By Megan Maruschke

This article is part of our series entitled “Exiled: Identity and Identification,” which explores the semantic evolution of exile and the lived experiences of people seeking refuge across the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century. It was presented originally at the conference “Who is a Refugee? Concepts of Exile, Refuge and Asylum, c.1750-1850”, which took place on 30 June – 1 July 2022 at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.

This publication is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 849189).

On June 25, 1793, the Philadelphia Guardians of the Poor admitted “Esperance a Negro boy who is supposed to be the property of a French Gentleman” to the almshouse. The guardians’ minute book states, “it appears that this boy is sent here on acct of some ill natured & perhaps untimely information.” Enslaved people were admitted to the almshouse on their owner’s account during times when they were too ill to work. The presumably white “French Gentleman” had however not received the required signatures of magistrates and support from the board. Esperance was duly discharged without the care he required. What was the “untimely information”? Settlement in Philadelphia was a requirement to receive support from the almshouse, but having the support of the board or a signatory might have signaled community ties. Weeks earlier, another “French Negro man” had been admitted and was receiving care for an illness at the almshouse “paid by his Master,” and discharged on July 19, 1793, a year of peaking flight of Saint-Dominguans to the US during the upheaval of the Haitian Revolution. While these enslaved French Black people were both seen in the almshouse (although Esperance was turned away), there is no sign of white French refugees attempting to receive care at the sanitorium or almshouse in the 1790s despite the “distressed” circumstances in which they arrived.^[1] They also remain conspicuously absent from Philadelphia’s Walnut Street prison despite the significant French presence in the city.

The 1790s are known as the time when “the United States spoke French.”^[2] The influx of French was so large, Allan Potofsky estimates that (based on the United States 1790 census), approximately one percent of the white/free population consisted of French nationals. Roughly five thousand of them settled in Philadelphia meaning that one in six residents of Philadelphia were French.^[3] “French” however, did not only designate arrivals from France but also from the French Caribbean, especially Saint-Dominguans. The French population boomed due to the tightly woven trade ties between the US and the French Caribbean since the American Revolution and as a result of revolutionary turmoil in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). ^[4] The French were only a subset of political exiles and refugees who sought asylum within and across imperial borders. According to Jan C. Jansen – bringing together the scholarship on British loyalists, French émigrés and refugees, and Spanish American exiles – the tumultuous revolutionary era (circa 1770s-1830s) set a quarter million people on the move, often for political reasons.^[5] A large movement of free and enslaved people from Saint-Domingue arrived in US Atlantic port cities, especially after the 1793 battle of Le Cap.

French refugees sought asylum in US cities such as Philadelphia as they fled the Haitian Revolution on the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Ashli White notes American contemporaries described the refugees’ situation as “distressed,” “unfortunate” and “miserable.”^[6] These terms do not attach any specific monetary value to the poverty or financial need of the white French refugees arriving on US soil. These refugees did however win charity and assistance from the US Congress as well as local states, communities, and benevolent societies in US port cities, not to mention the financial assistance they received from the French metropole. White claims, “dramatic sudden poverty registered more powerfully with American audiences than did the plight of the chronically indigent.”^[7] She addresses the private assistance given to the refugees, who would have been ineligible to receive assistance at the local almshouse, which was reserved for “settled” poor, not refugees, vagrants, or other people on the move. In Philadelphia, Black churches and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society intervened in integrating the Black French community. The French Benevolent Society supported white French arrivals. 

This article asks about the French refugee experience in Philadelphia in light of research on class, race, gender, and disability in US mobility control before the emergence of federal immigration law in the 1870s. Starting with the almshouse and prison seems today like an odd place to begin such an inquiry, but these are key sites where rights to assistance and rights to remain were exercised. In the 1780s and 1790s, a small number of French sailors and French Black people arrived in Philadelphia’s almshouse. The sailors could use the number of years they sailed out of Philadelphia as a rationale for temporary assistance. White Saint-Dominguans did not appear in the almshouse during the 1790s, despite the large numbers who arrived “distressed.” Yet, the experiences of these two French Black people and the (presumably) white French owners do not differ substantially from the limitations faced by anyone not a legal resident of Philadelphia.^[8] The almshouse was reserved for legal residents who had lived a number of years in the city and were thereby considered “settled.” Even though national citizenship was becoming an important criterion for certain rights, poverty and local affiliations were still (if not more) central in determining the rights of people on the move. Reading the mobility control of the French refugees in light of the plethora of local control efforts directed at the poor help to contextualize who among the French arrivals were able to remain and who were forced to leave Philadelphia and under which conditions. 

The United States attempted to control mobility of people in international treaties and domestic acts. The international treaties include Paris (1783), the Jay Treaty (1794), the Treaty of Ghent (1814). There were also domestic efforts, including the Northwest Ordinance (1787) and the Fugitive Slave Act (1793). Additionally, the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) did not exactly regulate mobility but rather the effects of it: the political threats presented by the presence of foreigners in the United States, in particular the French exiled from France and the Caribbean, though many had already returned to France by the time it passed.^[9] The series of acts went so far as to give the US president the authority to imprison and deport dangerous aliens. The US was not alone in passing alien laws. Other states and colonial governments passed regulations to document and limit the presence of foreigners in their territories during the Age of Revolutions in response to the movements of refugees.^[10] But French exiles from the metropole or refugees from the colonies were, in the end, not deported from the US under these measures. These acts also fit into a wider spectrum of mobility control in the United States that was not exclusively about concern for foreigners and were carried out at the local level.

State and municipal regulations restricting or controlling mobility were legacies from poor laws established in the colonial period or were instituted during the period of the Early Republic. The largest categories of regulations that sought to hinder the ability to enter or remain in various towns or states dealt with restricting criminality, poverty, and associated disabilities – including age and gender., i.e. ability to work –, race and slavery, preventing contagious diseases, or restrictions on ideological grounds.^[11] A growing body of scholarship on mobility control in the Early Republic and its legacy in the later nineteenth century should be read in conjunction with research on the arrival of refugees. Samantha Seeley tracks the 19^th century contestations around “removal” and the right to remain in states and the US, showing how race was galvanized in removals. Hidetaka Hirota shows how controlling the mobility of the poor and their migration to the US eastern seaboard in the nineteenth century formed the basis for later federal immigration policies in the post-Civil War era. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan tracks the mobility control of “vagrants” and “vagabonds” across towns and between states, or in the terms frequently found in the Philadelphia almshouse daily occurrence dockets, “nonresident strollers.” Kevin Kenny shows how slavery and abolition were central to mobility control in later US immigration policy.^[12] The French refugees were merely “added to the lists of unfortunates” who found themselves in the city, but could be subjected to an increasing number of local mobility restrictions based on age, race, gender, and class.^[13]

Literature on the arrivals of French Black people from the Caribbean to US soil highlight white American’s fear of the revolutionary contagion of slave rebellion and the Haitian Revolution.^[14] The imprisonment and removal of a small number of these French Black refugees addressed perhaps the generalized fear regarding the presence of French Black people on US soil, but in Philadelphia were carried out within a spectrum of control of the mobile poor and criminals. A prison sentence in the 1790s could lead to removal from the state of Pennsylvania. Just as they are absent from the almshouse, I have not found any (suspected) white French Caribbean people in the sentencing docket for these years.^[15] Of course, names were often Anglicized but the docket tried to track prisoners’ place of birth or place they lived prior to arrival in Philadelphia. The fact that white Frenchmen received public and private aid suggests that this aid possibly prevented them from ending up imprisoned for crimes of poverty such as theft or in the almshouse. Unlike the white population, Black French people are listed in the Walnut Street jail’s sentencing docket.

Gary Nash shows that the overall Black population in the city’s almshouse and jail was merely representative of their proportion of the population, but looking for French in the docket shows a disparity between the white and Black French populations.^[16] The archived docket begins in 1794. The jail’s sentencing dockets for 1794-1798 (the years I have consulted so far) suggest that approximately 13 people described as “negroe” or “mulatto” from the French Caribbean did become convicts, one of whom, Chanson, was “pardoned on condition of leaving the state forthwith not to return & discharged” in October 1796. Two additional convicts from the French Caribbean were not identified with any racial description, but both are listed only by first names, Marianne and Louison, which might suggest their enslavement but confirms their poverty. They were imprisoned for larceny or related notes of theft (“receiving stolen goods”). Both Marianne and Louison were required to leave the state of Pennsylvania after pardoning. Their removal from Pennsylvania represented a rescaling of banishment from empire-wide to the state as a way of commuting a prison sentence after the American Revolution. Convicts also faced difficulties entering new communities once convicted of a crime, including Pennsylvania’s own ban on the entry of convicts from 1788/89. At this point, I am left with more questions than answers about the fates of these refugees set on the move once again. 

This article represents preliminary research into the mobility controls faced by refugees in Philadelphia in the Early Republic. I suggest integrating histories of refugees in the Age of Revolutions into the fruitful and burgeoning debates on US empire and a pre-history of US immigration policy before the 1870s. Mobility control took place not at international borders but in jurisdictions of towns and states and territories within the United States and was directed towards a variety of vulnerable population groups, not specifically refugees or foreigners. These histories bring together (local, state, and national) mobility control, state territorialization, and imperialism in a broader sense. They consider the removals of Indigenous peoples, the colonization of Liberia, the deportation of the poor and disabled European arrivals, and the re-enslavement, removal, or prohibition on free Blacks in both their multi-scalar domestic and international contexts.^[17] In the case of French refugees, doing so contextualizes their reception and rights to assistance. It places the mobility controls enacted into a broader context beyond this population group. And it reframes the focus from political refugees threatened with deportation by new, politically motivated laws at the national level to those who did face removal at a local/state level: poorer French people of color convicted of crimes. The small number of restrictions on foreigners and refugees may be contextualized among this wider tapestry of barriers to entry – due to race, class, health, age, and disability – and the right to remain in American cities and states in the Early Republic.

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Megan Maruschke is assistant professor (Juniorprofessorin) for global studies at the Global and European Studies Institute at Leipzig University since 2022. Her most recent articles appear in a thematic forum she co-edited with Manuel Covo in French Historical Studies, “The French Revolution as an Imperial Revolution.” Her current book project is provisionally titled “American Boundaries and Refugee Mobilities at the Heart of the Republic and at the Edge of Empire.”

Title Image: Philadelphia Alms House, 1799. Source: Library Company of Philadelphia.

Endnotes:

^[1] I have read entries from the late 1780s through 1796. Guardians of the Poor, Almshouse Daily Occurrences, June 1793–March 1794, GP 67, Philadelphia City Archives. Dates indicated in text are the entry dates cited. Names were often anglicized but almshouse managers sought to record the origins and legal residency of people admitted or denied entry. There are several “French” listed in the almshouse since the late 1780s, but unconnected to the French Caribbean according to the managers’ notes. For their “distress,” see: Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 53–61.

^[2] François Furstenberg, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation, New York: Penguin, 2014.

^[3] Allan Potofsky, “The ‘Non-Aligned Status’ of French Emigrés and Refugees in Philadelphia, 1793–1798,” Transatlantica, 2 (2006), http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/1147. 

^[4] Manuel Covo, Entrepôt of Revolutions: Saint-Domingue, Commercial Sovereignty, and the French-American Alliance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, especially 188–212.

^[5] Jansen, “Flucht und Exil im Zeitalter der Revolutionen: Perspektiven einer atlantischen Flüchtlingsgeschichte (1770er – 1820er Jahre,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 44, no. 4 (2018): 495–525, 495–496.

^[6] White, Encountering Revolution, 59

^[7] White, Encountering Revolution, 59

^[8] In the French Caribbean, it was not uncommon for free people of color (gens de couleur) to be enslavers.

^[9] James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, 163–185.

^[10] Jan C. Jansen, “Aliens in a Revolutionary World: Refugees, Migration Control and Subjecthood in the British Atlantic, 1790s–1820s,” Past & Present 255, no. 1 (2022): 189–231.

^[11] Gerald L. Newman, “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law (1776–1875),” Columbia Law Review 93, no. 8 (1993), 1833–1901.

^[12] Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States, Williamsburg and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021; Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic New York: New York University Press, 2019; Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States & the 19th Century Origins of American Immigration Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017; Kevin Kenny, The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic: Policing Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023. Seely considers refugees prior to and as a result of the American Revolution under her considerations on “removal,” but does not deeply engage with the post-revolutionary intersections regarding arrivals: 44–52.

^[13] Catherine Therese Christians Spaeth, “Purgatory or promised land? French emigrés in Philadelphia and their perceptions of America during the 1790s,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1992), 71.

^[14] White, Encountering Revolution; James Alexander Dun, Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; Sara E. Johnson, The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

^[15] 38.36 Sentence Docket, volume 1, P 60, 1794–1804, Philadelphia City Archives. Convicts’ self-reported places of birth or origins (not citizenship or nationality) were listed in the sentencing docket. 

^[16] Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720–1840 Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, 180–181.

^[17] In addition to the work already mentioned, see Brandon Mills’ entangled history of removal and colonization in The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.