QUAKER AND HUGUENOT SETTLEMENTS. 133 permanent legislative union between hereditary wealth and political pc wer in this country, and of course these constitutions never took effect. Bancroft well says, on this point: 'But the formation of political institutions in the United States was not effected by giant minds, or nobles after the flesh;' and, borrowing the maxim which Lord Bacon lays down in that treasure-house of imperishable wisdom, the Novum Organum, the American historian adds: 'American history knows but one avenue to success in American legislation -freedom from ancient prejudice. The truly great law-givers in our colonies first became as little children.' The Quakers and Huguenots in the Carolinas.-With a spirit not unworthy of a Christian apostle, George Fox, who was now visiting his disciples in all their settlements scattered through the colonies, penetrated the Carolinas in his missionary travels. Some of the Friends had early chosen their homes in those districts, attracted by a spirit of toleration as grateful to the Quaker character as the corresponding blandness of the climate itself. The Quaker apostle found himself the only preacher of the Gospel in the whole region, and he luxuriated in the perfect freedom with which he could do his divine Master's work in the most strange medley which constituted the society there growing up. Insensible to fatigue, heedless of danger from malaria, savages, or wild beasts, he tells us how he crossed the great bogs of the Dismal Swamp, 'laying abroad anights in the woods by a fire,' till he reached some cabin, and brought to the settler and his family the winning message of love from the Prince of Peace. He tells us how the settlers lived, 'lonely in their woods, with no sentinel on guard but the watch-dog.' We next find the apostle a guest of the Governor, 'who, with his wife, receive him lovingly.' In parting from this magistrate, he had for a companion in travelling towards the south, the Governor of South Carolina, a superior man, who showed him the way through the luxuriant region, to his own plantation, where another warm greeting was extended; for, as the Governor's boat got aground, the wife of the Secretary of State shot out in her light canoe and took the preacher to her home. And so he completed his tour; having, as he said, found the people 'generally tender and open, and a little entrance for the Truth.' Entrance, indeed!—so broad that the principles of a pure Gospel were introduced, which left little hope for the constitutions of Locke and Shaftesbury; for it was not the metaphysician, but the Nazarene, who was to shape the fortunes of those Carolina settlers and their distant posterity. But a vigorous effort was made by Shaftesbury and his fellow-corporators, to colonize and rule the Carolinas. Ships were sent out, carrying superior classes of emigrants,-scholars, philosophers, Puritans, Quakers-but all free thinkers, divided on all points except the two great ones,-a new home in Nature's own paradise, and freedom of conscience. They embraced the noblest elements that could have been invoked to form a great State. country was moreover freer to them than it had been to the other colonists, The 134 EFFECTS OF REVOCATION OF EDICT OF NANTES. for wasting epidemics had long before swept the native population away alc ng the shore of the Atlantic and the banks of the great rivers; and murderous wars between the tribes had still further reduced their numbers. Sites for towns were chosen with little reference to commerce, and even the spot between the two rivers, selected by Shaftesbury himself, and called after him, proved not so attractive nor useful as the neck of land known as Oyster Point, where a village soon sprang up called Charleston, after the king of England.' The history of that little hamlet which afterwards was to grow into the opulent and beautiful city destined to so checkered, and sometimes so mournful, but always heroic and brilliant a life, is worthy of a larger record than I can find space for. But her record is in the memory and in the literature of the last two centuries; and may it live in all that are to come. Glowing accounts of this beautiful region captivated the fancies of some of the noblest and most gifted of the English people. They were lured from all ranks. Furgueson brought a colony from Ireland. Joseph Blake, the brother of the great Admiral, took a company of persecuted dissenters from Somersetshire, and lavished upon their establishment the wealth he had inherited from the Spanish plunder of his gallant brother, as a part of the reward of his immortal victories. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Oct. 22, 1685.-The compensations which Providence, history, and men work out, are among the most mysterious, and when solved, the most exquisitely beautiful riddles that puzzle the brains of angels or mortals. My readers will not have forgotten how the noble Coligny, a century before, had been allowed by Francis to found asylums for the hunted Huguenots on the Carolina and Florida coasts; nor how they had been laid waste by the cruelty of the remorseless Melendez. The actors of those times had all passed away. Francis, Coligny, Melendez, the slaughtered Huguenots were all forgotten, or lived only on the pages of history. But ideas never die: and from a higher sphere the exalted spirit of the protector of the Huguenots now saw his darling scheme carried to consummation. I have never heard any Carolinian express his gratitude to Madame de Maintenon, the fascinating mistress of Louis XIV.; and yet the Carolinians are still in her debt. But for that mysterious supremacy she gained over the mind of the Grand Monarque, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes never would have been proclaimed, and the ascended Coligny never would have seen the grandchildren of his beloved Huguenots finally established in their western homes." 1 On the spot where opulence now crowds the wharfs of the most prosperous mart on our southern seaboard, among ancient groves that swept down to the rivers' banks, and were covered with the yellow Jasmine, which burdened the vernal zephyrs with its perfumes, the cabins of graziers began the city. Long afterwards, the splendid vegetation which environs Charleston, especially the pine, and cedar, and cypress trees along the broad road which is now Meetng street, delighted the observer by its perpetual verdure. The settlement, though for some years it struggled against an unhealthy climate, steadily in creased; and to its influence is in some degree to be attributed the love of letters, and that desire of institutions for education, for which South Carolina was afterwards distinguished.-Bancroft, vol. ii., p. 170. 2 When Louis XIV. approached the borders of age, he was troubled by remorse; the weakness of superstition succeeded to the weakness of indulgence; and the flatteries of bigots, artfully employed for their own selfish purposes, led the vanity of the monarch to seek in making proselytes to the Church, a new method of gaining glory, and an atonement for the voluptuous profligacy of his life. Louis was not naturally cruel, but EMIGRATION OF THE HUGUENOTS TO AMERICA. 135 Emigration of the Huguenots to America.-How much France lost, and the rest of Europe, but above all America gained, by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, history has but partially disclosed; for it could not fully. Many Huguenots came to New England, hungry, and naked: they were clothed and ied. Others were kindly received at New York. But those of them who had fled from Languedoc on the Mediterranean, were more attracted to the balmy regions of the south. It was not, however, from that province of France alone that they came to Carolina, but from the old bombarded cities of Rochelle and Bordeaux, and the far-off enchanting valley of the Tours; men who, as Bancroft so truthfully says, had the virtues of the English Puritans, without their bigotry; attracted to the land whither the tolerant benevolence of Shaftesbury had invited the believer of every creed. From a country that had suffered its king in wanton bigotry,-rising from the embrace of the Delilah of France' to drive half a million of its best citizens into exile, they came to the land which was the hospitable refuge of the oppressed; where superstition and fanaticism, infidelity and faith, cold speculation and animated zeal, were alike admitted without question, and where the fires of religious persecution were never to be kindled. There they obtained an assigment of lands, and soon had tenements; there they might safely make the woods the scene of their devotions, and join the simple incense of their psalms to the melodies of the winds among the ancient groves. Their church was in Charleston; and thither, on every Lord's Day, gathering from their plantations upon the banks of the Cooper, and taking advantage of the ebb and flow of the tide, they might all regularly be seen, the parents with their children, whom no bigot could now wrest from them, making their way in light skiffs, through scenes so tranquil that silence was broken only by the rippling of oars, and the hum of the flourishing village at the confluence of the rivers." We have thus glanced at the settlement of the Carolinas. We may safely leave them in their garden homes, all under their own vines and fig-trees, having for a long time none to molest them or make them afraid. Georgia, 1733.-The youngest of the Thirteen Colonies was founded one year after the birth of Washington. The Spaniards claimed the territory as a was an easy dupe of those in whom he most confidedof priests and of a woman. The daughter of an adven turer-for nearly ten years of childhood a resident in the West Indies, educated a Calvinist, but early converted to the Roman faith,-Madame de Maintenon, had, in the house of a burlesque poet, learned the art of conversation, and in the intimate society of Ninon de l'Enclos, had studied the mysteries of the passions. Of a clear and penetrating mind, of a calculating judg ment, which her calm imagination could not lead astray, she never forgot her self-possession in a generous transport, and was never mastered even by the passions she sought to gratify. Already advanced in life when she began to attract the attention of the king, whose character she profoundly understood, she sought to inthrall his mind by the influences of religion; and becoming herself devout, or feigning to be so, always nodest and discreet, she knew how to awaken in him compunctions which she alone could tranquillize, and subjected his mind to her sway by substituting the sentiment of devotion for the passion of love. The conversion of the Huguenots was to excuse the sins of his earlier years. They, like herself, were to become re conciled to the Church; yet not by methods of violence. Creeds were to melt away in the sunshine of favor, and proselytes to be won by appeals to interest.-Bancroft, vol. ii., pp. 175-6. 1 The United States are full of monuments of the emigrations from France. When the struggle for independence arrived, the son of Judith Manigault intrusted the vast fortune he had acquired to the service of the country that had adopted his mother; the hall in Boston, where the eloquence of New England rocked the infant spirit of independence, was the gift of the son of a Huguenot; when the treaty of Paris for the independence of our country was framing, the grandson of a Huguenot, acquainted from childhood with the wrongs of his ancestors, would not allow his jealousies of France to be lulled, and exerted a powerful influence in stretching the boundary of the States to the Mississippi. On the north-eastern frontier State the name of the oldest college bears witness to the wise liberality of the Huguenots. The children of the Calvinists of France have reason to respect the memory of their ancestors.-Bancroft, vol. ii., pp. 182-3. 136 GENERAL OGLETHORPE SETTLES GEORGIA. portion of Florida, and the cloud of war hung along the settlemen s→ the Indian tribes having been influenced to make common cause with the Spaniards. The origin of this colony rose in one of the abuses of oppressive government in Europe, and under circumstances so peculiar they demand our notice. Imprisonment for debt was so generally enforced, that many thousands of good people in England were dragging the chain of prison life, beyond the hope of relief. Not a prison but what swarmed with them. The educated and the ignorant, the refined and the brutal, the pure and the infamous, were all herded together. At last a brave and benevolent man came to their relief. Gen. James Edward Oglethorpe.-This humane gentleman, whose wealth and rank, united to his rare abilities as a statesman, had already undertaken in Parliament the cause of this numerous and neglected class, enforcing it with such eloquence that a committee of inquiry was appointed, of which he was made chairman. His report embraced a plan of practical relief. A thorough investigation was to be made, and the prison doors of England opened to every virtuous man who would consent to emigrate under the government of a colony to be founded of that class. The plan met with the approval of Parliament and the sanction of George II., then on the throne. On the 9th of June, 1732, a royal charter for twenty-one years was granted to a corporation, 'in trust for the poor,' to establish a colony within the disputed territory, south of the Savannah, to be called Georgia, in honor of the king. A general subscription took place among the benevolent and enlightened classes, and two years after the signing of the charter, Parliament itself appropriated $180,000 for the purpose. Gen. Oglethorpe was so earnest and prac tical in his philanthropy, that he headed the movement, and in November of the same year he sailed for Georgia with a hundred and twenty emigrants. Savannah Founded, Feb. 12, 1733.-Touching at Charleston, after a passage of only fifty-seven days, and afterwards at Port Royal, where he landed most of his emigrants, he proceeded up the Savannah river as far as Yamacraw Bluff, and chose the site for the foundation of a city, which was to become the capital of his State. From the commencement of settlements in North America, no one had started under auspices so fair. The equipment was complete; the management was under the control of a great man, loyal to his king, large in his liberality-not of purse only, but of soul-sagacious in business, and illuminated in political judgment. The work was begun at once; the town was laid out with regularity in broad streets; public squares were reserved; and the houses, all of the same model, were twenty-four by sixteen feet. The work went on without interruption during the winter, and early in the spring crops were put in. Oglethorpe had no sooner pitched his tent on the bank of the Savannah, than he entered into friendly relations with the sachems of the Lower Creek confederacy for a regular purchase of land. We have a most interesting description of the reception of To-mo-chi-chi by |