Our humble community along the Santee had suffered the worst privations of their times and people. But, beyond the necessity of hard labor, they had little to deplore, at the outset, in their new condition.
They had been schooled sufficiently by misfortune to have acquired humility.
They observed, accordingly, in their new relations, a policy equally prudent and sagacious. More flexible in their habits than the English, they conciliated the latter by deference; and, soothing the unruly passions of the Indians -- the Santee and Sewee tribes, who were still in considerable numbers in their immediate neighborhood --they won them to alliance by kindness and forbearance. From the latter, indeed, they learned their best lessons for the cultivation of the soil.
That, upon which they found themselves, lay in the unbroken forest.
The high lands which they first undertook to clear, as less stubborn, were most sterile; and, by a very natural mistake, our Frenchmen adopted the modes and objects of European culture; the grains, the fruits and the vegetables, as well as the implements, to which they had been accustomed. The Indians came to their succor, taught them the cultivation of maize, and assisted them in the preparation of their lands; in return for lessons thought equally valuable by the savages, to whom they taught, along with gentler habits and morals, a better taste for music and the dance! To subdue the forest, of itself, to European hands, implied labors not unlike those of Hercules.
But the refugees, though a gentle race, were men of soul and strength, capable of great sacrifices, and protracted self-denial.
Accommodating themselves with a patient courage to the necessities before them, they cheerfully undertook and accomplished their tasks.
We have more than one lively picture among the early chroniclers of the distress and hardship which they were compelled to encounter at the first. But, in this particular, there was nothing peculiar in their situation. It differed in no respect from that which fell to the lot of all the early colonists in America. The toil of felling trees, over whose heavy boughs and knotty arms the winters of centuries had passed;the constant danger from noxious reptiles and beasts of prey, which, coiled in the bush or crouching in the brake, lurked day and night, in waiting for the incautious victim; and, most insidious and fatal enemy of all, the malaria of the swamp, of the rank and affluent soil, for the first time laid open to the sun; these are all only the ordinary evils which encountered in America, at the very threshold, the advances of European civilisation.
That the Huguenots should meet these toils and dangers with the sinews and the hearts of men, was to be expected from their past experience and history.
They had endured too many and too superior evils in the old world, to be discouraged by, or to shrink from, any of those which hung upon their progress in the new. Like the hardy Briton, whom, under the circumstances, we may readily suppose them to have emulated, they addressed themselves, with little murmuring, to the tasks before them.
We have, at the hands of one of their number, -- a lady born and raised in affluence at home, -- a lively and touching picture of the sufferings and duties, which, in Carolina, at that period, neither *** nor age was permitted to escape. "After our arrival," she writes, "we suffered every kind of evil. In about eighteen months our elder brother, unaccustomed to the hard labor we were obliged to undergo, died of a fever. Since leaving France, we had experienced every kind of affliction, disease, pestilence, famine, poverty and hard labor!
I have been for six months together without tasting bread, working the ground like a slave; and I have even passed three or four years without always having it when I wanted it. I should never have done were I to attempt to detail to you all our adventures."*--
* The narrative of Mrs. Judith Manigault, wife of Peter Manigault, as quoted by Ramsay. -- Hist. S. C. Vol. I., p. 4.
For a graphic detail of the usual difficulties and dangers attending the escape of the Huguenots from France, at the period of migration, see the first portion of this letter.
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We may safely conclude that there was no exaggeration in this picture.
The lot of all the refugees seems to have been very equally severe.
Men and women, old and young, strove together in the most menial and laborious occupations. But, as courage and virtue usually go hand in hand with industry, the three are apt to triumph together.
Such was the history in the case of the Carolina Huguenots.
If the labor and the suffering were great, the fruits were prosperity.
They were more. Honors, distinction, a goodly name, and the love of those around them, have blessed their posterity, many of whom rank with the noblest citizens that were ever reared in America.
In a few years after their first settlement, their forest homes were crowned with a degree of comfort, which is described as very far superior to that in the usual enjoyment of the British colonists.
They were a more docile and tractable race; not so restless, nor -- though this may seem difficult to understand to those who consider their past history -- so impatient of foreign control.
Of their condition in Carolina, we have a brief but pleasing picture from the hands of John Lawson, then surveyor-general of the province of North Carolina.* This gentleman, in 1701, just fifteen years after its settlement, made a progress through that portion of the Huguenot colony which lay immediately along the Santee.
