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.

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