mother country. One of these communities, comprising
from seventy to eighty families, found their way to the banks of
the Santee in South Carolina.* From this point they gradually spread
themselves out so as to embrace, in partial settlements, the spacious
tract of country stretching to the Winyah, on the one hand, and
the sources of Cooper River on the other; extending upward into the
interior, following the course of the Santee nearly to the point where
it loses its identity in receiving the descending streams of the
Wateree and Congaree. These settlers were generally poor. They had been
despoiled of all their goods by the persecutions which had driven them
into exile. This, indeed, had been one of the favorite modes by which
this result had been effected. Doubtless, also, it had been, among the
subordinates of the crown, one of the chief motives of the persecution.
It was a frequent promise of his Jesuit advisers, to the vain and
bigoted Louis, that the heretics should be brought into the fold of the
Church without a drop of bloodshed; and, until the formal revocation of
the edict of Nantz, by which the Huguenots were put without the pale and
protection of the laws, spoliation was one of the means, with others,
by which to avoid this necessity. These alternatives, however, were of
a kind not greatly to lessen the cruelties of the persecutor or the
sufferings of the victim. It does not fall within our province to detail
them. It is enough that one of the first and most obvious measures
by which to keep their promise to the king, was to dispossess the
proscribed subjects of their worldly goods and chattels. By this measure
a two-fold object was secured. While the heretic was made to suffer, the
faithful were sure of their reward. It was a principle faithfully kept
in view; and the refugees brought with them into exile, little beyond
the liberties and the virtues for which they had endured so much. But
these were possessions, as their subsequent history has shown, beyond
all price.

* Dalcho, in his Church History, says, "upwards of one
hundred families."

Our humble community along the Santee had suffered the worst privations
of their times and people. But, beyond the necessity of hard labor, they
had little to deplore, at the outset, in their new condition. They had
been schooled sufficiently by misfortune to have acquired humility. They
observed, accordingly, in their new relations, a policy equally prude