From the Christian Observer.

THE HUGUENOT EMIGRANTS IN AMERICA.

THE perfidious and sanguinary persecutions of the Huguenots in France verified the ancient adage, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Thousands of their fellow-confessors, who shared their sufferings, but escaped with life, found their way to various countries, which offered them an asylum from popish tyranny and cruelty; and by their constancy and piety they edified the faithful, and renovated the zeal of many lukewarm Protestants. They carried with them useful arts wherever they went, and benefited the civil as well as the religious weal of the nations which hospitably received them. Saurin, Basnage and Claude, in Holland, were expatriated Huguenots; Romaine and Romilly, in England, were descendants of expatriated Huguenots; and in what Protestant country were not these victims of papal tyranny to be found? Some fled to the Cape of Good Hope, others to America, and great numbers to England, Holland and Germany. William of Orange manned his ships with them, and in one year raised three regiments from among them, who afterwards fought the battles of England, when he ascended the British throne. Thus France lost many of its bravest warriors, as well as of its most industrious artisans. One Vincent had employed five hundred workmen ; the mayors of various towns complained that the emigrants had carried away commerce and manufactures with them; Rouen had lost its fabric of hats; Poictiers of druggets; and the silk trade of France had become located in Spitalfields, London; in which city so great were their numbers, that they had occasion for six churches. Such was the political policy, to say nothing of the wickedness, of religious persecution. In recently visiting Jersey and Guernsey, we found some worthy descendants of these holy confessors, who obtained a welcome refuge in the Channel Islands from the tyranny which oppressed them in the neighboring mainland.

"Here," says the eloquent Saurin, we saw our persecutors drawing on a sledge the dead bodies of those who had expired on the rack. There, we beheld a false friar tormenting a dying man, who was terrified, on the one hand, with the fears of hell if he should apostatize, and on the other, with the fear of leaving his children without bread if he should continue in the faith; while yonder they were tearing children from their parents, while the tender parents were shedding more tears for the loss of their souls than for that of their bodies or lives." The reverend Claude says: "They cast some into large fires, and took them out when they were half roasted. They hanged others with long ropes under the arms, and plunged them several times into wells till they promised to renounce their religion. They stretched them like criminals upon the rack, and poured wine with a funnel down their throats, till being intoxicated they consented to turn Romanists."

But we will not dilate upon these scenes of horror: our present design being chiefly to introduce to our readers the faithful bands of French Protestants who found a shelter in what are now the United States of America, and whose history is not generally known. Dr. Baird has collected some interesting notices upon the subject, of which we shall avail ourselves in the following statement.

"In our American colonies," says Bancroft in his History of the United States," they were welcome everywhere. The religious sympathies of poverty, having barely escaped with life, the New England were awakened. Did any arrive in towns of Massachusetts contributed liberally to their support, and provided them with lands; others repaired to New York. But a warmer climate was more inviting to the exiles of Languedoc, and Huguenots. What, though the attempt to emiSouth Carolina became the chief resort of the grate was by the laws of France a felony; in spite of every precaution of the police, five hundred thousand souls escaped from the country. The unfortunate were more wakeful to fly than the ministers of tyranny to restrain.

The numbers who suffered from the first per- soldiers in their beds, and abandoning the house "We quitted home by night, leaving the secution till the Edict of Nantes, in 1598, and with its furniture,' said Judith, the young wife of after the revocation of that edict, cannot be cor-Pierre Manigault; ' we contrived to hide ourselves rectly computed. It has been estimated that for ten days at Romans, in Dauphiny, while a seventy thousand perished in the massacre on the search was made for us; but our faithful hostess tide of St. Bartholomew, 1572; and the number would not betray us.' Nor could they escape to of emigrants after the revocation of the Edict of through Germany and Holland, and thence to the seaboard, except by a circuitous journey Nantes has been reckoned at half a million. The England, in the depths of winter. Having emhorrors which ensued upon the revocation of that barked at London, we were sadly off. The spotgrant of toleration, furnish some of the blackest ted fever appeared on board, and many died of the pages of human history. Property of every kind disease; among these our aged mother. We was plundered; children were touched at Bermuda, where the vessel was seized. Our arms of their parents; churches were profaned procured a passage in another vessel. After money was all spent ; with great difficulty we and razed to the ground; matrons and young our arrival in Carolina, we suffered every kind of women were abandoned to a licentious soldiery; evil. In eighteen months, our eldest brother, unmen were imprisoned, scourged, condemned to the accustomed to the hard labor which we were galleys, roasted at slow fires, and wounded with obliged to undergo, died of a fever. Since our knives and red-hot pincers; faithful pastors were leaving France we had experienced every sort of broken on the wheel, and the bodies of the suffer- hard labor. I have been six months without tastaffliction, disease, pestilence, famine, poverty, ers were thrown naked to the dogs and wolves.ing bread, working like a slave; and I have passed

torn from the

three or four years without having it when I wanted it. And yet,' adds the excellent woman in the spirit of grateful resignation, God has done great things for us in enabling us to bear up under so many trials.'

and having put the three ministers to death, returned to France, leaving the remains of the colony to be massacred by the Portuguese. Nor did better success attend two attempts made by the good admiral to plant colonies in North America, the one in South Carolina, the other in Florida.

mew's day, some of the Protestant leaders, whether from feeling their position to be even then intolerable, or from their anticipations of a still darker futurity, proposed to establish a colony and a mis"This family was but one of many that found sion in Brazil-the mission being the first ever a shelter in Carolina, the general asylum of the projected by Protestants. The admiral of France, Calvinist refugees. Escaping from a land where De Coligny, who was afterwards a victim in the the profession of their religion was a felony, where St. Bartholomew's massacre, entered warmly into their estates were liable to become confiscated in the undertaking, and Calvin urged it on, and sefavor of the apostate, where the preaching of their faith was a crime to be expiated on the wheel, lected three excellent ministers, who had been where their children might be torn from them to trained under his own eye at Geneva, to accombe subjected to their nearest Catholic relation,-pany the emigrants. The expedition (which set the fugitives from Languedoc on the Mediterra- out in 1556) proved peculiarly disastrous. The nean, from Rochelle and Saintonge and Bordeaux, commander relapsed to the Roman Catholic faith, the provinces on the Bay of Biscay, from St. Quentin, Poictiers, aud the beautiful valley of Tours, from St. Lo and Dieppe, men who had the virtues of the English Puritans without their bigotry, came to the land to which the tolerant benevolence of Shaftesbury had invited the believer of every creed. From a land that had suffered its king in wanton bigotry 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 assignment 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 the plantations on 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 wrest from them, making their way in light skiffs through scenes so tranquil, that silence was broken only by the rippling of the oars, and the hum of the flourishing village at the confluence of the rivers.

"Other Huguenot emigrants established themselves on the south bank of the Santee, in a region which has since been celebrated for affluence and refined hospitality.

From the time of the siege of Rochelle to that of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, there had been a continual emigration of French Protestants to the English colonies in America, which after the last of these two events was greatly augmented, as is proved by the public acts of those colonies. The first notice of the kind to be found, is an act of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, in 1662, to this effect, "that John Touton, a French doctor and inhabitant of Rochelle, made application to the general court of Massachusetts in behalf of himself and other Protestants, expelled from their habitations on account of their religion, that they might have liberty to live there, which was readily granted them." In 1686, a grant of 11,000 acres was made to another company of French Protestants who had settled at Oxford, in the same colony. In that year, too, a French Protestant church was erected at Boston, which, ten years after, had the Rev. Mr. Daillé for its pastor. A century later, when the French Protestants had ceased to use the French language, and had become merged in other churches, their place of worship fell into the hands of some French Roman Catholic refugees.

In 1666, an act for the naturalization of French Protestants was passed by the legislature of Maryland; acts to the like effect were passed in Virginia in 1671; in the Carolinas in 1696, and in New York in 1703.

"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 New York became an asylum for the Huguenots his ancestors, would not allow his jealousies of at a very early date; for even before it was surFrance to be lulled, and exerted a powerful influence in stretching the boundary of the states to rendered to England, namely, about 1656, they the Mississippi. On our north-eastern frontier were so numerous there that the public documents state, the name of the oldest college bears witness of the colony nad to be published in French as to the wise liberality of a descendant of the Hugue-well as in English; and in 1708, Smith, the hisnots. The children of the Calvinists of France torian of that colony, says, that next to the Dutch have reason to respect the memory of their ancestors."

they were the most numerous and the wealthiest class of the population. From an early period The emigration of the Huguenots to America, they had in that city a church, which exists at the is an interesting event in the history of that country. present day. Dr. Baird was informed that it has Even previous to the massacre of St. Bartholo-long been attached to the denomination of the

Protestant Episcopal Church, and has a French- sessments." This exemption was to last for man for its rector. seven years, and was afterwards renewed for seven more.

New Rochelle, about sixteen miles above the city of New York, on the East River, was settled solely by Huguenots from Rochelle in France, and the French tongue, both in public worship and common speech, was in use even until after the American revolution. There are many of the descendants of French Huguenots in Ulster and Duchess counties, in the state of New York.

f

The Rev. Dr. Millar, professor of Church History in the theological seminary at Princeton, New Jersey, had the following interesting facts respecting the early inhabitants of New Rochelle communicated to him: "When the Huguenots first settled in that neighborhood their only place of worship was in the city of New York. They had taken lands on terms that required the utmost exertions of men, women, and children among them to render tillable. They were, therefore, in the habit of working hard till Saturday night, spending the night in trudging down on foot to the city, attending worship twice the next day, and walking home the same night to be ready for work in the morning. Amid all these hardships they wrote to France, to tell what great privileges they enjoyed."

In 1679, Charles II. sent, at his own expense, in two ships, a company of Huguenots to South Carolina, in order that they might there cultivate the vine, the olive, &c., and from that time there was an extensive emigration of French Protestants to the colonies. Collections were made for them in England in the reign of James II., and the English parliament at one time aided them with a grant of £15,000. In 1690, William III. sent a large colony of them to Virginia, in addition to which that colony received three hundred families in 1699, followed successively by two hundred, and afterwards by one hundred families more. In 1752, no fewer than one thousand six hundred foreign Protestants, chiefly French, settled in South Carolina, and above two hundred more in 1764.

These Huguenots, whenever sufficiently numerous, at first used their own language in public worship, and had churches of their own, until, with one or two exceptions, and those only for a time, they fell into either Presbyterian or Episcopal denominations. This must be taken as a general statement, for their descendants may now be found in almost all communions, as well as in all parts of the United States. Many members, too, of the Dutch reformed churches are descended from Huguenots, who had first taken refuge in Holland, and afterwards emigrated to America.

As the entire population of the American colonies amounted only to about two hundred thousand souls in 1701, more than forty years after the commencement of the Huguenot emigrations, a large proportion of that number must have been French Protestants, and Huguenot blood accordingly must be extensively diffused among the citizens of the United States at the present day. So large an accession of people, whose very presence in Amer ica proved the consistency of their religious char acter, and who were generally distinguished by simple and sincere piety, must have been a great blessing to the land of their adoption, especially to the southern states, where it was most required. Their coming to America, on the other hand, has been blessed, under God, to them and their descendants. Many of the first families in New York, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, as well as other states, are to be found among the latter, as may be seen in many cases from their names, although these have often been lost through intermarriages, or can with difficulty be recognized, owing to their being spelt as they are pronounced by Anglo-Americans. Some of the most eminent persons that have ever adorned the United States were of Huguenot descent. Such were no fewer than three out of the seven presidents of Congress, and in a sense of the whole nation, during the war of the revolution, namely, John Jay, Henry Laurens, and Elias Boudinot,-all excellent men. "No man in America," says Dr. Hawks, in his History of the Episcopal Church in Virginia, "need blush to own himself one of their descendants; for observation has more than once been made, and In some of the colonies, where an established it is believed to be true, that among their descendchurch was supported by a tax, special acts were ants the instances have been rare indeed, of indipassed for relieving French Protestants from as-viduals who have been arraigned for crime before sessment, and for granting them liberty of worship. the courts of the country." Thus, in 1700, the colony of Virginia enacted as follows: "Whereas a considerable number of French Protestant refugees have been lately imported into this his majesty's colony and dominion, several of which refugees have seated themselves above the fall of James' river, at or near the place commonly called and known by the name of the Monacan towns, &c., the said settlement be erected into a parish, not liable to other parochial as

In 1733, three hundred and seventy Swiss Protestant families settled in South Carolina under the conduct of Jean Pierre Pury, of Neuchâtel; the British government granting them 40,000 acres of land, and £400 Sterling for every hundred adult emigrants landed in the colony.

IMPORTATION OF NEW ZEALAND WOOL.-An importation of New Zealand Wool, the first, we believe, which has reached England, realized from 1s. 6d. to 1s. 7d. per lb. It is hoped that this is article which New Zealand is in so many respects the beginning of an extensive trade in wool, an so well suited to afford. Some specimens of fancy and plain wools imported from the island have been very generally admired and approved of.

LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-No. 20.-28 SEPTEMBER, 1844.

19. SHORT REVIEWS.-First Ideas of Number and Geography, 482-Life Assurance--Glossology-Gospel before the Age-Social Systems-Sierra Leone, 504-Guide BooksEuphrosyne, 505.

20. SCIENTIFIC INTELLIGENCE.-Paris Academy of Sciences, 505-French Scientific Expedition --Prussian Savans-M. Botta at Nineveh-Telephone, 506-College of ChemistryContraction of Iron-MSS. of Euler-Hyssop, 507.

21. MISCELLANY.-Anti-State-Church Conference, 454-Bees, 467-Spontaneous Combustion of Pictures, 482-Porcelain Tower at Nanking, 486-Guano, 486-Pea from a Mummy, 496-Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt, 496-Louis Philippe, 507-New Uses of India Rubber-French Criminal Trials-Egyptian Prisoners, 508-Stephenson the EngineerPensions on the Civil List-Iowa Indians-Literary Treaty-Art Unions, 509-Thorwaldson-Lavoisier-Condorcet-Rev. Sydney Smith-Burke-Peasant of Palestine, 510 -Panorama of Baalbec-Siamese Skylarks-Enigma-Real Murder-Anecdote of the Queen, 511.

22. POETRY.-Life's Companions, 488-The First Valentine, 496; Death of Thomas Campbell, 503-Still, still thou hauntest me! 503.

23. OBITUARY.-Mr. Nicholas Biddle-Dr. Haslam-Mr. Hyman Hurwitz-M. Fauriel-Earl of Mountnorris-Count de Survilliers-James Stuart, 512.

CORRESPONDENCE.

JUST as our last sheet is completed, the steamer of 4 September has arrived. We have no space remaining for more than a few extracts upon the question of War. Bell's Messenger is confident that all will be well, and that the alarm which has induced the "agricultural interest to act hastily in matters connected with their own interest," was not justified; although it sees, "with equal regret and surprise, that the price of our own stocks begins to be affected by the current alarm: large sums are sold out by country families, and serious interests will be affected unless the public mind is put at rest."

a view as at Tangier, while the official accounts of the French are meagre and dilatory; but enough is stated to show that the engagement was more important than that of Tangier: the Moors made a fiercer resistance, and the assailants, besides conquering that resistance, proceeded to take possession of the island that forms the port. The position of the island, which covers the town, may render its possession necessary to an effectual attack; but there is at least the appearance of a tighter grasp on the Morocco territory-one step forward towards that French occupation which has been declared a casus belli. A sometimes ministerial journal, indeed, which declared that the French might bombard Tangier but they would not dare to occupy it, is reconciled to the seizure of the island of Mogador by the necessity of the case; a line of sophisticating argument by which The fighting fuss is kept up, and is supplied with the French might be proved virtually to have forfresh fuel by the Prince De Joinville's bombard-borne from occupying even Algiers. Nor has the ment of Mogador, Marshal Bugeaud's victory over the Morocco army, and the mutual taunts of French and English newspapers. The details of the attack on Mogador come slowly, because the English spectators had not so close and favorable

inland frontier of Morocco been inviolate: Marshal Bugeaud has advanced within it, has routed a great army, and has seized not only a quantity of artillery, but the Imperial Prince's luggage. The French lost many men, but not nearly se many aɛ.

was effected by some parties of the French in ships' boats; and it is with great pleasure we record that by this means the British consul and some other British subjects, who had been detained in the city for the preceding five days by the authorities of the place, were rescued. They were conveyed by the boats of the Cassard, one of the French brigs, to the Warspite, which had followed the squadron to watch its operations; and they were received by the crew of that vessel with great enthusiasm, whilst, as we are informed, the band of the Warspite played the national airs of France.

the Moors; and the Marshal's étui was not even their yataghans in their hands. The rest at last in danger; so that the victory is quite unequivo- effected their retreat to a mosque situated in or cal. All the while, there is no proof that the near the water, where they capitulated. MeanMoorish Emperor had really avowed himself ready while, the islet being occupied by the French, the to satisfy the demands of France, or that his fanat-works were in part dismantled and in part directed ical subjects would let him do so if he would. It against the city. The work of destruction prois still a question to be solved, whether Morocco ceeded with frightful violence; the batteries on can cease to resist its overwhelming enemy; and the shore were gradually silenced, and the walls if so, whether France can ever retract while Abd- of the town were reduced to ruins. A landing el-Keder is at large; and again, if matters thus pursue their natural course, whether Europe may not be dragged into war, however reluctantly. This is the theme in which journalists exult. To them, hungry for "subjects" in the dull autumnal season, this topic is a windfall. Military ardor is a chronic affection of the French journals; but the acute inflammation of some London papers almost surpasses the Gallic fever. The journalizing "Liberals" speak of war as the one thing to be thought of. The mere talk about it is very convenient just now for editors; it promotes activity in the journal-trade; a real war would be good for newspapers. Stung with anger at the noise "Terrible, in the mean while, was the fate of and pother, a ministerial writer shrewdly guesses the devoted city. The inhabitants, to the number that it may be meant to promote some stockjobbing of 12,000 or 13,000, had already fled from it in all ends. Likely enough; but the "Liberals," as directions; but fled to dangers scarcely less formian opposition, have a particular purpose to serve. dable than the fire of the French vessels. The One paper, for instance, ridicules the notion of a boats which had effected a landing on the maincontemporary already alluded to, that Mogador has land were recalled, but the natives of those inhosnot been occupied; hints that it might be made a pitable coasts and mountains completed what the casus belli; insists that the time has come to pro-enemy had begun. The Kabyles, descending from test against the occupation of Morocco as well as Algiers; and, with the mocking word of "peace" paraded to save appearances, labors to show how facile war would be, and to taunt ministers into taking that short road out of difficulties. If the tory cabinet were jeered into it, the whigs would have a fine opportunity to cry out against that old tory mistake, and to offer to set the world to rights. No wonder that the whig journals provoke the war they affect to deprecate.-Spectator, 31 Aug.

The Times gives the following account of the attack on Mogador:

the hills, plundered the houses and set fire to the city in several places; and the desolation of Mogador was consummated by Mussulman hands.

"In these engagements the Prince De Joinville had lost a considerable number of men; Captain Duquesne was severely wounded, as well as several other officers; the ships, and especially the Belle Poule, had suffered severely. The French squadron, therefore, leaving a small force to maintain the blockade of the city, which had been reduced to a heap of ruins-a needless precautionretired to Cadiz, and left the coast of Morocco."

him; or whether he cunningly sought to raise a panic, the more easily to effect some coup d'état of cutting down official salaries for the benefit of the treasury,-whether any of these, or a score of other guesses, are right, there is no means of judging, For all his faults, everybody seems glad to have the old Pacha back again; and when calm is restored, perhaps the motive to the freak may come out.-Spectator.

As many suspected, Mehemet Ali has not abdi"The only vessels which could enter the harbor cated, after all; and he was on his way back to were the Belle Poule frigate and the three armed Alexandria when we last hear of his movements. brigs which had been prepared for that purpose. Whether it was an act of senile madness or a pre"The fire was opened by the frigate on the morning tence; whether he was bewildered in brain with of the 15th instant, and sustained for the whole the wretched state of his finances, the misery of day with unabated vigor. It was met [or rather his people, or the simple advance of age; whether anticipated before the ships had taken up their he had really discovered some treason against position] by a very severe fire from the batteries of the town and of the island at the mouth of the harbor; where it is said there were no less than 120 pieces of cannon, ably served by 400 or 500 of the best troops in the service of the emperor. The Belle Poule suffered severely from this prolonged engagement; and it appears that the effect of her fire and of the armed brigs was not sufficiently decisive to bring the affair to a conclusion. It was therefore determined by the Prince De Joinville to attack the islet, and to destroy the batteries upon it, or turn their guns against the city. This attack was made on the morning of NOTA BENE.-The Iowy American Indians, now the 16th, by 500 picked men, under the orders of exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall, belong to a tribe Captain Duquesne (a descendant of the French from the interior of the country, which is reported admiral of that name) and Captain Bouet. The to be a very honorable race, being always honest troops who were engaged in this enterprise, and in their dealings with strangers, and never breakwho effected a landing on the islet, encountered a ing their faith when once it is pledged. They most furious and sanguinary resistance; and nearly must not be confounded with the tribe of the IO U's, half the number of the Moorish soldiers who who are natives of Pennsylvania, and bear a very formed the garrison perished on the spot with opposite character.-Punch.