e French preacher
a dissenter. From the parochial account of the former, the town embraced
two Quaker families, three Dutch ones, four Lutherans, and several of
the French; and the Huguenots settling among them in the year 1726,
gathered a congregation of 'about one hundred persons.'

The Rev. Messrs. Daille and Labord appear early to have served the
French Protestant Church in New-York; but of the latter we have learned
nothing. The former had been pastor awhile to the French Protestants in
Boston. About the year 1690, the Dutch Church Consistory employed Mr.
Daille to preach to the French in their own language, at New-York, and
also to conduct the religious services of the pulpit during a part of
the Lord's day.

In 1763, Jean Carll was the pastor of Du Saint-Esprit, for we discover
his name, together with Peter Vallade and James Desbrosses, the present
elders, Daniel Bounet and Charles Jardine, the present deacons of the
French Protestant Church in the city of New-York, to a petition for a
charter. Their church property, they state, was purchased agreeable to
an act of the Legislature in 1703; 'a decent edifice for the public
worship of Almighty God, according to the usage of the French Protestant
Churches,' erected; 'and the residue they devoted to the use of the
cemetery or church-yard for the interment of their dead.' 'Ever since,
they have maintained a succession of ministers there, who have dispensed
the ordinances of divine worship in the French tongue.' Besides this
property, they received the rents of a house and parcel of ground in the
township of Breucklin, on Nassau Island, near the ferry, and the French
Church now asked from the legislative authorities a proper charter. With
honest pride they boast, in their petition, of the most inviolable
fidelity 'to all those indulgent states and powers who protected them
from the merciless rage of their Popish persecutors. As your petitioners
in particular are the descendants of a people who suffered the greatest
hardships and flew from their native country to preserve the purity of
the Christian faith and worship.' Eloquent and truthful words. The
Huguenots were a great blessing to every land where they settled. The
name of their body politic was 'the Ministers, Elders, and Deacons of
the Protestant French Church of the City of New-York.'

During the Revolutionary War, New-York became literally a city of
prisons. The pews of the North Dutch Church in William stree