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There were NO Huguenots in the South after their one-month residence in what is now Jacksonville, where they were sent by the French king (a Catholic but considered to be a crypto-Protestant) as a combined militar and settlement expedition to set up a base from which the French could attack the Spanish treasure fleets and hopefully seize the land claimed and explored by the Spanish 50 years earlier.

The Huguenots at that time were mostly Normans, a seafaring people, and this was one of the reasons that most of the original “Pirates of the Caribbean” were actually Protestants. They roamed the area attacking the Spanish and Catholic communities in general, and in fact one of the reasons that Haiti is French is that a group of French Protestant pirates had settled there. The Spanish were never able to drive them off Hispaniola, because it was a remote location and the Spanish king would never cut loose with enough money to fund a serious attack. Eventually the pirate town became simply another French town, and that was the birth of Haiti. But look at Haiti, a basket case, and the now prosperous Dominican Republic (with virtually the same heavily African ethnic component) and you’ll see what lousy settlers the French were!

Huguenots came back into the South from the north many, many decades if not centuries later.

BTW, the Catholic Carroll set up the first truly free, non-confessional community in the US in what is now Maryland. His grandson converted to Anglicanism after marrying an Anglican and immediately started to attack Catholics and in fact revoked the tolerance acts put in place under Carroll.

And the poor UU’s are nuts. I know some very nice elderly UU’s, but they’re all living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

I have absolutely no idea where you got the idea that the Huguenots were ever predominantly "Norman". The fellows over in Brittany and along the Loire were hardly "Norman" ~ and the greater percentage of them actually hailed from South Eastern France, butt up against Switzerland and parts of what are now Italy.

The top end leadership were all noblemen or related to noblemen, and initially during the very beginning of The Religious wars, they were all members of the royal family itself ~ in France, change always starts at the top.

I think you are confounding the Castle at Saumur with something that never existed ~ to wit, a Norman kingdom that extended down into Anjou ~ which, for a number of centuries, ruled Great Britain like it was a banana republic colony!

Maryland was a special case ~ the Indians couldn't get to it, so the main thrust of British settlement shifted quickly from Virginia to Maryland.

Now, about the Maryland Catholics, if you are a decendant of the Maryland Murphy family, or McConnell family, or Smallwood family, or Dorsey/Darsey family, or several others ~ you have both Roman Catholic and Protestant antecedents.

The loss of Official Toleration in Maryland also meant Catholic land titles were no good ~ numerous Protestants in the region immediately MARRIED INTO those families to protect the property from division by evil doers from England.

In the old families that tradition has continued down to today. Even St. Mary's City folks have happily moved off to distant colonies with Catholic and Protestant cousins in tow.

The urge from England was probably anti-Catholic, but the response in America was to protect friends, family and neighbors ~ which is pretty much a "nationalist" impulse.