French-Caribbean Refugees and Slavery in German Protestant Maryland

The late eighteenth century saw the immigration of thousands of French refugees from France and its Caribbean colonies to the United States. An examination of one family of these refugees, Jean Payen de Boisneuf and his relatives the Vincendières, reveals that the values that the refugees imported, such as plantation slavery and Catholicism, could be antagonistic to social norms in the regions they chose to settle.