Carré, John Thomas, ca. 1744-ca. 1825

The educator and Saint Domingue refugee, John Thomas Carré was born in Normandy in about 1744. After apparently receiving a sound basic education, Carré was induced by a physician friend of his to emigrate to the colony of Saint Domingue. Whatever his initial intentions may have been in emigrating, Carré's talent for drawing earned him a position in the Corps des Ingenieurs in the colony, where he worked preparing maps and plans for a variety of public works projects. According to family legend, he also began to study Latin at about this time, allegedly after being embarrassed at misspelling a common Latin phrase when finishing a map.

As surveyor for the parishes of Borgne and Plaisance, near Cap Haitien on the northern coast, Carré was introduced to the widow of a local planter, Mme Chicaneau, and while surveying her plantation, rashly eloped with her daughter, Anne Beatrice. Despite her initial displeasure at the marriage, Chicaneau rewarded the young couple with a sizable estate of their own, along with twelve slaves to manage it (four of them children). Still a young man, Carré became a coffee planter overnight, eventually overseeing almost 50,000 coffee plants tended by as many as 60 slaves. The couple prospered, raising six children in Saint Domingue, Emile, Victor, Sophie, George Washington, Marcelline, and Seraphine, with a seventh arriving later.

News of the revolution in France strongly affected Carré from the outset. While apparently neither a Royalist nor a Jacobin, he was deeply concerned about the bloodshed and disorder he feared might follow. Prescient or not, the Carrés and Chicaneaus were swept up in the violence of the slave revolt, leaving the colony in 1792 with their lives intact, but little of their fortune. Carré described his remarkable escape to Charles Willson Peale:

a year is hardly Since they [Carré's children] have been Eyewitnesses of the murder of forty white peoples, men, women, and children barbarously butchered by their own Negroes, in my neighbourhood.... These assassins came to my house to the number of about two hundred, besmeared all over with human blood. a white man who had Just come to inform me of the massacre of my Neighbours, immediately fell victim of their rage. he was murdered in my arms; his blood filled up me Shoes and yielding to a cruel destiny, he fell down dead upon one of my children, whom I looked upon half dead with fear... Then more than twenty guns were aimed at my breast; but my Negroes making a wall with their own bodies all around me, threatened of an instant death whomsoever Should do me the least harm. Thus Shielding me and my family at that dreadful moment, They got time enough to move and set the heart of these assassins into its natural way again. Then being turned from wild brutes into men again, far from doing me any mischief their chief assured me of their protection...[John Thomas Carré to Charles Willson Peale, ca.1792. Peale-Sellers Papers (B P31.50). In the edited edition of the Peale Papers, this letter is given the more probable date of 1793.]

The Carrés arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1793 with three slaves still in tow, and with the assistance of local supporters like Peale, recovered his finances. During the revolutionary years, however, the Carrés lost five children to disease or to the conflict itself. While in Philadelphia, Carré had some communication with the American Philosophical Society, transmitting an essay on the Natural History of St. Domingo in September 1795 and translating Palisot de Beauvois' catalogue of Peales' Museum into English.

At some point between December 1798 and June 1799, Carré decided to return to Saint Domingue, perhaps hoping to recover his estates. Traveling as secretary to the U.S. Consul Edward Stevens, however, his timing was not propitious: instability and renewed violence forced Carré to abandon Saint Domingue a second time, possibly as early as June 1799. After returning to Philadelphia in 1804, following a stay in Burlington, N.J., Carré established a select school with his brother, Charles. Situated half way between Germantown and Frankford, the Clermont Seminary gained a reputation as one of the city's finest boarding schools for boys, drawing students not only from the local elite, but from as far away as Natchez and New Orleans. The Carrés were later assisted by John Sanderson (1783-1844), a noted writer who married Carré's only surviving daughter Sophie. John Carré died in about 1825, the year in which his Seminary closed.

From the guide to the John Thomas Carré diary, 1807-1809, (American Philosophical Society)