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.” 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.” 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. 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.