Carolyn Brown:
Well, good afternoon everyone.  I am Carolyn Brown.  I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs in the John W.  Kluge Center here at the Library.  It gives me great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon for what I'm sure will be a fascinating lecture by Professor Owen Stanwood who this year has been here in the Kluge Center as one of our Kluge Fellows.  Professor Stanwood will be speaking on the "Second Great Migration: Religious Refugees And The Remaking Of America, 1678 to 1690."  Professor Stanwood is Assistant Professor of History at The Catholic University of America, down the street from us.  He received his B.A. from Grinnell College and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University.  

His talk today is based on research for a larger project, his book with an evolving title.  The current iteration of the title is "Popish Plots and Imperial Designs: The Making of British America 1678 to 1700."  We know he's working hard; he actually has an advance contract for his book.  But if you look at his Vitae, you'll see that he has a number of articles and chapters towards books either written or in press.  He's written numerous book reviews, given conference papers, he's been working really hard on this general subject.  

I asked him how the genesis of today's talk and he said that he had noticed that there were religious refugees in the U.S. in this period, 1678 up to the 1700s, who were part of the religious and cultural political formulation of the U.S. and yet hadn't received a lot of attention.  He thought it would be kind of useful to take a look at the impact of these religious refugees in the whole formation of what was to become the United States.  You can tell, and I have little more conversation revealed that Owen is one who stays close to the sources, which aren't that easy to find when you're talking about the pre-U.S. in its earliest formulating stages.  He describes himself -- a wonderful term, all you historians out there -- as a scavenger, as someone -- I immediately conjured up an image of him creeping through books and articles and letters and turning and peeking and what not --but that is the way historians do work when they stay close to the sources.  

So today we have an opportunity to find out what our hunter and gatherer has found as he's been here in an institution, which actually is a very good place to go hunting and gathering.  But I ask you, then, to please welcome Professor Owen Stanwood, historian and scavenger.

[applause]

Owen Stanwood:
Thank you all for coming and thank you, Carolyn, for that great introduction.  I prefer scavenger to another term I've been called which is "archive rat" -- 

[laughter]

-- which for some reason has never sounded very complimentary to me.  I'd also like to thank everybody at the Kluge Center and the Library of Congress.  This has really been a wonderful place to spend the last seven months or so.  It's really made the difference, I think, between finishing the book by the time I'm supposed to finish it and not finishing the book by the time I'm supposed to finish it, so I'm very grateful for all the assistance.

I have to apologize.  I'm surrounded by all this equipment, and I have nothing to show you on the screen.

[laughter]

But I do have a handout, so this is very low tech.

I'm going to start my talk today with a grisly story.  On May 3, 1679, the leader of Scotland's Episcopal Church, Archbishop James Sharp, was traveling from Edinburgh home to St. Andrew's.  A group of armed men began shooting at his coach forcing it to stop.  Then they opened up the coach, dragged Sharp to the ground and started hacking at his head and neck with their swords until he died.  All this happened in front of Sharp's daughter and servants while they looked on.  

This level of brutality was necessary, the murders later said, because Sharp had summoned up his magical powers and made himself impervious to their bullets.  This was not a good kind of magic.  Sharp was, in their minds, a very, very bad man.  As they rode off, the murders cried, "The Judas was killed." Soon this incident pushed Scotland into a civil war and the early 1680's are known in Scottish history as "Killing Times," when radical Presbyterians, like these murderers known as "Covenanters," fought tooth-and-nail with partisans of King Charles II over the settlement between church and state.

Now this may seem an odd place to begin a talk about Colonial American history, but, in fact, this incident on the moors of Scotland eventually impacted the English colonies thousands of miles across the ocean.  The main link was a man named William Kelso.  Kelso was a surgeon and a radical Covenanter.  He may have been one of the murderers who killed Sharp that day or he might have joined them later, but there's no doubt that he was part of their party.  

After the Covenanters were defeated at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1680, Kelso, like many others, was on the run.  He first escaped to Northern Ireland, donning a wig in order to escape Scotland unnoticed.  Then he made his way to Dublin and later to London, but all of these places were dangerous for a wanted man like Kelso.  

So in 1681 he signed up as a doctor on a ship bound for New England, a place where he might finally be safe.  Once he got to Boston, Kelso found himself a virtual celebrity.  According to his employer, he "insinuated himself with several of the magistrates and preachers in that Colony by telling them he was a Scotch gentleman and a Covenanter." These magistrates even ordered him discharged from his employment and when the ship captain, who had been his boss, refused to pay Kelso back wages, the magistrates imprisoned the captain and confiscated his ship.  

Now we don't know what happened to Kelso in the end.  He kind of drops off the records.  But clearly he had made a very good decision when he came to New England.  

Now this story provides a good backdrop for my talk for a couple of reasons.  First of all, the killing of Sharp represented one of the starting points to a period of religious strife in Western Europe, as old disputes over church and state re-emerged, not just in Scotland, but in England, France and other places as well.  These disputes had massive political effects, eventually contributing to a revolution of government in England, the Glorious Revolution, and changing the geo-political balance on the Continent.  

That story is well known, but few have appreciated the role that American colonies played in the crisis.  European religious disputes caused a mass exodus, a second Great Migration similar to an earlier movement of Puritans to New England in the 1630s, which brought thousands of people, like Kelso, to the Colonies as refugees or as prisoners of war.  Now in terms of numbers, this migration was not all that significant, but these were not ordinary travelers.  They were religious zealots, political activists and, in many cases, accomplished propagandists.  In collective terms, they ensured that America had a place in contemporary debates about religion and politics that rocked the Christian world.  

By the end of the century, the Colonies looked starkly different from what they had before.  I would argue that these migrants played a role in that transformation, far out of proportion to their actual numbers.  In the next few minutes, what I will do is outline this migration, its causes in Europe and its consequences in America.  As my title indicates, I owe a lot to previous studies of movements of people, especially the Puritan migration of the 1630s.  But in other ways, this study is very different.  Most importantly, you're going to hear virtually no statistics today --

[laughter]

-- partially because I don't think there are reliable statistics out there and partially because I think that's not really the point of this migration.  Also, I'm not going to tell you very much about ordinary people.  Instead, what I'm going to do is relate the stories of a number of migrants who were most certainly not ordinary, who were not normal.  Indeed, I think it was their very lack of normalcy that led them to the American colonies, which were, at this time, certainly not normal places.

I'm going to start with a man named Benjamin Harris.  This is in the year 1678.  Harris was in his early 30s.  He lived in London.  He was a member of the Stationers' Company of London, a printer and seller of books.  In this, he was not that different from any number of artisans in the City of London except that, being a bookseller and a printer, Harris's craft brought him much closer to political and religious controversy than most of the city's middling inhabitants.  In addition, Benjamin Harris was a Baptist, and while he printed and sold books on any number of topics, basically anything that would sell, he did gravitate towards those works that reflected his beliefs.  

In the 1670s he lived in a controversial time.  English people were consumed by fear of two different kinds.  On one hand, Charles II, the King, and many of his ministers feared the Dissenters from the Church of England, people like Harris, were inherently rebellious and disloyal and that they intended to undermine royal government and push the kingdom toward civil war.  Remember, England had had a civil war in the 1640s.  

On the other hand, many people thought that the real threat came not from Dissenters but from Catholics who intended to infiltrate the court and subvert the English Constitution.  The King's brother and heir to the throne, James, Duke of York, was a confirmed Papist and many people close to the King seemed to have sympathies with Catholicism and what their opponents referred to as "the French interest" because it was associated with Louis XIV in France.  These two kinds of fear dominated England's politics and the life of this humble bookseller shows us how.

In 1678, rumors circulated around the capital of a Popish Plot, a design by foreign and domestic Papists to kill the King, burn the City of London and force the inhabitants to convert to Catholicism.  This Plot was entirely fictional, but it touched a nerve.  After all, the French King, Louis XIV, was at that same time busy consolidating power on the continent and the heir to the English and Scottish thrones was Catholic.  

Printers, people like Harris, played a leading role in making their countrymen aware of the Popish Plot.  In some ways, this was just good business, but clearly Harris believed in the cause.  He saw his country as under siege, in danger of subversion from these Catholics at any moment.  In 1679, he started publishing an anti-Catholic newspaper called Domestic Intelligence, which basically carried rumors of various Popish Plots around the World and made English people aware of them.  He also took the lead in publishing books and tracts, usually written by other people detailing the Popish threat and telling English people what they could do to prevent it.  

Now the most radical of these tracts was called Appeal from the Country to the City.  Harris didn't write it and may not have been the primary publisher but he definitely sold the tract in his bookshop.  The Appeal detailed what would happen if the Popish Plot succeeded, and it's worth quoting at length because it helps to explain why so many people were so afraid of this Catholic threat that to us seems a bit farfetched.  

Now the Catholic invasion would not be a pretty site.  First, the Papists would set London on fire.  "The whole town in aflame, occasioned the second time by the same popish malice which set it on fire before." This was a reference to 1666, the Great London Fire, which many Londoners still believed was set by Catholics.  "Then a military invasion.  Troops of Papists ravishing your wives and your daughters, dashing your little children's brains out against the walls, plundering your houses and cutting your own throats by the name of 'Heretic Dogs.'" This, while we can't tell, is a reference to the Irish Rebellion of 1641 which had been the greatest example Protestants had of savage Catholic violence.  

"If you happen to survive this then torture and fire.  Your father or your mother or some of your nearest and dearest relations tied to a stake in the midst of flames when with hands and eyes lifted up to heaven, they scream and cry out to God for whose cause they die, which was a frequent spectacle the last time Popery reigned amongst us," a reference to Bloody Mary's reign, the last Catholic monarch in the 1650s.  "And if all this wasn't bad enough, your wives and daughters raped, your house in ruins, your parents burned at the stake, your throat cut, business would also suffer."

[laughter]

"Your trading is bad and, in a manner, lost already but the only commodity will be fire and sword, the only object, women running with their hair about their ears, men covered with blood, children sprawling under horses feet, and only the walls of houses left standing."

Now this tract caused a sensation but publishing it was not a particularly good career move for Harris as it landed him in serious trouble with the authorities.  The Appeal was not openly disloyal.  Its professed aim was to protect the King from his would-be assassins, but it made a very dangerous claim.  It implied that the solution to the problem was excluding the Duke of York, the Catholic heir, from the throne and replacing him with the King's illegitimate son, James, Duke of Monmouth, who was a soldier and adventurer who at least was a confirmed Protestant.  

This debate over whether or not a Catholic could inherit the throne divided the English political nation.  Those who answered in the negative became known as Tories.  Most of them were not Catholic, but they believed that the royal succession was ordained by God and could not be changed at a whim.  Such things could lead to anarchy.  Their opponents were the Whigs who increasingly argued that the King's power had limits and that parliament, in particular, could set those limits.  

Harris was basically a scapegoat in this political struggle.  He was arrested and put on trial for publishing a seditious pamphlet, found guilty and forced to spend hours in the pillory while the common hangman burned the Appeal in front of him.  The judge declared the tract to be "...as base a piece as ever was contrived in Hell, either by Papists or the blackest rebel that ever was, designed only to rake up all sedition and rebellion." Harris also had to pay 500 pounds, which was an excessive amount.  It meant that he spent nearly a year in Newgate Prison.  While he ultimately got relief, Harris's trial was part of a much larger campaign against printers and Dissenters in London and elsewhere in England.  

During the 1680s there were rumors of a number of Presbyterian Plots.  These were basically the counterpart of the Popish Plot in which Dissenters were rumored to be trying to kill the King.  This meant that there were gangs of ruffians wandering around London.  They were shutting down printing houses.  They were throwing dissenting preachers in jail and boarding up their churches.  So this was a very bad time to be someone like Harris in London.  By 1685, just like the Appeal had warned, Harris was basically living in fear of his life and business was terrible.  

In 1685, things got even worse.  First, in England, James II finally became King after his brother died, an event that caused far less controversy than one might expect but did inspire the Duke of Monmouth to raise up a force to try to invade England, one which the King easily put down.  This defeat led to another crackdown on Dissenters, and it was this time that Harris, "To save my life and family from ruin, I was compelled to be an exile from my native country."  

Now he was not alone.  Many of the more prominent of the dissenting community, like John Locke the philosopher, were already in exile, mostly in the Netherlands.  America, on the other hand, tended to appeal to people with a bit less money.  In addition, the largest number of migrants to America had no choice in the matter, at all.  They were prisoners, mostly humble artisans, who had taken up arms against the King for Monmouth and most of them ended up as indentured servants in the West Indies.  

Now if life was bad for Harris, he knew that things were even worse in other parts of Europe.  Scottish Covenanters had been on the run since Kelso's time, and many of them ended up in America as well, including a number of very prominent nobles.  But perhaps the largest single number of migrants came from France, which was experiencing its own crises in the 1680s.  Now France, of course, was a Catholic country but from 1598, the King had allowed Protestants, who made up just less than 10 percent of the population some freedom of worship.  In the 1680s, Louis XIV started chipping away at these liberties.  

First he levied heavy taxes on the Huguenots, as French protestants were known, and then in 1685 he passed an edict that made Protestantism illegal and forced all protestants to convert to Catholicism.  Most of them did but a sizable minority chose to sneak out of the kingdom, ending up in The Netherlands, Germany and England.  This event helped to galvanize Protestants everywhere, and especially in Britain and its territories, by showing how a Catholic king was likely to treat his protestant subjects.  So in other words, British people thought James II, as King, might do something similar to them.  

So this was the Protestant world in 1685, under siege, attacked on every side by Papists or, even worst, by Protestants who seemed to be in league with the Papists and there appeared to be little that could be done.  Public opinion in England was in favor of the Catholic King so long as he didn't promote his religion too strongly, and the power of the State had succeeded in rooting out dissent in both Britain and France.  It's not surprising in this situation that many radicals would decide to leave.  But why choose America? This was, after all, a very long way to go.  In order to understand this, I want to highlight two examples, one Scottish and one French.  

The first was Francis Borland, a University student in Glasgow.  He didn't have to leave Scotland but there was little for him to do there.  He had been trained as a minister but that path was closed to anyone who wouldn't pledge their allegiance to the King and the Church.  This was an act that Francis considered to be blasphemy.  His big brother John was a merchant and in 1680, John had begun trading to Boston where he eventually took up residence.  This created possibilities for Francis.  He was able to get passage to New England on one of his brother's ships and there he could get a job as a schoolteacher, sort of an apprentice minister.  

What I'd like you to notice here is the combination of motives.  Francis's migration was brought about by economic necessity.  He basically couldn't get a job in his profession at home, but he was unemployable because of his religious beliefs.  The lesson here is that however much we want to separate religion and economics in motivating people during this period, they always seem to work together.

The second migrant I want to talk about is named Durand de Daufinet [Spelled phonetically].  We just know his last name, Durand, and Daufinet was the region that he came from in France.  He was a Huguenot from the mountains of Southeastern France who fled, in 1685, with many of his countrymen.  After hiding out in Marseilles for a while, he gained passage on a ship to Livorno in Italy and from there to London where he hoped to join other Huguenots.  

On this ship, as he was going to London, he came across a French-language promotional pamphlet for South Carolina which was a fairly recently founded colony in North America.  In fact, the colony's promoters envisioned it much as Pennsylvania, which was founded about the same time as a haven for those who were no longer tolerated in Europe, whether English, Scottish or French, and Durand was hooked.  The pamphlet made Carolina sound like a heaven on earth.  Everything grew there; the climate was perfect and particularly good for people from the South of France.  Even though some people in London warned him that maybe this pamphlet wasn't entirely correct, he was still determined to go to South Carolina and he was particularly determined because he hated the weather in London.  It was way too cold and rainy, and he just couldn't imagine staying in a place like that, so he booked passage to Carolina in 1686.  

Now these were just two people and perhaps not representative.  To be honest, we just don't know why most of these migrants chose America.  Benjamin Harris who left about the same time as Durand didn't leave any sort of explanation.  But for the most part, it seems like it was this combination of religion and economics that pushed people West.  The political climate in Europe made it impossible for them to stay, both because they couldn't worship as they saw fit, and they couldn't practice their trades.  They thought both of these problems could be solved in America where there was land, work and, for the most part, toleration of various forms of Protestantism.

At this point the story moves, like these migrants themselves, from Europe to America.  These persecuted newcomers settled everywhere.  Scottish Covenanters formed communities in the new colonies of South Carolina and New Jersey, Huguenots went to New York, New England and also South Carolina, Quakers and German Protestants mostly chose Pennsylvania which had been settled in 1683 and then there were the hundreds of prisoners of war, most of whom ended up in the Caribbean.  So basically every region of the Colonies was affected one way or another by this migration.  But since I only have a few minutes, I'm going to focus on one region, New England.

Many historians point out that New England is, in some ways, the most atypical of all Colonial regions, but I think it is here that we can best see the effect that the migration had on two aspects Colonial American life, politics and religion.  Now New Englanders, more than I think anyone else in the Colonies, were very aware of what was going on in Europe at this time.  The region had been settled by religious refugees from an earlier time, Puritans, and many of them maintained contact with Dissenters in England.  They also traveled back and forth quite a lot.  A good example of this is Increase Mather, perhaps the most powerful minister in Boston at this time.  

Now Mather was something of a refugee himself.  He was born in New England to the son of another prominent minister, but he was sent back to Europe for his education.  He was trained at Trinity College in Dublin.  For his first job as a minister after he graduated, he went to the island of Guernsey, which is in the English Channel between England and France.  Mather left after the restoration of Charles II because he feared that he might be singled out because of his unorthodox political views.  He said he "refused to drink a toast to the King's health" and he thought that this could land him in trouble.  He's probably right about that; toasts were a very big deal in the 17th century.  

But even after he got back from England in 1664, he kept up contact with the people he had met and his family members in Europe.  He maintained a vast correspondence network with Ireland, with Dissenters in London and even as far away as Amsterdam.  Then, after he got information about what was going on in Europe, he shared it both with other ministers in New England and with the audience at his weekly sermons.  So this was a very effective mechanism for making everyone aware of what was going on.  

Historians often characterize what was going on in New England as a closed society, suspicious of outsiders.  But this was most definitely not the case in the 1680s.  Led by people like Mather, New Englanders accepted these refugees, these newcomers, with open arms.  There are several reasons for this.  One was the Biblical injunction to give charity for those people who are suffering for the faith.  These were fellow suffers in the Protestant cause, but there was also a more specific theological reason.  Some Protestant intellectuals, including Mather, thought that this upsurge in persecution was a sign that the end-times were approaching.  When Christ returned, all of the evil people, like James Sharp, would be cleared out leaving only the righteous and if New England and New Englanders wanted to be counted among the righteous, then they needed to do their part to help the cause.  

In the early 1680s, a small number of prominent newcomers started showing up in Boston and many of them had connections, or quickly made connections, with Increase Mather.  There was Charles Morton, who had been the head of a very prestigious school for Dissenters in London.  There were the Bailey brothers, John and Thomas, who had been Dissenting preachers in Limerick, Ireland.  There was a very good reason for preachers to choose New England, as there were lots of jobs for preachers, especially these newcomers from Europe.  They came in as virtual celebrities and New England was a place where preachers were very popular.  Even Francis Borland, who was only 20 and not a celebrity at all or even ordained, had no trouble finding work.  He just made an appointment with Increase Mather after he got to town and Mather found him a post in the town of Barnstable South of Boston.

In 1686, this trickle of refugees became a flood after events in England and France pushed more people to leave.  One traveler that year, a bookseller named John Dunton, shared passage with a number of Dissenters.  His boat was literally filled with people fleeing for one reason or another.  At the same time, whole boatloads of Huguenots were arriving from France, so many that by the mid-1680s they had three churches in New England, alone, and this didn't even count their settlements in other parts of the Colonies.  It's impossible to know exactly how many newcomers there were but demographic historians -- here's the one statistic that I'll give you -- have estimated that the population of New England alone rose from 68,000 to 86,000 over ten years, so that's more than a 25 percent increase.  

Now the importance of this migration went beyond the numbers.  They came at a critical time, just as Imperial officials in England were trying to reform the Empire and make the Colonies more responsive to the King.  Up until this point, most of the plantations had been nominally independent, officially English but in actuality left to their own devices.  This made the Colonies very idiosyncratic and allowed the existence of everything from the unique church-state establishment in Massachusetts to the slave codes of Barbados.  To people in Charles II court, though, this lack of coordination seemed like a very bad idea.  It made the Colonies very hard to defend from foreign enemies and it also cut down on the King's profits.  For years officials had wanted to change the system, but in the late 1670s they actually started to do so.  

It's not coincidental that this campaign to remake the Empire coincided with all these refugees arriving in the Colonies.  Royal officials noticed that a lot of the King's enemies were ending up in these plantations, especially in New England, and they were not a good influence.  The presence of these "rebels" as they called them made it even more imperative that the Crown reform the Colonies; otherwise, they could end up basically breaking off from England.  There were great fears of independent Colonies, Commonwealths, during this time and then they could be basically refuges for anyone who disliked the King to flee to.  At the same time, though, the refugees who were already in the Colonies fought tooth-and-nail against these reforms because they had already dealt with these campaigns in England, and they knew what could happen if the Crown tightened control.  

Now as it happened, most people living in the Colonies just didn't care that much about Imperial reforms.  Americans and even American historians like to assume that there was this kind of natural kind of love of independence from the very beginning in the Colonies but, ironically, it was the newcomers, the people who had just come over from Europe, rather than the people who had been established there longer, that really fought against the reform of the Empire because they viewed these reforms as tyrannical designs to do in the Colonies what Charles II had already done in England, Scotland and Ireland.  

A lot of these people were very persuasive.  They came with books, works of propaganda from England, that offered a rationale for resisting the King's plans and they also had stories they could tell about their own persecution at the hands of Charles II or Louis XIV.  The result of all of this was that there was a general, gradual change of opinion in the Colonies.  They stopped thinking that these Imperial reforms were okay and gradually started to resist them.  

The best example of this comes from Massachusetts, where Increase Mather, not coincidentally, became the primary spokesman against reform.  Crown officials wanted to do in Massachusetts what they had already done in Bermuda and New Hampshire, impose a Royal government that answered directly to the King.  To do this, they initiated a legal campaign against the old Massachusetts Charter that had guaranteed self-government to the Colony, asking the Colony to voluntarily relinquish it so they wouldn't have to take it by force.  Most people in the Colony, at first, at least, didn't care all that much, but Mather initiated a campaign for resistance that cast the struggle for the Charter as one point in a global battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil.  This was not just any legal case.  They were fighting for their liberties and for the future of their faith in this epic struggle.  

Now here the influence of the refugees was unmistakable.  Without them and without Mather's network of correspondents, he wouldn't have known what was going on in the rest of the World.  He wouldn't have been able to bring in this larger context and since he did, he was able to make a much more compelling case for New Englanders to hold on to their liberties.  So one effect of these refugees was to radicalize American politics and to engender resistance to Imperial reforms that might otherwise have been no big deal.  To really show how this worked, I want to return for a minute to Benjamin Harris, the printer who came to Boston in 1686.  

Almost immediately, Harris opened the London Coffee House.  Now coffee houses in the restoration were places where people came to drink coffee, obviously, but also to socialize, spread gossip and read the news.  A restoration era coffee house, whether in England or the Colonies, would be a place where you could go to read all of the latest pamphlets and newspapers that were current at that time.  The first thing that you would hear whenever anyone new came into the coffee house, the proprietor or someone else would say "What news?" so they would just say whatever they heard on the street or whatever they had heard in their last destination and this would be spread around the Coffee House.  This was particularly important in a place like Boston.  Harris's Coffee House as basically right off the docks so any time someone came in from England or the West Indies or from Virginia or wherever they would come into the coffee house and basically relate their news and share whatever printed works they had.  

Now coffee houses can spread all kinds of information but we can probably assume, based on Harris's own habits, that he was interested in spreading very particular kinds of information, basically what was going on with Catholics and Protestants around the World.  Now Harris entered the coffee business because his other livelihood, printing, was just as difficult in Boston in 1686 as it had been in London.  Despite the resistance of Increase Mather, the Crown had taken away the Massachusetts Charter and set up a new Royal government called the Dominion of New England that encompassed all of the Colonies from Maine to New Jersey under one governor.  

This new government tightly controlled printing but still opposition literature flowed in from England and other places and the government couldn't or wouldn't completely silence this opposition.  Harris himself seems to have made frequent trips to London in 1687 and 1688 where he must have collected news and intelligence that he could then bring back to Boston.  There he would have learned that the Catholic King was in hot water.  First his program for religious toleration alienated members of the established church.  Then the birth of a male heir in the summer of 1688 ensured that the Crown would remain in Catholic hands.  All of this led some of the English nobility to invite the King's oldest daughter, Mary, and her husband William of Orange, to invade the island from The Netherlands leading to the armed invasion that historians later named "The Glorious Revolution." 

Back in Boston, Harris lent his considerable talents to being the greatest champion of William and Mary's cause.  On April 18, 1689, the people of Boston rose in arms and threw their governor in prison claiming he was the main player in a Catholic plot that would deliver the Colonies to France.  Harris was there, as well.  He printed the manifesto that declared and explained why the Colonists had taken this fairly extreme step of throwing their leader in jail.  The tract, not surprisingly, located the beginning of the troubles with an event that Harris knew well, the Popish Plot of 1678, which had been the beginning of a concerted effort by Papists to rule the World, culminating in the reign of James II and his plan to remake the Colonies.  William and Mary, thankfully, had foiled this plan, and New Englanders now declared themselves to be faithful subjects of an Empire that would finally defend them from these Catholic enemies that they feared so excessively.  

Later Harris wrote a lengthy poetic tribute that placed New England's troubles in a global context, which again told of how the Catholic King, James II, had subverted the laws and liberties of England, how Edmund Andros, the Governor of the Dominion of New England, had followed suit in America and how colonists had spontaneously risen up to save themselves and the King's inheritance from Papists.  Harris even talked up himself so I quote this a little bit.  I had the opportunity in working on this project to read this really awful poetry, so I'd like to be able to share a little bit.

[laughter]

"And bold was he who dared to wish you well" -- he's speaking to William of Orange.

Him shall I style a true band who hither came
To save his life and an untainted fame
Harris was he to whom Parliament unknown
To Popish raids and frauds undone
Yet here he could not state the Lion's paw
Only for wishing well to William in Nassau.

Now perhaps no source better encapsulates the transformation of the Colonies in the 1680s.  Harris and other people like him fled Europe but ended up bringing their problems with them to the extent that a European event, William and Mary's invasion of England, became the most important milestone in American political history up until that point.  I've printed, as some I think some of you have already noticed, the complete text of this poem.  If you have a magnifying glass and a lot of patience you can work your way through it.

As in Massachusetts and other Colonies, the presence of refugees radicalized Colonial politics and encouraged people to act against Imperial centralization and in favor of the global Protestant cause.  Colonists in New York and Maryland also rebelled while Virginia, the Leeward Islands and Barbados experienced less severe troubles.  But it would be a mistake to view these rebellions as somehow isolationist acts by remote people trying to remain aloof from the world.  Indeed, the second major effect of these refugees that I wanted to talk about was to bring the Colonies closer to the World than they had ever been before, most notably by increasing the level of ethnic and religious diversity in America.  

Before 1680, at least in comparison to most parts of Europe, the Colonies were already diverse, but virtually nowhere did people embrace diversity as a positive good.  In both Massachusetts and Virginia, secular officials routinely banished people who dissented from the regions dominant religious vision, while legal codes in other Colonies openly discriminated against ethnic and racial outsiders.  After 1680, this gradually changed.  All of the new Colonies formed during this period allowed for some form of religious toleration and encouraged ethnic diversity, at least among Protestants -- there were important limits to this diversity, of course.  Even more interesting is what happened in some of the established Colonies, the places that had already been around, and especially Massachusetts which is a place that's not usually known for its acceptance of outsiders.  To tell this story, I need to introduce the last of my characters, another Frenchman called Ezekiel Carre.

Carre had been a minister in Southwestern France at the time of Louis XIV's crackdown.  Unfortunately we have no idea of how he ended up in America, but he may, like Francis Borland before him, have followed a relative who was a merchant.  He settled first in the Colony of Rhode Island where he ministered to a small French church.  By 1689 he had moved to Boston and become the minister of the French church there.  Now times were hard for Carre and his fellow Huguenots during the late 1680s and early '90s.  While still in Rhode Island, the Huguenots had become embroiled in a land controversy with their English neighbors that culminated, basically, in them being forcibly kicked off their land.  Then in the fall of 1689, England and France went to war and this created new problems.  

Despite their status as enemies of Louis XIV and heroes of the Protestant cause, many of their English neighbors just didn't trust the French.  Perhaps they weren't really Protestants at all, maybe they were Catholics in disguise who were just claiming to be Huguenots so they could infiltrate the Colonies.  In response to these fears, the government of Massachusetts actually passed laws that restricted the movements of French refuges in the Colonies.  

It was at this time that Carre came to the defense of his people, and he didn't do it alone.  Though the natural ally would have been Increase Mather, but he was in England at the time so he turned to Increase's son, Cotton Mather.  In 1689 and 1690, the two men collaborated on two writing projects that set out to show that far from being enemies, French Protestants were natural allies to the New Englanders because they were fellow sufferers in this ongoing fight against Popery.

Now the first publication was a sermon that Carre preached at the French church entitled "The Charitable Samaritan." It was a classic Calvinist sermon using a scriptural passage to show that his congregants needed to provide more relief for the poor people among them.  This was a favorite theme for French Protestants because so many of them had their estates confiscated after they left France.  There was an obvious subtext, though.  The real audience was not the French, but the English who also needed to show more charity to the Huguenots who had suffered so much for the faith and were fellow Protestants.  The sermon demonstrated, in Carre's words, "The uniformity of the doctrine of Protestants from the most distant places in the world." In case this was too subtle, Cotton Mather wrote a preface that chronicled all the sufferings that the Huguenots had gone through the previous years.  The clear lesson was that anyone who had experienced such hardship deserved New Englanders' respect.

The two ministers' second collaboration was even more interesting.  Cotton Mather happened upon a set of documents including a catechism that Jesuit missionaries used in their efforts to convert Indians.  He asked Carre, the French minister, to read and interpret the documents using his years of expertise on Popish tyranny to show how Jesuit actions in America simply represented a new chapter in a familiar story.  Again, Mather supplied an instructive preface but this book appeared in French meaning that hardly anyone in New England was able to read it.  Mather's purpose, probably, was to make French-speaking Protestants outside of New England aware of how much Protestants in America were laboring to "destroy Popery." 

Now, Mather's embrace of the Huguenots was in some ways natural but it also heralded a change in New England's religious culture.  The French newcomers were Calvinists like their English neighbors, but New Englanders, to put it mildly, were sticklers.  They didn't like anybody who deviated at all from the way they liked to do things.  Mather, himself, complained that the Huguenots did things that he didn't approve of.  Ministers officiated marriages, which Puritans didn't like.  They celebrated Christmas, which was, of course, unscriptural and Popish.  They also didn't spend so much time at church as Mather would have liked them to.  But he still welcomed them into the fold because he saw them as allies against the greater threat, which was Popery, and this was only one example.  

Benjamin Harris, for example, was a Baptist, a group that had been persecuted relentlessly in Boston before 1680.  Every time they would build a church, authorities would come and board it up and they'd unboard it and they'd board it up again -- it went on for decades.  So in 1680, the ruling Congregationalists basically stopped getting in their way and allowed Baptists freedom of worship.  In Anglican Colonies like Virginia and Barbados, the ruling church made similar concessions, they began allowing dissenting preachers as long as they had licenses.

These groups didn't all like each other and they never stop arguing about who was right.  But civil governments generally stopped persecuting religious minorities though there was one exception, of course, and that exception proved the rule.  For Roman Catholics, things became officially worse after 1689 as most Colonies passed new laws or renewed old ones that denied Papists voting or other rights.  The irony is that both intolerance of Catholics and toleration of Protestants came from the same root cause, basically from these migrants of the 1680s.  These newcomers were theologically and ethnically diverse but they had one thing in common, they had all been victims of violent Popish persecution, sometimes at the hands of actual Catholics, sometimes by Protestants acting like Catholics.  

To be sure, Protestants had lots of problems with Catholicism, the faulty theology, the tendency toward absolute government, the offensive rituals, but for these migrants, it all boiled down to persecution.  Catholics were bad because they persecuted.  If Protestants didn't want to act like Catholics, they needed to stop persecuting each other.  Toleration, on the other hand, was a Protestant value, but Catholics could not be tolerated because they rejected toleration.  

Now in conclusion I should mentioned what happened to the migrants that I've been talking about today.  Benjamin Harris stayed in Boston for the first few years of the 1690s where he published the first American newspaper, which was suppressed after one issue partially because he printed a bawdy story about Louis XIV's sex life.

[laughter]

He returned to England and had a rather unsuccessful printing career there, eventually making a living by selling patent medicines.  Francis Borland left Boston for the Dutch Colony of Surinam in 1685, again using his brother's merchant connections to get employment as a minister.  By 1693 he was back in Scotland where he took up a position as a minister in a small town and stayed there for most of his life.  

Durand de Daufinet wandered around Virginia for a while -- he never made it to South Carolina because his ship ran aground -- and ended up writing a book urging his countrymen to move to Virginia and not South Carolina, which he turned his back on.  But when some Huguenots finally ended up there in 1699, he wasn't among them.  We have no idea what happened to him.  

Finally, Ezekiel Carre left Boston sometime in the mid-1690s, becoming a minister on the island of Guernsey, the same place where Increase Mather had started his preaching career 40 years earlier.  

Now you'll notice something here.  Of all the people I've talked about, none of them actually stayed in America, and it's no wonder.  The Glorious Revolution changed the nature of religious politics in Britain making it much safer for Dissenters and Presbyterians to go back.  Many did stay, of course, people like Josiah Franklin, a Dissenter from Northhamptonshire who settled in Boston in 1685, the father of Benjamin Franklin.  But even those who did go home left America far different than they had found it.  

American history, as scholars love to note, is filled with paradoxes.  This was a society that decried persecution and embraced toleration and pluralism but based that toleration on an intense fear of a particular religious minority, Catholics.  Here was a people who rose up to defend their liberties but at the same time but listed that they were full subjects of the British King with full partners in this global protestant cause.  These paradoxes helped define American politics and religion during the 18th century and they originated with the boatloads of persecuted Protestants who flooded the Colonies in the 1680s.

Thank you.

[applause]

Carolyn Brown:
Owen has agreed to take questions.  Because of the terrible acoustics in this room, if you would speak loudly when you ask your question and also he will repeat the question.  For those people sitting on the side, you may find you'll hear better if you move to the center.  So why don't you try that.  So, questions.

Male Speaker:
Yes.  I'm interested -- I believe that you mentioned The Netherlands and you mentioned France -- Spain, which has been the traditional representation for English Protestants and the Catholic threat in the New World, doesn't really figure into this late 17th century story.  In particular, the idea of Spain as the motive force behind the so-called Black Legend, Spanish tyranny, the threat of Spanish settlements in the West Indies and Florida that are near English settlements.  Is there a way to tell a Spanish dimension to this story about Spanish Catholicism and its threat to [unintelligible] or really is France the most menacing Catholic power pushing Spain off the map?

Owen Stanwood:
The question is about the role of Spain in anti-Catholic fears.  The short answer is I think France is seen as the greater threat because Louis XIV is this aggrandizing monarch at the time.  He has kind of taken the mantle of the -- and he has pushed himself as being kind of the big Catholic political force.  But there is still fears of Spain.  They're for the most part localized in places like South Carolina and the West Indies.  

But there's a further complicating factor, which is that Spain is an ally of England at this time and remains an ally after 1689.  They're actually also fighting France with England.  So I think there are a lot of people who are still fearful of the Spanish, but they don't see them as as great a threat because they're not as powerful and they can't really say a lot of stuff openly.  So you have people in the West Indies, for example, complaining about the Spanish and then people in England saying, "No-no, don't say that," you know, "Don't talk about the Spanish," because they don't want anger diplomats in Madrid, what you see with France, too, before 1689 and then once war comes, things very abruptly change.  

Male Speaker:
Let me ask a quick follow-up.  You know Linda Colley in her book on the Seven Years War and British identity talks about anti-French and anti-Catholic rhetoric as really being the key to understanding British identity.  Is this moment that you're really putting up here the focus really shifts from Spain to France?  Does anti-Spanish, anti-Catholicism resurge in the 18th century when England and Spain are no longer allies?

Owen Stanwood:
Yes, it does, especially in the War of Jenkins' Ear in the 1730s when Spain and France finally do go back to work and to a lesser extent, I think, in the War of Spanish Succession in the first decade of the 18th century.  I think that once these Catholic powers, France and Spain, are on the same side, it allows for a more complete demonization of the Continental Catholic enemies, although Austria is still a Catholic ally of England, so it's never complete.  

Male Speaker:
A related question.  How about the Jesuits? You mentioned a couple of times in the context of New England where most of the Jesuits were French [unintelligible]. Looking at the broader context in the South and West Indies, was there much of a sense that Jesuits [unintelligible].

Owen Stanwood:
The question is about the role of the Jesuits in these spheres.  The Jesuits were extremely central to any sort of Protestant anti-Catholicism during this period because they were seen as being master tricksters, and they also were very active in converting Indians.  This became one of the most practical threats to America from the Catholic cause was that the Indians would basically switch sides or become more dependably on the Catholic side.  

It was, I'd say, more localized in the Northeast but certainly Maryland Jesuits, the Protestants in Maryland and Virginia were very fearful of Maryland Jesuits.  To a lesser extent this happened in the West Indies.  For example, a Jesuit came to Barbados in 1688 and 1689 and caused kind of a panic because this is right during the Revolution so it was thought he had come to sort of scout out the island to hand it over to France.  

What I don't see quite as much is a sense that Jesuits in different parts of America are talking to each other.  There's only one real instance of that which was in the 1670s when a French Jesuit actually traveled overland through the Colonies from Acadia to Maryland, and he actually stopped in Boston.  Of course, he was in disguise.  The New Englanders loved him because he was so erudite and so smart, and he knew his theology so well, and he went and talked to all the ministers and they're like, "Oh, this guy is so great." Then he laughed and they said, "Oh-oh, we've been tricked" and that actually led them to pass new anti-Jesuit laws.  But you only see a few instances of stuff like that happening.  

Female Speaker:
I'm really struck by the end of you stories of how many of the [unintelligible] back to Europe.  Did they play a role in politics there [unintelligible].

Owen Stanwood:
The question is about the influence of these refugees once they got back to Europe.  I think they did remain active in politics but their numbers were not enough in the European context to really make as much a difference.  I think if you look at refugees returning from everywhere, not just America, but especially The Netherlands -- this is really a story for European historians to tell -- is how these refugees from The Netherlands once they come back to England, basically they come back with William and Mary in 1688, and become very politically prominent in England.  So I think that, in general, the refugees coming back to England and Scotland is extremely important but not -- I don't think the American refugees have a huge effect on their own, but as part of a larger story, yes.

Female Speaker:
[Unintelligible] coming to America and going back. [Unintelligible] theoretically defining migration [unintelligible]?

Owen Stanwood:
Okay, so the question is about theories of diaspora and migration, and my short answer is I guess I've thought about it.

[laughter]

I haven't really -- you know I don't really know that theoretical literature very well.  I think I could learn a lot by studying other diasporas in more detail in the modern period because I think this is, in some ways, a precursor.  

Male Speaker:
[Unintelligible].  Did you have any association with the book Gotham [unintelligible]?

Owen Stanwood:
You mean Gotham: A History of New York City?  No, I have not read it.

Male Speaker:
It gives a [unintelligible] It's very, very interesting.  [Unintelligible].

Owen Stanwood:
Yeah, well New York is an interesting --

Male Speaker:
[Unintelligible].

Owen Stanwood:
Okay, thanks.  I'll check that out.  

Female Speaker:
[Unintelligible].

Owen Stanwood:
Well, the question is why I end.  I think that for the story of these refugees, The Glorious Revolution really makes things so different that it becomes kind of a different story.  Because so many of them leave, they return to the Colonies, and I don't think it's only my few examples.  I've seen many other people who decide during the 1690s that now the climate has changed so they can be doing the real work back in Europe.  But also the political context is just entirely different.  

Now, the same people who have been resisting Imperial reforms very suddenly are the greatest advocates of Imperial reform in some cases because now these Protestants, William and Mary, who are pushing Imperial reforms as a way to defend global Protestantism rather than the Stuart monarchs who are seen by many of their people as being against the Protestant cause whether or not that's actually true I think is very debatable.  But that really changes the whole political context, and that's why you see, in the 18th century, Colonial Americans are, until the 1760s, fanatically loyal and even many of them after the 1760s.  I mean they really identify on an emotional level with the monarchs and the Empire, and I think this religious connection is very important for that.  

Carolyn Brown:
Okay, I think we should bring this to a close.  We're a few minutes over, but this has been a really wonderful and interesting paper and discussion so please, again, give your thanks to Professor Stanwood.

[applause]

[music playing]

[end of transcript]