FRENCH PROTESTANTS “OF LITTLE WORTH”

“With the sole exception of a little band of French Huguenot refugees ... none but English immigrants were admitted to the [Massachusetts Bay] colony; even the Huguenots were here for half a century before they were naturalized.” — Tourtellot, Arthur Bernon, THE CHARLES NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941, page 294

QUESTION:

What did Henry David Thoreau have in common with Paul Revere?

I am, it appears, not the 1st to hypothesize that the terrible history of the Huguenot diaspora1 must have had a marked impact upon the Thoreau family of Concord’s general concept of the world. Horace Rice Hosmer’s Huguenot hypothesis was that John Thoreau, Sr. was “a terribly cautious and secretive man,” and he was that way because he had been made so, by “the religious persecution of his Huguenot ancestors”: I have tried to understand and describe a true French Gentleman of the middle class in the person of John Thoreau Sen. He was French from the shrug of his shoulders to his snuff box. I never saw a Yankee hair on his head. He was not alone in Concord and vicinity. A Frenchman [Chevally] married my grandmother’s sister [Sarah Hosmer] and he was a Huguenot. John Le Gross lived in Concord with John Thoreau. The first Le Gross was an Aide to Lafayette. John Le Grosse would say more quaint, original things during a conversation, than any man I have ever seen. Lewis Rouillard is another French name. The Surettes of Concord [for whom Henry Thoreau surveyed] are of French origen [sic] and are brainy fellows.

1. This term “diaspora” is from the Greek  meaning dispersion, from  meaning through plus  meaning to sow or scatter, as in “sperm” as used in the Greek translation of Deuteronomy 28:25 “thou shalt be a  in all kingdoms of the earth.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1170

At this time France was the most heavily populated area of Europe, and Lyon the second-largest city in France. The man whom we now refer to as “Peter Waldo” or as “Pierre Vaudès”, who seems to have been known as Vaudès2 of Lyon –a prosperous merchant whose surname might well have seemed to have meant “of the forest,” as in the Latin Rex Nemorensis, but did not, as it actually merely indicated that the town of his nativity had been Waldum or Vaux, which had been in that era a town near Lyon (no longer in existence as any name similar to this)– attempted to obtain the translation of the BIBLE into the language of the people. In his 30th HISTORY OF year, he hired two priests to translate the BIBLE into common French. He then accepted the invitation of LUKE THE BIBLE 18:23 to sell all he had and give the proceeds to the poor. He joined a movement already then in existence, and came to lead it in a campaign of publicity to the effect that the “church of Rome was in a state of apostasy from the true faith of the gospel; that she was the harlot of Babylon, and the barren fig-tree which our Lord cursed; that we are not bound to obey the pope, who is not the true head of the church; that monasticism is like corrupt carrion and has the mark of the beast; and that masses and purgatory, the dedication of temples, and the worship of the saints are inventions of the devil.” No quotations are extant from the teachings of Pierre Waldo/Vaudès of Lyon, and likewise no pictorial depictions have survived the Inquisition; therefore I have employed as a substitute for such lost historical material a 19th-Century engraving of Friend Elias Hicks, and a very Waldensian quotation from one of Friend Elias’s sermons: To be a Christian is to be Christ- like.

VAUDÈS OF LYON

The Waldo family is said to be descended from one Thomas Waldo of Lyon, who was also identified with these Waldensians, and who was perhaps Vaudès’s brother. Peter himself apparently never married. Another brother of Peter became a galley slave.

The followers of Peter Waldo were known as Waldenses, as well as Leonists (poor of Lyon) and Sabatati or Insabatati (wearers of sabots, that is, of the wooden shoes of the peasantry, the first saboteurs being people who threw their wooden shoes into the gears of a machine and brought it to a halt), and Humiliatists (professors of humility) — and Henry Thoreau was descended from them. Therefore when, in WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE 2. The given name “Peter” for this man Vaudès is a name that first would appear in any extant record a full century and a half after that man’s death. A century and a half amounts to some six generations. In other words, the faithful of the 14th Century would be hypothesizing about a Founding Father of the 12th Century who actually was of roughly the generation of their great-great-great- grandparents. The given, or Christian, name they selected for this eponymous daddy may well have been selected to be identical with Peter the founder of the Roman church. Because of this, it is the unanimous opinion now, of Waldensian historians, that we can have no idea whatever, what the given name of the founder of this movement in Lyon, France in 1170 CE might actually have been. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WOODS, Thoreau plays around with strange and fanciful derivations of “Walden Pond” such as an eponymous “Squaw Walden,” and “Walled-In Pond,” and “Saffron Walden” in England (182-3), he is mentioning by implication a religious tradition with obvious similarities to his own manner of life, a tradition that was persecuted and virtually exterminated by the true believers of those dark ages. Even if we are scholars we must acknowledge the irony of such silence. It is a wink and a nod directed at others who may desire to live such a life, so incomprehensible to good Christians in Christendom. He is writing a book about how to lead that religious life in the midst of American progress and prosperity. Yet has anyone pointed to this association with the name “Walden” to you before? Hey, all you have to do is look in a good old dictionary, it’s not a big job of research.3

These Waldenses are predecessors of St. Francis, and predecessors of the Protestant movement, perhaps springing out of such earlier dissenting sects as the Albigensians or Cathari (against the heresy of which the Waldensians preached with great fervor), the Patarenes, and the Henricans. The main area of their persistence is the Cottian Alps south-west of Turin.

Waldo is a copse between Lavant and Goodwood in Sussex, England. We can establish that the root of this word is weald, wold, wald, walt, “a wood,” in Anglo-Saxon. That final “o” would be approximately equivalent to the definite article “the,” as for instance in haelo meaning the whole, health, what is integral, and maenego meaning the many, the multitude, what is made up of many members.

Those who embraced this religious discipline were also variously termed Pauperes or “poor ones,”4 Picards or “those who read the Bible for themselves,”5 Waldenses,6 Vaudois and Valdese or “those who live in the valleys,” and finally Huguenots or people who are of no worldly worth because they have made a religious covenant, people who have “sought individual perfection apart from the Roman Church, rejected the official clergy, abstained from oaths and the use of force, and attempted in general to reintroduce primitive Christian fellowship and apostolic simplicity of living.” The sociologist Henri Desroches has termed this les religions de contraband. The eight centuries between AD313, when Constantine (280?-337CE) began to transform the Christian Church into a mere apparatus of the state and Lactantius (240-320CE) began to accommodate its belief system to this new regime of power,7 and the middle of the 1170s when Pierre Valdès began to teach that we should utilize the life of Jesus as the prime moral example for our own lives, were dark and wicked ages indeed, or at least, they were dark and wicked in Christendom.

3. Interestingly, although our annotated editions of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS in the English language talk about the newspaper receipt on the blank side of which Thoreau originally jotted down this word, and although they talk about Walden Street in Waltham, Massachusetts, the only edition of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS that I know of, that presents this information about Thoreau’s connection with the “Poor of Lyon” explicitly and bluntly, is the Spanish edition by Carlos Sánchez-Rodrigo and Parsifal Ediciones of Barcelona in 1989: O Pobres de Lyon. Sociedad religiosa fundada por Pierre de Valdo a fines del siglo XII, que aspiraba a restituir la pobreza evangélica a la iglesia. 4. The entire subject of the first chapter of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. 5. Thus Thoreau’s “pickerel” metaphor. 6. To get this reference into his text, Thoreau pretends that “Waldenses” is merely a plural form for “Walden” like the more obvious “Waldens,” whereas in point of fact “Waldenses” is not a plural but a collective term. 7. According to the standard story, a document termed the “Donation of Constantine,” the Emperor donated the Roman state to the Christian church. However, in the 15th Century this document was discovered to be an 8th-Century forging. As usual in such cases, the official lie had been constructed by exact inversion: what had happened was that the Christian church had been donated to the Roman state. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1535

The authorities began to suspect that the family of Abraham Ortelius, secretly, was a Protestant one.

In Germany, the Anabaptist city of Münster capitulated to the Hessian army. The leader John of Leiden would be tortured to death and his rotting corpse would be displayed permanently in a cage attached to the spire of St. Lambert’s Church. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1544

Guillaume de Salluste seigneur Du Bartas was born into a Huguenot family at Monfort near Auch, France. WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS

Sweden made Lutheranism its official state religion, banning Catholic worship.

King Henry VIII’s chancellor Thomas Audley, who had been made 1st Baron Audley of Walden, died a natural death and when the body was buried in the mediaeval church in Saffron Walden, it was still in one piece (imagine that).

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Huguenots HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1549

Conrad Gesner published a theological encyclopaedia.

Between this year and 1560, approximately 6,000 of the French Protestant group contemptuously referred to by the French Catholics as les Huguenots, worthless ones,8 would flee to Geneva to escape religious persecution — but the mass migrations out of France were yet to come.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

8. The term Huguenot may have originated in the same manner in which the terms “Quaker” and “Sioux” originated, as a gesture of contempt expressed by hostile opponents. We know that for a time, in Poitou, the French Protestants were referred to by the orthodox as Fribours, which was the term used for a counterfeit coin then in circulation, of debased metal. One of the possibilities is therefore that in the argot of the time, a Huguenot may have been a small coin of little worth. The matter is not well documented. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1550

In London, the first church for French Huguenot worship was founded, on Threadneedle Street.

John Heywood’s “The Play of Love” was printed by J. Waley and his AN HUNDRED EPIGRAMMES was printed by T. Berthelet (what I have to show you here is a recent reprint of the 1562 edition). HEYWOOD’S EPIGRAMMESA

William Hunnis’s CERTAYNE PSALMES CHOSEN OUT OF THE PSALTER OF DAVID, AND DRAWEN FURTH INTO ENGLISH METER, BY WILLIAM HUNNIS, SERUANT TO THE RYGHT HONORABLE SYR SYLLYAM HARBERDE KNIGHT, NEWLY COLLECTED AND IMPRINTED (Imprinted at London in Aldersgate Streete by the wydowe of Jhon Herforde, for Jhon Harrington the yeare of our Lord MDL. cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum). He became a member of the Chapel Royal of King Edward VI.

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Huguenots HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1552

The series of civil wars between Protestants (Huguenots) and Catholics in France, characterized by historians for some ungodly reason as “Wars of Religion,” were at this point beginning:

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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During this earliest of the eight wars of religion the first mass out-migration of Huguenots took place across the channel to England. Many of these early fugitives were from Normandy and Brittany, of course, but many also came from areas in western France near the ocean.

Some came in open boats, others in sailing vessels.... Some crossed the Channel in mid-winter, braving the stormiest weather; and when they reached the English shore they usually fell upon their knees and thanked God for their deliverance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1553

December 13, Wednesday (Old Style): At 1:30AM, King Henri III of Navarre was born in Pau, France. He would found the House of Bourbon, by making himself King Henri IV of France. Baptized as a Roman Catholic but raised by his mother as a Huguenot, –avoiding assassination during the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre only by good luck, –leading the Protestant forces against the royal army — upon his rise to the French throne he would abjure Calvinism and return to Roman Catholicism. In 1598 it would be he who would promulgate the Edict of Nantes guaranteeing the religious liberties of French Protestants (in 1610 he would be assassinated by an unforgiving Catholic).

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Huguenots HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1559

In France, Anne du Bourg said, in the presence of King Henry II of France, in regard to his execution of a primitive Christian, that it was no small thing to condemn those who, amidst the flames, invoked the name of Jesus Christ. Here is a drawing of Anne du Bourg being suspended over a fire by a rope and dipped in and out of the flames until death, for having dared thus to attempt to disturb the conscience of the monarch.

HUGUENOTS WALDENSES Meanwhile, Bishop John Jewell, who had been living in exile in Geneva, had been able to return to England, and had brought the Protestant witchhunting craze with him. He preached before the new Protestant Queen of England, Elizabeth I, that: It may please your Grace to understand that witches and sorcerers within these last few years are marvelously increased within your Grace’s realm, Your Grace’s subjects pine away even unto the death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1562

Being a French Huguenot under the rule of Charles IX was not a comfortable situation. Being a Puritan in England or Holland was not a comfortable situation. These groups therefore looked toward North America for a haven from religious persecution. Politically, the powers that be in France and England were eager to establish strongholds in the New World in opposition to Spanish expansion in the Caribbean and Mexico. A French admiral, Jean Ribault, scouted the east coast of Florida for the French and established a Huguenot colony named Charles Fort at a place named Port Royal in what is now South Carolina.9 He termed the native American music “howls, yelps, and lugubrious songs.” This venture would be so poorly managed that the settlers would be forced to return to France. Two copies of an English translation of an account of this venture is all that survives: “The Whole and True Discoverie of Terra Florida,” printed in London in 1563.10

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

9. This is now Parris Island, the east-coast center for the basic training of recruits to the USMC. 10. A facsimile edition has been published by the Florida State Historical Society in 1927. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1563

Completion of the 1st of the 8 Civil Wars between Huguenots and Roman Catholics in France, characterized for some unknown reason by historians as the “Wars of Religion”:

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589

The 39 Articles completed the establishment of the Anglican Church.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Huguenots HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1564

Conrad Gesner, the 1st chap to draw a picture of a pencil, was in this year granted a title of nobility, and became Conrad von Gesner.11

Graphite came to be used as a marker, when the purest deposit ever found was revealed near Borrowdale, in Cumberland in the Lake District of north-western England, when an oak fell during a storm. Shepherds found the rough chunks useful to mark their flocks, but the material was messy to handle. That problem would be addressed by cutting the material into small square-cornered sticks and wrapping them in string to make them easier to hold, and then people would begin to glue the graphite sticks into grooves cut in small wands of wood. The material would be referred to as “plumbago” (imitation lead). The first handmade pencils, in the form that we know today are the “Crayons d’Angleterre,” would be made from Borrowdale graphite.

11. Shades of Escher! —One may suppose that Von Gesner may have used a pencil at least to create the 1st draft of this woodcut (which has above been enhanced somewhat, for purposes of clarity). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Among the users of the pencil would be a chap name of William Shakespeare who would be known on occasion to scribble quickly in order to pay the rent. In this year, we suspect, he was born. For some time he wouldn’t look very much like this, if he ever looked like this at all (the representation is fanciful, and based upon approximately nothing):

We have about five hard facts about Shakespeare’s life, such as that he rented his London room from a Huguenot — which means that there are only about a couple of facts left after this. But who’s counting?

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Huguenots “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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June 30, Friday (Old Style): René de Laudonnière had disembarked near present-day Jacksonville, Florida, to build a fort north of St. John’s Bluff named Fort Caroline. He heard twenty native musicians who were “blowing hideous discord through pipes of reed.” The French brought musicians to play the violin, spinet, fife, trumpet, and drums for both military and social occasions.12 Their spinet was the first keyboard instrument brought by Florida settlers, and the first on the American eastern seaboard. On this day the first recognizable Thanksgiving festival –by white people that is– was held in the New World. This was not in what would become Massachusetts but in what eventually would become Florida — it was held not in Plymouth but in this Fort Caroline. It was not held by the famous Puritans who had obtained freedom from English Protestant religious persecution but by these ignored Huguenots who were fleeing from French Catholic religious

12. With this group, also, was an artist named Jacques Le Moyne. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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persecution. (So much for what you were taught in high school!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1565

Fall: Captain Jean Ribaut returned to the New World and took command of Fort Caroline. Captain Pedro Menéndez de Aviles sent about 40 Spanish Catholic soldiers to destroy this Huguenot colony. After the Protestants had surrendered, the Catholics separated out a few Protestant musicians and artisans whose services they needed, and four guys who could see what was coming, behind the Catholics’ repeated assurances that they had nothing to fear, managed to save themselves by claiming to be Catholics held by the Huguenots against their will. Then the hands of the Protestants were tied and they were taken, in the words of the report by Menéndez to his king, “off ten at a time to a place out of sight, where they were promptly killed.”

On the site, Menéndez erected a marker stating that they had been killed not for political reasons but because they were Protestants.13 Six trunkfulls of Huguenot books were thrown into a bonfire. Because the Adelanto was a friend of music, he spared the fifers, drummers, and trumpeters. Lieutenant René de Laudonnière, the artist Le Moyne, a carpenter named Nicolas Le Challeux, and about 23 others who had by one device or another escaped the slaughter began to make their way back from Catholic Florida to the only relative safety of Catholic France.14

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

13. For this action Menéndez would be honored by King Philip II “for the Lord.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1567

The beginning of the 2nd of the eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France, characterized for some unknown reason by our clueless historians as the “Wars of Religion”:

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589

14. For documentation of this episode of American religious history, consult George R. Fairbanks’s THE HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF THE CITY OF ST. AUGUSTINE, FLORIDA (1858, pages 34, 67, 84. Facsimile edition, Gainesville FL: U Presses of Florida, 1975), Charleton W. Tebeau’s A HISTORY OF FLORIDA (Coral Gables FL: U of Miami P, 1971), Martin E. Marty’s PILGRIMS IN THEIR OWN LAND (Boston MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), and Florian A. Mann’s A STORY OF THE HUGUENOTS (Los Angeles CA: Will A. Kistler Company, 1912). Interestingly, Mann states on page 198 that these Huguenots at Fort Caroline were the first martyrs to civil and religious liberty on the North American continent, although one wonders whether perhaps —on a continent which had been peopled for lo these 8,000 years— this white scholar intended simply that they were the first martyrs whose martyrdom was of significance since they were the first whites to be martyred by other whites (silent assumption, coloreds may be important enough to be recognized to play the role of victimizer when, silent assumption, those whom they victimize are white people, but, silent assumption, only whites may be considered to be important enough in the scheme of things to be allowed to fill the role of victim. Is it not interesting that we have histories in which the lives and deaths of these Huguenots are ignored as unimportant because these American lives and deaths are not really part of “our” story (presumably because the Huguenots were “Mediterranean” types rather than “Nordic” types?), whereas in histories which seek to correct those histories by insisting that the lives and deaths of Huguenots have indeed been part of “our” story, precisely the same blinders reappear in regard to the lives and deaths of Americans who do not have the decency to be white? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1568

The end of the 2d Round and the beginning of the 3d Round of the eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France, characterized for some unknown reason by historians as the “Wars of Religion”:

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this year and the next, the 2d mass out-migration of French Huguenots, fleeing their homeland due to Catholic persecution.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Huguenots “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A WEEK: It reminded me of the homesteads of the Huguenots, on Staten Island, off the coast of New Jersey. The hills in the interior of this island, though comparatively low, are penetrated in various directions by similar sloping valleys on a humble scale, gradually narrowing and rising to the centre, and at the head of these the Huguenots, who were the first settlers, placed their houses quite within the land, in rural and sheltered places, in leafy recesses where the breeze played with the poplar and the gum-tree, from which, with equal security in calm and storm, they looked out through a widening vista, over miles of forest and stretching salt marsh, to the Huguenot’s Tree, an old elm on the shore at whose root they had landed, and across the spacious outer bay of New York to Sandy Hook and the Highlands of Neversink, and thence over leagues of the Atlantic, perchance to some faint vessel in the horizon, almost a day’s sail on her voyage to that Europe whence they had come. When walking in the interior there, in the midst of rural scenery, where there was as little to remind me of the ocean as amid the New Hampshire hills, I have suddenly, through a gap, a cleft or “clove road,” as the Dutch settlers called it, caught sight of a ship under full sail, over a field of corn, twenty or thirty miles at sea. The effect was similar, since I had no means of measuring distances, to seeing a painted ship passed backwards and forwards through a magic-lantern. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1569

March 13, Saturday (1568, Old Style): Walter Raleigh had been fighting on the Huguenot side in France, in what were known at the time for some reason as “Wars of Religion.”15 On this day the Huguenots were defeated at Jarnac.

15. “Golly, Mom, whassa religious war? –After God wins will we hafter obey His commandments again?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1570

Jasper Heywood took full Jesuit vows.

Early in this decade Thomas Heywood would be born, most likely in Lincolnshire, perhaps in the family of a country parson. It is not clear that he was related to John and Jasper Heywood (note that John and Jasper had been Roman Catholics, whereas Thomas was Anglican). He is said to have been educated at Cambridge University and to have become a fellow of Peterhouse College, the oldest and smallest of the schools.

The end of Round #3 of the eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France (characterized for some obtuse reason by historians as “Wars of Religion”):

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1572

The beginning of Round #4 of the eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France (characterized for some unknown reason by historians as the “Wars of Religion”):

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589

Early in this year reports began to circulate, that Jasper Heywood SJ, professor of moral theology and controversy in the Jesuit College at Dillingen, Swabia, Bavaria, was experiencing acute terror every night, troubled by what he termed a “demon.” The professor would be sent for a vacation at Augsburg, and by the end of the year the affliction would have waned. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 23, Saturday-24, Sunday (Old Style): A series of religious repressions during the rule of the Catholic regent Catherine d’Medici (1560-1574) culminated in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of some 8,000 French Protestants. Troops loyal to the French crown alongside Catholic civilians massacred the Protestant Huguenots of Paris, estimates range between 20,000 and 100,000 deaths. This visualization was intended to depict the regent’s viewing of the accomplishment of her orders:

At news of this carnage of this St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, a gleeful Pope Gregory XIII would order celebrations and that a medal to be struck. This would occasion some American humor: THE LOWEST ANIMAL Mark Twain from The Damned Human Race

In August, 1572, similar things were occurring in Paris and elsewhere in France. In this case it was Christian against Christian. The Roman Catholics, by previous con- cert, sprang a surprise upon the unprepared and unsus- pecting Protestants, and butchered them by thousands —— both sexes and all ages. This was the memorable St. Bar- tholomew’s Day. At Rome the Pope and the Church gave pub- HDT WHAT? INDEX

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lic thanks to God when the happy news came. During several centuries hundreds of heretics were burned at the stake every year because their religious opinions were not sat- isfactory to the Roman Church. In all ages the savages of all lands have made the slaughtering of their neighboring brothers and the enslaving of their women and children the common business of their lives. Hypocrisy, envy, mal- ice, cruelty, vengefulness, seduction, rape, robbery, swindling, arson, bigamy, adultery, and the oppression and humiliation of the poor and the helpless in all ways have been and still are more or less common among both the civilized and uncivilized peoples of the earth. For many centuries “the common brotherhood of man” has been urged--on Sundays--and “patriotism” on Sundays and week- days both. Yet patriotism contemplates the opposite of a common brotherhood. Woman’s equality with man has never been conceded by any people, ancient or modern, civilized or savage. I have been studying the traits and disposi- tions of the “lower animals” (so-called), and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The 3d mass out-migration of French Huguenots began. This image purportedly depicts some actual Huguenot refugees as they passed through Lyon during this year:

(It would, however, be more than a century, four more generations of human existence, before the Thoreau family of Huguenots would be forced out of France to the island of Jersey in the English Channel — as that would not be happening until the Year of Our Lord 1685.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1573

The 4th Round of the eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France, characterized for some unknown reason by historians as the “Wars of Religion,” came to an end:

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589

When Queen Elizabeth offered to allow John Heywood to return to England, that family, at Malines in Brabant, sat tight. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1574

JUDITH, the Biblical epic of the Huguenot poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas.

During the reign of King Henry III over France, beginning in 1574 and continuing through 1589, a 4th mass out-migration of Huguenots occurred:

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 30, Sunday (Old Style): At the Château de Vincennes, the death of King Charles IX of France (born June 27, 1550, ruler since 1560). Despite his tuberculosis he had reached the age of 24:

He would be best known as the man who had been in charge at the time of one of France’s shames, the horrific St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of its Huguenot citizens. (His name seems to have been perpetuated in the names of two states of the United States of America, North Carolina and South Carolina.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This man had been born Charles Maximilian, third son of King Henry II of France and Catherine de’ Medici in the royal chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Immediately upon birth he became Duke of Orléans, succeeding his older brother Louis, his father’s 2d son, who had recently died in infancy. He had visited England and been made a Knight of the Order of the Garter at St George’s, Windsor, along with Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford, and Sir Henry Sidney. His father had died in 1559, followed in December 1560 by his eldest brother, King Francis II (1544-1560). The 10-year-old immediately had been proclaimed monarch and, on May 15, 1561, consecrated in the cathedral at Reims as King of France. His government had been dominated by his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, who at first was acting as regent for her young son. Antoine of Bourbon, himself in line for the French throne, and husband to Queen Joan III of Navarre, had been appointed lieutenant-general of France. The Huguenots, French adherents of Calvinism, had a considerable following among the nobility, while their enemies, later organized into the Catholic League, were led by a cadet branch of the House of Lorraine, the House of Guise. Catherine, though nominally Catholic, had attempted to steer a middle course between the two factions, maximizing royal power by minimizing damage. The factions had been engaged in hostilities even before Charles’s accession: a group of Huguenot nobles at Amboise had tried to abduct King Francis II and arrest the Catholic leaders — Francis, Duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal of Lorraine. This failed attempt had been followed by spasms of Protestant image- shattering and Catholic reprisal. The regent had attempted to foster reconciliation at the colloquy at Poissy and, after that failed, had in the Edict of Saint-Germain during January 1562 made several concessions to the Huguenots, but open war had begun after some retainers of the House of Guise –taking revenge for the abduction attempt by Amboise– had at Vassy killed several Huguenot worshippers. Louis of Bourbon, Prince of Conde, brother to the lieutenant-general and the suspected architect of the Amboise conspiracy, was already prepared for war, and seized Vassy as the occasion, assuming the mantle of a protector of Protestantism. He had begun to seize and garrison strategic towns along the Loire. In response, the monarchy revoked concessions it had granted to the Huguenots. After the military leaders of both sides had been either killed or captured in battles at Rouen, Dreux, and Orléans, the regent had mediated a truce and in 1563 had issued the Edict of Amboise. This war had been followed by four years of an uneasy “armed peace,” during which Catherine had attempted to unite the factions by means of a successful effort to recapture Le Havre from the English. After this victory, during August 1563, Charles had declared his legal majority, formally bringing his mother’s regency to an end. Nevertheless Catherine had, being Catherine and a de’ Medici, continued to play a principal role in politics and often prevailed over her son. During March 1564, the King and his mother had set out from Fontainebleau on a tour of this war-torn kingdom. Their tour had spanned two years and taken them through Bar, Lyon, Salon (where they had visited Nostradamus, Carcassonne), Toulouse (where the King and his younger brother Henry had been confirmed), Bayonne, La Rochelle, and Moulins. During this trip Charles IX had issued the Edict of Roussillon that standardised January 1st throughout France, as the initial day of a new year. War had again broke out in 1567 after reports of iconoclasm in Flanders prompted Charles to support Catholics there. Huguenots, fearing a Catholic attack, had attempted to abduct the King at Meaux, seized various cities and massacring Catholics at Nîmes. After a defeat of the Huguenots at the battle of Saint- Denis had produced the death of their royal commander-in-chief, the short war had ended in the truce of 1568. However, the significant privileges granted to Protestants were widely opposed, leading to their cancellation and the resumption of war, and this time the Dutch Republic, England, and Navarra had intervened on the Protestant side while Spain, Tuscany, and the Pope had intervened on the side of the Catholics. Finally, the royal debt and the King’s desire to seek a peaceful solution had led during August 1570 to another truce, again making concessions to the Huguenots. On November 26, 1570, Charles had gotten married with Elisabeth of Austria, who produced a daughter, Marie Elisabeth of Valois (1572-1578). During 1573, Charles had fathered an illegitimate son, Charles, Duke of Angoulême, upon his mistress, Marie Touchet. After the truce, the King had increasingly came under the influence of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who during the war had succeeded the fallen Prince of Condé as leader of the Huguenots. The Queen Mother had become increasingly fearful of Coligny’s unchecked power, especially since the Admiral was pursuing an alliance with England and the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Dutch. Coligny was also hated by Henry, Duke of Guise, who accused the Admiral of having ordered the salinizing of the body of his father in 1562 during the siege of Orléans. During the peace settlement, a marriage was arranged between Charles’s sister Margaret and Henry of Bourbon, heir to the throne of Navarre and one of the leading Huguenots. Many Huguenots nobles, including Admiral de Coligny, had thronged into Paris for the wedding, which was planned for August 18th. On August 22d there had been a failed attempt on Coligny’s life and the city had been thrown into a condition of apprehension, as both visiting Huguenots and local Parisian Catholics were in fear of attack by the other side. In this situation, in the early morning of August 24th, the Duke of Guise had avenged his father by murdering Coligny in his lodgings. As Coligny’s body was thrown into the street, Parisians had mutilated it and then begun a full-scale massacre of Huguenots, a massacre which lasted fully five days. Henry of Navarre managed to avoid death only by converting to Catholicism. Over the next few weeks the disorder had spread to various cities across France. In total, up to 10,000 Huguenots were killed in Paris and the provinces. Though the massacres severely weakened Huguenot power, it also reignited war, which only ceased after the Edict of Boulogne in 1573 had granted Huguenots amnesty and limited religious freedom. However, in this final year of Charles’s reign there was a failed Huguenot coup at Saint-Germain and successful Huguenot uprisings in Normandy, Poitou, and the Rhône valley, setting the stage for another round of war. Having witnessed the horrors of a massacre he had neither approved of nor predicted, the King’s fragile mental and physical constitution drastically weakened. His moods swung from boasting about the extremity of the massacre to exclamations that the screams of the murdered Huguenots kept ringing in his ears. Frantically, he blamed himself — “What blood shed! What murders! he cried to his nurse. What evil council I have followed! O my God, forgive me... I am lost! I am lost!” He also blamed his mother — “Who but you is the cause of all of this? God’s blood, you are the cause of it all!” Queen Mother Catherine responded that she had a lunatic for a son. His physical condition, which seems to have been tubercular, deteriorated to the point where, by Spring 1574, his hoarse coughing was producing blood. These hemorrhages grew more acute. On the final day of his life, May 30th, he embraced his brother Henry of Navarre and went “Brother, you are losing a good friend. Had I believed all that I was told, you would not be alive. But I always loved you ... I trust you alone to look after my wife and daughter. Pray God for me. Farewell.” As his younger brother, Henry, Duke of Anjou had recently been elected King of Poland and was away from France, Catherine resumed her regency until his return from Poland. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1576

The 5th Round of the eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France, characterized for some obtuse reason by historians as the “Wars of Religion,” came to an end:

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1577

The 6th Round of the eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France (characterized for some ungodly reason by historians as “Wars of Religion”):

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589

Jasper Heywood had become restive in his duties as professor of moral theology and controversy in the Jesuit College at Dillingen, Swabia, Bavaria, and the Society of Jesus was coming to consider him to represent a disciplinary problem. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1578

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’s LA SEPMAINE; OU, CREATION DU MONDE.

Abraham Ortelius laid the basis of a critical treatment of ancient geography by his SYNONYMIA GEOGRAPHICA issued by the Plantin press at Antwerp and republished in expanded form as THESAURUS GEOGRAPHICUS in 1587 and again expanded in 1596 (it would be in this 1596 edition that he would begin to contemplate the possibility of continental drift). CARTOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1579

King James VI of Scotland (who would eventually become King James I of England) perused a volume of Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas’s poetry — and was greatly impressed. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1580

The 7th Round of the eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France (characterized for some ungodly reason by historians as “Wars of Religion”):

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1585

This was a poor harvest year in Europe. The beginning of the 8th and final Round of the eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France (characterized for some ungodly reason by historians as “Wars of Religion”):

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1586

Holland began its own papermaking, in Dordrecht. Because of the Huguenots who would flee there, Holland would become during the 17th Century the leading papermaking country of Europe. Rembrandt would insist upon printing his productions upon either van Gelder paper or Japanese paper. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1589

The eight Civil Wars between Huguenots and Catholics in France, characterized for some unknown reason by historians as the “Wars of Religion,” at this point came to an end. Was everybody dead?

Civil Began: Ended: War

1.) 1552 1563 2.) 1567 1568 3.) 1568 1570 4.) 1572 1573 5.) 1574 1576 6.) 1577 1577 7.) 1580 1580 8.) 1585 1589

Jasper Heywood was sent from the Jesuit College at Dôle in Burgundy to Rome. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1590

July: The Huguenot poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, died at Coudons, France.

WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1598

April 13, Thursday (Old Style): King Henri IV of France signed the Edict of Nantes assuring freedom of conscience and the right of Huguenots to worship in public anywhere — except of course never in Paris itself.16 (But freedom of conscience did not mean freedom of speech or of the press, and Bibles continued to be hard to come by, and Europe’s records are full of attempts to arrange for new editions to replace people’s worn-out copies.) HISTORY OF THE BOOK

16. In order to obey this edict, the Huguenots in Paris would be worshiping at a church in Charenton, just outside the city limits, until on October 18, 1685 King Louis XIV would revoke this Edict, thus provoking one of the greatest sustained persecutions and diasporas of European history. (The English term “refugee” would come about due to reluctance to employ the term “diaspora” which seemed to be reserved for the scattering of the Jews per John 7:35. In 1985 French President Mitterrand would issue an official apology, on behalf of the French government and the French people, for Louis XIV’s diktat, and a commemorative postage stamp would be issued characterizing this our modern era as under the suasion of “Tolerance, Pluralism, Brotherhood.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1604

In London, a family of Huguenot wig-makers accepted a lodger named William Shakespeare. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Spring: A new French attempt was made at the colonization of Canada, by the Huguenot gentleman Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, to whom a fur-trading monopoly had been granted. Samuel de Champlain and François Gravé or Pointgravé the Sieur du Pont went along on this one as well.

They sailed into the Bay of Fundy and landed at an islet on the southwest shore of Nova Scotia which they would name Port Royal. From this point Champlain would discover and name the “Isle des Monts Déserts.” The French, probably inspired by the Micmac name aquoddy, would call the region L’Acadie, meaning “place” or “region” but this “Acadia” had also an association with the honored name “Arcadia.” This trading post would persist until the French Catholic persecution of Huguenots began. From Champlain’s VOYAGES: ... a report had been made to the king on the fertility of the soil by him, and by me on the feasibility of discovering the passage to China, without the inconveniences of the ice of the north or the heats of the torrid zone, through which our sailors pass twice in going and twice in returning, with inconceivable hardships and risks.... Champlain would map the east coast of North America from Canso to Nantucket Island. He and Pierre de Monts would establish the 1st French settlement in North America at the mouth of the St. Croix River, the current boundary between Maine and the New Brunswick. Although it was close to both the Abenaki and Maliseet villages, the location proved a terrible choice, and the French would remain there only one winter. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Frozen and flooded, half the party would die of scurvy, and in 1605 Champlain and the survivors would move across the Bay of Fundy to the Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Basin. The new site was in Micmac territory and would become known as Port Royal. Although this gave the Micmac a definite advantage, the French continued to trade with the Abenaki, particularly the Penobscot. The Penobscot would prosper as a result, and their sachem Bashaba would be able to form a powerful alliance which would threaten the Micmac across the bay. The rivalry over the French fur trade would aggravate earlier animosities and by 1607 would escalate into the 8-year Tarrateen War between the Bashaba’s Penobscot confederacy and the Micmac and their Maliseet allies.

CARTOGRAPHY

Here is some further text and context from Samuel de Champlain’s VOYAGES: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In the year 1496, the king of England commissioned John Cabot and his son Sebastian to engage in this search. About the same time, Don Emanuel, king of Portugal, despatched on the same errand Gaspar Cortereal, who returned without attaining his object. Resuming his journeys the year after, he died in the undertaking; as did also his brother Michel, who was prosecuting it perseveringly. In the years 1534 and 1535, Jacques Cartier received a like commission from King Francis I, but was arrested in his course. Six years after, Sieur de Roberval, having renewed it, sent Jean Alfonse of Saintonge farther northward along the coast of Labrador; but he returned as wise as the others. In the years 1576, 1577, and 1578, Sir Martin Frobisher, an Englishman, made three voyages along the northern coasts. Seven years later, Humphrey Gilbert, also an Englishman, set out with five ships, but suffered shipwreck on Sable Island, where three of his vessels were lost. In the same and two following years, John Davis, an Englishman, made three voyages for the same object; penetrating to the 72d degree, as far as a strait which is called at the present day by his name. After him, Captain Georges made also a voyage in 1590, but in consequence of the ice was compelled to return without having made any discovery. The Hollanders, on their part, had no more precise knowledge in the direction of Nova Zembla. So many voyages and discoveries without result, and attended with so much hardship and expense, have caused us French in late years to attempt a permanent settlement in those lands which we call New France, in the hope of thus realizing more easily this object; since the voyage in search of the desired passage commences on the other side of the ocean, and is made along the coast of this region. These considerations had induced the Marquis de la Roche, in 1598, to take a commission from the king for making a settlement in the above region. With this object, he landed men and supplies on Sable Island; but, as the conditions which had been accorded to him by his Majesty were not fulfilled, he was obliged to abandon his undertaking, and leave his men there. A year after, Captain Chauvin accepted another commission to transport settlers to the same region; but, as this was shortly after revoked, he prosecuted the matter no farther. After the above, notwithstanding all these accidents and disappointments, Sieur de Monts desired to attempt what had been given up in despair, and requested a commission for this purpose of his Majesty, being satisfied that the previous enterprises had failed because the undertakers of them had not received assistance, who had not succeeded, in one nor even two years’ time, in making the acquaintance of the regions and people there, nor in finding harbors adapted for a settlement. He proposed to his Majesty a means for covering these expenses, without drawing any thing from the royal revenues; viz., by granting to him the monopoly of the fur-trade in this land. This having been granted to him, he made great and excessive outlays, and carried out with him a large number of men of various vocations. Upon his arrival, he caused the necessary number of habitations for his followers to he constructed. This expenditure he continued for three consecutive years, after which, in consequence of the jealousy and annoyance of certain Basque merchants, together with some from Brittany, the monopoly which had been granted to him was revoked by the Council to the great injury and loss of Sieur de Monts, who, in consequence of this revocation, was compelled to abandon his entire undertaking, sacrificing his labors and the outfit for his settlement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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But since, a report had been made to the king on the fertility of the soil by him, and by me on the feasibility of discovering the passage to China, without the inconveniences of the ice of the north or the heats of the torrid zone, through which our sailors pass twice in going and twice in returning, with inconceivable hardships and risks, his Majesty directed Sieur de Monts to make a new outfit, and send men to continue what he had commenced. This he did. And, in view of the uncertainty of his commission, he chose a new spot for his settlement, in order to deprive jealous persons of any such distrust as they had previously conceived. He was also influenced by the hope of greater advantages in case of settling in the interior, where the people are civilized, and where it is easier to plant the Christian faith and establish such order as is necessary for the protection of a country, than along the sea-shore, where the savages generally dwell. From this course, he believed the king would derive an inestimable profit; for it is easy to suppose that Europeans will seek out this advantage rather than those of a jealous and intractable disposition to be found on the shores, and the barbarous tribes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1620

In the decade of the 1620s in France, up to the fall of LaRochelle, the last Huguenot stronghold in the Languedoc region of France, a fifth mass out-migration of Huguenots occurred.17

17. Stamp Series: 300th Anniversary of the Huguenot Immigration; Issued September 10, 1985; Design: R. Granger Barrett; Printed in lithography by Questa; Perforations 14 - Stamp size 42½mm x 28½mm HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1621

March 24, Wednesday (March 14, 1620 or 1620/1621 Old Style): Elizabeth Barker Winslow died at Plymouth. (Of the five in this particular immigrant group –George Soule the fleeing Huguenot, Elias Story and Ellen More, Edward Winslow and Elizabeth Barker Winslow– all would shortly die with the exception of Edward Winslow.) MAYFLOWER HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1623

Captain Martin Pring brought in a number of French and Spanish trading ships as prizes, as a privateer for England.

Cornelius Mey, a Huguenot ship captain, brought about 30 families, mostly French-speaking Protestants like himself, from Belgium to the island of Man-a-hatt-a at the mouth of a sizeable river on the coast of the New World.

STATEN ISLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1624

From this year until 1642 CE, Cardinal Richelieu would be minister of France. He would break the power of the nobility, reduce the Huguenots to complete subjection, and by aiding the Protestant German princes in the latter part of the Thirty Years’ War, humiliate France’s ancient rival, Austria. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1626

November: According to a letter which turned up in some Dutch archives in the 1840s, from Peter Jansen Schagen of the West India Company in Amsterdam to the States-General in The Hague, a ship had just arrived at the port of New Amsterdam bearing tidings that “our people ... have purchased the island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; — tis 11,000 morgens in size.” READ THE FULL TEXT

What island was it that “our people” had just “purchased”? Who specifically was it who had done that purchasing, and who specifically was it who had done that selling? The record does not state, and 11,000 morgens (half a Dutch morgen was roughly equivalent to an English acre) would be far too large to fit the presumption that this thing that had been purchased under the name “Manhattes” was the Man-a-hatt-a we know as the island of Manhattan today. Even taking into account the various massive landfills which have occurred over the years, our Manhattan Island has not grown to anywhere near 22,000 acres in extent. The presumption has been that it was Peter Minuit who had done the purchasing, but Minuit was a French Protestant type rather than any sort of Dutchman type. There were Huguenot refugees already in the area, who would be settling on Staten Island, when Minuit had arrived from Europe on May 4th with a mandate from the Dutch for authority over the New Amsterdam, and he took over control from a previous governor named Verhulst who had himself been charged to establish a settlement on the Delaware or Hudson River and who himself had the authority to purchase said real estate. The only island we know for sure that Minuit himself “purchased” was Staten Island, for the Huguenot settlers. The presumption has been that this 60 guilders of “purchase” value amounted to $26, as per the Rogers and Hart lyric of 1939: Old Peter Minuit had nothing to lose When he bought the Isle of Manhattan For twenty-six dollars and a bottle of booze.... but the value in question would not have been a value in coinage, since when the deal was made slightly later for Staten Island we know the value was transferred as a sort of hostess gift, “some Diffles [duffle cloth], Kittles [cast-iron kettles], Axes, Hoes, Wampum, Drilling Awls, Jews Harps, and diverse other wares.” Anyway, that figure that is commonly mentioned in dollars, $26 or $24, representing the 60 guilders of value in Schagen’s letter discovered in the 1840s, was an equivalence figure which we do not find published until the 1880s, at which point it surfaces in a local history of Harlem without any information as to the manner of HDT WHAT? INDEX

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its computation. And we do not know what it would have been which was purchased with some trade goods equivalent to 60 guilders in value, since the native Americans with whom the transaction was being negotiated would not have had any conception of the distinction between sole ownership of land, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, permission to make shared temporary use of land. And, we do not know that the native American fisherman with whom these negotiations were accomplished had any claim upon the land he “sold,” since he was of a tribe which used some of the surrounding waters but did not reside on Manhattan Island itself. From the native American point of view, this deal may have been no more than a sucker ploy similar to our modern “Hey, buddy, I need some ready cash, ya wanna buy that Brooklyn Bridge over there?”18 About the only thing we know for sure in regard to this history is that immediately the Dutch West India Company brought the 1st slaves into this area!

“History is the why of now.”

— Austin Meredith

Nota Bene: There are some real comparisons to be drawn between this “purchase” of Manhattan and the problematic nature of the New York “records” of this New Amsterdam purchase, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the “purchase” of Musketaquid and the problematic nature of the Boston “records” of that Concord purchase. In both of these cases what we confidently proclaim now as fact actually amounts to the sheerest self-serving reconstruction based upon the merest fragments of an exceedingly problematic historical record.

18. The curious fact of compound interest has been pointed out, that had this fisherman been able to take the beads downtown and display them in a briefcase on a TV tray on a cracked sidewalk in the East Village, and sell them back to the white folks for this oft- mentioned $26.00 in coinage, and had he then walked this coinage into a 1st Federal Savings & Loan and socked it into an 8% savings account, by this year 2005 of the Common Era, barring a banking crisis, his red descendants might have owned the entire earth and all the starry heavens! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1627

During this year and the next, the French Catholics would be besieging the French Protestants, Huguenots, of La Rochelle on the western coast of France. More Huguenot refugees would arrive on Staten Island.

At about this point, Thomas Heywood’s THE ENGLISH TRAVELLER. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1631

A group of Waldensian Huguenot refugees from Germany arrived on Staten Island.19

Thomas Heywood’s THE FAIR MAID OF THE WEST OR A GIRLE WORTH GOLD, and ENGLAND’S ELIZABETH, HER LIFE AND TROUBLES DURING HER MINORITY FROM TIME CRADLE TO THE CROWN.

Francis Quarles’s THE HISTORIC OF SAMSON.

19. For documentation on this, consult the contributions of Elizabeth Gardner Hayward, Jane Hawkes Liddell, Corrine Ingraham Pigott, Kenneth Edward Hasbrouck, and Henry Darlington, Jr. in Gannon, Peter Steven (ed.) HUGUENOT REFUGEES IN THE SETTLING OF COLONIAL AMERICA (NY: Huguenot Society of America, 1985). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1644

April 6, Saturday (Old Style): Gabriel Bernon was born as the 4th son of André Bernon and Suzanne Guillemard Bernon in an ancient mercantile Huguenot family of La Rochelle, France. (His baptismal certificate at the Protestant church there is now on file at the Rhode Island Historical Society.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1647

October 14, Thursday (Old Style): According to George Fox the name “Quaker” was first given to himself and his followers by Justice Bennet at Derby in 1650 “because I bid them, Tremble at the Word of the Lord.” It would appears, however, from an OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY entry in regard to this term “Quaker,” that this was not its first application. According to a letter of intelligence written on this date in London, the term “Quakers” had previously been applied to the members of some foreign religious sect:

I heare of a Sect of woemen (they are at Southworke) come from beyond Sea, called Quakers, and these swell, shiver, and shake, and when they come to themselves (for in all this fitt Mahomett’s holy-ghost hath bin conversing with them) they begin to preache what hath bin delivered to them by the Spiritt. — CLARENDON MSS #2624 This Justice Bennet may have been recycling a term already familiar and appropriate as descriptive of Fox’s earlier adherents (cf. quotations. 1654, 1694, and see quaking vbl. sb. and ppl. a. 2). If this could help us understand Friend George, perhaps by displaying a situation in which he mythified history by inappropriately placing himself at its center, it wouldn’t be mere etymology. One of the possibilities would be that these women of Southworke who were from “beyond Sea” were not Moslems but merely refugee Huguenots, and that the reference to the spirit of “Mahomett” in the quotation is a mere pejorative aspersion. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1650

Without her knowledge, the brother-in-law of Anne Bradstreet of Salem, Massachusetts published a collection of her poems, entitled THE TENTH MUSE LATELY SPRUNG UP IN AMERICA “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth, of most happy memory,” in London.

It is believed that King George III would have this volume in his library. The book’s preface is careful to assert that Bradstreet was a virtuous wife and devoted mother who did not neglect her womanly duties in order to write the verse. Bradstreet was a close observer of nature. Her poetry was modeled upon that of Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, and the Huguenot poet Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas. Proem. Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie, Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime, And so has vow’d, whilst there is world or time.

So great’s thy glory, and thine excellence, The sound thereof raps every human sense That men account it no impiety To say thou wert a fleshly Deity.

Thousands bring off’rings (though out of date) Thy world of honours to accumulate. ’Mongst hundred Hecatombs of roaring Verse, ’Mine bleating stands before thy royal Hearse.

Thou never didst, nor canst thou now disdain, T’ accept the tribute of a loyal Brain. Thy clemency did yerst esteem as much The acclamations of the poor, as rich, Which makes me deem, my rudeness is no wrong, Though I resound thy greatness ’mongst the throng. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Poem. No Phoenix Pen, nor Spenser’s Poetry, No Speed’s, nor Camden’s learned History; Eliza’s works, wars, praise, can e’re compact, The World’s the Theater where she did act.

No memories, nor volumes can contain, The nine Olymp’ades of her happy reign, Who was so good, so just, so learn’d, so wise, From all the Kings on earth she won the prize.

Nor say I more than truly is her due. Millions will testify that this is true. She hath wip’d off th’ aspersion of her Sex, That women wisdom lack to play the Rex.

Spain’s Monarch sa’s not so, not yet his Host: She taught them better manners to their cost. The Salic Law had not in force now been, If France had ever hop’d for such a Queen.

But can you Doctors now this point dispute, She’s argument enough to make you mute, Since first the Sun did run, his ne’er runn’d race, And earth had twice a year, a new old face;

Since time was time, and man unmanly man, Come shew me such a Phoenix if you can. Was ever people better rul’d than hers? Was ever Land more happy, freed from stirs?

Did ever wealth in England so abound? Her Victories in foreign Coasts resound? Ships more invincible than Spain’s, her foe She rack’t, she sack’d, she sunk his Armadoe.

Her stately Troops advanc’d to Lisbon’s wall, Don Anthony in’s right for to install. She frankly help’d Franks’ (brave) distressed King, The States united now her fame do sing.

She their Protectrix was, they well do know, Unto our dread Virago, what they owe. Her Nobles sacrific’d their noble blood, Nor men, nor coin she shap’d, to do them good.

The rude untamed Irish she did quell, And Tiron bound, before her picture fell. Had ever Prince such Counsellors as she? Her self Minerva caus’d them so to be.

Such Soldiers, and such Captains never seen, As were the subjects of our (Pallas) Queen: Her Sea-men through all straits the world did round, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Terra incognitæ might know her sound.

Her Drake came laded home with Spanish gold, Her Essex took Cadiz, their Herculean hold. But time would fail me, so my wit would too, To tell of half she did, or she could do.

Semiramis to her is but obscure; More infamy than fame she did procure. She plac’d her glory but on Babel’s walls, World’s wonder for a time, but yet it falls. Fierce Tomris (Cirus’ Heads-man, Sythians’ Queen) Had put her Harness off, had she but seen Our Amazon i’ th’ Camp at Tilbury, (Judging all valour, and all Majesty) Within that Princess to have residence, And prostrate yielded to her Excellence. Dido first Foundress of proud Carthage walls (Who living consummates her Funerals), A great Eliza, but compar’d with ours, How vanisheth her glory, wealth, and powers. Proud profuse Cleopatra, whose wrong name, Instead of glory, prov’d her Country’s shame: Of her what worth in Story’s to be seen, But that she was a rich Ægyptian Queen. Zenobia, potent Empress of the East, And of all these without compare the best (Whom none but great Aurelius could quell) Yet for our Queen is no fit parallel: She was a Phoenix Queen, so shall she be, Her ashes not reviv’d more Phoenix she. Her personal perfections, who would tell, Must dip his Pen i’ th’ Heliconian Well, Which I may not, my pride doth but aspire To read what others write and then admire. Now say, have women worth, or have they none? Or had they some, but with our Queen is’t gone? Nay Masculines, you have thus tax’d us long, But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. Let such as say our sex is void of reason Know ’tis a slander now, but once was treason. But happy England, which had such a Queen, O happy, happy, had those days still been, But happiness lies in a higher sphere. Then wonder not, Eliza moves not here. Full fraught with honour, riches, and with days, She set, she set, like Titan in his rays. No more shall rise or set such glorious Sun, Until the heaven’s great revolution: If then new things, their old form must retain, Eliza shall rule Albian once again. Her Epitaph. Here sleeps THE Queen, this is the royal bed O’ th’ Damask Rose, sprung from the white and red, Whose sweet perfume fills the all-filling air, This Rose is withered, once so lovely fair: On neither tree did grow such Rose before, The greater was our gain, our loss the more. Another. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Here lies the pride of Queens, pattern of Kings: So blaze it fame, here’s feathers for thy wings. Here lies the envy’d, yet unparallel’d Prince, Whose living virtues speak (though dead long since). If many worlds, as that fantastic framed, In every one, be her great glory famed. The Four Ages of Man. Lo now! four other acts upon the stage, Childhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age. The first: son unto Phlegm, grand-child to water, Unstable, supple, moist, and cold’s his Nature. The second: frolic claims his pedigree; From blood and air, for hot and moist is he. The third of fire and choler is compos’d, Vindicative, and quarrelsome dispos’d. The last, of earth and heavy melancholy, Solid, hating all lightness, and all folly. Childhood was cloth’d in white, and given to show, His spring was intermixed with some snow. Upon his head a Garland Nature set: Of Daisy, Primrose, and the Violet. Such cold mean flowers (as these) blossom betime, Before the Sun hath throughly warm’d the clime. His hobby striding, did not ride, but run, And in his hand an hour-glass new begun, In dangers every moment of a fall, And when ’tis broke, then ends his life and all. But if he held till it have run its last, Then may he live till threescore years or past. Next, youth came up in gorgeous attire (As that fond age, doth most of all desire), His Suit of Crimson, and his Scarf of Green. In’s countenance, his pride quickly was seen. Garland of Roses, Pinks, and Gillyflowers Seemed to grow on’s head (bedew’d with showers). His face as fresh, as is Aurora fair, When blushing first, she ’gins to red the Air. No wooden horse, but one of metal try’d: He seems to fly, or swim, and not to ride. Then prancing on the Stage, about he wheels; But as he went, death waited at his heels. The next came up, in a more graver sort, As one that cared for a good report. His Sword by’s side, and choler in his eyes, But neither us’d (as yet) for he was wise, Of Autumn fruits a basket on his arm, His golden rod in’s purse, which was his charm. And last of all, to act upon this Stage, Leaning upon his staff, comes up old age. Under his arm a Sheaf of wheat he bore, A Harvest of the best: what needs he more? In’s other hand a glass, ev’n almost run, This writ about: This out, then I am done. His hoary hairs and grave aspect made way, And all gave ear to what he had to say. These being met, each in his equipage Intend to speak, according to their age, But wise Old-age did with all gravity To childish childhood give precedency, And to the rest, his reason mildly told: That he was young, before he grew so old. To do as he, the rest full soon assents, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Their method was that of the Elements, That each should tell what of himself he knew, Both good and bad, but yet no more then’s true. With heed now stood, three ages of frail man, To hear the child, who crying, thus began. Childhood Ah me! conceiv’d in sin, and born in sorrow, A nothing, here to day, but gone to morrow, Whose mean beginning, blushing can’t reveal, But night and darkness must with shame conceal. My mother’s breeding sickness, I will spare, Her nine months’ weary burden not declare. To shew her bearing pangs, I should do wrong, To tell that pain, which can’t be told by tongue. With tears into this world I did arrive; My mother still did waste, as I did thrive, Who yet with love and all alacity, Spending was willing to be spent for me. With wayward cries, I did disturb her rest, Who sought still to appease me with her breast; With weary arms, she danc’d, and By, By, sung, When wretched I (ungrate) had done the wrong. When Infancy was past, my Childishness Did act all folly that it could express. My silliness did only take delight, In that which riper age did scorn and slight, In Rattles, Bables, and such toyish stuff. My then ambitious thoughts were low enough. My high-born soul so straitly was confin’d That its own worth it did not know nor mind. This little house of flesh did spacious count, Through ignorance, all troubles did surmount, Yet this advantage had mine ignorance, Freedom from Envy and from Arrogance. How to be rich, or great, I did not cark, A Baron or a Duke ne’r made my mark, Nor studious was, Kings favours how to buy, With costly presents, or base flattery; No office coveted, wherein I might Make strong my self and turn aside weak right. No malice bare to this or that great Peer, Nor unto buzzing whisperers gave ear. I gave no hand, nor vote, for death, of life. I’d nought to do, ’twixt Prince, and peoples’ strife. No Statist I: nor Marti’list i’ th’ field. Where e’re I went, mine innocence was shield. My quarrels, not for Diadems, did rise, But for an Apple, Plumb, or some such prize. My strokes did cause no death, nor wounds, nor scars. My little wrath did cease soon as my wars. My duel was no challenge, nor did seek. My foe should weltering, with his bowels reek. I had no Suits at law, neighbours to vex, Nor evidence for land did me perplex. I fear’d no storms, nor all the winds that blows. I had no ships at Sea, no fraughts to loose. I fear’d no drought, nor wet; I had no crop, Nor yet on future things did place my hope. This was mine innocence, but oh the seeds Lay raked up of all the cursed weeds, Which sprouted forth in my insuing age, As he can tell, that next comes on the stage. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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But yet me let me relate, before I go, The sins and dangers I am subject to: From birth stained, with Adam’s sinful fact, From thence I ’gan to sin, as soon as act; A perverse will, a love to what’s forbid; A serpent’s sting in pleasing face lay hid; A lying tongue as soon as it could speak And fifth Commandment do daily break; Oft stubborn, peevish, sullen, pout, and cry; Then nought can please, and yet I know not why. As many was my sins, so dangers too, For sin brings sorrow, sickness, death, and woe, And though I miss the tossings of the mind, Yet griefs in my frail flesh I still do find. What gripes of wind, mine infancy did pain? What tortures I, in breeding teeth sustain? What crudities my cold stomach hath bred? Whence vomits, worms, and flux have issued? What breaches, knocks, and falls I daily have? And some perhaps, I carry to my grave. Sometimes in fire, sometimes in water fall: Strangely preserv’d, yet mind it not at all. At home, abroad, my danger’s manifold That wonder ’tis, my glass till now doth hold. I’ve done: unto my elders I give way, For ’tis but little that a child can say. Youth My goodly clothing and beauteous skin Declare some greater riches are within, But what is best I’ll first present to view, And then the worst, in a more ugly hue, For thus to do we on this Stage assemble, Then let not him, which hath most craft dissemble. Mine education, and my learning’s such, As might my self, and others, profit much: With nurture trained up in virtue’s Schools; Of Science, Arts, and Tongues, I know the rules; The manners of the Court, I likewise know, Nor ignorant what they in Country do. The brave attempts of valiant Knights I prize That dare climb Battlements, rear’d to the skies. The snorting Horse, the Trumpet, Drum I like, The glist’ring Sword, and well advanced Pike. I cannot lie in trench before a Town, Nor wait til good advice our hopes do crown. I scorn the heavy Corslet, Musket-proof; I fly to catch the Bullet that’s aloof. Though thus in field, at home, to all most kind, So affable that I do suit each mind, I can insinuate into the breast And by my mirth can raise the heart deprest. Sweet Music rapteth my harmonious Soul, And elevates my thoughts above the Pole. My wit, my bounty, and my courtesy Makes all to place their future hopes on me. This is my best, but youth (is known) alas, To be as wild as is the snuffing Ass, As vain as froth, as vanity can be, That who would see vain man may look on me: My gifts abus’d, my education lost, My woful Parents’ longing hopes all crost; My wit evaporates in merriment; HDT WHAT? INDEX

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My valour in some beastly quarrel’s spent; Martial deeds I love not, ’cause they’re virtuous, But doing so, might seem magnanimous. My Lust doth hurry me to all that’s ill, I know no Law, nor reason, but my will; Sometimes lay wait to take a wealthy purse Or stab the man in’s own defence, that’s worse. Sometimes I cheat (unkind) a female Heir Of all at once, who not so wise, as fair, Trusteth my loving looks and glozing tongue Until her friends, treasure, and honour’s gone. Sometimes I sit carousing others’ health Until mine own be gone, my wit, and wealth. From pipe to pot, from pot to words and blows, For he that loveth Wine wanteth no woes. Days, nights, with Ruffins, Roarers, Fiddlers spend, To all obscenity my ears I bend, All counsel hate which tends to make me wise, And dearest friends count for mine enemies. If any care I take, ’tis to be fine, For sure my suit more than my virtues shine. If any time from company I spare, ’Tis spent in curling, frisling up my hair, Some young Adonais I do strive to be. Sardana Pallas now survives in me. Cards, Dice, and Oaths, concomitant, I love; To Masques, to Plays, to Taverns still I move; And in a word, if what I am you’d hear, Seek out a British, bruitish Cavalier. Such wretch, such monster am I; but yet more I want a heart all this for to deplore. Thus, thus alas! I have mispent my time, My youth, my best, my strength, my bud, and prime, Remembring not the dreadful day of Doom, Nor yet the heavy reckoning for to come, Though dangers do attend me every hour And ghastly death oft threats me with her power: Sometimes by wounds in idle combats taken, Sometimes by Agues all my body shaken; Sometimes by Fevers, all my moisture drinking, My heart lies frying, and my eyes are sinking. Sometimes the Cough, Stitch, painful Pleurisy, With sad affrights of death, do menace me. Sometimes the loathsome Pox my face be-mars With ugly marks of his eternal scars. Sometimes the Frenzy strangely mads my Brain That oft for it in Bedlam I remain. Too many’s my Diseases to recite, That wonder ’tis I yet behold the light, That yet my bed in darkness is not made, And I in black oblivion’s den long laid. Of Marrow full my bones, of Milk my breasts, Ceas’d by the gripes of Serjeant Death’s Arrests: Thus I have said, and what I’ve said you see, Childhood and youth is vain, yea vanity. Middle Age Childhood and youth forgot, sometimes I’ve seen, And now am grown more staid that have been green, What they have done, the same was done by me: As was their praise, or shame, so mine must be. Now age is more, more good ye do expect; But more my age, the more is my defect. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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But what’s of worth, your eyes shall first behold, And then a world of dross among my gold. When my Wild Oats were sown, and ripe, and mown, I then receiv’d a harvest of mine own. My reason, then bad judge, how little hope Such empty seed should yield a better crop. I then with both hands graspt the world together, Thus out of one extreme into another, But yet laid hold on virtue seemingly: Who climbs without hold, climbs dangerously. Be my condition mean, I then take pains My family to keep, but not for gains. If rich, I’m urged then to gather more To bear me out i’ th’ world and feed the poor; If a father, then for children must provide, But if none, then for kindred near ally’d; If Noble, then mine honour to maintain; If not, yet wealth, Nobility can gain. For time, for place, likewise for each relation, I wanted not my ready allegation. Yet all my powers for self-ends are not spent, For hundreds bless me for my bounty sent, Whose loins I’ve cloth’d, and bellies I have fed, With mine own fleece, and with my household bread. Yea, justice I have done, was I in place, To cheer the good and wicked to deface. The proud I crush’d, th’oppressed I set free, The liars curb’d but nourisht verity. Was I a pastor, I my flock did feed And gently lead the lambs, as they had need. A Captain I, with skill I train’d my band And shew’d them how in face of foes to stand. If a Soldier, with speed I did obey As readily as could my Leader say. Was I a laborer, I wrought all day As cheerfully as ere I took my pay. Thus hath mine age (in all) sometimes done well; Sometimes mine age (in all) been worse than hell. In meanness, greatness, riches, poverty Did toil, did broil; oppress’d, did steal and lie. Was I as poor as poverty could be, Then baseness was companion unto me. Such scum as Hedges and High-ways do yield, As neither sow, nor reap, nor plant, nor build. If to Agriculture I was ordain’d, Great labours, sorrows, crosses I sustain’d. The early Cock did summon, but in vain, My wakeful thoughts up to my painful gain. For restless day and night, I’m robb’d of sleep By cankered care, who sentinel doth keep. My weary breast rest from his toil can find, But if I rest, the more distrest my mind. If happiness my sordidness hath found, ’Twas in the crop of my manured ground: My fatted Ox, and my exuberous Cow, My fleeced Ewe, and ever farrowing Sow. To greater things I never did aspire, My dunghill thoughts or hopes could reach no higher. If to be rich, or great, it was my fate. How was I broil’d with envy, and with hate? Greater than was the great’st was my desire, And greater still, did set my heart on fire. If honour was the point to which I steer’d, To run my hull upon disgrace I fear’d, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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But by ambitious sails I was so carried That over flats, and sands, and rocks I hurried, Opprest, and sunk, and sack’d, all in my way That did oppose me to my longed bay. My thirst was higher than Nobility And oft long’d sore to taste on Royalty, Whence poison, Pistols, and dread instruments Have been curst furtherers of mine intents. Nor Brothers, Nephews, Sons, nor Sires I’ve spar’d. When to a Monarchy my way they barr’d, There set, I rid my self straight out of hand Of such as might my son, or his withstand, Then heapt up gold and riches as the clay, Which others scatter like the dew in May. Sometimes vain-glory is the only bait Whereby my empty school is lur’d and caught. Be I of worth, of learning, or of parts, I judge I should have room in all men’s hearts; And envy gnaws if any do surmount. I hate for to be had in small account. If Bias like, I’m stript unto my skin; I glory in my wealth I have within. Thus good, and bad, and what I am, you see, Now in a word, what my diseases be: The vexing Stone, in bladder and in reins, Torments me with intolerable pains; The windy cholic oft my bowels rend, To break the darksome prison, where it’s penn’d; The knotty Gout doth sadly torture me, And the restraining lame Sciatica; The Quinsy and the Fevers often distaste me, And the Consumption to the bones doth waste me, Subject to all Diseases, that’s the truth, Though some more incident to age, or youth; And to conclude, I may not tedious be, Man at his best estate is vanity. Old Age What you have been, ev’n such have I before, And all you say, say I, and something more. Babe’s innocence, Youth’s wildness I have seen, And in perplexed Middle-age have been, Sickness, dangers, and anxieties have past, And on this Stage am come to act my last. I have been young, and strong, and wise as you But now, Bis pueri senes is too true. In every Age I’ve found much vanity. An end of all perfection now I see. It’s not my valour, honour, nor my gold, My ruin’d house, now falling can uphold; It’s not my Learning, Rhetoric, wit so large, Now hath the power, Death’s Warfare, to discharge. It’s not my goodly house, nor bed of down, That can refresh, or ease, if Conscience frown; Nor from alliance now can I have hope, But what I have done well, that is my prop. He that in youth is godly, wise, and sage Provides a staff for to support his age. Great mutations, some joyful, and some sad, In this short Pilgrimage I oft have had. Sometimes the Heavens with plenty smil’d on me, Sometimes, again, rain’d all adversity; Sometimes in honour, sometimes in disgrace, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Sometime an abject, then again in place: Such private changes oft mine eyes have seen. In various times of state I’ve also been. I’ve seen a Kingdom flourish like a tree When it was rul’d by that Celestial she, And like a Cedar others so surmount That but for shrubs they did themselves account. Then saw I France, and Holland sav’d, Calais won, And Philip and Albertus half undone. I saw all peace at home, terror to foes, But ah, I saw at last those eyes to close, And then, me thought, the world at noon grew dark When it had lost that radiant Sun-like spark. In midst of griefs, I saw some hopes revive (For ’twas our hopes then kept our hearts alive); I saw hopes dash’t, our forwardness was shent, And silenc’d we, by Act of Parliament. I’ve seen from Rome, an execrable thing, A plot to blow up Nobles and their King. I’ve seen designs at Ree and Cades cross’t, And poor Palatinate for every lost. I’ve seen a Prince to live on others’ lands, A Royal one, by alms from Subjects’ hands. I’ve seen base men, advanc’d to great degree, And worthy ones, put to extremity, But not their Prince’s love, nor state so high, Could once reverse, their shameful destiny. I’ve seen one stabb’d, another lose his head, And others fly their Country through their dread. I’ve seen, and so have ye, for ’tis but late, The desolation of a goodly State. Plotted and acted so that none can tell Who gave the counsell, but the Prince of hell. I’ve seen a land unmoulded with great pain, But yet may live to see’t made up again. I’ve seen it shaken, rent, and soak’d in blood, But out of troubles ye may see much good. These are no old wives’ tales, but this is truth. We old men love to tell, what’s done in youth. But I return from whence I stept awry; My memory is short and brain is dry. My Almond-tree (gray hairs) doth flourish now, And back, once straight, begins apace to bow. My grinders now are few, my sight doth fail, My skin is wrinkled, and my cheeks are pale. No more rejoice, at music’s pleasant noise, But do awake at the cock’s clanging voice. I cannot scent savours of pleasant meat, Nor sapors find in what I drink or eat. My hands and arms, once strong, have lost their might. I cannot labour, nor I cannot fight: My comely legs, as nimble as the Roe, Now stiff and numb, can hardly creep or go. My heart sometimes as fierce, as Lion bold, Now trembling, and fearful, sad, and cold. My golden Bowl and silver Cord, e’re long, Shall both be broke, by wracking death so strong. I then shall go whence I shall come no more. Sons, Nephews, leave, my death for to deplore. In pleasures, and in labours, I have found That earth can give no consolation sound To great, to rich, to poor, to young, or old, To mean, to noble, fearful, or to bold. From King to beggar, all degrees shall find HDT WHAT? INDEX

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But vanity, vexation of the mind. Yea, knowing much, the pleasant’st life of all Hath yet amongst that sweet, some bitter gall. Though reading others’ Works doth much refresh, Yet studying much brings weariness to th’ flesh. My studies, labours, readings all are done, And my last period can e’en elmost run. Corruption, my Father, I do call, Mother, and sisters both; the worms that crawl In my dark house, such kindred I have store. There I shall rest till heavens shall be no more; And when this flesh shall rot and be consum’d, This body, by this soul, shall be assum’d; And I shall see with these same very eyes My strong Redeemer coming in the skies. Triumph I shall, o’re Sin, o’re Death, o’re Hell, And in that hope, I bid you all farewell. The Author to her Book Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain, Who after birth did’st by my side remain, Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true, Who thee abroad expos’d to public view, Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge, Where errors were not lessened (all may judge). At thy return my blushing was not small, My rambling brat (in print) should mother call. I cast thee by as one unfit for light, Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight, Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could. I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet, Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet. In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save home-spun Cloth, i’ th’ house I find. In this array, ’mongst Vulgars mayst thou roam. In Critics’ hands, beware thou dost not come, And take thy way where yet thou art not known. If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none; And for thy Mother, she alas is poor, Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1655

John Milton’s “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.” Henry Thoreau knew very well that he was descended from primitive Christians, the Waldenses and the Huguenots who had fled France to wherever in the world they could go –such as to Saffron Walden across the water in England in the first wave of diaspora in the 12th Century and to the vicinity of Mount Wachusett in the Massachusetts-Bay Colony across the water in America20 in the second wave of diaspora in the 17th Century– antinomians in regard to whom Milton had penned the lines:

Avenge O Lord thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones Lie scatter’d on the Alpine meadows cold.

20. As Thoreau reported in his Harvard classbook autobiography, he was a man “of French extract” whose ancestors had been forced to take “refuge in the isle of Jersey, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, by Lewis 14th, in the year 1685.” Presumably the Thoreau family had fled from France to the isle of Jersey braving their fears of being sent to row in the galleys –for this was the usual penalty if detected– at roughly the same time that the Jacques Louis Guillet family had fled to that island in the English Channel, because the two families were intermarried. It is Jacques Thoreau’s son Philippe who was the ancestor of Henry David. His daughter Jean’s daughter Marie married Charles William Guillet in AD1796 and their son John Guillet emigrated in AD1832 to Cobourg on Lake Ontario east of Toronto, producing Edwin Clarence Guillet, the Canadian historian. Since the American branch of the Thoreau family came to an end with the unmarried generation of Helen, John, Henry, and Sophia, this Edwin Clarence Guillet (who died in 1974) was one of Henry David’s few modern relatives. As we can see in the following footnote from page 230 of his THE PIONEER FARMER AND BACKWOODSMAN (Toronto: The Ontario Publishing Company, Ltd., 1963), he was quite proud of Henry although reluctant to brag about being a relative:

The period of the settlement of Upper Canada was too late for the inclusion of religious refugees among its settlers. But a large number of descendants of French Huguenots, driven from France in the sixteen-eighties, came to the United States and Canada, where they have tended to retain an independent and non-conformist attitude. The greatest of them all, of course, is Henry David Thoreau, whose philosophy and example have been so influential in shaping the career of Gandhi, British labour leaders, and broader loyalties of every type throughout the world. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this year Milton began to compose PARADISE LOST. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1660

Huguenot refugees began to arrive in the port of Salem. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1661

A poor harvest year in Europe. In France, when Mazarin died and King Louis XIV began to rule directly, taking the reins of administration into his own hands, a 6th mass out-migration of Huguenots began to take place. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1663

March 3, Tuesday (1662, Old Style): Elizabeth Soule, daughter of George Soule the fleeing Huguenot passenger aboard the Mayflower, and Nathaniel Church, grandson of Mayflower passenger Richard Warren, were fined £5 for fornication. THIS DAY IN PEPYS’S DIARY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1664

King Louis XIV, deeply religious, was becoming more and more exasperated at the Huguenot worship. He ordained that in the French colonies if anyone should speak against Catholicism, their lips should be split. Then if they continued to speak against the official religion, their tongues should be pierced with a hot iron. And then, if further punishment seemed necessary: tear out the tongue. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1667

June 24, Monday (Old Style): It is likely that Abel Boyer was born on this day, at Castres in the Upper Languedoc region of France. His father, Pierre Boyer, one of the two consuls or chief magistrates of Castres, had been suspended and fined for being Huguenot. Abel’s education at the academy of Puylaurens would be interrupted by religious disturbances. Leaving France with his maternal uncle Pierre Campdomerc, a noted Huguenot preacher, he would finish his studies at Franeker in Friesland (after, it has been reported, a brief episode of military service in Holland).

John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows: John Evelyn’s Diary

I was before the Council (the Dutch fleete still continuing to stop up the river of Thames, so as nothing could stirr out, or come in) and commanded by his Majestie that I with some others, should search about the invirons of the Citty, now exceedingly distressed for want of fuell, whither there could be any Peate or turfe, fit for use, could be found: & the next day I went, & found enough, & made my report, that there might be found a greate deale, &c: but nothing was now farther don in it:

So on the 28 I went to Chattham, and thence to view not onely what Mischiefe the Dutch had don, but how triumphantly their whole Fleete, lay within the very mouth of the Thames, all from North-foreland, Mergate, even to the Buoy of the Noore, a Dreadfull Spectacle as ever any English men saw, & a dishonour never to be wiped off: Those who advised his Majestie to prepare no fleete this Spring, deserv’d I know what! but -

Here in the river of Chattam, just before the Towne lay the Carkasse of the Lond[on] (now the 3d time burnt) the Royal Oake, the James &c yet Smoking, & now when the mischiefe was don, we were making trifling forts on the brink of the river: Here were yet forces both of horse & foote with Gen[eral] Midleton, continualy expecting the motions of the Enemys fleete: I had much discourse with him, an experien[c]’d Commander: I told him I wondered the King did not fortifie Sheerenesse, [since don:] & the Ferry, both abandon’d: and so returned home:

THIS DAY IN PEPYS’S DIARY HDT WHAT? INDEX

HUGUENOTS HUGUENOTS

July 2, Tuesday (Old Style): Elizabeth Soule, daughter of the fleeing Huguenot Mayflower passenger George Soule, appeared again in court and “for comitting fornication the second time” was sentenced to be whipped at the post.

John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows: John Evelyn’s Diary

Cald upon by my L[ord] Arlington, as from his Majestie, about the new fuell; the occasion why I was mention’d, was from something I had said about a sort of fuell, for a neede, printed in my Sylva 3 yeares before, which obstructing a pattent my Lord Carlingford had ben seeking for himselfe; he was seeking to bring me into the project, & proffered me a share: I met my Lord, & on the 4th by an order of Council, went to my Lord Major, to be assisting: In the meane time, they had made an experiment of my receite of Houllies which I mention in my booke, to be made at Maastricht, with a mixture of charcoale dust & loame, which was tried with Successe at Gressham Colledge (which then was the Exchange, for meeting of the Merchants, since the fire of London) for every body to see: This don, I went to the Lords Commissioners of the Tressury about a supply of 12000 pounds for the Sick & Wounded yet on my hands: next day we met againe about the Fuell, at Sir Ja Armorers in the Mewes, & thence home.

THIS DAY IN PEPYS’S DIARY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1669

July 21, Wednesday (Old Style): The Lords Proprietors approved THE FUNDAMENTAL CONSTITUTION OF CAROLINA as penned by John Locke, secretary to Ashley-Cooper. This document included a guarantee of religious freedom in language similar to what Locke had put into his A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION. This was to have a profound and lasting influence on the development of Charleston’s social fabric, as it would lead to the immigration of such diverse groups as the Huguenots and the Sephardic Jews. Soon the Carolina colonists would sail from London on the Albemarle, the Port Royal, and the Carolina. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1675

In about this year Pierre Thoreau was born in a Huguenot family in the Poitou-Charentes district of France. The mother of this Thoreau family probably had been a member of the de la Lesroy family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HUGUENOTS HUGUENOTS

1680

April 30, Friday (Old Style): The Richmond arrived at Charleston with a 1st large group of Huguenots. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HUGUENOTS HUGUENOTS

1681

In France, increased persecution by the dragoons of Louis XIV caused in this year and the next a seventh mass out-migration of Huguenots. The English king, Charles II, issued a royal proclamation in July, formally welcoming the escaping French Huguenots to his English shore, ordering that the local authorities allow them to bring ashore their effects duty free, and pledging that in England these exiles would be free to pursue their trades. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1682

March 7, Tuesday (1681, Old Style): Gabriel Bernon embarked for New France (Canada). With the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, since it could no longer be allowed for a Huguenot to be present in that French colony, he would be ordered to return to Europe — and would be imprisoned for seven months in the Tour de la Lanterne of La Rochelle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HUGUENOTS HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1683

Between this year and 1715 France would lose about a tenth to a fifth of its population to starvation, expulsion of Jews and Huguenots, disease, and execution, with some French cities losing even as much as a third of their citizenry. In a still-extant image, Huguenot refugees were depicted arriving at Dover: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1685

Gabriel Bernon’s brother Samuel Bernon converted to Catholicism. “Dans ses lettres écrites de la Nouvelle- Angleterre, il tente de convaincre son frère de se convertir et de rentrer en France.” HUGUENOTS

October: Gabriel Bernon was imprisoned in the Tour de la Lanterne of La Rochelle, evidently as part of religious persecution by French Catholics of French Protestants. He would be held there for some seven months. HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

HUGUENOTS HUGUENOTS

October 18, Sunday (Old Style): John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows:

Dr. Good-man [at Whitehall:] preached on 2:Cor:4:18: The King was now building all that range from East to west by the Court & Garden to the streete, & making a new Chapel for the Queene, whose Lodgings this new building was: as also a new Council Chamber & offices next the South end of the Banqueting-house: HDT WHAT? INDEX

HUGUENOTS HUGUENOTS

King Louis XIV of France commenced a merciless persecution of his Protestant subjects., by declaring the April 13, 1598 Edict of Nantes which had been issued by King Henry IV to be null and void and by removing all religious and civil liberties of any French citizens who were Huguenots. The eighth and largest mass out-migration of Huguenots began:21

WALDENSES In this year Pierre Thoreau, who at the time was approximately ten years of age, his two sisters Francoise and Marie, and their mother, fled from the Poitou-Charentes district of France, initially to Richmond near London and then to St. Hélier on the island of Jersey in the English Channel. Presumably this religio-political situation was what occasioned the flight, at penalty of being sent to row in the galleys had they been intercepted. (We can imagine the image above, which is of Huguenots arriving in this year on the shingle beach under the white cliffs at Dover, as an approximation of the group including the combined Thoreau and Guillet families disembarking in the harbor on the island of Jersey!) Presumably the Thoreau family fled from France to Jersey in the Channel Islands in about 1685, at roughly the same time that the Jacques Louis Guillet family fled to

21. This movement of refugees is said to have been the “largest forced migration of Europeans in the early modern period.” Refer to Jon Butler’s THE HUGUENOT IN AMERICA: A REFUGEE PEOPLE IN NEW WORLD SOCIETY. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1983. The English word “refugee” would come about due to reluctance to employ the term “diaspora” which seemed to be reserved for 1 the scattering of the Jews per JOHN 7:35. The Huguenots amounted to some /4th million out of France’s 20 million citizens, and during the years 1682-1690 were concentrated in the West and in the South. After some 50,000 had fled to England, they made up 5% of London town at a time when the London population was 10% of England. Genetically, the statistical probability that the next English person you meet in England will have at least some Huguenot ancestry is 75%. Refer to Bernard Cottret’s THE HUGUENOT IN ENGLAND and to Peter Steven Gannon’s volume on REFUGEES IN THE SETTLING OF COLONIAL AMERICA. In 1985 French President Mitterrand would issue an official apology, on behalf of the French government and the French people, for Louis XIV’s diktat revoking the Edict of Nantes, and a commemorative postage stamp would be issued characterizing this our modern era as under the suasion of “Tolerance, Pluralism, Brotherhood.”) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Jersey, because the two families were intermarried.

It would be Pierre’s grandson Philippe Thoreau who would become the ancestor of Henry David, but it would be his great-granddaughter Marie who would marry Charles William Guillet in 1796 and it would be their son John Guillet who would emigrate in 1832 to Cobourg on Lake Ontario east of Toronto, eventually producing Edwin Clarence Guillet, the Canadian historian. Since the American branch of the Thoreau family would come to an end with the unmarried generation of Helen Louisa Thoreau, John Thoreau, Jr., Henry David Thoreau, and Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, this Edwin Clarence Guillet, who died in 1974, would be one of Henry David’s few modern American relatives (though Henry had a closer relative in England until 1949, a son of Sophia Thoreau Du Parcq who had risen to the status of Law Lord and been entitled, who was named at birth Herbert Du Parcq).

HENRY’S RELATIVES HDT WHAT? INDEX

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As you can see in the following footnote from page 230 of his THE PIONEER FARMER AND BACKWOODSMAN, Edwin was quite proud of Henry — although reluctant to brag about being a relative:

The period of the settlement of Upper Canada was too late for the inclusion of religious refugees among its settlers. But a large number of descendants of French Huguenots, driven from France in the sixteen-eighties, came to the United States and Canada, where they have tended to retain an independent and non-conformist attitude. The greatest of them all, of course, is Henry David Thoreau, whose philosophy and example have been so influential in shaping the career of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, British labour leaders, and broader loyalties of every type throughout the world.

In addition to the above revocation of religious liberty at home, Louis also proclaimed a Code Noir for his colonies in the Caribbean. First, all Jews get out, you are to be gone within three months. Second, Huguenots may not observe their religion in any way. There was to be no intermarriage of non-Catholics with Catholics. Products of such unions were declared bastards. Slaves of Huguenots were to be baptized as Catholics. When the news of this reached the Caribbean, many Huguenot families fled from French islands to English and Dutch islands.

Now I need to lay on you an analogy which you may consider, at first glimpse, to be severe. “Even with due allowance for exaggeration in contemporary accounts, one gets the impression of stark terrorism just as grim as the anti-Semitic nightmare in Nazi Germany.” Yet the opinion I just gave you is that of a reputable historian, Warren C. Scoville.22 As an example, the king of France had declared that if any “New Convert” from Protestantism to Catholicism should recant his conversion on his death bed, all his property was to be seized by the authorities, and they were to have his “naked body dragged through the streets and tossed on a public dump.” Of every six men captured in Huguenot worship meetings, one was to be executed and five condemned to serve as galley slaves, and in fact we know of at least 1,132 men who became galley slaves in this manner prior to the death of Louis XIV. Serving out one’s sentence as a galley slave was no guarantee of release, and in fact a number of Huguenots were kept at their seats on the rowing benches, in their chains, for the duration of their lives, in spite of the fact that they had long since completed their sentences.23

It was in the Languedoc-Dauphine area of southern France, so impacted by the Catholic extermination of the Cathar heresy, that Huguenots were most concentrated. Under persecution, there were visions, people claimed they had heard choirs of angels in the sky and so on and so forth, and a belief arose that the Christian millennium was coming in the year 1689.

A number of Huguenots would wind up in Charleston.

22. Scoville, Warren C. THE PERSECUTION OF HUGUENOTS AND FRENCH ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, 1680 TO 1720. Berkeley CA: U of California P, 1960, page 61. 23. During this period the Pope himself, in the Papal States, was holding galley slaves to row him to and fro. These slaves might be in one or another of the following categories: “convicted criminals condemned to a life sentence” — “captured non-Christian prisoners of war” — “bonavoglie, so-called ‘volunteers’ who through indigence had sold themselves into slavery, and could be released at the end of their contracted period of service in the galleys on condition of good conduct.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

HUGUENOTS HUGUENOTS

I suppose Abraham D. Lavender to be the poet who wrote the following (since he did not attribute the poem and since the color lavender appears in it):

THE EXILE Your sunny shores, Your rugged peaks, Your vineyards, fields, and forests, Your flowery gardens in bloom, With red, yellow, lavender, pink, and blue, Your meandering rivers, Your flowing streams, Your roads that lead everywhere, Your humble hamlets, Your teeming towns, Your courtly cities ablaze, Your toiling farmers, Your masterful merchants, Your artful artisans and would-be scholars, Your poor, pious, pampered, and princely, Men and women of all nuances and shades, Your lives so colorful, Vivaciously vibrant, But oppressive, Struggling to be free, To break the shackles of an ancient age, Blood of my fathers, Tears of my mothers, Roots of my branches, All intertwined in your soil so deep, My mother earth, My father land, How my heart weeps for you, From whom I was so cruelly exiled, In leaking boats, Over frightful borders, Hurried journeys in the darkened nights, Leaving behind so much of me, Embittered, impoverished, but free, Angered by the fearful tyrant, The betraying countrymen, The yoke of intolerance, Saddened by the theft of freedom, The rupture of dreams, The hopeful hope of a speedy return, A new beginning, In a strange new land, Different, engulfing, demanding, But flexible, sensitive, and free, This land that welcomed me, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Exhausted, lonely, afraid, Sadder, but wiser, Stronger and prouder, Reaffirmed in honor, From a life torn asunder, This exile that became me, Days turned into years, And years into decades, And generations multiply and divide,

A new language, A new name, A new home, New loves to love, In this no longer strange new land, But, your sunny shores, Your rugged peaks, Your vineyards, fields, and forests, Your flowery gardens in bloom, With red, yellow, lavender, pink, and blue, My colorfully vibrant memories, That my mind cannot repress, My meandering gazes ablaze, That go with me everywhere, My mother earth, My father land, How my soul dreams of you, I am a part of you, And you are a part of me, The dreams, The hope, The faith, That neither tyranny, Nor time, Can ever erase. HDT WHAT? INDEX

HUGUENOTS HUGUENOTS

November 3, Tuesday (Old Style): John Evelyn’s diary contained a remark about the fate of the Huguenots:

I returned home: The French persecution of the Protestants, raging with uttmost barbarity, exceeding what the very heathens used: Innumerable persons of the greatest birth, & riches, leaving all their earthly substance & hardly escaping with their lives, dispers’d thro’ all the Countries of Europe: The Fr: Tyrant, abrogating the Edicts of Nants &c in favour of them, & without any Cause on the suddaine, demolishing all their Churches, banishing, Imprisoning, sending to the Gallies all the Ministers: plundring the common people, & exposing them all sorts of barbarous usage, by souldiers sent to ruine & prey upon them; taking away their children; forcing people to the Masse, & then executing them as Relapsers: They burnt the libraries, pillag’d their goods, eate up their filds & sustenance, banish’d or sent to the Gallies the people, & seiz’d on their Estates: There had now ben numbred to passe through Geneva onely, from time to time by stealth onely (for all the usual passages were strictly guarded by sea & land) fourty thousand, towards Swisserland: In Holland, Denmark, & all about Germany, were dispersed some hundred thousands besids here in England, where though multitude of all degrees sought for shelter, & wellcome, as distressed Christians & Confessors, they found least encouragement; by a fatality of the times we were fall’n into, & the incharity & indifference of such, as should have embrac’d them: and I pray, it be not laied to our Charge: The famous Claude fled to Holland: Alex & severall more came to Lond[on] & persons of mighty estates came over who had forsaken all: But France was almost dispeopled, the bankers so broaken that the Tyrants revenue exceedingly diminished: Manufacture ceased, & every body there save the Jesuites &c. abhorring what was don: nor the Papists themselves approving it; what the intention farther is time will shew, but doubtlesse portending some extraordinary revolution: I was now shew’d the Harangue that the Bishop of Valentia on Rhone, made in the name of the Cleargie, celebrating the Fr: King (as if he were a God) for his persecuting the poore protestants; with this Expression in it: That as his Victories over Heresy was greater than all the Conquests of Alexander & Caesars &c: it was but what was wished in England: & that God seem’d to raise the French King to this power & magnanimous action, that he might be in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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capacity to assist the doing of the same here: This paragraph is very bold & remarkable; severall reflecting on A[rch]B[ishop] Ushers Prophecy as now begun in France, & approching the orthodox in all other reformed Churches: &c: One thing was much taken notice of, That the Gazetts which were still constantly printed twice a weeke, & informing us what was don all Europ over &c: never all this time, spake one syllable of this wonderfull proceeding in France, nor was any Relation of it published by any, save what private letters & the persecuted fugitives brought: Whence this silence, I list not to conjecture, but it appeared very extraordinary in a Protestant Countrie, that we should know nothing of what Protestants suffered &c: whilst greate Collections were made for them in forraine places more hospitable & Christian to appearance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1686

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet sponsored Père François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénélon to participate in a great French campaign to bring the Huguenots within the Church of Rome. In his missionary field, would be the Saintogne region of France, he and five other priests would attempt to force these schismatics to be persuaded by the voice of reason, and heed the truth. He would be quite moderate in his use of force, exiling only a few and fining citizens merely five sous for each failure to make themselves available for Catholic indoctrination.24

Interest had begun early in the 1680s in the development of a plantation in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Hugh Campbell, a Scots merchant in Boston, petitioned the General Court for permission to establish a town there. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton attempted to claim all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts. Robert Thompson of London was involved in this Dudley/Stoughton scheme. Dr. Daniel Cox of London, John Blackwell of London, and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire were listed among the original proprietors. They were pledging that within four years they would settle 30 families there and provide them with an orthodox minister, but the four years elapsed without any such success and so an extension had been sought, and granted by the General Court.

In this year the original proprietors of this proposed isolated town of New Oxford in Nipmuc Country25 extended their hospitality to a band of about 30 families of Huguenots, some from the shores of the Bay of Biscay and some from Rochelle in France. A number of them bore the name Rochellois. They were under the leadership of Gabriel Bernon and their first minister was Daniel Bondett. They received 11,000 to 12,000 acres 1 at the east end of the area, 1 /4 miles outside of Oxford village on the French River. The first ten families of Huguenots were guided there from Boston in this year, accompanied by their pastor, on foot, by Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau.26 They built their meetinghouse and established their burying ground near the road to Norwich CT, at the foot of Mayo’s hill. The Wachusett wilderness could be seen to the northwest. They built one fort near the meeting-house and another at the top of their hill, each of course with its own well. (A plan of one of these fortifications is at the Rhode Island Historical Society.) They established a grist mill and a malt mill. They planted vineyards and orchards. When Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernon he learned that this Huguenot refugee businessman was seeking an area in which his Protestant countrymen, who had fled their native France after the Edict of Nantes, might re-establish their lives. Their primary concern was avoiding further religious persecution. This proposed town of New Oxford at that time included the larger part of what is now Charlton, a quarter of what is now Auburn, a fifth of what is now Dudley, and the easterly area now known as Webster, as well as several square miles of the northeast portion of what is now Southbridge! There were lots of hay meadows there in what the American natives referred to as Manchaug, alongside the region’s ponds, brooks, and rivers, to provide the necessary winter fodder for farm animals — as these natives had been keeping the area free of underwood and brush, to 24. The Huguenot young people Pierre Thoreau and Jeanne Servant, ancestors to Henry David Thoreau, may well not yet have fled to the Isle of Jersey –may still have been in this region– while Père François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénélon was conducting this Roman Catholic indoctrination campaign. 25. The native American name for the freshwater pond dotted upland plateau the white intrusives knew as “Nipmuc Country” was Mauchaug. 26. At that time there were only about 20 French families in Boston although there was a somewhat larger number settled in Frenchtown, a community at Narragansett in Rhode Island. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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assist them in their hunting for small game, by regular burnings.

Although these Protestant immigrants were settling near the site of a town which would later grow up, that we now know as Oxford MA, we need to bear in mind that there is not continuity with present-day Oxford, for eventually, under Nipmuc attack, their pastor Père Boudet deserted the others and took with him all documentation of their land grant and the Huguenots would then evacuate the area. (The English settlement would not begin until 1713.) Then, when an English family which had settled on the outskirts of their Huguenot village, the Johnsons, was murdered by native Americans (possibly Hurons, Catholic native Americans from Canada?), the settlers were driven into the safer settlements along the coast and as usual for Huguenots, integrated immediately with the other Europeans there. They would leave behind them only Boston names such as Sigourney, Bowdoin, Faneuil, Revere, and Johonnot to mark their episode as religious refugees in the wilderness.

A “French Church” was established on School Street by French Protestant refugees residing in Boston. This church was at least nominally “Presbyterian.” After assimilation had proceeded, and attendance fallen off, it would be sold, and eventually this structure would become the chapel in which, during the Revolution, chaplains from the French fleet would celebrate the mass for Boston’s few Catholic residents. (One supposes that these French Catholics knew nothing of the origins of the structure they were using, which they were renting at that time from Congregationalists. –Or, perhaps they knew and it did not matter. Regular mass would begin in this chapel in 1788, and would prove, according to the Reverend Jeremy Belknap, to be not only “mummery” and “a puppet show,” but –would you believe– “a source of ridicule.” These comments, of course, come from the period when, on Guy Fawkes Day of each year, the 5th of November, gangs of toughs from Boston’s North End would battle it out in the streets with gangs of toughs from Boston’s South End, for possession of each other’s offensive effigies of the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic faith. “Pope’s Day,” this source of ridicule was termed locally, until it came to be the 5th day of November in the Year of Our Lord 1764, and a child died as a result of the mock warfare.27)

The following material about Boston MA as a refuge for fleeing Huguenots appears on pages 152-3 and then passim of Abraham D. Lavender’s FRENCH HUGUENOTS: FROM MEDITERRANEAN CATHOLICS TO WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANTS (NY: Peter Lang, 1990), and helps explain how one of Thoreau’s ancestors fleeing France to the islands of the English Channel happened to wind up in Boston: With the Revocation, Boston became a major Huguenot area. By 1704, the Huguenots began a decade-long plan to build a Huguenot church. But, assimilation was rapid. Butler discusses “The Disappearance of the Huguenots in America,” and concludes that in Boston the Huguenots had disappeared as an immigrant group by 1784, when the French Church disbanded. They disappeared through a “subtle, evolutionary process” that is particularly hard to trace because it occurred so fast. They rapidly entered into the mainstream of Boston’s established political and economic life, and had an extraordinarily high rate of intermarriage with Boston’s English society. Soon, they lost their social and religious identity as Huguenots, and French was replaced by English. Anglicanism was the most favored HDT WHAT? INDEX

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denomination as these Huguenots changed from French churches. Kingdon suggests that the Anglicans’ active charitable help for the Huguenots both in England and in the United States was the major reason for this preference.28 Other factors such as social status and a general lack of heavy religious involvement also inclined the Huguenots toward the most establishment religious identity. Other religious factors, discussed in the next few pages, also influenced the Huguenots. most Huguenot ministers moved toward Anglicanism. Butler concludes that only one colonial New England Huguenot minister ever became a Presbyterian.29... Butler concludes that internal disintegration and assimilation were completed by 1750, with the official end being the collapse of the French Church in 1776. Large scale intermarriage took place, first with the Dutch and then, after the 1750s, increasingly with the English. There was a revival in the 1760s resulting from an influx of immigrants from eastern France and Switzerland, but this revival did not last long.... Smaller numbers of Huguenots joined other Protestant denominations. As Butler notes, however, “None seem to have become Quakers and only after 1750 did a few Huguenots associate with the city’s Presbyterian Church. Despite the apparent ‘presbyterian’ character of French Protestantism, neither the Huguenot clergy nor the Huguenot laity evidenced significant interest in Presbyterian institutions”30.... Where did the Huguenots come from before their exile? Baird notes that a large proportion of the Huguenots who came to the United States came from western France, from “the towns and villages of the country between the Loire and the Gironde.”31 27. In the struggle the carriage bearing one of the Pope effigies rolled over this five-year-old’s head. Anti-Catholicism was seen as appropriate for Guy Fawkes Day because it commemorated the exposure of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and that plot had been a conspiracy by Roman Catholics to blow up the English Parliament.

28. Kingdon, Robert M. “Why Did the Huguenot Refugees in the American Colonies Become Episcopalians?” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 49, 1980 29. Butler, Jon. THE HUGUENOT IN AMERICA: A REFUGEE PEOPLE IN NEW WORLD SOCIETY. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1983, page 88 30. Butler, page 194 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A number of Huguenots also came from northern France, around Normandy and Brittany, and a lesser number from southern France, around Languedoc. But, those who came to America were largely from the “younger segment of the Huguenot population that left France in the 1680s.”32... In the late 1600s and early 1700s, there was some prejudice against French immigrants in the United States. The Puritans especially, and to a lesser extent the Anglicans, had brought a fear and dislike of Catholicism with them from England. In England, these Protestants concluded that England “could save herself from Catholic aggression only by assuming the role of aggressor.” They had used this fear of Catholic internationalism, in an era of intense nascent nationalism, to “win converts from among the common people” who were not attracted by theological arguments alone.33... With the fear of Indians, and the good relations between Indians and French traders near the frontier (particularly in New York and Pennsylvania, next to Canada), French in general were suspect. The typical non-French person did not understand the internal politics of France, and all French were viewed with suspicion: “Not only every stranger but even the most peaceful neighbor who spoke French was a possible spy and a potential accomplice of skulking savages.”34 Huguenots often were taken to be secret Jesuit priests. In France, the government became aware that Huguenot families were abandoning the French islands of the Caribbean for the English and Dutch islands, and steps were taken to replenish the supply. That is, the French government began assembling columns of citizens in French Huguenot communities and marching them to ports to be delivered to the French islands of the Caribbean as slaves. “Parents and children, husbands and wives, neighbors and friends, were carefully separated from one another. Companies of soldiers escorted the wretched travelers, not so much to prevent their escape, as to degrade them, by giving the procession the aspect of a gang of criminals.”35 Of course, mortality was high at every stage along such a journey. The Tour de Constance was used as a prison for these people, and the initial shipload sailed out of Marseilles harbor in September.

31. Baird, Charles W. HISTORY OF THE HUGUENOT EMIGRATION TO AMERICA. NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1885: Volume I, page 263 32. Butler, page 56 33. Billington, Ray Allen. THE PROTESTANT CRUSADE 1800-1860. NY: Rinehart and Company, 1938, page 2 34. Reference given only to page 384 of “Hansen 1931.”

35. Baird, Volume I, pages 219-20 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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During the interruption in government caused by King James II’s abortive effort to merge the Massachusetts Bay settlements under Royal Governor Sir Edmund Andros, the Huguenots would manage to establish a

French congregation of 45 families in the southeastern part of East Greenwich (for instance, the Mawney family, whose name in France had been “Le Moigne”). Purchasing some 5000 acres of Narragansett land from the Atherton Land Company, they allotted their farms, planted trees and hedgerows, and began raising crops. There would be friction, however, with their English-speaking neighbors in Rhode Island, over meadows and hay, and the French would remain only until 1691. READ EDWARD FIELD TEXT

In the autumn of 1686 about forty-five of these French families had come to Rhode Island, and on November 4 had purchased of the Atherton proprietors a large tract of land in the northern part of Kingstown. Here two dozen dwellings were soon erected, lands were cultivated, and a church established. Hardly was the settlement begun when the refugees unwittingly became involved in the bitter dispute over the Narragansett lands that had been so long in progress. In July 1687, some residents of East Greenwich and of Kingstown forcibly carried off forty loads of hay from the Frenchmen’s meadows. The Huguenot minister immediately hurried to Boston to make complaint before Governor Andros. When summoned to explain their proceedings, the Greenwich men asserted that the lands in question had been laid out to them nine years before by the Rhode Island government. Andros, unable to make any final decision upon the case, ordered that the cut hay should be equally divided between the English and the French. Although no further encroachment was made upon the settlement during Andros’s rule, the precedent thus set was followed a few years later, this time with more harmful results. In the summer of 1691 some inhabitants of East Greenwich, evidently of the more rude and lawless portion of the population, subjected the Huguenots to many annoyances and indignities. Monsieur Ayrault, the old French doctor, thus quaintly refers to their afflictions: “We were molested by the vulgar sort of the people, who, flinging down our fences, laid open our lands to ruin, so that all benefit thereby we were deprived of. Ruin looked on us in a dismal state, our wives and children living in fear of the threats of many unruly persons.” He describes how finally the ill treatment became so pronounced that his companions were compelled to flee from the colony, thus being “forced away from their lands and houses, orchards and vineyards.” Rhode Island has been accused, and perhaps justly, of not doing enough to repress such disorderly proceedings. There was some justice in the claim of the East Greenwich men that the Atherton proprietors had unscrupulously sold to the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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refugees a tract of land to which Rhode Island had the prior claim; but the claimants should have sought retribution by legal means and not taken the law into their own hands. We can excuse to a certain extent the Westerly participants in the broils and frays upon the southwest border, but the injuries inflicted upon these inoffensive Huguenots can only be condemned as hasty and willful. The Rhode Island legislators, although evidently disapproving of these actions, were either too indifferent or else too familiar with such disorders to repress the persecutors with the arm of the law.

King James II banned the first New York House of Representatives and prohibited printing presses. The colony’s new Charter of Liberties was disallowed. The Crown established the Dominion of New England, covering all lands from New Jersey to Maine.

Businessman Stephanus Van Cortlandt would be appointed mayor of New-York for this and each of the next two years. A new seal was granted to the city, bearing a beaver, a windmill, a flour barrel, a cross, and two Indians.

May: Having been held for some seven months in the La Lanterne Tower of La Rochelle on account of his Protestant faith, the Huguenot merchant Gabriel Bernon was released. He would flee with his wife Ester le Roy Bernon and their children Gabriel, Marie, and Esther from France to Amsterdam, eventually arriving in London.

(Note that this was the very month during which, in London, the English Catholic king James II was ordering his common hangman to burn publicly before the Royal Exchange, the Huguenot refugee Jean Claude’s anonymous LES PLAINTES DES PROTESTANS CRUELLEMENT OPPRIMEZ DANS LE ROYAUME DE FRANCE, 192 pages printed in Cologne chez Pierre Marteau MD.C.LXXXVI, for the offense of describing the persecutions being experienced by French Protestants such as the Bernon family and the Thoreau family.) LES PLAINTES DES PROTESTANS

May 2, Sunday (April 22, Old Style): The Privy Council ordered the common hangman to burn publicly before the Royal Exchange, one copy in the original French of the Huguenot refugee Jean Claude’s anonymous LES PLAINTES DES PROTESTANS CRUELLEMENT OPPRIMEZ DANS LE ROYAUME DE FRANCE, 192 pages printed in Cologne chez Pierre Marteau MD.C.LXXXVI, and one copy in an anonymous English translation in 48 pages that had subsequently appeared, AN ACCOUNT OF THE PERSECUTIONS AND OPPRESSIONS OF THE PROTESTANTS IN FRANCE. When it was brought to the attention of King James II that such an action would be viewed as entirely unprecedented, over the top, he explained his decision most frankly by expressing a kingly circle-the- wagons mindset: My resolution is taken. It has become the fashion to treat Kings disrespectfully; and they must stand by each other. One King should always take another’s part; and I have particular reasons for showing this respect to the King of France. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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According to the above explanation, it seemed necessary that all the kings of the world stand united to keep under control all the non-kingly citizenry of the world — apparently because there was a need to safeguard the powerful against unseemly depredations by the powerless. The matter would be detailed in a following issue of the London Gazette: Whitehall, May 8. The French Ambassador [Paul Barillon] having, by a Memorial, complained to His Majesty, That a Book, intituled, ‘Les Plaintes des Protestants cruellement opprimés dans le Royaume de France,’ was sold and dispersed in this Kingdom: in which Book are many Falsities, and scandalous Reflections upon the Most Christian King: And that the said Book was likewise Translated into English, and Printed here. His Majesty was pleased to Order, That diligent Enquiry should be made after the Translator and Printer of the same, that they may be prosecuted according to Law: And that a printed Copy of the said Book in French, and another in English, should be Publickly burnt by the hands of the Common Hangman; which was accordingly put in execution on Wednesday last, before the Royal Exchange. No. 2136. Monday, May 10, 1686.

(By means of this one incident –the callous attitude expressed by this English monarch in the face of the suffering of refugee families such as the Thoreaus– do we not possess a complete historical explanation for the “Glorious Revolution” that would shortly come to the British Isles?) LES PLAINTES DES PROTESTANS

An understanding that King James II was himself determinedly of the Catholic faith, and some entries in the current diary of Evelyn, may help us understand what had been going on here in the background of this news item. In John Evelyn’s entry for March 29th we learn that ministers in English Protestant churches had been using their bully pulpits to protest the cruelties of the French Catholic king toward his Protestant subjects, who (like the Thoreaus) were fleeing in great numbers to Protestant-dominated England: March 29, Monday (Old Style): I return’d home: The Duke of Northumberland (a Natural sonn of the late King, by the Dutchesse of Cleaveland, an impudent woman) marrying very meanely, with the help of his bro[ther] Grafton, attempted to spirit away his Wife &c: A Briefe was read in all the Churches for Relieving the French Protestants who came here for protection, from the unheard-off, cruelties of their King: April 15, Thursday (Old Style): I went to Mr. Cooks funerall, a Merchant my kind Neighbour at Greenewich where our Viccar preach’d the sermon: 2. Tim: 4:- 6.7.8: proper on the Occasion: Little Fr:Godolphin was now sick of the small pox, I pray God be gracious to that precious Chld: The Arch-Bish[op] of Yorke now died of the small-pox, aged 62 yeares, a Corpulent man; My special loving Friend, & whilst our Bish[op] of Rochester (from whence he was translated) my excellent Neighbour, an unexpressible losse to the whole Church, & that Province especialy, he being a learned, Wise, stoute, and most worthy prelate; so as I looke on this as a greate stroke to the poore Church of England now in this defecting period: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 18, Sunday (Old Style): Our Viccar on his former Text & most of it repetition: Afternoone I went to Camberwell to visite Dr. Par: but sate so inconveniently at Church, that I could very hardly heare his Text, which was 5.Heb:9: After sermon I went to the Doctors house, where he shew’d me The life and Letters of the late learned Primate of Armagh, Usher, and among them that letter of Bish[op] Bramhals to the Primate, giving notice of the popish practices to pervert this nation, by sending an hundred priests &c into England, who were to conforme themselves to all Sectaries, and Conditions for the more easily dispersing their doctrine amongst us: This Letter was the cause of the whole Impressions being seiz’d on, upon pretence, that it was a political or historical account, of things, not relating to Theologie, though it had ben licenc’d by the Bish[op] &c: which plainely shewe’d what an Interest the Popish now had, that a Protestant Booke, containing the life, & letters of so eminent a man was not to be publish’d. There were also many letters to & from most of the learned persons his correspondents in Europ: but The Booke will, (I doubt not) struggle through this unjust impediment. April 20, Tuesday (Old Style): To Lond[on] a seale - & to see little Godolphin now, I blesse God, in an hope full way of Escape: Severall Judges put out, & new complying ones put in. April 24, Saturday (Old Style): I returned home, found my Coach-man dangerously ill of vomiting greate quantities of blood: May 5, Wednesday (Old Style): To Lond[on] There being a Seale, it was feared we should be required to passe a Doquett, Dispensing with Dr. Obadia Walker & 4 more, wheroff one an Apostate Curate at Putney, the other Master of University Coll[ege] Ox: to hold their Masterships, fellowships & Cures, & keepe pub: schooles & enjoy all former emoluments &c. notwithstanding they no more frequented, or used the pub: formes of Prayers, or Communion with the Church of England, or tooke the Test, & oathes of Allegeance & Supremacy, contrary to 20 Acts of Parliaments &c: which Dispensation being likewise repugnant to his Majesties owne gracious declaration at the begining of his Reigne, gave umbrage (as well it might) to every good Protestant: nor could we safely have passed it under the Privy-Seale: wherefore it was don by Immediate warrant, sign’d by Mr. Solicitor &c at which I was not a little glad: This Walker was a learned person, of a munkish life, to whose Tuition I had more than 30 yeares since, recommended the sonns of my worthy friend Mr. Hyldiard of Horsley in Surry: believing him to be far from what he proved, an hypocritical concealed papist, by which he perverted the Eldest son of Mr. Hyldyard, Sir Ed. Hales’s eld: son & severall more [&] to the greate disturbance of the whole nation, as well as the University, as by his now publique defection appeared: All engines being now at worke to bring in popery amaine, which God in mercy prevent: This day was burnt, in the old Exchange, by the publique Hang-man, a booke (supposed to be written by the famous Monsieur Claude) relating the horrid massacres & barbarous proceedings of the Fr:King against his Protestant subjects, without any refutation, that might HDT WHAT? INDEX

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convince it of any thing false: so mighty a power & ascendant here, had the French Ambassador: doubtlesse in greate Indignation at the pious & truly generous Charity of all the Nation, for the reliefe of those miserable sufferers, who came over for shelter: About this time also, The Duke of Savoy, instigated by the Fr:King to exterpate the Protestants of Piemont, slew many thousands of those innocent people, so as there seemed to be a universal designe to destroy all that would not Masse it, thro[ugh] out Europ, as they had power, quod avertat D.O.M. I procur’d of my L[ord] president of the Council, the nomination of a son of Mrs. Cock, a Widdow (formerly living plentifully, now falln to want) to be chosen into the Charter-house Schoole, which would be a competent subsistence for him: May 7, Friday (Old Style): I return’d home: May 8, Saturday (Old Style): Died my sick Coachman of his feavor, to my greate griefe, being a very honest, faithfull servant: I beseech the Lord, to take-off his afflicting hand, in his good time. May 9, Sunday (Old Style): ... The Duke of Savoy, instigated by the French [king], put to the HUGUENOTS sword many of his protestant subjects: No faith in Princes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1687

The Reverend Daniel Bondet, who had been educated at Geneva, was able to preach in French, English, and Indian. He began to serve the New Oxford community of refugee Huguenots in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in this year, and would continue until sometime in 1695. (In about 1697 he would become the pastor of the French church in New Rochelle, New York, and would serve there until his death in 1722.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A Huguenot arrived in Boston and reported to co-religionists still in Europe, in a series of three letters:36

[At Boston, the 15-25 of November, 1687:] By the Grace of God, I have been in these happy Regions, in perfect Health, since the seventeenth of the last Month, after a Passage of fifty-three Days, reckoning from the Downs, which are twenty Leagues from London, to Boston, and I may say there are few Vessels which make the Passage in so short a Time. Our Voyage was most fortunate, and I can say that, excepting three days and three Nights when we had a great Storm, the entire remainder was only agreeable and delicious Weather; for one and each brought Joy to our Bark. Wives, Daughters and Children came almost every day to enjoy themselves on the Poop-deck. We had not the Pleasure of fishing on the Banks, because we did not come upon them; we passed them fifty Leagues to the South; our Course was almost always from the East to West. We passed in the Latitude of the Fejalles,1 distant about sixty leagues; these are Islands belonging to the Portuguese, and are four hundred Leagues from England. If there were no Fear of the Corsairs of Sales,2 who often cruise about these Islands, Vessels would often come to Anchor in these Harbors, but these Pirates are the Cause of Vessels holding a Course far to the North. We met a Number of Ships at Sea, some coming from the fishing Banks, others from the Islands of America; among others we met a Ship belonging in La Rochelle, which was coming from Martinique laden with Sugar, and which had previously made a Voyage to Guinea, whence it had brought one hundred and fifty Negroes, and two Capuchin Fathers who had been obliged to abandon their Post in Guinea, in View of the little Progress they there made. Almost the entire Crew and the Captain are Protestant. They came to our Vessel in their Launch, and promised us they would soon come to see us in Boston, in order to make reparation for having unluckily succumbed.3 They told us, moreover, that almost all the Protestant Inhabitants of the French Islands have gone; we have several here in Boston, with their whole Families.

1. Azores Islands. 2. A pirate port near Rabat, Morocco. 3. Succumbed to what, to the Love of Gain? Note the contrast with a later paragraph in which the black people who have been enslaved and transported in this manner are treated as mass quantity: “there is not a House in Boston, however small may be its Means, that has not one or two.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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By a Ship arrived from the Islands we have News that the greater Part of our poor Brethren who had been conveyed to St. Martin Island, have escaped to the Island of St. Eustatius, which belongs to the Dutch, and there is Hope that the Rest will soon be there. You will have learned, no doubt, that one of the three Ships that transported these poor Brethren, was lost, and from her only the Crew were saved. May God pardon these cruel Men, who are the Cause of these Sorrows, and convert them!...

January 5, Wednesday (1686, Old Style): Ann(e) Franklin (half-sister of Benjamin Franklin) was born in Boston (married July 10, 1712, William Harris; deceased June 16, 1729).

John Evelyn’s diary entry for this day was in part as follows: The French K[ing] now sayd to be healed or rather patch’d up of the fistula in Ano,37 for which HUGUENOTS he had ben severall times cut: &c: The persecution still raging: I was to heare the Musique of the Italians in the new Chapel, now first of all opned at White- hall publiquely for the Popish Service: Nothing can be finer than the magnificent Marble work & Architecture at the End, where are 4 statues representing st. Joh[n] st. Petre, st. Paule, & the Church, statues in white marble, the worke of Mr. Gibbons, with all the carving & Pillars of exquisite art & greate cost: The history or altar piece is the Salutation, The Volto, in fresca, the Asumption of the blessed Virgin according to their Traditions with our B[lessed] Saviour, & a world of figures, painted by Verio. The thrones where the K[ing] & Q[ueen] sits is very glorious in a Closset above just opposite to the Altar: Here we saw the Bishop in his Miter, & rich

36. REPORT OF A FRENCH PROTESTANT REFUGEE, IN BOSTON, 1687: TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY E.T. FISHER, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK. Albany NY: Munsell, Printer, 1868, edition of 125 copies — a translation of surviving portions of three letter reports, now in the Manuscript Collections of Antoine Court at the Library of Geneva, from a Huguenot in Boston, presumably originally from the Languedoc region, to his (her?? – a history book speaks of the author as “her”) compatriots who were contemplating emigration after the Edict of Nantes. Another source tells us that “a Huguenot woman in Boston” –and presumably this would be another snippet by the same person– wrote to a Huguenot friend on the other side of the Atlantic who was considering resettlement in America, offering: You can bring with you hired help in any Vocation whatever.... You may also own Negroes and Negresses; ... there is no Danger that they will leave you, nor Hired help likewise, for the Moment one is missing from the Town you have only to notify the Savages, who, provided you promise them Something, and describe the Man to them, he is right soon found. 37. Rectal ulcer. King Louis XIV of France had been suffering from an anal fistula for at least a year. Initially they tried a poultice that wasn’t seeming to help and that summer the condition of the monarch’s butt became the talk of the French court. He called for other sufferers to report their own experience, and dispatched them to various spas to try the waters and report back to him. When he finally agreed to surgery the royal surgeon, Charles Felix de Tassy, who had never performed such an operation, decided to get in some practice first, on butts of lesser moment. After a couple of unfortunate deaths and a series of successful operations, the surgeon had gained enough confidence that on November 18, 1686 he had the King drop his drawers and assumed the position. The cutting was performed in the presence of the monarch’s mistress, the chief minister, and entire medical staff. A special curved scalpel had been fashioned for the occasion. Only an hour after the cutting the King was conducting state business from his bed, and in a few months the wound healed. The bold surgeon would be granted an estate and a pile of money. The event became such a rage at court that some 30 gentleman hangers-on would attempt to persuade this surgeon to perform upon them the monarch’s procedure — despite their having no need for it. (Being relieved of his affliction would not induce the Catholic monarch to become more forgiving toward his Protestant subjects in the south of France, the Vaudois.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Copes, with 6 or 7: Jesuits & others in Rich Copes richly habited, often taking off, & putting on the Bishops Miter, who sate in a Chaire with Armes pontificaly, was adored, & censed by 3 Jesuits in their Copes, then he went to the Altar & made divers Cringes there, censing the Images, & glorious Tabernacle placed upon the Altar, & now & then changing place; The Crosier (which was of silver) put into his hand, with a world of mysterious Ceremony the Musique pla[y]ing & singing: & so I came away: not believing I should ever have lived to see such things in the K[ing] of Englands palace, after it had pleas’d God to inlighten this nation; but our greate sinn, has (for the present) Eclips’d the Blessing, which I hope he will in mercy & his good time restore to its purity. This was on the 29 of December: Little appearance of any Winter as yet: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1688

In the Languedoc-Dauphine area of southern France where persecution of Huguenots was severe, the first Huguenot “saints” began to appear, shaking, falling down, choking, having convulsions, and announcing that the end of the world would come in the next year, 1689. MILLENNIALISM

At least the 10th, and possibly the final, shipload of enslaved French Huguenots (ten shiploads, that is, are presently known to historians) arrived from Marseilles in the islands of Guadeloupe, St. Martin, St. Eustatius, and St. Domingo in the Caribbean. The mortality had been about 25% and there were about a thousand left alive to begin tropical labor under Catholic slavemasters. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE

“The grandeur of a country is to assume all its history. With its glorious pages but also its more shady parts.” — President Jacques Chirac of France

SLAVEHOLDING

June: The Huguenot merchant Gabriel Bernon, in his flight from the Catholic persecution in France, arrived at Boston in New England with about £5,500. His intention, formed at meetings with other refugees in London, was to sponsor a Huguenot settlement at New Oxford, Massachusetts. The home being built for him there was to do double duty as one of the little community’s fortifications. He would remain, himself, in Boston, while the 40 Huguenot refugees who had come over with him went on to build their homes and work their farms. He quickly established himself in trade in Boston, becoming involved in the construction of ships and in the manufacture of nails, as well as in the commodity market for salt and for pine rosin. He set up awash-leather manufactory in New Oxford, to make use of the labors of his fellow Huguenot refugees, and began to supply the Boston and Newport glovers and hatters with fine leathers.38 His success in these enterprises would enable him to obtain contracts from the English government for the provision of naval supplies.

38. René Grignon, partner of Jean Papineau in this chamoiserie, was also a silversmith and goldsmith: a silver porringer he would create in 1692 is now at Yale University. Earlier, Grignon had been a member of the Narragansett settlement at East Greenwich RI in Rhode Island, which lasted from 1686 to 1691. During 1696-1699 he would be elder of the French church in Boston. After New Oxford would finally be abandoned in 1704, he would become master of a sailing vessel and then settle in Norwich, Connecticut, where he would be a jeweler and merchant until his death in 1715. The church bell from New Oxford would be contributed by him to the church in Norwich. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1689

The whites of Cape Colony were augmented by 150 Huguenot refugees out of Holland, who brought with them their Dutch Reformed Church and a sticky attitude toward persecution. Their sticky attitude was “Better I persecute you than you persecute me.” An excellent reason why we should stop persecuting people is that under persecution people tend to develop this attitude which perpetuates persecution. –Hey, we’re only human, right?

April 11, Thursday (Old Style): The “Glorious Revolution” overthrew the English Catholics and King James II, and William, Prince of Orange (and Mary, his wife), with much help from Huguenot exiles in Great Britain, took the throne as the Protestant sovereigns of England.

The deposed king James II would flee to Ireland but in the following year would be defeated at the Battle of the Boyne. The Jacobite War would culminate in a few years, in the defeat of Irish Catholics by the Dutch/ English King William III and expropriation of land owned by Catholics.

Whereupon, an Act of Toleration would close a chapter in Quaker history: the Convention Parliament would issue a Bill of Rights limiting the powers of the monarchy over Parliament. READ THE FULL TEXT

After many years of guarded privilege, as one of the acts of the Glorious Revolution the government charter of the Merchant Adventurers Company was withdrawn.

This act, ratifying the Revolution of 1688-1689, would incorporate the earlier “Declaration of Rights” offered to William upon his accession. This established a constitutional monarchy in Britain. It barred Roman HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Catholics from the throne. William III and Mary II became joint monarchs of England and Scotland (to 1694).

A Toleration Act granted freedom of worship to dissenters in England. This Toleration Act closed a chapter in Quaker history. Although the Religious Society of Friends would still be prosecuted for refusal to pay tithes, the prosecution rate would fall off as and many Friends would connive in the payment of, and in some cases even the receiving of, tithes. By the turn of the century the Quakers would have adjusted to England, and England to them.

Although Quakers would still be prosecuted for refusal to pay tithes, the prosecution rate would fall off and many Friends would connive in the payment of, and in some cases, the receiving of tithes. By the turn of the century the Quakers would have adjusted to England, and England to them.

The Huguenot young scholar Abel Boyer ventured from the continent of Europe to England and would there HDT WHAT? INDEX

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suffer a period of great economic stress.

“William and Mary” would ally with Spain, Austria, and the Netherlands to engage in what were called in Europe “King William’s Wars,” to oppose the expansionism of the French under King Louis XIV. In North America these would be referred to as the French and Indian Wars and would be fought between the French and English and their respective Indian allies, the Algonquian and the Iroquois, for control of the colonial lands. These wars will continue off and on in America until 1763: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1691

Mary Hale was brought before the court on an accusation of witchcraft in Boston, Massachusetts. The accused had been in court on similar charges before. We don’t know how the case came out.

By this year a Huguenot named Peter Faneuil, from La Rochelle, had settled in Boston. His descendant Andrew Faneuil, merchant, would establish a warehouse on the corner of Merchants Row. WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS

The house in which Benjamin Franklin would be born had probably been partly rebuilt after the fire of September 16th in the previous year. The house occupied the corner of High Street (later called Marlborough Street, and after 1789, called Washington Street) and Milk Street, on the southern side of Milk Street. The Old South Church was just across from this home, that is, on the north side of Milk Street (Milk Street ended at High Street). The southwesterly end of the lot contained a well shared with neighbor Jonathan Balston. The last inhabitant of the Reynolds/Franklin house would describe it, some years after it had been demolished, in the following manner: Its front upon the street was rudely clapboarded, and the sides and rear were protected from the inclemencies of a New England climate by large rough shingles. On the street it measured about twenty feet; and on the sides (the westerly of which was bounded by the passageway, and contained the doorway approached, by two steps) the extreme length of the building, including a wooden lean-to used as a kitchen, was about thirty feet. In height the house was about three stories, the upper being an attic, which presented a pointed gable towards the street. In front, the second story and attic projected somewhat into the street over the principal story on the ground floor. On the lower floor of the main house there was one room only. This, which probably served the Franklins as a parlor and sitting-room, and also for the family eating-room, was about twenty feet square, and had two windows upon the street; and it had, also, one upon the passageway, so near the corner as to give the inmates a good view of Washington Street. Besides these windows there had been HDT WHAT? INDEX

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others in the days of its early proprietors which opened upon the easterly side of the house, the seats of which were retained until the destruction of the building. In the centre of the southerly side of the room was one of those noted large fireplaces, situated in a most capacious chimney, which are so well remembered as among the comforts of old houses; on the left of this was a spacious closet, and on the right, the door communicating with a small entry in which were the stairs to the rooms above and the cellar, the latter of which was accessible to the street through one of the old-fashioned cellar doors, situated partly in the sidewalk. On the ground floor, connecting with the sitting-room through the entry, was situated the kitchen, in a ten-foot addition to the rear part of the main building [the 8-square-foot addition by Josiah Franklin?]. The only windows from this part of the house looked back upon a vacant lot of land in the extreme rear of the lot which served as a yard and a garden plot. The second story originally contained but one chamber and in this the windows, door, fireplace and closet were similar in number and position to those in the parlor beneath it. The attic was also, originally, one unplastered room, and had a window in front on the street, and two common attic windows, one on each side of the roof, near the back part of it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1692

Although some remained in Newport, most of the Huguenots who had in 1686 taken to farming in a French- speaking colony in Rhode Island had by this point departed. In France they had been largely of the merchant class, and they had passed on mostly to New-York and Boston. Among the Huguenots who had remained in Rhode Island was the Jamain family of Newport, headed by Etienne (Stephen) Jamain. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1695

The Reverend Daniel Bondet, who had begun to serve the New Oxford community of refugee Huguenots in 1687, left his flock, either inadvertently or purposefully taking with him the ownership documentation for all the land. (In about 1697 this reverend would become the pastor of the French church in New Rochelle, New York, and he would serve there until his death in 1722.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1696

August: After the murder of four members of the Johnson family,39 the Huguenot “Plantation of New Oxford of 500 aikers of Land granted by their Excellencies Mr Dudley and Mr Stoughton to Isaac Bertrand Du Taffeau and Gabriel Bernon in the year 1687 and the 250 aikers granted since, making in all 750 aikers” in Nipmuc country40 was abandoned. (This Johnson family was in fact not Huguenot and not integral with the French settlement. There is in existence a short testimonial regarding the actions of Gabriel Bernon in the encounter, and a description of the killings of John Johnson and his three children (“fes trois Enfans”). I have seen, however, another account that alleges that the total was five rather than four white deaths, and Bernon’s untranslated document in French does mention the name “John Evane.”)

The remainder of the intrusives at this point fled, primarily into Boston. Their names were: • Montel • Andre Segourney (Town Constable) • Jacques Dupen • Jean Maillet, ant. • Captain Charles Germain • Peter Canton • Peter Cante • Jean Jeanson • Bereau Caeini •Mr. Germaine • Elie Dupeu • Jean Baudoin • Ober Jermon • ???? Baudoin • Jean Maillet • Benjamin Faneuil I do not know why the names of Isaac Bertrand du Truffeau, village Magistrate and Bernon’s agent, and his wife the former Demoiselle Rochefoucauld, do not appear on this list. The name “Bernon” is not on this list. Although “Their Excellencies Mr Dudley and Mr Stoughton did grant to the faid Mr Bernon for his own use

39. Nearby, while this attack was going down, an elderly white woman was being safely delivered of one female and two male infants! 40. The native American name for what the white intrusives knew as the “Nipmuc” Or “Nipnet” country was Mauchaug. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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alone 1750 aikers more, which makes in all 2500 aikers which Mr Bernon justly claims,” that founding family never actually moved onto its farm in Oxford, choosing to reside instead in Boston and then somewhat closer to their plantation, in Providence. (The name “Faneuil” on this list is of course of interest, since Benjamin Faneuil’s brother Andre, who was married to one of Gabriel Bernon’s sisters, would become one of the wealthiest merchants in Boston and would erect the famous Faneuil Hall as a market house. Jean Baudoin of New Oxford was the brother of James Baudoin of Boston, a distinguished merchant and for several years a member of the Colonial Council; James’s son James Bowdoin would become a Governor of Massachusetts and give his name to Bowdoin College.)

Here are the entries for this month in the diary of John Evelyn:

August 9, Sunday (Old Style): ... I drank Epsom waters some days: nothing of publique this weeke save the Bank lending the King 200000 pounds for the Army in Flanders, that having don nothing against the Enemy, had so exhausted the Treasure of the Nation that one could not have borrowed mony under 14 or 15 per Cent on bills nor Exchequer Tallies [on] the best funds for 30 per Cent, so miserably had we lost our best credit: Reasonable good harvest weather: August 23, Sunday (Old Style): ... Clippers & abusers of the publique Coine every day discovered, & all these disorders evidently occasioned by the dishonesty of the Goldsmith & Banker, &c: August 29, Saturday (Old Style): I went to Lambeth, dined with the A Bishop: there had that morning ben a Court upon the Complaint against Dr. Watson the Bishop of Bristol suspended for Simonie; The AB[ishop] told me how unsatisfied he was with the Cannon Law, & how exceedingly unreasonable all their pleadings appeared to him: After dinner I mooved him for Dr. Bohune for a preferment promised me for him; & told him how much I had ben solicited to Bespeake his suffrage for the Deane of Carlisle, to succeede the Bishop of that Diocesse, now very old: As also concerning Okewood Chapell &c: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1697

The Reverend Daniel Bondet, who had been the pastor of the emptied community of refugee Huguenots at New Oxford in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, became the pastor of the French church in New Rochelle, New York, where there was also a very substantial, and considerably more prosperous, Huguenot settlement.41 (He would serve there until his death in 1722.)

41. There were substantial Huguenot communities on Manhattan Island, on Staten Island, and at New Rochelle, New York. New Rochelle in particular was completely Huguenot (completely, that is, if you leave out of your account as is customary the numerous black slaves owned by the more prosperous Huguenot families there). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1699

Attempts were made to re-establish the Huguenot plantation at New Oxford, which had been abandoned in 1696 after a family of four white people had been killed locally, evidently by native American raiders from Canada. The Reverend Jacques Laborie of Cardaillac was its new pastor, replacing the Reverend Daniel Bondet. The Reverend Laborie had completed the study of theology in Geneva in 1688 and had been ordained in Zurich, and had then for a decade served as a Huguenot pastor in London before coming to America in 1698. While serving at New Oxford he would also be serving as a missionary to the surviving local native Americans. (After the final abandonment of New Oxford by the French settlers in 1704, he would serve for two years at the French church of New-York, a large congregation since by the late 1600s the Huguenot church in New-York had come to be twice the size of the city’s Anglican church and half the size of its Dutch church. Then the Reverend Laborie would take up the practice of medicine and surgery in Fairfield, Connecticut, the town in which he would die in about 1731.)

March 28, Tuesday (Old Style): George Cutler was tried for piracy before the Court of General Tryalls at Newport, Rhode Island and guess what, no one showed up to claim the cash and goods and levy charges against him. Questioned as to how he had come into all that money, Cutler avowed that he picked it up in various places, included being willed some of it by a resident of Madagascar. Wink wink, nudge nudge. The jury of his peers then acquitted. A few months later, as one of the wealthy men of the town, Cutler would join with Captain Thomas Paine and others in signing a petition for the assignment of an Anglican minister to Newport — thus becoming, along with the wealthy Huguenot merchant Gabriel Bernon, a founder of Trinity Church (Huguenots and pirates, assimilating with a vengeance). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1700

From the late 1600s into the early 1700s, in the New England colonies, there was a general prejudice and caution in regard to anyone with a French accent, whether or not they identified themselves as Catholic. Particularly in regions near Canada such as upstate New York and Pennsylvania, there was a general fear of sneak attacks by the Indian tribes with whom the French trappers and traders of the interior were known to have allied. Any man with a French accent might find himself accused of spying for the Jesuits, even if he was a longtime neighbor and even if he insisted that his parents had been Huguenot refugees who had fled France in fear of being made galley slaves.42 SLAVERY

Popish priests were banned from Boston and from surrounding areas. All French Catholics were imprisoned and all citizens of French extraction, regardless of religion, were required to register with the police. People were being warned that they had better not be heard to speak French.

In the Virginia colony, however, they appeared to be able to distinguish between Catholic Frenchmen and Protestant Frenchmen. A settlement of Huguenots having been paid for by donations from the English, the overlords of Virginia promised them land in the area of Norfolk. Once they had arrived, however, the found that this prime land had been swapped out, under their feet, by William Byrd, and that they would need to settle on 10,000 acres out on the frontier, just west of present-day Richmond, more than 20 miles distant from any other white settlement. Byrd wanted them there in order to discourage the Monocan natives who had lived there from moving back into the area. They named their town Manakintowne.

42. During this period the Pope himself, in the Papal States, was holding galley slaves to row him to and fro. These slaves might be in one or another of the following categories: “convicted criminals condemned to a life sentence” — “captured non-Christian prisoners of war” — “bonavoglie, so-called ‘volunteers’ who through indigence had sold themselves into slavery, and could be released at the end of their contracted period of service in the galleys on condition of good conduct.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1701

On a voyage to the West Indies, Gabriel Bernon’s son Gabriel was lost at sea.

A large number of the refugee Huguenots who had settled in New York were entering the mainstream of political and economic life: 84 had become freemen since 1687, and 59 more would become freemen by 1710. Many of these French Protestant immigrants were becoming merchants, although about one in ten was a cloth or leather worker. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In France, there were about 40 Huguenot “prophets” serving time on the rowing benches of the galleys, and more than 350 Huguenots were being held in French prisons for the crime of belief. The remaining Huguenots in France were being pushed to the point at which they were going to turn violent, and resist this abuse. As of about this time, at least 150,000 Huguenots had made good their escape and were living in the three primary destinations of the mass migrations: Holland, England, and Germany. In addition, smaller groups had made their way to various of the Channel Islands (such as the intermarried Thoreau and Guillet families on the island of Jersey), and to such destinations as Denmark, Scotland, South Africa,43 Sweden, Turkey, various of the islands of the West Indies, and the North American colonies.

HENRY’S RELATIVES

43. James Michener’s THE COVENANT has an interesting chapter on this. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1702

With the government of France nearly bankrupt due to its wars and the series of bad crop years, the Huguenots of Languedoc-Dauphine in France abandoned a three-generation tradition of pacifism and became guerrilla fighters. They attacked French military and Catholic religious targets, taking as their battle song Psalm 68 and identifying themselves with the Jews of the Babylonian captivity. The odds were of course preposterous, approximately 3,000 Huguenot fighters against approximately 25,000 royal troops. This must have been a gesture of desperation; like the five Woodland Dakota tribes of Minnesota in 1862, they must have known in advance that they were going to get wiped out. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1704

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts opened a formal school of catechism for the blacks of New-York, to prepare them for Christian baptism. One of the things which would have to happen, in order to legitimate such an activity, would be the development of an ideology according to which the slavemasters might be reassured that regardless of conversion, regardless of baptism, regardless of literacy, regardless of whatever, a slave would remain a slave would remain a slave. That new ideology would be difficult to develop, since the rule had always been that Christians might not enslave Christians — yet that new ideology would develop apace, and when it developed it would of course be linked with race — the new ideology would be, it goes without saying, that despite the fact that a Christian is a Christian is a Christian, a nigger is a nigger is a nigger. (Sorry for needing to deploy the N-word, but I am determined that the utter repugnance of such developments accurately be characterized.) One of the white teachers, name of Elias Neau, was found to be extraordinarily effective with his black students. Why was he so effective? He was effective because his black students were aware that their teacher had once himself served in chains, as a galley slave — being as he was a Huguenot. AN INFORMED CITIZENRY Mr. Elias Neau, by nation a Frenchman, who, having made a confession of the Protestant religion in France, for which he had been confined several years in prison, and seven years in the gallies.

The blacks could almost trust such a person — and trust does immensely help the learning process along.

Spring: After the native attack on the Deerfield settlement along the Connecticut River, the Huguenot settlement at New Oxford, Massachusetts was again abandoned. Capt. Joseph Bulkeley with a company of 51 soldiers, chiefly from Concord, was engaged at Groton, Lancaster and other frontier towns in 1704. Penhallow remarks that “Capt. Prescott, Bulkeley, and Willard, with their companies, were so vigorous in pursuing the enemy that they put them all to flight.” The account of provisions furnished to this company mentions among others the names of “Mr. Choat, Dr. Simon Davis,” and several Indians.44

Winter: During this year and the next the 1st Huguenot church was being established in Boston, which would become known as “the French church.” However, the “wiser heads” of this exile community would always prevail, and successfully urge a low profile and a non-confrontational stance, and there would be no conspicuous edifices of the sort that might generate fierce glares.

44. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1706

The Huguenot refugee businessman Gabriel Bernon, who had since 1697 been residing in Newport, Rhode Island, at this point relocated to Providence. He would be instrumental in setting up a branch office of the Church of England there: St. John’s Episcopal church. In this year or the following one, Pierre Daille, Leblond (?), Baker, and Guionneau wrote to Gabriel Bernon. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1709

May: The Reverend James Laborie became the pastor of New-York’s French Church (Huguenots).

December 13, Tuesday (Old Style): The Reverend James Laborie, pastor to New-York’s Huguenots, had petitioned Royal governor Lord Cornbury for a salary of £20 a year, which was the same salary as his predecessor. On this day his petition was approved. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1712

The Huguenot refugee businessman Gabriel Bernon, who had since 1706 been residing in Providence, Rhode Island, at this point relocated to Kingston. He would be instrumental in setting up a branch office of the Church of England there: St. Paul’s Episcopal church. During this year, at age 68, he remarried, with Mary Harris (she was 24 years of age and would produce one son and several daughters, the last one while her hubby was in his late 70s).

In a New-York that at this point had reached a population of 5,840, one of the blacks who had been taught to read and write by the Huguenot catechism instructor Ellis Neau was charged with involvement in a slave plot. Did this mean that it was demonstrably unwise to teach American slaves to read and write, even barely enough to be able to receive the gospel of Christ? Defenders of the agenda of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts would be able to point out that although this black had indeed been taught to read and to write up to a certain level as part of their class, in preparation for a baptismal ceremony, in fact after his execution –guess what– he had been discovered to have been quite innocent of any involvement in that slave plot. SERVILE INSURRECTION In the year 1712 a considerable number of negroes of the Carmantee and Pappa Nations formed a plot to destroy all the English, in order to obtain their liberty; and kept their conspiracy so secret, that there was no suspicion of it till it came to the very execution. However, the plot was by God’s Providence happily defeated. The plot was this. The negroes sat fire to a house in York city, and Sunday night in April, about the going down of the moon. The fire alarmed the town, who from all parts ran to it; the conspirators planted themselves in several streets and lanes leading to the fire, and shot or stabbed the people as they were running to it. Some of the wounded escaped, and acquainted the Government, and presently by the firing of a great gun from the fort, the inhabitants were called under arms and pretty easily scattered the negroes; they had killed about 8 and wounded 12 more. In their flight some of them shot themselves, others their wives, and then themselves; some absconded a few days, and then killed themselves for fear of being taken; but a great many were taken, and 18 of them suffered death. This wicked conspiracy was at first apprehended to be general among all the negroes, and opened the mouths of many to speak against giving the negroes instruction. Mr. Neau durst hardly appear abroad for some days; his school was blamed as the main occasion of this barbarous plot. On examination, only two of all his school were so much as charged with the plot, and on full trial the guilty negroes were found to be such as never came to Mr. Neau’s school; and what is very observable, the persons, whose negroes were found to be most guilty, were such as were the declared opposers of making them Christians. However a great jealousy was now raised, and the common cry very HDT WHAT? INDEX

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loud against instructing the negroes.

Of course, if it were going to be allowed that some slaves might read and write, then it would be necessary to institute some sort of program to ensure that whatever reading materials became available to them would include nothing having any problematic ideas. For instance, it would be exceedingly unwise to allow a slave access to such opinion pieces as the Declaration of Independence (when events would work their way around to that document getting written), with its rank celebration of the notion of personal “freedom. AN INFORMED CITIZENRY

In the colony of New York in this year, it was being made more difficult for a white slavemaster to legally manumit his black slaves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1713

January 31, Saturday (1712, Old Style): Antoine Bénézet was born to a Huguenot family in Saint-Quentin in Picardy in northern France. WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS

July 8, Wednesday (Old Style): The land of Oxford that had once been granted to Huguenots, with these French Protestants long since driven away by fear of native Americans, was reassigned to 30 families of English settlers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1714

The plan of the Huguenots to build a “French Church” structure in Boston was put on ice due to lack of interest, or due to fear of provoking a hostile response. The refugees were being entirely too successful in assimilating to the dominant culture to be willing to pursue this at the moment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1715

King Louis XIV died and Louis XV ascended the throne of France.

While Antoine Bénézet was a 2-year-old, his family emigrated from France to London. As “Anthony Benezet,” this Huguenot child would receive an English education appropriate for a scion of a merchant family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1719

In about this year, we suppose, in Nimes some say, or in Switzerland, Antoine Court was born, who would denominate himself “Antoine Court de Gébelin” (his birth may have been as late as 1728). His father was a notable pastor of the Huguenots. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1720

Henry Thoreau’s Great-Grandfather Philippe Thoreau was born in St. Hélier, the capital city and main port of the island of Jersey in the English channel, the son of Pierre Thoreau (which makes him a member of the 2d cohort subsequent to the great Huguenot diaspora). He would become a wine merchant.

HENRY’S RELATIVES

Crocus sativus (the saffron crocus), a little golden autumn flower, had become synonymous with the town of Walden because it was rare and precious and had uses as a medicine as well as in cooking and dying. It was a fitful crop; an early October frost and all hopes could be wiped out overnight. In about this year, when King George I stopped at Audley End –which was at that time one of the largest houses in England– and a traditional gift was required, the burghers of Saffron Walden had to rush to Bishops Stortford to purchase some, evidently because it was the wrong season or perhaps the local crop had failed.

In Philadelphia, Edward Horne was advertising English saffron “by retail, for its weight in silver.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1721

South Carolina was made a royal colony. General Sir Francis Nicholson became Governor.

A Huguenot, Gabriel Bernon, settled at Providence, Rhode Island after trying out Boston and then Newport. He would help a bunch of wealthy retired pirates there found Trinity Church.

THERE WAS A PORTRAIT OF HIM AT THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. JOHN IN PROVIDENCE BUT THEY’VE LOST ALL TRACK OF IT.

January 14, Saturday (1720, Old Style): While in Boston, Gabriel Bernon wrote a brief account of the 1696 massacre at the Huguenot settlement of New Oxford, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1722

The Reverend Daniel Bondet, who had been the pastor of the dispersed community of refugee Huguenots at New Oxford in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and then the pastor of the French church in New Rochelle (just north of New York City along the sound), died.

June 28, Thursday (Old Style): Peter Papillians or Papillon of Boston, presumably a Huguenot, was in command of a ship that the town was using to discourage pirates along the New England coast. Coming back into the harbor on this day after yet another fruitless search for the famous pirate Ned Low45 who for long had been harassing the trade of New England, he was at least able to back in with him as a prize, a brigantine that had been in Ned Low’s possession.

45. Ned Low was a Boston ship rigger who had turned to piracy. He had a reputation for cruelty and would be described by his own compatriots as a “maniac and a brute.” For instance, upon capturing a Nantucket whaler, he sliced off the vessel’s skipper’s ears, sprinkled them with salt, and forced the man to eat them — and then he killing him. Then, when he captured the Spanish galleon Montcova, he took it upon himself to personally off, one after another, the vessel’s 53 officers. Before killing one of these Spaniards, he forced him to eat the heart of another. Eventually his own crew had had enough of this and set him adrift without provisions. Two days later, a French ship came across his drifting open boat, and as soon as they had discovered who it was whom they had rescued, held a short trial at sea and hanged him from their yardarm. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1723

July 2, Tuesday (Old Style): Daniel Ayrault, a merchant of Rhode Island, wrote in French to Gabriel Bernon, Huguenot businessman refugee in the town of Providence. Bernon would respond shortly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1727

February 16, Friday (1727, Old Style): At “Rhoad Island and Providence plantations in New England,” Gabriel Bernon made his will in English (proven copy, 1735/1736). In the will he disposed of various artifacts and properties, inclusive of “Negro man woman and 4 children £500.” His desire was that “Negro man Manuel, Negro woman Peggy, to be at disposition of wife also the Negro boy and girl and the product of them, if sold,” which accounts for four of this family of six human beings, and then, casually mentioned, “One Negro child being with daughter Esther Powell, is left to her,” and “a boy has been given to daughter,” seems to account for the final two members, unnamed, of this family of six human beings.46 PROVIDENCE RHODE ISLAND

October 29, the Holy Day (Old Style): An earthquake occurred throughout New England at 40 minutes past 10 o’clock in the evening. An initial temblor was followed by aftershocks. Andrew Sigourney, a member of a Huguenot family that had emigrated to Boston in 1686, would write in the family’s French BIBLE:

Boston Octob. the 29, 1727 being on the Lords Day at Evening about Ten and Eleven a Clock at Night their was an Earth Quake not verey terrible but the 2d and Third Exceeding Terrible So that Everey Inhabitant in the Town thought their houses would Fall upon their heads & their was a Chille thrown down to the Ground their was another about 5 a Clock in the morning and Reached an 100 miles in the Country....

(Below this, in this BIBLE, is a record of the Boston earthquake of 1744.)

It so affected the minds of people, that it was a means used by the Holy Spirit to produce a very powerful revival of religion ... throughout New-England.

Refer to:

46. A statistic that we have, dating to 1703, is that 37% of the Dutch households in the American colonies, 44% of the English households, and 50% of the Huguenot households possessed slaves. Looking at the above will created by this wealthy Providence, Rhode Island citizen of Huguenot extraction, I am somewhat surprised at its casualness. It seems clear that at this point in American history, merely passing an owned Negro from person to person within a white family, and merely passing an owned Negro along from generation to generation, amounts to no big deal, with there being no worry to be sure to dot every “i” and cross every “t” of the formal documentation. Clearly, there is no concern whatever that the transaction might be scrutinized or challenged. –This is in very marked contrast with manumission documents, which tend to be on their face much more “worried,” more precise and legalistic (perhaps for good reason). We note in this context that in 1687, while these Huguenots were embarking for the New World, one who had already arrived reported back to her co-religionists still in Europe that in America it was very easy to maintain control over one’s servants — since one could always count on help in this regard from the native Americans: You can bring with you hired help in any Vocation whatever.... You may also own Negroes and Negresses; ... there is no Danger that they will leave you, nor Hired help likewise, for the Moment one is missing from the Town you have only to notify the Savages, who, provided you promise them Something, and describe the Man to them, he is right soon found. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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• The Reverend Cotton Mather’s THE TERROR OF THE LORD. SOME ACCOUNT OF THE EARTHQUAKE THAT SHOOK NEW-ENGLAND, IN THE NIGHT, BETWEEN THE 29 AND THE 30 OF OCTOBER. 1727. WITH A SPEECH, MADE UNTO THE INHABITANTS OF BOSTON, WHO ASSEMBLED THE NEXT MORNING, FOR THE PROPER EXERCISES OF RELIGION, ON SO UNCOMMON, AND SO TREMENDOUS AN OCCASION. [One line from Corinthians]. Boston: printed by T. Fleet, for S. Kneeland, and sold at his shop in King-street. (This included a 6-page Appendix at the end, which contained a Latin epigram on the 1653 earthquake by the Reverend Peter Bulkeley taken from the MAGNALIA CHRISTI AMERICANA, and an account of the 1663 earthquake by Samuel Danforth.) • The Reverend Cotton Mather’s BOANERGES. A SHORT ESSAY TO PRESERVE AND STRENGTHEN THE GOOD IMPRESSIONS PRODUCED BY EARTHQUAKES ON THE MINDS OF PEOPLE THAT HAVE BEEN AWAKENED WITH THEM, WITH SOME VIEWS OF WHAT IS TO BE FURTHER AND QUICKLY LOOK’D FOR, ADDRESS’D UNTO THE WHOLE PEOPLE OF NEW-ENGLAND, WHO HAVE BEEN TERRIFIED WITH THE LATE EARTHQUAKES, AND MORE ESPECIALLY THE TOWNS THAT HAVE HAD A MORE SINGULAR SHARE IN THE TERRORS OF THEM. Boston: Printed for S. Kneeland, and sold at his shop in King- Street, 1727. • Autograph Letter, signed, from the Reverend Cotton Mather to Governor Dummer. 9 December 1727. 3pp. • Thomas Foxcroft. THE VOICE OF THE LORD, FROM THE DEEP PLACES OF THE EARTH. A SERMON PREACH’D ON THE THURSDAY-LECTURE IN BOSTON, IN THE AUDIENCE OF THE GENERAL COURT, AT THE OPENING OF THE SESSIONS, NOV. 23, 1727. THREE WEEKS AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE. Boston: Printed for S. Gerrish, at the lower end of Cornhill, 1727. • Benjamin Colman. THE JUDGMENTS OF PROVIDENCE IN THE HAND OF CHRIST. HIS VOICE TO US IN THE TERRIBLE EARTHQUAKE, AND THE EARTH DEVOURED BY THE CURSE. IN FOUR SERMONS. Boston: printed for J. Phillips at the Stationers-arms on the south side of the Town-house, T. Hancock at the Bible and three Crowns near the town dock, 1727. • Thomas Prince. EARTHQUAKES THE WORKS OF GOD, AND TOKENS OF HIS JUST DISPLEASURE. TWO SERMONS ON PSAL. XVIII.7. AT THE PARTICULAR FAST IN BOSTON, NOV. 2. AND THE GENERAL THANKSGIVING, NOV. 9. OCCASIONED BY THE LATE DREADFUL EARTHQUAKE. WHEREIN AMONG OTHER THINGS IS OFFERED A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE NATURAL CAUSES OF THESE OPERATIONS IN THE HANDS OF GOD. WITH A RELATION OF SOME LATE TERRIBLE ONES IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD, AS WELL AS THOSE THAT HAVE BEEN PERCEIVED IN NEW-ENGLAND SINCE ITS SETTLEMENT BY ENGLISH INHABITANTS. BY THOMAS PRINCE, M.A., AND ONE OF THE PASTORS OF THE SOUTH CHURCH IN BOSTON. Boston: printed for D. Henchman, over against the Brick Meeting House in Cornhill, 1727. • Thomas Paine. THE DOCTRINE OF EARTHQUAKES. TWO SERMONS PREACHED AT A PARTICULAR FAST IN WEYMOUTH, NOV. 3, 1727, THE FRIDAY AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE. WHEREIN THIS TERRIBLE WORK APPEARS NOT TO PROCEED FROM NATURAL SECOND CAUSES, IN ANY ORDERLY WAY OF THEIR PRODUCING, BUT FROM THE MIGHTY POWER OF GOD IMMEDIATELY INTERPOSED, AND IS TO THE WORLD, A TOKEN OF GOD’S ANGER, &C. AND PRESAGE OF TERRIBLE CHANGES. WITH EXAMPLES OF MANY EARTHQUAKES IN HISTORY--ILLUSTRATING THIS DOCTRINE. BY THOMAS PAINE, M.A. PASTOR OF A CHURCH IN WEYMOUTH. Boston: Printed for D. Henchman, over-against the Brick meeting house in Cornhill, 1728. • Jonathan Mayhew. PRACTICAL DISCOURSES DELIVERED ON OCCASION OF THE EARTHQUAKES IN NOVEMBER, 1755. WHEREIN IS PARTICULARLY SHOWN, BY A VARIETY OF ARGUMENTS, THE GREAT IMPORTANCE OF TURNING OUR FEET UNTO GOD’S TESTIMONIES, AND OF MAKING HASTE TO KEEP HIS COMMANDMENTS, TOGETHER WITH THE REASONABLENESS, THE NECESSITY, AND GREAT ADVANTAGE, OF A SERIOUS CONSIDERATION OF OUR WAYS. Boston: Printed and sold by Richard Draper, in Newbury-street, and Edes and Gill, in Queen-street, 1760. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1731

Antoine Bénézet was 17 years of age when his family emigrated from England to Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. Here Anthony Benezet, a consummate Huguenot “joiner,” would affiliate himself with the Religious Society of Friends. WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1733

The Moncures arrived in Virginia (refer to the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway). They were Huguenot religious refugees, the name originating as Mon Coeur. WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1744

June 3, the Lord’s Holy Day (Old Style): King George’s War began as France joined in a war effort against England. (This war would be going on until the treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle, in 1748.)

An earthquake occurred while people were at the forenoon meeting. In the Hamlet of Ipswich, although the Reverend Wigglesworth’s hearers were exceedingly alarmed, he calmed them somewhat by remarking “There can be no better place for us to die in, than the house of God.”

In a Huguenot family BIBLE –the same one in which there had been placed a record of the great earthquake of October 29/30, 1727– a record was made also of this earthquake of 1744 as it was experienced in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1750

The Huguenot refugee community in Boston had been outmarrying, mostly with the Dutch up to this point, and were blending in with the resident “wasp” types so successfully that in four more generations they would be able to remain quite invisible in the pews of establishment churches while preachers like the Reverend Theodore Parker pontificated about the marvelous Nordic race. Their assimilation has been so successful and so silent that we now refer to this resultant grouping as “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” without any awareness that significant portions of the background of these people are with persecuted Mediterranean peoples rather than with either the dominant “Angles” or the dominant “Saxons.”47

47. Yet Lavender, from whom I have extracted this information, has jested that the title of his book should have been not FRENCH HUGUENOTS: FROM MEDITERRANEAN CATHOLICS TO WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANTS but instead FRENCH HUGUENOTS: FROM MEDITERRANEAN CATHOLICS TO WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANTS, ALMOST. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1754

On the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel in this year, the Huguenot couple Philippe Thoreau and Marie Le Galais Thoreau had a baby boy they would have christened on April 28th as Jean Thoreau (which makes him a member of the 3d cohort subsequent to the great Huguenot diaspora). Later, the records of Concord town in Massachusetts would falsely reflect, as below, not only that Jean’s given name was the English-language name “John” but also that he had been born in Concord, that is, that he was an American by birth rather than an immigrant: Births

Name Sex Birth Date Birth Place Father’s Name Mother’s Name

THOREAU, John 1754 Concord

THOREAU, Mary F 1786 Concord John

THOREAU, Sarah 1791 Concord

THOREAU, Helen L. F 1813 Concord John Cynthia

THOREAU, John M 1815 Concord John Cynthia

THOREAU, Sophia Elizabeth F Sept. 27, 1819 Chelmsford John Cynthia HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The parish records of St. Hélier show that on this island in this year, also, Marie Guillet was born to Jaques Guillet and Elizabeth Quintal (or Quintare or Quintore) Guillet, and the godparents were listed as Jean Perrochon and Marie Thoreau.

On the peninsula of Boston in the Massachusetts Bay, at their house on Prince Street, Mr. Burns and Mrs. Sarah Orrok Burns had a baby girl they named Jane Burns.

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(About all we know of this father is that he would not remain with his American family, at some point returning instead permanently to Stirlingshire, Scotland.)

It was in this year that Ammi White was born in Groton, Massachusetts, son of Thomas White and Hannah Faulkner White. (They named their infant after its maternal grandfather Ammi Ruhammah Faulkner. Note that this infant could not have been the son of Deacon John White of Concord, in whose store Jean Thoreau’s son HDT WHAT? INDEX

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John Thoreau eventually would work, since at the time he was only four or five years old. Deacon John White was a son of Thomas White’s brother, Mark White, Jr., and therefore Ammi White’s 1st cousin!) THE DEACONS OF CONCORD HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1755

No offensive operations took place between England and France, except a small naval engagement on the banks of Newfoundland, till this year, when an expedition of regular and colonial militia under General Braddock, for the purpose of giving a decided check to the encroachments of the French government on the valley of the Ohio River, was defeated through his disregard of all precautionary measures. The troops which were brought off by the celebrated General Washington joined the provincial troops under Governor Shirley and General W. Johnson. The latter was attacked near Lake George by a large army under Baron Dieskau, whom he repulsed and forced back upon Crown Point. This success restored the spirit of the hitherto discomfited provincial troops, but circumstances did not permit their following up their success this season.

In this year the British captured a French fortress at Beauséjour that controlled the neck of the Acadian peninsula, and were in the process of hegemonizing Canada. They began the expulsion of some 10,000 French- speaking Roman Catholic settlers from Nova Scotia, on the basis of their French origin. The people in question were ethnically offensive because they had originated in France and religiously offensive because they were Catholic. Some of these would wind up in Louisiana. (We’re paying a rather steep price here, folks, but it will HDT WHAT? INDEX

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lead to such a literary production as “Evangeline.”)

Fortunately, that level of ethnic prejudice was not being implemented in their colony midway along the American seaboard, in New England. HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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On the island of Jersey in the English Channel, the French Huguenot couple Philippe Thoreau and Marie Le Galais Thoreau had the other of their two baby boys, the one who would be christened as Pierre Thoreau. This child would become the ancestor of the closest living relative to Henry David Thoreau as of 1971, the Law Lord of England, Sir Herbert Du Parcq, Lord Du Parcq of Grouville, a member of the House of Lords and the Lord Justice of Appeal for England, through Pierre’s marriage to Elizabeth Anquetil who would give birth to Pierre Thomas Thoreau who would produce Sophia Thoreau (not the Sophia who was a sister to Henry David Thoreau) who would marry with Clement du Parcq and give birth to Herbert du Parcq (1880-1949) who would be created a Law Lord.

THOREAU LIFESPANS

September 5, Friday: “The Massachusetts soldiers trapped some 6800 Acadians, ... held them for deportation; and gathered a hundred thousand cattle.”48 During this 8-year campaign under General Monckton, the Massachusetts soldiers had indulged in tactics of starvation and extermination. They hunted the Acadians down in the woods and shot or imprisoned them. Whenever they came across a structure, they burned it to prevent it from being used as any form of shelter by the resisters. Whenever they found any field or crop or stored commodity or anything else that was edible, they destroyed it regardless of season, weather, or temperature to prevent it from being used as sustenance by the resisters. Roughly speaking, about a third of the Acadians, or some 6,000 persons, would have been killed off, and about the final third would have somehow evaded the campaign. The following advertisement ran in the Virginia Gazette (Hunter) of Williamsburg VA (“has been outlaw’d” in this context means “he may be injured or killed by anyone with no reimbursement due to his owner”): York-Town, August 27, 1755. RAN away from the Subscriber, early on Saturday Morning last, a young Negroe Fellow, named Mingo, of a yellowish Complexion, slim made, about 15 Years of Age; had on when he went away, a light colored Russia Drab Coat: He was seen in and about Hampton, and pretended he was sent down to wait on a Gentleman. He took with him a Bay Horse, which has since been found near Hampton, Whoever will apprehend the said Slave, and deliver him to Mr. Jacob Walker, or Mr. George Walker, in Hampton, shall have Half a Pistole Reward, besides what the Law allows. John Norton. N.B. The said Slave has been Outlaw’d. (Note carefully also that this slave’s name was “Mingo,” despite the fact that we learned in the Year of our Lord 1734 from published Harvard College Rule #20, that “to mingo” was slang for taking a leak, urinating.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1756

A year after awarding the prize to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s essay “Discourse on the Origins of Equality,” in which the Academy of Dijon had been urged to find a way to send naturalists along on expeditions into the unknown portions of the earth’s surface, Charles de Brosses of the Academy of Dijon was recommending in his HISTOIRE DES NAVIGATIONS AUX TERRES AUSTRALES. CONTENANT CE QUE L’ON SÇAIT DES MOEURS ET DES PRODUCTIONS DES CONTRÉES DÉCOUVERTES JUSQU’À CE JOUR;... offered a survey of everything known about previous voyages to the Southern seas and petitioned for a new campaign of exploration in these waters. This treatise includes what may be the 1st appearance of words such as “Polynésie” and “Australasie.” He suggested that natural philosophers be taken along on all long-distance voyages.49 (Surely this is no 48. Belliveau, Pierre. FRENCH NEUTRALS IN MASSACHUSETTS: THE STORY OF ACADIANS ROUNDED UP BY SOLDIERS FROM MASSACHUSETTS AND THEIR CAPTIVITY IN THE BAY PROVINCE 1755-1766. Boston MA: Kirk S. Giffen, 1972 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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coincidence.)

TERRA AUSTRALIS COGNITA I TERRA AUSTRALIS COGNITA II

“A YANKEE IN CANADA”

Thomas Carlyle had denounced “touring expeditions which are now blinder than ever, and done by steam, without even eyesight, not to say intelligence.” But there’s an important distinction to be made between travel and travel. Some of our journeys, such as the group fare into Canada which would be taken advantage of by Henry Thoreau and Ellery Channing, have been made not under any particular duress but as circular and temporary escapes from local ennui and as techniques for learning, which is to say, as a sort of self-definition. Mass tourism was just starting, taking as its ideal model the pilgrimage rather than the crusade and taking as its material model the logistics of the military expedition rather than the opportunism of hermit wandering. However, other of our journeys have been one-way journeys made either under the push of duress or under the pull of allure or both simultaneously, but as real matters of fate and necessity. –Which is self-definition of an entirely different order. When we remember these prior paths of our forebears, we see them as portraits of the forces which have controlled us and which have been defining the lives of our families. The journeys of Thoreau’s ancestors had been of that one-way sort — the flight from France to Jersey had been definitively a push-journey, since it had been made under the lash of religious bigotry, and then the adventure from Jersey to Boston had been definitively a pull-journey, an adventure in economic self-determination. Given this, we should expect a Thoreau who is ambivalent about travel, rather than merely fascinated with it. This is especially pertinent in regard to this adventure into the littoral of the St. Lawrence River, since the north shore of this river had been one of the refuges of the Huguenots escaping religious persecution in France, and since some of Thoreau’s relatives, the Guillets, were even then living along this littoral.

49.It has been alleged that this book induced the French explorer Loui-Antoine de Bougainville, then a soldier in Canada, to become a sailor and, in his own terms, “do something great.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1758

Oliver Goldsmith used the pseudonym “James Willington” (this had been the name of a fellow student at Trinity College) to publish his translation of the autobiography of the Huguenot, Jean Marteilhe. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1760

Friend Anthony Benezet, a Quaker of Huguenot extraction, pointed out in OBSERVATIONS ON THE INſLAVING, IMPORTING AND PURCHAſING OF NEGROES. WITH SOME ADVICE THEREON, EXTRACTED FROM THE EPISTLE OF THE YEARLY-MEETING OF THE PEOPLE CALLED QUAKERS HELD AT LONDON IN THE YEAR 1748 (2d edition, printed in Germantown PA by Christopher Sower) that if buyers did not demand slaves, the supply HDT WHAT? INDEX

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would end. “Without purchasers,” he argued, “there would be no trade; and consequently every purchaser as

he encourages the trade, becomes partaker in the guilt of it.” He saw guilt existed on both sides of the Atlantic, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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for some Africans, it appeared, would “sell their own children, kindred, or neighbors.” Benezet applied “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” to enslavement.

“EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”: All the great geniuses of the British senate, Fox, Pitt, Burke, Grenville, Sheridan, Grey, Canning, ranged themselves on its side; the poet Cowper wrote for it: Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, in this country, all recorded their votes.

Since emancipation alone would not do the trick, Friend Anthony proposed schooling. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE W.E. Burghardt Du Bois: In 1760 England, the chief slave-trading nation, was sending on an average to Africa 163 ships annually, with a tonnage of 18,000 tons, carrying exports to the value of £163,818. Only about twenty of these ships regularly returned to England. Most of them carried slaves to the West Indies, and returned laden with sugar and other products. Thus may be formed some idea of the size and importance of the slave-trade at that time, although for a complete view we must add to this the trade under the French, Portuguese, Dutch, and Americans. The trade fell off somewhat toward 1770, but was flourishing again when the Revolution brought a sharp and serious check upon it, bringing down the number of English slavers, clearing, from 167 in 1774 to 28 in 1779, and the tonnage from 17,218 to 3,475 tons. After the war the trade gradually recovered, and by 1786 had reached nearly its former extent. In 1783 the British West Indies received 16,208 Negroes from Africa, and by 1787 the importation had increased to 21,023. In this latter year it was estimated that the British were taking annually from Africa 38,000 slaves; the French, 20,000; the Portuguese, 10,000; the Dutch and Danes, 6,000; a total of 74,000. Manchester alone sent £180,000 annually in goods to Africa in exchange for Negroes.50

William Molineaux, Huguenot merchant, built an exceedingly pretentious house in Boston on the site of what would eventually become the east wing of the State House.

With the late 17th Century/early 18th Century arrival in Boston of French Huguenots had come their dedication to “keeping,” despite the overwhelming Puritanism there, the Christmas day of nativity, with lights, greenery, prayer, and music. Paul Revere’s father had noted his initial Christmas in Boston, and little Paul would sneak into the Episcopal church to enjoy the sweet smell of decorative greens.

50. These figures are from the REPORT OF THE LORDS OF THE COMMITTEE OF COUNCIL, etc. (London, 1789). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1762

Antoine Court de Gébelin’s LES TOULOUSAINES OU LETTRES HISTORIQUES ET APOLOGÉTIQUES EN FAVEUR DE LA RELIGION RÉFORMÉ (THE PEOPLE OF TOULOUSE OR HISTORICAL AND APOLOGETIC LETTERS IN FAVOR OF THE PROTESTANT RELIGION), an account of a Huguenot merchant, Jean Calas, who had been suspected of the murder of a son who had converted to Catholicism, and executed. Volt ai re, despite the fact that he agreed that Calas had been innocent, was critical of the manner in which this book promoted Protestantism. Court de Gébelin left Switzerland to visit Protestant communities throughout France. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1764

December 5, Wednesday: Philip Karl Buttmann was born at Frankfort-on-Main, a son of the Huguenot stationer Jacob Buttmann. He would be educated in Frankfort-on-Main and then at Göttingen, and would teach at Joachimsthalsche Gymnasium in Berlin and spend most of his life at the university there. The works for which he is best remembered are his GRIECHISCHE SCHUL-GRAMMATIK and his LEXILOGUS for Hesiod and Homer. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1767

January 5, Monday: Jean-Baptiste Say was born in Lyon, France in the family of a Huguenot, Jean-Étienne Say, that had returned to France after having fled from Nîmes to Geneva upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He would get work experience in England before returning to work in France.

October 25, Sunday: Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was born into a family descended from Huguenots who in the early 17th Century had fled from France. His father was Colonel Arnold Louis-Juste Constant Rebecque, a Swissman serving in the military of Holland, and his mother Henrietta Pauline Chandieu died at his birth.

Being expelled from New Spain, all Jesuits headed toward the port of Veracruz, Mexico — most would end up in Italy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1770

March 5, Monday: The town of Acton voted to join in the general colonial boycott of imported British goods. As early as the 21st of December, 1767, the town [of Acton] voted to “comply with the proposals, by the town of Boston, relating to the encouraging of manufactures among ourselves, and not purchasing of superfluities from abroad.” On the 5th of March, 1770, the town entered into a covenant not to purchase nor use foreign merchandise, nor tea. The state of public affairs was again brought before the town on the 21st of December, 1772, and referred to a committee, consisting of Capt. Daniel Fletcher, Francis Faulkner, Deacon Jonathan Hosmer, Deacon John Brooks, Josiah Hayward, Ephraim Hapgood, Captain Samuel Hayward, Simon Tuttle, and Daniel Brooks. Their report was made on the 18th of the following month, and expresses the general sentiments of the people in this vicinity. At this time the town had no representative in the General Court, and a vote was passed recommending to the representatives of the people, that they use every constitutional measure in their power to obtain a redress of all their grievances.51 Although the Parliament was rescinding all of its Townshend Revenue Act’s imposts except for the one upon bulk tea, by this point things were getting very much out of hand in the American colonies. An incident occurred which has been recorded in part by an engraving by Paul Revere, in part by Boston court records, which closely resembles in its development the “Arawak Massacre” that had occurred in the Year of Our Lord 1503 on the island of Haiti. One of the first major clashes between army and citizenry came about as an intensification of a mistake made while some drunks were throwing snowballs at some annoyed soldiers outside a tavern. One of the deep-rooted causes of the incident in downtown Boston was that the army soldiers were being so poorly paid that they were forced to moonlight for American employers. The incident began as an American rope-maker named William Green pretended to be offering paid work to a British private named Walker. When Walker, sucked in, responded the affirmative, Green proceeded to make a rough joke out of it, and then Walker was tripped and his weapon taken away from him. He went and got eight or nine of his fellow soldiers, and it was then that the drunken mob of Americans began to pelt the soldiers with icy snowballs. This was in downtown Boston not far from the Quaker meetinghouse, and it intensified in a manner similar to that in which some playful Spaniard in Haiti had shouted “Tomalo!” causing an attack dog being held on leash nearby to lunge and disembowel a minor chief. It is possible that there was a minor fire nearby, but at any rate someone on that street in Boston shouted “Fire!” Seven of the frightened soldiers obeyed what they thought was an order to fire into the taunting crowd of drunken civilians throwing snowballs some of which were admittedly loaded with rocks and ice. After which some people were very sorry that this thing had happened, and that some people had been killed for no very good reason, while some other people were exceedingly elated because such stuff was going to be a prime ingredient in the manufacture of further such confused and frightful hostilities. Capitalizing on this incident to the maximum extent possible, a Boston Huguenot named

51. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Paul Revere very promptly rushed out an engraving of a “Boston Massacre,” which you will be able to view on a following screen. WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS

Evidently he had copied this design being worked up by a colleague, his brother-in-law Pelham, and beaten him to publication:

Thomas Hutchinson was acting royal governor of the colony at the time of the Boston Massacre, and was virtually forced by the citizens of Boston, under the leadership of Samuel Adams, to order the removal of the British troops from the town. Throughout the pre-Revolutionary disturbances in Massachusetts he would be the representative of the British ministry, and though he would disapprove of some of the ministerial measures he would feel impelled by his role to enforce them and would necessarily incur the hostility of the Whig or Patriot element.

The attorneys for the defense, Josiah Quincy and John Adams, would be able to win acquittals for most of the accused soldiers despite the fact that their response had created five corpses, among them most notably the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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lengthy corpse of Crispus Attucks. The jury, which, one must consider, was made up of Boston citizens, would find a couple of these soldiers guilty of an offense, but the offense would be not be murder. As their penalty the court would require of them that they read aloud a verse of Scripture and then –to ensure that they could in the future be identified if they were again tempted to this sort of conduct– submit to having a thumb branded with the letter “M” standing for “manslaughter.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Reverend Doctor Mather Byles, Sr. of Boston, a Congregationalist who was being forced from the pulpit on account of his Loyalist views, was said to have remarked during the long funeral procession for the people killed in the Boston Massacre: “They call me a brainless Tory; but tell me, my young friend, which is better, to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?”52

52. Arthur Wentworth Hamilton Eaton, THE FAMOUS MATHER BYLES: THE NOTED BOSTON TORY PREACHER, POET, AND WIT, 1707-1788 (Boston MA: W.A. Butterfield, 1914), 146-7 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1771

Antoine Court de Gébelin, who had settled in Paris, opened an office in support of the sometimes persecuted Huguenot communities. He was appointed as a royal censor, something unusual for a non-Catholic. He was initiated into Freemasonry at the lodge “Les Amis Réunis” (The United Friends). He would move on to the lodge “Neuf Sœurs” where he would welcome Benjamin Franklin as a lodge-brother. He was a supporter of American Independence who contributed to the massive AFFAIRES DE L’ANGLETERRE ET DE L’AMÉRIQUE, of the new theories of economics, and of the “animal magnetism” of Franz Anton Mesmer (in an electrical experiment that brought about his death, apparently of an electrically induced heart attack). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1773

May 3, Monday: William Bartram arrived in Savannah.

Henry Thoreau’s paternal grandfather Jean Thoreau (1754-1801) took the Protestant sacrament in St. Hélier, on the island of Jersey in the English Channel, HUGUENOTS

HENRY’S RELATIVES

in preparation for embarking on a privateering voyage that would eventually, after a shipwreck, dump him at Boston Harbor without any intention on his part of going there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Jean’s father Philippe Thoreau was a wine merchant on Jersey but by family tradition the Thoreaus had originated either in Tours or in the Poitou-Charentes district of France. (Jean’s mother’s name was Marie Le Galais.) Some of the Thoreaus married English and it is said one descendant was a military officer. John would begin as a merchant in America on Boston’s Long Wharf with one barrel of sugar, and would go privateering again, and eventually would possess a fortune of $25,000.00 and a home on Prince Street — the American dream!53 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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53. On July 26, 1851 at Cohasset, while going along for the experience of it on a commercial cruise for mackerel, Thoreau would meet up with a Captain Snow who would be able to remember hearing fishermen say they “fitted out at Thoreau’s.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1775

April 19, Wednesday: People were trying to kill each other at Lexington, and then people were trying to kill each other at Concord.

The Reverend Asa Dunbar recorded of this day in his journal that: “Hostilities commenced at Concord & Lexington.” The day that would be remembered as “Patriots Day” because folks perceived was a one-day reprieve from the obtrusive Old Testament commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” and from the intrusive new New Testament commandment “Love thine enemy.”54 For 24 hours, apparently, the operating rule would be not the Ten Commandments (portrayed here as they have been presented on a T-shirt), not the Golden Rule,

but a much more intriguing “Thou shalt lay waste thine enemy.” The Bedford Minutemen, for instance, bore with them a banner emblazoned with the motto of the Dukes of Kent, “Conquer or die.” [next screen]

54. A POP ESSAY QUESTION. In terms of the above, define and provide synonyms for the term “patriot”: ______. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALDEN: I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two reds ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle- cry was Conquer or die.... I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on the patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick, –“Fire! for God’s sake fire!”– and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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This all came about because the army that had been camped on Boston Common, early that morning, embarked to cross the Charles River estuary with muffled oarlocks at the point which is now the corner of Boyleston and Charles streets (this part of the estuary long since filled in). The “two lantern” signal from the steeple of one or another Boston church (we don’t actually know which one, perhaps the Congregational church of which Revere was a member, or the nearby Anglican church in the North End) meant that the soldiers were crossing the Charles River (Quinobequin) and being marched through Cambridge, not that they were coming by sea, and the “one lantern” signal would have meant that the soldiers were being marching down Boston Neck, through Roxbury. The two lanterns which were used had been made in the workshops of Paul Revere or Rivière.55 General Thomas Gage had sent an army detail to dismantle the steeple of the Old West Church, to ensure that it could not be used for any such signaling. SLAVERY

As the Army marched up the Charlestown road from the Boston ferry landing, it would have passed a specimen of local justice: an old set of chains with human bones inside them, dating to an incident of September 1755. This had been an African slave, Mark, who had been left to rot after throttling, disemboweling and beheading upon suspicion of having poisoned, or of having attempted to poison, his American owner, Captain John Codman. (Keep this cage in mind, when you are tempted to suspect that what these indignant colonials had

55. This Huguenot silversmith received the warning signal from the church steeple while still in Boston and only afterward departed from the city on his errand, rather than seeing the signal from the opposite shore as has commonly been fantasized. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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decided to fight for was freedom and justice for all.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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One of the men who were marching to unite with the Lexington militia, had slept the previous night in this house:

He was Francis Nurse, a great grandson of Goodwife Rebecca Towne Nurse who had been hanged in Salem as a witch and then, when the witch fervor had died down, been reinstated postmortem into her church.

The Lexington militia had assembled too early, in response to the riders coming out of Boston such as Revere, and when the army column had not showed up by 2AM they decided to disperse and get some sleep. Shortly before daybreak there were some 70 of them on the Lexington green, and they spread out in two lines to face HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the oncoming troops. Major John Pitcairn of the Marines called out to the army troops that they were not to

fire but were to surround these militiamen and then take away their weapons, and Captain John Parker of the militia (ancestor of the Reverend Theodore Parker of Thoreau’s day, carrying his Charleville musket) called

out to the militiamen that they were not to fire, but were to disperse. At that point there was a gunshot, origins unclear, and the army troops broke ranks and began to fire at the 27 militiamen. It would be pointless to inquire who fired, as in such a situation at the instant that it occurs nobody has any idea where the round came from or where it went and therefore everyone becomes terrified and presumes that he is being fired upon and proceeds to fire as rapidly as possible at anyone who appears to be holding a weapon. As Parker stated it, the result was that the army killed “eight of our party, with out receiving any provocation therefor from us.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After this killing, and presumably after the army had collected the militia’s weapons,56 neighbors were

allowed to come forward to tend the wounded and remove the corpses, while the army got itself back into a column, fired off one massive victory volley to clear their weapons, and marched on toward Concord. Major John Buttrick sent Captain Reuben Brown on horseback down Lexington Road toward Boston to report the firing in Lexington. Captain Brown would ride more than 100 miles to the coast and back, while the soldiers were looting his liveries and setting his barn on fire (neither the barn nor the house would be destroyed).

As the redcoat drums rumbled like thunder through the town’s streets, a panic-stricken 18-year-old named Harry Gould was being consoled by the Reverend William Emerson. In Concord, while destroying what few military stores they could get their hands on, the army also set afire the liberty pole in front of the courthouse. The scene would be re-imagined and painted by Amos Doolittle and then a famous lithograph would be made

56. Likewise, we do not refer here to the militia as “the Americans” and the army as “the British,” since that is a later conceptual framework and anyhow would have been false to the actual constitution of these bodies of armed men. There were in fact many Americans in the paid colonial army, and I know of at least one Brit who was assembled with the Minutemen militia — before the battle we know that he put aside his rifle for awhile and went down the hill to chat up various Redcoats. This was a struggle of a militia faction of British subjects in America, the separatist faction, versus an army faction of British subjects in America, the loyalist faction, similar to the struggle during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 between the Imperial Iranian Air Force cadets and warrant officers, adherents of the religious faction in Iranian politics, versus the Imperial Iranian Ground Forces brigades, controlled by officers adherent to the secular faction in Iranian politics. It is significant, then, using this more accurate terminology, that rather than attempt to seize “the militia’s” stores and withdraw with them to Boston, “the army” was attempting to destroy those military stores in place. This means that, going into this action, “the army” was already regarding its withdrawal to Boston to be the difficult part of the day’s military operation, because, had they seized and relocated these military stores, “the army” could have made use of them itself — the military may upon occasion become wanton in the destruction of civilian properties, just as it may upon occasion rape, but military stores are never destroyed in place without at least one damned good reason. The major military stores available to “the militia” were being stockpiled in Worcester rather than in Concord, because it was more of a march from Boston for “the army” and was therefore safer. Had “the army” succeeded in its withdrawal from Concord, of course, it would have marched to Worcester to destroy the bulk of the stores in the possession of “the militia,” in order to force “the militia” to return once again to the political faction favored by the officers of “the army.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of this famous painting by Smith: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Sparks from the liberty pole, however, ignited the courthouse roof, and while that fire was extinguished without great harm to the structure, the smoke from this fire caused the some 400 militiamen assembled in safety on the rise on the opposite side of the Concord River to presume that it was the army’s intention to burn their dissident town to the ground. In a column of pairs they approached the Old North Bridge, on the Concord side of which were three army companies. The army made some attempt to render the bridge impassible by removing planks, and then fired a volley which killed the militia Captain Isaac David and Abner Hosmer, in the front rank of the Acton minutemen as their drummer, whose face was half shot away.57 It was then that

Major John Buttrick called out “Fire, fellow soldiers, for God’s sake, fire.” Thus it came to be that here the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard ’round the world.58

Not counting those who were wounded but would survive, three redcoats of the Light Infantry Company, 4th

57. When Deacon Jonathan Hosmer inspected Private Abner Hosmer’s faceless corpse, he found a breastpin his son had received for his 21st birthday. 58. A footnote to Waldo Emerson’s famed line “Here the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard ’round the world”: A publication of the Boeing Corporation would eventually declare that with the employees of the Boeing Corporation on the job, making Minuteman ICBMs, it was quite a bit less likely that “some future poet” would be forced to “modify the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson” into “Here the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot reaching ’round the world.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Regiment fell in the responding volley, Thomas Smith, Patrick Gray, and James Hall. One went down evidently with a bullet through the head and two would die of bodily wounds. Two would be buried by colonials where they had fallen next to the Bridge, and one would be buried in Concord center by the army (somewhere “in the ragged curb where that road wound around the side of the hill,” a gravesite now evidently disturbed during later centuries of construction activity). Through the affair Acton’s fifer, Luther Blanchard, and the drummer Francis Barker, were performing a lively Jacobin tune, “The White Cockade.”59 According to the Reverend William Emerson, the Reverend Waldo Emerson’s grandfather, who was watching from an upstairs window at the Old Manse as these people shot off muskets at each other out at the North Bridge, one or the other of the seriously wounded soldiers was then struck, as he attempted to rise, on the head with a hatchet.

Ammi White was a private in Captain David Brown’s company of militia. Captain Brown60 had his home near the Old North Bridge and in 1770 had been paid by the town of Concord to care for the causeway and wall associated with that bridge. As the redcoats fell back from the firing, Colonel Barrett’s militia unit advanced a short distance. According to reconstructions of what happened, the gravely wounded British soldier, between the retreating and the advancing lines, was attempting to rise when he was chopped down with a small hatchet by militiaman White, “not under the feelings of humanity.” He “barbarously broke his skull,” he “uplifted his axe, and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head,” with Thomas Thorp of Acton nearby but unable or unwilling to intercede:

This one circumstance has borne more fruit for me, than all that history tells us of the fight. Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Reverend William Emerson acknowledged the fact of an ax blow and acknowledged also that the soldier languished for hours before expiring, but would insist that neither scalp nor ears were removed. When the

59. Major Francis Faulkner led a company, the “Acton Patriots.” 60. Captain David Brown of Concord (1732-1802) kept a diary of Bunker Hill action in 1775. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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redcoats returned from Barrett’s farm and were grossing out at the sight of the wound on the head of their fallen comrade, they told one another the story that the American militia had scalped him as if they were red savages (the usual story, things like this typically are done to innocent white people by vicious persons of color). Five soldiers would testify to having themselves seen the wounded man with the skin over his eyes cut and also the top part of his ears cut off. There was not only misunderstanding, there was considerable exaggeration: A rumor would begin to circulate that the dying soldier’s eyes had been gouged out. Ensign Jeremy Lister later would write tendentiously and falsely that “4 men...killd who afterwards scalp’d their eyes goug’d their noses and ears cut of, such barbarity execut’d upon the Corps could scarcely be paralleled by the most uncivilised savages.” The army would be forced to abandon its dead and wounded that hot day, with soldiers falling not only from bullets but also from sunstroke, and the citizens of Concord would need to dig a hole and inter two of the bodies where they lay (there being no particular reason for the extra labor of transporting these dead bodies anywhere else prior to interment), and one of the wounded soldiers, Samuel Lee of the 10th Regiment, left behind, eventually would become a Concord citizen. The commander of the Concord column, LTC Smith, reported to his superiors Lord Percy and General Gage that “after the bridge was quitted, they scalped and otherwise ill-treated one or two of the men who were either killed or severely wounded.” General Gage would summarize this as: “... one scalped, his head much mangled and his ears cut off, though not quite dead ... a sight which struck the soldiers with horror.” In Concord, stories would be generated that the person who had used the hatchet had been merely a wood-chopping chore boy of the Emersons, or had been Frank, the Emersons’ slave (the usual story, blame everything on some nearby flunky or on some handy person of color) — but in fact there had been no such chore boy and black Frank’s activities on that date had been well vouched for by members of the Emerson family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Here is the story per D. Michael Ryan: Various explanations for the cause of this deed were advanced. The culprit was “half-witted”; excused only by excitement and inexperience; startled by the soldier and acted out of fear; acting to end the soldier’s suffering. Extreme claims noted that the victim was trying to drown himself in a water puddle and begged someone to kill him; had thrust at the American with his bayonet; or was an escaping prisoner. None of these theories have a basis in fact and had such mitigating circumstances existed, would certainly have been mentioned by the Reverend William Emerson. While the British publicized the incident, Americans chose to ignore it possibly due to embarrassment, fear of reprisals, failure to appreciate its importance or a notion that it would blot a historic cause. Provincial authorities hesitated to confirm that the act had occurred but in response to a Boston story insured that the burial detail testified that “neither of those persons (2 dead soldiers buried at the bridge) were scalped nor their ears cut off.” Concord historians Ripley [??] and Lemuel Shattuck ignored the incident completely while well into the 19th Century, British historians continued to write of the scalping and ear cutting episode. A long guarded secret was the name of the young culprit who tradition acknowledges as Ammi White.... The British troops returning to Boston would remember the “scalping” with fear, anger and a sense of revenge. This, together with civilian hostility in Boston and the tactics of the colonials along the retreat route, considered cowardly, would lead to army reprisals and atrocities (house burnings, killing of unarmed men, bayoneting of wounded and dead colonials, etc.) especially in the village of Menotomy. Lord Percy’s relief column had been informed of the “scalping” and General Gage would later use the story to offset atrocity charges leveled against his troops.

In a much later timeframe Waldo Emerson would declaim at this famed bridge that “Here once the embattled farmers stood / and fired the shot heard round the world” for the freedom of white people, and would sagely say nothing about the alleged offing of a defenseless, critically wounded man with a hatchet. And then at an even later date Henry Thoreau would be refused an audience in Concord, and would declare in Framingham MA that “The inhabitants of Concord are not prepared to stand by one of their own bridges” for the freedom of black people. (That was in 1854 in his speech “Slavery in Massachusetts,” but Thoreau would be preparing this sentiment as early as 1851.)

After some two hours more in Concord, the army began its disastrous withdrawal to Lexington, where its remnants were reinforced by the 1st Brigade under Sir Hugh Percy.

61 In his SACRED GROUND, Edward Linenthal has presented an extended treatment of dissidence in the Concord context in effect with one hand tied behind his back. That is, he does this while accomplishing the feat of not once bringing in the name of Thoreau. Picking up on the Emersonian description of the fallen farmer

61. Linenthal, Edward Tabor. SACRED GROUND: AMERICANS AND THEIR BATTLEFIELDS. Urbana IL: U of Illinois P, 1991 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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minutemen of April 19, 1775 as having acted “from the simplest instincts,”62 Linenthal states that: These instinctive warriors were ceremoniously perceived as men whose New England origins nurtured republican principles that protected them from the moral pollution of old-world warriors. Consequently, the minuteman became a powerful cultural model for generations of Americans at war and at peace: from Billy Yank and Johnny Reb in the Civil War to the doughboys of World War I and the GI’s of World War II; from the right-wing Minutemen of the 1960s to a more recent transformation into the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile. Patriotic rhetoric portrayed the minutemen as Christ-like saviors, and citizens of Lexington and Concord were proud that these new-world warriors drank from the wellsprings of liberty which, they believed, ran especially deep in their towns.... Beyond the ever-present threat of failing to measure up to the principles embodied by the minutemen, the specter of defilement appeared in other ways. Beginning in rancorous debate in the 1820s, a number of citizens of Lexington and Concord claimed that their town was the authentic birthplace of the nation. Each was accused of falsifying the national creation story by refusing to grant this sacred status to the other.... If the encounter on Lexington Green was not a battle but a massacre, were the martyred minutemen really the first models of how Americans die in war or just further examples of colonial victims? And if they were only victims, could that affect popular perception of the potency of their sacrifice?... On occasion, what some people perceived as defilement, others viewed as creative attempts to redefine the meaning of the events of April 19, 1775. Both the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the Peoples Bicentennial Commission understood Lexington and Concord to be sacred ground when they held separate protests on the Battle Green and at the North Bridge in the mid-1970s. In their view, the purpose of protest was not desecration of a sacred spot, for they believed the real defilement had been perpetrated by a new class of American Tories who had severed the link between revolutionary war principles (especially the principle of dissent) and contemporary American life. Each group believed that its protest would spark the recovery of the American revolutionary tradition, which was viewed as crucial to the resuscitation of authentic American values that had fallen into disrepair because of public apathy. OLD NORTH BRIDGE The fifer boy of the Concord Minutemen was the son of Major John Buttrick, 15 years of age. The side drum he used would belong to the son of Colonel James Barrett, Nathan Barrett, until it would fall apart and the town would need to purchase a new one. One source alleges that a severe earthquake shook Concord.63 March and early April having been extraordinarily warm, the apple trees around Concord were in bloom by April 19th, and the soldiers being marched through Lexington toward Concord suffered heat prostration. Later, when Lafayette would visit Concord as part of a triumphal tour, tiny Mary Moody Emerson would approach him to let him know that she had been “‘in arms’ at the Concord fight” — she having been a newborn during that period. 62. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. A HISTORICAL DISCOURSE DELIVERED BEFORE THE CITIZENS OF CONCORD, 12 SEPTEMBER 1835 ON THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF THE INCORPORATION OF THE TOWN. Boston MA: W.B. Clarke, 1835. 63. Such an earthquake is not listed on the comprehensive scientific list of known New England earthquakes, which has no entries between August 15, 1772 and February 7, 1776. –Presumably some historian has misunderstood a casual comment on the order of “the earth certainly shook that day.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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When word of approaching British troops was received, Captain Charles Miles had mustered his company near the Wright Tavern.64 Included with the muster roll we can discover a handwritten note by Sergeant David Hartwell, “Concord, April 19th 1775, then the battel begune....”

On the high ground above North Bridge where the colonial force reformed, Captain Miles then joined the officers’ conference. When it was decided to march into Town, the story is, the lead was initially offered to a Concord captain but this man said he “should rather not go.” Since it was Captain Miles who was in command of the senior minute company, and would not be in the lead, it is speculated that he might have been the one to have said this. Captain Isaac Davis’s Acton company then led the march to the Bridge and while the position of other units is uncertain, several accounts have placed Miles’s company either second or third in line. Years later, the Reverend Ezra Ripley noted that when Captain Miles was asked his feelings when marching on the

64. The Wright Tavern is called that because Amos Wright was renting the building from its owner Samuel Swan and keeping tavern there when first the local militia gathered there and then Army officers Lt. Col. Smith and Maj. Pitcairn used it as their headquarters. In such a quarrel the businessman of course would sell drinks to all comers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Battle Bridge on April 19, 1775, he responded “that he went to the service of the day with the same seriousness and acknowledgement of God which he carried to church. During the fighting it was though that this reluctant captain had been killed, but he had only been somewhat wounded and would be able to continue to direct his company during the chasing of the Regulars back to Charlestown.

We don’t have the names of the army casualties of this glorious day, only those of the militia and of bystanders. The numerical estimate of General Gage’s intelligence officer was that about 25 of the soldiers had been killed and almost 150 wounded; the estimate by a soldier, John Pope, was that 90 soldiers had been killed and 181 wounded; the estimate by Ensign De Berniere was that 73 soldiers had been killed, 174 wounded, and 25 were missing in action; — and General Gage reported to his superior officer that 65 of his soldiers had been killed, 180 wounded, and 27 were missing in action.

Presumably what we would discover, if we had the names of the army casualties, would be that a significant number of them had been Americans who had enlisted in the army. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Here are the names of the militia casualties and the civilian casualties including an unarmed 14-year-old bystander (that’s termed “collateral damage”):

Town Killed Wounded Missing

Acton Isaac Davis Luther Blanchard James Hayward Abner Hosmer (would die this year of wound)

Bedford Captain Jonathan Wilson Job Lane

Beverly Reuben Kenyme Nathaniel Cleves William Dodge III Samuel Woodbury

Billerica Timothy Blanchard John Nichols

Brookline Isaac Gardner

Cambridge John Hicks Samuel Whittemore Samuel Frost William Marcy Seth Russell Moses Richardson James Russell Jason Winship Jabez Wyman

Charlestown Edward Barber James Miller

Chelmsford Oliver Barron Aaron Chamberlain

Concord Nathan Barrett Jonas Brown Captain Charles Miles George Minot Abel Prescott, Jr.

Danvers Samuel Cook Nathan Putnam Joseph Bell Benjamin Deland Dennis Wallace Ebenezer Golwait Henry Jacobs Perley Putnam George Southwick Jothan Webb

Dedham Elias Haven Israel Everett

Framingham Daniel Hemminway HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lexington John Brown Francis Brown Samuel Hadley Joseph Comee Caleb Harrington Prince Estabrook Jonathan Harrington, Jr. Nathaniel Farmer Jonas Parker Ebenezer Munroe, Jr. Jedidiah Munroe Jedidiah Munroe Robert Munroe Solomon Pierce Isaac Muzzy John Robbins John Raymond John Tidd Nathaniel Wyman Thomas Winship

Lynn William Flint Joseph Felt Josiah Breed Thomas Hadley Timothy Monroe Abednego Ramsdell Daniel Townsend

Medford Henry Putnam William Holly

Needham John Bacon Eleazer Kingsbury Nathaniel Chamberlain Xxxxx Tolman Amos Mills Elisha Mills Jonathan Parker

Newton Noah Wiswell

Roxbury Elijah Seaver

Salem Benjamin Pierce

Stow Daniel Conant Daniel Conant

Sudbury Deacon Josiah Haynes Joshua Haynes, Jr. Asahael Reed Thomas Bent

Watertown Joseph Coolidge

Woburn Daniel Thompson Jacob Bacon Asahel Porter Xxxxx Johnson George Reed HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Here is an example of what we don’t know. When we somewhat belatedly erected this grave marker, in the Year of Our Lord 2000, we presumed that the slain army soldier was a Brit although he may very well have been simply one of the Americans who had enlisted not in what was at that time our militia but in what was at that time our army:

Dr. Charles Russell, son of the Hon. James Russell, born in Charlestown, graduated at Harvard College, 1757, and inherited his uncle Chambers’s estate in Lincoln, where he resided as a physician. He married Miss Elizabeth Vassall of Cambridge, and from his father-in-law he contracted opinions opposed to the measures of the people in the revolution, and left Lincoln on the 19th of April, 1775, and went to Martinique, in the West- Indies, where he died.... Dr. Joseph Adams was also unfriendly to the revolution, and went to England, where he died.65

65. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy (On or about November 11, 1837 Henry David Thoreau would indicate a familiarity with the contents of at least pages 2-3 and 6-9 of this historical study.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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When Timothy Dwight would write of his 1795 travels, while speaking of his passing through Concord he would give a small amount of attention to the bucolic details of the place:

Concord was purchased of the Indians and incorporated in 1635. Three persons only are known to have been killed within the limits of this township by the savages, although it was the first settlement made in New England so far from the shore. From Boston it is distant nineteen miles, from Williams’ in Marlboro, fifteen. The soil of this township is various. The higher grounds have loam mixed with gravel. The plains are sandy, light but warm, and friendly to rye and maize, of which considerable quantities are carried to market. Pastures are visibly few and indifferent. Along the river, which is named from this town and runs through the middle of it, lie extensive and rich meadows. Hemp and flax grow here luxuriantly. Two acres are said to have yielded in one instance one thousand pounds of flax. Few fruits are seen except apples, and these plainly do not abound as in most other parts of the country. The face of this township is generally a plain. A hill of no great height ascends at a small distance from the river on the eastern side and pursues a course northward, parallel with that of the river. Between this hill and the river lies the principal street. Another containing a considerable number of houses abuts upon it, perpendicularly from the western side. The houses in Concord are generally well built, and with the outbuildings and fences make a good appearance. The public buildings are the church, courthouse, and jail, all of them neat.

But then he would devote a good deal of his attention to this locale’s belligerent status as the site of this notorious squabble. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Concord will be long remembered as having been, partially, the scene of the first military action in the Revolutionary War, and the object of an expedition, the first in that chain of events which terminated in the separation of the British colonies from their mother country. A traveler on this spot, particularly an American traveler, will irresistibly recall to his mind an event of this magnitude, and cannot fail of being deeply affected by a comparison of so small a beginning with so mighty an issue. In other circumstances, the expedition to Concord and the contest which ensued would have been merely little tales of wonder and woe, chiefly recited by the parents of the neighborhood to their circles at the fireside, commanding a momentary attention of childhood, and calling forth the tear of sorrow from the eyes of those who were intimately connected with the sufferers. Now, the same events preface the history of a nation and the beginning of an empire, and are themes of disquisition and astonishment to the civilized world. From the plains of Concord will henceforth be dated a change in human affairs, an alteration in the balance of human power, and a new direction to the course of human improvement. Man, from the events which have occurred here, will in some respects assume a new character, and experience in some respects a new destiny. General Gage, to whom was committed one of the most unfortunate trusts ever allotted to an individual, having obtained information that a considerable quantity of arms and military stores was by order of the Provincial Congress deposited in this town,1 sent Lieut. Col. Smith and Major Pitcairn at the head of eight hundred grenadiers and light infantry, with orders to march to Concord and destroy the deposit. The troops were accordingly embarked from the common in Boston, and landed on the opposite shore in Cambridge at a place called Phipps’s farm. Thence they marched by the shortest route to this town.

1.The whole amount of the warlike stores in the province of Massachusetts as they appear on a return, April 14, 1775, is contained in the following list. Firearms 21,549 Pounds of powder 17,441 Pounds of ball 22,191 No. of flints 144,699 No. of bayonets 10,103 No. of pouches 11,979 The whole of the town stocks Firearms 68 Pounds of powder 357 1/2 Pounds of ball 66,78 No. of flints 100,531 Duke’s county and Nantucket were not included in this list. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The salubrity of Concord violates the most received medical theories concerning such diseases as are supposed to be generated by stagnant waters. I know of no stream which approaches nearer to a state of stagnation than Concord River. Yet diseases of this class are seldom, or never, found here. The cause I shall not pretend to assign. Within these thirteen years the baptisms in Concord amounted to 395,. Three fourths only of those who were born are supposed to have been baptized. The number of births, therefore, was about 527. Concord contains a single congregation. The whole number of inhabitants in 1790, as has been observed, was 1,590. In 1800, it contained 227 dwelling houses, and 1,679 inhabitants; and in 1810, 1,633. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1776

Boston’s Huguenot refugee families had been outmarrying with Boston families of English origin, and so many of them had become Anglicans that the “French Church” Congregation of Boston, which had never had a structure of its own, was no longer even bothering to schedule meetings for worship.

QUESTION:

What did Henry David Thoreau have in common with Paul Revere?

Most Huguenot exiles fought on the colonial side in the revolution, although some, such as the DeLanceys of New-York (the de Lanci family from Isle de France), sided with the British and then had to flee to Canada with their American property confiscated. There were a number of Huguenots prominent in the Continental Congress and in the Revolutionary Army, such as Henry Laurens of South Carolina (the biggest name in slave trading in Charleston), John Jay of New York, Elias Boudinot of New Jersey, Alexander Hamilton of the West Indies, Gouverneur Morris of New Rochelle, Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion of Georgetown, South Carolina, Paul Revere of Boston, Andrew Pickens of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, etc. A comment that has been made on this is that “their sacrifices for freedom of religious worship kindled in them the love of liberty and they shared the aspirations of the English colonists for just treatment.”66

66. Summerall, Charles Pelot. “Huguenot Descendants in the Revolutionary War.” Transactions of the Huguenot Society of South Carolina, 37, 1932, page 25. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In their retreat, however, they set fire to several houses, plundered whatever pleased their fancy or gratified their avarice, and killed several unarmed persons: particularly two old men, whose hoary locks pleaded for compassion in vain. Bunker Hill, which they reached about sunset, was the first place of safety and repose in their march. The next day they returned to Boston. In this expedition the British had sixty-five killed, and one hundred and eighty wounded, and twenty-eight made prisoners: two hundred and seventy-three. Among the wounded were fifteen officers, one of them Lieutenant Colonel Smith. Of the Americans, fifty were killed, thirty-four wounded, and four missing: eighty-eight. Several gentlemen of reputation fell in this conflict, and were regarded as martyrs in the cause of freedom and their country. Such was the issue of this memorable day, and such the commencement of the Revolutionary War in the United States. Whatever opinions may be adopted concerning the controversy between the British government and the colonies by those who come after us, every man of sober, candid reflection must confess that very gross and very unfortunate errors existed in the measures adopted, both in Great Britain and America, toward the colonies. In both countries information was drawn and received almost solely from those who espoused the system of the reigning administration. It hardly needs to be observed that deception and mischief were the necessary consequence. An opinion also was boldly advanced, sedulously adopted, and extensively diffused that the Americans were mere blusterers and poltroons. In the British Parliament, Colonel Grant declared, with equal folly and insolence, that at the head of five hundred, or perhaps (as numerals are easily misprinted) of five thousand men, he would undertake to march from one end of the British settlements to the other, in spite of all American opposition.1 This declaration would almost of itself have converted a nation of real cowards into soldiers. Why it should be believed that the descendants of Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irishmen were cowards, especially by their brethren descended from the same ancestors, I shall not take upon me to explain. The difficulties and hazards attendant upon a war conducted at the distance of three thousand miles from the source of control and supplies were certainly not realized by the British cabinet. As little did they realize the disposition or the circumstances of the Americans.

1.Probably Dwight refers to James Grant (1720-1806), member of Parliament at different times, a military man who went to America with reinforcements under Howe and became a general. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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General Gage’s principal advisers were of two classes, both very unhappily fitted to give him useful advice. One class was composed of Britons, utterly unacquainted with the state of the country, unwarrantably relying on their own prowess, and foolishly presuming on the supposed pusillanimity of the colonists. The other class was composed of colonists who had embarked their all in British measures, were generally deceived themselves, and were strongly prompted by every motive to deceive him. When the expedition to Concord was planned, it is probable that neither General Gage, nor his advisers, expected the least attempt at resistance. This opinion was bandied through the whole party in Boston. At the same time were continually circulated fulsome panegyrics on the bravery of the British troops. Silly jests and contemptible sneers were also reiterated concerning the dastardly character of the colonists. All these were spread, felt, and remembered. The expedition to Concord refuted them all. Concord, as has been observed, lies almost equally on both sides of the river to which it gives its name. The surface of the township is generally level and low, and the river remarkably sluggish. From these facts a traveler would naturally conclude that Concord must be unhealthy. The following statement will however prove this conclusion to be unsound. In the year 1790, the township contained 1,590 inhabitants. Of these, seventy-five were seventy years of age, or upward. From the year 1779 to 1791 inclusive, a period of thirteen years, 222 persons died. The greatest number in a single year was twenty-five, the least ten. The average number was seventeen. Of these, fifty-nine were more than seventy, thirty others more than eighty, and eight more than ninety, amounting in the whole to ninety-seven (out of 222) who passed the limit of seventy years. It is presumed, a more remarkable instance of health and longevity cannot be produced. Almost 7/17 of the whole number deceased have during this period reached the boundary of human life. It is scarcely to be imagined that even here a similar list will be furnished a second time. Yet the Rev. Mr. Ripley, minister of Concord, who kept this register, informed me that the state of health during this period did not, so far as he had observed, differ very materially from what was common.1

1.Ezra Ripley (1751-1841), Harvard 1776, became pastor of the First Church in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1778. There he founded what was perhaps the first temperance society in the country. He was the stepfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1777

The father of Alexander von Humboldt and of his older brother Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt (who would not only become the next Freiherr von Humboldt, but also in his own right become a language scholar, philosopher, diplomat, and educational reformer) died when little Alex was only eight. His mother, who was a Huguenot, would have to raise the boys in a single-parent home. But no, this wasn’t in a basement flat in a Berlin tenement, it was at the family estate at Tegel. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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An expedition of this nature had for some time been expected. Certain intelligence of it had been obtained the preceding afternoon by Dr. Warren, who afterwards fell in the battle of Breed’s Hill,1 and was forwarded by him with the utmost celerity to the intervening towns, particularly to Lexington, where were at that time Mr. Hancock and Mr. Adams, both afterwards governors of Massachusetts.2 As these gentlemen were supposed to be the principal objects of the expedition, the expresses who carried the intelligence (Col. Paul Revere and Mr. William Dawes) were peculiarly directed to them.3 They reached Lexington, which is four miles from Concord, in such season that Messrs. Hancock and Adams made their escape.4 Here, however, the expresses were stopped by the British as they were advancing toward Concord; but Dr. Prescott, a young gentleman to whom they had communicated their message, escaped and alarmed the inhabitants of Concord.5 The British troops reached Lexington at five o’clock in the morning. Here they found about seventy militia and forty unarmed spectators by the side of the church. Major Pitcairn rode up to them and cried out with vehemence, “Disperse you rebels; throw down your arms, and disperse.” As this command was not immediately obeyed, he discharged a pistol and ordered his soldiers to fire upon the inhabitants. The soldiers fired, and the people instantly fled. The soldiers, however, continued to fire at individuals. This at length provoked a return, and several were killed on both sides. Still the troops continued their march toward Concord, where they arrived early in the morning. For the purpose of defense, the inhabitants had drawn themselves up in a kind of order; but, upon discovering the number of the enemy withdrew over the North Bridge, half a mile below the church, where they waited for reinforcements. The soldiers then broke open and scattered about sixty barrels of flour, disabled two twenty-four pounders, destroyed the carriages of about twenty cannon, and threw five hundred pounds of ball into the river and neighboring wells. The principal part of the stores, however, was not discovered.

1.Joseph Warren (1741-1755), Harvard 1759, an excellent physician in Boston, became deeply involved in Revolutionary politics. Early in 1775, he gave up his profession to enter the army. He became president pro tempore of the Provincial Congress and was elected a major general four days before his death. 2.John Hancock (1737-1793), Harvard 1754, adopted by his rich uncle Thomas, joined his successful mercantile firm. The famous Revolutionary patriot was treasurer of Harvard College, 1773-1777, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and first governor of Massachusetts in the new republic, 1780-1785. His successor was Samuel Adams (1722-1803), Harvard 1740, better remembered for his incendiary role as one of the “Sons of Liberty” in the Revolution. As lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1789, acting governor in 1793, and elected governor, 1794- 1798, this turbulent man showed little understanding of the problems of the state or of the nation. 3.See Colonel Revere’s letters to the corresponding secretary of the Mass. Hist. Society…. 4.Revolutionary patriot Paul Revere (1735-1818), a silversmith, was the official courier for the massachusetts Provincial Assembly as well as an effective political cartoonist and the acknowledged leader of Boston’s artisans. William Dawes (1745-1799) was one of the two men chosen to spread the alarm if the British troops should move to raid the military stores deposited in Concord. 5.Samuel Prescott (1751-c. 1777) completed the famous midnight ride after Paul Revere was captured, but died later in a prison in Halifax. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1779

It has been alleged that at some point during the revolution, Henry Thoreau’s paternal grandfather Jean Thoreau served as a private in a unit under the leadership of fellow Huguenot Paul Revere.67

March 2, Tuesday: Joel Roberts Poinsett was born in Charleston, South Carolina to Huguenot refugees. WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS

67. Well, at the least, he may have been in some sort of dustup which also involved Paul Revere or Riviere. Note that at the onset of the Revolutionary War, when General George Washington had issued a draft order covering “all young men of suitable age to be drafted,” there was an exclusionary clause, “except those with conscientious scruples against war.” It would appear that Jean did not seek to avail himself of this exclusionary clause — which is to say, conscientious objection was not part of the Thoreau family heritage. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After this work was completed, the troops advanced to the bridge in order to disperse the Americans. Major Buttrick, of Concord, who commanded the militia, being ignorant of the tragedy at Lexington, had directed his men not to begin the fire.1 As he advanced with his party, the light infantry began to pull up the bridge; and, as he approached, fired, and killed two Americans one of them a Captain Davis, of Acton, in the neighborhood.2 The fire was instantly returned, and the troops were compelled to retreat. Several of them were killed, several wounded, and a few taken prisoners. The party was pursued; and, after they had rejoined the main body, the whole retired with the utmost expedition. On their way to Lexington they were continually harassed by an irregular and not ill-directed fire from the buildings and walls on their route. Every moment increased the number of their assailants and their own fatigue, distress, and danger. Upon the first intelligence that the Americans had betaken themselves to arms, General Gage sent a second detachment to the relief of Lieutenant Colonel Smith under the command of Lord Percy.3 It amounted to nine hundred men and marched from Boston with two fieldpieces, their music playing the tune of Yankee Doodle to insult the Americans. As they were passing through Roxbury, a young man who was making himself merry on the occasion being asked, as is said, by his lordship, why he laughed so heartily, replied “To think how you will dance by and by to Chevy Chase.” This detachment joined their friends at Lexington, where the whole body rested for a short time, and with their fieldpieces kept the Americans at a distance. The neighboring country was now in arms, and moving both to attack the enemy and to intercept their retreat. The troops, therefore speedily recommenced their march. From both sides of the road issued a continual fire, directed often by excellent marksmen, and particularly dangerous to the officers. Major Pitcairn thought it prudent to quit his horse and lose himself among the soldiery. Everywhere the retreating army was pursued and flanked. Their enemies descended from every new hill and poured through every new valley. Perplexed by a mode of fighting to which they were strangers, and from which neither their valor, nor their discipline furnished any security; exhausted by fatigue, and without a hope of succor; the troops wisely withdrew from impending destruction with the utmost celerity.

1.John Buttrick (1715-1791) was a leader of the Concord militia in action on April 19, 1775. 2.Isaac Davis (1745-1775), who led the Acton minute men against the British on the Concord bridge, was killed in the first volley. 3.Hugh Percy, Duke of Northumberland (1742-1817), apparently disapproved of the war with the American colonies although he entered military service against them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1780

January 14, Friday: Edward Jesse was born at Hutton-Cranswick near Halifax in Yorkshire, in a family descended from the Languedoc barons de Jessé Lévas, as the 2d son and 4th child of the vicar of the parish, the Reverend William Jesse, with Mary Sage Jesse. Edward would receive his early education at Leicester with a clergyman, and then at Bristol with a Huguenot émigré. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1784

By this year in Boston, there was no longer any visible Huguenot presence. The visible French were such as the Marquis de Lafayette, who was revisiting the scene of his triumphs. Harvard College awarded an honorary LLD to this French tourist in recognition of his services to the American revolution, disregarding the fact that he was at least nominally one of those Papists whom they detested. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The invisibly Huguenot immigrant Peter Thoreau sold his home on Cambridge Street in Boston. The expulsion order of 1755 was enforced and the remaining Acadians (Catholics of French origin) departed from Nova Scotia and lower New Brunswick for Maine and Louisiana. During this year, also, the Province of New Brunswick was separated from Nova Scotia (and Cape Breton was severed from Nova Scotia as a separate colony but would be reunited in 1820).

George Sproule was appointed the 1st Surveyor General of New Brunswick. He would take office in the spring of 1785 and would remain in the position for 33 years. He would create the Surveyor General’s Office and maintain essential land records. CARTOGRAPHY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1787

October 8, Monday: John Thoreau was born in Boston, son of Jane “Jennie” Burns Thoreau and Jean Thoreau (a member of the 4th cohort after the great Huguenot diaspora that had begun during the 16th Century, which would make his son Henry Thoreau out to be a member of the 5th cohort).68

Meanwhile, back in France, King Louis XVI was issuing an “Edict of Toleration” which, among other things, was bringing to a state of legitimacy all the bastards who had been produced by a previous state ruling — that any marriage between loyal French Catholics and loyal French Huguenots was outside the law.

THOREAU LIFESPANS

68. Note: We don’t have a date of birth for the other John Thoreau, who would become a British officer. The most we can do safely is, to assign him to the same generation of the Thoreau family as this American John Thoreau. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1790

March 1, Monday: On March 1st in our national capital, New-York, the federal congress enacted a Census Act calling for a census every tenth year effective immediately. Domesday was an idea whose time had come. When conducted, this 1st US census revealed us to be a nation of 3,929,214 persons eligible to be counted. When analyzed, the census data would indicate that our 13 states consisted of roughly 500,000 slaves and 3,500,000 free citizens. About 92% of black Americans, with the Freeman household of Concord, Massachusetts being among the few exceptions, were enslaved.69

The census that would be completed by August 1st would list seven members in this Freeman household on Brister’s Hill, although now we can identify but five: Brister, Fenda, Nancy, Amos, and Charlestown Edes. Whether Edes also had family or whether Brister and Fenda had additional children is unknown. These five persons definitely did not fit in among the enumerated roughly 500,000 American slaves, since they were no longer slaves, but then, again, they did not exactly fit in among the enumerated roughly 3,500,000 free citizens either — since it is quite a stretch to think of them as being treated as citizens.

Squire Duncan Ingraham, owner of the slave Cato Ingraham (or, we might say, “former owner and present master” — since in 1783 slavery had allegedly been done away with entirely in the sovereign state of Massachusetts, and for some seven years there had been “no slaves in Massachusetts at all”), was in about this decade the most prominent citizen of Concord, having made his pile in part, but only in part, in the slave trade. The indications of this census are that more than 90 out of 100 of the persons in the United States at this point SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS

with identifiably French surnames were descended from Huguenot refugees, mainly in the 3d or 4th generation but with a few survivors of the 2d and 3d generation after flight still alive (for instance, Pierre Thoreau had

69.Theriseinmanumissions in the post-Revolutionary period would increase the proportion of free black Americans to about 13.5% by 1810, where it would remain through 1840. A decline in manumissions in the late antebellum period, combined with the lesser fecundity of free black Americans, would then move the free-to-enslaved proportion back down to about 11% when we reached the point of civil war: Year % in Population

1790 8

1810 13.5

1840 13.5

1861 11 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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represented the 1st generation of the Thoreaus, the generation that had fled from the Poitou-Charentes district of France in 1685 to find refuge in St. Hélier on the island of Jersey, the 2d generation had been represented by Philippe Thoreau (1720-1800), the 3d generation had been represented by Jean Thoreau who had come to America in 1773, and in Boston, John Thoreau had just been born as a member of the 4th cohort after the great diaspora that had begun during the 16th Century, and in 1817, Henry Thoreau would be born in Concord as a member of the 5th cohort of this diaspora).

THOREAU LIFESPANS

HENRY’S RELATIVES

This figures out to be a little over 60,000 diaspora persons.

More on our 1st national census:

The population of Massachusetts remained overwhelmingly English in origin through the end of the eighteenth century. The first census, in 1790, reported a total population of 378,556 in the state. of those 373,187 were white and 5,369 “colored” (presumably “Indians” and blacks); to each 100 white inhabitants, there were only 1.4 “colored.” Of the 373,187 white residents, 354,528 (95%) were of English origin; 3.6 percent were Scots and 1 percent Irish, making a total of 99.6 percent from the British Isles. French amounted to only 0.2 percent, Dutch to 0.1 percent. Germans, “Hebrews,” and all other nationalities were represented by less than one tenth of 1 percent.... Boston was growing again after the decline brought about by years of Revolutionary agitation; the 18,038 inhabitants reported in 1790, however, seem a modest increase over the 1743 peak of 16,182, when the town was the largest in British North America. The census reported forty towns in the state with populations in excess of 2,000; those were almost evenly divided between the coast and inland areas. The four of these forty that exceeded 5,000 were, however, all seaports: Boston, Salem (7,921), Gloucester (5,137), and Marblehead (5,061). The situation was about to change radically and rapidly. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1791

Jane Griffith was born into a family of well-to-do silk weaving Huguenots. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1792

November 26, Monday: Sarah Moore Grimké was born as the 6th child of John Fauchereau Grimké, an aristocratic slaveholding judge in the Deep South, on his mother’s side a descendant of the Huguenots, with Mary Smith Grimké, in Charleston, South Carolina. Father was pre-eminently a man of common sense, and economy was one of his darling virtues. I suppose I inherited some of the latter quality, for from early life I have been renowned for gathering up the fragments that nothing be lost, so that it was quite a common saying in the family: “Oh, give it to Sally; she’ll find use for it,” when anything was to be thrown away. Only once within my memory did I depart from this law of my nature. I went to our country residence to pass the summer with father. He had deposited a number of useful odds and ends in a drawer. Now little miss, being installed as housekeeper to papa, and for the first time in her life being queen –at least so she fancied– of all she surveyed, went to work searching every cranny, and prying into every drawer, and woe betide anything which did not come up to my idea of neat housekeeping. When I chanced across the drawer of scraps I at once condemned them to the flames. Such a place of disorder could not be tolerated in my dominions. I never thought of the contingency of papa’s shirts, etc., wanting mending; my oversight, however, did not prevent the natural catastrophe of clothes wearing out, and one day papa brought me a garment to mend, “Oh,” said I, tossing it carelessly aside, “that hole is too big to darn.” “Certainly, my dear,” he replied, “but you can put a piece in. Look in such a drawer, and you will find plenty to patch with.” But behold the drawer was empty. Happily, I had commuted the sentence of burning to that of distribution to the slaves, one of whom furnished me the piece, and mended the garment ten times better than I could have done. So I was let to go unwhipped of justice for that misdemeanor, and perhaps that was the lesson which burnt into my soul. My story doesn’t sound Southerny, does it? Well, here is something more. During that summer, father had me taught to spin and weave negro cloth. Don’t suppose I ever did anything worth while; only it was one of his maxims: “Never lose an opportunity of learning what is useful. If you never need the knowledge, it will be no burden to have it; and if you should, you will be thankful to have it.” So I had to use my delicate fingers now and then to shell corn, a process which sometimes blistered them, and was sent into the field to pick cotton occasionally. Perhaps I am indebted HDT WHAT? INDEX

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partially to this for my life-long detestation of slavery, as it brought me in close contact with these unpaid toilers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1794

The seaman David Orrok, Sr., a Quaker, and his wife Sarah Tillet Orrok (who may have been of Huguenot descent) had a son they named David Orrok, Jr. This son would of course be a “birthright” Quaker. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1795

February 21, Saturday: Freedom of worship came to be guaranteed in France. HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1802

June 12, Saturday: Harriet Martineau was born in England of a Huguenot family which had become Unitarian: On occasion of the Revelation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1688, a surgeon of the name of Martineau, and a family of the name of Pierre, crossed the Channel, and settled with other Huguenot refugees, in England. My ancestor married a young lady of the Pierre family, and settled in Norwich, where his descendants afforded a succession of surgeons up to my own day. My eminent uncle, Mr. Philip Meadows Martineau, and my eldest brother, who died before the age of thirty, were the last Norwich surgeons of the name. — My grandfather, who was one of the honorable series, died at the age of forty-two, of a fever caught among his poor patients. He left a large family, of whom my father was the youngest. When established as a Norwich manufacturer, my father married Elizabeth Rankin, the eldest daughter of a sugar- refiner at Newcastle upon Tyne. My father and mother had eight children, of whom I was the sixth: and I was born on the 12th of June, 1802. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1803

April 23, Saturday: In France, Napoléon Bonaparte acknowledged the legitimacy of Huguenot religious worship.

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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April 23, Saturday: Adin Ballou was born to Ariel and Edilda Ballou on a farm in Cumberland on the border between Rhode Island and Massachusetts, descendant in the 5th generation of one Maturin Ballou who had come to America about 1640 and had involved himself in the founding of Providence (the family has even preserved a scrap of paper that was a signed receipt given to them, for something, by the Reverend Roger Williams). Ballou was instructed that his ancestor Maturin had been the descendant of a French family of Huguenots that had been driven into exile in England by religious persecution.70

WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS

70. Later in life he would be forced to the conclusion that this family tradition was probably inaccurate, but the main thing in such influences is that an impressionable age he believed it and was thereby impressed with a putative tradition of suppression. While the Reverend Adin Ballou was creating his communitarian movement in New England, of Christian non-resistance to evil, and was lecturing on this topic before an audience including Henry Thoreau –an authentic descendant of persecuted Huguenots– in January 1841 at the Concord Lyceum, he was believing himself to be the inheritor of this sort of religious tradition. Those of us who interest ourselves in this sort of thing would be interested to learn whether Ballou recognized John Thoreau, Sr., upon his visit to Concord, to be specifically of Huguenot as well as of French extraction. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1805

February 20, Wednesday: Angelina Emily Grimké was born as the 14th and final child of John Fauchereau Grimké, an aristocratic slaveholding judge in the Deep South, on his mother’s side a descendant of the Huguenots, with Mary Smith Grimké, in Charleston, South Carolina. Her sister Sarah Moore Grimké, 12 years of age, was designated as Angelina’s godmother.

The mother, burdened as she was with 14 children, seems to have been less than competent in dealing with the family’s domestic slaves, even when she resorted to the more severe punishments. Hence this, from Angelina’s diary: On 2d day I had some conversation with sister Mary on the deplorable state of our family, and to-day with Eliza. They complain very much of the servants being so rude, and doing so much as they please. But I tried to convince them that the servants were just what the family was, that they were not at all more rude and selfish and disobliging than they themselves were. I gave one or two instances of the manner in which they treated mother and each other, and asked how they could expect the servants to behave in any other way when they had such examples continually before them, and queried in which such conduct was most culpable. Eliza always admits what I say to be true, but, as I tell her, never profits by it.... Sister Mary is somewhat different; she will not condemn herself.... She will acknowledge the sad state of the family, but seems to think mother is altogether to blame. And dear mother seems to resist all I say: she will neither acknowledge the state of the family nor her own faults, and always is angry when I speak to her.... Sometimes when I look back to the first years of my religious life, and remember how unremittingly I labored with mother, though in a very wrong spirit, being alienated from her and destitute of the spirit of love and forbearance, my heart is very sore.

Having married outside the Religious Society of Friends, Friend Charles Brockden Brown of course needed to be disowned by his Philadelphia monthly meeting: At a monthly meeting of friends of Philadelphia for the Southern District held the 20th of 2mo. 1805. — The following Testimony against the conduct of Charles Brockden Brown was united with and a committee appointed to deliver him a copy out — Charles Brockden Brown of this city who had by Birth a right of membership in our Religious Society — having accomplished his marriage by the assistance of an hireling minister — to a person HDT WHAT? INDEX

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not in profession with us — it became our concern tenderly to treat with him on that account — but not appearing duly sensible of the impropriety of his conduct — We testify that we cannot consider him a member among us — yet desire that thro’ submission to the operation of Truth he may be qualified to condemn his transgression to the satisfaction of this meeting and become united in Religious Fellowship with us —

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS QUAKER DISOWNMENT HDT WHAT? INDEX

HUGUENOTS HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1806

January 14, Tuesday: Matthew Fontaine Maury was born in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. His mother’s ancestors, of the “Minor” family, had come to Virginia from Holland, and his father Richard Maury’s ancestors had been Huguenots (his granddaddy the Reverend James Maury had taught Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1807

December 17, Thursday: The Emperor Napoléon issued the Milan Decrees: all neutral shipping which submitted to British search or visited British ports would be banned from continental ports.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 17 of 12 M 1807 / It was a silent meeting, & to me a close searching season but I trust not the worst of times - Just now heard my brother James had arrived in NewYork after a passage of 29 days from Liverpool In the eveng walked out to D Buffums to wait on my H & sister A [?] home - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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John Greenleaf Whittier was born to a Quaker family of Huguenot ancestry (John and Abigail Hussey Whittier)71 living in an old hand-hewn oak cabin near Haverhill north of Boston. He was their 2d child, the 1st having been Mary, born in the previous year.

This was one family that would not be claiming, like some, to be blond-haired and blue-eyed and hereditarily

71.Using statistical methods, Abraham D. Lavender has calculated in his FRENCH HUGUENOTS: FROM MEDITERRANEAN CATHOLICS TO WHITE ANGLO-SAXON PROTESTANTS (New York: Peter Lang, 1990, page 171) that as of the middle of the 19th Century there were perhaps a million people in the US who had credentials similar to Thoreau’s and Whittier’s for descent, with considerable outmarriage, from French Huguenot religious refugees. WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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privileged and to have come over in the Mayflower.72

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS

72. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had been born on February 27th of that year in the Massachusetts town of Portland (Portland not yet having been assigned to Maine), to parents who did claim such distinction. According to the American Methodist Monthly, Volume II, page 229, John Greenleaf Whittier was descended from a religious refugee named Fouillevert who had fled from Brittagne in the early states of the persecution by the French government. John Greenleaf Whittier was distantly related to Benjamin Franklin, Friend Lucretia Mott, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, and Henry Adams. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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When Friend John would belatedly enroll at the Haverhill Academy, he would need to support himself by odd jobs and by crafting slippers for other students at $0.25 per pair. Due to poor health, as well as to lack of financial backing and to being quite a bit older than the other students, he would be quite unable to proceed HDT WHAT? INDEX

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from the academy to college.

I was born on the 17th of December, 1807, in the easterly part of Haverhill, Mass., in the house built by my first American ancestor, two hundred years ago. My father was a farmer, in moderate circumstances,—a man of good natural ability, and sound judgment. For a great many years he was one of the Selectmen of the town, and was often called upon to act as arbitrator in matters at issue between neighbors. My mother was Abigail Hussey, of Rollinsford, N.H. A bachelor uncle and a maiden aunt, both of whom I remember with much affection, lived in the family. The farm was not a very profitable one; it was burdened with debt and we had no spare money; but with strict economy we lived comfortably and respectably. Both my parents were members of the Society of Friends. I had a brother and two sisters. Our home was somewhat lonely, half hidden in oak woods, with no house in sight, and we had few companions of our age, and few occasions of recreation. Our school was only for twelve weeks in a year,— in the depth of winter, and half a mile distant. At an early age I was set at work on the farm, and doing errands for my mother, who, in addition to her ordinary house duties, was busy in spinning and weaving the linen and woolen cloth needed in the family. On First-days. father and mother, and sometimes one of the children, rode down to the Friends’ Meeting-house in Amesbury, eight miles distant. I think I rather enjoyed staying at home and wandering in the woods, or climbing Job’s hill, which rose abruptly from the brook which rippled down at the foot of our garden. From the top of the hill I could see the blue outline of the Deerfield mountains in New Hampshire, and the solitary peak of Agamenticus on the coast of Maine. A curving line of morning mist marked the course of the Merrimac, and Great Pond, or Kenoza, stretched away from the foot of the hill towards the village of Haverhill hidden from sight by intervening hills and woods, but which sent to us the sound of its two church bells. We had only about twenty volumes of books, most of them the journals of pioneer ministers in our society. Our only annual was an almanac. I was early fond of reading, and now and then heard of a book of biography or travel, and walked miles to borrow it. When I was fourteen years old my first school-master, Joshua Coffin, the able, eccentric historian of Newbury, brought with him to our house a volume of Burns’ poems, from which he read, greatly to my delight. I begged him to leave the book with me; and set myself at once to the task of mastering the glossary of the Scottish dialect at its close. This was about the first poetry I had ever read, (with the exception of that of the Bible, of which I had been a close student,) and it had a lasting influence upon me I began to make rhymes myself, and to imagine stories and adventures. In fact I lived a sort of dual life, and in a world of fancy, as well as in the world of plain matter-of- fact about me. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1817

October 12, Sunday: David Henry Thoreau was christened, by his parents John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau in recognition of his paternal uncle David Orrok, son of Friend David Orrok, Sr. and Friend Sarah Tillet Orrok, who had died in August.73

October 12: “I was baptized in old M[eeting] H[ouse] by Dr. [Ezra] Ripley, when I was three months, and did not cry.”

Nobody knows where the family came up with the name “Henry,” but such untraditional naming was quite common among Huguenot transplant families of this period as they gradually assimilated to their new context and removed the “markers” by which they could be discriminated. There are some things to be said about Huguenots naming conventions from this period, that inform us of why little David Henry was not named Barzillai or Ralph or Stephen or whatever. American descendants of Huguenot refugees tended to favor names which existed in some form in French, such as Henry (Henri) and John (Jean). They also favored Old Testament names over the names of New Testament saints, whom were to them tainted with Catholicism. Hence “David” after King David of the Old Testament and the same as in French — satisfying both naming conventions at once. The ten most favored names were Abraham, Isaac, Daniel, David, Jacob, Salomon, and Samuel.74

3d Lieutenant of the Corps of Artillery James Duncan Graham, freshly minted, began to serve at the United States Military Academy, West Point as Adjutant.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 12 of 10 M / Soon after taking my seat I felt life to arise & circulate among us, & my spirit was comforted with the prospect. — Lydia Almy for the first time in several years appeared in testimony, I thought very sweetly — & Abigail Robinson for a great rarity appeared in a testimony of some 73. Professor William E. Cain, in the frontmatter to A HISTORICAL GUIDE TO HENRY DAVID THOREAU (NY, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) writes that this uncle David “died in Concord in July.” We wonder from whence Professor Cain has derived this information that David had died in Concord, and from whence he has derived this information that David had died in July. He may well be correct. He was asked, by email, whether he has perchance investigated, and discovered the grave of David in what has now become the old section of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, or whether he has perchance managed to obtain a Concord documentary record of this death, but has not yet responded. 74. In the late 16th Century in Rouen, France, for purposes of illustration of these naming traditions, the ten most popular names for Huguenot boys had been, in order of popularity from most popular down, Jean, Pierre, Jacques, Abraham, Isaac, Daniel, David, Jacob, Salomon, and Samuel, whereas the ten most popular names for Catholic boys had been, in the same order, Jean, Guillaume, Pierre, Nicolas, Jacques, Robert, François, Charles, Richard, and Abraham. We may note that only the name Abraham appears on both lists. The influence of tradition presents itself in the fact that there is a 70% match between the list of names from Rouen and the list of names from the US despite the passage of four full generations. Now, it might be objected that the name “David” was assigned on the basis of an uncle named David Orrok who lay dying at the time, but there is of course a reason why that uncle was named “David,” and besides, it was at least as conventional among Huguenots to perpetuate or recycle names used in previous generations of the family as it was among other ethnic groups. From the 17th through the middle of the 19th centuries, over 60% of the families in Hingham assigned the name of the Huguenot father to a son (as, John Thoreau the father and little John the first son), and over 70% assigned the name of the Huguenot mother to a daughter (in America the Huguenots if you remember tended to outmarry, so Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau was, of course, not Huguenot, so the Thoreau daughters became Helen and Sophia rather than, perhaps, little Cynthia and, then, perhaps, Naomi). Thus, and this sums up my comment, the very fact that little David Henry was named David Henry speaks to the fact that their Huguenot heritage was a matter of importance in this family. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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length - The meeting was large & attended by a considerable number of other societies, as they have been in the forenoon, for some time — In the Afternoon the meeting was again pretty well attended but silent & to me rather a poor time, but not accompanied by that distressing hardness as at sometimes. —After tea took a little walk round the hill with my H set the evening with my Mother. — RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1821

Using the name Alcandro Grineo, Giacomo Costantino Beltrami became a member of the Accademia dei Catenati di Macerata. (He would soon determine that, with the Napoleonic project in ruins and the Pope in control, he needed to flee entirely from his native land.)

On the Italian peninsula, the Waldenses religious college at Torre Pellice, erected on the site of a fort once built to suppress them, was of course shut down by the new state authorities for having been teaching the doctrines of that heretic anti-Catholic faith.

Meanwhile, Joel Roberts Poinsett, a descendant of these Huguenots, was entering the US House of Representatives. WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS

September 27, Thursday: Augustin de Iturbide entered Mexico City in triumph after his Mexican forces defeated Spanish troops.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born in Genève, Switzerland in a Huguenot family that had fled from Languedoc to Genève due to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 27th of 9 M / Our Moy [Monthly] Meeting was this day held in town. The first was a season of some favor, Anne Dennis was concerned in a few words - Anne Greene followed in a communication of some length & father Rodman closed in a short testimony - in the last Meeting we had but little buisness & The Meeting closed at a little past on OClock Uncle Saml Thurston & Aunt Stanton Dined with us, after which My H & John went out with Aunt Stanton intending to Spend a few days on a visit to them - RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1822

President James Monroe declared the “Monroe Doctrine”: from now on, only New-World nations were going to be allowed to mess with New-World nations. He sent Joel Roberts Poinsett on a diplomatic mission to mess with the Mexicans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1825

March 7, Monday: Representative Joel Roberts Poinsett became US Minister to Mexico.

The University of Virginia, its buildings and curriculum designed by Thomas Jefferson, opened to students (the buildings would be completed in the following year). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1826

The Reverend Abiel Holmes’s A MEMOIR OF THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS, WHO SETTLED AT OXFORD, IN MASSACHUSETTS, A.D. MDCLXXXVI; WITH A SKETCH OF THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE PROTESTANTS OF FRANCE. THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1829

December: Returning from Mexico, where his office had been to cause the term poinsettismo to enter the Spanish language as a shorthand for “officious and intrusive,” US Minister Joel Roberts Poinsett brought north some cuttings of the Euphorbia pulcherrima, known in Mexico as La Flor de Noche Buena, the plant which would be publicized in the US as the “poinsettia,” the red bracts of which (they’re not red flowers, the flowers are the little knobs) have become a synonym in all the nations of Christendom and in all the department stores of all the cities on the planet for the holy night of Xmas Eve. Back home in our nation’s puzzle palace, Poinsett became a player in President Andrew Jackson’s deal to force Mexico to “sell” Texas to the United States. The asking price (the US asking price) for Texas was to be US$5,000,000.75

There was no living American who was more truly a citizen of the world, in the old Jeffersonian way, than Joel R. Poinsett, the Charleston friend of Petigru and William J. Grayson, the poet, who were also opposed to the sectionalism of the adored Calhoun. [In a footnote: Both Calhoun and Poinsett were pupils of Timothy Dwight in Connecticut, Poinsett at the Greenfield Hill Academy, Calhoun at Yale.] This first American minister to Mexico, whence he had brought back the Christmas flower and plant that bore his name, retained the universal mind, with the courtier’s manner and the versatile charm, of the days before cotton filled the horizon of the South. In years of travel in his youth he had visited Madam de Staël, studied at Edinburgh, lived for a while in Russia, and in 1811 President Madison had sent him to Chile and Argentina to cultivate friendly relations with these embryo republics. As one of the Americans, like Madison and Clay, for whom their country was ordained to establish an order superior to that of the old world, he encouraged the liberals in these insurgent colonies of Spain on this first of the inter-American “good will” missions. Then Poinsett, as secretary of war, furthered the exploration of the West, enabling the Charlestonian Frémont to show what he was made of, while he appointed Charles Wilkes to command the South Sea expedition and tried to secure George Catlin’s pictures for the nation. A naturalist and an antiquarian, always a patron of learning and art, he had helped Prescott in his work on the Mexican conquest, preserved examples of the Indian crafts, rescued Peruvian manuscripts and made a collection of ancient Mexican sculpture. Still later, on the Pedee river, he had experimented with grapes and rice, assembling countless specimens of trees and shrubs from all over the world in the park that surrounded his plantation-house. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1836

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots was first performed, at the Paris Opera House. The opera’s drama centers upon a love affair between a French Huguenot garçon and a French Catholic fille, and is set in the time of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Meyerbeer, born into a Jewish family (Jakob Liebmann Beer), was careful to avoid demonizing either side in depicting the historic struggle between two Christian groupings.

75. The Encyclopædia Britannica, always a good source of whitewash, alleges that “A fervent liberal, he frequently meddled in the affairs of Latin American nations and was one of the earliest U.S. citizens to be disliked for his misdirected good intentions.” Q: Why is the worst thing one can say, about a white man, that his good intentions were misdirected? A: It’s pointless to try to say anything more challenging than this, for the white people simply wouldn’t believe one, they’d assume one was being malicious. It can be known directly and indubitably, from the contents of personal consciousness, that white people are well-intentioned. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1837

August 30, Wednesday: At the Harvard College graduation ceremonies, William James Hubard was busy cutting memento silhouettes of the various seniors of the graduating Class of 1837, and so of course he one of the silhouettes he cut, presumably attired in a mortar-board graduation hat, was a full-figure one of graduating senior David H. Thoreau. (I do not have an illustration of this, but on the following screen is a silhouette, done of Stansfield Rawson of Wastdale Hall, Cumberland, that is generally representative of Hubard’s skill in the genre.) http://www.baumanrarebooks.com/browse-books.aspx AN EXTRAORDINARY DISCOVERY: THE EARLIEST KNOWN PORTRAIT OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU, AN EXTRAORDINARY SILHOUETTE BY HUBARD DONE FOR THOREAU’S 1837 HARVARD GRADUATION THOREAU, Henry David. Original silhouette portrait. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1837. Image measures 6-3/8 by 9-1/4 inches, mounted in original bird’s-eye maple frame; overall measurements 10-3/8 by 13-1/4 inches. $90,000. A splendid, hitherto unknown and unrecorded silhouette portrait of Henry David Thoreau, this silhouette was done by the prominent silhouette artist and painter William J. Hubard on the occasion of Thoreau’s graduation from Harvard University in 1837 and is signed by Hubbard. In fine original bird’s-eye frame. Thoreau allowed only a few portraits to be done in his lifetime, and until now, only a handful of images, all dated after 1854, were known to exist: two daguerreotypes, several rough caricatures done by friends, and a sketch, the original of which is nearly completely disintegrated. This silhouette portrait pre-dates the other portraits by some 17 years. It depicts Thoreau’s full figure and profile and shows him dressed in graduation cap and gown. It is identified on the front, in the artist’s hand, “Henry David Thoreau, Harvard 183, Wm. J. Hubard, profilist.” Hubard was an English-born artist who attained fame at an early age as a silhouettist. Upon his arrival in America in the mid-1800’s, he was widely praised and his silhouettes were displayed at exhibitions; within a few years, however, he had retired from silhouette-cutting and devoted himself to painting, exhibiting at the National Academy of Design in 1834. he continued throughout his life to occasionally cut profiles, doing a silhouette of Franklin Pierce as late as 1852. Hubard was on the east coast in 1837, eventually marrying in October in Virginia and traveling to Europe at the beginning of 1838. Hubard is considered to be a major silhouette artist of the 19th century, and examples of his work signed are rare. On the reverse of the silhouette is a small piece of paper which reads in a contemporary hand “David Henry Thoreau, Harvard 1837, given Dr. Joseph Green Cogswell Cambridge, Mass.” Cogswell, at one point librarian of Harvard University, was the first superintendent of the Astor Library in New York. The switch in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Thoreau’s name –it reads “David Henry,” not “Henry David”– is in fact appropriate, as Thoreau’s name was indeed officially “David Henry.” Called by his middle name by his family from birth, after graduating from college he changed his name to “Henry David” to reflect this practice (though characteristically he never bothered to make it official, just as he never officially graduated from Harvard because he refused to pay a five dollar fee for the diploma). With the help of curators and experts, we have ascertained that no mention of this portrait exists in Thoreau’s archives or in modern bibliographies. In our experience, we have encountered few pieces of such immediate historical, literary and artistic interest as this silhouette. Because so few images of Thoreau exist, this will be regarded as an important discovery by literary scholars and Thoreau enthusiasts. An unusually large silhouette, the portrait faithfully depicts Thoreau’s profile and characteristic stance, as described by his contemporaries. As an unrecorded signed work by William Hubard, the silhouette is also of great importance to Hubard experts and collectors of early American silhouettes. A truly extraordinary piece. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Harvard commencement contributions made by graduating senior Charles Wyatt Rice of Brookfield and by graduating senior Henry Vose of Dorchester in regard to “The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times Considered in its Influence on the Political, Moral, and Literary Character of a Nation” offer interesting points of comparison and contrast with the contribution made on this day by the 3d member of their panel, graduating senior Henry David Thoreau of Concord:

This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it is useful –it is more to be admired and enjoyed then, than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed, –the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature. 1st, the contribution which would have been made by Young Charles Wyatt Rice (had he bothered to show up for this commencement exercise): Paragraph the first: The distinguishing trait of modern times is, the comercial [sic] spirit. The love of gain seems to have taken an universal hold on the hearts of men. Plutus is now worshipped with a zeal that consumes itself, and the flame at His altar is lit up with an intensity, that brings the very temple crackling and clashing upon the head of the zealous votary, and buries him in its ruins. In looking around upon the faces of our fellow men for sympathy with the purer emotions that sometimes spring up in our own bosoms, we find nought [sic] there but gain. Until the question is forced with thrilling energy upon every lover of his country, what must be the effect of this universal love of gain, this commercial spirit of modern times on the political character of his nation. Well, first of all, there is the matter of young Charles Wyatt Rice’s spelling. He has been attending a college of some repute for something like four years. Has nobody taken the trouble to teach this student how to spell?

Despite the fact that he has been supplied with the word “commercial,” properly spelled, Rice comes up with “comercial.” He also creates the word “nought,” phonetically spelled, for “naught.”

There is a problem with young Charles Wyatt Rice’s classical allusion:

He should have referred to the worship of Mammon, rather than to the worship of Plutus. Presumably he is attempting to refer to the plutocrat, and to plutocracy?

There is the matter of young Charles Wyatt Rice’s metaphors: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A flame does not light itself up with an intensity, it lights other things with an intensity. A temple may, one is willing to suppose, crackle rather than crack, but when it did so it would crash, rather than clash, upon the head of the zealous votary inside it. Gain is hardly the sort of thing that one finds upon the faces of our fellow men, as what one finds upon the faces of our fellow men are expressions and although greed may involve an expression, gain does not.

Young Charles Wyatt Rice uses curious modifiers:

What might be the function, in this piece, of magnifying mere energy into “thrilling” energy? Young Charles Wyatt Rice’s sentence construction leaves something to be desired:

The last long sentence of this would apparently be a question, if it made sense at all, but it apparently here was intended to function in some other manner.

Paragraph 2: The answer is every where around us. We read in the crises to which nations have come. Well do the members of all commercial states exclaim, the country is in bankruptcy; the people are in distress; in every quarter the cry is help. And with this exclamation is uttered the confession that very much of this calamity has been brought about by the universal love of gain, the commercial spirit of modern times. Were this questioned, it might be read in the fate of the merchant whom once the morn beheld constant at his counting room, content to get rich slowly but surely, until the passion became inordinate and in a moment of temptation, he plunged into speculation and ruin. It might be read in the fate of the mechanick, who saved his hardearned wages, but only to sink them in speculation, and his family in distress. It might be read, indeed, in the conduct and fate of every class of the community.

Young Charles Wyatt Rice presumably would be saying, above, that speculation has brought about a business crash, and that people are in distress. He certainly is not saying this very well. One might have expected better from a young gentleman who has just spent approximately four years in a liberal arts college — or even two years in a junior college.

Paragraph 3: And now the cry for aid has gone up from the people. This cry has arisen to our legislatures. Another week beholds the congress of the nation assembled at its Capitol. The course of our own nation will find its parallel in that of other countries. Let us for a moment play the prophet, and, reasoning from the nature of things, anticipate the effect of measures. Influenced, then, by the desire of affording some present relief, the national counsellors enact laws for the present - laws to operate but for a time - laws to which men look for aid, but under which they know not how to act. In a word, they bring upon the people all the evils of temporary legislation. And what a tyranny is this! Under it men stand in suspense, looking eagerly to the ground before them, but too fearful to advance to it. They dare not take new steps for they fear that the laws which urged them to it will cease, and then they may wish, but wish in vain for their former station. The country presents a singular but a fearful spectacle, the business of a nation fettered by suspense, and men looking, but looking in vain to the countenances of their fellows for hope and assurance. A new reign is brought upon the land, not indeed the reign of Terrour, but one more fearful still, the reign of Doubt. We behold a nation, whose countenance bears but one impress, anxiety, and whose limbs are fettered but by one manacle, uncertainty.

Young Charles Wyatt Rice presumably is saying, above, that any legislative measures which would be responses to the nation’s economic predicament would be of necessity temporary HDT WHAT? INDEX

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measures, and would therefore be unreassuring. We note that he does not say why the legislative response would of necessity be in the form of temporary measures. We note also that after having identified the cause of the nation’s economic slump as overextension due to overconfidence, he identifies the solution as a return of confidence without explaining how it might be, that the antidote to a poison is to consist of a great deal more of that very same poison.

Paragraph the last: Or if the bark, whose progress we are watching, escape this Scylla of the Political Sea, it may still dash upon the Charybdis. In times of deep distress, it is thought that any state must be better than the present, any laws better than those now in force. The people rise, but too often only to sink into deeper subjection. Witness the popular tumults of the Old World, where the mass rule today, only that the morrow may behold them suffering under sterner tyranny. The tumult is calmed. But it is the calmness of despair. The attempt to sunder the chains, has been but the occasion of rivetting [sic] them the tighter. The depression of trade, too, is ever a strong motive in the people to grant new powers to government. They feel but too deeply that their trade is depressed, and they fancy that the remedy is not in themselves but in their legislators. They come with the humble prayer that the power may be taken from them. For they fancy they cannot govern themselves. Let them not wonder then, that they feel the power they have conferred on others. Let them not be surprised, that the laws which appear to give relief to the many, give nothing but power to the few. Let them not be disappointed, when they find that a weight, like the pressure of the night-mare, is on them. But let them awake to the consciousness, that their best dependence is upon themselves, and that power is safest, where it is easiest recalled to those who delegated it.

Young Charles Wyatt Rice has perhaps in the course of his college education read Homer’s Odyssey, or more likely hear of it, but Charybdis was not a rock upon which one’s bark might dash — it was, instead, a humongous whirlpool in which one might be swallowed up. Rice’s metaphor of the chain does not work, for one cannot by riveting (or even by rivetting) tighten a chain. Also, what is this “pressure of the night-mare,” is it maybe like a horse that comes and lies upon one as one sleeps, pressing one down upon one’s bed? Rice’s proffered solution, which is for each businessman to rely on himself rather than waiting upon collective or governmental action, appears to be a standard proposal out of standard polemical party politics. –Rice is a regular Harvard Man, your standard product.

In brief, had Henry David Thoreau delivered such a piece we might have serious doubts at this point that he would ever become competent as a thinker, let alone as a writer! Is it any wonder that, discretion being the better part of valor, Young Charles Wyatt Rice didn’t show up to recite such a commencement exercise as this one, and had to be officially recorded as “sick”? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Now here is the contribution made by Henry Vose, who at the very least in his approximately four years of study has learned how to spell, if he is not yet entirely clear as to the distinction between “farther” and “further”: Paragraph the first: It has been said to be one of the principal signs of the times that the commercial spirit is superseding the warlike spirit in Christendom. If this be true it is indeed a triumph, and we may discover in it some of the causes of that superiority we fondly believe in, of modern times over past ages. That commerce in its innumerable relations influences almost every department of human affairs no one can doubt. Morals and Politics acknowledge its power, and Letters, which might be supposed to be exempt from its sway, are immediately affected by it. This growing commercial spirit of modern days, this love of enterprise cannot but engender a boldness of thought and action, which the whole community must feel. Its power is almost without limit. As long as there are lands to be explored, or seas to be navigated, its votaries are imperceptibly carried farther and farther into its meshes. It deals with every nation, and every class, and comes in contact with human character of every stamp.

Young Henry Vose has done better than Young Charles Wyatt Rice, in that he has created a 1st paragraph without an egregious spelling error. He posits a world in which a newer commercial spirit, of production and distribution of goods and service, is overwhelming an earlier preoccupation with the appropriation and reappropriation of existing goods. Paragraph 2: And can it be that commerce, in these numberless connections, does not touch the literary character of a nation? Must not its influence be widely felt, even if indirect and silent, where letters and science are concerned? Philosophy and fiction find in it elements congenial to their growth. The novelist finds a romance on the sea and in traffic, matter-of-fact as it may seem, and seizes upon it with the boldness and zeal, which characterize the seaman and the merchant; and the philosopher, as he surveys the ordinary courses of business, finds ample materials for the imagination, or for reflection, wherewith to verify hypotheses, or erect theories. And his prospect is boundless: he may look onward and onward as far as the mind’s vision can extend, and still there is something beyond; something to exercise curiosity and excite investigation.

Young Henry Vose supposes, plausibly, that people who are not in want can be expected to be more productive in science, philosophy, and fiction than people who live in want. Where is this observation going to lead him? Paragraph 3: But commerce exerts a more direct influence on literature. It is from the munificence of its devotees that the noblest institutions for the amelioration and education of mankind have grown up. If the public in modern times is indebted to any one class of men more than another for the aid they have given the sciences and arts, it is to our merchants. They have erected lasting monuments to their memory in the public institutions they have founded: they have endeared themselves to a grateful community by their never failing zeal to aid, either by their wealth or their talents in the great cause of education and reform; And among other objects of their liberality they have not forgotten our Alma Mater. They have ever extended to her a fostering hand, encouraging her in the day of her adversity, and aiding her to extend her influence, when in the full tide of her glory. It is for us, her sons, to regard them with the liveliest feelings of respect, and to cherish their memory with the warmest gratitude.

Young Henry Vose demonstrates that commerce influences literature by pointing to financial bequests bestowed. The more “munificent” the male merchants of Boston (by which he evidently means, the richer they get) the larger their financial bequests become, and the more lasting these monuments to their memory become, the nobler the recipient institutions become, and the nobler they become, the more able they become to “ameliorate” mankind (by which he evidently means, to reduce the original ignorance of all of us male citizens, as his ignorance has evidently been reduced). It is therefore our duty as the sons of this maternal institution, Harvard College, our Alma Mater, to respect her, remember her, and be grateful. Wow — what a HDT WHAT? INDEX

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concept! This has presumably never been said before, or never so well. Vose might as well stop here, but he does not, for he senses that there may be lingering doubts on the parts of those of us who can perceive only the surface appearances of things: Paragraph 4: It is an opinion entertained by many that the operations of traffic must induce a narrowness of mind and soul directly averse to the interests of literature and science. There are some whose vision is so limited that they only see the merchant through the medium of his day- book and ledger, and who, in the simplicity of their heart believe his whole life consists in buying and selling merchandize [sic]. They are of that class, who form their judgments from palpable and outward circumstances, and who are either too indifferent or too thoughtless to carry their observation farther [sic]. They merely see the ripple on the surface and know nothing of the undercurrent. Perhaps we are lucky that Young Henry Vose names no names here. Who would want to be exposed, as biting the hand that feeds? Paragraph 5: We need entertain no fears that this growing love of traffic of modern times will engross public attention and absorb our best minds to the prejudice of literary pursuits. The different occupations of life will never suffer for want of numbers. Every man will follow the bent of his feelings and talents, and from the present state of society we have little to apprehend that any one profession will extend itself to the exclusion of the rest. It is indeed desirable that the pursuits of literature and commerce should have a common feeling and end. It were to be wished that their votaries would seek to aid each other; the merchant by imparting his zeal and boldness, and something more solid than either; the scholar by exercising that influence, which letters and science never fail to give. And we know of no readier means, by which this community of feeling may be effected than that the scholar and the merchant should oftentimes change places. Should one of us descend from the temple of learning to mingle in the walks of business, let us bid him God-speed, and pray him to remember the interests of science and education, and employ his extended means in their behalf. And when one, who has begun life in the counting room, enters the race with us, let us extend to him the hand of welcome, hoping that he may bring with him a portion of that zeal and enterprise, that are the characteristics of his former profession.

Young Henry Vose is democratically inclined, one perceives; there may be a mingling of the classes, a circulation of places and roles. The clerk may quit his job and enroll in college, the literary scholar go to work in a downtown firm. This is all OK. Paragraph the last: This growing commercial spirit is of a nature to unite the nations of the earth. It nurtures a community of interests among people of different tongues and climes. It brings them nearer to each other, and the advance of one nation in education and refinement is made to bear upon the character of its neighbor. And so it is of that internal commerce, which binds together the different parts of the same country: giving impetus and nutriment to all the energies of mankind, and spreading activity, enterprize [sic] and wealth through all classes of society; awakening the moral and intellectual powers of a people as necessary to its own success, and stamping upon their literary character its own indelible characteristics. Young Henry Vose posits at the end what he has posited at the beginning, a world in which the production and distribution of goods and service gives people of different areas an excuse to rub elbows with one another. The circularity of this reasoning process seems not to have perplexed him. Now let us compare and contrast this with the contribution made by the third member of the student panel: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THE COMMERCIAL SPIRIT OF MODERN TIMES,

CONSIDERED IN ITS INFLUENCE ON THE POLITICAL, MORAL,

AND LITERARY CHARACTER OF A NATION.

The history of the world, it has been justly observed, is the history of the progress of humanity; each epoch is characterized by some peculiar development; some element or principle is continually being evolved by the simultaneous, though unconscious and involuntary, workings and struggles of the human mind.76 Profound study and observation have discovered, that the characteristic of our epoch is perfect freedom — freedom of thought and action.77 The indignant Greek, the oppressed Pole, the zealous American, assert it. The skeptic no less than the believer, the heretic no less than the faithful child of the church, have begun to enjoy it. It has generated an unusual degree of energy and activity — it has generated the commercial spirit. Man thinks faster and freer than ever before. He moreover [inserted above line: ^moves] moves faster and freer. He is more restless, for the reason that he is more independent, than ever. The winds and the waves78 are not enough for him; he must needs ransack the bowels of the earth that he may make for himself a highway of iron over its surface. Indeed, could one examine this beehive of ours from an observatory among the stars, he would perceive an unwonted degree of bustle in these later ages. There would be hammering and chipping, baking and brewing, in one quarter;79 buying and selling, money-changing and speech-making, in another. What impression would he receive from so general and impartial a survey? Would it appear to him that mankind used this world as not abusing it?80 Doubtles[s] he would first be struck with the profuse beauty of our orb; he would never tire of admiring its varied zones and seasons, with their changes of livery. He could not but notice that restless animal for whose sake it was contrived,81 but where he found one to admire with him his fair 76. Presumably at the suggestion of the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson, who had written on Victor Cousin in 1836, Thoreau had checked out from the Gore Hall library in June 1837, and then renewed in July, the English translation published in Boston in 1832 of Professor Cousin’s 1828 lectures, FRAGMENTS PHILOSOPHIQUES, titled INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (tr. Henning Gottfried Linberg). Here we can see the influence of this reading. Refer to pages 146-7, 157, and 272- 4. 77. In NEW VIEWS OF CHRISTIANITY, SOCIETY, AND THE CHURCH, published in Boston in 1836 while Thoreau was staying at his home, Orestes Augustus Brownson had written as if perfect freedom were something to be expected in humankind’s future. Here, ironically, Thoreau, who himself owned a copy of this treatise, situates it instead in our magnificent present. 78. If this indicates anything, Waldo Emerson had written, in NATURE in 1836, that:

NATURE: “The winds and waves,” said Gibbon, “are always on the side of the ablest navigators.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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dwelling place, the ninety and nine82 would be scraping together a little of the gilded dust upon its surface. In considering the influence of the commercial spirit on the moral character of a nation, we have only to look at its ruling principle. We are to look chiefly for its origin, and the power that still cherishes and sustains [this may have been: sustains and cherishes] it, in a blind and unmanly love of wealth. And it is seriously asked, whether the prevalence of such a spirit can be prejudicial to a community? Wherever it exists it is too sure to become the ruling spirit, and as a natural consequence, it infuses into all our thoughts and affections a degree of its own selfishness; we become selfish in our patriotism, selfish in our domestic relations, selfish in our religion. Let men, true to their natures, cultivate the moral affections, lead manly and independent lives; let them make riches the means and not the end of existence, and we shall hear no more of the commercial spirit. The sea will not stagnate, the earth will be as green as ever, and the air as pure. This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it is useful—83 it is more to be admired and enjoyed then, than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed, —the seventh should be man’s day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow,84 and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this wide-spread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature. But the veriest slave of avarice, the most devoted and selfish worshipper of Mammon, is toiling and calculating to some other purpose than the mere acquisition of the good things of this world; he is preparing, gradually and unconsciously it may be, to lead a more intellectual and spiritual life. Man cannot if he will, however degraded or sensual his existence, escape truth. She makes herself to be heard above the din and bustle of commerce, by the 79. Emerson had written, in NATURE in 1836, that:

NATURE: [Humankind’s] operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.

80. Emerson had written, in NATURE in 1836, that:

NATURE: The misery of man appears like childish petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens. What angels invented these splendid ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firmament of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of climates, this fourfold year? HDT WHAT? INDEX

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merchant at his desk, or the miser counting his gains, as well as in the retirement of the study, by her humble and patient follower. Our subject has its bright as well as its dark side.85 The spirit we are considering is not altogether and without exception bad. We rejoice in it as one more indication of the entire and universal freedom which characterizes the age in which we live — as an indication that the human race is making one more advance in that infinite series of progressions which awaits it. We rejoice that the history of our epoch will not be a barren chapter in the annals of the world, — that the progress which it shall record bids fair to be general and decided. We glory in those very excesses which are a source of anxiety to the wise and good, as an evidence that man will not always be the slave of matter, but erelong, casting off those earth-born desires which identify him with the brute, shall pass the days of his sojourn in this his nether paradise as becomes the Lord of Creation.86 Young Henry David Thoreau had been reading, during the preceding June and July, in a book published in Boston in 1832 which he twice checked out from the collection of his student club, the “Institute of 1770,” the Henning Gottfried Linberg translation of Professor Victor Cousin’s INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. He had also perused Mrs. William Minot’s review of that book, “Cousin’s Philosophy” in the North American Review (XXXV, December 1936) and may have seen the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson’s review of it in The Christian Examiner (XXI, 1836-1837:33-64). From this introduction to the CHRISTIAN EXAMINER

history of philosophy, on pages 186-7, he would have learned that any truth or interest considered exclusively inevitably invites displacement or change; that “all the points of view from which truth has been regarded, all the systems and the epochs which history describes, (though excellent in themselves,) are incomplete, and therefore, reciprocally destroy each other; yet there still remains something which preceded and which survives them, namely, humanity itself. Humanity embraces all things, it profits by all; and it advances always, 81. The earth was of course per GENESIS 1:3 contrived for our use. Emerson, in NATURE, quoted a similar conceit as found in a poem by George Herbert: Man is all symmetry, The stars have us to bed: Full of proportions, one limb to another, Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws. And to all the world besides. Music and light attend our head. Each part may call the farthest, brother; All things unto our flesh are kind, For head with foot hath private amity, In their descent and being; to our mind, And both with moons and tides. In their ascent and cause. Nothing hath got so far More servants wait on man But man hath caught and kept it as his prey; Than he’ll take notice of. In every path, His eyes dismount the highest star; He treads down that which doth befriend him He is in little all the sphere. When sickness makes him pale and wan. Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath Find their acquaintance there. Another to attend him. For us, the winds do blow, The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow; Nothing we see, but means our good, As our delight, or as our treasure; The whole is either our cupboard of food, Or cabinet of pleasure. 82. MATTHEW 18:12/13, LUKE 15:4,7. 83. NATURE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and athwart of every thing. And when I speak of humanity, I speak of all the powers which represent it in history; of industry, the state, religion, art, and philosophy.... In fact, humanity is superior to all its epochs. Every epoch aspires to make itself equivalent to humanity; it endeavors to measure its duration, to fill it, and to give a complete idea of humanity; ... therefore, each of these is good, in its time and its place; and it is also good that each of them should, in its turn, succeed and displace its predecessor.” Might it be from this that young Thoreau derived the sentiment he expressed at the conclusion of his piece, as to the “goodness” of the commercial spirit, and the optimism he expresses in regard to human nature?

Christian P. Gruber has, in THE EDUCATION OF HENRY THOREAU, HARVARD 1833-1837 (Ann Arbor MI: University Microfilms Publication 8077 of 1954, pages 193-5, 273-6), suggested that Henry David Thoreau may have been influenced by the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson’s NEW VIEWS OF CHRISTIANITY, SOCIETY, AND THE CHURCH, which had been published in the previous year in Boston and of which Thoreau owned a copy, as well as by the teaching skills of Professor Edward Tyrrell Channing.

84. GENESIS 3:19

WALDEN: For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. I have thoroughly tried school-keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good part of my fellow- men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business.

WALDEN: In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience that to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Joseph J. Kwiat has, in “Thoreau’s Philosophical Apprenticeship” (New England Quarterly XVIII,1945:61- 69), written of the manner in which Henry David Thoreau in this piece preferred the NATURE of Waldo Emerson over the NATURAL THEOLOGY: OR, EVIDENCES OF THE EXISTENCE AND ATTRIBUTES OF THE DEITY, COLLECTED FROM THE APPEARANCES OF NATURE of the Reverend William Paley.

At graduation from Harvard College, in addition to his commencement lecture, Henry David Thoreau prepared a page for his class’s yearbook in which he referred to Stoughton Hall and Hollis Hall as having “dank but classic walls” which had shut “his old, and almost forgotten friend, Nature” out.

[next screen] Since he ranked 4th among the 47 graduating seniors in Thoreau’s Harvard College graduating class who were receiving Bachelor of Arts Degrees, and since the parts of the graduation ceremony had been assigned on the basis of class standing, it was Charles Theodore Russell of Princeton, Massachusetts who stood up first, and delivered the salutatory oration in Latin. (As 19th in class standing, Thoreau had to wait through this, a conference, and an essay, before being able to participate in the conference to which he had been assigned.) One of the auditors, the Reverend John Pierce, thought that Russell’s piece “was well written and delivered, but spoken, as if he were disappointed in not having one of the English Orations.”87

85. By 1854 he no longer shared Cousin’s view of inevitable progress:

WALDEN: When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I could do, and its small profits might suffice, –for my greatest skill has been to want but little,– so little capital it required, so little distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I contemplated this occupation as most like theirs; ranging the hills all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter carelessly dispose of them; so, to keep the flocks of Admetus, I also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the city, by hay-cart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses every thing it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.

86. This reflects Cousin’s principal thesis in ECLECTICISM. “Lord of Creation” reflects GENESIS 3:19 as well as Emerson’s NATURE. 87. The Reverend John Pierce, MS journal, entry of 30 August 1837. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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David Henry Thoreau I am of French extract, my ancestors having taken refuge in the isle of Jersey, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, by Lewis 14th, in the year 1685. My grandfather came to this country about the year —73, “sans souci sans sous,” in season to take an active part in the Revolution, as a sailor before the mast. I first saw the light in the quiet village of Concord, of Revolutionary memory, July 12th 1817. I shall ever pride myself upon the place of my birth ———May she never have cause to be ashamed of her sons. If I forget thee, O Concord, let my right hand forget her cunning. Thy name shall be my passport in foreign lands. To whatever quarter of the world I may wander, I shall deem it my good fortune that I hail from Concord North Bridge. At the age of sixteen I turned my steps toward these venerable halls, bearing in mind, as I have ever since done, that I had two ears and but one tongue. I came —— I saw —— I conquered —— but at the hardest, another such a victory and I had been undone; “One branch more,” to use Mr. Quincy’s own words, “and you had been turned by entirely. You have barely got in.” However, “A man’s a man for a’ that,” I was in, and didn’t stop to ask how I got there. I see but two alternatives, a page or a volume. Spare me, and be thou spared, the latter. Suffice it to say, that though bodily I have been a member of Harvard University, heart and soul I have been far away among the scenes of my boyhood. Those hours that should have been devoted to study, have been spent in scouring the woods, and exploring the lakes and streams of my native village. Oft could I sing with the poet, My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart’s in the Higlands [sic] a-chasing the deer; Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe, My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.

The occasional day-dream is a bright spot in the student’s history, a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night, shedding a grateful lustre over long years of toil, and cheering him onward to the end of his pilgrimage. Immured within the dank but classic walls of a Stoughton or Hollis, his wearied and care-worn spirit yearns for the sympathy of his old, and almost forgotten friend, Nature, but failing of this is fain to have recourse to Memory’s perennial fount, lest her features, her teachings, and spirit-stirring revelations, be forever lost. Think not that my Classmates have no place in my heart —— but this is too sacred a matter even for a Class Book. “Friends! that parting tear reserve it, Tho’ ’tis doubly dear to me! Could I think I did deserve it, How much happier would I be.”

As to my intentions ——————— enough for the day is the evil thereof. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1838

George Payne Rainsford James’s THE HUGUENOT; A TALE OF THE FRENCH PROTESTANTS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots was performed at the Theatre d’Orleans in New Orleans. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1842

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots was performed, with success, in Berlin. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

May: “Went to [Judge William Emerson’s home “The Snuggery” at Castleton on] Staten Island, June, 1843, and returned in December, 1843, or to Thanksgiving.”88

A WEEK: It reminded me of the homesteads of the Huguenots, on Staten Island, off the coast of New Jersey. The hills in the interior of this island, though comparatively low, are penetrated in various directions by similar sloping valleys on a humble scale, gradually narrowing and rising to the centre, and at the head of these the Huguenots, who were the first settlers, placed their houses quite within the land, in rural and sheltered places, in leafy recesses where the breeze played with the poplar and the gum-tree, from which, with equal security in calm and storm, they looked out through a widening vista, over miles of forest and stretching salt marsh, to the Huguenot’s Tree, an old elm on the shore at whose root they had landed, and across the spacious outer bay of New York to Sandy Hook and the Highlands of Neversink, and thence over leagues of the Atlantic, perchance to some faint vessel in the horizon, almost a day’s sail on her voyage to that Europe whence they had come. When walking in the interior there, in the midst of rural scenery, where there was as little to remind me of the ocean as amid the New Hampshire hills, I have suddenly, through a gap, a cleft or “clove road,” as the Dutch settlers called it, caught sight of a ship under full sail, over a field of corn, twenty or thirty miles at sea. The effect was similar, since I had no means of measuring distances, to seeing a painted ship passed backwards and forwards through a magic-lantern.

88. Thanksgiving, in November, according to the Universal Traveller, was one of the occasions upon which traditionally apprentices “who are not permitted to visit their parental and rural homes more than twice in a year” were expected to travel home “to renew the bonds of affinity and affection under the paternal roof.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Immediately after arrival Henry Thoreau would come down with two and a half weeks of cold and bronchitis, then a month later he would have an attack of the family narcolepsy. Passing back and forth on the ferry between New-York and Staten Island, Thoreau would have repeatedly passed the immigration center at Castle Garden, a repurposed fortress structure which did not even as yet have a roof.89 Thoreau would visit the picture gallery of the National Academy of Design, but his haunts on Manhattan Island would be the New York Society Library and the Mercantile Library, and his reading list has recently been investigated.

Wm Emerson During this month, or before the 8th of the following month, Thoreau visited Henry James, Sr. at 21 Washington Place, New-York. Please note that William James was one year old, and Henry James, Jr. an infant, for some commentators in their simplicity and great-manitis have assumed that the Henry James with whom Thoreau talked in 1843 was “the novelist Henry James.” If Thoreau did talk with the novelist Henry James on this occasion, the novelist Henry James did not respond in any sophisticated fashion and did not in later life remember having encountered this Transcendentalist writer. (Thoreau and James Sr. had a 3-hour conversation and, replaying their chat for the benefit of readers of a Boston newspaper many years later after having become a Swedenborgian mystic, this aristocat alleged that Thoreau had been “literally the most childlike, unconscious, and unblushing egotist it has ever been my fortune to encounter.”) Professor Walter Harding’s take on this meeting was that it transformed the city of New York for Thoreau: whereas previously he had been

89. Very little of what Henry Thoreau saw now remains, as the building has been demolished back to its 1811 appearance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“ashamed of [his] eyes that beh[e]ld it,” the metropolis became by this visit to a cultivated gentleman’s home “naturalized and humanized.”

Later on in this year Henry James, Sr. took his family plus his wife’s sister Catherine Walsh on an extended trip to London and Paris.

It seems that Thoreau was reading in the Elizabethan and Jacobean poets (he would quote from the Reverend John Donne in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, using lines from “Obsequies on the Lord Harrington, Brother to the Countess of Bedford,” a line from “The Second Anniversary,” and lines from “Second Letter to the Countess of Huntington”).90

A WEEK: Undoubtedly, countless reforms are called for, because PEOPLE OF society is not animated, or instinct enough with life, but in the A WEEK condition of some snakes which I have seen in early spring, with alternate portions of their bodies torpid and flexible, so that they could wriggle neither way. All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant. “Virtues as rivers pass, But still remains that virtuous man there was.”

REVEREND JOHN DONNE

A WEEK: I dreamed this night of an event which had occurred long PEOPLE OF before. It was a difference with a Friend, which had not ceased A WEEK to give me pain, though I had no cause to blame myself. But in my dream ideal justice was at length done me for his suspicions, and I received that compensation which I had never obtained in my waking hours. I was unspeakably soothed and rejoiced, even after I awoke, because in dreams we never deceive ourselves, nor are deceived, and this seemed to have the authority of a final judgment. We bless and curse ourselves. Some dreams are divine, as well as some waking thoughts. Donne sings of one “Who dreamt devoutlier than most use to pray.”

REVEREND JOHN DONNE

90. Notice that since Staten Island is formed from the extreme terminal moraine of the farthest reaching advance of the ice of our current Ice Age, and that since Henry did not venture beyond Staten Island prior to the publication of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, in fact prior to the publication of WALDEN Thoreau had not once ever departed from the Walden Pond ice age landscape of detritus and erratic boulders! That landscape was in fact the sole landscape with which he had had any experience at all. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A WEEK: Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of PEOPLE OF men. A WEEK “He that hath love and judgment too, Sees more than any other doe.”

It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just, the magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with man. And it is well said by another poet, “Why love among the virtues is not known, Is that love is them all contract in one.”

REVEREND JOHN DONNE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 21, Friday: Henry Thoreau wrote to his sister Helen Louisa Thoreau in Roxbury MA from Staten Island, mentioning that tomatoes were being raised by the acre on this island on which Huguenots had settled, Dear Helen, I am not in such haste to write home when I remember that I make my readers pay the postage— But I believe I have not taxed you before.— I have pretty much explored this island — inland and along the shore — finding my health inclined me to the peripatetic philosophy— I have visited Telegraph Stations — Sailor's Snug Harbors — Seaman's Retreats — Old Elm Trees, where the Hugonots landed — Brittons Mills — and all the villages on the island. Last Sunday I walked over to Lake Island Farm — 8 or 9 miles from here — where Moses Prichard lived, and found the present occupant, one Mr Davenport formerly from Mass. — with 3 or four men to help him — raising sweet potatoes and tomatoes by the acre. It seemed a cool and pleasant retreat, but a hungry soil. As I was coming away I took my toll out of the soil in the shape of arrow-heads — which may after all be the surest crop — certainly not affected by drought.

and also describing immigrants he had seen on the streets of New-York, and speaking of the Quaker meeting shortly before July 7th, in the Hester Street meetinghouse in Brooklyn on Paumanok Long Island at which HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Lucretia Mott had spoken: I liked all the proceedings very well –their plainly greater harmony and sincerity than elsewhere. They do nothing in a hurry. Every one that walks up the aisle in his square coat and expansive hat– has a history, and comes from house to a house. The women come in one after another in their Quaker bonnets and handkerchiefs, looking all like sisters and so many chick-a-dees– At length, after a long silence, waiting for the spirit, Mrs Mott rose, took off her bonnet, and began to utter very deliberately what the spirit suggested. Her self-possession was something to say, if all else failed – but it did not. Her subject was the abuse of the BIBLE –and thence she straightway digressed to slavery and the degradation of woman. It was a good speech –transcendentalism in its mildest form. She sat down at length and after a long and decorous silence in which some seemed to be really digesting her words, the elders shook hands and the meeting dispersed. On the whole I liked their ways, and the plainness of their meeting house. It looked as if it was indeed made for service.

The biographer Henry Seidel Canby has commented, about this worship service, that “Already, and long before Emerson, [Henry Thoreau] sensed the dangerous quietism of the Quakers, which was to be content with solidity and reform, and let the spirit speak too mildly. Indeed, his final conclusion as to all these idealists is a distrust of reformers.” Canby seems not to have been aware that Quakerism had torn itself apart, and that the very person and presence of this Hicksite traveling minister, Mott, was a reproach to these evangelical Quakers Canby so rightly here contemns for their dangerous self-righteous and self-satisfied quietism. With an understanding of what was going on within Quakerism at that point, we must place quite a different interpretation on that particular worship. Clearly Thoreau had no inclination to mouth his favorite gibe at those HDT WHAT? INDEX

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who replace faith in deity with membership in community, “Why do all your prayers begin ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’?”

What precisely was it that Friend Lucretia said? The Herald incorrectly asserted that she handed her bonnet to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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another woman before beginning to speak and incorrectly asserted that a handkerchief was laid over the

railing, so there is little in its report that we can accept as reliable. Those who wish to learn how she spoke to the condition of a Henry Thoreau she somehow knew, must consult representative sermons that we know were accurately transcribed, such as “Abuses and Uses of the BIBLE,” “Likeness to Christ,” and “Keep Yourself from Idols.”91 One of the things she might have urged was:

“First that which is natural, afterwards that which is spiritual.” It is theology, not the Scriptures, that has degraded the natural … skepticism has become a religious duty –skepticism as to the scheme of salvation, the plans of redemption, that are abounding in the religious world … this kind of doubt, and unbelief are coming to be a real belief, and … a better theology will follow –has followed. … We need non- conformity in our age, and I believe it will come.

Another agenda she might have urged:

That while we are applying our principles to civil government we will not be unmindful of their application to ourselves in the regulation of our own tempers and in the government of our families, leading to the substitution of the law of peace and love.

Whatever. In that meeting at the Religious Society of Friends meeting-house on Hester Street in New York City shortly before July 7, 1843, despite the sectarian turmoil of the split between Hicksite and non-Hicksite Quakers, clearly Friend Lucretia Mott succeeded in putting a defensive 26-year-old man more or less at ease.

91. Mott 279-80. The volume does not, however, include a transcript of what she said at the Hester Street meeting in 1843 (which indicates there is more research that needs to be done, than I have as yet been able to do). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In this letter he characterized Horace Greeley as “cheerfully in earnest” and contrasted this with the “sadly in earnest” Reverend William Henry Channing with his Fourierist fantasies of resolving all human frictions. He mentioned obliquely that Greeley was at that point deeply involved in the creation of the Eagleswood intentional community — the New Jersey grounds of which, incidentally, he would one day, upon its failure and dissolution, be surveying into individual house lots: HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Staten Island July 21st 43

Dear Helen, I am not in such haste to write home when I remember that I make my readers pay the postage— But I believe I have not taxed you be- fore.— I have pretty much explored this island – inland and along the shore – finding my health inclined me to the peripatetic philoso- phy— I have visited Telegraph Stations – Sailor’s Snug Harbors – Seaman’s Retreats – Old Elm Trees, where the Hugonots landed – Brittons Mills – and all the villages on the island. Last Sunday I walked over to Lake Island Farm –8 or 9 miles from here– where Moses Prichard lived, and found the present occupant, one Mr Dav- enport formerly from Mass.– with 3 or four men to help him – rais- ing sweet potatoes and tomatoes by the acre. It seemed a cool and pleasant retreat, but a hungry soil. As I was coming away I took my toll out of the soil in the shape of arrow-heads – which may after all be the surest crop – certainly not affected by drought. I am well enough situated here to observe one aspect of the modern world at least – I mean the migratory – the western movement. Six- teen hundred imigrants arrived at quarrantine ground on the fourth of July, and more or less every day since I have been here. I see them occasionally washing their persons and clothes, or men women and children gathered on an isolated quay near the shore, stretching their limbs and taking the air, the children running races and swing- ing – on this artificial piece of the land of liberty – while their vessels are undergoing purification. They are detained but a day or two, and then go up to the city, for the most part without having landed here. In the city I have seen since I wrote last – WH Channing – at whose house in 15th St. I spent a few pleasant hours, discussing the all ab- sorbing question – What to do for the race. (He is sadly in earnest – — About going up the river to rusticate for six weeks— And issues a new periodical called The Present in September.)— Also Horace Greeley Editor of the Tribune – who is cheerfully in earnest. – at his office of all work – a hearty New Hampshire boy as one would wish to meet. And says “now be neighborly” – and believes only or main- ly, first, in the Sylvania Association somewhere in Pennsylvania – and secondly and most of all, in a new association to go into opera- tion soon in New Jersey, with which he is connected.— Edward Palmer came down to see me Sunday before last— As for Waldo and Tappan we have strangely dodged one another and have not met for some weeks. I believe I have not told you anything about Lucretia Motte. It was a good while ago that I heard her at the Quaker church in Hester St. She is a preacher, and it was advertised that she would be present HDT WHAT? INDEX

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on that day. I liked all the proceedings very well – their plainly greater harmony and sincerity than elsewhere. They do nothing in a hurry. Every one that walks up the aisle in his square coat and ex- pansive hat – has a history, and comes from a house to a house. The women come in one after another in their Quaker bonnets and hand- kerchiefs looking all like sisters and so many chic-a-dees— At length, after a long silence, waiting for the spirit, M{MS torn} Motte rose, took off her bonnet, and began to utter very deliberately what the spirit suggested. Her self-possession was something to say if all else failed – but it did not. Her subject was the abuse of the Bible – and thence she straightway digressed to Slavery and the degrada- tion of woman. It was a good speech – transcendentalism in its mild- est form. She sat down at length and after a long and decorous silence in which some seemed to be really digesting her words, the elders shook hands and the meeting dispersed. On the whole I liked their ways and the plainness of their meeting-house— It looked as if it was indeed made for service. I think that Stearns Wheeler has left a gap in the community not easy to be filled. Though he did not exhibit the highest qualities of the scholar, he possessed in a remark- able degree many of the essential and rarer ones – and his patient industry and energy – his reverent love of letters – and his proverbi- al accuracy – will cause him to be associated in my memory even with many venerable names of former days— It was not wholly unfit that so pure a lover of books should have ended his pilgrimage at the great book-mart of the world. I think of him as healthy and brave, and am confident that if he had lived he would have proved useful in more ways than I can describe— He would have been authority on all matters of fact – and a sort of connecting link between men and scholars of different walks and tastes. The literary enterprises he was planning for himself and friends remind me of an older and more studious time— So much then remains for us to do who sur- vive. Tell mother that there is no Ann Jones in the Directory. Love to all— Tell all my friends in Concord that I do not send m{sealing wax}e to them but retain it still. yr affectionate Brother H.D.T. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1845

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots began to be performed in New-York. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1846

Dismissed from the Methodist Church on an accusation of embezzlement, George Copway went to New-York to make of himself an identity-politics writer. Broadway! Bright lights! I’m gonna become famous!

In this year a local historian was calculating that the goods equivalent to 60 guilders as of 1626 that the Huguenot Peter Minuit (not a Dutchman) allegedly had offered in return for Manhattan Island would translate as the equivalent of $24, in 1846 US dollars. READ THE FULL TEXT

Per the lyric that Rogers and Hart would create about a century later, in 1939: Old Peter Minuit had nothing to lose When he bought the Isle of Manhattan For twenty-six dollars and a bottle of booze.... (So much for local history. Ever since we have been stuck with this magical number, $24, or that magical number, twenty-six dollars and a bottle of booze, in spite of the fact that since 1846 we have been experiencing something like two orders of magnitude of inflation in the value of that US dollar! –But it truly doesn’t matter in the slightest, since it is so overwhelmingly probable that this thirdhand account, that good old Peter Minuit actually had purchased Manhattan Island in 1626 on behalf of all white people everywhere is merely a nice story that the white people have been enjoying telling themselves!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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December 2, Wednesday: A deed of sale was witnessed by Henry Thoreau, for purchase for $1,239.56 of 41 acres at Walden Pond by Waldo Emerson.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN By this point in time Thoreau had finished his draft account of his visit to Maine, the one into which his readings in Herman Melville’s TYPEE had been interpolated. Eventually this reading would show up in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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published WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, in masked form as follows:

WALDEN: The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin- deep and unalterable. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Dec 2nd 23 geese in the pond this morn. flew over my house about 10 ’oclock in morn within gun shot. The ground has been covered with snow since Nov. 25th {Three-fourths page missing} {leaf missing} add lest one ray more than usual come into our eyes –a little information from the western heavens –and where are we?– ubique gentium sumus!– where are we as it is? Who shall say what is? He can only say how he sees. One man sees 100 stars in the heavens –another sees 1000– There is no doubt of it –but why should they turn their backs on one another, & join different sects– As for the reality no man sees it –but some see more and some less– what ground then is there to quarrel on? No man lives in that world which I inhabit –or ever came rambling into it– Nor did I ever journey in any other man’s– Our differences have frequently such foundation VENUS as if venus should roll quite near to the orbit of the earth one day –and two inhabitants of the respective planets should take the opportunity to lecture one another I have noticed that if a man thinks he needs 1000 dollars & cant be convinced that he does not –he will be found to have it. If he lives & thinks a thousand dollars will be forthcoming –though it be to by shoe-strings –they have got to come. 1000 mills will be just as hard to come to one who finds it equally hard to convince himself that he needs them. — — Of Emerson’s Essays I should say that they were not poetry –that they were not written exactly at the right crisis though inconceivably near to it. Poetry is simply a miracle & we only recognize it receding from us not coming toward us– It yields only tints & hues of thought like the clouds which reflect the sun –& not distinct propositions– In poetry the sentence is as one word –whose syllables are words– They do not convey thoughts but some of the health which he had inspired– It does not deal in thoughts –they are indifferent to it– A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression –fallen ripe into literature The poet has opened his heart and still lives– And it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured –but mortal eye can never dissect it– while it sees it is blinded. The wisest man –though he should get all the academies in the world to help him cannot add to or subtract one syllable from the line of poetry. If you can speak what you {Three leaves missing} and crownings. As the youth studies minutely the order and the degrees in the imperial procession and suffered none of its effect to be lost on him –so the man at last secured a rank in society which satisfied his notion of fitness & respectability He was defrauded of so much which the savage boy enjoys. Indeed he himself has occasion to say in this very autobiography, when at last he escapes into the woods without the gates –“Thus much is certain, that only the undefinable, wide-expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are adapted to the sublime, which, whenever it may be excited in us through external objects, since it is either formless, or else moulded into forms which are incomprehensible, must surround us with a grandeur which we find above our reach.” He was even too well-bred to be thoroughly bred. He says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of his townsmen– The child should have the full advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge –& is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure. “The law of nature break the rules of art” He further says of himself “I had lived among painters from my childhood, and had accustomed myself to look at objects, as they did, with reference to art.” This was his peculiarity in after years. His writings are not the inspiration of nature into his soul –but his own observations rather.”

After December 2: When I am stimulated by reading the biographies of literary men to adopt some method of educating myself and directing my studies –I can only resolve to keep unimpaired the freedom & wakefulness of my genius. I will not seek to accomplish much in breadth and bulk and loose my self in industry but keep my celestial relations fresh. No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert– What is a course of History –no matter how well selected –or the most admirable routine of life –and fairest relation to society –when one is reminded that he may be a Seer that to keep his eye constantly on the true and real is a discipline that will absorb every other. How can he appear or be seen to be well employed to the mass of men whose profession it is to climb resolutely the heights of life –and never lose a step he has taken Let the youth seize upon the finest and most memorable experience in his life –that which most reconciled him to his unknown destiny –and seek to discover in it his future path. Let him be sure that that way is his only true HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and worthy career. Every mortal sent into this world has a star in the heavens appointed to guide him– Its ray he cannot mistake– It has sent its beam to him either through clouds and mists faintly or through a serene heaven– He knows better than to seek advice of any. This world is no place for the exercise of what is called common sense. This world would be denied. Of how much improvement a man is susceptible –and what are the methods? When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion or say rather like a comet –for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and that direction it will ever revisit this system –its steam-cloud like a banner streaming behind like such a fleecy cloud as I have seen in a summer’s day –high in the heavens unfolding its wreathed masses to the light –as if this travelling and aspiring man would ere long take the sunset sky for his train in livery when he travelled – When I have heard the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth –with his feet and breathing fire and smoke– It seems to me that the earth has got a race now that deserves to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends. If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroes or as innocent and beneficent an omen as that which hovers over the parched fields of the farmer. If the elements did not have to lament their time wasted in accompanying men on their errands. If this enterprise were as noble as it seems. The stabler was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars to fodder and harness his steed –fire was awakened too to get him off– If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early– For all the day he flies over the country stopping only that his master may rest– If the enterprise were as disinterested as it is unwearied.– And I am awakened by its tramp and defiant snort at midnight while in some far glen it fronts the elements encased in ice and snow and will only reach its stall to start once more If the enterprise were as important as it is protracted. No doubt there is to follow a moral advantage proportionate to this physical one Astronomy is that department of physics which answers to Prophesy the Seer’s or Poets calling It is a mild a patient deliberate and contemplative science. To see more with the physical eye than man has yet seen to see farther, and off the planet –into the system. Shall a man stay on this globe without learning something –without adding to his knowledge –merely sustaining his body and with morbid anxiety saving his soul. This world is not a place for him who does not discover its laws. Dull Despairing and brutish generations have left the race where they found it or in deeper obscurity and night –impatient and restless ones have wasted their lives in seeking after the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life– These are indeed within the reach of science –but only of a universal and wise science to which an enlightened generation may one day attain. The wise will bring to the task patience humility (serenity) –joy – resolute labor and undying faith.I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer days travelling early in the morning and resting at noon in the shade by the side of some stream and resuming my journey in the cool of the evening– With a knapsack on my back which held a few books and a change of clothing, and a stout staff in my hand. I had looked down from Hoosack mountain where the road crosses it upon the village of North Adams in the valley 3 miles away under my feet –showing how uneven the earth sometimes is and making us wonder that it should ever be level and convenient for man, or any other creatures than birds. As the mountain which now rose before me in the Southwest so blue and cloudy was my goal I did not stop long in this village but buying a little rice and sugar which I put into my knapsack and a pint tin dipper I began to ascend the mt whose summit was 7 or 8 miles distant by the path. My rout lay up a long and spacious valley sloping up to the very clouds, between the principle ridge and a lower elevation called the Bellows. There were a few farms scattered along at different elevations each commanding a noble prospect of the mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the valley, on which near the head there was a mill It seemed a very fit rout for the pilgrim to enter upon who is climbing to the gates of heaven– now I crossed a hay field, and now over the brook upon a slight bridge still gradually ascending all the while with a sort of awe and filled with indefinable expectations as to what kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature I should come to at last– And now it seemed some advantage that the earth was uneven, for you could not imagine a more noble position for a farm and farm house than this vale afforded farther or nearer from its head, from all the seclusion of the deepest glen overlooking the country from a great elevation –between these two mountain walls. It reminded me of the homesteads on Staten Island, on the coast of New Jersey– This island which is about 18 miles in length, and rises gradually to the height of 3 or 400 feet in the centre, commands fine views in every direction, whether on the side of the continent or the ocean –and southward it looks over the outer bay of New York to Sandy Hook and the Highlands of Neversink, and over long island quite to the open sea toward the shore of europe. HUGUENOTS There are sloping valleys penetrating the island in various directions gradually narrowing and rising to the central table land and at the head of these the Hugenots the first settlers placed their houses quite in the land in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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healthy and sheltered places from which they looked out serenely through a widening vista over a distant salt prairie and then over miles of the Atlantic –to some faint vessel in the horizon almost a days sail on her voyage to Europe whence they had come. From these quiet nooks they looked out with equal security on calm and storm on fleets which were spell bound and loitering on the coast for want of wind and on tempest & shipwreck. I have been walking in the interior seven or eight miles from the shore, in the midst of rural scenery where there was as little to remind me of the ocean as amid these N H hills when suddenly through a gap in the hills –a cleft or “Clove road”, as the Dutch settlers called it I caught sight of a ship under full sail over a corn field 20 or thirty miles at sea. The effect was similar to seeing the objects in a magic lantern, passed back and forth by day-light since I had no means of measuring distance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1847

Dr. Elisha Kent Kane served with the United States Marine Corps. The Secretary of War sent him to Mexico City to deliver an oral message to General Winfield Scott and, during an encounter with guerillas, he was severely wounded. WAR ON MEXICO

At about this time the poinsettia plant was brought up from Mexico into the United States. It was introduced by, and named after, a man who like Thoreau was a descendant of French Huguenot religious refugees, Joel Roberts Poinsett. Poinsett was industrious, was frugal, was active in botany, and helped create a precursor organization to the Smithsonian Institution. Unfortunately, the resemblance to Thoreau ends there, for Squire Poinsett was a Charleston plantation slaveholder.92

92. Legally, there was a distinction between a slaveowner and a slaveholder. The owner of a slave might rent the custody and use of that slave out for a year, in which case the distinction would arise and be a meaningful one in law, since the other party to such a transaction would be the holder but not the owner. However, in this Kouroo database, I will ordinarily be deploying the term “slaveholder” as the normative term, as we are no longer all that concerned with the making of such fine economic distinctions but are, rather, concerned almost exclusively with the human issues involved in the enslavement of other human beings. I use the term “slaveholder” in preference to “slaveowner” not only because no human being can really own another human being but also because it is important that slavery never be defined as the legal ownership of one person by another — in fact not only had human slavery existed before the first such legislation but also it has continued long since we abolished all legal deployment of the term “slave.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1848

Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots was performed, for the first time in the Italian language, in London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

During this year and the following one, Draft F of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN ms:

WALDEN: Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, ^golden and emerald I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes- -fresh water dolphins dauphins eldest sons of Walden, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a ^quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates them far^by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock at least two days old whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. handsome artlovers [ILLEGIBLE] & gems --they^They are not green like the pines, nor gray like the stones nor blue like ^the sky; but they have, to my eye^eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like ^flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, of this great shell-- ^some solid opied &^the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are composed of Walden wholly^Walden all over and all through; are ^themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, ^Waldenses ^perhaps dolphins--dauphins eldest sons of Walden, for whose behalf this whole world is but a dauphin edition to study--It is surprising that these fishes^fish^they are caught here, –that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes there. ^Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their diluted^watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the subtile^thin air of heaven. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of heaven”: This is a reference not only to hanging, but to the hanging of the Huguenot saints in France after revocation of the Edict of Nantes, while the members of Thoreau’s family, the intermarried Thoreaus and Guillets, were fleeing to the relative safety offered by the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel. The pickerel of Walden Pond was of course a small pike, and the pike is named of course for its pointy head. Per FACTS ON FILE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WORD AND PHRASE ORIGINS, this is the fish that lifted its head from the water to observe the Crucifixion –– and it bears images of the cross, three nails, and a sword. You will remember that on page 40 of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, Thoreau imagines that his soul is “bright invisible green.” These great gold and emerald Waldenses are the ghosts of Thoreau’s Huguenot ancestors, translated before their time, by the believers of France, to the thin air of heaven. Hanged! I show, on the next page, an old illustration of Anne du Bourg dancing on air, and a 20th Century painting by N.C. Wyeth titled “Fishing Through the Ice,” and what I suggest is that the one is quite as apt an illustration of this passage from WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS as the other. No, more than that. I suggest that the painter Wyeth had no clue what Thoreau was talking about in this passage. He was trapped in the pikeresque, and might as well have been drawing Norman-Rockwellish kitsch covers for the Saturday Evening Post. But WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS is a book of pending issues, a book in which Brahmins hang suspended over flames on page 4, in which we hang conspirators from the tough rafters of the trees on page 208, in which still-living heads hang on either side of a warrior like ghastly trophies on page 231, in which a man thinks to hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies on page 326, in which a man stands on the gallows on page 327 and says “Tell the tailors to remember to make a knot in their thread before they take the first stitch” –although his companion’s prayer is forgotten,– and in which on page 330 our author chooses not to hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less. GALLOWS HUMOR

You may well wonder how I am going to make a connection between these two illustrations, of Anne du Bourg dancing on air and of a pickerel dancing on air, other than by offering that the pickerel, being a fish, evokes that old graphitum of primitive Christianity scratched into the walls of the catacombs of Rome.  = “fish” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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 = Jesus  = Christ  = God’s  = Son  = Savior

But the pickerel connection, once it is made, will be obvious to you, for Thoreau speaks of them as “Waldenses” and that word is only from the Medieval Latin Valdenses via the French Vaudois and the Italian Valdese. The followers of that “Peter Waldo” or “Pierre Vaudès” –who, in AD1170, in his thirtieth year, hired two priests to translate the Bible into common French, and then accepted the invitation of Luke 18:23 to sell all he had and give the proceeds to the poor– were medieval convinced persons who strived, until they were suppressed by Christians, to live in the manner of life portrayed in the Gospels. At his point of greatest acceptability, Waldo was confirmed in his vow of poverty by Pope Alexander III, although this dangerous man was most pointedly not granted permission to teach or preach about his convictions. His teaching was banned by Pope Lucius III in the bull Ad Abolendam issued at the Synod of Verona in AD1184. Innocent VIII declared in AD1487 that when a Christian kills one of the Waldenses –followers of the way of Waldo– he inherit his property if any. Those who embraced this discipline were variously termed Pauperes or “poor ones” (the entire subject of the first chapter of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS), Picards or “those who read the Bible for themselves” (thus Thoreau’s “pickerel” metaphor), Waldenses (to get this reference into his text, Thoreau pretends that “Waldenses” is merely a plural form for “Walden” like the more obvious “Waldens,” whereas “Waldenses” is a collective term), Vaudois and Valdese or “those who live in the valleys,” and finally “Huguenots” or people who have made a covenant, people who have “sought individual perfection apart from the Roman Church, rejected the official clergy, abstained from oaths and the use of force, and attempted in general to reintroduce primitive Christian fellowship and apostolic simplicity of living.”93

93. Reaman, G. Elmore. THE TRAIL OF THE HUGUENOTS IN EUROPE, THE UNITED STATES, SOUTH AFRICA AND CANADA. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1966, page 21. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Anne du Bourg said, in the presence of Henry II, in regard to his execution of a primitive Christian, that it was no small thing to condemn those who, amidst the flames, invoked the name of Jesus Christ. The penalty for saying this to the king was the usual penalty accorded to heretics in France in the late 1550s: suspension over a fire by a rope, and dipping in and out of the flames until death. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Pickerel dancing on air; N.C. Wyeth fishing for meaning through the ice of his own incomprehension HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

April: The Continental Monthly, a magazine devoted to literature and national policy, in its 4th issue, offered information in regard to “The Huguenot Families in America,” in particular in regard to the Huguenots of Ulster County in upstate New York: It is said that the lands of the early Huguenot settlers in Ulster County were so arranged in small lots, and within sight of each other, as to prevent surprise from the Indians whilst their owners were cultivating them. Louis Bevier, one of the most honored patentees, was the ancestor of the highly- respectable family bearing his name in that region. When he was about to leave France, his father became so exasperated, that he refused to bestow upon him the commonest civilities. Nor would he condescend to return the kind salutations of another son in the public streets, affectionately offered by the pious emigrant, and for the last time. Another of the patentees, Deyo, visited France to claim his confiscated estates, but, failing of success, returned. Kingston, at this early period, was the only trading post or village for the French Protestants, and sixteen miles distant from their settlement, although in a straight line. Paltz was not more than eight miles west of the Hudson River; this route, M. Deyo undertook, alone, to explore — but never returned. It was thought that the adventurous Huguenot died suddenly, or was devoured by the wild beasts. A truss and buckle which he owned were found about thirty years afterwards, at the side of a large hollow tree. His life seems to have been one full of toils and dangers, having endured severe sufferings for conscience’ sake, before he reached Holland from France. For days he concealed himself in hiding places from his persecutors, and without food, finally escaping alone in a fishing boat, during a terrific storm. The descendants of the Ulster Dubois are very influential and numerous in our day, but there is a tradition that this family at one time was in great danger of becoming extinct. For a long while it was the custom of parents to visit Kingston, for the purpose of having their children baptized. M. Dubois and wife were returning from such a pious visit, and while crossing the Roundout, on the ice, it gave way, plunging the horses, sleigh and party in the rapid stream. With great presence of mind, the mother threw her infant, an only son, upon a floating frozen cake, which, like the ark of Moses, floated him safely down the stream, until he was providentially rescued. For some time this child was the only male Dubois among the Paltz Huguenots, and had he perished on that perilous occasion, his family name would also have perished with him; still there were seven females of the same house, called the seven sisters, all of whom married among the most respectable French Protestant families. To no stock do more families in Ulster County trace their origin than HDT WHAT? INDEX

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that of Dubois. Some antiquarians deny this tradition of the seven sisters, but contend that they were Lefevres. There were two Le Fevres among the Ulster patentees. Their progenitors it is said were among those early Protestants of France who distinguished themselves for intellectual powers, prominence in the Reformed Church, with enduring patience under the severest trials, and death itself. Le Fevre, a doctor of theology, adorned the French metropolis when Paris caught the first means of salvation in the fifteenth century. He preached the pure gospel within its walls; and this early teacher declared “our religion has only one foundation, one object, one head, Jesus Christ, blessed forever. Let us then not take the name of Paul, of Apostles, or of Peter. The Cross of Christ alone opens heaven and shuts the gates of hell.” In 1524, he published a translation of the New Testament, and the next year a version of the Psalms. Many received the Holy Scriptures from his hands, and read them in their families, producing the happiest results. Margaret, the beautiful and talented Princess of Valois, celebrated by all the wits and scholars of the time, embraced the true Christianity, uniting her fortune and influence with the Huguenots, and the Reformation thus had a witness in the king’s court. She was sister to Francis the First, the reigning monarch. By the hands of this noble lady, the Bishop of Meuse sent to the king a translation of St. Paul’s Epistles, richly illuminated, he adding, in his quaint and beautiful language, “They will make a truly royal dish of fatness, that never corrupts, and having the power to restore from all manner of sickness. The more we taste them, the more we hunger after them, with desires that are ever fed and never cloyed.” Abraham Hasbroucq, which is the original orthography of the name among the patentees, was a native of Calais, and the first emigrant of that family to America, in 1675, with a party of Huguenot friends; they resided for a while in the Palatinate on the banks of the Rhine. To commemorate their kindness, when they reached our shores the new settlement was called “De Paltz,” now “New Paltz,” as the Palatinate was always styled by the Dutch. Here, also, the beautiful stream flowing through New Paltz was known by the name of Walkill, after the river Wael, a branch of the Rhine, running into Holland. The first twelve patentees, or the “Duzine,” managed the affairs of the infant settlement as long as they lived, and after their death it was a custom to elect a court officer from among the descendants of each, at the annual town meetings. For a long period they kept in one chest all the important papers of their property and land titles. The pastor or the oldest man had charge of the key, and reference was made to this depository for the settlement of all difficulties about boundaries. Hence they were free from legal suits as to their lands; and to this judicious, simple plan may be traced the well-known harmony of the numerous descendants in this region, — the fidelity of their landmarks, with the absence of litigation. We know of no region in our land where property has remained so HDT WHAT? INDEX

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long in the same families, as it has at New Paltz; since its first settlement, there has been a constant succession of intermarriages among the French descendants, and many continue to reside upon the venerable homesteads of their early and honored forefathers. Devoted as the Huguenots ever had been to the worship of the Almighty, one of their first objects at New Paltz was the erection of a church. It was built of logs, and afterwards gave place to a substantial edifice of brick, brought from Holland, the place answering the double purpose of church and fort. Their third house of worship was an excellent stone building, which served the Huguenots for eighty years, when it was demolished in 1839, and the present splendid edifice placed on the venerable spot and dedicated to the service of Almighty God. It is related that a clergyman of eccentric dress and manners, at an early period, would occasionally make a visit to New Paltz, and, for the purpose of meditation, would cross the Walkill in a canoe, to some large elms growing upon a bank opposite the church; on one occasion the stream was low, and while pushing across with a pole, it broke, and the Dominie, losing his balance, pitched overboard. He succeeded, however, in reaching the shore, and proceeded to the nearest house, for the purpose of drying his clothes. This partly accomplished, he entered the pulpit and informed his congregation that he had intended to have preached a sermon on baptism; but, eyeing his garments, he observed that circumstances prevented, as he could now sympathize with Peter, and take the text, “Lord, save, or I perish.” To serve God according to the dictates of their own conscience, had ever been a supreme duty with the French Protestants, and paramount to everything else. For this they had endured the severest persecutions in France, and had sacrificed houses, lands, kindred and their native homes; they had crossed a trackless ocean, and penetrated the howling wilderness, inhabited by savage tribes — and for what? — To serve their MAKER, and the RIGHTS OF CONSCIENCE. They had been the salt of France, and brought over with them their pious principles, with their Bibles, — the most precious things. Some of these faded volumes are still to be found among the children of the American Huguenots, and we have often seen and examined one of the most venerable copies. It is Diodati’s French Bible, with this title:— LA SAINTE BIBLE, INTERPRETEE PAR JEAN DIODATI, MDCXLIII. IMPRIMEE A GENEVE. The sacred book is 219 years old, in excellent condition, and well covered with white dressed deerskin, its ties of the same HDT WHAT? INDEX

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material. It was brought to America by Louis Bevier, a French Protestant of Ulster, and has been preserved as a precious family relic through nine generations. It was carried from France to Holland, and thence to New Paltz. “Blessed Book! the hands of holy martyrs have unfolded thy sacred pages, and their hearts been cheered by thy holy truths and promises!” There is also a family record written in the volume, faintly legible, of the immediate descendants of Louis Bevier and his wife, Maria Lablau, from the year 1674 to 1684. Above anything else did the Huguenots of France love their BIBLES. Various edicts, renewed in 1729, had commanded the seizure and destruction of all books used by the Protestants, and for this purpose, any consul of a commune, or any priest, might enter the houses to make the necessary search. We may therefore compute by millions the volumes destroyed in obedience to these royal edicts. On the 17th of April, 1758, about 40,000 books were burned at one time in Bordeaux; and it is also well known that at Beaucaire, in 1735, there was an auto-da-fé almost equal to that of Bordeaux. It was a truly sad day, in France, when the old family BIBLE must be given up; the book doubly revered and most sacred, because it was the WORD of GOD, and sacred too from the recollections connected with it! Grandparents, parents, and children, all, from their earliest infancy, had daily seen, read and touched it. Like the household deities of the ancients, it had been always present at all the joys and sorrows of the family. A touching custom inscribed on the first or last pages, and at times even upon its margins, the principal events in all those beloved lives. Here were the Births, Baptisms, Marriages, and the Deaths. Now all these tender, pious records must perish at once in the flames. But mind, immortal mind, could not be destroyed; for free thought, and truth, and instruction, among the people, were companions of the Reformation, and books would circulate among all ranks throughout Protestant France. The works generally came from Holland through Paris, and from Geneva, by Lyons or Grenoble. Inside of baled goods, and in cases and barrels of provisions, secretly, thousands of volumes were sent from north to south, from east to west, to the oppressed Huguenots. The great work which Louis XIV. believed buried beneath the ruins of his bloody edicts still went on silently. At Lausanne was established a seminary, about the year 1725, where works for the French Protestant people were printed and circulated. The Bishop of Canterbury, with Lord Warke, and a few foreign sovereigns, actively assisted in the founding of this institution. Thus did that beautiful town become the source of useful and religious knowledge to thousands, although it was conveyed far and wide in a very quiet and secret way. One man was condemned to the galleys for having received barrels, marked “Black and White Peas,” which were found full of “Ostervald’s Catechisms.” How strange it seems to us, writing in our own Protestant land, that cruel authority should ever have intervened with matters of faith! What can be more plain or truthful than that there HDT WHAT? INDEX

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should be liberty of conscience; and that God alone has the power and the right to direct it, and that it is an abuse and a sacrilege to come between God and conscience? After the revocation of the edict of Nantes and the death of Louis XIV., his royal successor sometimes vaguely asked himself why he persecuted his Protestant subjects? when his marshal replied, that his majesty was only the executor of former edicts. He seemed to have consoled himself that he had found the system already established, and he only carried out the errors of his predecessor. Forty years of remorseless persecutions against his best subjects, without asking himself why! Of all the weaknesses of his reign, this was the most odious and the most guilty; his hand was most literally weary of signing cruel edicts against the Protestants of his kingdom, without even reading them, and which obedience to his mandates had to transcribe in letters of fire and blood, on the remotest parts of his realm. Let us return to the Frenchmen of Ulster, who for some time after their emigration used their own language, until a consultation was held to determine whether this, or the English or Dutch, should be adopted in the families. As the latter was generally spoken in the neighboring places,—Kingston, Poughkeepsie and Newburgh,—and also at the schools and churches, it was decided to speak Dutch only to their children and servants. Having for a while, however, continued the use of their native tongue, some of the Huguenot descendants in the Paltz still write their names as their French ancestors wrote them more than two centuries ago. Dubois, Bevier, Deyeau, Le Fevre, Hasbroque, are well-known instances. Petronella was once an admired name among the Huguenot ladies, and became almost extinct in Ulster at one time. The last was said to have been Petronella Hasbroque, a lady distinguished for remarkable traits of character. Judge Hasbroque, of Kingston, the father of the former President of Rutger’s College, was very anxious that his son would give this name to one of his daughters. In case of compliance, a handsome marriage portion was also promised; but the parents declined the generous offer, whether from a dislike to the name, or a belief that the property would be theirs, at any rate, some day, is not known. A granddaughter, however, of a second generation, named her first- born Petronella, and thus gratifying the desire of her near kinsman, secured a marriage portion for the heir, and preserved the much-admired name from oblivion — certainly three important results. It was a well-known and distinguished trait of the New Paltz Huguenots, that but few intermarriages have taken place among their own families (Walloon); they differed in this respect from all other French Protestants who emigrated to America and mingled with the other population by matrimonial alliances. In Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and other neighborhoods, near by, there is an unusual number of Dutch names — the Van Deusens, Van Benschotens, Van Kleeds, Van Gosbeeks, Van De Bogerts, Van Bewer, and others, almost ad infinitum, whilst for miles around HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the populous and wealthy town of Old Paltz scarcely a family can be found with such patronymics. Notwithstanding, somewhat like the Israelites, these Frenchmen classed themselves, in a measure, as a distinct and separate people; still, the custom did not arise from any dislike to the Hollanders, — on the contrary, they were particularly attached to that people, who had been their best friends, both in Holland and America; and these associations were ever of a most friendly and generous character. After a while, the Huguenots of Ulster adopted not only the language, but the customs and habits of the Dutch. After the destruction of the Protestant churches at Rochelle, in 1685, the colonists of that city came in such numbers to the settlement of New York, that it was necessary sometimes to print public documents not only in Dutch and English, but French also. We do not wish to make our articles a Doomsday-book for the Huguenots, still it is pleasant for their descendants to know that they came from such honorable stock, and, with all of our boasted republicanism, we are not ashamed that we are so born. Here are some of the names to be found in the old records of Ulster:— Abraham Hausbrough, Nicholas Antonio, “Sherriffe” Moses Quartain, “Leon,” Christian Dubois, Solomon Hasbrook, Andries Lafeever, Hugo Freer, Peter Low, Samuel Boyce, Roeleff Eltinge, “Esq.,” Nicholas Roosa, Jacobus DeLametie, Nicholas Depew, “Esq.,” Philip Viely, Boudwyn Lacounti, “Capt.” Zacharus Hoofman, “Lieut.” Benjamin Smedes, Jr., “Capt.” Christian Dugo, James Agmodi, Johannis Low, Josia Eltin, Samuel Sampson, Lewis Pontenere, Abra. Bovier, Peter Dejo, Robert Cain, Robert Hanne, William Ward, Robert Banker, John Marie, Jonathan Owens, Daniel Coleman, Stephen D’Lancey, Eolias Nezereau, Abraham Jouneau, Thomas Bayeuk, Elia Neau, Paul Droilet, Augustus Jay, Jean Cazeale, Benjamin Faneil, Daniel Cromelin, John Auboyneau, Francis Vincent, Ackande Alliare, James Laboue (Minister). In 1713-14 we find, in an address of the ministers and elders of the Huguenot Church in New York, “Louis Rou, Minister of the French Church, in New York, John Barberie, Elder, Louis Cané, ancien (the older), Jean Lafont, ancien, André Feyneau, ancien.” To another religious document there are Jean la Chan, Elias Pelletrau, Andrew Foucault, James Ballereau, Jaque Bobin, N. Cazalet, Sam’l Bourdet, David Le Telier, Francois Bosset. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1880

A history of the Huguenot settlement in Oxford, Massachusetts, George F. Daniels’s THE HUGUENOTS IN THE NIPMUCK COUNTRY OR OXFORD PRIOR TO 1713, WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (Boston: Estes & Lauriat). HUGUENOTS IN OXFORD HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1884

September: William D. Ely drew a plan of a fortification that had existed in Oxford, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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October 2, Thursday: A monument was erected to honor the Huguenot setters of Oxford, Massachusetts.

WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1885

The two volumes of the Reverend Charles Washington Baird’s HISTORY OF THE HUGUENOT EMIGRATION TO AMERICA: READ BAIRD’S VOL. I READ BAIRD’S VOL. II HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1924

The 300th anniversary of the Huguenot diaspora:

WIKIPEDIA’S LIST OF HUGUENOTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1985

French President Mitterrand officially apologized, on behalf of the French government and the French people, for King Louis XIV’s diktat revoking the 1598 Edict of Nantes in 1685. A commemorative postage stamp was issued in honor of the Huguenot diaspora, characterizing this our modern era as under the suasion of “Tolerance, Pluralism, Brotherhood.”

Even the Russians evidently were getting in the spirit of “Tolerance, Pluralism, Brotherhood,” as Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko as Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, was in this year declaring “Glasnost” and “Perestroika” upon all and sundry.

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Huguenots HDT WHAT? INDEX

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 26, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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