This post is a part of the 2023 Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, which were edited and compiled by members of the CRE’s board alongside editors at Age of Revolutions.

By Suzanne Krebsbach

Information desired …. Lequinio, once a resident of this district …. One of the most cruel subactors in the French Reign of Terror, and came to Charleston …. Who knows aught of Lequinio and his fate? Any information on the subject will enable us to oblige a third person, who has made an inquiry …. for a desire to know the termination of this bloody man’s earthly career. It is conjectured that his wife was instrumental in his death. 

–Edgefield Advertiser, 30 April 1858.

Frenchmen and women of all classes, aristocrats to artisans, fled political upheaval and revolutionary excesses in their nation between 1789 and 1815. Of the estimated thousands of exiles who sought safety in nearby Germany, Netherlands, and Great Britain a substantial number were aristocrats and nobles who expected to reclaim their lands soon. Others who sought more distant refuge in British North America and the United States sought to create a new identities in the frontier regions of a distant continent. Not all aristocrats could support themselves, but pragmatic refugees of all social ranks created opportunities for themselves and others.^[1] Historians have studied French refugee assimilation and acculturation in New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Orleans.^[2] Historian Thomas Sosnowski observed that in South Carolina, most refugees were from Saint-Domingue. These refugees left traces of their new lives in legal documents and civic records. Those who left wills, inventories, and business records, and claims for indemnity, reveal a variety of backgrounds, relationships, and kinship in Charleston. A closer look at four representative French refugees illustrates their backgrounds, networks of kinship and commerce, and the varying degrees of their assimilation in frontier South Carolina. The term frontier is used loosely, because for these immigrants even the Charleston metropolis was a frontier to them.

Circumstance, family, and relationships lured refugees to Charleston. Nathalie Sumter, Joseph Clorivière, Anne Rossignol, and Joseph Lequinio Kerblay are examples of pragmatic adaptability. By any measure Nathalie Sumter was distinguished among any possible list of notable emigres. Nathalie Marie Louise Stephanie de Lage de Volude Sumter(1782 – 1841) was born at Versailles. Her full name included Marie for her godmother Queen Marie Antoinette, and Louise for her godfather King Louis XVI.  She was born in Versailles to Stephanie Beatrix d’Amblimont, Marquise de Lage de Volude of the Queen’s household. Her grandfather was Vice Admiral Claude François Renart d’Amblimont. To escape the Terror, her mother sent her to New York (as a child of seven) where she was reared under the protection of Aaron Burr, whose daughter Theodosia was her childhood companion.^[3] On a return voyage to France in 1802 she met and married Thomas Sumter, Jr.^[4]  She bore him seven children; followed him on his diplomatic postings; and made a life in isolated Sumter, South Carolina, where she wrote weekly letters to her family in France. A devout Roman Catholic, she recorded in her diary the many difficulties with her sons, her enslaved people, and the isolation which presented few occasions to practice her faith.^[5]

Monarchist Joseph Pierre Picot, Chevalier de Limoëlan, Chevalier de Clorivière, (1768 – 1826) was another exiled Catholic aristocrat. At the outbreak of Revolution, he was a Royalist Army officer as was a cousin who died in the 1790 Nancy Affair. His father, and another cousin, were guillotined in 1793 for their roles in an uprising in Brittany. During the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire Limoëlan fought in the Chouan Wars and spied for the British.^[6] After failing to assassinate Napoleon in the “Infernal Machine Affair,” Christmas Eve, 1800, he escaped Paris for Savannah, Georgia, with the aid of his sister and brother-in-law Jean-Baptiste Chappedelaine.^[7] To conceal his violent past he became Picotde Clorivière in Savannah, where he acted as an agent for Chappedelaine.  To earn a living, he painted miniature portraits on ivory for select Georgia and South Carolina families.  In American art history he known as a gifted artist.^[8] By 1812 he had another identity: Fr. Joseph Clorivière, Catholic priest in Charleston.^[9]

Anne Rossignol (1730 – 1810) was neither Catholic nor an aristocrat. A wealthy Senegal-born colonial French citizen and Saint Dominguan slave trader, Anne Rossignol (1730 – 1810) lived in Saint Domingue where Rossignol family members had settled so many sugar plantations that they added their plantation names to their patronymics to distinguish the various familial branches. To escape the terrors of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 she and her daughter Marie Adelaide Dumont, her French-born son-in-law Guillaume Dumont and two grandchildren refugeed to Charleston, South Carolina, where she continued the lucrative trade in human beings.^[10] In her will Madame Rossignol stated Paul Rossignol could purchase his children Charlotte and Brutus by Marianne, one of her enslaved women. If he declined; she would sell them. She regretted the loss of her Cap Français property but not her enslaved people there.^[11]

Lawyer and French Jacobin leader Joseph Marie Lequinio Kerblay (1755 – 1812) emigrated from France to Rhode Island and then relocated to South Carolina where he reinvented himself as a slave-owning farmer. Joseph Marie Lequinio Kerblay was born in Sarzeau, Brittany. He was elected to the National Convention where he voted to abolish the monarchy. His actions in the Vendee were violent and controversial even by revolutionary standards. Historians of the French Revolution note his political career yet give less attention to his political and social writings.  They also pay no attention to his life after he left France in 1801 to become the French commercial consul in Newport, Rhode Island, and in South Carolina where he died. American historians fail to acknowledge his influence on American political thought.  For example, Kerblay’s Prejudices Destroyed influenced Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason but the Frenchman’s name appears only in the 1794 edition.^[12]  His works on natural history and civil improvements such as inland navigation was significant in his time, and environmental historians still cite his Voyage dans le Jura.^[13]

Napoleon knew Limoëlan was behind the Christmas Eve assassination attempt, yet he blamed the Jacobins.^[14] Lequinio, a prominent Jacobin, sensed his future in France had run out, and accepted Bonaparte’s appointment as Deputy Commissioner of Commercial Relations in Newport, Rhode Island.^[15] Kerblay clearly planned to turn his American ‘exile’ to advantage by using contacts in France, the new American republic, and in Newport, to forge a new identity.^[16]

Newport, Rhode Island, was a sophisticated Northern watering spot where Southerners of means escaped blistering summers. In the eighteenth century there was active triangular trade in tourists, commodities, and enslaved people between the Caribbean, Newport, and Charleston. Charleston’s earliest settlers came from the Caribbean – Middletons from Barbados, Lowndes and Rawlings from St. Kitts, Lucas from Antigua, Whaleys from Jamaica, and La Mottes from Grenada. New England ship owners Nathaniel Russell and Benjamin Smith made Charleston their base in the lucrative trade with the Caribbean, New England, and the Continent.^[17] In the War for American Independence Rhode Islanders welcomed French, albeit Catholic, presence and that welcome extended into the early republic and beyond.^[18]

When Kerblay arrived in Newport in 1801, several American Founding Fathers welcomed him as a fellow revolutionary and man of letters. The former regicide sought letters of introduction to President Thomas Jefferson from two French aristocrats: the social reformer Francois Alexandre Frederic, Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt and General Gilbert du Motier Lafayette.  Alexander Hamilton knew of atheist Kerblay’s contempt of traditional religion and thought the Frenchman would find little welcome in puritan New England.^[19] To smooth his access to an emerging American aristocracy of wealth Kerblay shrewdly approached Charles Lucas Pinckney Horry, a nephew of South Carolina’s most famous heroes of the War of Independence, the brothers General Thomas Pinckney and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, who had been United States Minister to France 1796 – 1797.^[20] Although alienated from his family and American politics, Pinckney Horry was well known in Newport society and his letter of introduction contributed to the Frenchman’s social success.  Soon after arriving in Rhode Island Kerblay was dining with illustrious members of the Rutledge and the Pinckney families.^[21] Francis Kinloch, a planter from Georgetown, South Carolina, found Kerblay “a man of warm affections and honourable sentiments.”^[22]

Louis Rene Adrien Dugas de Vallon, late of Saint Domingue, also lived in Newport at the time. The Dugas family lived in Newport in August 1794 when his daughter Elisabeth Adrienne was baptized there.^[23]  He grew cotton and indigo in the Artibonite district of Saint Domingue near the Rossignol plantations la Chicotte, des Cahaut, du Lagon, and de Grandbois.^[24] When the Dugas family moved from Newport to Edgefield, South Carolina, to recreate their lost Saint Dominguan plantations the Kerblay and his wife followed. 

Edgefield, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia were central locations in a centuries-old inland frontier where one could easily forge a new identity. Kerblay sought to become a plantation owner and recreate his French fields and vineyards. He abandoned his “rights of man” sentiments to acquire enslaved people to work his new enterprises. His republicanism too died in South Carolina’s slave culture. He called on Clorivière, formerly Limoëlan, his enemy in the Vendee, and Louis Rene Adrien Dugas de Vallon, a Saint Domingue planter, for assistance with financial transactions and other matters in arranging funds, land acquisition, and enslaved workers. Kerblay’s efforts at viticulture in South Carolina bore as little fruit as did the better-known Vine and Olive Society in Demopolis, Alabama.^[25]

Paul Rossignol, a relative of Anne Rossignol, practiced law in Augusta, Georgia. Among his clients were Picot de Clorivière in Savannah, Lequinio Kerblay, and Louis Rene Dugas in Edgefield District, South Carolina, across the Savannah River from Augusta.^[26] While little in their earlier lives could have predicted similarities, as refugees they became part of a socially and economically homogeneous South Carolina network. Kerblay purchased property and enslaved people from John Rainsford and others. Pico de Clorivière (formerly Limoëlan), his enemy in the Chouan War, was occasionally one of Kerblay’s financial partners. Clorivière’s brother-in-law Chappedelaine had inherited properties in Sapelo Island and part shares in other American ventures. As a financial agent Cloriviére dealt in French bills of exchange and had access to French credit which enabled him to assist his former enemy and others. In 1808 Kerblay purchased 57 acres in Greenville District, South Carolina, a hilly area with a climate closer to the familiar French climate. He died in 1812 before he could transfer his operations to the Upstate.^[27] Madame Kerblay resided in Edgefield and died in 1822.^[28]

When Kerblay died, Pierre La Borde purchased the entire estate valued at $13,252.60. Laborde, from Bordeaux by way of Saint Domingue, was another link in the refugee network. He had inherited a large estate but lost it in the Haitian Revolution.^[29] The childless Madame Kerblay was close to the Dugas family. In her will Madame Kerblay named Alexander and Louis Dugas, sons of Louis Rene Adrien Dugas, executors and sole heirs of her estate. Her property in France went to her French relatives on condition they paid all her debts. Paul Rossignol and his son Dr. Louis Rossignol were witnesses.  

The French revolutionary diaspora was a kaleidoscope of Black, White, mixed-race, free and enslaved people from France and the former colony, Saint Domingue. They radically changed the racial and cultural dynamics of every Atlantic World community in which they settled.  Wealthy emigres Natalie de Lage Sumter, Limoëlan Clorivière, Lequinio Kerblay had resources and access to credit. Limoëlan and Lequinio accommodated each other despite their former political positions. Among the wealthiest women in the Atlantic world, Madame Rossignol lived the last ten years of her life in Charleston, South Carolina. These four emigres were French citizens of means, three from the metropole, one from the overseas colonies of Senegal and Saint Domingue. Clorivière and Sumter were devout Catholics. To disguise their violent pasts, Cloriviére changed his name to Limoëlan and Joseph Lequinio became Kerblay. Lequinio and Rossignol displayed no religious preference. The boldest of them all – Anne Rossignol – felt no need to disguise herself to atone for her past or present.

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Suzanne Krebsbach is an independent scholar based in Charleston, South Carolina. Her work focuses on the experience of African-American Catholics of Charleston.

Title Image: A view of Charleston Bay and City in 1864 by Conrad Wise Chapman and John Gadsby Chapman. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Endnotes:

^[1] Nicholas M. Butler, Votaries of Apollo: the Saint Cecilia Society and Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007). There were so many skilled French musicians that the city supported two orchestras. 

^[2] Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2010); Frances Sergeant Childs, French Refugee Life in the United States, 1790 – 1800 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1940; Reprint Philadelphia, Porcupine Press, 1978); Donald Greer, The Incidence of Emigration During the French Revolution (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1951); Juliette Reboul, French Emigration to Great Britain in Response to the French Revolution (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Erica Johnson, “Religion and the Atlantic World: The Case of Saint-Domingue and French Guiana,” in The French Revolution and Religion in Global Perspective, edited by Bryan A. Banks and Erica Johnson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 49 – 71; Kirsty Carpenter, “The Novelty of French Emigres in London in the 1790s,” in A History of the French in London: Liberty, Equality, Opportunity, edited by Debra Kelly and Martyn Cornick (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2013): 69 – 90. Thomas Sosnowski, “Revolutionary Emigres and Exiles in the United States: Problems of Economic Survival in a New Republican Society,” Papers from the George Rude Society Seminar, French History and Civilization, Volume 1 (Melbourne, AU: University of Melbourne Print and Design, 2005); Thomas Sosnowski, “French Emigres in the Unites States,” in The French Emigres in Europe and the Struggle Against Revolution, edited by Kirsty Carpenter and Philip Mansel (London: Macmillan, 1999): 138 – 150. 

^[3] Aaron Burr was a hero in the War for American Independence; a United States Senator; and vice-president in Thomas Jefferson’s administration. Theodosia Burr married Joseph Alston, governor of South Carolina from 1812 – 1814. She and her young son perished at sea in 1813.

^[4] Thomas Sumter Junior was the son of Revolutionary War hero General Thomas Sumter. He served as Lt. Governor of South Carolina 1804 – 1806. In 1808 he was appointed first U.S. Ambassador to Brazil and served until 1819.

^[5] Natalie’s forebears were among the oldest nobility in France. Thomas Tisdale, Lady of the High Hills (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001): 3 – 4; Mitchell Edward Oxford, “’I have had vexation enough to spoil the temper of a saint:” Natalie Delage Sumter’s Catholic Cosmopolitanism in the Early Republic,” Early American Studies 15, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 133 – 163; “Diary of Natalie de Lage Sumter: 1840 – 1841,” University of South Carolina Archives and Special Collections, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, WPA project 65-33-118.

^[6] Donald Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770 – 1796 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1982); Elizabeth Sparrow, Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792 – 1815 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 1999).

^[7] See David Darrah, Conspiracy in Paris:  The Strange Career of Joseph Picot Limoëlan, Aristocrat, Soldier, and Priest and the Gunpowder Plot Against Napoleon on 3 Nivôse, Year IX (December 24, 1800) (New York: Exposition Press, 1953); Rene D’Ambrieres, Le Fulgurant Destin du Chevalier de Limoëlan (Paris: Via Romana, 2023).

^[8] Stephen Worsley, “Joseph Pierre Picot de Limoëlan de Clorivière: A Portrait Miniaturist Revisited,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 1 – 47. He may have painted a portrait of Archbishop John Carroll when he (Clorivière) was in the Roman Catholic seminary at Baltimore. For a discussion of this image see Toby Marie Chieffo, “Joshua Johnson Revisited: Filling the Lacunae,” Master’s Thesis (College of William and Mary, 1995).

^[9] Suzanne Krebsbach, “From Assassin Limoëlan to Father Clorivière,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 120.2 (April 2019): 102 ‒ 30.

^[10] Suzanne Krebsbach, “Anne Rossignol, Madame Dumont and Dr. John Schmidt Junior: Community and Accommodation in Charleston, South Carolina, 1790 – 1840,” Select Papers of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 2020: 6.

^[11] For the genealogy of the sprawling Rossignol family see Elizabeth Sullivan-Holleman and Isabel Hillery Cobb, The Saint Domingue Epic: the de Rossignol des Dunes and Family Alliances (Bay St. Louis, MS: the Nightingale Press, 1984), 128 – 169. Chapter V traces the various families in detail. Lorelle Semley states Anne Rossignol was the natural daughter of Claude Rossignol of Nantes. See Semely, To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 24 – 33. Further research into French archival records may shed light on Anne’s relationship with the various Rossignol families on Saint Domingue.

^[12] See Joseph Marie Lequinio, Les prejudges detruits (Paris: de l’imprimerie nationale, 1792). For Paine’s Age of Reason which included Lequinio, and others. See https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3Alequinio+AND+ti%3Areason+AND+au%3Apaine.

^[13] Joseph Marie Lequinio, Voyage pittoresque et physio-economique dans le Jura (Paris: Caillot, 1800). See also Kieko Matteson, Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict, 1669 – 1848 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 161 -2, 164. For comments on Kerblay’s social thought see Michèle Bokobza Kahan, “Tolerance et philosophie sociale dans l’oeuvre de Lequinio (1755 – 1814),” Société Française d’Étude du Dix-Huitième Siècle 48, no.1 (2016): 551 – 567.

^[14] The First Consul offered a reward of 12,000 francs for Limoëlan but only 6,000 for Cadoudal and other conspirators.  See Napoleon Bonaparte to Joseph Fouche, April 13, 1801, in Correspondence de Napoleon I er: Publiee par Ordre de l’Empereur Napoleon III, vol 7 (Paris: Henri Plan and J. Dumaine, 1861(, 123.  See also Proces Instruit par la Cour de Justice Criminelle et Speciale du Department de la Seine (Paris: C. F. Patris, Imprimeur de la Cour de Justice Criminelle, 1804, 1804), 1: 239, 254, 257.  

^[15] Lequinio is generally known as `Lequinio’ in French sources and `Kerblay’ in American sources. 

^[16] Claudy Valin, Lequinio, Law and Public Safety, (Rennes, France: PUR, 2014). There are over two hundred Kerblay and Dugas records at the University of South Carolina’s South Caroliniana Library and Edgefield County archives which deal with deeds and financial matters.  Additional documents are in the Rainsford Corporation Archives, a private collection in Edgefield. As Valin notes, Kerblay’s personal papers are not in evidence.

^[17] J. Thomas Savage, Nathaniel Russell House (Santa Barbara, CA: Left Coast Books, 1986); Martha Zierden, “A Transatlantic Merchant’s House in Charleston: Archeological Exploration of Refinement and Subsistence in an Urban Setting,”Historical Archaeology 33, no. 3 (1999): 73 – 87; Huw T. David, “The Atlantic at Work: Britain and South Carolina’s Trading Networks, ca. 1730 – 1790” (Oxford University, Lincoln College, PhD dissertation, 2011).

^[18] George Champlin Mason, Reminiscences of Newport (Newport, RI: Charles Hammett, 1884), 9 – 18.

^[19] To Thomas Jefferson from La Rochefoucauld-Linacourt, 11 January 1801 https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-36-02-0207 ; To Thomas Jefferson from Lafayette, 30 January 1802, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-36-02-0305; Alexander Hamilton, Views on the French Revolution, 1794, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-26-02-0002-0442.

^[20] Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention from South Carolina and signed of the United States Constitution.

^[21] G. Melvin Herndon, “Pinckney Horry, 1769 – 1828: Rebel Without a Cause,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 50, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 232 – 253: Kerblay may have spent summers in Newport society after he moved to Edgefield, South Carolina. George Champlin Mason, Reminiscences of Newport (Newport, RI: Charles E. Hammett, 1884), 213 – 214, 388. The Rutledge family included John Rutledge (1739 – 1800) one of the original justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and later Chief Justice. South Carolina’s Pinckney family had numerous descendants, many of whom held elective office.  Eliza Lucas Pinckney is credited with growing indigo in South Carolina which became a valuable export. Walter Edgar, South Carolina, a History (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1998), 146, 154, 161, 175, 179.

^[22] Francis Kinloch, Letters from Switzerland and France Written during a Residence between Two and Three Years in Different Parts of Those Countries, volume 1 (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1819): 3 – 4, 251, 461 – 463. One of Kinloch’s letters describing Kerblay appeared in the Charleston Courier, August 20, 1808, p. 2. Kinloch’s Letters from Switzerland were first published in the Charleston Courier. 

^[23] Priests from Boston attended the small Roman Catholic community in Newport.  See Genealogie et Histoire de la Caraibe Nouvelle SeriesNo 25, 1er trimestre (2017), 145. Dugas grew cotton and indigo on plantations which he lost in the revolution. See University of South Carolina Archives and Special Collections, Kerblay Dugas Papers, no. 38 “A List of territories marked according to “Rossignol’s map made in 1790 which were in the possession of Magnon in the year 1826 in the Parish of St. Jerome of Little River;” no.  XXIV “List of the Properties that the heirs of Monsieur Dugas de Vallon have reclaimed in the Isle of St. Domingue;” XXV, “Papers which had been in the possession of L. Dugas such as: Titles of the dwelling called La Louisiana where lived Monsieur Dugas; titles of the habitation, called La Peron of 100 squares where the Tuilerie(palace and garden) were and different papers; a genealogical tree of the Dugas family from the time of the first Dugas married at St. Domingue, Feb.27, 1681, and two notebooks of papers and accounts.”

^[24] See Sullivan and Cobb, p.127.

^[25]  Napoleonic officers were involved in a land scheme known as the Vine and Olive Society, and a conquest scheme in Texas. The conquest of Texas failed; French refugees from the Haitian Revolution took over the colony, which also failed.  The colonist eventually assimilated with local planter society. Rafe Blaufarb, Bonapartists in the Borderland: French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815 – 1835, (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2005).

^[26] Augusta, Georgia, is located on the south side of the Savanah River which borders South Carolina opposite Edgefield. Then as now Augusta served as an entrepot for the surrounding area.

^[27] South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Deed, series S213192, volume 0041, page 00358, item 001.

^[28] Edgefield County Archives. Box 16, Package 569. Madame Kerblay’s Will, Edward Dugas executor, filed August 21,1826.

^[29] Peter Laborde’s son Maximilian Laborde (1804 ‒ 73) was a medical doctor, South Carolina Secretary of State, trustee of the South Carolina College, and later professor.  He was the author of History of South Carolina College . . . (Columbia: Peter B. Glass, 1859). See J.L. Reynolds, History of the South Carolina College (Charleston: Walker Evans and Cogswell, 1874).