminder of that civilization of which she took leave almost at the beginning of her travels in her visit at Dedham, to "Mr. Belcher, the minister of the town." One incident of travel related by her is the passage of a river, since identified as running south of East Greenwich. She says : "The post told me there was a bad river we were to ride through, which was so very fierce a horse could hardly stem it." On reach- ing it, "I perceived by the horse's going we were on the descent of a hill which, as we came nearer to the bottom, was totally dark with the trees that sur- rounded it." But "I knew by the going of the horse we had entered the water." Having crossed, giving the reins to her horse, as bidden by her guide, "he then put on harder than I with my weary bones could fol- low; so left me and the way behind him in the dole- some woods." These descriptive touches show us that the conditions of pioneer life in Narragansett were, as the writer says of the experiences of her journey, "enough to startle a masculine courage."
The fertility of the land was the chief advantage en-
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joyed by the Huguenot settlers. In this temperate cli- mate their favorite gardens and orchards would flour- ish abundantly. Nowhere in Rhode Island does the wild grape grow in greater profusion than here; and the sci- ons of the mulberry trees of their projected silk culture are still cultivated in Frenchtown. But, in the words of the Psalmist, "A fruitful land maketh He barren, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein"; and the dispersed settlers, in their ignorance of any well-estab- lished prior claim to the land, must have believed it a wickedness to drive them from the fields they had dili- gently tilled and planted. How severe must have been the hardships of exile from the oldest of European civ- ilizations to the struggles of colonial existence! How rude the transition from the courtly scenes in which some of the emigrants had moved to the stern solitudes of Narragansett! The strange contrasts in their expe- riences did not pass unnoticed by their fellow-colonists. In the manuscript diary of John Saffin, of Bristol, one of the three "Proprietors of the Narragansett Coun- try," who signed the articles of agreement with "the French gentlemen," may be traced certain indications of his indignation at the story of their wrongs and his hearty hatred of their royal oppressor. "The king of France is so absolute that his will is his law. . . . The mere impost of salt throughout France is said to amount to two million of pounds sterling, the poor people being forced to take yearly such a quantity they know not how to use at the King's excessive rates." And further: "It is affirmed and taken for a certain truth that the French King's own table stands him £500,000 yearly, besides the Dauphin and the Queen's expenses at
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court, and in pensions yearly, at home and abroad, seven millions of money. And the French clergy are believed to possess thirty millions of yearly rent which they pay to the King." Thus far our diarist, whose homely record impresses us with the arrogant luxury of a court, the abuses of which had become matter of reflection with an obscure provincial in a foreign col- ony. His bare rendering of the "certain truth" brings before us the Grand Monarque, the dispenser of the wealth of the nation in pensions among the tools of his policy "at home and abroad," and especially at the English court, no less strongly than his figure is dis- played in the brilliant narrative of Macaulay, whose rhetoric but enhances the original force of the facts. Where in all the circuit of human affairs could the moralist find the antithesis more sharply drawn be- tween the splendors of sin and the sufferings of the righteous, than in the opposite fortunes of the Most Christian King and his unhappy subjects? As we have seen, the power and opulence of "Lewis, ye French King," had penetrated even the obscurity of Narra- gansett
" With far-off glories of the Throne, And glimmerings of the Crown."
And the keen distresses of these exiles from persecu- tion had gained a hearing even from Andros, whom Puritan narrators have depicted as the tyrant of New England annals, but who lent a merciful ear to the prayer of the refugees, ordering half the hay mown on the meadows of which the holding was disputed between the old and the new settlers, to be "for the use and benefit of the said French families, who, being
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strangers and lately settled, are wholly destitute, and have no other way to supply themselves." Such were the contrasted conditions of royalty and exile. But the earthly honors of Louis could afford him only a cor- ruptible crown, while
"The memory of the just Smells sweet, and blossoms in the dust."
The giving of this considerate order by Governor An- dros, and his neutrality in the conflict of possession, could not provide against the difficulties of an imper- fect title. To review the controversy over the jurisdic- tion and occupation of Narragansett would, as Updike said, require a volume. But the nucleus of the annoy- ances experienced by the Huguenots lies in the fact of their making claim to lands which in 1677 had been granted to actual settlers. Had they taken up some of the vacant lands of Narragansett, the diffi- culties attending the adjustment of the rights of the Crown, and the proprietorship of the Atherton Com- pany, might have been as slight as the colonists had expected them to be. They seem never to have known that Rhode Island, by the act of her Assembly, had committed herself to the protection of the earlier set- tlers; nor to have taken account of that Colony as a party, and an active one, in the controversy. It is true that all parties were nominally awaiting the decision of the Crown in respect to the opposing claims of Rhode Island and Connecticut; but Rhode Islanders were by no means disposed to tarry for the slow processes of a conclusion concerning which they cherished an as- surance, eventually to be justified, that it would prove
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favorable to their rights. They were first in possession, and they vigorously enforced their claims. The Hu- guenots, lacking any effectual support from Connecti- cut, and finding no hope in the intricacies of the law and the administration of a foreign country, the lan- guage of which was but imperfectly understood, but interpreting only too plainly the signs of violence and hostility in the effacing of their boundaries, the block- ing of their highways, and finally in personal assaults, quietly withdrew from the debatable land. The East Greenwich and Kingston settlers seem to have asserted their ownership by the arm of flesh rather than by the arm of the law. It was perhaps too much to expect of their magnanimity that they should show moderation in the defence of rights which they regarded as out- rageously violated; and we cannot be surprised at their disorderly behavior, in view of the fact that they evi- dently belonged to that class of society which knows little of self-control. The long period of border warfare over the disputed lands of Narragansett had developed the natural lawlessness of persons for whose conduct the better order of settlers were not responsible. "Many of the English inhabitants," says Dr. Ayrault, in his remonstrance to the Commissioners of the Colony, "would have helped us, but when they used any means therein they were evilly treated." When the war be- tween France and England was impending in 1689 the Huguenots suffered serious annoyance from the rude search for arms made among them, without legal warrant, by their turbulent neighbors; but such of the English as were of better nurture joined the French in making formal complaint of this treatment; and the
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refugees, by obeying the order of the Rhode Island government, and taking the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, secured themselves against further molestation.
It was a fair promise of colonial prosperity that was dissipated with the expulsion of the refugees. Each family was entitled to 100 acres of upland, besides meadow land in proportion. The price was to be £20 the hundred acres, if paid immediately, or £25 if the payment were deferred for three years. The pastor's endowment consisted of 150 acres. One hundred acres were set apart as glebe land; and fifty acres were al- lotted toward the support of a schoolmaster. A church was built, in which, to quote the touching expressions of Ayrault, "we could enjoy our worship to God, ... it being a very wilderness country." This little church was destroyed by persons unknown to posterity, but charitably characterized by Ayrault in terms much below the severity merited by the offence as "the vul- gar sort of the people."
Five hundred French families, we are told, would have come to join their countrymen in Narragansett, but it was not to be the fortune of the French emigrant to America to found a lasting, vigorous, and homoge- neous colony, save in that province which has been called "the home of the Huguenots," and in which the sheltered flowering of the transplanted French char- acter has been apparent in the social supremacy and the generous traits of the Carolinian. The researches of the Rev. Dr. Charles W. Baird, as given in his his- tory of the Huguenot Emigration to America, have unveiled the few facts in the story of the dispersed
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colonists that can now be ascertained. Natives of La Rochelle, and of Normandy, of Saintonge, Poitou, and Guyenne, they were finally scattered among the sev- eral colonies already entered by their countrymen and brethren. The greatest number went to New York; others removed to New Rochelle, South Carolina, Bos- ton, and Oxford. But Pastor Carré, born in the faith- ful Protestant Isle de Ré, which lay under the pro- tecting shield of La Rochelle, a Genevan student of the academy founded by Calvin, the former minister of two congregations in France, and now in the for- tieth year of his useful life, passes out of ken, with the dispersion of his flock. The local tradition of the pas- tor of the Oxford colony is preserved by the beautiful outlines of Bondet Hill, but no trace remains of the brief residence in the Narragansett country of this European scholar and man of gentle nurture. Two families only, of those named on the authorized list of the original settlers, remained in Narragansett. Möise Le Moine (the name being now corrupted to Mawney) retained the farm still held and occupied by his descendants, and on which are found the principal evidences of the French settlement. Dr. Ayrault also continued to hold his lands, being, as he says, "per- suaded by many to stay," doubtless because of his use- fulness to a community in which, to quote his own words, he had been "a help to raise many from ex- treme sickness." A third settler, Julien, removed to Newport.
Though, perhaps, an idle speculation, yet it is one upon which the annalist pensively dwells, that rep- resents the results of the growth of a large and flour-
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ishing Huguenot settlement in our borders, as they might have been felt in the greater prosperity and finer culture of Narragansett. From the character of the actual settlers we may judge of such as were to have been added to their number; and the names of De Marigny, the Norman noble, Carré, the learned pastor, and Ayrault, the able physician, are guarantees of the high order of the moral and social elements of the colony. With these leading members were fitly joined Beauchamps, of a family which still remained among the faithful few in Paris, so long the centre of Romanist fanaticism and cruelty. He became one of the successful merchants of Boston, and removed to Hartford, where his descendants are now living. There were besides, in the list thus suggestively labelled in the British State Paper Office "Mapp of the French refugee Gentlemen who are all turned out by the Road Islanders," the names of the two Davids, scions of one of the best families of La Rochelle. Allaire, afterwards a Boston merchant, was also of that city, and belonged to a family even then long tried in fidelity to the re- formed religion, and to this day still true to its cause. Collin, another member of the Rochellese gentry, be- came the ancestor of a well-known Connecticut line. Grazillier was, in later years, one of the leading mem- bers of the Huguenot colony in New York. Tourtellot, of Bordeaux, was connected with some of the chief refugee families. Legaré belonged to the family of that name which has won intellectual and social distinction in Charleston, South Carolina. Barbut and Grignon were to be known as elders of the French Church in Boston. These colonists, with others of no slighter re-
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spectability, were unfortunately lost to Rhode Island, and their energies and influence were expended in the building up of other communities. Had they been able to make Narragansett their home, it would certainly have become the seat of a civilization in many respects superior to that which has as yet penetrated some of the interior regions of our State. Beginning with the earliest requirements of a newly settled country, they would have pursued their diligent and painstaking system of agriculture until their orchards and vine- yards had enriched the plantation with the fruits of their patriarchal toils. Their simple gayety and social refinements would have brightened the savage gloom of the wilderness. Their "songs of lofty cheer," the psalms which they suited, not only to the stated hours of devotion, but to the daily round of duty, would ring out, as in the happier years of "the Religion" in France, from field and garden, from the workshop and the shallop. Their school would keep alive the traditions of classic learning, and inculcate those gracious les- sons of courtesy and reverence by which their own youth was formed, in their old home. And then, ris- ing to the highest need of their natures, their spiritual aspirations must find expression. To their rude church in the clearing they devoted their first labors:
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