you? I wish to say, have you not, since the beginning of that period, added crime to crime?”
Another letter is to Pierre Neau, of Amsterdam, his first cousin:—
“Your letter gave me a joyful surprise; for I thus got intelligence not only of a dear cousin to whom I am attached, but also of all his family, and of my dear cousin Henri Neau, whom I love with all my heart. You know well that for seventeen years I have not had the honour of seeing you; hence my surprise arose. I was well aware that you had become a refugee, my dear sister Sason told me so five years ago, when she removed to New England, I having sent for her. There she was married, three years since, to a native of La Tremblade, a remarkably honest man and very steady I am greatly obliged to Monsieur Gorgeon, who (you tell me) enquires about me and my family. I do not deserve such concern from so worthy a gentleman whom I have not the honour to know. My family is not in Europe, my dear cousin; it is in New England; it consists of two little children. The first offspring of our marriage was a daughter, whom God took from us eight days after her birth. When I parted from my dear wife she had only an amiable little boy, eighteen months old, who was beginning to speak; but she was very near her accouchement. For two years I remained without any news from home; but at last the Lord had pity on me, and gave an opportunity, through Messieurs Le Boiteux. I had no ink or paper to write an answer. I was obliged to write to these gentlemen with a pencil which had been left in my possession.”
Some of his cousins probably settled in England, or on British ground. James Neau was naturalised by Royal Letters Patent, dated Westminster, nth March 1700 (see List xxiv). Martin Neau was a lieutenant in Cambon’s; he married Jeanne Priolleau, and his son Elie was born 17th November 1692. Jean Neau was godmother to Jacques Blanchard in 1691 in L’Artillerie French Church. Jean Neau married Madelaine Robardeau, and his son Jacob was baptized in Glasshouse French Church, London, 23d April 1699. On 1st January 1730 Henri Neau married Jeanne Theronde, at the French Church, in St. Martin’s Lane, in the city.
I refer my readers to Professor Weiss’s five chapters on the “Refugees in America.” He mentions that in 1662 some La Rochelle ship-owners were prosecuted for “conveying” French “emigrants to a country belonging to Great Britain.” The information against Neau was that he did not return to France when summoned.
II. Anthony Benezet.
Antoine Benezet, the amiable and useful author and correspondent concerning slavery and the slave trade, was by birth a Frenchman, the son of a Huguenot gentleman. [A mistake concerning him has accidentally found its way into a noble and careful publication, “The Imperial Dictionary of Biography,” which begins an article thus:— “Benezet, Antoine, a man of colour.”] E. M. Chandler, a poet of America (in some verses addressed to Anthony Benezet), correctly indicates France as his birthplace:—
“Friend of the Afric! friend of the oppressed!
Thou who wert cradled in a far-off clime,
Where bigotry, and tyranny unblest,
Defaced with gory hand the page of time!”
The Benezet family was wealthy and important, but their estates were confiscated on account of their Protestantism in 1715. Antoine was born at St. Ouentin on the 31st January 1714 (new style).[1] His ancestors were of Calvisson in Languedoc; but had removed to the northern and manufacturing district of France in or soon after 1681, on the marriage of his grandfather, Jean Benezet, who allied her husband to the celebrated family of Crommelin. The good old man died in 1690. His eldest son, John Stephen Benezet, continued to keep up the family registers in the old way, a pious sentiment being appended to each entry; to the name of his little Antoine he added the prayer, “May God bless him in making him a partaker of his mercies.”
In order to show the alliance of Jean Benezet’s descendants with the Crommelins, we make the following statement:— Jean Crommelin became Seigneur de Camas in right of his wife, Marie de Semery, whom he had married on 17th December 1595. We are concerned with his sons, Pierre (born 28th November 1596), who married Marie Desormeaux, of Cambray, and Jean (born 19th March 1603), who married
- ↑ For this memoir I am chiefly indebted to the Memoirs of Anthony Benezet by Roberts Vaux (1817) — and to “Anthony Benezet — from the Original Memoir, revised with additions by Wilson Armistead (1859).” The original memoir is indispensable — the reviser has given 1713 as the year of birth (omitting month and day) — failing to notice that the true date is 1713 (old style), and that in consequence of his reckoning according to the old style of year, the biographer called the month of January the “Eleventh Month.”
