The family of Marion came from France. They emigrated to South Carolina somewhere about the year 1685, within twenty years after the first British settlement of the province. They belonged, in the parent country, to that sect of religious dissenters which bore the name of Huguenots;and were among those who fled from the cruel persecutions which, in the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV., followed close upon the re-admission of the Jesuits into France. The edict of Nantz, which had been issued under the auspices of Henri IV., and by which the Huguenots had been guaranteed, with some slight qualifications, the securities of the citizen, almost in the same degree with the Catholic inhabitants, had, under the weak and tyrannous sway of the former monarch, proved totally inadequate to their protection.
Long before its formal revocation, the unmeasured and inhuman persecutions to which they were subjected, drove thousands of them into voluntary banishment. The subsequent decree of Louis, by which even the nominal securities of the Huguenots were withdrawn, increased the number of the exiles, and completed the sentence of separation from all those ties which bind the son to the soil. The neighboring Protestant countries received the fugitives, the number and condition of whom may be estimated by the simple fact, not commonly known, that England alone possessed "eleven regiments composed entirely of these unhappy refugees, besides others enrolled among the troops of the line. There were in London twenty French churches supported by Government; about three thousand refugees were maintained by public subscription; many received grants from the crown;and a great number lived by their own industry.* Some of the nobility were naturalized and obtained high rank; among others, Ruvigny, son of the Marquis, was made Earl of Galway, and Schomberg received the dignity of Duke."**--
* Memoires et Observations faites par un Voyageur en Angleterre, 12mo.
La Haye, 1698, p. 362. Quoted by Browning in his History of the Huguenots.
** Browning, [William Shergold]: History of the Huguenots.
London: Whittaker and Co. 1840. p. 256. Of the Refugees from France, Hume says, "near fifty thousand passed over into England;"and Voltaire writes that "one of the suburbs of London was entirely peopled with French workers of silk."[W. S. Browning was uncle to the poet, Robert Browning. -- A. L., 1996.]
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America, the new world, was naturally a land of refuge, and soon received her share of these unhappy fugitives. The transition was easy from England to her colonies. Every facility was afforded them for transportation, and the wise policy which encouraged their settlement in the new countries was amply rewarded by the results.
Altogether, the Huguenots were a much better sort of people than those who usually constituted the mass of European emigrants.
The very desperation of their circumstances was a proof of their virtues.
They were a people of principle, for they had suffered everything for conscience sake. They were a people of pure habits, for it was because of their religion that they suffered banishment.
In little patriarchal groups of sixty, seventy, or eighty families, they made their way to different parts of America; and with the conscious poverty of their own members, were generally received with open arms by those whom they found in possession of the soil. The English, as they beheld the dependent and destitute condition of the fugitives, forgot, for a season, their usual national animosities; and assigning ample tracts of land for their occupation, beheld them, without displeasure, settling down in exclusive colonies, in which they sought to maintain, as far as possible, the pious habits and customs of the mother country.
One of these communities, comprising from seventy to eighty families, found their way to the banks of the Santee in South Carolina.*From this point they gradually spread themselves out so as to embrace, in partial settlements, the spacious tract of country stretching to the Winyah, on the one hand, and the sources of Cooper River on the other; extending upward into the interior, following the course of the Santee nearly to the point where it loses its identity in receiving the descending streams of the Wateree and Congaree. These settlers were generally poor. They had been despoiled of all their goods by the persecutions which had driven them into exile. This, indeed, had been one of the favorite modes by which this result had been effected.
Doubtless, also, it had been, among the subordinates of the crown, one of the chief motives of the persecution. It was a frequent promise of his Jesuit advisers, to the vain and bigoted Louis, that the heretics should be brought into the fold of the Church without a drop of bloodshed;and, until the formal revocation of the edict of Nantz, by which the Huguenots were put without the pale and protection of the laws, spoliation was one of the means, with others, by which to avoid this necessity. These alternatives, however, were of a kind not greatly to lessen the cruelties of the persecutor or the sufferings of the victim. It does not fall within our province to detail them.
It is enough that one of the first and most obvious measures by which to keep their promise to the king, was to dispossess the proscribed subjects of their worldly goods and chattels.
By this measure a two-fold object was secured. While the heretic was made to suffer, the faithful were sure of their reward.
It was a principle faithfully kept in view; and the refugees brought with them into exile, little beyond the liberties and the virtues for which they had endured so much. But these were possessions, as their subsequent history has shown, beyond all price.
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* Dalcho, in his Church History, says, "upwards of one hundred families."--
