The Poyen sampler names Elizabeth’s parents, Joseph and Sally, their birth dates, and the date of their marriage, as well as the names and birth dates of the seven eldest Poyen children. There was no space left to list the births of two later siblings, in 1820 and 1825, after Elizabeth had finished the sampler. Because of this omission, we can place the probable date of the sampler’s completion to between 1819 and 1820, before the next child was born. It is logical to assume that the sampler was made by fifteen-year-old Elizabeth (b. 1806), who was the only Poyen daughter of the proper age to make a sampler of this quality, as well as the eldest daughter. Family record samplers were most often the product of either the eldest or the youngest daughter in the family.3

In its overall composition and details, the sampler displays design elements that relate to other samplers from Essex County, Massachusetts, but that perhaps also subtly reflect the maker’s French heritage. The horizonal format of the Poyen family record sampler is characteristic of other Essex County examples made in the first decades of the nineteenth century. So, too, is the wide, three-sided satin-stitched border featuring a meandering floral vine with large roses in full bloom and the hilly lawn at the bottom with an overflowing basket of flowers flanked by leafy trees (fig. 3).4 It has not yet been determined who taught Elizabeth to design and sew her sampler; she may have taken a needlework class with a private teacher, or she could have attended one of several known Haverhill schools for young ladies that were extant while she was growing up. The sampler’s design most resembles those made at Miss Parker’s School (c. 1801–c. 1827).5

There are two possible explanations for the unique design of the central ground of Elizabeth’s sampler. The more mundane supposition is that the design was composed by her, or her teacher, by enlarging the small upper-border design of alternating diamonds and hexagons found in some other Haverhill samplers (fig. 4). However, the precisely rendered and elegant central area may also allude to a French aesthetic. Elizabeth outlined three rows of hexagonal lozenges framing the name and birth date of each family member. Between each lozenge is a small diamond with a three-budded floral sprig. This type of orderly geometric design is not found in any other known Massachusetts family record sampler and is reminiscent of the neoclassical printed-cotton furnishing fabrics produced by French factories such as Oberkampf in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (fig. 5).6 Could this similarity in design mean that the Poyen family had access to these fabrics through the wide international textile-trade network that was in place in the early nineteenth century? With the young country’s lessened dependence on English products after the American Revolution, French fabrics were more readily available and likely considered highly fashionable.

Enslaved labor was the backbone of the West Indies’ sugarcane industry (fig. 6). In the eighteenth century, 80 percent of the population of the French islands were enslaved plantation workers.9 Records from 1796 show that the de Poyens’ approximately 750-acre plantation near Sainte-Rose enslaved 207 people.10

As an overseas department of France, Guadeloupe was, and continues to be, considered a French region. When the French Revolution began in 1789, it spread to Guadeloupe. The people of the French West Indian islands were torn between those in favor of the Republican cause, which among other goals sought to abolish slavery, and those loyal to the king, including those who were dependent on enslaved labor to run their plantations. The de Poyens were royalists, and after two of Joseph de Poyen’s brothers had been killed by Republicans in the conflict, Joseph, his father, two other brothers, a sister, an aunt, and a cousin, Count François de Vipart, managed to board an American merchant vessel moored in a nearby harbor in early 1792.11 They were likely accompanied by other royalists fleeing the violence. According to a nineteenth-century historian, they “concealed themselves on board,” presumably to escape notice by the Republicans. The family landed in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in March 1792 (fig. 7).12 It is likely that the de Poyens had connections through their production of sugarcane and molasses that helped them gain passage on that ship, and Newburyport turned out to be a fortuitous destination, as the town’s economy was largely based on the triangle trade. Between 1734 and 1858, forty-seven ships, which made a total of eighty-eight voyages, were built in Newburyport for the transatlantic slave trade. In total, they carried 22,629 enslaved people from Africa, though several thousand died during the horrific voyages.13 Undoubtedly, there were also other smaller ships made locally that participated in the coastal trade routes between New England and the Caribbean. Newburyport’s citizens were not only shipbuilders but also ship captains, crewmen, and merchants invested in the trade. Partial ownership in vessels was common at all levels of society. Newburyport was also one of the biggest producers of rum in New England; in 1790 its waterfront was home to seventy distilleries.14

The arrival of a group of aristocratic French royalists fleeing Guadeloupe was a notable event, though these were not the first French émigrés who had sought refuge in Newburyport.15 People in the port city of about five thousand largely Anglo-Americans may have retained an appreciation for France due to its military support during the American Revolution. Thus, during the French Revolution, many Americans felt that France and the United States were bound together in a single, anti-monarchy cause. But when, in the 1780s and 1790s, US coastal cities saw an influx of French émigrés loyal to the king fleeing from both continental France and the French Caribbean islands, was there debate about how they should be welcomed? It is hard to know in all cases, but within a few years, the de Poyens became an integral part of the local community. Although Joseph de Poyen arrived in America from a family plantation dependent on chattel slavery, surely an anathema to some New Englanders, the family’s local connections to the triangle trade likely eased their way. Additionally, the de Poyens’ status as aristocratic French émigrés, as well as their presumably comfortable financial status, must have contributed to their assimilation. Moreover, at this time, many of the new American gentry who had become wealthy through trade sought to emulate French culture, manners, and fashion.16

Much of what we have been able to learn about the de Poyen family in the United States comes from Newburyport’s prolific late nineteenth-century chronicler, Sarah Anna Emery (1821–1907), as recorded in her book, Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian (1879), in which she recounts the remembrances of her ninety-two-year-old mother, Sarah Smith Emery (1787–1879). Emery devoted a complete chapter to the various French families who made their home in Newburyport following the French Revolution.17 Almost one hundred years after the de Poyen family’s arrival in Newburyport, she described the events surrounding it in highly dramatic terms:

As chronicled by Emery, Elizabeth’s grandfather Pierre Robert de Poyen de Saint Sauveur “inherited all the instincts and pride of the aristocracy of France” and was “a staunch royalist and an ardent defender of King Louis XVI.” Pierre Robert’s time in America, however, was short-lived. He died seven months following his arrival in Newburyport on October 14, 1792. Emery surmises that “the loss of home, change of climate, grief and anxiety, was too much for the exile.”19 At the time of Pierre Robert’s death, there was no consecrated burial ground for Catholics, and the senior de Poyen was laid to rest in the local Protestant cemetery in a “quiet spot . . . apart from others.”20 Three months later, Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793. Of major concern to plantation owners such as the de Poyens, slavery in Guadeloupe was banned for eight years, from 1794 until 1802, when Napoleon I’s government reestablished slavery in the French colonies.21 After the family left the island in 1792, their plantation was seized by the interim government, which handed over its management to a trustee. When slavery was reestablished in 1802, Joseph Poyen did not return to Guadeloupe to retake possession of his father’s plantation, and it was auctioned off to another owner in 1803.22

Following the patriarch Pierre Robert’s death, his twenty-five-year-old son, Joseph, eventually the father to the sampler maker, made his home in Newburyport. Emery records that Joseph’s early years were spent “in careless, easy living, dividing his time between the town and the romantic villages along the river’s bank.”23 One can speculate that this young émigré aristocrat soon learned to speak English, in an effort to get to know the community, and perhaps looked for a way to make a living.

By the fall of 1797, five years into his stay, Joseph Poyen (having dropped the aristocratic “de” from his name), astutely perceived the social environment of Newburyport’s gentry and their interest in French styles and customs. Using an adaptation of his name, “Poyen Rochmond,” he advertised in local newspapers the opening of an evening dancing school “for the young Ladies and Gentlemen” of Newburyport (fig. 8). Local advertisements record that fellow Frenchmen Renard & Barbot had a competing dance class and that Mr. Renard also offered French-language classes on Mondays and Thursdays—in the morning for ladies and in the evening for gentlemen. The following year, Joseph advertised his skills as a swordsman under the headline “Useful Art,” offering to teach the “young Gentlemen of this town . . . the useful and necessary art of self-defense by the Broad Sword.”24

In some of his “Dancing School” and “Useful Art” advertisements, Joseph invited students to apply at his lodgings on Liberty Street in Newburyport, but in 1798 “Poyn Joseph” was listed as one of the householders in the neighboring city of Haverhill, with his home valued at $650.25 Period documents record that this house at 38 East Main Street was located in “Rocks Village” in eastern Haverhill, in the same neighborhood as three local families with deep roots in the community: the Elliots, the Ingalls, and the Whittiers. Members of each of these families would marry into Joseph Poyen’s family.

On March 5, 1805, when he was thirty-six, Joseph married Sally Elliot, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of Thomas Elliot.26 Elliot’s ancestors were members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and became Haverhill landowners beginning in the early 1700s.27 Joseph’s cousin the Count de Vipart wooed Mary Balch Ingalls (1786–1807) with “moonlight sails” and violin serenades, according to Emery, and he and Mary were married only a few days after Joseph and Sally on March 21, 1805.28 Mary Ingalls’s wedding “created a great sensation” and she assumed the title of Countess de Vipart, but she died of consumption less than two years after her marriage. Later in the nineteenth century, Mary Ingalls de Vipart became a legendary figure as the heroine of John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1864 poem “The Countess.”29 After Mary’s death, François left Massachusetts and returned to Sainte-Rose, Guadeloupe, where a year later he remarried. He died there on September 15, 1811, at age thirty-five.30

Although Thomas and Sally Elliot apparently did not like their daughter “marrying a foreigner,” Joseph and Sally Poyen’s marriage lasted until Joseph’s death in 1850.31 During that time, the Poyens raised nine children, six daughters and three sons. A pastel portrait of Sally, likely done at the time of her marriage, shows her with fine features, dark eyes, and black hair, wearing a simple neoclassical white dress with a ruffled collar, perhaps her wedding dress (fig. 9). Emery described Sally as “a handsome, brilliant girl” who “made Rochemont de Poyen a most excellent wife,” and she characterized Joseph as “a genial Frenchman; a lithe active man. . . . Though irascible and impatient, he was the soul of wit and good humor, happy in making all around him happy.”32

As seen in the Poyen family sampler, Joseph and Sally chose their children’s names to reflect both their fraternal and maternal family heritages. Mary Antoinette and Francis Louis are anglicized names that attest to Joseph’s continuing loyalty to the deposed French monarchy. From the maternal Elliot and Swett families, with their deep English roots in the Haverhill area, there is Sally’s namesake, Sally Elliot, and a second son, Thomas Elliot. Other children, John Saint Sauveur and Abigail Rochemont Weld, have names that meld the lineage of both parents. The tradition of naming offspring after family ancestors would continue for several generations of the extended Poyen family.

During the years when his children were growing up, property deeds record that Joseph Poyen owned land in various locations in Rocks Village.33 In these deeds, he is variously described as a tobacconist, a comb maker, and a trader. Emery wrote that Joseph was “a great fancier of horse flesh, always ready for a trade.” In his will, Joseph is listed as a “yeoman,” indicating that he was a small landowning farmer. As Emery remembered: “Years passed and grandchildren also came, and grew up to love the dear old man, whose delight it was to play and dance with them; he grew old in years but not in elasticity of spirit, and his life went out in glorious fullness, at a ripe old age [of eighty-three].”34 There is no evidence that while in Massachusetts Joseph was directly involved in the triangle trade, but his will and probate record valued his estate at $4,264.15 including $2,710.45 from Guadeloupe, an indication of some continuing connection to the family’s sugarcane fortunes.35 In today’s money, the total value of his estate was $165,119.77, with the portion from Guadeloupe equivalent to $104,886.08, the majority of the total.