The Germans in colonial times

Foreword

Singularly little is known of the magnitude of the German emigration to America in colonial times. The very fact of such a movement is commonly unknown to the American at the present day ; and even the descendants of these Teutonic pioneers are often ignorant or — more inexcusably — ashamed of their progenitors, and have sought by anglicizing their names and lightly passing over the fact of their descent from " Dutchmen" to conceal the wide and deep traces which this movement has left on American life. Yet this Volkerwanderung (for it merits the name) brought to our shores in the century before the Revolution one hundred and fifty thousand people, one-half of the population of the great province of Pennsylvania, besides large settlements in the provinces of New York, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, not to mention the small and illfated colonies of Law on the Mississippi and those in the State of Maine. Nor is their history lacking in interest, containing as it does the peaceful picture which Whittier has immortalized in his "Pennsylvania Pilgrim ;" the self-sacrifice of the Moravian missionaries among the Indians ; the dramatic fire of Muhlenberg throwing off his pastor's gown for a Continental uniform and calling to his flock that "the time to fight had come ;" and the tragic resolution with which the embattled farmers of Oriskany held back, with the sacrifice of their own lives,

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Foreword

the English rifle and Indian scalping-knife from their Mohawk Valle}' homes. Or we may turn to the quaint Rosicrucians, the hermits of the Wissahickon, or the cloisters of Ephrata for a life almost unknown among the more practical English colonists.

If we would sup full of the horrors of war, pestilence and famine, or religious persecution with stake and fire and noisome prison, with midnight flight for conscience' sake, we can find these told in simple pathos in the stories of the Palatines of the Rhine, the Mennonites of Switzerland, the INIoravians, or the tiny sect of the Schwenkfelders. If we would meet with good men or great, we may see here the gentle Pastorius, first protestant against American slavery, or Conrad Weiser, whose adventurous life was largely filled with embassies to might}' Indian chiefs and nations, whom he held back from war from the white men's frontier, or, last but not least, William Penn, whose might}' figure dominates the histoiy as its counterfeit presentment does the city he has builded beside the Delaware. And indeed " time would fail us to tell" of the many people and incidents, interesting, pathetic, humorous, or containing in them the germs of our present American development, which fill the annals of those " Pennsylvania Germans" and their kin in many States, whom the New England historian, Parkman, slurred over with the description, " dull and ignorant boors, which character their descendants for the most part retain."

How many even of these same descendants know tliat to this people belong, by ancestn,' more or less remote, some of the first scientific men of America, such as the Muhlenbergs, Melsheimer, the ** father of

Foreword

American entomology," Leidy, and Gross, the great surgeon ; Herkimer, the hero of Oriskany ; " Moll Pitcher," the heroine of Monmouth ; Post, the Indian missionary, to whom Parkman liimself pays a noble tribute ; Heckewelder, the Moravian lexicographer of the speech of the Delawares ; Armistead, the defender of Fort McHenry in the war of 1812, whose flag, "still there," inspired the "Star-Spangled Banner;" Barbara Frietchie ; and General Custer? Surely this people merit that some slight account be drawn from the mostly unknown books and documents where they have for years reposed, known only to antiquarians and often veiled from English readers by the German language in which many of the best and most valuable are written, and be given to the English-speaking world of America. Such is the purpose of the present work.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Conditions in Germany which led to emigration ii

II PENN'S visit to GERMANY 22

Chapter I

The large emigration of Germans to America and especially to Pennsylvania in colonial times seems on first examination a mysterious phenomenon. The Germans were aliens in language among the mainly English-speaking colonists ; were obliged to undertake a long and toilsome journey before reaching the ocean over which they must sail for weeks and months, amidst the greatest hardships and dangers, before they could even attain to their desired haven ; their own government, so soon as the size of the movement attracted attention, did all in its power to restrain it, and the PLnglish provincial authorities received the foreigners by no means with open arms ; yet the cry was still "They come." The well-known energy, resolution, and fondness for emigration characterizing the Germans of earlier times — the merchants of the Hansa, whose flag was on every sea and whose warehouses and trading-posts dotted every land and^ strand — had been crushed out of the seventeenthcentury Germans by the fearful peine forte et dure of the Thirty Years' War.'' So the Americans who saw this tide of strangers rising on their shore were naturally surprised, and the few of their descendants who know the proportions of the early German emigration to America are still astonished at it. But a slight knowledge of the condition of Germany at the time that the emigration took its rise and for some generations previous will explain it.

This movement had a twofold cause : first in point of time as of importance, a religious motive ; and secondly, a social or material one. That the religious was predominant may be seen by the character of the emigration, which at first and for two generations consisted entirely of the sectaries who were persecuted in Germ.any by state and church. And it may also be proved by the rise and course of the emigration which was begun and fostered by such men as Penn the Quaker and his Mennonite and Pietist friends and religious acquaintances.

The Rhine country, from which such an overwhelming proportion of the colonial German emigrants came that it may be almost exclusively considered, was the home of Mysticism and Pietism, two most elastic designations, which include phenomena as various as the wild and immoral fanaticism of the prophets of Miinster and the peaceful purity of Tersteegen and his little circle of pious friends. Mysticism had had its home on the Rhine ever since " Master Eckart" taught a strange mystical pantheism among the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and Tauler and the author of the "Theologia Germanica" preached a self-surrender as complete as that which Loyola exacted from his " Company of Jesus." This mysticism flowered later into the practical endeavors of

Gerhard Groot and the " Brethren of the Common Life" to instruct youth in their schools, and one of their scholars was th.it Thomas of Kempen who wrote the "Imitation of Christ," still beloved among us. The final result of this movement was the Reformation.

But the Reformation did not go far enough to satisfy many of the pious souls looking for more or different light than Luther and Zwingli found to break forth from God's word. Nor did it content the longings of many among the Swiss compatriots of Zwingli who felt the danger of his union between church and state or the coldness of his somewhat rationalistic views of the sacraments. So among the many scattered circles who fed their spirits upon the mystical writings of Boehme, Tauler, and Swedenborg, or the hidden people who proudly retained in secret the pure, early Christianity of the Waldenses, lived, amid continual suspicion and persecution, the beliefs which crystallized here and there into "the Sects." These flourished mainly among the lower classes, those who had wished during the Reformation to abolish nobles and kings along with priesthood, and these social and socialistic views naturally made them obnoxious to the authorities. "The persecuted Sects" they were designated, and persecuted they were indeed : unto death by fire and sword and drowning in earlier times ; then, as civilization advanced, through imprisonment, harassments by the authorities, and forcible conversions ; and, finally, by all sorts of worrying attacks, such as spared life and limb but left little else. No wonder that "as soon as an asylum was provided them, they flocked to it, one little company after another of the sectarians braving the dangers of the long, trying voyage and the hardships of the unknown wilderness to find the precious jewel of religious freedom.

In the midst of the religious intolerance and persecutions of the century after the Reformation fell upon Germany the unimaginable and indescribable horrors of the Thirty Years' War. It is difficult to call up to one's mind what this event was. Many portions of Germany became uninhabited wildernesses ; many of the miserable people became in the extremity of their distress robbers, murderers, and even cannibals. The free peasants were degraded to serfs, the rich and energetic burghers became narrow-minded shopkeepers, the noblemen servile courtiers, the princes shameless oppressors. Of the rich, blooming land, full of trade and learning and refinement, was left a wrecked country, the sites of burnt villages overgrown by the forests, tiny towns amid the ruin of their former greatness, and a handful of broken-spirited people creeping fearfully about the work of earning a bare existence. It was a full generation after the war before the exhausted and demoralized nation could stir itself to an interest in those spiritual things which were seemingly all that were left to it.

From desolation and barbarism, persecution and oppression on earth, the Germans looked to heaven. The churches, — and by this I mean the three "tolerated confessions" (Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic), — at least the Protestant churches, had fallen into a state of formalism and indifference to religious things, while retaining a vivid and often virulent interest in orthodoxy and the stiffest scholastic theology. The use of the sacraments had become in many places a magical cere-

Contlirions in Germany which led to Emigration

mony. The youth were not instructed, the openly scandalous in Hfe neither admonished nor excluded from the church. Men with none of that preparation of heart which our forefathers quaintly called " experimental religion" were ordained and ministered to congregations, famished for plain teaching of duty, scholastic treatises, or furious polemics against the sins of sectarianism, the dangers of good works, and the wickedness of prayermeetings. It is not strange that many simpl^e and godly people went off into the extravagances of the various mystical coteries where the Bible was at least studied, and, after a most singular fashion, expounded. The Rhine country was full of little circles of devout, if ignorant, people, who listened to some self-constituted minister, — perhaps a pious and sensible mystic like Tcrsteegen, perhaps a wild dreamer like the " Inspired Saddler" Rock, a learned lady like Eleanora von Merlau, or an immoral fanatic such as Eva von Buttlar.

But, fortunately for these ofttimes deluded good people, there arose the movement called or nicknamed Pietism, given a direction by the devout, learned, and lovable Spener, whose principle was " that Christianity was first of all life, and that the strongest proof of the truth of its doctrine was to be found in the religious experience of the believing." It embraced among its leaders — along with the fanatical cranks who are the curse of any movement which stirs men's enthusiasm — men like Gottfried Arnold, the church historian, the equally learned Professor Thomasius, the noble and benevolent Francke, the founder of the Orphan House of Halle, and his son, the benefactor and guide of the neglected Lutherans of Pennsylvania. The Pietists struggled not only against the dry and dead theology of the time, but for the purity and simplicity of the German language against the barbarous scholastic German of the time. The whole Pictistic movement was earnestly directed to the betterment of mankind, materially as well as spiritually. It found its field, in contradistinction to the mysticism of the "plain people," among the upper and cultivated classes, and many names of those rich and noble and mighty according to this world adorn its roll. The Pietists stood like the Deists for freedom of thought in religious matters and against the mental oppression which everywhere existed ; both appealed to the New Testament from the decisions of councils which in every case the authorities desired to maintain. The Collegia or conventicles of the Pietists were nothing but simple assemblies as harmless as a Methodist classmeeting, where the members appealed to the Scriptures in the original from the pedantic systems of the theologians. This new school was strong and pure so long as it preached free investigation, liberty of thought and conscience, and rectitude of life. The leaders were noble men and did a noble work, and not the least of their services to humanity was the part which they took in the colonization of the New World, where freedom of conscience existed. It is to the Pietists and their unknown and often unacknowledged brethren, the mystical and persecuted sectaries, that we owe the inception of the early colonial emigration of Germans to Pennsylvania.

The second cause of the colonial German emigration was the social and political condition of Germany, and this may be summed up as deterioration in ever}^ way.

i6

The Rhineland recovered more rapidly from the ravages of the Thirty Years' War than other parts of Germany, but misgovernment and reHgious intolerance were more severely felt there than in other sections of the country. To the reader of its depressing history it finally becomes a wonder, not that so many of its inhabitants emigrated, but that any one had the courage and the truly German perseverance to remain behind in the miserable land. The rulers sought only their own advantage and pleasure, the prosperity of their subjects was not at all in their thoughts. Wars were almost unceasing : French devastations and "reunions" along the Rhine, wars with the Swedes and Turks, the two dynastic wars named of the Spanish and Austrian successions, the Seven Years' War, and unceasing feuds among the little principalities. "The peasant did not conceive of a time in which there was not war." They must have prayed with a special feeling the pathetic petition of the litany : " Give peace in our time, O Lord : because there is none other that fighteth for us but only Thou, O God." All Southwest Germany was as full of misgovernment as of sectarianism, " filled with tiny principalities, old religious foundations, — secularized or still remaining, — free cities of the moribund empire and even free villages ; counts, princes, and lords of all kinds, who caricatured Louis XIV. sometimes by dozens to the square mile and kept the fruitful land in an artificial condition of perpetual exhaustion." This unhappy section of Germany included first in an unfortunate pre-eminence the Rheinpfalz or Rhenish Palatinate ; Swabia, Wiirtemberg, Silesia, and the many little principalities between Bavaria and Austria. The Rhenish Palatinate was a model of these badly ruled

2 17 and plundered principalities, and so many of its inhabitants fled that in America all German immigrants were called Palatines, and we even encounter in colonial records that nondescript "A Palatine from Holsteyn." When, after the Thirty Years' War, the elector Karl Ludwig returned to his desolated dominions, he found but a fiftieth part of the inhabitants remaining, and all his efforts (for he was a good ruler taught in the hard school of personal adversity) to restore prosperity were frustrated by the continual wars of his time. In 1668 was war with the neighboring Duke of Lorraine ; in 1673 the invasions of the Most Christian King, Louis XIV., began without declaration of war or any excuse save that he desired a desert made to protect his frontier. In the intervals of peace were carried on the shameless reunions by which territory was taken for France on the flimsiest pretexts of law. During the various campaigns, Mannheim and Heidelberg were burnt ; two separate efforts, four years apart, were necessary to destroy the strong and beautiful castle, to-day " majestic though in ruin ;" at Speyer the graves of the old Kaisers were broken open and their dust scattered by the French soldiers. Worms was burnt "on Whit-Tuesday," the French military bands playing dance-music while the city and its old cathedral were reduced to ashes. From this destruction Worms and Speyer have never recovered, and traces of the work of Louis's robber bands are still apparent ; all the villages and towns between Heilbronn and the Lower Rhine are new, with no remains left of their historic past.

To these outward afflictions of the Palatinate was now added religious intolerance. The succeeding elector, Johann Wilhelm, was a Catholic, and endeavored by taking advantage of the differences between the Lutherans and the Reformed to make the whole land of his own faith. Under his orders children were taken from their parents to be brought up Catholics. In some cases his Protestant subjects were driven away, sometimes their churches taken from them by force, or they were forcibly converted under pain of fines impossible to pay. In some places they were hunted into church by soldiers and the host crammed into their mouths. The Huguenots and Waldenses who had been invited by Karl Ludwig to take asylum in the Palatinate after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes were turned out and went with other Palatines to America. The Reformed were made incapable of holding civil office, the stipends were withdrawn from preachers and teachers, and, following the illustrious example of Louis XIV., they were subjected to the dragonnade. But the Protestants stood firm and almost none became Catholics. The elector meanwhile lived away from his country and spent his subjects' money gayly in private theatricals, buildings, and art collections.

His successor, Karl Philip, was one of the worst rulers that the Palatinate ever had, though he showed some little consideration for his subjects ; some of the feudal services were remitted in 1735 in order that the peasants might till their fields, but the despairing people refused to accept this, because they knew that all their crops would be taken from them by the invading French. The elector received an indemnity from the invaders, but retained it in his own pocket. The court was inconceivably costly — the master of horse, for instance, had one hundred and eighty persons under his orders alone, while other officials whose titles and rank are alike untranslatable and incomprehensible to us had as many or more. There were mounted life-guards, falconers, court musicians, and court architects besides.

It might have been supposed that this was the high-water mark of extravagance, but Karl Theodor, whose long reign filled out the eighteenth century, was the w^orst of all under whom the miserable Palatinate suffered. The elector was shamelessly in the pay of France, and under the influence of the Jesuits, like most of the Simmern branch of the Palatinate house ; bribery Avas open in the government ; in the court, avarice, extravagance, and immorality. He forbade his loving subjects to leave his well-governed land, where he destroyed the peasants' crops and fields with his magnificent hunts. His court far exceeded in expense and extravagance that of his predecessor. This magnificent court, with innumerable fine rooms, stables with hundreds of horses, gardens, and orangeries, was the resort of countless adventurers who were fed by scores at the monarch's table. Meanwhile, every nineteenth inhabitant was a beggar ; and the result of the census was concealed, for it showed a progressive diminution of population.

Wiirtemberg, which, next to the Palatinate, sent most emigrants to America, offers a replica of these conditions. In Wiirtemberg the French robbers came twice, in 1688 and 1693 ; the Spanish Succession War brought desolation to the country and a three days' plundering to the city of Stuttgart ; but from the beginning of the eighteenth century to its end Wiirtemberg had the advantage over its neighboring country, that no foreign army entered it. Its dukes for a hundred years, however, were merely bad imitations of a wretched model in their endeavors to equal the oppressions, extravagance, and wickedness of the French sovereigns. Karl Eugen of Wiirtemberg, whose treatment of Schiller and the poet Schubart has made him notorious, had two thousand courtiers, the finest ballet and opera out of Paris, increased the taxes of his subjects threefold, and drove them by thousands to America. In Baden reigned another imitator of Le Grand Monarque, Karl Wilhelm, the builder of Karlsruhe ; his people emigrated to New York and also to Pennsylvania in goodly numbers.

Truly an unpleasant and disheartening picture to contemplate, — these gilded princelings, these crushed people solacing themselves in their misery with wild religious dreams or subdued into the dumb non-resistance of sheep. One wonders that so feeble a folk ever had the spirit to leave their homes, embittered as their existence there was, to go across the sea to the New World.

This portrayal of the social conditions of Germany has brought us rather in advance chronologically of our subject, for the first emigration of Germans to America in 1683 was influenced by purely religious motives and not at all by any social conditions. Many causes, as is usual in any large movement, combined to influence this : mysticism with a Rosicrucian coloring. Pietism and the unfavorable aspect towards it of German church life, the Mennonite movement, and last, but not least, the personal influence and presence of a man great enough to lead events, — William Penn, Founder of Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER II PENN's visit to GERMANY

Penn made, it is probable, three visits to Germany and Holland. The first, to Labadie, had probably no influence on subsequent emigration ; the second, in 1674, to Embden and Crefeld, led only to the writing of several religious pamphlets; but the last, in 1677, more extensive in its scope, set in motion the tiny rivulet of sectarian emigration, which grew presently to a mighty river.

The journal of this religious visit was subsequently published, but we take from it only notices of those portions of the journey which influenced subsequent emigration. The Mennonites in Holland and Germany offered prepared ground for Quaker missionaiy endeavors ; the two sects held many principles in common, as the wrongfulness of war, of judicial oaths, of a paid ministry, of ornament in dress, and of infant baptism. Pearly Quaker missionaries had set up meetings at Krisheim and Crefeld. The Pietists also sympathized with many of the Quaker views, in particular that of the Inner Light ; but Spener, the leader of these believers in Frankfort, avoided a meeting with Penn. The Philadelphian societies, of English origin, were tolerably numerous both in Holland and Germany ; the Labadists and the mystics generally also formed strategic points, of which Penn, like the able man he was, took advantage.

At Frankfort he became much interested in the young

Penn's Visit to Germany

and nobly born mystic, Fraiilein von Merlau, who, after her marriage to the learned Chiliast professor, Petersen, wrote apocalyptic books " hard to be understood." Penn made from Frankfort a short visit to Worms and Krisheim ; at the latter place he edified the plain folk of the village in a barn ; the magistrate of the little town hid behind a door to spy upon the conventicle, but afterwards reported that " he heard nothing but what was good, and as to heresy he had not discovered any."

After Penn returned to England and obtained the grant of his province, four years later, he thought of the distressed " Friends" of Germany, and wrote to Benjamin Furly to recommend him Pennsylvania as an asylum for all oppressed sects. A number of pamphlets were prepared, setting forth the advantages of the new province beyond the seas : such as "Some Account of the Pro\'ince of Pennsylvania," which was translated into German under the title " Eine Nachricht wegen der Landschaft Pennsilvania in America" and went through several editions, also Dutch and French translations. The "Frame of Government" of the new province was also published, as was a little tract giving " Information and direction to such persons as are inclined to America," which was translated into German and Dutch. "A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania" was immediately translated by Furly into Dutch, French, and German. There soon began a flood of books, broadsides, and pamphlets, some setting forth the advantages of the Quaker province, others attacking or defending the Quakers or their doctrine. But enough had been disseminated to show what a haven of refug-e had been opened for the troubled sectaries of the Rhineland, and into it flocked all manner of persecuted, plundered, and down-trodden people.

Furly established two companies, one (not formally associated) at Crefeld, the other, the Frankfort Company, at that city on the Main. Of this Eleanora von Merlau and her husband, Dr. Petersen, were among the original stockholders, as also the merchant, Van de Walle, at whose house Peqn held his first meeting in Frankfort. None of the Frankfort Company ever came to America ; but the weavers of Crefeld and the simple Mennonites of Krisheim did emigrate and were the pioneers of the immense emigration of later time.

Dr. Seidensticker, the first and fullest investigator of the German roots of the emigration, says, "To complete the proof that the project of buying land and founding a settlement in Pennsylvania originated in the very circles that had been in contact with Penn, we have the statement of Pastorius, contained in an autobiographical memoir, to this effect ; ' Upon my return to Frankfort in 1682, I was glad to enjoy the company of my former acquaintances and Christian friends assembled together in a house called the Saalhof, viz. : Dr. Spener . . . Jacobus von de Walle . . . Eleanora von Merlau . . . etc., who sometimes made mention of William Penn, of Pennsylvania, and showed me letters from Benjamin Furley, also printed relations concerning said province [probably the "Account"] ; finally the whole secret could not be withheld from me that they had purchased twenty-five thousand acres of land in this remote part of the world. Some of them entirely resolved to transport themselves, families and all. This begat such a desire

Penn's Visit to Germany

in my soul to continue in their society and with them to lead a quiet, godly, and honest life in a howling wilderness, that by several letters I requested my father's consent, besides two hundred and fifty reichsthalers ; whereupon I went to Krisheim and immediately prepared for the journey.' " So at last we are face to face with a body of sectaries who really intend to emigrate, and with the man who is to be their leader. The era of journeying, of preparation, of pamphleteering, is passed, and that of action, of emigration, of pioneering, has begun.

The German emigration to America has been compared to a mighty river ; the simile is a good one. And as a river is made up of the waters of many streams and these in turn flow from numberless tiny springs rising in obscure places, so many things and people little accounted of by the great world went to feed the tide. The century-long suffering of Mennonite in Switzerland and Protestant in the Palatinate ; Penn's apostolic journeyings along the Rhine from one little group of " Friends" or Mystics or Pietists to another ; Furly's industrious pamphlet-writing ; the mystical dreamings of " the fair von Merlau" and her Pietist friends of the Saalhof concerning the possibility of better serving God in the virgin wilderness of Pennsylvania, which fired the noble, simple, courageous heart of Pastorius ; all went to prepare the way — may we not reverently say ? — for Him who led His humble people by a way they knew not, through the sea to a promised land of peace and freedom and brotherly love.

Chapter III

As we enter upon the histor>^ of the settlement of Germans in the New World, we feel that nothing in that history, no homeh^ trait nor trifling detail, can be uninteresting. It has the freshness and importance that inhere in all beginnings. Yet the story is largely but "the short and simple annals of the poor."

The colonists were Mennonites, weavers from Crefeld on the Rhine. They belonged to that persecuted sect of "defenceless Christians," as they often entitled themselves, who trace their spiritual descent back to the pure doctrines of the early Waldenses. But it is likely that they represent onh* one of the streams of tendency of Reformation or indeed pre-Reformation times ; one which arose among the common people and represented obscurely, and sometimes faultily, their blind and passionate desire for a pure, simple church in which all believers should be equal, in which no importance should be attached to forms and ceremonies, in which tliere should be no strife between brethren, neither wars nor judicial oaths ; and an equal desire for such a reform in the state as should make their burdens and oppressions a little lighter and by which the state should not persecute any man for doing or believing what he thought to be right. These Swiss and German peasants of the time of Columbus were inarticulately desiring what the great Italian statesman of our own day phrased in his immortal watchword of " a free church in a free state." But the idea was too great and free for the time. The unlearned men who taught it and tried to practise it, though they sometimes enjoyed the leadership of men like Felix Mantz, learned and wise and good, yet fell for the most part under the guidance of leaders so maddened by their wrongs that they could but strike blindly at the whole existing order of things or who reacted from churchly formalism into a fanatical freedom which broke all laws, human and divine. The excesses of the Peasants' War turned Luther's mighty influence against them. John of Leyden and the other mad "prophets" of Miinster gave the Anabaptists a name and a fame which centuries of pious and peaceful life could not clear.