The Life of Francis Marion | Page 7

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.
-- * Dalcho, in his Church History, says, "upwards of one hundred
families." --
Our humble community along the Santee had suffered the worst
privations of their times and people. But, beyond the necessity of hard
labor, they had little to deplore, at the outset, in their new condition.
They had been schooled sufficiently by misfortune to have acquired
humility. They observed, accordingly, in their new relations, a policy
equally prudent and sagacious. More flexible in their habits than the
English, they conciliated the latter by deference; and, soothing the
unruly passions of the Indians -- the Santee and Sewee tribes, who were
still in considerable numbers in their immediate neighborhood -- they
won them to alliance by kindness and forbearance. From the latter,
indeed, they learned their best lessons for the cultivation of the soil.
That, upon which they found themselves, lay in the unbroken forest.
The high lands which they first undertook to clear, as less stubborn,
were most sterile; and, by a very natural mistake, our Frenchmen
adopted the modes and objects of European culture; the grains, the
fruits and the vegetables, as well as the implements, to which they had
been accustomed. The Indians came to their succor, taught them the
cultivation of maize, and assisted them in the preparation of their lands;
in return for lessons thought equally valuable by the savages, to whom
they taught, along with gentler habits and morals, a better taste for
music and the dance! To subdue the forest, of itself, to European hands,
implied labors not unlike those of Hercules. But the refugees, though a
gentle race, were men of soul and strength, capable of great sacrifices,
and protracted self-denial. Accommodating themselves with a patient
courage to the necessities before them, they cheerfully undertook and
accomplished their tasks. We have more than one lively picture among

the early chroniclers of the distress and hardship which they were
compelled to encounter at the first. But, in this particular, there was
nothing peculiar in their situation. It differed in no respect from that
which fell to the lot of all the early colonists in America. The toil of
felling trees, over whose heavy boughs and knotty arms the winters of
centuries had passed; the constant danger from noxious reptiles and
beasts of prey, which, coiled in the bush or crouching in the brake,
lurked day and night, in waiting for the incautious victim; and, most
insidious and fatal enemy of all, the malaria of the swamp, of the rank
and affluent soil, for the first time laid open to the sun; these are all
only the ordinary evils which encountered in America, at the very
threshold, the advances of European civilisation. That the Huguenots
should meet these toils and dangers with the sinews and