RELIGION
HUGUENOTS (Decou Family)
NOTES
...French Protestants-offers intriguing insights into the process and result of migrations by religius refugees to America. Huguenots were the first substantial continental European immigrants to arrive in British America, the first to from identifiable "immigrant" communities within the English colonies, and the first to assimilate thoroughly. Although the Huguenots' experience utlimately proved atypical, it spoke to the special openness of America to European immigrants in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
The Huguenots' route to America linked continental European population mobility and American emigration. Huguenots came to America in a second, unanticipated stage of a bitter and forced exile from France. The first stage occurred between 1675 and 1690 as 100,000 French Protestants fled France when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes that had guaranteed limited Protestant worship in Catholic France since 1592. This stream of emigrants, cvalled le refuge by Protestant historians, sent French Protestants pouring into Prussia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England-men, women, and children, young and old, rich and poor.
The second stage emerged as refugee Huguenots took up American colonization to alleviate their miserable exile in Europe. The Huguenot exodus had occurred just as a late-seventeenth-century colonization boom was beginning in America, and colonial entrepreneurs quickly advertised among the Huguenot refugees. Agents for William Penn and the proprietors of the Carolinas circulated pamphlets in the Huguenot refugee centers advertising their colonies, and their pamphlets proved intriguing in one special regard: even to the Huguenots they appealed more to their material than their spiritual interest in America. Penn and the Carolina proprietors touted their commitment to religious toleration. But most of their pamphlets also stressed the material gain possible across the Atlantic.
Huguenot immigrants to America looked very much like many later European immigrants to America. Aid records document their poverty in London: for example, Laurent Corniflau received money for "stockings and shoes," Charles Faucheraud received a straw bed, and Pierre Cante received money for food and clothing. By 1695 all three men were in America. Huguenot immigrants to America also were overwhelmingly young, although many old people and children had fled France. A 1697 naturalization list from South Carolina and a 1698 census of the Huguenot village of New Rochelle in New York profile settlers who were between twenty-five and forty when they arrived in America and who traveled with few older immigrants and very few children. Clearly, the decision to emigrate to America was quite separate from the decision to leave France, and it produced a far younger, largely childless group of immigrants to the New World.
Hugenots settled in surprising and selective places in America. Pennsylvania received almost no Huguenots despite William Penn's advertising. Instead, most of the 2,000 to 2,500 Huguenots who arrived in America between 1680 and 1700 headed for South Carolina and New York, with smalled numbers going to New England. In South Carolina, most settlers farmed, though many of the Huguenots who settled there were identified in the London aid records as craftsmen and tradesmen. In New York, Huguenots split between settlers who farmed (mainly on Staten Island and in the town of New Rochelle) and settlers who pursued trades (mainly in New York City). And in New England, most congregated in Boston, especially after early agricultural settlements at Oxford in Massachusetts and in the "Narragansett country" of Rhode Island collapsed.
Hugenots quickly disappeared as a cohesive religious and "ethnic" group in America. Intermarriage paralleled, reinforced, and speeded the Huguenots' religious fissure.
This was taken from a book called "Becoming America, The Revolution before 1776", by
Jon Butler
QUAKERS
NOTES
WILLIAM MATLOCK-Decow Familywas a Quaker
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