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 3
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"Scarce steal the winds that sweep his woodland tracks The larch's perfume from the settler's axe, Ere, like a vision of the morning air, His slight-framed steeple marks the house of prayer.
It sheds the raindrops from its shingled eaves Ere its green brothers once have changed their leaves."
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Here they came to receive from the hands of their faith- ful pastor the ministrations of the altar and the font. Here they fervently repeated their pious ritual, and hither, if death visited them during their stay in our coasts, they came to chant a funeral psalm. Here was kindled a pure spiritual light-not the fierce and short-lived flame of fanaticism, but a mild glow that might have shed its sacred cheer upon many a Rhode Island home. But the fair prospect soon faded, and the Huguenot settlement was added to the long list of dis- persions which belong to the history of colonization. No evident trace of their sojourn remains, and nothing has been supplied by any appeal to the motive of sym- pathy for their misfortunes. Rhode Island has done a tardy justice to the memories of her great sons; and has even given a monumental form to her gratitude toward the Indian benefactors of the infant colony; but not the humblest memorial points out the spot once dignified by the pure home life and sacred to the wor- ship of the Huguenot exiles. Few of the present gen- eration have heard their story, or can appreciate the regretful suggestions of interest and sympathy that are recalled to others by the homely and provincial name of Frenchtown.
There was to be no focus of Huguenot influence in Rhode Island, and the names associated either by rec- ord or by strong presumptive evidence with Huguenot ancestry, and which chiefly appear in their noted repre- sentatives, at a later date than the founding of the short- lived Narragansett colony, such as the historical name of Decatur, with Papillion, Pineau, Lucas, Ballou, the ancestor of Garfield, Grennell, founder of the mercantile
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family of the brothers Grinnell, Ganeau, Marchant, Jer- auld, and others, are isolated instances of national traits which were never so combined as to give character to any one community.
But the religious interests of Rhode Island were to be in no small degree moulded by the zeal and energy of one whom Dr. Baird characterizes as perhaps the most remarkable of the Huguenot emigrants to Amer- ica. Not to honor an individual, however worthy, have tributes repeatedly been paid to the memory of Gabriel Bernon. But the place which he fills in colonial annals, and especially in the religious history of Rhode Island, justly entitles him to rank as the representative of the Huguenot character and influence in this State.
Nor is it from motives of family interest, nor even as presenting interesting features of a picturesque family history, that reference is made to his origin and asso- ciations. The analysis of the Huguenot type in New England must be preceded by the study of the typical Huguenot family in La Rochelle, the capital of "the Religion," the "Geneva of the West." In art we find no figure of heroic stature without its cloudy back- ground of ancestral prototypes. To define the heredi- tary qualities which Bernon received and transmitted, we must know the stock whence sprang this vigorous offshoot.
The Bernons are identified with La Rochelle, where they have been seated for centuries, but their remote history, as traced by Dr. Baird, relates their descent from a younger branch of the Counts of Burgundy. In this province the family originated, and its fortunes have been known and celebrated from the earliest ages
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of the French monarchy. The house of De Bernon is numbered in the lists of crusaders, and the name of Bernon is mentioned in Froissart's chronicles. In the sixteenth century the Bernons contributed to the ran- som of the sons of Francis I, held as hostages in Spain after the battle of Pavia, and they aided Henry IV in his struggle for the crown, sending him a sum of money by the hands of Duplessis Mornay. They held the manors of La Bernonière in Poitou, and Bernon- ville on the Isle de Ré. An official claim to nobility among the Bernons of La Rochelle (the lineage of this branch being traced to an early date in the thirteenth century) was founded on the antique usage which con- ferred rank upon the mayors of the city and their de- scendants in perpetuity. This civic honor was often held by members of the family. When the golden book of the French Noblesse says, "The house of Bernon has formed alliances with some of the most illustrious families of the kingdom; it has rendered military ser- vices that have not been without distinction; it counts among its members superior officers of the greatest merit, both military and naval; and it has had several chevaliers of the Order of Saint Louis"; it simply sums up the facts which may be gleaned from the Bernon genealogy, compiled a century ago.
Such was the record of a family which, according to the Genealogical History of Poitou, had always been flourishing and distinguished before embracing the Calvinist heresy. "I might have kept my property and my quality," wrote the exiled Gabriel Bernon in his old age, "if I had been willing to submit to slavery." The pride of resolute will in the De Bernons, which
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had sustained them as knightly crusaders for the faith, and, in later times, as true followers of Henry of Na- varre, was a trait that, purified by adversity and per- secution, shone out in the firmness of the confessor or the constancy of the saint. The family narrative, as fol- lowed to a later date than that of the emigration, shows that the sons were zealously attached to the creed of the fathers. From the Revocation to the Revolution, or through the eighteenth century, and until France en- joyed freedom of conscience, the home of the Bernons was the centre of the Reformed religion in La Rochelle. Here secretly, but continuously, were held those Pro- testant services which the Government tacitly tolerated, with a consideration which probably would not have been shown to heretics of slighter distinction. These were the surroundings and the antecedents from which Gabriel Bernon separated himself in loyalty to his faith and in obedience to his conscience. He could not be less than true to the example of a father who, when he, with other heads of families, was summoned before Arnou, the military governor, after the first quartering of the dragoons upon them, and bidden to choose be- tween ruin and recantation, exclaimed: "Sir, would you have me lose my soul? for it is impossible for me to believe in the religion which you command me to ac- cept." "Much do I care," was the reply, made in the characteristic spirit of military insolence and sordid worldliness, "whether you lose your soul or not, pro- vided you obey." This André Bernon derived his name from the first of his ancestors enumerated in the gene- alogy drawn up in 1782, by M. Joseph Crassons, and beginning with the year 1545, a date six generations
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later than that with which authentic records begin the history of the Rochelle branch. This paper, which now piques the interest with its inevitable blanks and omis- sions, and again displays a redundant fullness in its title-rolls and its hints of antiquarian zeal and family pride, is like some ancient and faded tapestry, show- ing dagger-rents and dusty folds in its hangings, but still a proud relic of antique story. From its records we gather that the Bernon lineage, in its different branches, and by the brilliant alliances of its daugh- ters, has been illustrated, among its representatives and connections, by chevaliers of St. Louis, mayors of La Rochelle, naval and military officers, merchants and bankers, government officers, seigneurs, canonesses, grand seneschals of La Rochelle, holders of high places at court, nuns of the La Rochelle convents, colonists (evidently Protestant) of St. Domingo, Martinique, and New York, members of the learned professions, prefects, barons, military governors, civil engineers, pastors of the Reformed faith, marquises, viscounts, counts, consuls, and a manufacturer of glassware, this industry being one of the distinctive Huguenot call- ings. Among its semi-historical figures are such as the son of the house who was killed "at a siege in the Indies," one who fell at Fontenoy, another who was physician to Monsieur, brother of Louis XIV, and afterwards the Regent, and Benjamin, father of Peter Faneuil, of Faneuil Hall memory.
Against this rich background of courtly associations the severe outlines of the self-denying life of Gabriel Bernon, the fugitive for conscience' sake, are defined in a simple dignity. Although forty-one years old at the
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time of his flight, soon after the Revocation, his life was to be prolonged for half a century of the experiences of exile, until his ninety-first year. Recalled to his native La Rochelle from his mercantile affairs in Canada by the decree which excluded the Reformed from the colonies, he was incarcerated for several months in the gloomy Tour de la Lanterne, where prisoners of state were confined. A memorial of his imprisonment is still pre- served among his descendants. It is a psalter of the ver- sion of Marot, given him by a fellow-prisoner; and is of that minute size in which Bibles and psalters were often issued from the press of Geneva or Amsterdam, in order that they might be thus more readily con- cealed by those colporteurs whose pious mission is touchingly described in one of Macaulay's Huguenot ballads, and by thereaders among whom they were dis- tributed. Such also is the tradition respecting the use of this volume by the prisoners, who hastily secreted it at the approach of their jailer. Most of these editions were destroyed at the public burnings of heretical books in France; and very few copies are known to be extant in America.
On his release, due probably to the intercession of relatives who were numbered among the nouveaux con- vertis, he escaped to Amsterdam, where he was soon joined by his wife and children, and thence to London, where he obtained a certificate of denization. While there, the project of the Oxford settlement affected him as an inducement to execute the plan of emigration to New England, to which he had given expression after the signing of the Revocation, in the eventful month of October, 1685, by a letter to a Boston correspondent.
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In 1688 he arrived in Boston, where he became a mem- ber of the French Reformed Church. He soon entered upon various enterprises of trade and manufacture, such as proved to be of difficult and costly development, under the new conditions of colonial immaturity which formed his surroundings. His leading motive in these numerous undertakings is believed to have been that spirit of fraternal benevolence which so prevailed among the exiles as to be recognized in the different colonies as a Huguenot trait, and which closely united him to "our refugee brothers," as he styled his co-religionists. The manufacture of wash-leather in the chamoiserie which he established at Oxford, and the making of hats at Newport, as promoted by him, may be named among instances of his systematic provision for the employ- ment of artisans some of whom had emigrated as under his protection. He twice returned to London on errands intimately connected with the promotion of colonial in- dustry. After a residence of nine years in Boston, during which occurred the attempt toward settling Oxford, in which he took the leading part, paying the passage of the emigrants, and building the fort against the Indians which has lately been restored, he came to Rhode Island, which for nearly forty years, and until his death, was to be his home. For eight years he was a resident of Newport, which doubtless attracted him by its rising commercial importance, but more especially by that atmosphere of religious freedom which made it a fitter residence than Puritan Boston for a man of independent mind. Some of his near connections had been settlers of Frenchtown, and one former member of that colony, Daniel Ayrault, became his business partner in New-
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port. He was also associated with him in the petition originating with Bernon and headed by him, for the sending of a clergyman of the Church of England as a missionary to Newport. This, with like appeals from other colonies, led to the organization, two years later, in 1701, of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Thus Trinity Church was founded in Newport. Bernon resided in Providence from 1706 to 1712, when he went to Kingstown, where the ruins of his house were still to be seen, a generation ago. Here he was active in the formation of St. Paul's parish. In 1718 he returned to Providence, where he contracted a second marriage, with a lady of that town, and be- coming closely identified with its interests, continued to reside there until his death in 1736.
His Providence house, which stood till about 1875, was nearly opposite the old St. John's Church, beneath which he was buried. He had been its founder, having made a journey to London in his eighty-first year, his third visit to that capital since his emigration, to secure the services of a missionary as rector of this venerable parish, which is to-day distinguished by the same earnest Protestant spirit that marked the influence of the Huguenot refugee, "to whose untiring zeal," in the words of Arnold, the historian of Rhode Island, "the first three Episcopal churches in the colony owed their origin."
What were the results of this long, active, and use- ful life of untiring and versatile energy? Gabriel Bernon engaged in almost every branch of colonial traffic, spending £10,000 in trade; he made himself the owner of a great landed estate; he labored toward the found-
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ing of a Huguenot colony; he undertook tedious jour- neyings by sea and land, and, in the pursuit of these varied interests, he met the persons most distinguished by birth, position, or talent among his contemporaries. In a word, he toiled long and faithfully in the round of his duties as a citizen, yet was denied the fruition of that success which should have been the reward of his abilities and his public spirit. His private interests were not served by the manufacturing schemes upon which he entered with a confidence and an enterprise in which he anticipated the merchants of a period of more devel- oped resources. He failed in his endeavors to release the colonies from such restrictions on home-trade or inter- colonial traffic as his intelligent son had complained of in the relations between Acadia and Massachu- setts; and he could not obtain any encouragement for new industries among the colonists from the parent country. The home government was too suspicious of colonial independence to favor any schemes looking toward colonial prosperity, and Bernon lived an age too early for the dissemination of ideas which were yet to find their place in the slowly maturing science of political economy.
The study of this life, of which, in its material sphere of activity, we are often constrained to write "failure" upon the promise of many brave hopes and efforts, may suggest the question whether it left any lasting influ- ence beyond that of the lesson which a virtuous exam- ple communicated to contemporaries and descendants. What special work was accomplished by this repre- sentative of the Huguenot mind as an element in the evolution of Rhode Island civilization ? Many aims and
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endeavors of eager and restless spirits leave but little impress on a community like ours. The renewing pro- cesses of assimilation and circulation can be traced in the body politic no less clearly than in our physical life, and our State has not the same component parts as the Colony of our ancestors. The Rhode Island of the present is not the Rhode Island of the generation that has just passed away, and, if we are to anticipate the changes that are already indicated, it will not long be the Rhode Island of even a short term of years ago. Then can there be truth in the claim that there still ex- ists in the Rhode Island of to-day an appreciable influ- ence emanating from a single mind, the activities of which belong to the record of a buried past? Can the agencies that controlled the nurture of the infant Colony still be felt in the matured manhood of the State?
The answer is found in the recognition of the higher quality of the work to which this typical Huguenot devoted his best energies. "Every man's work shall be made manifest; for the day shall declare it." To this faithful worker long since came the fulfillment of the promise, "If any man's work abide, which he had built thereupon, he shall receive a reward"; for he built, in his noblest undertakings, not as for his own honor or advantage; not upon perishable foundations; but upon the indestructible religious element of our nature.
The persecuted exile from far-away Rochelle, bur- ied beneath the ancient church of the parish, which is his enduring memorial, brought to the service of his adopted country a religious fervor that was untinged with fanaticism or bigotry. His great benefaction to New England and the colony with which he identified
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his interests, saying warmly, in his Boston correspond- ence, "I am for Rhode Island," was the introduction of the worship of the Church of England. As one of the chief instruments in bringing about the formation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, his memory is associated with an influence as far-reach- ing as the wide-spread missionary work of that Ven- erable Society. As the founder, among laymen, of the Episcopal Church in this State -a church named by the voice of one alien to her communion, "one of the grandest of the Christian sisterhood," and recognized by an eminent jurist of Puritan antecedents and spirit as "one of the few of those conservative forces so essen- tial to the welfare of our country" -his name must be honored with the gratitude due to a benefactor. This is not the homage of the Churchman, for which the present occasion affords no fitting time or place. It is simply the calm judgment of the citizen, recognizing the value of the mission of charity and comfort, of edu- cation and elevation in which this sacred organization has its part, sharing in the work of reaching the sor- did life of our manufacturing towns, and penetrating the homes of labor with the lessons of practical help- fulness, and the teachings of the Christian ideal.
Other proofs of the conservative tendency of the Huguenot influence are found in the instances of te- nacity of tradition, in the families of Huguenot descent. The peculiar veneration with which they regarded the memory of their expatriated ancestors led them to cherish an honorable pride in virtuous antecedents, and to treasure up every material or verbal reminder of the days of persecution with a pious care that was joined
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with a meritorious zeal for the furtherance of historical and genealogical researches. Their interest in the facts of family records long anticipated the energy in that work, of which the present time affords instances of almost daily occurrence. Rhode Islanders in general were too long neglectful of the tribute of regard due to the memory of a virtuous ancestry. Judge Potter said, not long before his death: "When, many years ago, the writer was collecting material for the 'Early History of Narragansett,' published in 1835, it was with the utmost difficulty that the materials could be obtained for the few pages of family history contained in that work. Few families had preserved any family records, and few seemed to care about them. And most of this information in that work was obtained from the records with a good deal of labor." Among the few who readily contributed to that valuable collocation of materials for history were the Huguenot families of Rhode Island, to one of which, as is well known to our genealogical students, Judge Potter, the early leader in our State in this species of research, belonged. Nor is it needful to name the late president of the Rhode Island Historical Society to recall his memory to listeners who were instructed by his bold analysis of the elements of colonial history, or to friends who loved to trace hereditary merit as reflected in the traits of the true son of a worthy ancestor.
The general commemoration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes may be thought to have come a century late. But it would have lacked some qualities of its full significance had it been earlier observed. True, a harvest of memo-
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rials and recitals might have been garnered in 1785. Pardon Mawney, of the Le Moine line, to whom we owe the scanty traditions of Frenchtown which reached Judge Potter through an intermediate link in the chain of descent, was then in the prime of middle life. Born in 1748, and having personal knowledge of the emi- grants, how readily he could have answered those ques- tions which we now vainly ask from lips on which "the mossy marbles rest"! Mrs. Seabury, granddaughter of Gabriel Bernon, relict of the Rev. Samuel Seabury, and stepmother of the first Bishop in America, who, coming under her influence in early childhood, owed to her Christian nurture the principles by which his maturity was guided, then past her three score and ten, was yet to live until the last year of the eighteenth century and the eighty-seventh of her age. Among survivors of their generation like her lingered a fund of traditional knowledge which perished with them. But it was no time, in 1785, for the independent State to review her colonial history. The questions of the present were too engrossing, the outlook into the fu- ture was too momentous, for the revival of the lessons of the past; and thirty-seven years elapsed before the formation, in 1822, of the Historical Society, charged with the duty of preserving the annals of Rhode Is- land. Indeed, it would have been too early in the eigh- teenth century to celebrate an era of religious freedom in France. So late as 1773, a Protestant minister, La Brie, was apprehended for exercising his vocation, the civil rights of the Reformed dating only from the time of the Revolutionary legislation, when the power of the church was prostrated, and a new class of refugees, the
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émigré priests, were escaping from the country by stealth and in dread of persecution, as the heretics had taken their flight in 1685. Nor was the time ripe, in the year 1785, for the full estimate of all that our State and country owes to the merits of this class of her founders. The second centennial brings the fitting op- portunity for the judgment of a generation taught of national experience, rich in a culture such as colonial scholarship could not command, and armed with those methods of critical study and original research with which only the analysis of historical sequences should be attempted. The time has arrived for the summing up of the debt which American nationality owes to the Huguenot character.
But if, ceasing from the retrospect of the buried cen- tury, we lift up our eyes and meet the century to come, we pause with some touch of the wondering awe of childhood, before the promise of a future which must hold even greater gifts than such as are the heritage of the present. What revelations in science, what pros- pects in the arts, what wealth of culture, what energy of scholarship, what purity of reform in the national life, what development of the unsunned riches of this new continent, what elevation of manners, and what enlargement of human sympathies float before us! There, in the distant vista, are the treasures awaiting our successors to the perpetual hope of that golden age which always precedes and follows the present. The coming century with all its substantial possessions, and all the glory which our imagination lends it, rises upon us in a power that stills our busy employments and hushes our too eager voices. In its silent presence
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we keenly feel the poor and petty nature of very many of our judgments and the inanity of our activities. Yet one word may be firmly spoken, here and now, in the assurance that the verdict of the future will but con- firm its foundation in immutable truth. It is a word of prayer to
"Our fathers' God, from out whose hand The centuries fall like grains of sand,"
to whom arises no purer petition than that He would keep us steadfast in the faith of our righteous fathers, that faith in the supremacy of honor and conscience, of truth and loyalty, by which they lived bravely, and died peacefully, leaving in the name of Huguenot an inheritance in which their descendants cherish the presence of an ideal, and their country guards the in- calculable wealth of an historical inspiration.
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