A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America 9780271063003

Citation preview

A Peculiar Mixture

The Max Kade Research Institute Series: Germans Beyond Europe Series Editors A. Gregg Roeber and Daniel Purdy

The Max Kade Research Institute Series is an outlet for scholarship that examines the history and culture of German-speaking communities in America and across the globe, from the early modern period to the start of the First World War. Books in this series examine the movements of the German-speaking diaspora as influenced by forces such as migration, colonization, war, research, religious missions, or trade. This series explores the historical and cultural depictions of the international networks that connect these communities, as well as linguistic relations between German and other languages within European global networks. This series is a project of the Max Kade German-American Research Institute located on Penn State’s campus. This Institute, co-directed by A. Gregg Roeber and Daniel Purdy, was founded in 1993 thanks to a grant from the Max Kade Foundation, New York.

A Peculiar Mixture Germ an-L anguage Cultures and Identities

in Eighteenth-Century North A merica

Edited by Jan Stievermann and Oliver Scheiding

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Map on page viii by Eric Oberhart, University of Wisconsin–Madison Cartography Lab, based on map by Peg Kearney, University of Maine, as well as Gary T. Horlacher, “Eighteenth Century German Emigration Research,” ProGenealogists, 2000, http://www.progenealogists.com/germanemigration.htm; Aaron Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 7; Michael S. Bird, Ontario Fraktur: A Pennsylvania-­ German Folk Tradition in Early Canada (Toronto: M. F. Feheley, 1977), 28; and U.S. Census Office, “1850 U.S. Census Map of Lutheran Churches,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data A peculiar mixture : German-language cultures and identities in eighteenth-century North America / edited by Jan Stievermann and Oliver Scheiding. p. cm. — (Max Kade German American Research Institute series) Summary: “A collection of essays that explore the transatlantic German cultures and identities of the colonial period”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-271-05949-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Germans—North America—History—18th century. 2. Germans—North America—Ethnic identity. 3. German Americans—History—18th century. 4. German Americans—Ethnic identity. 5. North America—Emigration and immigration— History—18th century. 6. Germany—Emigration and immigration—History— 18th century. I. Stievermann, Jan. II. Scheiding, Oliver. III. Series: Max Kade German-American Research Institute series. E49.2.G3P43 2013 973'.0431—dc23 2012044625 Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-­free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992. This book is printed on Nature’s Natural, which contains 30% post-consumer waste.

Contents

Acknowledgments / vii



Introduction / 1 Jan Stievermann

Part 1  Migration and Settlement / 21 1

Rethinking the Significance of the 1709 Mass Migration / 23 Marianne S. Wokeck

2

Information Brokers and Mediators: The Role of Diplomats in the Migration of German-­Speaking People, 1709–1711 / 43 Rosalind J. Beiler

3

The Palatine Immigrants of 1710 and the Native Americans / 58 Philip Otterness

Part 2  Material and Intellectual Cultures in the Making / 83 4 5 6

Of Dwelling Houses, Painted Chests, and Stove Plates: What Material Culture Tells Us About the Palatines in Early New York / 85 Cynthia G. Falk (Re)Discovering the German-­Language Literature of Colonial America / 117 Patrick M. Erben “Runs, Creeks, and Rivers Join”: The Correspondence Network of Gotthilf Henry Ernst Mühlenberg / 150 Matthias Schönhofer

vi  Contents

Part 3  Negotiations of Ethnic and Religious Identities / 181 7 8

Divergent Paths: Processes of Identity Formation Among German Speakers, 1730–1760 / 183 Marie Basile McDaniel Defining the Limits of American Liberty: Pennsylvania’s German Peace Churches During the Revolution / 207 Jan Stievermann



Pennsylvania German Taufscheine and Revolutionary America: Cultural History and Interpreting Identity / 246 Liam Riordan



Contributors / 275 Index / 279

9

Acknowledgments The conference from which this collection of essays grew was made possible by the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG), the American Embassy in cooperation with the German Association for American Studies (DGfA), the University of Mainz, the Ministry of Education of the Rhineland-­Palatinate, the Research Center of Social and Cultural Studies Mainz (SOCUM), the Center for Intercultural Studies (ZIS), and the Atlantische Akademie. The Max Kade Institute provided a subsidy for the publication of this book. We wish to thank these organizations for their generosity in supporting this project. For their invaluable help in organizing the conference we are indebted to the American Studies Department at Mainz University, especially to Matthias Köhler, Tim Lanzendörfer, and Anette Vollrath. Thanks are also due to Gregg Roeber, who encouraged and supported the enterprise from the beginning, as well as to Christina Kühnel, Julia Lauer, Lukas Dausend, and Jennifer Adams-­ Maßmann, who formatted and proofread the essays.

Germanic Cultural Presence in Early America to c. 1830 Heartland

Core Area

Secondary Area

ITISH CANADA

Nova Scotia Maine

Ontario

Vt. N.H. Albany

New York

Pennsylvania

Mass. Conn.

Rhode Island

New Jersey Philadelphia

Ohio

Maryland West Virginia

Delaware

ATL ANTIC Virginia

OCEAN

North Carolina

South Carolina Georgia

Charleston

Savannah

0 0

Base Map: Peg Kearney Sources: Gary T. Hortacher, 2000, http://www.progenealogists.com/germanemigration.htm Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys (1996), p. 7. Bird, Ontario Fraktur (1977), p.28. Map: Lutheran Churches 1850, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American.

100 100

200 miles

200 kilometers

Introduction Jan Stievermann

For the most part the author’s artless and unornamented account of the habits of various Europeans and of the American savages, of their laws, their customs, their domestic and religious institutions, is new, and of such a nature that the reflective reader will be delighted to perceive in it a peculiar mixture of the European and the American environment, of the customs of the Old and the New World, and of a people living partly in civilization and partly in a state of natural freedom. —From the preface to Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey to Pennsylvania

Hoping to pique the curiosity of potential buyers, the anonymous editor of Gottlieb Mittelberger’s travel account, Journey to Pennsylvania, highlighted in 1756 some of the issues that occupy scholars in the discipline of early American studies today. For quite some time now, deepened attention has been given to the ethnic and religious diversity of the peoples who came to British North America, especially the middle colonies, as well as to the persistent plurality of “their laws, their customs, their domestic and religious institutions”—all of which confused and appalled poor Gottlieb Mittelberger.1 There has also been substantial interest in the complex relations between the various groups of European colonists and the many different tribes of “American savages” among whom they settled.2 Moreover, historians have called into question long-­prevalent narratives about progressive Americanization of immigrant populations, as they have challenged cherished assumptions about the preservation of authentic European traditions in the New World. Instead, recent

2  A Peculiar Mixture

studies tend to emphasize that the development of colonial cultures, religions, and identities was characterized everywhere, as Mittelberger’s editor put it, by a “peculiar mixture of the European and the American environment, of the customs of the Old and the New World” (eine besondere Vermischung des europäischen und amerikanischen Climatis, der Sitten der alten und neuen Welt). Scholars have also shown that these heterogeneous mixtures never fully blended into a new whole, but remained full of tensions and contradictions.3 Ironically, the issues that struck Mittelberger’s editor upon reading the descriptions of Pennsylvania—those issues that so clearly resonate with contemporary concerns—have not featured prominently in the historiography of the so-­called Pennsylvania Germans. The history of this minority was, in the interpretations offered from the late nineteenth century well into the second half of the twentieth century, dominated by questions about the German contribution to a later national culture and about the persistence or assimilation of specific ethnic and denominational traditions. Themes such as cross-­cultural contacts and conflicts in a pluralistic environment, or transatlantic processes of identity formation, were largely ignored. Indeed, the scholarship concerned with German-­speaking people in early America has been rather slow to catch up with the trends that have reconfigured the discipline. Given that this group constituted not only the largest but also one of the most culturally and religiously diverse body of immigrants to the middle colonies (exactly those colonies that have come to displace the more homogenous New England as the paradigm of early American history), this is all the more surprising. To be sure, the last two decades or so have seen a good number of pioneering works that have examined various aspects of German religion and culture from an Atlantic perspective, which has given new impetus to the field.4 Too much of the specialized literature is still tied, though, into nation-­ or denomination-­centered frameworks of interpretation. Much work continues to be informed by essentialist concepts both of German ethnicity and of Americanness and demonstrates a reliance on antiquarian or positivistic approaches to history. Building on the theoretical insights and findings of recent revisionist scholarship, this volume seeks to contribute to modernizing and further advancing the study of transatlantic German cultures and identities during the colonial period by bringing together nine original case studies that all try out innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and explore fresh avenues of inquiry. Taken together, these case studies add considerably to the ongoing transformation of how we understand the bewildering multiplicity and complexity,

Introduction  3

as well as the besondere Vermischung, of Old World practices and New World influences that characterized the experience of German-­speaking people in the middle colonies. Simultaneously, this collection of essays broadens our knowledge of how the various cultural expressions of German speakers in British North America functioned as a site of negotiation between particular regional, religious, and denominational traditions, a new sense of ethnic solidarity, and, eventually, a national identity. The essays in this collection grew from presentations given during an international symposium held at Mainz University in 2009 to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the first large-­scale German migration to British North America, an event that constituted a watershed in several ways. Small bands of German-­speaking settlers had, of course, come to British North America during the seventeenth century: the 1683 arrival of Francis Daniel Pastorius and the famous thirteen Krefeld families certainly marks an important event in this context, but by no means an absolute beginning. In 1709, this trickle turned into a stream when thousands began to leave the Palatinate and other parts of southwestern Germany to make their way up the Rhine to Rotterdam and from there to England.5 With ever more boats full of “poor Palatines” coming in, the British government soon changed its initially welcoming attitude and clamped down on further migration across the channel. By that time some 14,000 people had been housed in refugee camps on the outskirts of London. The problems caused by these camps and the realization that their inhabitants were, for the most part, economic refugees rather than Protestant brethren in distress who had escaped French persecution led the authorities to solve the crisis in a rather ruthless manner. While the Catholics were simply sent home, a large portion of the Protestants (about 3,000) were, against their own will, relocated to Ireland. The British government eventually allowed fewer than 4,000 to proceed to the colonies, of which only about 600 were allowed to go to their desired designation, North Carolina. The rest ended up in the woods of New York, where Governor Hunter thought he could use them to produce tar and pitch for the navy—a misapprehension that brought Hunter nothing but trouble and many of the Palatines near to starvation. In 1712, the project was abandoned, and most Palatines left their original settlements along the Hudson, dispersing in search of new homes in New York and the neighboring colonies. Although the migration of 1709 was a disaster by most accounts, a precedent had been established. While prior to 1709 German colonists were

4  A Peculiar Mixture

associated primarily with religious minorities, from then on emigration also became an option for many nonminorities seeking better opportunities in the New World. Up until the American Revolution, the “poor Palatines” of 1709 were followed by roughly another 90,000 German-­speaking migrants, who arrived in British North America in several large waves during the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s.6 Linguistically, culturally, and religiously, these migrants were quite disparate. They came from various regions of the Holy Roman Empire, including the Palatinate, Württemberg, the Westerwald area, the Rhineland, Alsace, and the territories of Hesse, Hanau, and Baden, as well as Switzerland. Although members of sectarian groups, such as the Mennonites, Dunkers, Moravians, and Schwenkfelders, continued to come and play a significant role, the vast majority of arrivals after 1709 were “church people” (i.e., Lutherans or Reformed). For all of them, the preferred destination was the middle colonies, and it has been estimated that about 80 percent of them settled in Pennsylvania. In the multiethnic population of Pennsylvania, German-­speaking people would constitute the largest group of non-­English origin. By 1775, they accounted for nearly 10 percent of the mainland British colonial population and about 30 percent in Pennsylvania. The agenda of the Mainz symposium, which informs this collection of essays, was, first of all, to reassess the migration of 1709 and its larger significance. We wanted to know more about why so many ordinary Palatines decided to up and go, apparently suddenly, and what exactly they expected to find in the New World. To accomplish this, the symposium called for a move beyond the familiar account of “push-­and-­pull” factors. No doubt the 1709 emigrants were indeed frustrated with an oppressive social system and driven by chronic poverty and the recent devastation caused by the War of the Spanish Succession. No doubt they did dream of cheap land, better living conditions, and, in the cases of sectarians, freedom from religious oppression. Yet this does not explain why these factors took effect precisely in 1709, or why the hopes of these Palatines were fixed on British North America rather than Hungary or other parts of eastern Europe, as was true for many other German emigrants during this period. In accordance with recent developments in the field of migration history, we thus asked for an interrogation of 1709 with the help of sociological and cultural studies theories. Through these theories, a mass exodus such as the one of 1709 could be analyzed as a “discursive event,” which, by means of print media and oral communication, created a reality that was in many ways independent of any verifiable “push-­and-­pull” factors, but which nevertheless powerfully shaped the decisions and thus the

Introduction  5

real lives of emigrants. The most spectacular example of this would certainly be the Ausführlich-­und Umständlicher Bericht von der berühmten Landschafft Carolina, in dem Engelländischen America gelegen (A complete and detailed report of the renowned district of Carolina located in English America), written by Joshua Kocherthal (also known as Joshua Harrsch) in 1709. Writing in the service of the Carolina proprietors, who were looking for new settlers, this Lutheran pastor from the Kraichgau glowingly described the Carolinas as a second Eden and thereby did much to inspire the mass exodus from the Palatinate. We also asked scholars to take a closer look at how the Palatines actually got to the colonies, if they got there at all, and at the challenges they faced en route. Of special interest to us were the complex roles played in this process by various kinds of recruiting or migration agents, who alternately coaxed and rebuffed the migrants, as well as by philanthropists, who supported and then often abandoned the “poor Palatines.” Moreover, we encouraged a more thorough investigation of the fate of the 1709 migrants once they arrived in British North America. The second basic aim of the conference was to explore new facets in the sociopolitical, religious, cultural, and literary history of the fast-­growing community of German speakers in the middle colonies after 1709. Here the focus was on the transatlantic networks through which the various German-­ speaking settler communities kept in touch with kin, churches, or intellectual developments in their old homes, and on the different experiences and exchanges they had with the multiplicity of ethnic and religious communities around them.7 How did they interact or clash with, say, English-­speaking Quakers, Scots Irish Presbyterians, African slaves, or the different indigenous tribes they met on the frontiers? What effects did these encounters have on the religious, cultural, juridical, and economic practices imported from the Old World? How did their traditional practices and ideas inversely affect the (literary) culture of the people with whom they came into contact? What traces did these encounters and conflicts leave in the broad range of surviving cultural artifacts, including literary media—biographies, travel writings, tracts, poetry, broadsides, hymnbooks, taufscheine or other works of frakturschrift, etc.—but also items of visual and material culture, such as paintings, maps, devotional objects, tools, clothing, architecture, or furniture? And how did these processes of transculturation affect the (re)formation of collective identities, both religious and ethnic, among the different groups of German immigrants and their descendants? In other words, how did German immigrants reform their identities as “Pennsylvanians” or even “Americans,” and how did

6  A Peculiar Mixture

the importation of their heritage, as well as their ongoing cultural exchange across the Atlantic, affect the other “American” communities around them? The response to these questions posed in our call for papers was quite impressive, reflecting the momentum that currently drives the field. Over three tightly packed days, papers were read by leading experts as well as junior scholars, and the group engaged in lively discussions. It is to be hoped that the resulting collection of essays, with its relatively small selection of expanded papers, not only conveys some of the excitement and vitality of this memorable gathering, but also shares, in condensed form, the new insights and conceptual advances that all felt they had gained from this confluence of various kinds of expertise and complementary perspectives. True to the nature of our symposium, the contributors to this collection come from multiple disciplines. As historians, as well as scholars of literary studies or material culture, they naturally take different methodological approaches to their respective subjects. All, however, share the conviction that the study of German-­speaking people in the colonial period has to be moved forward through interdisciplinary work. They are consequently united in their effort to cross institutional and intellectual boundaries and consider materials, methodologies, and theories that traditionally have been outside of their disciplinary domain. This effort may be most strikingly exemplified by the essays of Cynthia Falk and Liam Riordan. While Falk, a specialist in early American material culture, seeks to read reflections of changing identities in the architectural remains of German settlements in New York by applying theories developed in the fields of cultural studies and ethnography, Riordan, a traditional, text-­centered historian by training, branches out into the study of pictorial artifacts to learn more about how Pennsylvania Germans expressed their newly assertive sense of ethnic particularity in the aftermath of the Revolution. Falk’s and Riordan’s essays, with their examinations of German houses, furniture, and taufscheine, illustrate a willingness to utilize hitherto understudied or overlooked archives and material-­culture sources—a willingness evinced by every contribution to this collection. Both assert the importance of making mixed pictorial-­textual evidence more central to our understanding of the past.8 Patrick Erben’s piece, to give another example, makes a passionate plea for finally giving adequate attention to the rich heritage of colonial literature in German, especially the religious poetry and hymnody of radical Pietists, while demonstrating how rewarding such a rediscovery can be.9 In addition to this interdisciplinary spirit and a common commitment to the recovery of neglected German materials, all the essays in this volume share two fundamental theoretical

Introduction  7

orientations, explicitly or implicitly, which strongly bear on their specific interests in and interpretation of the “German experience” in early America. One is a transatlantic conceptualization of American history, and the other a nonessentialist understanding of ethnicity as a subjective category largely defined by cultural practices and historical context. Generally speaking, the turn toward an “Atlantic” or “transatlantic” conceptualization of American history implies that the nation should not be seen as the basic unit of, or sole framework for, cultural and literary analysis, as it often was in traditional historiography.10 On the most basic level, an Atlantic perspective (which includes not only Europe and the Americas but also the coastal regions of Africa) thus involves attention to the myriad ways in which events and developments in the territory of the (future) United States were connected to and influenced by happenings and changes across the Atlantic world, and vice versa. Furthermore, such an approach demands a move beyond Anglocentrism and the accompanying monolingualism, and, maybe most important, an avoidance of the kind of national(istic) narratives of American exceptionalism that have been so deeply ingrained in our thinking. For early American studies in particular, this entails overcoming the long-­standing habit of retrospectively projecting onto the colonial period interpretations that lead, teleologically, to the constitution of a cultural totality, however internally diversified, in which some notion of “Americanness” is seen as dominating and ultimately containing all other levels of expression and identity formation. In a programmatic study, Hermann Wellenreuther recently reminded us that to study early American history from a transatlantic perspective requires much more than a heightened awareness of the European roots of what came to unfold in the colonies. It requires a fundamental problematization of an interpretative paradigm that instinctively searches for an American proprium and therefore, as a matter of routine, assumes that those who came to the New World (be it by immigration or enslavement), together with their cultural traditions and churches, inevitably underwent a metamorphosis into something new and distinctively American.11 Instead of thinking about early American culture and literature as developing “from seeds to flowering” in the fashion of an autonomous, self-­evolving, quasi-­organic unity, we should conceive of it as an ever-­shifting and tangled “web of contact zones,” with a plurality of different native and colonial cultures interacting not only with one another but also with cultures and traditions from outside the colonies.12 Likewise, the various groups of settlers, indigenous tribes, and African slaves inhabiting British North America should

8  A Peculiar Mixture

not be regarded as discrete, stable, or unified cultural blocks, even though, of course, they were separated by substantial differences. They should rather be seen as highly interdependent and fluid entities, whose cultures have constantly been redefined and creolised. Attention should be paid to the ways in which those interactions took place in multiple contacts and conflicts within the colonies and across the Atlantic. Neither a simple continuation of European traditions and identities nor ever fully transformed into a unique American form of existence, it is indeed more helpful to think of these groups as, to use the phrase of Mittelberger’s editor once more, an ever-­shifting, “peculiar mixture of the European and the American environment, of the customs of the Old and the New World.” Perhaps nowhere in the collection is this point more strongly hammered home than in Philip Otterness’s exploration of how a good portion of the 1709 immigrants to New York came to settle with the Mohawks and partly “went native,” thereby creating a uniquely creolised, Palatine-­Indian identity that is impossible to subsume under any totalizing narrative of Americanization. As Wellenreuther further points out, a genuinely Atlantic perspective has to be informed by a communicative or dialogic approach that eschews any kind of monodirectionalism in conceiving of the historical causalities and cultural flows between the Old and New World. Such an approach foregrounds the far-­flung networks of travel, trade (including the print trade), and communication through which immigrant groups and their descendants were connected to communities all over the Atlantic world, exchanging people, goods, information, literature, and other cultural artifacts. Focusing our research on the close and continuous communicative ties between the colonists and their old homes is thus the surest way to avoid misconstruals of early American history in terms of linearity, alterity (i.e., an overemphasis on essential difference), or insularity of the developments in Europe and America.13 While all of the essays, in one way or another, attend to such material and ideological networks, the fruitfulness of a communicative approach is probably most clearly on display in Marianne Wokeck’s and Rosalind Beiler’s examinations of the circumstances enabling the 1709 exodus, in Matthias Schönhofer’s reconstruction of the epistolary exchange through which Mühlenberg participated in the burgeoning botanical discourse among German and other European scholars, and in Erben’s look at the literary exchanges between German Pietist communities on both sides of the Atlantic. Just as the contributors to this volume converge in their critical interrogation of traditional nation-­centered models of interpretation, they come

Introduction  9

together in their skepticism toward established notions of ethnicity and the corresponding narratives about the genesis of a German minority identity in America. For a long time, the prevalent narrative posited a progressive move toward ethnic consensus and national integration, giving birth to one more minority group within the American people—usually subsumed under the misleading umbrella term “Pennsylvania Dutch”—whose sense of an essential “Germanness” within the context of the new nation found expression in diverse forms of folk culture. Thus, it was taken for granted that the various German-­speaking immigrant groups that came to the middle colonies underwent a process of ethnic homogenization through which they mostly overcame their many regional and religious differences and increasingly developed a cultural consensus rooted in a communal consciousness of being German. As such a minority group, they were either thought to have bravely resisted the maelstrom of cultural assimilation into the Anglo-­American mainstream or to have eventually joined the happy family of hyphenated Americans under the roof of a national identity, contributing a share of authentic Old World traditions to the cultural repertoire of the nation. By contrast, recent studies on other immigrant groups, such as the Scots Irish, the Dutch, or the French Huguenots, have mostly abandoned this kind of thinking in favor of a relational and more fluid concept of ethnicity that takes into account the inherently contested nature of collective identities and the often crosscutting dynamics between creative adjustment of traditions, resistance, and assimilation that are at work in their formation. In this and other respects, scholarship on colonial German immigrants can still learn a lot by looking at neighboring areas of investigation.14 Unanimously, the essays gathered here are predicated on such a relational and dynamic understanding of ethnicity.15 They therefore assume that any sense of communal Germanness that might have been shared by the different immigrant communities was not something preexisting in any essential form that then found an organic expression in German American folk culture, but rather it came into being as a result of new social constellations and through cultural practices. As such, ethnic identity is viewed as something far from unified or stable. It is an inherently dynamic category, contingent on ever-­shifting historical and social contexts and subject to manifold tensions and conflicts. Simultaneously the product of self-­identification and external ascription, ethnicity constitutes a sense of peoplehood, of common values, customs, and traditions that define the boundaries between different groups. This implies that these values and traditions are fluid in nature and

10  A Peculiar Mixture

are continually being reinvented through the network of reciprocal cultural relations in which these groups negotiate fluctuating boundaries. As the essays on migration and settlement make clear, the German-­ speaking settlers of 1709 and subsequent waves of immigration came from various social backgrounds and regions with diverse dialects. They adhered to particular local customs, belonged to different churches, and, therefore, initially lacked a unifying German identity. However, a process of “becoming German” began—often starting even en route to the New World16—wherein, despite everything that separated them, migrants increasingly identified with one another, based on their shared experience of travel and dislocation as well as on their ability to communicate in variants of the same language. Once they arrived in the middle colonies, these tentative bonds solidified, in many cases, into some kind of German identity, depending on circumstances such as the economic situation, the location of settlement, the ethnic composition of neighborhoods or villages, and the responses of non-­German-­speaking groups in the various colonial societies. This solidification could occur through various kinds of cultural practices, including rich literary and journalistic productions, in which German speakers learned to imagine themselves as a community distinct from the perceived “others” around it, as well as through shared practical or political interests vis-­à-­vis other groups in the colonies. However, at least as important as any processes of “in-­group” formation through which German speakers might have chosen to define themselves as collectively different from other groups of colonists, were the involuntary processes of “out-­group” formation, the often brutal mechanisms of “othering” to which they were subjected. These mechanisms took many forms, from discrimination by government officials, to the expression of prejudice among members of the dominant English-­speaking culture, to anti-­German propaganda written by colonial leaders such as William Smith and Benjamin Franklin. Well before the period of the early republic, we can therefore observe what Steven Nolt has called the paradox of “ethnicization-­as-­Americanization,” if by “American” we do not yet mean a national identity but different varieties of a colonial identity in British North America. What Nolt suggests by his phrase is that “creating an ethnic identity and becoming American are integrally related processes . . . because the process of constructing ethnicity is derived from and stated in terms of the American experience.”17 Put differently, the various groups of German-­speaking people in Pennsylvania and the other middle colonies, partly by choice and partly by force, forged for

Introduction  11

themselves new forms of identity as Germans, creatively reinventing traditions, customs, and values in response to a New World context. These particularly “German” forms of cultural expression were always already hybrid in nature, as they bore the traces of an American environment and of the exchanges with the diverse people the immigrants encountered there. “Germanness” in America consequently came to be characterized by a complex pattern of in-­betweenness that reveals, as A. G. Roeber has remarked, “a separate, transferred cultural sphere,” but one that was consistently open “to developments and contributions from other sources.”18 By consistently attending to these patterns of in-­betweenness, our contributors seek to avoid what Erben, in his contribution to this collection, calls the ethnic fallacy “that would interpret German culture in America as caught between the poles of assimilation to English-­language culture and cultural isolationism.” Of course, the meaning of being German in America dramatically changed during and after the Revolution when the discourse of patriotism and the founding of the United States introduced a new level of national identity formation. How the paradox of “ethnicization-­as-­Americanization” further developed in the early national period, when German-­speaking people began to reform their colonial identities as “German Americans,” lies largely outside the scope of this collection, even though Riordan’s essay peeks, as it were, into the nineteenth century. For the most part, our contributors are concerned with investigating the manifold contingencies and complications involved in the formation of German ethnicity up until the revolutionary period. All foreground just how malleable and contested the imaginary community of “the Germans” actually was in the colonies, with defining customs and values partly derived from Old World traditions and partly composed of New World innovations, but consistently responsive to circumstances. More specifically, they demonstrate, as Marie Basile McDaniel argues, that there was no inevitability to this process of becoming German, since many of the early German-­ speaking immigrants to Pennsylvania chose or were forced to completely assimilate to an English-­speaking environment. Attending to the transatlantic networks connecting the immigrant communities with their old homes reminds us, as Schönhofer does, for example, that ethnicization was never a linear process that played out solely within the colonies, but one that remained dependent on developments in Europe. Finally, this collection—and in particular the essays by Otterness, Falk, Stievermann, and Riordan—shows that Germanness in early America was anything but homogenous. The negotiation of ethnicity always interacted,

12  A Peculiar Mixture

competed, and also frequently conflicted with other identities, such as those of region, gender, race, and religious affiliation. In highly pluralistic societies such as Pennsylvania, Germanness was a contested site where constant struggles over definitional hegemony between different interest groups took place. This, of course, was especially so during periods of political, social, and military crisis. While Otterness, for instance, explores how the increasing racialization of colonial culture during the Seven Years’ War might have affected the identity of Germans settling with the Mohawks, Stievermann examines the crosscutting dynamics during the American Revolution between the imposition of a new concept of American citizenship and the formation of a shared ethno-­religious identity among those German speakers in Pennsylvania who belonged to nonresistant churches. The essays are divided into three sections: “Migration and Settlement,” “Material and Intellectual Cultures in the Making,” and “Negotiations of Ethnic and Religious Identities.” This reflects the overarching questions discussed at the conference. The essays in the first section are dedicated to rethinking the significance of the first German mass exodus three hundred years ago and the subsequent settlement of the “Palatines” in the colonies. A leading expert of eighteenth-­century migration history, Marianne Wokeck argues that 1709 marks a critical shift in the history of German migration, dramatically altering the perception of “trying one’s luck” in the American colonies from an extraordinary step to a broadly acceptable option. This profoundly influenced the direction, shape, and character of subsequent population movements from German-­speaking territories to British North America. Using Kuran’s theory of “preference falsification,” she offers a fruitful explanation of the ways in which, after the hard winter of 1708, Joshua Kocherthal’s famous Ausführlich-­und Umständlicher Bericht von der berühmten Landschafft Carolina, with its description not only of golden opportunities in America but also of charitable support for migrants in Britain, served as a decisive catalyst triggering an abrupt shift in people’s readiness to risk leaving home for the promise of faraway places. She then goes on to consider more broadly how the experience of relocation to North America affected immigrant identities and how the experience of the 1709 exodus spurred the development of new attitudes, policies, and a regular transatlantic system of recruiters and migration agents, contributing to the rising tide of German mass migration during the following decades. Rosalind Beiler focuses on one significant but largely unstudied group of migration agents, namely diplomats, who played a decisive part not only in

Introduction  13

the events of 1709 but also in subsequent migrations of German-­speaking people to America. Her examples are James Dayrolle, the British resident at the Hague who organized the movement of the “poor Palatines” to London in 1709, and Johann Ludwig Runckel, envoy of the Dutch States General in Switzerland who negotiated the relocation of persecuted Mennonites from the canton of Bern to Pennsylvania. Through her detailed study of these two cases, Beiler sheds new light on the political reasons why diplomats such as Dayrolle and Runckel became involved, and on the dynamic roles they played as both information brokers and mediators in shepherding migrants on their way to the New World. Building on his important history of the 1709 exodus, Philip Otterness’s essay zeros in on the fascinating story of the three thousand Palatines whom the governor of New York brought to his colony to produce tar and pitch for the navy, but subsequently left to their own devices when they turned out to be unwilling and unable to fulfill this task. Alienated from the British authorities, these Palatines found that their most trustworthy allies in America were not other Europeans but the Native Americans, and it was among the Iroquois tribes in upstate New York that many of the Palatines would make their homes, living with them as neighbors for over fifty years. Otterness’s reconstruction of this story goes to show that becoming German in the context of early America meant dwelling in liminal spaces of cultural in-­betweenness. By demonstrating how closely these Palatines affiliated with the Mohawks and Oneidas even through the Seven Years’ War, he simultaneously sounds a note of caution in the direction of those recent studies that have represented the increasing racialization of colonial societies as an almost inevitable process. The second section, “Material and Intellectual Cultures in the Making,” opens with Cynthia Falk’s essay, which resumes and expands the story of the Palatines in colonial New York. With great expertise, she examines the sites and items left by this group, and she illustrates how they contribute to a better understanding of the way the Palatines lived in the Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys. By looking at the architectural patterns of their houses, their household goods, and their furniture, Falk reveals a great deal about the processes of cultural adaptation that these settlers underwent in response to frontier conditions of widespread violence, unprecedented ethnic diversity, and isolated settlement patterns, and about the emergence of a regionally specific German identity. Moreover, she points out the ways in which German speakers in New York reinvented the inherited patterns of their material culture, and how it differed significantly from what we can observe among the Pennsylvania

14  A Peculiar Mixture

Germans around the same time. Falk’s essay thus makes a powerful case that the objects of material culture produced in diverse German-­speaking populations in colonial America are important sources to complement our knowledge derived from textual documents, most of which were written not by but about them. Due to the prevalent monolingualism of the discipline and the long ascendancy of exceptionalist models in American studies based on “Puritan origin” theories, the rich archives of German-­language literatures written in or in exchange with colonial America are almost as neglected as the sources of material culture considered by Falk. Given the great quantity and, frequently, also the great quality of this German-­language literature, there is indeed an embarrassing paucity of modern editions, anthologies, and up-­to-­ date scholarship. Thus, Patrick Erben sounds a much-­needed call to recover and study afresh this treasure trove of promotional literature, ethnography, captivity narratives, travel narratives, political tracts, personal memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, didactic literature, theological tracts, commonplace books, martyrologies, sermons, histories, fictional tales, and, most of all, the enigmatic poetry and hymns composed by radical Pietist groups such as the Moravians, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, and the brethren of the Ephrata Cloister. Throughout, his essay, with its bibliographic appendix, points out research opportunities and new scholarly perspectives, taking stock of the widely scattered textual collections and studies that have been done since the late nineteenth century. Backing the programmatic with the concrete, Erben also offers two exemplary case studies for how we might situate German-­language literature and culture in colonial America within a multilingual and postnational American literary history. In tracing the exchanges between Quaker Anthony Benezet and Schwenkfelder Christopher Schultz, the first case study explores the connections between and mutual development of English-­and German-­language writing, such as the expansive literature of nonresistant piety, through translation and multilingual exchange. The second case study offers a parallel reading of the esoteric and alchemic language employed by the Pennsylvania German radical Pietist Johannes Kelpius and the New England Puritan Edward Taylor, which substantiates how fruitful a multilingual and comparative approach to early American poetry can be. Matthias Schönhofer’s essay on the “American Linnaeus,” Gotthilf Henry Ernst Mühlenberg, provides evidence that such an approach also yields rich results when applied to other areas of German intellectual culture in early America. Based on just the kind of fresh archival research that Erben

Introduction  15

demands, Schönhofer’s essay investigates the far-­flung and multilingual web of correspondence, both across the Atlantic and within the colonies, through which Mühlenberg carried out his botanical research in dialogue with other scholars. Schönhofer’s meticulous analysis of Mühlenberg’s letters discloses how the developments that this transatlantic network underwent over the decades reflect not only changes in Mühlenberg’s ideas of professional and American national identity but also changes in the larger cultural context in which his botanical work was undertaken. Although the negotiations of ethnic and religious identities among German-­speaking people in colonial America are, in one way or another, addressed by all the essays, the three studies in the final section, “Negotiations of Ethnic and Religious Identities,” give special scrutiny to this topic and reveal its many complications. Marie Basile McDaniel adds further complexity to recent scholarship that has explored the processes through which immigrants developed a communal sense of Germanness in the New World, an identity that was, however, very much contested and open to different interpretations. From an examination of the surviving church archives from eighteenth-­century Philadelphia, especially marriage records, she concludes that, in fact, not all German speakers who arrived in this fast-­growing, multiethnic town joined the German community or became German. Depending on contingent factors—such as preexisting networks of kin or trade, economic and legal status, or the ship on which one arrived—as well as on religious affiliation and personal preference, immigrants followed various paths, as their marital choices reveal. A growing number did marry other German speakers and joined ethnically specific church communities (e.g., German Lutheran or German Reformed), thereby participating in the formation of a separate German identity. Others, however, chose from a variety of linguistic and religious associations made possible by the diversity of the city, which overwrote their (potential) ethnic identity. For instance, a good number of these immigrants married English speakers in English churches and thereby quickly became acculturated. McDaniel also pays some attention to the role played by English prejudices against German culture and religion, especially against sectarian groups, and to how, in some cases, membership in a religious minority overrode the mechanisms of ethnicization. These dynamics are further explored by Jan Stievermann’s essay. In his study on the German Peace Churches during the American Revolution, Stievermann illustrates how shared religious beliefs and traditions could at least partly counteract both the pull of ethnic solidarity among the wider

16  A Peculiar Mixture

community of German-­speaking people and the growing pull of patriotic solidarity and national identity formation. Stievermann argues that underlying the great hardships that Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, Moravians, and Schwenkfelders experienced at the hands of the revolutionary authorities in Pennsylvania was an ultimately irreconcilable conflict between the ideal of nonresistant discipleship common to these churches and the new concept of American citizenship being imposed on them by the Patriots. While for German speakers from the Lutheran and especially from the Reformed churches the Revolution offered an occasion to claim for themselves, as German Americans, a position of greater acceptance and civic participation in Pennsylvania society and the new nation, most members of the Peace Churches withdrew into a deepened cultural isolation. Caught in a situation where they not only felt threatened by material loss and violence but also feared a violation of their essential beliefs in the form of coercive militia and test acts, these groups further developed an ecumenical group consciousness that had first emerged during the French and Indian War.19 As Stievermann demonstrates, a cross-­denominational mobilization and reinterpretation of the historical memory of pacifist martyrs significantly contributed to this process. Harnessed by religious leaders, this communal self-­fashioning as Christ’s suffering witnesses was instrumental in rallying the German-­speaking pacifist groups to resist Pennsylvania’s Patriots and to withstand the pressure to join their neighbors in the militias and swear loyalty to the new government. Their shared language of martyrdom thus helped the German Peace Churches define themselves collectively as a doubly marginal ethno-­religious minority within the colony at large and vis-­à-­vis their increasingly antagonistic Lutheran and Reformed compatriots, who by far constituted the majority of German speakers in revolutionary America. It is the place of these “church Germans” (Kirchenleute) in the predominantly English-­speaking new nation that Liam Riordan seeks to understand more fully by analyzing what is probably the most widely known form of early German material culture: taufscheine, the often elaborately decorated records of birth and baptism of children that were also used to transmit key personal information. Although this kind of “Pennsylvania Dutch” folk art is highly sought after by collectors and has been the subject of considerable stylistic, artistic, and genealogical analysis, there are surprisingly few assessments of this distinctive textual-­pictorial genre as a means of preserving and expressing individual and ethno-­religious identity. The essay looks at a broad sampling of taufscheine from the region of “larger Pennsylvania,” the swath

Introduction  17

of Pennsylvania German settlement that arced around Philadelphia from northern New Jersey, running diagonally across the interior of Pennsylvania on into Maryland, and then to the Virginia and Carolina backcountry, where a number of distinctive craftsmen and schools can be identified for the postrevolutionary era. Riordan’s overall conclusion is that the taufscheine reflect how, after the Revolution, the church Germans acted with greater vigor and self-­consciousness in claiming a more public space for themselves in the postcolonial nation. Through their folk art they expressed a newly assertive sense of ethnic particularity. At the same time, the changes in the manners in which taufscheine were produced show how their creators engaged with non-­German cultural forms and technical developments in an innovative and effective manner. Thus, taufscheine were not fading expressions of isolated folk traditions soon to pass, but a bold hybrid form that took advantage of mechanical reproduction and numerous Anglo-­American visual elements that helped the form remain vital into the twentieth century, even while remaining immediately recognizable as non-­English.

notes 1. Gottlieb Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania, trans. and ed. Oscar Handlin and John Clive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). For the German original, see Jürgen Charnitzky, ed., Reise nach Pennsylvanien im Jahr 1750 und Rückreise nach Deutschland im Jahr 1754 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1997). The literature on ethnic diversity and religious pluralism in British North America is ever growing. Landmark studies include Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1986), as well as the collection Bailyn edited with Philip D. Morgan, Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, updated ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). On Pennsylvania in particular, see Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 1987), and Stephen L. Longenecker, Piety and Tolerance: Pennsylvania German Religion, 1700–1850 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994). The best current overview is Ned C. Landsman, Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in British North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). A fascinating recent case study is Mark Häberlein, The Practice of Pluralism: Congregational Life and Religious Diversity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730–1820 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). 2. Important studies of European-­native relations that give substantial attention to German-­ speaking settlers are Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-­Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); William A. Pencak and Daniel K. Richter, eds., Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); David L. Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

18  A Peculiar Mixture 3. The continuing cultural in-­betweenness of German-­speaking people in colonial America is a common theme in some of the most influential studies of this group in recent times, among them A.  G. Roeber, “ ‘The Origins of Whatever Is Not English Among Us’: The Dutch-­Speaking and German-­Speaking Peoples of Colonial British America,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 220–83; Aaron Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Liam Riordan, Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-­Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 4. Two trailblazing collections of essays are Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-­Hundred-­Year History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), and Winfried Fluck and Werner Sollors, eds., German? American? Literature? New Directions in German-­American Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). Many of the best works that have been written on the German experience in early America are focused on specific religious traditions and churches. A major work is A. G. Roeber, “Der Pietismus in Nordamerika im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Geschichte des Pietismus, vol. 2, Der Pietismus im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Martin Brecht and Klaus Deppermann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 666–99. On German Lutherans, see A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), and Thomas J. Müller, Kirche zwischen zwei Welten: Die Obrigkeitsproblematik bei Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg und die Kirchengründungen der deutschen Lutheraner in Pennsylvania (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1994). For the Lutheran and Reformed churches, see also Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717–1793, 2 vols. (Breinigsville, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1980–81). On the Mennonite and Dunker communities, see Richard MacMaster, Land, Piety, Peoplehood: The Establishment of Mennonite Communities in America, 1683–1790 (Scottdale, Pa: Herald Press, 1985); Donald F. Durnbaugh, Fruit of the Vine: A History of the Brethren, 1708–1995 (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Press, 1997); Jeff Bach, Voices of the Turtledove: The Sacred World of Ephrata (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). The Moravians also have attracted much attention recently. See, among others, Gillian Lindt Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds: A Study of Changing Communities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967); Beverly Prior Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Craig D. Atwood, Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Aaron Fogleman, Jesus Is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Michele Gillespie and Robert Beachy, Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007). On the Schwenkfelders, see Horst Weigelt, Von Schlesien nach Amerika: Die Geschichte des Schwenckfeldertums (Köln: Böhlau, 2007). 5. The most detailed study on the 1709 exodus is Otterness, Becoming German. 6. The standard work on eighteenth-­century German migration to America is Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). See also Hermann Wellenreuther, “Contexts for Migration in the Early Modern World: Public Policy, European Migrating Experiences, Transatlantic Migration, and the Genesis of American Culture,” in In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in Eighteenth-­Century Europe and America, ed. Hartmut Lehmann, Hermann Wellenreuther, and Renate Wilson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 3–20; Georg Fertig, Lokales Leben, atlantische Welt: Die Entscheidung zur Auswanderung vom Rhein nach Nordamerika im 18. Jahrhundert (Osnabrück: Unversitätsverlag Rasch, 2000); Sabine Heerwart and Claudia Schnurmann, eds., Atlantic Migrations: Regions and Movements in Germany and North America/USA During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century (Hamburg: Lit, 2007); Annette K. Burgert, Eighteenth-­Century Emigrants from German-­Speaking Lands to North America (Birdsboro, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1985).

Introduction  19 7. The study of transatlantic networks and their influence on cultures and identities has been the focus of a number of important studies recently, among them Renate Wilson, Pious Traders in Medicine: A German Pharmaceutical Network in Eighteenth-­Century North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), and Rosalind Beiler, Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650–1750 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). The transatlantic networks of Pietism in particular have attracted scholarly interest. See, for instance, Ernest F. Stoeffler, ed., Continental Pietism and Early American Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmanns, 1976); W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Hans-­Jürgen Grabbe, ed., Halle Pietism, Colonial North America, and the Young United States (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008); Jonathan Strom, Hartmut Lehmann, and James Van Horn Melton, eds., Pietism in Germany and North America, 1680–1820 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009). 8. Important studies on early German American material culture include Scott T. Swank, ed., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans (New York: W. W. Norton for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1983); Don Yoder, The Pennsylvania German Broadside: A History and Guide (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); Cynthia G. Falk, Architecture and Artifacts of the Pennsylvania Germans: Constructing Identity in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 9. The relative paucity of studies on early German literature in America and the inherent problems of this field are discussed in Frank Trommler, “Literary Scholarship and Ethnic Studies: A Reevaluation,” in Fluck and Sollors, German? American? Literature?, 36–37. 10. In the field of history, important theoretical contributions to the Atlantic approach are Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), and Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). For the field of early American religious history, in particular Puritan history, see, for instance, Francis J. Bremer, ed., Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-­Century Anglo-­American Faith (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), and Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann, eds., Cotton Mather and “Biblia Americana”—America’s First Bible Commentary (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010). 11. Hermann Wellenreuther, “Die atlantische Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts: Überlegungen zur Bedeutung des Atlantiks für die Welt der Frommen im Britischen Weltreich,” in Transatlantische Religionsgeschichte: 18 bis 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), 9–30. 12. The phrase “web of contact zones” is taken from Shelly Fisher Fiskin, “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005): 21. 13. An Atlantic approach, as Wellenreuther writes, emphasizes “[den Aspekt] der intensiven kommunikativen Bindung zwischen der Alten und Neuen Welt” against “[Vorstellungen von] der Linearität und Alterität, Exzeptionalismus und Insularität der Entwicklungen in Europa und in Amerika.” Wellenreuther, “Die atlantische Welt des 18. Jahrhunderts,” 13. 14. Exemplary studies for other immigrant groups are Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Ned C. Landsman, ed., Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2001); Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Randal H. Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Paula Wheeler Carlo, Huguenot Refugees in Colonial America: Becoming American in the Hudson Valley (Brighton, England: Sussex University Press, 2005). 15. The locus classicus on this topic is Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Although focusing on the nineteenth century, a very helpful study on immigration and ethnicity is Kathleen Neils Conzen et al., “The

20  A Peculiar Mixture Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no. 1 (1992): 3–41. See also Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Mainstreams and Side Channels: The Localization of Immigrant Cultures,” Journal of American Ethnic History 11, no. 1 (1991): 5–20, and “Phantom Landscapes of Colonization: Germans in the Making of a Pluralist America,” in The German-­American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation Between Two Cultures, 1800–2000, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 7–21. An insightful recent collection on the subject is Ned C. Landsman, Wendy F. Katkin, and Andrea Tyree, eds., Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 16. See Philip Otterness, “The 1709 Palatine Migration and the Formation of German Immigrant Identity in London and New York,” in “Exploration in Early American Culture,” supplemental issue, Pennsylvania History 66 (1999): 4–23. 17. Steven M. Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land: Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 3–5. 18. Roeber, “ ‘The Origins,’ ” 269–70. 19. This is discussed in Jan Stievermann, “A ‘Plain, Rejected Little Flock’: The Politics of Martyrological Self-­Fashioning Among Pennsylvania’s German Peace Churches, 1739–65,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 66, no. 2 (2009): 287–324.

One

Rethinking the Significance of the 1709 Mass Migration Marianne S. Wokeck

The commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of the 1709 mass migration from the Palatinate and other German-­speaking territories has offered an opportunity for rethinking the significance of this event. In the early eighteenth century, this westward movement of German speakers received much attention and captured the imagination of many emigrants as well as those who stayed home. For historians in the early twenty-­first century, renewed interest in this phenomenon lies in the interdependence of exploring “what happened” (that is, what they can tease out of the surviving record and reconstruct) and what they then make of their findings for better explanation, further questions, and future research. Each generation of researchers reads the past through a different lens. Among the scholars in each cohort, the responsiveness and responses to historical events vary—sometimes a little but often substantially, most often advancing the knowledge and understanding of specialists through scholarly publications and less commonly recasting the narrative of the nation on the level of college textbooks. For professionals as well as the general public, the 1709 mass migration merits consideration as a transformative episode in the history of population movements and in shaping immigrant identities. In an age of global migration, renewed examination of the 1709 migration is apt because it was a life-­changing event for thousands of emigrants from the Rhine lands, similar to what many people experience today in search of

24  Migration and Settlement

opportunities far from their native homes. It was also pivotal in determining the direction, shape, and character of subsequent migrations of German speakers to colonial North America and, similarly far-­reaching, in determining how those sectarian and German Lutheran and Reformed immigrants defined and redefined their New World identities, as well as how they and their descendants made their marks on what became recognizably “American” at later times. This essay focuses first on the critical shift, marked by the 1709 mass migration, in the perception of migration to the American colonies from an extraordinary step to a broadly acceptable option. It then addresses how the experience of this migration event spurred the development of regular transatlantic routes for German-­speaking migrants and considers how it affected immigrant identities along the way and upon settlement in North America. Rethinking the significance of the 1709 mass migration from the Palatinate presents a challenge to explore—and resolve, if possible—the tension between the stories of individuals and social pressure from institutions and groups that reinforced or constrained personal beliefs, decisions, and actions concerning migration. The premise here is that private views and public opinion differed and that those differences mattered. The ways in which individuals publicly assessed the risks and promises of leaving home depended on the context of the encounter. Public opinion, which reflects prevailing social pressure as expressed by secular and religious authorities as well as social groups interested in maintaining the established order, can obscure the nature, depth, and pervasiveness of private sentiments. Moreover, private and public views found critical expression and resulted in decisions in connection with philanthropic behavior and structures. Private charity and publicly supported generosity focused on the “Palatine” migrants in special ways and with a long-­ term impact in that such philanthropy was limited and targeted in terms of who could benefit, in what ways and to what degree, and for how long. Even though the generosity from which some migrants benefited in some places and for some time was extraordinary, it could not sustain a large migration over an extended period of time. It took the entrepreneurial development of a mostly private business to enable large numbers of German-­speaking migrants to relocate across the Atlantic, which was key to the long-­term impact of this remarkable migration episode.1 In this reevaluation of the 1709 mass migration, a model presented by Timur Kuran offers a new way for making sense of the exodus.2 Kuran articulates a theory for explaining social change that makes complementary use of

Rethinking the 1709 Mass Migration  25

frameworks of individualism and structuralism that disciplines such as history and anthropology, as well as economics, political science, and sociology, tend to consider separately.3 His objective is “to develop a simple framework for thinking about the mechanics, dynamics, and consequences of preference falsification,” and he seeks to link “traditions that focus on social structure with ones that emphasize individual choice.”4 Since Kuran’s conceptualization is grounded in the theories and terms typical in the discourse of economists and social scientists, “preference falsification” is far from self-­explanatory for those with other disciplinary interests.5 Despite the awkward unfamiliarity of the model’s term, preference falsification—“an act that conceals information on the forces behind social trends” with the specific aim to “manipulate the perceptions others hold about one’s motivations or dispositions”—can alert historians of the eighteenth century to reexamine the mechanics and dynamics of the 1709 migration more fully than before and to explore more consciously the consequences of that particular episode for later developments in the transatlantic migration from Germany to the American colonies.6 For historians, whose research is not guided by the falsificationism-­based hypothetic-­deductive method with which science tests theories and general laws, the usefulness of Kuran’s model is presented here not for its methodological applicability but for its value toward framing and developing questions with which to reconsider the surviving sources and conventional explanations for the exodus.7 Very much simplified, Kuran’s model of “dual preferences” stipulates that in all societies individuals hold “private truths” (beliefs, opinions, values) and that there are frequently instances in their discourse with others in which those private thoughts are not expressed truthfully but are adjusted in light of “public lies”—namely, the going majority party line or, more generally, public opinion. It is the shaping of private thoughts under public constraints that results in individuals lying about their preferences (preference falsification). Put differently, prevailing public opinion may not necessarily be a reflection of what individuals really think but rather what they feel prudent or compelled to express in certain circumstances. The discrepancy between private and public preferences is the central feature of the dual preference model.8 Of course, there are people who do not lie about their preferences (committed religious dissenters come to mind), and there are some who cannot easily lie about their preferences, such as immigrants whose language, for example, immediately gives them away as different and foreign, even if they wanted to deny their otherness under certain circumstances. In situations that are stable

26  Migration and Settlement

and in which the majority of people are content with the established order and norms, the occasional, even frequent, hiding of privately held truths is unlikely to lead to noticeable or noteworthy social change. By contrast, in situations in which discontent with certain practices or convictions is widespread but concealed in accordance with “public lies,” the resulting—and undetected, but not undetectable—tension-­filled discrepancies between what people believe to be true and what they can publicly acknowledge or profess can grow sufficiently to bring about a seemingly abrupt and irrevocable shift in the ways that social norms, order, and institutions function. In such cases, the consequence is that thereafter individual views and public opinion are better, more truthfully aligned.9 How can this model offer a framework for explaining the significance of 1709 better than the common and popular variants of push-­and-­pull factors to which potential German-­speaking migrants in the Rhine lands were exposed and to which they responded especially enthusiastically in that particular year?10 Even though imperfect historical data can only provide impressionistic evidence, they can identify the existence of widespread discontent. Measuring discrepancies between private and public opinions—that is, identifying preference falsification—is feasible by paying attention to expressions of controversial thought “between the lines” of the documentary record.11 An exploration of possible, and possibly growing, tension between private truths and public lies can provide valuable insights into the timing of the migration as well as the dynamic impact of this extraordinary emigration year on the flow, composition, and direction of population movements in subsequent years. A suitable start for this exploration is the role of Joshua (also Josua) Harrsch, or Kocherthal, and his “golden book” in marking the shift, or tipping point, from general reluctance to leave home among ordinary people— many of them farmers—toward almost blind acceptance of the promise of a good life that removal to distant Carolina would bring.12 It is well established that information about America was readily available to the reading public as well as to illiterate audiences in German-­speaking lands for more than a generation.13 Many of the descriptions of faraway colonies and the published or otherwise circulated accounts of immigrants settled in those places were associated with behavior marking outsiders—namely, people who did not fit into the established order at home. Most prominent in this group were religious dissenters. Emigration offered those sectarian seekers a viable option, sometimes the only possible reaction to adversity, and it was in that context that they cast their need or desire to leave oppressive circumstances in biblical

Rethinking the 1709 Mass Migration  27

language. Emigration or exile thus became “exodus,” providing a justification to escape decadent and doomed Germany and, on the positive side, to pursue the promise of Canaan. Francis Daniel Pastorius and Daniel Falckner, in their writings from and about Pennsylvania, are outspoken on that last point, setting up an interpretative framework for their respective decisions to remove to Penn’s colony.14 Their examples allowed others to adopt similar reasoning, even though among ordinary farmers and artisans of the German southwest economically determined motives predominated.15 Ministers, teachers, and other local leaders were complicit in this framing of mostly secular motives in terms of biblical metaphors. There is evidence that they retold migration accounts found in print to those who could not read and that they used their sermons—in support of or against emigration—to comment publicly on the applicability and timeliness of those biblical stories.16 By doing so they lent credence and legitimacy to the widely circulating testimonies from emigrants. They also provided members of their parishes and communities considering or determined to emigrate with language for describing their plight that was more likely to elicit compassion and charity than difficulties and disdain from the authorities and other people along the way. Thus, emigrants from territories in southwestern Germany had learned how to describe their own reasons for leaving in empathetic ways well before Daniel Defoe, motivated by political considerations of his own, characterized the 1709 migrants in London as “poor Palatine refugees.”17 For the emigrants in question, both of these cases represent different forms of and reasons for preference falsification. Given the high level of economic uncertainty in southwestern Germany combined with the broad, albeit largely undetected, readiness to accept relocation in reaction to adversity, after the hard winter of 1708 Kocherthal’s Ausführlich-­und Umständlicher Bericht von der berühmten Landschafft Carolina, in dem Engelländischen America gelegen (A complete and detailed report of the renowned district of Carolina located in English America) marked the abrupt shift toward a willingness to risk leaving home for the promise of faraway places. The alignment of what potential emigrants could envision with the theretofore conflicting official policy occurred when evidence of public philanthropy, albeit not by rulers at home but by those in England, pointed to ways in which people who lacked the resources to finance relocation across the Atlantic could settle and obtain land in North America. The critical difference between Kocherthal’s updated pamphlet about Carolina and earlier publications was the Bericht’s description of the generosity of the people encountered by the Kraichgau group on the way to London in 1708

28  Migration and Settlement

and the interest of Queen Anne in offering material support for the journey to America and settlement in New York.18 These various and genuine charitable and philanthropic gestures seemed to suggest that the travel expenses of groups who followed in the footsteps of the Kraichgau group might well be met in the future, too. It was the fear of missing this opportunity in 1709 that seemingly made prompt action a burning necessity for impressive numbers of Palatines and their neighbors who had already accepted migration as a potential step but had hesitated to take it because they lacked the means for relocating across the Atlantic. It is an irony worth noting that Kocherthal did not have a very active hand in this development. Those historians who exclude him from the group of celebrated German Americans stand on solid ground.19 The role Kocherthal played is intriguing, but he does not deserve any blame for disappointments met by so many of the emigrants who sought Queen Anne’s support in their quest to reach North America in search of more land and better lives than they could expect at home. It is not clear why Joshua Harrsch, who did not seem to speak English, traveled to London for the first time in 1704, when the governor of Carolina was negotiating with German speakers for settlement opportunities. It is clear, however, that Pastor Harrsch was drawn into networks of influential people with interests in promoting settlements in the American colonies, and it is also clear that he was changed in some significant way through those encounters. How else would he have appeared as one of the group of emigrants in 1708—not under his given name but under a newly chosen name, Joshua Kocherthal? It is conjecture, but it seems that he felt somehow obliged, most likely to Carolina proprietors in London and a certain printer in Frankfurt, to lend his name and some additional accounts from his fellow emigrants about the generous treatment they had received as poor Protestants to a 1709 publication that showed Carolina in a very favorable light—supposedly a republication of a 1706 pamphlet, which has not been located thus far.20 The extraordinary reaction to Kocherthal’s 1709 Bericht occurred while he was in New York negotiating how best to approach Queen Anne for support again because his sponsor in New York had died and left the Kraichgau group of immigrants without the promised support that would have eased the start of their new life in the colony. With accounts of the debts he and his family had accrued, with projections of what it would cost to build a house and maintain a household of seven (nota bene: husband and wife, three children, and two slaves) for a year, and with plans to use and improve the 750 acres granted to

Rethinking the 1709 Mass Migration  29

him by settling them with farming immigrant families, he arrived in London after the thousands of poor Palatine Protestants had been put in camps near London. Kocherthal responded to this situation along with other German clergy in London and took an active role in the settlement of about three thousand of these refugees, returning to New York with immigrants destined for the naval stores project.21 Even if Kocherthal’s role in causing or prompting the 1709 mass migration was much more limited than authorities overwhelmed by the numbers of voyagers claimed, the impact of the large-­scale emigration was far-­reaching. The sudden and broad population movement demonstrated that relocation in reaction to adversity, typically combined with certain opportunities and incentives, was a choice not only for dissenters but also for ordinary people with limited resources. This kind of relocation became an option for the “middling sort”—neither too poor to move nor too strongly tied to their place in the community—most of whom labored in agriculture or crafts, lines of work in which the vicissitudes of nature and economic developments affected the pursuit of making a decent living. Such emigration occurred in various territories throughout the eighteenth century, sporadically in noticeable spikes, and gave particular shape to the flow and composition of the migration of German speakers to the American colonies.22 It also forced territorial lords in the various Rhine lands and beyond to reevaluate their population policies. The new policies met with varying success in restricting or easing the emigration of particularly defined groups of subjects, and they are well documented in the official records of the particular principalities. A more systematic examination promises insight into public opinion expressed by local rulers and their administrations. The westward movement also gave rise to small-­and large-­scale entrepreneurial opportunities in providing services for German-­speaking migrants on their journey from the Rhine lands and neighboring territories to North America, and, possibly most important, it created transatlantic networks of kin, countrymen, and coreligionists that provided both a framework and dynamic for the forces that fueled the German migration for most of the century. Once the decision to relocate was made and put into action, the subsequent migration experience had an impact not only on those on the move but also on those who interacted with the migrants along the way—in the Rhine lands; the United Provinces, especially Rotterdam; London; and British North America, mostly New York. From migrants’ incidental and occasional dealings with private persons as well as public officials who exercised

30  Migration and Settlement

authority, eventually there developed regular modes of operations for the trade in German-­speaking migrants that spanned the eighteenth century. The relationships between people on the move and those whom they encountered in transit found private and public expression in different sets of dual preferences. Or, to paraphrase Kuran, the interdependence of public opinions assigned roles and expectations to the emigrants as well as to those who facilitated, mediated, and profited from the transactions necessary for the voyagers to reach North America and settle in the British colonies. In this context, the role of private and public philanthropy is of particular interest and promise, and it deserves a fuller exploration than can be given here. Nevertheless, the following instances show the range of charitable and philanthropic practices directed at migrants as they left home, en route, and when they arrived and first settled in the colonies. The charity that certain religious groups offered coreligionists in the form of hospitality along the way and upon arrival, and also with respect to assistance in financing the voyage and start-­up in the colonies, represents one kind of philanthropy. Another, different sort of philanthropy is the conditional generosity that formed the basis of various large-­scale colonization and settlement schemes, such as the naval stores production project in New York or the redemption of fare debts by kin. Those expressions of private and public philanthropy were tied to certain expectations of performance and behavior that ranged from informal but well-­understood reciprocal obligations to business-­like formalized and documented requirements. Among the self-­supporting and self-­governing groups of sectarians and dissenters, for example, were Anabaptist refugees and emigrants from Switzerland and the Rhine lands, who crossed the Atlantic as small, distinct groups along with other German voyagers throughout the century. In planning and executing their relocation to Pennsylvania, they relied on the advice, experience, connections, and material, especially financial, support of their Mennonite brethren in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.23 The Schwenkfelders, who removed as one distinct group of dissenters under capable leadership from Silesia, via Saxony, to Pennsylvania, could count in transit on sympathizers, especially in Hamburg, for encouragement and generous assistance.24 When the Moravians planned the relocation of select members of their church to Pennsylvania, they rejected the transportation practices that had developed in the trade in German migrants and instead organized and vetted their own transportation network, including their own ships, which served them well.25 Public philanthropy developed from two different understandings and practices.26 Little is known about the charitable acts of strangers who, in

Rethinking the 1709 Mass Migration  31

helping migrants, followed the Christian model of true compassion and whose help transcended boundaries of ethnicity and social rank.27 Little more is known about the informal arrangements that immigrant kin and former neighbors made to assist family members and friends who followed in their footsteps, except for an unintended consequence of that kind of private charity. The “redemptioner” system of indentured servitude developed in effect from particular understandings of obligations and reciprocity between private individuals into business negotiations and deals by which shippers extended credit to passengers who pledged future labor as security for transatlantic fare loans.28 Similarly, official support in response to the plight of refugees who, in turn, were expected to later pay back such philanthropic investments in ways useful to the benefactors gave rise to speculative schemes that were more business than philanthropy.29 Promoters typically with interests in substantial land acquisition and development plans, such as Samuel Waldo and John Dick, sought government support for their ambitions and pledged settlement and crucial improvements in return. Such schemes, among them settlements in New England and Nova Scotia, depended on winning settlers and laborers whom agents recruited with promises of land and financial assistance, for the relocations were in effect business arrangements, although they were presented to sponsors, investors, and recruits in the guise of philanthropy. It remains to be explored if and how the interplay of private truths and public lies affected the success or failure of colonization and development schemes that depended on the generosity of small and large philanthropists or the investments of financiers. In the case of the redemptioner system as a mechanism for allowing capital-­poor emigrants to finance high transatlantic relocation costs, it is already clear that private views and public opinion were well enough aligned throughout the eighteenth century to keep this kind of business arrangement working.30 In addition to the broad acceptance of westward emigration among ordinary people in southwestern German territories, we should pay attention to the ways in which the processes of migration and settlement in a new place influenced the definition of identity. Ethnic identity is a well-­established and much-­researched category of considerable importance to political scientists and sociologists, who can make good use of contemporary polling data. Several historians have argued that for the eighteenth century, ethnic identity is an anachronistic attribute and hence useless for historical inquiry. Of course, there are no direct polling data about immigrants and their descendants available for the colonial period of American history, but the question of belonging

32  Migration and Settlement

to a particular, identifiable group is one that has considerable bearing on newcomers in any place at any time. Consequently, it may be better to focus on immigrant identity. This term can capture the local and regional roots of traditions and customs typical for the eighteenth century more appropriately than the more modern usage and understanding of ethnicity.31 How easily and how soon immigrants want to, or can, fit into the mainstream are questions that invite further study by historians. In this area, too, Kuran’s model might prove useful. An exploration of how private truths held by immigrants require shaping—that is, the downplaying of certain views, practices, and values, even the denial of some of them—in recognition of and reaction to prevailing “American” public opinion may lead to a better understanding of the path toward and price of acceptance and integration. Moreover, the ways in which immigrants disguise private truths in public can, under certain circumstances, effect change in mainstream opinion. For example, language is a critical component and readily recognized measure in the various negotiations of room for newcomers (and other outsiders) among already established inhabitants, as fellow citizens of the shared place. American English, with its many borrowed words and expressions that originally belonged to Native Americans and immigrants, bears testimony to this process of adjustment and accommodation. Similarly, Pennsylvania Dutch is a reflection of distinct local (one might say immigrant first, then ethnic) identity with many obvious “Americanisms,” especially in the realm of business and public affairs. The development of both can attest to the complex mutuality of articulating public opinion under circumstances in which private truths and public lies are reasonably balanced—where change tends to manifest itself incrementally, seemingly imperceptibly, and without much tension. In exploring the uses of immigrants’ and ethnic groups’ language, a systematic approach with a focus on particular local practices and traditions will prove useful. As Kathleen Conzen has convincingly argued, such an approach promises to overcome the restrictions of the conventional framework of ethnicity, which equates distinctiveness with the persistence of Old World customs instead of focusing on the creation of local culture that may well come at the loss of European authenticity.32 In the case of the Pennsylvania Germans, examples of material culture—house forms and taufscheine—seem to point to the usefulness of that approach concerning creolization among immigrants and their descendants and ethnically different neighbors.33 In this context, I also want to point out the great potential of recent theories of cultural and linguistic liminality for exploring the fate common to

Rethinking the 1709 Mass Migration  33

migrants at all times. This fate is the necessity of defining and redefining identities that are no longer referenced and rooted in the familiar past and traditions of the migrants’ places of origin but that are partly shaped by strangers along the journey and typecast by earlier arrivals—foreigners—at the immigrants’ new destinations. Migrants, on a journey away from the familiar into the unknown, always have to deal with linguistic multiplicity, adding ambiguity, confusion, and doubt to relationships, events, and loyalties.34 The same holds true for immigrants who have settled in their new place and, in a similar though somewhat different way for the children of immigrant parents, who need to learn a new language and culture.35 The immigrant destiny demands mediation between incommensurate situations that arise again and again, very often in the marketplace—a “crossroads” place where strangers meet, strange goods are sold, and linguistic invention takes place. Frequently, that means reliance on more or less trustworthy kinds of cultural go-­betweens and translators to meet these challenges until immigrants are familiar with the local ways and willing to take responsibility for determining and defining their own roles in their ethnic groups and in American society, thereby contributing to the creation of local cultures with distinct creole elements. In the early eighteenth-­century Rhine lands and all along the migration routes that most German speakers took to reach America, diverse recruiting and migration agents served in the role of such mediating, sometimes duplicitous, cultural go-­betweens. These men left marks that are worth exploring more fully in light of the various ways in which emigrants learned to become immigrants and to redefine who they were as they crossed boundaries and maneuvered among strangers in foreign lands.36 Evidence of different kinds of scheming for various ends can be found in advertisements and advice literature by speculators of all sorts and their agents, in the letters from immigrants and the stories told by “newlanders,” and in accounts of the many encounters with unfamiliar persons en route, ranging from boatmen on the Rhine to innkeepers upon debarkation in the American ports of arrival. This subject is comparatively poorly documented and awaits comprehensive and systematic analysis.37 Diplomats, who were in critical positions to issue or deny passports, offer advice, and organize assistance, including philanthropic support, as well as politicians and administrators, especially those with interests in and responsibilities for implementing population and naturalization policies, tend to be relatively well known because they were literate and obliged to account for their actions or were interested in making their opinions known. Those

34  Migration and Settlement

officials left a varied documentary record, which, if extant, historians can trace and examine to better understand the administrative frameworks within which individual migrants as well as groups of voyagers had to operate. Clearly, much more research remains to be done to uncover more fully how communication and contacts with and among emigrants worked along the various migration routes. In addition, it would add usefully to our knowledge if historians were to include more consciously and prominently in such considerations the perspective of persons who presented, advanced, or participated in schemes that promoted or discouraged migration to particular ends, pursuing certain ends of their own but not necessarily with the well-­being of the migrants as a goal. Along the migration routes from German-­speaking homelands to arrival and settlement in the British colonies of North America, many different types of people could take on the role of cultural go-­betweens, ranging from Rhine boatmen, shippers in Rotterdam, and captains of ships laden with emigrant cargo, to inn-­and shopkeepers, to German expatriate Lutheran and Reformed ministers. The focus here is on two examples: migration agents, often labeled “newlanders” and commonly stereotyped, and clergy, whom emigrants sought out for support or whose calling included ministering to transients in need. Newlanders have received much critical, mostly negative, judgment in the historical literature.38 Without a doubt there were unscrupulous, greedy, selfish, and despicable men (and probably a few women, too) among them. By contrast, other agents recognized, seized, and created opportunities in the migration business that suited their needs, including a strong desire for profits, and, if necessary, devised confidence games that took advantage of the migrants—but that also served them.39 Even those cunning, mischievous agents facilitated the migrants’ negotiations and dealings with the many people on whom they were dependent along their journey, including all kinds of officials—not just at border crossings—and all sorts of sales people. In particular instances, when agents served migrants well as guides and translators, they played a valuable role in helping the voyagers toward their goal and protecting them from adversity. More generally, those agents exemplified how to operate shrewdly with strangers in different places, modeling for observant migrants how to deal successfully on their own in foreign lands. Put differently, rather than weighing the relative good or bad of newlanders, and speculators and con men more generally, recognizing and exploring the adaptive duality of the migration agents’ roles in maneuvering between different cultures—that of the migrants and that of the lands through which they had to

Rethinking the 1709 Mass Migration  35

travel—enriches our understanding of how people could be made to believe the promise of a new and better life far away and could remain captivated by that promise after they left the familiarity of their homelands. The other example of cultural mediators includes mostly Reformed and Lutheran ministers who served as representatives of their confessional churches in parishes along the migration routes or were called upon to serve German-­speaking migrants on their way to the American colonies and also in places of arrival and first settlement in North America. Clergy belong in this category because they worked under circumstances that span different worlds and that require cultural interpretation.40 Even though they played crucial roles in interpreting different cultures, often literally translating mother languages into locally dominant tongues, the premises and goals of their interactions with the migrants were very different from those of the various agents with primary interests in the recruitment, transportation, or settlement of voyagers to North America. Church records indicate that certain clergy in Rotterdam and London saw to the needs of those transients and that they advocated for them with local leaders and other government authorities.41 Not surprisingly, migrants, who were in transit for months, called for the services of pastors and priests for baptism, burials, and weddings. In addition, charitable work was part of the clergy’s regular responsibilities. More research needs to be done to learn how ministers balanced pastoral duties to their resident flocks with immediate and pressing pleas from migrants whose ties to their parishes or congregations were tenuous but who had a considerable impact on the available, often limited, resources. At the height of the Palatine exodus, Dutch clergy in Rotterdam and German pastors serving in London responded to the immediate and most pressing needs of the emigrants, but we know little about how they viewed and commented on the migration and even less about how they counseled and dealt with demands from subsequent emigrants once certain routes to the American colonies were well established and traveled.42 In the group of ministers, Joshua Harrsch, alias Kocherthal, represents a special case. Kocherthal, the author of what became known as the “golden book,” even more so than Harrsch, the Lutheran pastor who moved from the Kraichgau to New York, can be seen in the role of a rather misleading kind of cultural go-­between. Kocherthal played this role rather unwittingly, however, since he himself fell for the ploy of Carolina’s proprietors to augment his original narrative about settlement prospects in Carolina with highly suggestive but unfounded promises of official migration subsidies. Moreover, the

36  Migration and Settlement

speculators, who sought to advance their goal of attracting settlers in order to improve the land chartered to them, used a Frankfurt publisher to print Kocherthal’s report, probably to his delight because of the impressive sales numbers of the publication. What the Carolina land speculators and their agents—con men advancing their own game and gain—did not know was that public opinion about the acceptance, even legitimacy, of emigration was about to shift. This was because over the course of the past generation residents in southwestern Germany had come to believe that emigration was no longer primarily an alternative for religious dissenters and social outcasts but rather an option for ordinary people who wished to leave difficulties behind in search of a better life. Evidence of this shift in public opinion became manifest abruptly after the difficult winter of 1708 and as the “Carolina fever” struck in 1709. Neither the difficulties that resulted from the disastrous weather nor the publication of Kocherthal’s Ausführlich-­und Umständlicher Bericht von der berühmten Landschafft Carolina caused the Palatine exodus, but they do constitute persuasive evidence that public opinion had shifted decisively to align with private hopes and convictions that relocation to America was acceptable—a readjustment with far-­reaching consequences. In the aftermath of the 1709 exodus, long-­distance westward migration, to which the difficulties and expense of the transatlantic crossing had been serious impediments, became a viable option for German-­speaking emigrants of limited means. Three general conclusions can be drawn from reconsidering the significance of the 1709 mass migration from the Palatinate and many other territories in Germany, and from reevaluating the impact of this extraordinary spike in emigration on the subsequent flow of German-­speaking immigrants to America. First, and most important, the exodus of 1709 is significant because it represents the tipping point for a particular development, signaling the beginning of a new stage in westward migration. The year 1709 marks the end of the prevailing view that emigration was a move only acceptable for religious and social outsiders. Personal opinion had already been shaped by information about settlement projects in America and news from immigrants in Britain’s American colonies, which allowed individuals to weigh the accuracy and legitimacy of official descriptions and claims about opportunities in distant lands. Tension grew between what people truly thought about a move that meant leaving their current situation for more land and a better life in a foreign country and what they could express publicly in response to questions about the appropriateness of emigration as a means for escaping real or

Rethinking the 1709 Mass Migration  37

perceived hardships. Like earth’s tectonic plates moving in opposite directions along a fault line, the relief of the accumulated stress resulted in a realignment—an abrupt, significant, and irrevocable shift in public opinion about the legitimacy of migration as an option to avoid difficulties at home and pursue faraway opportunities. This metaphor, used in Kuran’s model, offers a better explanation of these obvious, sudden shifts than the images of “push” and “pull” that have long been evoked to explain the mechanisms of migration processes, despite the fact that these images fail to provide satisfactory explanation as to the timing of a particular migration’s flow or ebb. The second insight from this reevaluation of the 1709 mass migration— signaling a new phase not only in the perception of migration but also in the organization of the transatlantic migration routes and processes—is the entrepreneurial dynamic that made the trade in migrants profitable for small-­as well as large-­scale operators and that could count not only on business innovations but also on the charity and generosity motivated by private and public philanthropy. Primarily, support for the benefit of migrating kin, coreligionists, and neighbors as well as some private and government investments in settlement and land development projects in the American colonies coalesced into regular and reliable transatlantic communication and trade networks that provided the basis for the westward flow of German migration from the Rhine lands and other territories. Transporting emigrants and their belongings across the Atlantic offered opportunities for merchants with interests in shipping. Long-­term success in this specialized trade depended on the flow of migrants. Innovative shippers therefore extended credit for the fare under circumstances that put the risk almost entirely on the voyagers directly or, more indirectly but most crucially, on earlier immigrants who were willing and able to accept newcomers’ promises of future labor in return for settling outstanding travel debts upon their arrival. That private investment in German immigrant labor was significant and fueled the migration, directing it mostly to and through Pennsylvania, where German speakers had settled successfully. Third and last, there is the strong suggestion that the migration experience itself—negotiating with strangers in foreign lands—served as preparation for the immigrants to deal with the questions that confront all newcomers in unfamiliar places: namely, “Who am I?” and “How do I interact with my neighbors?” Considerations of identity and especially immigrant identity— defining and redefining it—are at the heart of people’s perception of success and failure. The processes integrating newcomers into the mainstream also

38  Migration and Settlement

involve weighing the cost of expressing private truths in light of public opinion that may be accepting of immigrants or indifferent or hostile. From the perspective of twenty-­first-­century Germans and Americans, it is probably true—based on quantitative data—that for many of the 1709 emigrants the decision to leave home did not result in success. The “golden” promise of Carolina as described in Kocherthal’s report did not materialize, except later for a rather small number first in New York and then for a smaller number still who eventually moved to Pennsylvania. Yet it is difficult to judge whether the emigrants, even those who were forced to return to their German homelands, were generally worse off for acting on promises of more land and a better life than they expected at home, since we cannot know how they would have fared had they stayed. For those emigrants whose hopes were dashed, the experience was clearly disappointing, even devastating, but stories of such individual failures did not translate into a popular rejection of migration to North America. On the contrary, the mass emigration of 1709 should be seen as an experiment with the irreversible outcome of directing migration westward despite the many and varied stories of individual success or disappointment. The dramatic realignment of private and public reaction to overseas opportunities in times of real and perceived hardships at home created entrepreneurial energies that facilitated the development of viable and sustainable migration routes from German lands, first to the American colonies and later to the United States. These routes enabled significant numbers of German speakers to relocate across the Atlantic, with the effect that those immigrants and their descendants had a considerable impact in shaping American society and culture. The example of the 1709 mass migration may also serve to encourage further exploration of how private views and public opinion aligned in areas of outmigration, along migration routes, and in places where immigrants settled. It holds promise for developing a narrative framework—potentially interactive—that takes ongoing definitions and redefinitions of identities into consideration and within which stories of individuals that reveal private thoughts, as well as institutional structures and social movements that reflect public opinion, receive due attention because of their interdependence and are thus included in the findings that determine future questions.

notes 1. For a description of the business of transporting German immigrants across the Atlantic to the American colonies, see Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass

Rethinking the 1709 Mass Migration  39 Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), and Marianne S. Wokeck, “Irish and German Migration to Eighteenth-­Century North America,” in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 152–75. 2. Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). For a very different, modern case in which Kuran’s theory has found useful application, see Stacey Jones, “Dynamic Social Norms and the Unexpected Transformation of Women’s Higher Education, 1965–1975,” Social Science History 33, no. 3 (2009): 248–91. 3. Kuran characterizes his theory as “a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients political change, sustains social stability, fuels political revolution, distorts human knowledge, and hides political possibilities.” Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies, 21. 4. Ibid., xi. 5. Humanists may well be perplexed by the term and turn to the Internet as an easy way to find an explanation. If, for example, they were to search jargondatabase.com, they would find the following definition: preference falsification is “a behavior caused by social pressures that causes people to express feelings and sentiments that differ from their actual feelings.” If they were to consult the Harvard University Press webpage for Kuran’s book, Private Truths, Public Lies, they would find it defined as “the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures.” 6. Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies, xii, 4. Additional ways in which Kuran describes preference falsification include the following: preference falsification (the misrepresentation of “what [people] want and know”) has as “its intended effect . . . ‘the regulation of others’ perceptions’ ”; and “preference falsification is the selection of a public preference that differs from one’s private preference” (21, 5, 17). 7. For a recent examination of the applicability of science theory and method for social science, see Kevin A. Clarke and David M. Primo, A Model Discipline: Political Science and the Logic of Representations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 8. Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies, 30. 9. One of the test cases that Kuran uses to demonstrate the usefulness of this model is the surprising rapidity with which the Soviet and Soviet-­style regimes in eastern Europe collapsed in the early 1990s—a development that few had foreseen correctly. It is a demonstration of the book’s central claim that “social policies and institutions evolve sometimes through slow and continuous adjustments and at other times through sudden, discontinuous jumps.” Ibid., 345. 10. The concept of push-­and-­pull factors as incentives for and as regulators of migration has proved to be popular as well as long-­lived. It seems to make sense to nonspecialists, and it has motivated specialists to define, and possibly measure, the interplay and interdependence of circumstances in areas of emigration that prompted people to leave and in regions that attracted immigrants. Much of the literature on immigration to the United States addresses push-­and-­pull factors implicitly or explicitly in some fashion, even though this concept does not provide satisfactory explanation for how and when shifts in the dynamics of migration flows occur. According to Kuran, emphasis on individual choice is better than emphasis on social structure, as represented by push-­and-­pull factors, because people make individual choices with social significance. This means that individual choice is the key to comprehending social order. When, by contrast, the focus is on social structure, individual choice is less important than the constraints within which choices are made. Ibid., 329–30. 11. Ibid., 333, 337. 12. Joshua Harrsch’s name is variously spelled in the late seventeenth-­and early eighteenth-­ century sources. That the Lutheran minister used “Kocherthal” as his surname after his emigration adds to the confusion about his identity. See Joshua Kocherthal, Ausführlich-­und Umständlicher Bericht von der berühmten Landschafft Carolina, in dem Engelländischen America gelegen (Frankfurt/Main: Georg Heinrich Oehrling, 1709). For a discussion of the publication history of the pamphlet, see Andreas Mielke, “Who Was Kocherthal and What Happened to His Party of 1708?” in “Kocherthal: A Tricentennial Commemoration of the Palatine Migration of 1708/1709,”

40  Migration and Settlement Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage 31, no. 4 (2008): 8–31; also Klaus Wust and Heinz Moos, eds., Three Hundred Years of German Immigrants in North America, 1683–1983 (Baltimore: Heinz Moos, 1983), 22–23. Wust and Moos’s book was published in German as Dreihundert Jahre Deutsche Einwanderer in Nordamerika, 1683–1983 (Gräfelfing vor München: “300 Jahre Deutsche in Amerika” Verlag, 1983). 13. See, for example, the first practical guide for would-­be immigrants by Daniel Falckner, an ordained Lutheran minister who went to America as a member of a group of mystics in 1694; Falckner, Falckner’s “Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania,” trans. and ed. Julius Friedrich Sachse (1905; reprint, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht, including letters by Francis Daniel Pastorius, was commissioned by August Hermann Francke in Halle and first published in 1702. This work familiarized people all over Germany with the potential and promise of Pennsylvania. See Wust and Moos, German Immigrants, 20, and Herman Wellenreuther, Ausbildung und Neubildung: Die Geschichte Nordamerikas vom Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ausbruch der Amerikanischen Revolution 1775 (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2001), 138. See also Heiko Diekmann, Lockruf der Neuen Welt: Deutschsprachige Werbeschriften für die Auswanderung nach Nordamerika von 1680 bis 1760 (Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2005). 14. One example from Pastorius in the preface to Curieuse Nachricht reads, “Ought not a time of dearth and famine come onto you, ought not pestilence, epidemics, the French and other plagues overtake you? Ought not deluded men, wild dissolute tyrants rule over us? Ought not strife or war arise, should not evil government come about in the German States? Sodom and Gomorrah were not one tenth as wicked as Germany is at present; they had neither God’s Holy Word nor the ministry which we have gratuitously. But we act like those who would that both the Lord and his word, all discipline and honor perish. If this is to be the rule in Germany, I shall regret that I am born a German, or ever spoke or wrote German.” Quoted in translation in Wust and Moos, German Immigrants, 20. 15. A more careful, comprehensive, and systematic analysis of emigrants’ “exit” interviews with territorial officials than the more common anecdotal reading offers an opportunity for exploring the language and images with which farmers and artisans expressed their emigration decision. 16. There are no comprehensive and systematic analyses of sermons and newspapers that deal with migration, but examination of public opinion as expressed in those venues promises findings that would allow comparison of particular locales in German-­speaking territories with different attitudes and actions toward emigrating and emigrants. 17. For a detailed discussion of Daniel Defoe’s role in shaping England’s population and naturalization policies and how he used the German migration as a test case to advance his views— including labeling the migrants “poor Palatine refugees”—see Philip Otterness, “The Formation of German Immigrant Identity in London and New York,” in “Exploration in Early American Culture,” supplemental issue, Pennsylvania History 66 (1999): 4–23. This issue is also addressed in Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 18. Otterness, in Becoming German, details the 1709 migration and focuses in particular on the political context in England that first encouraged German immigrants and later encountered considerable difficulties in dealing with the unanticipated, large numbers of “refugees,” a small number of whom were transported to New York to produce naval stores. 19. Wust and Moos, in German Immigrants, do not profile Kocherthal as one of their 174 outstanding immigrants; Herman Wellenreuther does not even mention him in the second volume of his three-­volume American history. See Wellenreuther, Niedergang und Aufstieg (vol. 1), Ausbildung und Neubildung (vol. 2), and Von Chaos und Krieg zu Ordnung und Frieden (vol. 3), Geschichte Nordamerikas in atlantischer Perspektive von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Norbert Finzsch, Ursula Lehmkuhl, and Hermann Wellenreuther (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2000–2006). 20. Wust and Moos, German Immigrants, 22; Mielke, “Who Was Kocherthal,” 17–19. See also Andreas Mielke, ed. and trans., “Extensive and Detailed Report of the Famous Land Carolina, Situated in the English America [1708/1709], by Kocherthal [Josua Harrsch],” in collaboration with Sandra Yelton, in “Kocherthal: A Tricentennial Commemoration of the Palatine Migration of 1708/1709,” Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage 31, no. 4 (2008): 32–47.

Rethinking the 1709 Mass Migration  41 21. Mielke, “Who Was Kocherthal,” 19–31. The classic account of the 1709 migration is Walter Allen Knittle, Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration: A British Government Redemptioner Project to Manufacture Naval Stores (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1937; reprint, Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1976). Henry Z. Jones Jr. presents a very different record of the migration of Palatines to New York in that he reconstructs the family histories of voyagers listed on the manifests of vessels to New York from church records in Germany, London, and New York; see Jones, The Palatine Families of New York, 2 vols. (Universal City, Calif.: Henry Z. Jones Jr., 1985). 22. The work of genealogists, foremost among them Henry Z. Jones Jr. and Annette Kunselman Burgert, testifies to the diversity and far-­flung territorial distribution of German immigrants to the American colonies. See Henry Z. Jones Jr. and Lewis Bunker Rohrbach, Even More Palatine Families: Eighteenth Century Immigrants to the American Colonies and Their German, Swiss, and Austrian Origins, 3 vols. (Rockport, Maine: Picton Press, 2002), and “Anne K. Burgert, FGSP, FASG,” ProGenealogists, http://www.progenealogists.com/palproject/aburgert.htm. 23. Some of the records of the Mennonite Committee of Foreign Needs in Amsterdam are available on microfilm at the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (catalogued under “European Mennonites, Amsterdam Archives”). 24. Samuel Kriebel Brecht, The Genealogical Record of the Schwenkfelder Familie: Seekers of Religious Liberty Who Fled from Silesia to Saxony and Thence to Pennsylvania in the Years 1731–1737, 2 vols. (New York: Rand McNally, 1923); [David Schultze], “Narrative of the Journey of the Schwenkfelders to Pennsylvania, 1733,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 10 (1886): 167–79. 25. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 251 (nos. 523–27), 273n255. 26. The study of philanthropy has developed into a separate specialized field of study. For an introduction, see Walter W. Powell and Richard Steinberg, eds., The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), especially Kevin C. Robbins’s chapter, “The Nonprofit Sector in Historical Perspective: Traditions of Philanthropy in the West,” 13–31, and Peter Dobkin Hall’s chapter, “Scope and Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector,” 32–65. See also Merle Curti, “American Philanthropy and the American Character,” American Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1958): 420–37. 27. Robbins, “Nonprofit Sector,” 21. 28. The literature on the redemptioner system is large. Wokeck’s “Irish and German Migration” provides a summary of older studies and can serve as a starting place for research and references. 29. The public-­spirited generosity of philanthropists that brought aid to the 1709 emigrants is a reflection of a development in charitable giving based on spiritual and moral imperatives that was already under way. Philanthropists no longer considered giving to the poor as a selfless act of Christian charity but “increasingly preferred to patronize disciplinary institutions . . . whose full-­time officers and instructors could promise more economical and effective acquisition of orderly public welfare through social reform.” Robbins, “Nonprofit Sector,” 25. 30. Hans-­Jürgen Grabbe examines the decline of the redemptioner system in the early nineteenth century; see Grabbe, Vor der grossen Flut: Die europäische Migration in die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika 1783–1820 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001). 31. The literature on ethnicity and identity is extensive and varied. For a very thoughtful treatment, albeit with a focus on the nineteenth century, see Kathleen Neils Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no. 1 (1992): 3–41. See also Conzen’s essays “Mainstreams and Side Channels: The Localization of Immigrant Cultures,” Journal of American Ethnic History 11, no. 1 (1991): 5–20, and “Phantom Landscapes of Colonization: Germans in the Making of a Pluralist America,” in The German-­American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation Between Two Cultures, 1800–2000, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 7–21. 32. See the previous note. 33. The essays by Cynthia Falk and Liam Riordan in this collection demonstrate how productive such an approach can be. 34. Lewis Hyde, whose primary interest is in culture, art, and creativity, suggests a humanistic approach for exploring the fate common to all migrants. In Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1998), he explores how the trickster, personified

42  Migration and Settlement (among others) in ancient tradition as Hermes and Mercury and in Navajo tales as Coyote, is the “mythical embodiment” of “being on the road,” which “is a spirit road as well as a road in fact” (6). To the conceptualization of “cultural brokers” or “go-­betweens” familiar to ethnic historians, Hyde adds the important dimension of creators of culture in the trickster figures he explores (7–8). 35. Hyde describes this process well, using the literary example of Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Knopf, 1975): “The immigrant project is not merely to learn English but to infuse the local tongue with one’s own inflections”—that is, “ ‘to take [the immigrant] accent and [make] it part of America.’ . . . Having had the experience of unmaking an old world and redescribing its parts for his or her own purposes, the [immigrant] must at least suspect that the creole [creation] . . . is an artifice and subject to the same [reimagining] that allowed it in the first place.” Hyde, Trickster, 310. 36. It is worth remembering that the designation “emigrants” is assigned from the perspective of those who were left behind and stayed in their homeland, while “immigrants” indicates the arrival of newcomers in a place unfamiliar to them. Migrants cross the boundary from emigration—away from what and who is in the past—to immigration—toward a different life and strange place ahead. This transition encompasses trickster-­like characteristics and may help in understanding the broad range of ways in which migrants experience, perceive, and articulate the challenges of making a new life among strangers in a foreign land. 37. Taken together, the literature illuming the full arc of the immigrant experience is rich but uneven and scattered. Pertinent information needs to be gathered from a wide variety of unpublished and published sources. Advances in computer technology, especially content management systems, promise more comprehensive and systematic study of those sources, which, in turn, is likely to refine, if not change, our views and will lead to new questions. 38. The negative picture of newlanders in Gottlieb Mittelberger’s account has dominated in the literature and the public imagination, obscuring the vital role played by recruiting and migration agents—some undoubtedly of disreputable character and engaging in exploitative behavior, others responsible and helpful. Mittelberger, Journey to Pennsylvania, trans. and ed. Oscar Handlin and John Clive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). 39. In the historical literature with a focus on social behavior and relationships, the term “cultural broker” has been used to describe the role of newlanders, most often emphasizing the positive aspects rather than exploitative possibilities of mediation, translation, and interpretation. 40. Undoubtedly, leaders in sectarian and dissenting congregations located close to the migration routes played similar roles in dealing with migrating coreligionists. Since their numbers tended to be small, however, their impact as interpreters and mediators was less likely focused on issues concerning migration in particular and more likely on how beliefs generally affected and guided the life of these self-­reliant and self-­governing congregations. The Mennonite Committee of Foreign Needs in Amsterdam presents a good example for exploring this issue. 41. For the role of Lutheran clergy in London, see Otterness, “German Immigrant Identity,” 12, and Otterness, Becoming German, 51, 64. 42. In the United States at the beginning of the twenty-­first century, churches and clergy are at the forefront of ministering to immigrants, especially poor and often undocumented immigrants. At this point, it is not clear from the eighteenth-­century records that pastors and priests in port and border towns took on a comparable role when the German migration stream swelled and touched them. If Henry Melchior Muhlenberg’s letters and reports are any indication, it seems that tending to the needs of immigrants indiscriminately was not one of his recorded priorities. He was called upon for assistance and supported the German Society of Pennsylvania as a charter member with the goal of helping German immigrants, but he interpreted his pastoral duties toward immigrants within the context of tending to them as members of his flock.

Two

Information Brokers and Mediators The Role of Diplomats in the Migration of German-­Speaking People, 1709–1711 Rosalind J. Beiler

In the spring and summer of 1709, James Dayrolle, the British resident at the Hague, negotiated the movement of thousands of people from the Rhineland to London. Seeking relief from wars, crop failures, and poverty and lured by propaganda about opportunities in the colonies, between ten and fifteen thousand German-­speaking people left their homes to resettle in the British Empire. Dayrolle not only arranged for their transportation but also acted as a mediator between the British Crown and other Europeans when the crowds of people showing up in Rotterdam threatened to overwhelm both Dutch and British resources.1 A few months later, Johann Ludwig Runckel, envoy of the Dutch States General in Switzerland, sent news to Mennonite church leaders in Amsterdam that Bern’s officials were attempting to imprison and banish the city’s Mennonites. Runckel soon began to use his diplomatic connections to shuttle information and money back and forth between Swiss officials, Mennonite prisoners, Palatine and Dutch Mennonites, and Dutch officials as he negotiated a solution for the prisoners and refugees. By the time the exiles migrated down the Rhine in 1711, church leaders were considering resettlement offers from the Prussian king, the Dukes of Hesse, the British queen, the Dutch States General, and several British colonial proprietors. Runckel’s efforts were critical in securing these colonization options.2

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Historians writing about the migration of German-­speaking immigrants to British North America occasionally refer to diplomats or the processes in which they participated. Philip Otterness, in writing about the 1709 migration, presents a detailed description of James Dayrolle. He discusses Dayrolle’s views on recruiting English subjects, his role in arranging transportation for the immigrants, and his efforts to stem the flow when newcomers strained the charity Rotterdam and London officials had to offer them.3 Marianne Wokeck outlines the steps merchants took when organizing the transportation of immigrants. She notes that immigrants were required to present passports to travel down the Rhine and through the Netherlands, but she does not address how they obtained passports.4 Georg Fertig, in discussing the competition between ship captains controlling the transportation of German-­speaking immigrants, states that merchants obtained passports for those traveling through the Netherlands in the mid-­eighteenth century. However, it is not clear who was responsible for distributing them to the merchants.5 By asking why they became involved and what roles they played in moving people from one place to another, this essay examines the place of European diplomats in negotiating the migration of German-­speaking people in the early eighteenth century. Diplomats represented the interests of European heads of state, who viewed their populations as critical elements for the wealth of their realms. Consequently, diplomats were important players in monitoring the movement of people across political borders, especially during periods of war. From the perspective of their superiors, they acted as gatekeepers who could strategically admit promising prospective subjects. But they also faced pressure from the immigrants themselves and those acting on their behalf. As gatekeepers, diplomats were forced to turn away destitute people when heads of state determined to keep newcomers out. They also dealt with the demands of potential new subjects for better resettlement conditions. Thus, diplomats were both information brokers and mediators. Their positions in the middle demonstrate the constant tensions and negotiations between potential subjects and heads of state as political authorities sought to build empires and consolidate their power. Two migrations, in 1709 and 1711, provide excellent opportunities to understand in greater detail the role diplomats played as heads of state attempted to increase their subjects. Through these examples, their place in the larger Atlantic context of migration emerges. Examining diplomats’ place within European governments provides a starting point for contextualizing why they became involved in migration. In the

Information Brokers and Mediators  45

early modern period, diplomats represented the crown or the head of state to political powers outside of the realm. They were responsible for legitimating claims of sovereignty to other governments. For British monarchs at the end of the seventeenth century, this generally meant sending their representatives abroad rather than entertaining foreign diplomats in London. They believed that diplomats stood a smaller chance of becoming caught up in domestic political intrigues if they worked outside of the country. Sending them to live abroad, however, created the danger of their representatives taking on too much of the cultural and political interests of the countries in which they were stationed. Diplomats were expected to carefully balance fostering their foreign connections with legitimizing the sovereignty of their superior. British diplomats did not receive formal training; instead, the court in London functioned as an educational center for those who sought to become the personal representative of the sovereign. Since negotiation was not a formally taught skill in the period, honor and personal connections were critical in allowing diplomats to carry out their tasks successfully.6 One of the important ways in which diplomats advanced the interests of the crown was by protecting and increasing the country’s wealth. Prevailing early modern ideas about demography and political states posited that a large population produced more wealth and power. European economic and political discourse connected government policy with immigration. On the continent, expanding populations were significant considerations for military power—especially during the wars of the late seventeenth century. Success on the battlefield required a sufficient population of soldiers. But population expansion also had economic implications. Since increasing the number of laborers supposedly expanded wealth, policies to encourage immigration or discourage emigration became important factors in the competition between European powers. The expulsion of Huguenots from France, for example, sent thousands of craftsmen and merchants to Holland, Brandenburg, and England, where political leaders believed they had benefitted at France’s expense. For England, which suffered a diminished population at the end of the seventeenth century even as the government sought to increase its colonial empire, immigration became an important means of increasing its wealth. Leading intellectuals in Europe made similar arguments about competition for population. In France, the expansionist policies of Louis XIV required additional people, and the German states, suffering demographic losses following the Thirty Years’ War, sought ways to encourage immigration to assist with economic recovery.7 Diplomats, tasked with representing their sovereigns’

46  Migration and Settlement

interests abroad, were frequently in key positions to affect population expansion through immigration. Diplomats also negotiated treaties and agreements with other governments in ways that would maintain the balance of political power in Europe. During the first decade of the eighteenth century, this was especially critical in the attempts to reach a peace treaty to end the War of the Spanish Succession. At issue, from the perspective of the English Crown and its allies, was finding a way to contain the political ambitions of Louis XIV of France. Religion played a complex role in diplomatic relations during the period. On the one hand, the English needed the Catholic Hapsburgs as allies in the war. They could not afford to base their efforts against France solely on anti-­Catholic rhetoric. On the other hand, at a time when religion continued to play a key role in British succession, those in positions of power were often keen to point out the ways the French Crown persecuted Protestants.8 This anti-­French, anti-­Catholic sentiment was used to fashion a new identity for the German-­speaking immigrants James Dayrolle assisted in 1709 after they arrived in England.9 It is not surprising, therefore, that he and other diplomats were willing to assist potential Protestant subjects they believed would be assets for the heads of state whose interests they represented. Thus, diplomats—especially at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century—were in prime positions to monitor the potential for expanding populations by encouraging or discouraging migration of particular groups of people. Between March and September 1709, thousands of Germans arrived in Rotterdam en route to London, where they believed Queen Anne would assist them in migrating to the British colonies. Hoping to escape famine, war, and poverty and lured by the promise of better living conditions, they appealed to Rotterdam officials and Dayrolle for assistance.10 Initially, the British government approved subsidies to transport them to England but then considered a variety of proposals for how and where to settle the immigrants. While some returned to their homes and others settled in England and Ireland, the majority moved across the Atlantic to New York, where they worked on a government project to extract pitch and tar.11 Two years later, in July 1711, a group of 350 Swiss Mennonite refugees migrated down the Rhine en route to the Netherlands. The city government in Bern had first imprisoned and then exiled members of the religious group in 1709 because they refused to perform military service. Officials intended to confiscate their property and use the proceeds from its sale to send the refugees to the British colonies. Fellow believers in the Netherlands first

Information Brokers and Mediators  47

lobbied Bern’s officials to take a more tolerant stance toward the Swiss Mennonites. When that failed, they worked with Johann Ludwig Runckel to obtain amnesty and better resettlement options on their behalf.12 This was not the first time Swiss governments had imprisoned and banished religious dissenters; they had sent groups of Mennonite refugees down the Rhine in the 1670s as well. But by 1709 Dutch Mennonites had organized regular communication networks to assist fellow believers suffering from persecution and intolerance in other European states. They also had established strong political connections that they used to negotiate with other Protestant government officials. By the time the refugees migrated down the Rhine in 1711, their leaders were considering various resettlement options.13 In both migrations, diplomats played key roles in moving people from one place to another. One of the important tasks they undertook was to issue passports allowing immigrants to cross political borders legally. For much of the early modern period, England had few restrictions on arriving immigrants; however, during periods of war, those coming and going from the continent were supposed to obtain passports.14 On April 9, 1709, Dayrolle reported to Henry Boyle, the secretary of state at Whitehall, that he had given “a pass 2 days ago to about 60 familys of poor German protestants coming from Palatinet upon a design to go and imbarque for Pensilvania.” He thought that they totaled about two hundred people, and he commented that they intended to sail with the next convoy from Rotterdam, as the Admiralty there had promised to help them.15 Six days later he gave another passport to an additional group of German Protestants intending to go to the plantations.16 When Dayrolle issued these passports, Britain was fighting against France in the War of the Spanish Succession. As the numbers of German-­speaking emigrants grew, Dayrolle’s reports about the passports he issued quickened.17 But Dayrolle only needed to provide passports to enter Britain after immigrants had already traveled from their homes to the Netherlands. Obtaining passports for those who had not yet traveled down the Rhine was much more complicated. In 1711, Runckel worked to obtain passports for a group of banished Swiss Mennonites. He reported to Dutch Mennonites that he had already received passports from the archbishops of Mainz and Trier. In addition, Bern officials had written to the local French minister to obtain passports from the French court, and Runckel had written directly to the imperial minister in Bern for passports from the imperial court in Austria. Runckel still needed to obtain travel documents from Württemberg, the Palatinate, the Dukes of Hesse, the archbishop of Cologne, and the elector of Brandenburg.

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He suggested that it would be easiest if all of these passports were sent to him in Switzerland before the refugees set sail. If that was impossible, however, he laid out a plan by which they could be delivered to the ship’s captain one stop before each was needed to cross another political border.18 Obtaining passports to travel down the Rhine across a myriad of political boundaries was complicated indeed. In addition to granting immigrants permission to cross political borders, diplomats helped arrange transportation for them. Toward the end of April 1709, Dayrolle suggested that the ships being used to bring over recruits for the war could carry the immigrants to England because “the Paquetboat can take but very few of them.”19 Within a few weeks he had received word that the queen approved this arrangement.20 But he discovered that when the recruits arrived, only one of the transport ships had been ordered to return with immigrants. Of the 1,000 Germans who had gathered in Rotterdam, only 250 could be carried on the transport.21 Dayrolle convinced the Duke of Marlborough, who was organizing the English troops in the war effort, to use additional ships to take them across the channel. He reported on June 4 that 1,283 people had boarded those ships and that another 2,000 were waiting to embark on ships in a convoy set to sail in three or four days.22 Like Dayrolle, Runckel detailed carefully for Dutch Mennonites his plans to transport the refugees leaving Switzerland. He recommended as their chief director George Ritter, a Swiss grocer who had escorted a smaller contingent of Mennonite exiles down the Rhine the previous year. He believed Ritter’s assistance in negotiating with officials at border crossings and in dealing with passports was critical because many of the refugees were simple farmers and had little travel experience.23 After securing Ritter’s services as chief, Runkel worked with him to have ships built and to estimate the costs of moving 500 to 550 people down the Rhine. Like Dayrolle, he coordinated the details of their transportation. Diplomats went beyond securing transportation, however; they also sought the funding needed to move immigrants to their new homes. When the first of the “poor Palatines” arrived in Rotterdam, Dayrolle conferred with the Duke of Marlborough about their poor circumstances, and the duke “promised to move her Majesty in their behalf.”24 Queen Anne did indeed order funds to be paid to cover the immigrants’ transportation and subsistence while en route. Within a short time, however, Dayrolle was fearful that the costs were more than the queen might wish to spend. On June 21, he wrote to Secretary of State Boyle that they had just sent “about 1,800 Palatines” to

Information Brokers and Mediators  49

England but were expecting 3,000 more in Rotterdam shortly: “Their number increasing so considerably and likewise the Expences, you will be pleased to let me know Her Ma[jes]ties pleasure, how I am to behave myself.”25 Dayrolle had hired two commissioners, Hendrick Toren and Jan van Gent (Mennonite merchants in Rotterdam), to arrange for the immigrants’ travel and subsistence. He was paying them a set fee based on the number of days it should take them to load the ships and the cost for crossing the channel. Bad weather and contrary winds, however, had delayed their crossing and the costs were mounting.26 In response, Boyle sent instructions to transport only those Germans who were already in Rotterdam and no more. By July, Dayrolle vowed to do his best to stop the flow, but before that occurred, the government subsidized the transportation of more than 4,000 additional immigrants.27 Like Dayrolle, Runckel negotiated the funding needed to move Swiss Mennonite refugees down the Rhine. In their case, he sought funding not from government officials but from Dutch Mennonites. By the early eighteenth century, Dutch Mennonites had formed the Commission for Foreign Needs, a group representing numerous Mennonite congregations throughout the Netherlands and northern Europe. The Commission was to make decisions about and solicit funds and household goods on behalf of religious refugees. It was to this Commission, based in Amsterdam, that Runckel sent his reports. As he organized transportation for the refugees, he also gave specific estimates of how much he thought it would cost to move them. Some of the costs, he thought, could be covered by the funds raised when the exiles sold their property, if he could convince the Bernese officials to grant them amnesty and let them keep the proceeds from selling their belongings. The rest would need to come from the donations collected by the Dutch Mennonites. Runkel not only estimated the required funds for the Commission but also assisted it in arranging for the financing and transfer of money.28 Diplomats such as Runkel and Dayrolle, therefore, played a critical role in organizing the logistics of migration for German-­speaking people at the turn of the century. They arranged for passports to legalize the crossing of political borders, organized transportation, and sought funding for those who could not afford to pay for travel costs or for subsistence while they were en route to their new homes. Diplomats were critical, in part, because so much of Europe was at war. Their connections to powerful people who were competing to maintain a balance of power were important negotiating tools. As representatives of their respective states’ interests abroad, both Dayrolle and Runkel knew best how to make the practical arrangements for moving potential new

50  Migration and Settlement

subjects from foreign lands. In the process, they became mediators between the immigrants and those who held political power in the places to which they wished to migrate. Those for whom they worked also recognized the diplomats’ roles and sought to use their access to information for their own purposes. Both government authorities and immigrants understood that diplomats could help them secure particular benefits. In the case of Dayrolle and the 1709 migration, the British government recognized the need to expand its population in order to increase its wealth. On May 3, 1709, Secretary of State Charles Spencer, the Earl of Sunderland, wrote to the Board of Trade that although the immigrants intended to settle in the British colonies, the queen was “convinced that it would be more for the Advantage of her Kingdoms if a Method could be found to settle them here in Such manner as they might get a comfortable Livelyhood.” She thought that doing so would be “a great Encouragement to others to follow their Example and that this Addition to the Number of Her Subjects would in all probability produce a proportionable Increase of their Trade & Manufactures.” Sunderland therefore instructed the Board of Trade to make proposals to the queen on schemes to settle the immigrants.29 Sunderland’s request produced the intended results, as several groups and individuals proposed ways to turn the Palatines into productive British subjects. On May 23, 1709, the United Governors Assistants and Society of London for Mines Royal petitioned the Board of Trade to resettle the immigrants in Wales, where the strong ones were “to be Imployed in ye Silver & Copper Mines there open’d” and the rest could “cultivate the waste Grounds” or build houses for those who remained in London. They believed there was plenty of food in that place, so the immigrants would be able to “subsist themselves & instead of being a burthen to be a benefit to ye Public some thousands a year.”30 Other proposals included settling them on estates, having them clear wasteland, and encouraging English towns to take them in.31 While the queen’s first thoughts were to use the immigrants to expand her population at home, by early summer she began to entertain proposals to send them abroad to “people” the colonies. In July, Ireland’s Privy Council requested that a group of the “poor Palatines” be sent there to help bolster the Protestant interest. They believed the immigrants’ supposed refugee status made them ideal colonists. The Carolina proprietors also proposed sending a group of them to North Carolina, where they were prepared to offer them land on excellent terms. And some merchants presented a plan to send a group of the Palatines to Jamaica, where they believed the immigrants would

Information Brokers and Mediators  51

help shield the colony from foreign attack and increase its productivity. While several of these proposals led to some of the immigrants settling in the colonies, by far the most ambitious plan was the one to send Palatines to New York to produce pitch and tar. In that case, the proposal called for the British government to subsidize their first year in the colony in return for them providing a buffer between New York and its French and Indian neighbors and for contributing to the empire’s naval stores.32 As long as the immigrants promised to be productive subjects, government officials ordered Dayrolle to arrange and pay for their transportation to London. Secretary of State Boyle regularly forwarded to the treasurer accounts of the money Dayrolle paid to Toren and van Gent for the immigrants’ subsistence and travel.33 As the costs began to mount—especially when winds delayed the ships—Dayrolle feared his superiors would not approve his expenditures. He pointed out that such costs were unavoidable if the queen wanted these immigrants for her colonies, as Lord Townsend, the British ambassador at the Hague, had assured him she did.34 By the end of June, Dayrolle received word that the queen had ordered a stop to her subsidies and refused to support additional immigrants. The 6,500 immigrants who had already arrived were overwhelming the charity of London.35 Dayrolle promised to do everything in his power to stop the flow. On June 29, he noted that “about 2,000” Palatines had already embarked on ships to London and that there were “a great many others, whose number I don’t know yet, arrived newly at Rotterdam” who would also be shipped. But he warned that preventing the arrival of any more would be “very difficult, as long as the Summer last, for we are informed that a great many of them are moving this way from Several parts of Germany and that between Dusseldorp and Rotterdam there are about 2 or 3000 coming down the river in Boats; But they must return or dispose of themselves as they think fit, Since Her Ma[jes]ty is not pleased to have any more.”36 As a representative of the queen in the Netherlands, Dayrolle was the person tasked with ending the steady stream of Palatines heading toward London. Dayrolle did indeed work to stop the flow of immigrants. He went to Rotterdam and gave “the necessary orders for preventing the arrival of any more Palatins, having sent some of them back to give warning to the rest.” He also placed an advertisement in the Cologne Gazette announcing the end of British subsidies for immigrants. At the same time, however, Dayrolle remarked that if the queen changed her mind and “designs to have a greater quantity of those people,” the two commissioners with whom he had been working proposed to

52  Migration and Settlement

“keep a correspondence with Some of their Ministers who had writ to them and offer’d to accompany these Germans to the Plantations if Her Ma[jes]ty were pleased to take care of their maintenance.”37 Even as he worked to close the borders, Dayrolle promised to use his personal connections to help the queen expand her colonies if that was her wish. While government officials clearly understood their role in helping heads of state secure new subjects and future colonists, potential immigrants also recognized diplomats’ ability to advocate on their behalf. The Mennonite migration of 1711 demonstrates how the Dutch Mennonites sought to use diplomatic channels to find a solution to the persecution of their fellow believers in Switzerland. They, too, understood the importance of Protestant subjects in the early modern European political struggles for power. In this case, diplomats acted as information brokers for immigrant groups. On June 12, 1709, as Dayrolle was in the midst of organizing the migration of the “poor Palatines,” the Commission for Foreign Needs received news that city officials in Bern, Switzerland, were persecuting fellow Mennonites. They asked Mennonite leaders in the Palatinate to confirm the reports before they petitioned the Dutch States General to act on their behalf.38 Among the members of the Commission were Toren and van Gent, the two Mennonite merchants Dayrolle had hired to organize the transportation of the 1709 immigrants. By early 1710, Toren and van Gent were busy shuttling back and forth between Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and the Hague, using their connections to a variety of diplomats at the Hague to find a solution for the persecuted Swiss Mennonites. The first step the Commission took was to lobby Protestant rulers to pressure Bern officials to cease their harassment. On March 15, 1710, Toren and van Gent convinced the Dutch States General to send an appeal to the government of Bern to stop imprisoning the Mennonites there. The Dutch political leaders argued that they, like the Bernese officials, were members of the Reformed Church. While they thought the Reformed Church was the only true church and they wished the Mennonites among them would convert, the Dutch believed conversion would not come through coercion but rather through conversation and witness. They also thought that in a land claiming to be a republic, each person had the right to exercise his or her free will where religion was concerned. They hoped, therefore, that the Bernese government would end its imprisonment of Swiss Mennonites.39 A couple weeks later, Runckel, at the request of the Dutch States General, also wrote to government officials in Bern to intercede on behalf of the imprisoned

Information Brokers and Mediators  53

Mennonites. He argued that their actions would only add fuel to the efforts of their “shared religious enemies”—the French Catholics, with whom they were then at war—to encourage persecution of Protestants generally.40 While Runckel and the Dutch States General wrote to Bern’s officials, Toren and van Gent worked behind the scenes to gain an audience with the British queen in order to ask her to pressure the Swiss officials. They spoke to Dayrolle, who promised to speak to Ambassador Townsend and the queen about the plight of the Swiss Mennonites.41 Dayrolle also promised them that he would speak to Francois-­Louis de Pesmes, Saint-­Saphorin, the Swiss envoy at the Hague, on their behalf.42 Thus, those working on behalf of persecuted Swiss Mennonites began by lobbying diplomats who could funnel information to and encourage heads of state to pressure Bern officials to grant tolerance. When political pressure from other Protestant states failed to bring the intended results, the Commission began using diplomatic channels to secure the terms through which Swiss Mennonites could leave Bern. By May 1710, Dutch Mennonites received word that, in fact, the persecution had intensified. Banished refugees were threatened with beheading if they chose to return, and anyone found assisting them was also to receive a death sentence.43 Initially, Bern’s officials had arranged for the transportation of fifty banished exiles to the British colonies. They intended to sell the refugees’ property to pay for their journey. Now Runckel began making the case that government officials should grant all of the Mennonites amnesty long enough to sell their property and travel out of the area. He lobbied diligently, importing confessions of faith to demonstrate that the Mennonites were not like the Münsterites (radical Anabaptists) and arguing against proposals to allow amnesty only for those who were imprisoned but not for those who had gone into hiding. After several twists and turns of opinion by Bern’s officials, Runckel reported on March 18, 1711, that they had finally freed all of the prisoners and the government had promised full amnesty for all of the Mennonites in the canton.44 At the same time Runckel was negotiating the conditions of their departure, the Commission lobbied European heads of state through diplomatic channels to find the best resettlement options for the refugees. On April 17, 1710, Daniel Burchard, the Prussian resident in Hamburg, wrote to Friedrich I, king in Prussia, imploring him to help the Swiss Mennonites.45 Burchard explained that the Dutch States General had sent a letter to Swiss officials interceding on their behalf. Although others claimed they were radicals, Burchard thought he could honestly say that the Mennonites “led quiet, peaceful and God-­pleasing lives” and that they submitted willingly to authorities. He likely

54  Migration and Settlement

was familiar with Mennonites in Hamburg and Altona who worked diligently to prove they were obedient subjects.46 Burchard also claimed that, with the exception of a “few errors of opinion,” their beliefs were nearly the same as those of the Reformed Church, the religion of the king, and the Brandenburg court (in reality, a bit of a stretch). He asked the king to write to Bern’s officials requesting that they stop imprisoning and banishing the Mennonites there. If he was unwilling to do that, Burchard asked that the king at least consider letting them resettle in his lands near Bern at Neufchatel.47 Burchard was perfectly willing to shape information he sent about the Swiss Mennonites in ways he thought would move the king to act on their behalf. What followed was a flurry of letters that sheds interesting light on how the Mennonites used diplomatic channels to foster the exchange of information between Bern and Berlin. On May 5, the Prussian king sent news to Burchard that he would not intercede to stop the persecution but that he was willing to have Swiss Mennonites settle on his land. He promised to send word to the Prussian envoy in Switzerland, Simeon Bondely, to assist any of the Swiss Mennonites who wanted to accept his offer.48 But apparently information continued to flow through Hamburg. Three of the Swiss Mennonite ministers who had been banished and left Bern the year before worked as deputies on behalf of those still imprisoned. They traveled back and forth between Mennonite congregations in the Palatinate and the Netherlands. Dutch Mennonites, through the Commission, sent deputies to Hamburg, where they gave information to Burchard, who then sent letters to the Prussian king in Berlin. By July, Burchard was suggesting that it would be more efficient for the Mennonites from Amsterdam and the Hague to bypass him and communicate directly with Baron von Schmettau, the Prussian ambassador and plenipotentiary in the Hague, who could relay information to Berlin from there.49 Regardless of cumbersome communication channels, the Dutch Mennonites’ lobbying efforts began to pay off. The Prussian king did invite the Swiss refugees to his lands, where they could assist in his project of draining marshes in Brandenburg—though not in his holdings close to Bern, as they had hoped.50 The king of Denmark and the Dukes of Hesse also offered to let them settle on their lands.51 And the queen of England considered several petitions for colonizing schemes to send some of the refugees to Virginia or North Carolina along with the “poor Palatine” immigrants who had arrived in London the previous year.52 In November 1710, the Commission for Foreign Needs proposed its own plan to resettle the Swiss exiles in several

Information Brokers and Mediators  55

communities in the Netherlands.53 In each case, the immigrants relied on the Commission’s connections to diplomats to negotiate terms of resettlement. The migrations of the Swiss Mennonite refugees and the “poor Palatines” demonstrate the way diplomats functioned as mediators between heads of state and groups of immigrants. Because they represented the interests of European political leaders who were seeking to increase their power and wealth by expanding their populations, diplomats became involved in the logistical tasks of moving potential subjects from one place to another. They were key players in securing productive Protestant subjects for heads of state such as the British queen and the Prussian king. At the same time, European subjects such as the Dutch Mennonites, who represented particular groups of immigrants, also recognized the way diplomats could function as conduits for and brokers of information. They relied on diplomatic channels to shape the identity of their fellow believers in ways that encouraged political leaders to act on their behalf. As men in the middle, diplomats maneuvered between the varying and often competing interests that immigrants needed to negotiate when moving from one place to another. Thus, understanding the dynamic role of diplomats as mediators provides a piece of the broader context for the migration of German-­speaking immigrants to the mid-­Atlantic British colonies.

notes 1. Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 37–56. 2. Johann Ludwig Runckel, Bern, to J. Beets, Hoorn, January 22, 1710, Gemeentearchief Amsterdam (hereafter GA), coll. 565, A, no. 1255; Cornelius J. Dyck and Dennis Martin, eds., Mennonite Encyclopedia, vol. 4 (Hillsboro, Kans.: Mennonite Brethren Pub. House, 1959), 378; Rosalind J. Beiler, “Information Networks and the Dynamics of Migration: Swiss Anabaptist Exiles and Their Host Communities,” in Religious Refugees in Europe, Asia, and North America (Sixth–Twenty-­First Centuries), ed. Susanne Lachenicht (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2007), 81–91. 3. Otterness, Becoming German, 38–39, 43–45, 50–51, 70. 4. Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 60–67. 5. Georg Fertig, Lokales Leben, atlantische Welt: Die Entscheidung zur Auswanderung vom Rhein nach Nordamerika im 18. Jahrhundert (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 2000), 124. 6. Jeremy Black, British Diplomats and Diplomacy, 1688–1800 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), 1–9, 64–68. 7. Daniel Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 38–65; Hermann Wellenreuther, “Contexts for Migration in the Early Modern World: Public Policy, European Migrating Experiences, Transatlantic Migration, and the Genesis of American Culture,” in In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New

56  Migration and Settlement German Settlements in Eighteenth-­Century Europe and America, ed. Hartmut Lehmann, Hermann Wellenreuther, and Renate Wilson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 3–20; Otterness, Becoming German, 41–43. 8. Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 192–219. 9. Otterness, Becoming German, 41–56. 10. James Dayrolle (d. 1739) was resident in the United Provinces from 1706 to 1712 and again from 1717 to 1739. He also served as the resident in Geneva from 1715 to 1717. Little could be discovered about his background, other than that he was a Huguenot. Correspondence of Anthonie Heinsius, 1702–1720, comp. A. J. Veenendaal Jr., with the assistance of C. Hogenkamp and M. T. A. Schouten, 19 vols.; accessed online at http://www.historici.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/Brieven AnthonieHeinsius1702-­1720/Index/d. See also Ludwig Bittner and Lothar Gross, eds., Repertorium der diplomatischen Vertreter aller Länder seit dem Westfälischen Frieden (1648), vol. 1, 1648–1715 (Oldenburg i. O.: Gerhard Stalling Verlag, 1936), 13. 11. Walter Allen Knittle, Early Eighteenth Century Palatine Emigration: A British Government Redemptioner Project to Manufacture Naval Stores (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1937; reprint, Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1970), remains the classic treatment of this migration. Most recently, Otterness, in Becoming German, examines issues of identity among the 1709 immigrants to New York. 12. Johann Ludwig Runckel (d. 1720) served as the Netherlands’ secretary to Switzerland beginning in 1694 and as the secretary to the Netherlands’ ambassador to Switzerland beginning in 1704. Correspondence of Anthonie Heinsius, 1702–1720, accessed online at http://www.historici.nl /Onderzoek/Projecten/BrievenAnthonieHeinsius1702-­1720/Index/r. 13. Beiler, “Information Networks,” 81–91; Rosalind J. Beiler, “Dissenting Religious Communication Networks and European Migration, 1660–1710,” in Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 214–18. 14. Statt, Foreigners and Englishmen, 27. 15. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, April 9, 1709, National Archives/ Public Records Office, Kew Gardens, London (hereafter NA/PRO), State Papers (hereafter SP) 84/232, p. 92. 16. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, April 15/26, 1709, NA/PRO, SP 84/232, p. 108. 17. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, [April 30, 1709], NA/PRO, SP 84/232, p. 110. 18. Johann Ludwig Runckel, Bern, to Committee, June 18, 1711, GA, coll. 565, A, no. 1334. 19. Dayrolle to Boyle, [April 30, 1709]. 20. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, May 17, 1709, NA/PRO, SP 84/232, pp. 123–24. 21. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, May 21, 1709, NA/PRO, SP 84/232, p. 125. 22. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, June 4, 1709, NA/PRO, SP 84/232, p. 133. 23. Johann Ludwig Runckel, Bern, to Commission, March 18, 1711, GA, coll. 565, A, no. 1321. 24. Dayrolle to Boyle, [April 30, 1709]. 25. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, June 21, 1709, NA/PRO, SP 84/232, p. 141. 26. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, June 25, 1709, NA/PRO, SP 84/232, p. 144. 27. Otterness, Becoming German, 50; James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, July 12, 1709, NA/PRO, SP 84/232, p. 168. 28. Johann Ludwig Runckel, Bern, to Commission, June 13, 1711, GA, 565, A, no. 1334. 29. Earl of Sunderland, Whitehall, to Council of Trade, May 3, 1709, NA/PRO, Colonial Office (hereafter CO) 388/76, p. 54.

Information Brokers and Mediators  57 30. Proposal of the United Governors Assistants and Society of London for Mines Royal, May 23, 1709, NA/PRO, CO 388/76, p. 59. 31. Otterness, Becoming German, 49–50. 32. Ibid., 66–77. 33. Henry Boyle, Secretary of State, Whitehall, to the Lord High Treasurer, May 17, 1709, SP 44/107, p. 229; Henry Boyle, Secretary of State, Whitehall, to the Lord High Treasurer, June 2, 1709, SP 44/107, pp. 242–43; Henry Boyle, Secretary of State, Whitehall, to the Lord High Treasurer, June 14, 1709, SP 44/107, pp. 245–46; Henry Boyle, Secretary of State, Whitehall, to the Lord High Treasurer, June 23, 1709, SP 44/107, pp. 249–51; Henry Boyle, Secretary of State, Whitehall, to Mr. Compton, July 19, 1709, SP 44/107, p. 256; Henry Boyle, Secretary of State, Whitehall, to the Lord High Treasurer, July 21, 1709, SP 44/107, pp. 257–59. All in NA/PRO. 34. Dayrolle to Boyle, June 25, 1709. For Townsend’s position, see Black, British Diplomats, 193. 35. Otterness, Becoming German, 45–46. 36. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, June 29, 1709, NA/PRO, SP 84/232, p. 167. 37. James Dayrolle, the Hague, to Henry Boyle, Whitehall, July 1, 1709, NA/PRO, SP 84/232, p. 168. 38. Hermannus Schijn, Amsterdam, to Peter Kolb, Kriegsheim, 1709, in Documents of Brotherly Love: Dutch Mennonite Aid to Swiss Anabaptists, ed. James W. Lowry, vol. 1, 1635–1709 (Millersburg: Ohio Amish Library, 2007), 286. 39. Dutch States General, the Hague, to City of Bern, March 15, 1710, Toren Daybook, GA, coll. 565, A, no. 1009. 40. Runckel, Schaffhausen, to City of Bern, April 9, 1710, GA, coll. 565, A, no. 1769. 41. For Dutch Mennonites’ address to the queen of England, see GA, coll. 565, A, no. 1770. 42. Jan Willinks Jan to Hendrik Toren and Jan van Gent, [April 26, 1710?], Toren Daybook, GA, coll. 565, A, no. 1009. 43. Entry for May 14, 1710, Toren Daybook, GA, coll. 565, A, no. 1009. By then the first group of exiles the Swiss had arranged to transport to the British colonies had failed to make it to Rotterdam because they had not acquired the appropriate passport to travel through the Netherlands. Nanne van der Zijpp, “The Dutch Aid the Swiss Mennonites,” in A Legacy of Faith: The Heritage of Menno Simons: A Sixtieth Anniversary Tribute to Cornelius Krahn, ed. Cornelius J. Dyck (Newton, Kans.: Faith and Life Press, 1962), 147. 44. Runckel to Commission, March 18, 1711. 45. For Daniel Burchard’s identity, see J. M. Lappenberg, “Listen der in Hamburg residirenden, wie der daselbe vertretenden Diplomaten und Consulen,” Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgischen Geschichte 3 (1841): 465. 46. Michael D. Driedger, Obedient Heretics: Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona During the Confessional Age (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002), 75–106. 47. Daniel Burchard, Hamburg, to Friedrich I, Berlin, April 17 and 18, 1710, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (hereafter GStA), I HA, Rep. 11, Nr. 260, Fasc. 3, pp. 1–4. See also GA, coll. 565, A, nos. 1282 and 1283. 48. Prussian King, Landsberg, to Burchard, Hamburg, May 5, 1710, GStA, I HA, Rep. 11, Nr. 260, Fasc. 3, p. 8. 49. Burchard, Hamburg, to the Prussian King, Berlin, July 18, 1710, GStA, I HA, Rep. 11, Nr. 260, Fasc. 3, pp. 26–28. 50. Van der Zijpp, “Dutch Aid,” 149–50. 51. Benedict Brechtbuhl, Mannheim, to Abraham Jacobs, Amsterdam, April 4, 1711, GA, coll. 565, A, no. 1324. 52. Entries for April 25, April 26, May 14, July 2, July 15, 1710, Toren Daybook, GA, coll. 565, A, no. 1009; Otterness, Becoming German, 67–68. 53. Van der Zijpp, “Dutch Aid,” 150–54.

Three

The Palatine Immigrants of 1710 and the Native Americans Philip Otterness

In June 1710, a convoy of ships carrying three thousand German-­speaking immigrants arrived in New York City. The new arrivals came ashore with a strong vision of America as a promised land, a place where they could enjoy the earth’s bounty and live prosperous and secure lives. They soon discovered that realizing this vision meant finding allies who could provide them with guidance and support while they adapted to life in the New World. For most immigrants, the typical course was to turn to the British colonial authorities, placating these officials with their obedience and with some level of assimilation while working to establish their families as best they could. Although this course may have been the typical one, many of the German-­speaking immigrants who arrived in 1710 quickly grew to distrust the established authorities and felt forced to look elsewhere for support. For many of these so-­called Palatines—the label given them by the British and eventually adopted by the immigrants themselves—it often seemed that their most trustworthy allies in America were not other Europeans but the Native Americans, and it was among the Indians, especially the Mohawks and Oneidas, that many of the Palatines would make their homes, living together as neighbors for over fifty years. Several recent studies have examined the relationship between European settlers and Native Americans in the mid-­Atlantic colonies. They have noted the increasing tensions between Indians and European colonists in

Palatine Immigrants and Native Americans  59

Pennsylvania during the first half of the eighteenth century that eventually led to waves of violence during the Seven Years’ War. Accompanying this violence was a rhetoric emphasizing the perceived differences in “Indianness” and “whiteness” that further split the two groups. Such rhetoric helped justify Indian-­European violence and led to a situation in which reconciliation between the two was virtually impossible.1 A few historians have challenged this narrative, arguing that, at least in some parts of the middle colonies, especially in parts of New York, the lives of Indians and colonists were more closely interwoven than has been realized and that even the Seven Years’ War did not irrevocably tear apart communities of Native Americans and European settlers.2 This essay examines the experience of one settler group, the 1710 Palatine immigrants, that lived among the Indians of the middle colonies throughout much of the eighteenth century. The primary focus of the essay is on the Palatines in New York, especially in the Mohawk Valley, but it also briefly examines the experience of the 1710 Palatine immigrants who eventually settled in Pennsylvania and those who landed in North Carolina rather than in New York. I argue that the Palatines’ relations with the Indians were shaped by the Palatines’ vision of America and their struggle to see that vision fulfilled. The Palatines’ perception of the British colonial authorities as antagonistic to their dreams of a promised land, coupled with a lack of other German-­speaking immigrants to turn to as allies, forced the Palatines to look elsewhere for support. Their experiences in both Europe and America, along with their preconceptions of the Indians, made the Palatine settlers open to welcoming the Mohawks and then the Oneidas as their protectors and later as their neighbors and allies.

The 1709–1710 Migration The Palatines who arrived in New York in 1710 were part of a much larger migration that had left the German southwest during the spring and summer of 1709. This part of the Holy Roman Empire had suffered from repeated military and religious disruption during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. An unusually harsh winter in 1708–9 added to the peasants’ misery. It was, however, a small book filled with big promises that inspired the migrants to pack their belongings and leave for America. The book, Ausführlich-­und Umständlicher Bericht von der berühmten Landschafft Carolina, in dem Engelländischen America gelegen (A complete and detailed report of

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the renowned district of Carolina located in English America), was written by Joshua Kocherthal (pseudonym of Joshua Harrsch), a Lutheran pastor serving in the Kraichgau region south of Heidelberg. He had been hired by the Carolina proprietors to promote their colony. The migrants referred to Kocherthal’s book as the “golden book.” It was indeed a book of golden promises, describing the province of Carolina as a land with “an eternal summer” where crops grew so well that they could be harvested twice in one year. There were no feudal dues, no taxes, no warfare. It was a peasant’s paradise. Best of all, the book hinted that this paradise could be had for free. Kocherthal reported that Queen Anne had just given an earlier group of German-­speaking settlers land in America and free passage to it. Although he did not say so directly, Kocherthal left the impression that Queen Anne’s amazing offer of free land remained open. Those who heard Kocherthal’s Bericht read in churchyards and taverns throughout the German southwest interpreted his hints of the queen’s largesse not as possibilities but as promises. Soon thousands of people were on their way to London. The offer was simply too good to pass up.3 By April 1709, the first waves of migrants had sailed down the Rhine River and reached Rotterdam. There they sought out and received aid from surprised but accommodating representatives of the British government. The British authorities apparently knew nothing of the propaganda that was driving the migration but initially assumed the migrants were refugees fleeing the Palatinate, a principality of the German southwest well known to Britons as the site of French incursions and religious persecution. The British hoped that, like the Huguenots who had preceded them by a generation, these Palatine refugees would add to the wealth of the British kingdom with their skills and labor. Not knowing how many migrants were on their way, the British government helped the Palatines cross the Channel from Rotterdam to London and then settled them in refugee camps around the city. As the summer of 1709 wore on, the British realized that they could never accommodate the waves of migrants who continued to make their way to London. By July, the British government was working with the Dutch to turn back the boats of migrants that were still floating down the Rhine. Soon the British cut off the migration entirely, but not before some fourteen thousand Palatines were ensconced in camps on London’s periphery. Although the government had initially sponsored an extensive charity drive to support the Palatines, as the summer wore on the British people’s patience wore thin. By summer’s end, people began complaining that the refugees stole jobs and forced down wages, that they spread disease, and that they were unruly and

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disrespectful. Perhaps worst of all, it was eventually discovered that large numbers of them were Catholic, possibly French sympathizers rather than victims of French persecution. The Palatines had become a burden, and the people of Britain found themselves siding with the pamphleteer who wrote, “Our Charity ought to begin at Home, both in Peace and War, before we extend it to our Neighbors.”4 By September 1709, government officials, who had initially hoped to settle the migrants throughout the kingdom, began looking for ways to get rid of the Palatines. Their first step was to send the Catholics home. Thousands of them were put on ships and taken back across the Channel. The British authorities then attempted to settle around three thousand of the remaining Protestants in Ireland, although many of those sent to Ireland made their way back to London. Six hundred of the Palatines actually got the chance to go to Carolina, the land so glowingly described by Kocherthal in the golden book. Christoph von Graffenried and Franz Louis Michel, a pair of Swiss adventurers wanting to establish a settlement on the North Carolina coast, easily convinced the government authorities to let them recruit six hundred settlers from among the Palatines. After a long and difficult voyage, this group of settlers arrived in North Carolina in early 1710 and helped found the town of New Bern on the Neuse River. Of the remaining Palatines in London, the largest portion ended up going to New York. Robert Hunter, who was living in London in 1709, had just been appointed the new governor of New York. He was an ambitious man who saw an opportunity to enrich himself, the colony he would govern, and Britain as a whole with the labor of the Palatines. He proposed taking three thousand of them with him to New York, where he would settle them in the woods on the colony’s periphery. There they would form a line of defense between the British in New York and the French to the north, while at the same time making naval stores—tar and pitch—from the pine forests of the colony. The Palatines lacked both the expertise and the desire to make naval stores, but they realized the plan had one great benefit: it got them to America. After many delays, in April 1710, a convoy of eleven ships with Governor Hunter and three thousand Germans aboard set sail for New York. For the migrants, the stay in England had been marked by misunderstandings and delays that would color their impressions of Governor Hunter and his motives. As they boarded the ships bound for New York, the Palatines found themselves stuck in an onerous arrangement requiring them to make naval stores for the British government. Only after they had earned enough to pay

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off the expenses of their transport and resettlement would they finally receive the land that they had assumed would be given to them for free. Hunter also suffered from misunderstandings. He thought he was dealing with poor refugees, grateful to have been saved from the depredations of the French. Instead he left England surrounded by thousands of unhappy and suspicious settlers. Once the convoy reached New York, Hunter’s efforts to find a place to settle the Palatines only aroused their suspicions further. Hunter initially negotiated for land with the Mohawks living in the Schoharie Valley, a region west of Albany not yet settled by European colonists. Although the Mohawks expressed their willingness to allow the Palatines to settle in Schoharie, Hunter eventually deemed the land ill suited for the production of naval stores. Instead he purchased land from Robert Livingston, one of the colony’s largest landowners, about one hundred miles north of New York City along the Hudson River. The Palatines knew of Hunter’s negotiations with the Mohawks and were convinced that the land Hunter had rejected in Schoharie was the land of milk and honey that Kocherthal’s book had promised. Now they found themselves stuck in an arrangement that seemed to make them tenants of a wealthy Anglo-­Dutch landlord. Their position was little better than the one they had left behind in the principalities of the German southwest. Instead of free land and an easy life, the Palatines’ first two years in America were characterized by group indenture and work at an unfamiliar and undesirable task. The naval stores scheme was a fiasco. The Palatines often refused to work, and Hunter, whose view of the Palatines as grateful refugees quickly changed, had to send out troops to keep them under control. In the end, the Palatines never succeeded in converting pine trees to naval stores. After two years, Hunter, who had been privately financing the plan while awaiting funds from the government in London, ran out of money and abandoned the project. Unfortunately for the Palatines, the end of the naval stores project did little to improve their plight. When Hunter stopped the project, he also cut off the subsidies he had provided to ensure that the Palatines were fed. During the winter of 1712, many of them faced starvation and found themselves eating leaves and boiled grass. Although some of the Palatines remained in the naval stores camps, struggling to survive without Hunter’s support, others set off in search of land of their own. A few of the Palatines scattered up and down the Hudson to find work wherever they could. Some returned to New York City, and others moved to New Jersey. The largest group, numbering around five

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hundred people and containing the most outspoken and contentious leaders of the Palatines, seized the opportunity to move to the promised land of Schoharie. Here they thought they could at last procure the fertile land with its bountiful harvests that they had been dreaming of since leaving their homes in 1709. But, unlike later German-­speaking migrants to British North America, the Palatines of New York did not have countrymen of their own to whom they could turn for guidance and support. Nor were they inclined to turn to the English or the Dutch settlers, who seemed unsympathetic and even hostile to their plans. Besides, Schoharie was Indian land, settled primarily by the Mohawks. If the Palatines were going to be successful, it was Native American help that they needed.

Encountering the Indians Before their arrival in America, the Palatines’ chief source of knowledge of the Indians was probably the promotional tracts for the American colonies that circulated throughout the Rhineland. One such tract was Daniel Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania, which contained a lengthy description of the Native Americans. Falckner used the term Wilde to refer to the Indians, a term closely tied to the German phrase wilder Mann, which denoted an uncivilized child of nature and had roughly the same eighteenth-­century connotation as the word savage.5 Still, the people whom Falckner described were not necessarily violent and unruly. Rather, they were simple and unsophisticated. Falckner contended that they were not without morals and, if approached carefully, could be converted to Christianity. Although Falckner understood the Indians’ suspicion of European intentions, he contended that the Indians could be won over “by all kinds of repeated friendly allurement and offerings of love.”6 Kocherthal’s Bericht, the book that inspired the 1709–10 migration, hardly mentioned the Native Americans. Kocherthal called them Indianer rather than Wilde, and the image he painted of them was one of a peaceful, nonthreatening people. Most of what he had to say was contained in just three sentences: “The Indians, who live above Carolina and in part also within the country itself, live with our people in perfect peace and in very good friendship. They are decreasing much in number whereas the number of our people (namely, of the Europeans) is increasing. Furthermore, they have no experience in the manner of war that is customary with us except what they have

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learned from our people.”7 Obviously, the Indians presented no threat to potential settlers. An appendix added to the third and fourth printings of the book provided a few more details. The appendix, a translation of an English author’s description of Carolina, described the English and Indians as living “in complete friendship and understanding.” It argued that most Indian warfare was directed against other Indians and that the native population was simply too weak and divided to present a serious threat to European settlers.8 This nonthreatening view of the Indians was effectively summarized by the one illustration that Kocherthal included in his book: a map showing the region from Virginia southward to the border with Florida. The Appalachian Mountains run down the western side of the map. Most of the map depicts the region east of the mountains, which is shown devoid of people, with only a few nonthreatening animals, including a pig and a turkey, dotting the landscape. Only in the upper corner of the map, standing west of the mountains, is a drawing of two palisaded Indian villages. The map portrays Carolina as an open, empty country waiting to be settled. The only humans who inhabit the region are safely and, it would seem, contentedly settled beyond the mountains. The English settlers who had arrived in America one hundred years before the Palatines brought with them similar images of the Native Americans as a simple, peaceful, and childlike people. Although English writers noted the differences between themselves and the Indians, they, too, recognized the two groups’ common humanity. Over time and with increased contact between the Indians and the English, this simplistic understanding of the Indians began to change to one that was more complex and often more negatively charged. Although the Indians were often their trading partners and sometimes their neighbors, increasingly the English also saw them as potential enemies. The picture of peacefulness became tainted with violence.9 The Palatines’ understanding of the Indians also changed after the migrants’ arrival in America, but the relationships forged between the Palatines and Indians were, at certain times and in certain places, remarkably different from those formed between the English and the Indians. The Palatines’ first recorded face-­to-­face encounters with the Native Americans took place in the naval stores camps along the Hudson River. The Mahicans had suffered from warfare and disease throughout the seventeenth century but remained the main Indian group on the east side of the Hudson River, where they settled in small villages with other Algonquian-­speaking Indians. The colonists generally referred to these mixed groups as River Indians. Many of

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the River Indians had learned a little Dutch or English, and some had converted to Christianity. In fact, one of the first Indians the Palatines encountered along the Hudson was a fellow Christian who spoke Dutch and chose to attend church services alongside the newly arrived settlers. It is impossible to know what the Palatines made of this visitor, but their pastor welcomed him into his fold. Although the Palatines’ earliest contacts with Native Americans were probably with River Indians, it was the various nations of the Iroquois, especially the Mohawks, whose histories became most closely intertwined with the Palatines. This interaction is not surprising given the role the Iroquois played in New York society and politics. The Five Nations of the Iroquois—from east to west, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—constituted the most numerous native group in New York. They dominated many of the surrounding Indians and were a force with which both the British and the French had to reckon. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, New York’s colonial government had created a diplomatic framework with the Iroquois known as the Covenant Chain. This framework remained the basis for diplomatic relations between the two groups throughout the colonial period. As the easternmost of the Iroquois nations, the Mohawks played a key role in this diplomacy and had the most contact—political, economic, and social—with the New York colonists. The Palatines probably first heard of the Mohawks when they got news of Hunter’s negotiations with them to purchase land in the Schoharie Valley. They may have also met Mohawks who traded in Albany and along the Hudson. But the Palatines’ first significant encounter with the Mohawks and other Iroquois was in August 1711, during Queen Anne’s War, when 300 Palatine men along with 700 Iroquois, a quarter of whom were Mohawks, joined a planned British military expedition against the French. The British had planned a two-­pronged campaign with a force moving up from Albany toward Montreal and a naval force descending down the Saint Lawrence River toward Quebec. The troops in Albany began their march north toward Montreal but turned back before reaching Lake Champlain when word reached them that the navy had run aground in the Saint Lawrence and abandoned the campaign. The Iroquois, who had been part of an earlier failed expedition in 1709, were disgusted with the ill-­planned venture and the seeming incompetence of the British. The Palatines, who thought they might be freed from working in the naval stores camps by serving in the campaign, also lost what little regard they had for British authority. It is difficult to know how much

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contact the Palatine men had with the Iroquois during the campaign, but the Palatines’ participation had introduced them to a group of Native Americans who seemed to share their distrust of New York’s colonial authorities. It was not, however, until after the failure of the naval stores scheme in 1712 that the Palatines began to forge a special relationship with the Mohawks. Initially, the relationship was one of dependence. When the naval stores operation ended, the Palatines were left destitute and close to starving. Having been abandoned by Hunter, they were now intent on entering the promised land of Schoharie, which they felt Hunter had denied them. The Schoharie Valley had for many years been the approximate boundary between the Mohawks to the west and the Mahicans to the east. When the Dutch began trading with the Indians in the early seventeenth century, the Mohawks managed to gain greater access to that trade through a series of attacks that pushed the Mahicans east of the Hudson River. Yet the Mohawks failed to prosper as the century progressed. European diseases killed perhaps three-­quarters of the Mohawks, and wars with the French killed many of the rest. In addition, large numbers of the Mohawks converted to Catholicism and moved to mission settlements near Montreal. By the early eighteenth century, probably no more than 700 Mohawks lived in New York. Most of them resided in two villages—Tiononderoge, located where Schoharie Creek flows into the Mohawk River, and Canajoharie, also on the Mohawk River some twenty miles farther to the west.10 The Mohawks had also recently established two small settlements farther south along Schoharie Creek, where they were joined by a third small settlement of River Indians. Although the Native Americans living in the Schoharie Valley only numbered between 100 and 200, if the Palatines wanted to move into this promised land, they needed the permission of the people who would be their neighbors. The Iroquois often split over whether to maintain a diplomatic position that leaned more to the French or to the British, but the Mohawks generally saw greater advantage in maintaining the Covenant Chain alliance with the British. As the easternmost nation of the Iroquois, the Mohawks had the closest ties with the British, and, after suffering from a series of devastating French attacks in the 1690s, the Mohawks requested a British fort near their settlements to help provide defense against further French incursions. They also asked that a British missionary be sent to minister to the many Protestant Mohawks who lived in Tiononderoge. The British responded positively in 1712, building Fort Hunter across Schoharie Creek from Tiononderoge and sending an Anglican missionary to preside over the chapel there. Yet, despite

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the Mohawks’ request for British aid and growing pressure by the colonial government to make the Mohawks recognize British power, the Mohawks did not consider themselves subordinate to the British. At the same time, the colonial authorities realized that they needed to maintain the Iroquois as reliable allies against the French. This was the political situation into which the Palatines stepped in 1712. Coming from dozens of small principalities often with petty and ineffectual rulers, the Palatines probably saw nothing unusual in the fluid boundaries and changing alliances of colonial New York. Certainly, they exhibited no preference for dealing with Europeans rather than Native Americans and, in fact, seemed much more willing to cast themselves at the feet of the Mohawks than to submit to the British governor. In October 1712, several Palatine leaders met with the Mohawks, “by whom they were kindly receiv’d, and to whom they open’d their miserable Condition, and .  .  . intreated them to give ’em permission to settle on the tract of land call’d Schorie.”11 In a deal with a complicated history, the Mohawks had granted the Schoharie lands to Governor Hunter in 1710, but many in the Mohawk community had not favored the transaction and some feared they had been cheated by Hunter.12 In any case, the land the Palatines requested was no longer the Mohawks’ to give away. Nevertheless, the Mohawks welcomed the Palatines into the Schoharie Valley, no doubt knowing that Governor Hunter would be displeased by their action. Regardless of whether the Mohawks welcomed them out of pity or out of a desire to foil British attempts to control Schoharie, the Palatines understood that their survival depended on Mohawk charity and friendship. When the Palatines later recalled the first winter in Schoharie, they wrote that “upon the first settlement of this land the miserys those poor and allmost famish’d Creatures [the Palatines] underwent were incredible, and had it not been for the Charity of the Indians who shew’d them where to gather some eatable roots and herbs, must inevitably have perish’d every soul of them.”13 When, a few years later, Dutch and British speculators attempted to enlist the Mohawks’ help in pushing the Palatines from Schoharie, the Palatines appealed to the Mohawks as children to a mother, begging the Mohawks not to abandon them “since they had so long sukled them at their breast.”14 The imagery employed by the Palatines was in striking contrast to that encouraged by New York’s government. In 1688, Governor Andros had instructed the Iroquois to stop referring to the English as “brethren.” Instead, Andros likened his relationship with the Iroquois to that of a father to his children.15 The Palatines saw their relationship with the Mohawks in a completely different light. They

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had been misled and abused by the English father and now turned to their Mohawk mother to protect them. The Palatines’ understanding of these relationships was an early sign that they did not view colonial politics as a simple struggle for domination between Europeans and Native Americans. They may have shared a common European background, but British concerns were not necessarily Palatine concerns. The Palatines, coming from small, relatively powerless states, had little experience with or interest in Britain’s larger colonial interests. Not surprisingly, the Palatines’ initial concerns were with the related goals of survival and farmland. If the Mohawks were the better allies in reaching these goals, then the Palatines had no qualms about turning to them rather than to the British. The Palatines always remained pragmatists, and the historical record indicates that they were not going to allow issues of cultural difference to stand in the way of attaining land in America. And, unlike many other European settlers in America who initially relied on the Indians’ goodwill for their survival, the Palatines of New York continued to live with the Native Americans on cordial terms even after their survival no longer depended on them. There was another way that the behavior of the Palatines in Schoharie did not fit the usual American narrative of migration and assimilation. Generally, when historians try to determine the extent to which a group of migrants assimilates into its host society, the migrants’ willingness to learn and use the host’s language is one of the main markers of this process. Historians of British North America tend to focus on how quickly and how extensively non-­ English-­speaking groups adopted English as a second and, later, a primary language. The Palatine migrants who settled in Schoharie, however, were more concerned that their children learn Mohawk than that they learn English. Soon after they moved to Schoharie, one of the Palatines’ main leaders, Johann Weiser, had his son Conrad adopted by the Mohawks so that he could live with them and learn their language and customs. This was not an easy decision for Weiser, a widower who had already had two sons taken from him in 1710 when Governor Hunter ordered that they be apprenticed. Yet now he was willing to part with one more in order to assure closer ties with a deliberately chosen ally. In November 1710, the sixteen-­year-­old Conrad went to live with the family of Quainant, one of the Mohawk leaders, probably in Tiononderoge. He saw firsthand some of the difficulties the Mohawks faced. They ran short of food during the winter, and the men often drank too much. Although Weiser complained of cruelty at the hands of the drunken Indians, he adapted quickly to life with the Mohawks.16 When he returned to the

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Palatine settlements a year later, he was fluent in Mohawk and knowledgeable in the customs and traditions of the Palatines’ Native American neighbors. The Palatines had, perhaps unwittingly, tapped into an important aspect of Iroquois culture: its ready acceptance of adopted outsiders as members of Iroquois society. The Iroquois developed this practice out of necessity. Their communities had been so devastated by disease and warfare in the seventeenth century that the only way they could sustain their villages was by adopting other Indians, usually those captured in warfare, and over time making them full-­fledged members of their communities. Through adoption, Conrad Weiser became a member of the Mohawk people and was able to move back and forth between Palatine and Iroquois society for the rest of his life. His understanding of Iroquois culture and languages made him an important go-­between for both the Iroquois and the Europeans, and eventually he served as the primary translator and one of the chief negotiators for both the Pennsylvania government and the Iroquois. Although the colonial governments would find Weiser’s services useful in the years to come, in the period immediately after the Palatines settled in Schoharie, his adoption by the Mohawks aroused great suspicion among the English and Dutch communities of New York. When other settlers attempted to move into the Schoharie Valley, they quickly realized the advantage the Palatines gained from their close relationship with the Mohawks. Adam Vrooman, a Dutch trader from Schenectady who owned land in Schoharie, tried to settle in the valley but faced constant harassment from the Palatines, who feared Vrooman and his allies would challenge Palatine land claims. The Palatines, with the assistance of the nearby Mohawks, pulled down Vrooman’s house and allowed their cattle to graze on his newly planted crops. Vrooman was enraged at the collusion between the Mohawks and the Palatines, made possible by the Weiser family’s close ties to the Mohawks. He accused the elder Weiser of negotiating directly with the Indians in contravention of New York law and reported that the younger Weiser “every day tells the Indians many Lyes, whereby much mischeife may Ensue more than we now think off and is much to be feared.”17

Living Among the Indians in the Mohawk Valley By 1713, the Palatine settlements in Schoharie had almost five hundred inhabitants. Their farms prospered, but the Palatines had a hard time obtaining

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secure titles to their land. In 1714, a group of wealthy Albany merchants known as the Seven Partners received a patent from the New York government for more than ten thousand acres in the Schoharie Valley, much of which was already occupied by the Palatines. The following year, the Seven Partners told the Palatines that they had three choices: purchase their land from them, become their tenants, or leave. Although the Palatines did all they could to resist the Seven Partners, eventually the colonial elite gained the upper hand in Schoharie. Some of the Palatines, not wanting to lose the land that they had worked so hard to cultivate, came to terms with the Seven Partners, but, by the early 1720s, many of the original Schoharie settlers had begun to seek land elsewhere. In 1723, sixteen families traveled westward from Schoharie to the Susquehanna River and then floated down the river into south-­central Pennsylvania. There they disembarked from their boats, traveled overland eastward through Indian territory, and settled along Tulpehocken Creek in a region still claimed by the Delawares. The settlers had been invited to Pennsylvania by the colony’s governor, William Keith, who gave them permission to settle in the Tulpehocken region. But the Delawares, who disputed Keith’s right to give away land that they believed belonged to them, did not welcome the Palatines. Despite the Palatines’ precarious position, the settlement held on and slowly grew. In 1729, Conrad Weiser also moved to Tulpehocken, leaving behind his Mohawk allies and settling in the midst of resentful Delawares. Over the next three decades, other European migrants arriving in Pennsylvania would expand their settlements outward from Philadelphia and link the Tulpehocken Palatines with Pennsylvania’s colonial core. Among these migrants were large numbers of German-­speaking settlers who eventually encircled the Tulpehocken settlement and made it part of a larger Pennsylvania German world. The majority of the Palatines, however, remained in New York. Although some bought land or became tenants in Schoharie, by the early 1720s many of the Palatines decided to abandon Schoharie and set out again in search of land of their own. Once again, they moved westward, farther into Indian territory. One group of twenty-­seven families bought land from the Mohawks a few miles north of the Mohawk River in an area north of Canajoharie, the most westerly of the Mohawk settlements in New York. There they established a settlement called, rather oddly, Stone Arabia. The other group settled on land approximately twenty-­five miles farther west in the region between the main settlements of the Mohawks and the Oneidas. This land, on the north

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bank of the Mohawk River, had been purchased for them by New York’s new governor, William Burnet, who hoped to answer the Palatines’ long-­standing demand for land while establishing a community that would serve as a buffer between the French and the British. The settlement took the name of Burnetsfield, in honor of the governor, and soon was home to more than thirty Palatine families. Eventually, the settlement spilled across the Mohawk River, and this region of Palatine farms became known as German Flatts. The Palatines in the Mohawk Valley finally had what they wanted. They had good farmland and were close enough to Albany and other colonial settlements to ensure markets for their grain. In addition, their settlements’ locations near the trade routes along the Mohawk River ensured that they would play a major role in the trade between colonists and Indians. The Palatines soon became a formidable presence in the Mohawk Valley. Over time, more and more Palatines, along with a few other colonists, bought land and built homes in the territory stretching from Burnetsfield in the west to Stone Arabia in the east. Most of these homes were unremarkable timber-­ frame homes, but a few were more formidable stone structures that could provide some measure of security in case of a French attack.18 By the mid-­1700s, moving from an area of Mohawk settlement and farming to a neighboring area settled by Palatines would not have been visually remarkable. Although hunting remained an important part of Mohawk male culture, the Mohawks relied increasingly on agriculture as the backbone of their domestic economy. Like the Palatines, many of them lived in single-­family timber homes, raised livestock, and worked their own farmland. A few managed to prosper. One Mohawk leader in Tiononderoge lived comfortably in a two-­story frame house and was noted for his hospitality to visitors traveling through the community.19 The Mohawks in Canajoharie even adopted European styles of land rental. Remarkably, after protesting their status as tenants of German princes or colonial landlords, some Palatines willingly became tenants of the Canajoharie Mohawks. And, unlike in other places where they found themselves tenants, the Palatines clearly understood and supported the Mohawks as the rightful owners of the land.20 It is not clear why they took this position. Perhaps the terms were good, and certainly the land was fertile. Whatever the case, the Palatines seemed to prefer this arrangement of living with the Indians to one in which they were under the more immediate control of New York’s colonial authorities. Living among the Indians certainly did not hurt the Palatines’ prosperity. They were involved in extensive local trade with the Mohawks to the east and

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with the Oneidas to the west. The Palatine farmers also shipped part of their bountiful crops of wheat to Albany and New York City and brought back to their settlements goods that they could trade to the Indians—including blankets and ribbons as well as rum and large amounts of wampum.21 Wampum were beads made from shells that were then woven into belts. These belts, which played an important part in Iroquois diplomacy, were often exchanged between negotiating parties to signify important agreements. The Palatines clearly understood the diplomatic and cultural significance of wampum, and it did not take them long to understand wampum’s potential economic significance as well. The Palatines living farther west in the German Flatts region found themselves near the center of the east-­west and north-­south Iroquois trade routes that were often contested in the struggles between the French and the British in New York. The principal Indian inhabitants of this region were the Oneidas, and during the mid-­eighteenth century, Palatine interactions with them grew. Much of this interaction was based on trade, with the Palatines’ commercial activities sometimes extending many miles west of German Flatts. For example, by the late 1730s, the Palatines competed with the Oneidas for control of the portaging business between Wood Creek and the Mohawk River near Oneida Lake.22 Although this competition was sometimes acrimonious, the two groups benefited from the extensive trade they carried on with each other and learned to live in peace. When increased hostilities between the French and British brought greater instability to the region in the 1740s and 1750s, the Palatines found the Oneidas to be valuable allies as both groups attempted to figure out how best to position themselves between the contesting forces of the larger colonial powers. Trade and politics were not all that tied together the Palatine and Iroquois communities. Many Palatines learned enough of the Iroquois languages to communicate with their neighbors, and many Mohawks and Oneidas spoke some German. The Palatines often attended church with their Mohawk or Oneida neighbors, and the two groups served as godparents to each other’s children.23 Many of the Mohawks considered their shared Christianity an important trait tying them to the Palatines. As one Mohawk wrote in a 1753 petition, “We [the Mohawks and the Palatines] are one church and we will not part.” He went on to write, “We are grown up together and we intend to Live our Lifetime together as Brothers.”24 Although intermarriage between the Iroquois and the Palatines was not widespread, a few Iroquois and Palatines did join together in wedlock.25 More commonly, it was the simple

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sharing of everyday activities that ensured a close-­knit community of Palatines, Mohawks, and Oneidas in the Mohawk Valley. They helped plow one another’s land, built fences together, fished together, and visited in one another’s homes.26 Like most neighbors, they also had their disputes, generally centering on the ownership of land. These disputes, however, never destroyed the sense of community that existed between the Palatines and the Indians in New York. How does one explain the relatively peaceful coexistence of the Palatines and the Indians in the Mohawk Valley? The situation facing the Iroquois was complex. Some urged resistance against further encroachments by European settlers, while others sought some level of accommodation. For the most part, the Mohawks and Oneidas in the eastern Mohawk Valley were willing to follow a path of accommodation. Many, no doubt, believed that it was too late to turn back the clock and push the colonists from their land. But it seems that many also found that they could live peaceful lives with their European neighbors, lives that were becoming increasingly intertwined by shared activities of farming, trade, and religion. It was, perhaps, not a perfect world, but it offered enough benefits that the Indians could accommodate their Palatine and other European neighbors and live together in peace. The Palatines’ case is also complex, but an important element in explaining their behavior is the migration experience. The Palatine migrants left their homes in 1709 with dreams of settling in an American Canaan. Because they were the first large wave of German-­speaking settlers in America, they received no reports from earlier settlers to temper their unrealistic vision of what America held in store for them. When they found their dreams seemingly thwarted at every turn by hostile colonial officials or by unscrupulous British and Dutch land speculators, the Palatines learned to fend for themselves and to seek allies wherever they might be available. The Palatines eventually found those allies in the same place that they found their promised land: in the Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys. When the Indians in those places harbored them and nurtured them, the Palatines saw no reason why they could not live with them as friends. Certainly, the propaganda that the Palatines had been exposed to before leaving home gave them no reason to doubt the desirability of the Indians as neighbors. Some later German-­speaking migrants, such as the Moravians, brought with them a religious outlook that emphasized their common humanity with the Indians and a desire to win them over to Christianity. The 1710 immigrants’ relationship with the Indians was not, however, driven by religion. In fact, pastors

74  Migration and Settlement

visiting the Palatine settlements often despaired of the Palatines’ lack of concern for their own souls, let alone any concern for the souls of their Indian neighbors.27 Instead, the Palatines’ chief concern, as they repeatedly stated, was to earn their daily bread. When they saw that their Mohawk and Oneida neighbors would nurture these hopes and increase their prosperity through trade and the sale or rent of land, they were happy to live with them in peace. Finally, in addition to helping the Palatines secure their economic dreams, the Mohawks and the Oneidas served as a buffer between the Palatines and the colonial authorities. One of the many ironies of the Palatines’ story is that, although the British hoped that the Palatines would be a buffer between them and the French and Indians, in many ways, especially as the conflicts of the Seven Years’ War loomed large, the Palatines instead used the Indians to help create a barrier between themselves and the British.

The Palatines and the Indians in North Carolina and Pennsylvania The story of the 1710 Palatine immigrants who landed in North Carolina or who eventually settled in Pennsylvania helps illustrate the importance of the migration experience to the way that the Palatines interacted with the Indians. Although the Palatines who sailed with Christoph von Graffenried from London to North Carolina in early 1710 suffered terribly on the voyage, those who survived it at least ended up with farmland of their own. Unlike their fellow migrants in New York, they had no reason to resent their colonial overlords, nor did they have reason to seek out the help of the local Indians. In fact, their nearest Indian neighbors, the Tuscaroras, were deeply suspicious of the new arrivals. The Tuscaroras, unlike their distant Mohawk relatives in New York, felt no sympathy for the Palatines, whom they feared might one day push them from their lands. Although there is some evidence that the Tuscaroras were willing to reach an agreement that would have accommodated some of the settlers on their lands, North Carolina’s leaders showed little interest in negotiations. The Tuscaroras hoped that a deadly but limited attack might force the colonial government to address their concerns.28 The first part of their strategy went according to plan. On September 22, 1711, they swept down on the settlements along the Neuse River, catching the Palatine settlers by surprise, killing many of them, and burning their homes. But in the end the Tuscaroras’ long-­term strategy proved unsuccessful. Rather than leading to further talks, their attack led to all-­out war. By 1713, the colonial

Palatine Immigrants and Native Americans  75

armies of North and South Carolina, with aid from Virginia’s military, had defeated the Tuscaroras. Ironically, just as the Palatines of New York were turning to the Iroquois for aid and a place to settle, so too were the Tuscaroras turning to their Iroquois relatives for the same kind of relief after being defeated in a war that had begun with a devastating attack on the Palatines in North Carolina. Although the Tuscaroras were defeated, the Palatines also almost disappeared. By 1712, fewer than 250 Palatines still survived in the Carolina colony that Kocherthal had so glowingly described. The situation in Pennsylvania was more complex. In New York, the Palatines believed that Governor Hunter had cheated them of land that the Indians had granted for their use. In Pennsylvania, Governor Keith granted land to the Palatines that he had cheated from the Delawares. Although the Delawares were unhappy about their new neighbors, they lacked the power to do anything about the situation. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Iroquois had extended their influence over the Delawares and other Indians of the Susquehanna Valley, offering them protection but also insisting that the Iroquois would represent them in negotiations with Pennsylvania’s government.29 The Pennsylvania authorities supported this arrangement, finding it easier to recognize the Iroquois as the Delawares’ overlords than to deal directly with the Native Americans whose lands they were swallowing up. The Palatine settlers in Tulpehocken, who had lived among the Iroquois in New York, were also willing to see the Delawares subordinated to their old New York neighbors. In addition, the Tulpehocken settlement, unlike the Palatine settlements in the Mohawk Valley, did not remain isolated from other colonial settlements for long. Soon the Tulpehocken Palatines had other German-­speaking neighbors and even less reason to maintain good relations with their Delaware neighbors. Although many of the Delawares moved farther to the west, not all did, and the resentment of those who remained grew greater as time went by and their control over their old territories continued to weaken. In 1755, the Palatines discovered that the lack of good relations with the Delawares would have deadly consequences.

The Palatines and the Seven Years’ War The course of the Seven Years’ War in Pennsylvania and New York illustrates how differently Palatine-­Indian relations developed in the two colonies. In 1723, Sassoonan had led the Delawares in protesting the Palatine settlement at

76  Migration and Settlement

Tulpehocken. Just over thirty years later, in November 1755, his nephew Pisquetomen led a deadly raid against this same settlement, killing fifteen people and burning homes and barns throughout the community. The Delawares’ resentment was personal and specific. Like the Mohawks and Oneidas, the Delawares were neighbors to the Palatines. They knew them by name and could address them in German.30 But, whereas the Palatines in New York felt gratitude to the Iroquois for their sympathy and protection, the Delawares in Pennsylvania never forgot that the Palatines had helped cheat them of their lands. The Palatines were forced to abandon Tulpehocken and flee eastward. Conrad Weiser, who had been adopted by the Iroquois and who had served as Pennsylvania’s chief diplomat to the Indians for many years, now organized the German-­speaking settlers into a military force to fight the Indians. In 1756, Weiser became a lieutenant colonel in the Pennsylvania army. The waves of violence in Pennsylvania were quickly redirected toward the Delawares. By the end of the Seven Years’ War, they had lost all their lands east of the Susquehanna River, and most of them had been displaced to the Ohio Valley and other lands farther to the west. The Seven Years’ War also brought violence to the Palatine settlements along the Mohawk River, but the Palatine and Iroquois communities in New York were not torn apart by the war. In contrast to Pennsylvania, where Indians and Europeans attacked each other with a ferocity that led to permanent division, the Palatines and the Indians of the eastern Mohawk Valley continued to live together peacefully after the war. And, unlike in Pennsylvania, where a racialized rhetoric of difference began to demarcate separate Indian and colonist identities, this rhetoric seems much less apparent among the Palatines and Indians of New York.31 In many ways, the Palatines in the Mohawk Valley often took positions starkly different from those of their fellow settlers in Pennsylvania. For example, unlike in Pennsylvania, where the Palatines and other European settlers worried that the colonial authorities were taking the defense of the frontier too lightly, the Palatines along the Mohawk River often dismissed British attempts to fortify the valley and even attempted to negotiate on their own behalf with the French. When New York’s government sent soldiers to occupy Fort Herkimer in the German Flatts region, the Palatines complained of the soldiers’ presence. They disliked the obnoxious behavior of the soldiers, but they also feared that their presence would draw a French attack. Even after the French captured Fort Oswego and Fort Bull in western New York in 1756, the Palatines still did not want British soldiers in

Palatine Immigrants and Native Americans  77

the region. According to Cadwallader Colden, New York’s surveyor general, the Palatines “obstinately refused to receive any soldiers for their defence.”32 He feared—it turns out with very good reason—that their insubordination went much further. In addition to rebuffing the British decision to send more troops to the Mohawk Valley, the Palatines took the bold step of attempting to negotiate on their own behalf special agreements of neutrality with the Iroquois and with the French.33 Their principal message was that they wished to have no part in French and British disputes over control of New York. Instead, they hoped to ally themselves as neutral partners with the Iroquois. In making their case to the French, they went so far as to say that they identified more closely with the Indians than with any Europeans living in New York. In a letter sent to the French governor in Canada in late 1756, the Palatines asked the French “not to do them any hurt as [they were no more white people but] Oneidas and their blood was mixed with [the Indian].”34 The language of their message is striking. It appears that the Palatines are using the racialized language of “whiteness,” but they seem to turn the term “white” on its head by rejecting it as part of their identity rather than embracing it. One must, however, be careful when interpreting this passage. First of all, the quotation appears in the record secondhand. It is from an incomplete record of a report from an Englishman who has heard of the content of the letter from an Indian. It is not at all clear that the Palatines actually used the term “white,” and, even if they did, it is difficult to say exactly what they meant by it.35 It seems most likely that they primarily wanted to impress upon the French that they, the Palatines, were not French or British and, therefore, did not consider themselves players in the struggle between the two colonial powers. Instead, they wished to be identified with the Indians, another group stuck between the struggling powers. Yet their identification with the Indians went only so far. Even if “their blood was mixed” with that of the Indians, they never claimed that they had actually become Indians. True, some of them may have intermarried with the Mohawks and Oneidas, but in most ways—in the ways they dressed, farmed, built their homes, and worshipped—they remained clearly Palatine or European. Regardless of whether they actually used the term “white” or saw whiteness as an important racial characteristic, the Palatines managed to confound categorization. They did not identify with other European settlers, nor did they ever fully identify with the Indians. The Indians seemed to sense the Palatines’ ambiguous identity and, perhaps, were able to express it more clearly than the Palatines themselves.

78  Migration and Settlement

The Iroquois also realized that the Palatines, despite their close ties to the Mohawks and Oneidas, had not become Indians. Although some of the Iroquois described the Palatines as “brethren,” they never called them Indians. At the same time, they did not automatically categorize them among the “white” other. Their sense of the Palatines is perhaps best encapsulated in a remark made at a meeting with the French governor in December 1756. At that meeting, an Oneida leader described the Palatines’ ambiguous identity as “a nation which is neither French, nor English, nor Indian, and inhabits the lands round about us.”36 His description indicates that he was not sure how his Palatine neighbors fit into the diplomatic and political world of New York, but clearly he did not lump them in with the other European colonists who occupied New York, nor did he put them in the same category as the Indians. Still, in the same meeting with the French governor, the Oneida leader made it clear that a recent request by the Palatines to ally themselves with the Oneidas was one they were open to granting. Somehow the Palatines were not quite Indians and not quite Europeans, but they were definitely neighbors and potentially allies in the contentious world of mid-­eighteenth-­century New York. When war broke out in New York, the Palatines continued to trust “to a private Neutrality,” just as British colonial authorities feared they would.37 It turned out that the Palatines trusted too much. In the fall of 1757, their Iroquois allies warned them repeatedly of an impending attack on German Flatts, but the Palatines ignored them, laughing heartily and “slapping their hands on their buttocks.”38 They did not laugh for long. On November 12, 1757, a party of 260 Indians, mostly from Iroquois settlements in Canada, and 90 Frenchmen attacked the Burnetsfield settlement and destroyed most of the Palatines’ homes and barns. Several Palatines were killed in the attack, and more than a hundred were taken captive and marched off to Canada. The destruction and loss of life made the Palatines more suspicious of the Iroquois, but the attack and its aftermath also showed the Palatines that their trust in their Iroquois neighbors was not completely misplaced. In the lead­up to the attack, as the French-­led force made its way toward Burnetsfield, many of the Indians in the expedition refused to go farther when they realized the Palatine village was their target. As a further sign of the continuing close relations between the Oneidas and the Palatines, a short time after the attack, a few Oneidas and other Indians joined the Palatines at German Flatts and performed a condolence ceremony to mourn the loss of their friends.39 Although the attack led to greater distrust, it did not lead to all-­out warfare between the Palatines and the Native Americans. There was little further

Palatine Immigrants and Native Americans  79

violence in New York between the two groups, and after the war ended they continued to trade with each other and to live together in peace. Still, the British victory in the Seven Years’ War had dramatic consequences for the Iroquois in the politics of colonial New York. They were no longer able to play British and French interests against each other. Instead, they found themselves losing power as more and more European settlers pushed westward, displacing the Iroquois from their lands. Although relations between the Palatines and their Native American neighbors remained good, the balance had changed. Increasingly, it was the Oneidas and Mohawks who found themselves living among European settlers rather than the other way around. In some ways, the independence of the Palatines also suffered as a result of the Seven Years’ War. Before the war, they had managed to maintain some autonomy by settling in a region contested by larger powers. After the war, it became impossible for the Palatines to pretend to deal with other peoples independently of British colonial control. Instead, they were incorporated into a powerful and more secure British colonial state. This transition was not necessarily a difficult one for the Palatines. Their lands were secure, and the people continued to prosper. They began to incorporate themselves into the political system, and when the American Revolution broke out, they were prepared to join one side or the other rather than attempt to remain neutral. The Iroquois, of course, were also forced to choose sides, but neither the British nor the Americans offered them much chance of long-­term security in New York. In the end, the Palatines’ two closest neighbors split over which side to choose. Most Mohawks sided with the British and Loyalists; most Oneidas sided with those Americans seeking independence. As it turned out, neither the Oneidas nor the Mohawks won. During the war, Burnetsfield was burned again, this time by the Mohawks. The nearby Mohawk village of Tiononderoge was also destroyed, this time by the Mohawks’ Oneida cousins.40 The world of the Iroquois had collapsed, and the era of Palatine-­Iroquois cooperation disappeared with it. After the war, most of the Oneidas and Mohawks moved away, and new European immigrants took their place. Except for a few settlers who had been young children at the time of the migration, almost all of the 1710 immigrants had died by the time of the American Revolution. The world where Palatines and Native Americans had lived in peace for fifty years faded from memory. Although a few locations with names such as Palatine Bridge and German Flatts hinted of a German-­speaking past, the story of the Palatine migrants and their special relationship with the Indians of New York had come to an end.

80  Migration and Settlement

notes 1. Two important recent histories that document the growing violence between Indians and Europeans in Pennsylvania and the ways this antagonism led to clearly demarcated Indian and white identities are Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-­Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), and Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). Another recent study that examines the uneasy and violent nature of Indian-­European relations in Pennsylvania is Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 2. I tentatively put forth some of these ideas with regard to the New York Palatines in Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), but the most complete and compelling study of Iroquois and European settler communities is David L. Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). Preston argues against the inevitability of Indian-­European conflict and, in a series of community studies, finds evidence of long-­lasting cooperation and friendship between Iroquois and European settlers. In another important study, Gail D. MacLeitch presents a complex and somewhat less sanguine view of Iroquois-­European relations, referring to the Mohawk Valley as a “culturally ambiguous human landscape”; MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 150. Two other recent histories that add a great deal to our knowledge of Mohawk-­European relations in New York are Eric Hinderaker, The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), and Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Viking, 2008). 3. A fuller description of the 1709–10 Palatine migration and of many of the events described in this essay can be found in Otterness, Becoming German. 4. The Palatines’ Catechism, or A True Description of Their Camps at Black Heath and Camberwell: In a Pleasant Dialogue Between an English Tradesman and a High-­Dutchman (London: printed for T. Hare in Holborn, 1709), 4. 5. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978), 13. 6. Daniel Falckner, Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Andreas Otto, 1702). Reprinted as Daniel Falckner’s “Curieuse Nachricht von Pensylvania,” trans. and ed. Julius Friedrich Sachse (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1905), 112–13, quote on 122–23. 7. Joshua Kocherthal, Ausführlich-­und Umständlicher Bericht von der berühmten Landschafft Carolina, in dem Engelländischen America gelegen, 4th ed. (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Georg Heinrich Oehrling, 1709), 20. For an English translation, see Andreas Mielke, “Extensive and Detailed Report of the Famous Land Carolina, Situated in the English America [1709/1709]. By Kocherthal [Joshua Harrsch],” Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage 31, no. 4 (2008): 38. 8. Kocherthal, Bericht, 57–58. 9. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 39, 46, 55, 112. 10. Hinderaker, The Two Hendricks, 48. 11. “The Condition, Grievances, and Oppressions of the Germans in His Majesty’s Province of New York in America, 1720,” in The Documentary History of the State of New-­York (hereafter DHNY), ed. E. B. O’Callaghan, 4 vols. (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1849–51), 3:709–10. This description of the Palatines’ meeting with the Mohawks is contained in a petition that the Palatine settlers addressed to the Board of Trade in 1720. 12. Hinderaker, The Two Hendricks, 110–15. 13. “Condition, Grievances, and Oppressions,” 3:711.

Palatine Immigrants and Native Americans  81 14. Ibid., 3:712. 15. Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 193. 16. Frederick S. Weiser, ed., Johan Friederich Weisers Buch, Containing the Autobiography of John Conrad Weiser (1696–1760) (Hanover, Pa.: John Conrad Weiser Family Association, 1976), 23. 17. Vrooman to Gov. Hunter, Schenectady, July 9, 1715, in DHNY, 3:688. 18. See also the essay by Cynthia Falk in this collection. 19. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy, 117. 20. Preston, Texture of Contact, 99, 108–9. 21. Ibid., 181–84. 22. John William Parmenter, “At the Wood’s Edge: Iroquois Foreign Relations, 1727–1768” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999), 73. 23. Palatine farmers sometimes turn up in the diplomatic records of meetings between Iroquois leaders and colonial officials because they understood the Indians’ language and could serve as witnesses. See, for example, the speech of Conaghquieson in George Croghan, “A Summary Narrative,” in DHNY, 1:520–22. For records of German-­speaking Lutheran and Reformed pastors serving the Iroquois, see Harry Julius Kreider, Lutheranism in Colonial New York (New York: Edwards Brothers, 1942), 56, and Weiss to Classis of Amsterdam, July 14, 1741, in Ecclesiastical Records of the State of New York (hereafter ERNY), ed. Hugh Hastings, 8 vols. (Albany: James B. Lyon, 1910–16), 4:2760. For other examples of everyday interaction, see Otterness, Becoming German, 153–54, and Preston, Texture of Contact, 102–5, 188. 24. Quoted in Preston, Texture of Contact, 104–5. 25. Herkimer County Historical Society, Herkimer County at 200 (Herkimer, N.Y.: Herkimer County Historical Society, 1992), viii; Preston, Texture of Contact, 203–4. 26. Journal of Sir William Johnson’s Indian Transactions, March 5, 1756, in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York (hereafter NYCD), ed. E. B. O’Callaghan, 15 vols. (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1856–87), 7:92; Preston, Texture of Contact, 102–3. 27. Examples of Lutheran and Reformed pastors lamenting the actions of their parishioners in the Schoharie and Mohawk Valleys can be found in ERNY, 4:2676 and 5:3285, and in John P. Dern, ed., The Albany Protocol: Wilhelm Christoph Berkenmeyer’s Chronicle of Lutheran Affairs in New York Colony, 1731–1750 (Camden, Maine: Picton Press, 1992), 92, 100, and 101, where Berkenmeyer writes, “My weeping must have occurred because I saw how far Scoghary (Schoharie) was from our Lutheran Jerusalem.” 28. Stephen Delbert Feeley, “Tuscarora Trails: Indian Migrations, War, and Constructions of Colonial Frontiers” (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2007), 136, 265–66. 29. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy, 68–69, 106–7. 30. Merritt, At the Crossroads, 177. 31. As stated previously, the most recent and thorough studies of the violence in Pennsylvania and the rhetoric that accompanied it are Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, and Merritt, At the Crossroads. The most complete study of the contrasting situation in New York is Preston, Texture of Contact. 32. Colden to Peter Collinson, December 31, 1757, in The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden, 8 vols., Collections of the New York Historical Society (New York: printed for the New York Historical Society, 1918–34), 5:212–13. 33. Their attempts at such negotiations are noted in NYCD, 10:513–14, 562, and James Sullivan, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson (hereafter SWJP), 14 vols. (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1921–65), 2:692, as well as in Colden to Collinson, 5:212–13. 34. Account of a conference between Oneidas and the governor of Canada, March 21, 1757, in SWJP, 2:692. According to a note in Johnson’s published papers, parts of this letter were destroyed in a fire, and the words in brackets were provided by an extract, uncited, in the Public Record Office.

82  Migration and Settlement 35. It also seems likely that the Palatines wrote to the French governor in French, a language that some of them knew, rather than in English. So the term “white” may be the result of an Iroquois translating into English a term written in French by a German-­speaking settler. 36. Conferences between M. de Vaudreuil and the Indians, in NYCD, 10:513. 37. Colden to Collinson, 5:212–13. 38. Croghan, “A Summary Narrative,” 1:520–22. 39. Preston, Texture of Contact, 190. 40. Ibid., 286; Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy, 189.

Four

Of Dwelling Houses, Painted Chests, and Stove Plates What Material Culture Tells Us About the Palatines in Early New York Cynthia G. Falk

Much of what is known about the Palatines in New York comes from written sources, and many of these documents were authored not by members of the immigrant group but by others who observed or interacted with them. As this essay will demonstrate, the examination of material culture, in addition to textual sources, can contribute significantly to a better understanding of how the Palatines lived and what their lifestyle reveals about colonial German American history and culture. Such an approach provides a necessary corrective to the prevailing focus on Pennsylvania in the study of German communities in early America, and it allows for interpretation of the New York Palatine experience based not on what others said about them but rather on items they produced and used themselves.1 The study of immigration history by its very nature relies on evidence of how people of diverse backgrounds identified and defined those perceived as “other.” During the Palatines’ stay in London and at the naval stores camps in New York’s Hudson Valley, British officials had ample reason to make detailed records of the actions, attitudes, and physical condition of the group. Following the failed naval stores project and the migration of some Palatines farther west to the Mohawk Valley, both the British and the French kept accounts of the Germans who occupied a contested territory that both European powers hoped to control.2

86  Material and Intellectual Cultures

What is missing from interpretations based largely on the resulting documents is an understanding of the Palatine experience derived from sources produced by the Palatines themselves. Yet capturing the Palatine perspective is not an easy task. Often the most deeply rooted values as well as the mundane details of everyday life do not get recorded when people put pen to paper, because most writing is conceived not to document but to achieve a certain end result.3 For example, Philip Otterness has shown that when the Palatines engaged in written political discourse with British authorities, they used words, including the erroneous label “poor Palatines,” to realize particular goals.4 Even text produced for other German speakers was often designed to fulfill certain purposes. Ulrich Simmendinger authored his 1717 register of Palatine families in order to provide information as to the current whereabouts of members of the 1710 immigrant group, but he also discouraged further immigration by referring to the “wretched servitude” and “untilled and wild” conditions of the New World.5 Simmendinger’s case aside, as the Palatines gained greater freedom from English control, they generally had less reason to correspond with British authorities or with anyone else who archived their words for the sake of posterity. Ironically, a migration that began as the result of the written word—Joshua Kocherthal’s “golden book”—through time received less and less attention in textual sources. In studying Palatine immigrants and their descendants who settled on the frontier in the Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys, scholars interested in social and cultural history need to supplement what the written record tells them with other types of evidence in order to gain a more complete understanding of the Palatine experience. More than just physical reminders of Palatine settlement in the region, artifacts such as buildings, furniture, and other household goods provide evidence of the culture the Palatines helped forge in colonial New York’s river valleys. Surviving material goods, usually made to serve a practical purpose such as providing shelter or heat during the cold winter, can also function as evidence of deeply held beliefs and everyday behaviors, things not necessarily divulged in written sources.6 Particularly when examined as a group, rather than as discrete examples, the items that embodied the physicality of the domestic world have the potential to add depth and texture to our understanding of the lives of those who dwelled therein.7 Using material culture to learn more about New York’s Palatine population is not without its challenges, however. Violent conflicts in the eighteenth century destroyed many objects and buildings made and used by settlers in New York’s river valleys, thus eliminating many potential sources from the start.

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Over time, still more buildings and objects have been destroyed or physically altered. In 2011, for example, torrential rains caused the rivers to swell and did irreparable damage to the region, especially the Schoharie Valley. Studying material culture, like studying documents, requires a keen awareness of the incomplete nature of the historical record. The value of artifacts as nontextual and tactile evidence makes them compelling sources, but it also makes their interpretation less clear-­cut and limits what they can tell researchers about the past. Household objects seldom communicate factual data, and they cannot be “read” in the same way the written word can.8 Instead, the interpretation of buildings and objects relies on careful observation using multiple senses; comparison with similar items, often from different times, places, or groups; and frequently a thorough search of complementary written records for clues as to historical meaning.9 In the best cases, material culture analysis provides information that is not recoverable through more traditional sources, often concerning the texture of everyday life, the undocumented relationships between people, and personal and cultural responses to the events and changes that historians traditionally study. In the case of the people who lived in colonial upstate New York’s river valleys, by considering material culture we learn how the Palatines interacted with their ethnically diverse neighbors, borrowing ideas freely when the situation warranted and forging identities that blended cultural divides. We discover that the area’s settlers relied heavily on local natural resources but were able to obtain goods from farther afield when necessary. Furthermore, we realize that the Palatines, caught in the midst of international conflict not once but twice, often prepared for the worst but also reflected with gratefulness on surviving the hostilities that physically and culturally altered their world. Particularly when compared with that of German settlers farther south in Pennsylvania, the material culture of New York’s Palatine population provides insight into issues of cultural adaptation, frontier conditions, and colonial German American identity. Surviving structures and objects demonstrate that the ways Palatine immigrants became German Americans in the eighteenth-­ century mid-­Atlantic region were creative and complex, responding directly to the diverse locations and peoples they encountered. People of German descent in colonial America did not always fashion the same end products, customs, or cultural standards, despite a shared European background. Those who have studied German American material culture in the past have focused largely on objects made and used in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Particularly on the antiques market,

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Pennsylvania German material culture—including items such as painted chests and boxes, birth and baptismal certificates, and quilts and show towels—continues to receive significant attention and command high prices.10 Through nearly a century of study, scholars focusing on these objects have been able to trace specific craft techniques from central Europe to the New World, analyze how Germanic forms changed over time and with increased contact with members of other ethnic groups, and garner attention for a group often left out of the main narrative of American history.11 The decade of the 1980s, marking the three-­hundredth anniversary of the first German immigration to Pennsylvania, was especially rich with new theories for understanding the culture of the Pennsylvania Germans. Multiple authors presented a three-­part model to explain the relationship between Pennsylvania’s German and English populations, which usually included, in addition to outright rejection or complete assimilation on the part of the Germans, the option of adaptation, or the modification of ethnic patterns to create distinct new forms. In Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, a catalogue of the Pennsylvania German collections at Winterthur Museum, Scott Swank called this third alternative “controlled acculturation.” According to Swank, this middle-­of-­the-­road option allowed a “significant minority” of Germans in Pennsylvania to maintain a sense of traditional culture and to choose what and how change was affected, while still moving steadily toward acculturation.12 Today, a new wave of scholarship on Pennsylvania German material culture questions the dichotomy of the German and English categories that took center stage three decades ago. While still concerned with the concepts of ethnicity and ethnic distinctiveness, Sally McMurry and Nancy Van Dolsen, in their recent volume on Pennsylvania German vernacular architecture, note that “more recent work considers German Pennsylvania within a much broader context, and considers the continual process of interaction among social groups that took place right from the beginning.” Rather than viewing change from European models as evidence of assimilation, they characterize the relationship between European and Pennsylvania German buildings as “less a wholesale importation of Old World forms than an innovative reshaping of these forms in a new environment.”13 A new catalogue and exhibit of southeastern Pennsylvania furniture at Winterthur Museum exemplify the trend by focusing not on a specific cultural group, as Swank previously did, but rather on a geographic region that “a great mixed multitude” called home.14

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While much less is known about the goods made and used by the approximately 2,400 Germans who arrived in New York City in 1710, the material culture of this group has the potential to contribute to these developing ideas about colonial German Americans generally as well as to generate new knowledge of the culture of the Palatines in New York’s river valleys specifically. These New York Germans and their offspring built and furnished houses, painted chests, and displayed colorful family records like fellow continental Europeans farther south. Yet the objects they produced do not necessarily look the same as the Pennsylvania German objects so often illustrated in decorative arts catalogues or vernacular architecture studies, and these differences help explain the culture of Palatine settlers living in New York. In both Pennsylvania and New York, settlers emphasized and adapted some elements of the Old World culture they knew while simultaneously borrowing from other New World groups and forging a uniquely American way of life. The differences between Pennsylvania’s and New York’s eighteenth-­century German American settlements demonstrate how the conditions Germans met in the two colonies—from weather, to warfare, to proximity to American Indians and other European groups—influenced their lives. In Pennsylvania, decades of fieldwork have led to the identification of a specific floor plan, known today as the continental plan or Flurküchenhaus plan, associated with German immigrants and their descendants. In studying house types, field­workers such as Henry Glassie have chosen to focus on floor plan, rather than building materials or decorative elements. According to Glassie, “Random surface features . . . tell nothing about the human mind that designed the artifact and are inefficient, at best, when used as aids to historical or semiotic interpretation.”15 Recording the plan of buildings allows for greater understanding of how people have ordered, moved through, and used space, and it permits easier comparison between eras and places. Research has demonstrated that the so-­ called continental-­ plan house in Pennsylvania, while similar to houses built in German-­speaking parts of Europe, was not an exact copy of a typical eighteenth-­century European house type. In Pennsylvania, surviving houses utilizing the plan generally included three first-­floor rooms: a kitchen, or Küche; a stove-­heated parlor, or Stube; and a chamber, or Kammer (figs. 4.1 and 4.2).16 The term Flurküchenhaus, meaning entry-­kitchen house, is applied because entry was directly into the kitchen in these “open-­plan” houses. William Woys Weaver has studied the origins of the Flurküchenhaus type and determined that the form “found

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Fig. 4.1  Bertolet-­Herbein house, Daniel Boone Homestead State Historic Site, Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, ca. 1737–50. This rare survival from the period of early German settlement in Pennsylvania is built of logs, a once-­common construction material in the mid-­Atlantic region. The placement of the chimney near the center of the structure hints at its internal divisions. Photo by author.

its greatest expression in Pennsylvania rather than in Germany.” Weaver’s conclusion draws on the concept of the Oberdeutsches Haus, developed at the turn of the twentieth century by German architectural historians to differentiate the building traditions of southern Germany from those in the north. According to Weaver, guided by the pioneering work of Rudolph Meringer, “The most common room arrangement in middle and southern Germany . . . [was] a two-­room plan: a room called the Stube (stove room) and one called the Küche (hearth room).”17 By the second half of the eighteenth century in Pennsylvania, some people of German descent had begun to look to still newer types of houses. Germans who wished to express elevated social and economic status started to build “closed-­plan” dwellings with a center-­passage or side-­passage floor plan, where entry was into an intermediate corridor that was indoors but not part of the main living space. Other new features included formal rooms that were designed for specific purposes, such as dining, and a kitchen that was far

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Fig. 4.2  First-­floor plan, Bertolet-­Herbein house. Like many surviving colonial German houses in Pennsylvania, this dwelling included three first-­floor rooms: Küche, Stube, and Kammer. The closed stove used to heat the Stube, the lower-­left space in the drawing, was fed from the back of the kitchen fireplace. Illustration based on plan by J. Michael Everett for the Historic American Buildings Survey, 1958. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS-­PA,6-­LIMKI.V,5-­.

removed from the front door (fig. 4.3). These buildings have been interpreted by scholars, including myself, as creolized dwellings. They combined certain German elements (such as a stove-­heated best room) with conventions (such as entry through a passage) that, while often associated in America with the British Georgian style, were being used by elites throughout the Atlantic world.18 In New York, the dwellings occupied by people of German descent also included both open-­plan and closed-­plan houses, and certain similarities between houses in the two regions should not be overlooked. In terms of site, New York Palatines, like Pennsylvania Germans, often built their houses into a bank or hillside. The buildings included cellars, which could be under the whole house or only part of it. As in Pennsylvania, Palatines sometimes included a fireplace for cooking or a spring for cooling in this lowest level. In front of the house, a space referred to as the Vorhof was often sheltered by an

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Fig. 4.3  Peter and Rosina Margaretha Wentz house, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, 1758. The Wentz house included on its first floor a center passage. To the left of that passage, a stove room with a five-­plate iron jamb stove was located to the front and a kitchen to the rear. On the other side of the passage were two additional rooms, forming a floor plan that was almost as symmetrical as the facade. Behind the house, a second kitchen provided additional work space. Photo by author.

extension of the roof eave.19 While this appendage has rarely survived on Pennsylvania German houses, in New York, perhaps because of the cold weather and snow, the owner of at least one Palatine house chose to enclose the Vorhof at a later date, preserving its existence for future generations (fig. 4.4). Despite similarities in banked siting and the use of certain spaces, including the cellar and Vorhof, other characteristics distinguished New York Palatine houses from those in Pennsylvania. On a macro level, settlement patterns in New York were strikingly different from those in many areas where Pennsylvania Germans lived due in large measure to the nature of German immigration. In Pennsylvania, Germans came to the colony from 1683 through the Revolution, with the highest annual numbers of both ships and people arriving in the years 1749 to 1754. By 1776, more than 80,000 men, women, and children from the German-­speaking principalities of central Europe had arrived in the city of Philadelphia on 382 ships. In New York, on the other hand, immigration was largely the result of one concentrated influx of about

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Fig. 4.4  Gable-­end view, “Stony Brook” house, Schoharie, New York. This wood-­ frame dwelling, which seems to date from before the Revolutionary War, includes several features typical of German houses in the New World. It is built into a bank, which provides exterior access to a basement level as well as the first floor. In this case, the basement level contained a kitchen fireplace. The enclosed area just to the left of the current front porch was the Vorhof. As originally constructed, it would have been sheltered by an overhanging eave but open on the front and sides. A stove plate still survives in a first-­floor fireplace in this house, indicating that it once was heated by a five-­plate iron stove. Photo by author.

2,400 individuals in 1710. Of the 55 ships that brought German settlers to New York during the colonial period, ten arrived that year.20 The smaller number of German immigrants, and Europeans generally, in central New York’s river valleys made New York’s Palatine settlements markedly different in character from many Pennsylvania communities. In the Mohawk Valley, eighteenth-­century German centers included those at German Flatts and Stone Arabia. German Flatts was part of a twenty-­four-­ mile swath of land along the Mohawk River that was granted to just 92 individuals in hundred-­acre allotments; the Stone Arabia patent was conveyed to an additional 27 Palatines.21 To the southeast, other 1710 immigrants helped create a series of “dorfs,” including Hartmannsdorf and Kniskerndorf, along the Schoharie Creek. Yet despite the initial arrival of Europeans, the Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys remained part of the frontier throughout the eighteenth century. There were no towns comparable to Pennsylvania’s Lancaster

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Fig. 4.5  Hartmannsdorf house, Old Stone Fort museum complex, Schoharie, New York, ca. 1760. Moved from its original location in what was once known as Hartmannsdorf, this building serves as a model of the type of house Palatine settlers in the Schoharie Valley constructed. At one time, the front eave would have extended to create a covered Vorhof in front of the structure. Photo by author.

or Reading. German Flatts was estimated to have only sixty houses in 1756. The county seat for Schoharie was still in Albany until 1795; one eighteenth-­ century traveler reported that the forty-­mile trip took two days to complete.22 German houses in Pennsylvania and New York were different not only because of where they were located but also in their very form. In New York, no three-­room entry-­kitchen houses are presently known to survive. Instead, many New York Palatines built two-­room houses (figs. 4.5 and 4.6). One of the two rooms served as a kitchen and included a hearth for cooking. The other was often heated by a stove and provided space for living, eating, working, and perhaps even sleeping. At the Hartmannsdorf house, a colonial wood-­frame building relocated from Hartmannsdorf to the Schoharie Historical Society’s Old Stone Fort museum complex, there is no indication that this space was further divided to include a separate first-­floor chamber. In fact, the placement of windows on only the rear and side walls strongly suggests that the room was not divided from side to side. At other dwellings, such as the Johan Peter Wagner house in the Mohawk Valley, where the room is long in comparison to its width, there is no evidence

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Fig. 4.6  First-­floor plan, Hartmannsdorf house. The floor plan of the house included two first-­floor rooms. Entry was into the Küche, which had a large jambless fireplace for cooking, while the adjoining Stube was heated by a closed stove. Illustration by Timothy Layton, based on fieldwork by Trisha Maust-­Blosser, Rosamond Rea, and Cynthia Falk.

that it was originally divided from front to back either. The prevalence of a two-­room plan is intriguing in light of Weaver’s observation that in middle and southern Germany dwelling houses often consisted of two rooms rather than three. While two-­room houses were not unknown in Pennsylvania, they are uncommon among surviving structures. In New York, however, the two-­ room plan is the one most widely represented in extant buildings. By continuing to build two-­room houses of this type, Palatines in New York may have been maintaining a more Germanic form than their counterparts in Pennsylvania, who seem to have created a German American house type. On the other hand, the Palatine New Yorkers may have chosen to continue using the two-­room plan because it was similar in form to dwellings built by people who hailed from different European nations. Both Dutch and English settlers in New York often utilized two-­room house plans. Though construction

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Fig. 4.7  Hendrick Frey house, Palatine Bridge, New York, 1739. Often referred to as “Fort Frey,” this stone building included a center passage, two gable-­end fireplaces, defensive loopholes, and brick tumbling on the gable-­end walls. The second door, on the left, is part of an early addition to the house. Photo by author.

techniques and heating schemes differ among German, Dutch, and English dwellings, comparable room uses and spatial volumes may have provided a degree of commonality among people of different European backgrounds.23 The preference for houses that differed in form from those that Pennsylvania Germans built farther south—particularly in their utilization of fewer, but sometimes larger, first-­floor rooms—is further evidenced by buildings that do not conform to the so-­called continental center-­chimney plan. At the Hendrick Frey house, which is believed to date to 1739, there are two rooms, each serviced by a gable-­end fireplace, but a center passage separates them (fig. 4.7). The inclusion of a through-­passage in a Palatine house on the frontier at this early date is intriguing because its introduction is generally associated with the more formal British Georgian style, which in the colonies during the 1730s was largely limited to East Coast cities or to elite houses in rural areas, such as the dwellings of wealthy southern planters. Yet in the Mohawk Valley its use may have been desirable even in the early years of settlement to provide increased separation between the outside world and more private spaces used by the family. If buildings such as the Frey house served quasi-­public functions as centers of commerce or military defense, a passageway created an added barrier.

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Fig. 4.8  Johnson Hall, Johnstown, New York, 1763. The power of British Indian agent Sir William Johnson was evident in his grand dwelling house. A full two stories tall, it was finished on the outside with wood carved and painted to look like stone, capped with a fashionable hipped roof, and fitted with a stylish Palladian window on the second floor. Johnson had three children with a Palatine woman named Catherine Weissenberg. Photo by author.

Passages may have also helped insulate the heated rooms against the cold outdoors. Even in two-­room houses with a central chimney and stove-­ heated room, Palatines found ways to mediate the openness of the typical Flurküchenhaus. At the Johan Peter Wagner house, the exterior door led to a small, enclosed space in front of the hearth, rather than directly into the kitchen. The arrangement may have been particularly desirable in New York, where temperatures today average about ten degrees cooler than those in south-­central Pennsylvania. In 1749, Sir William Johnson, a British Indian agent, introduced a larger, more formal Georgian house form to valley residents at Fort Johnson. Later, in 1763, Johnson Hall was completed on an even grander scale (fig. 4.8). Among the Palatines, Johan Jost Herkimer, who came to New York in 1710 as a child, may have been the first to embrace this new style of building at Fort Herkimer, his fortified property on the south side of the Mohawk River, which was developed prior to the Seven Years’ War. A description provided by a local resident years later indicates that a twelve-­foot-­wide center passage with a “grand staircase” ran through the largest building within the fort. Two

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Fig. 4.9  Nicholas and Maria Herkimer house, Little Falls, New York, ca. 1764. Finished at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the Herkimer house sat on the Mohawk River near a portage that Herkimer controlled. The towering structure had a basement kitchen with two full stories above and additional room in the garret under the stylish gambrel roof. The use of red brick further distinguished the structure from wooden and stone buildings nearby. Photo by author.

doors from the center passage provided access to a large room to the west and a “large kitchen and a small bedroom and pantry” to the east. The upstairs included “a bedroom over the hall at the head of the stairs and a large room in each end of the house.”24 When Johan Jost’s son Nicholas Herkimer built his own house at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, he utilized a similar floor plan and incorporated stylish external features, such as brick walls and a gambrel roof that further set his house apart from others in the area (fig. 4.9). Despite the numerous changes to the building over the years, the presence of a central passage is undeniable. What seems unusual is the large, undivided room to the east of the passage. Significantly, the more intact Joseph Becker house in Schoharie County, which dates to the 1770s, follows a similar plan. To one side of the center passage, there was an undivided space heated by a fireplace, which was located centrally on the gable-­end wall (fig. 4.10). Moldings around

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Fig. 4.10  Floor plan, Joseph Becker house, Town of Wright, Schoharie County, ca. 1775. Like Nicholas Herkimer’s house, the Becker house included a center passage, which provided access to the other, more private rooms. To one side of the passage, there was a large, undivided room occupying more than a third of the first floor. The space was echoed above it on the second floor. This room configuration differentiated houses like this one in New York from contemporary examples in other locations, which tended to be divided into smaller spaces symmetrically arranged around the passage. Illustration by Timothy Layton, based on fieldwork by Stephanie Long, Rebecca Slaughter, Kate Weller, and Cynthia Falk.

this fireplace, as well as in the passage, were of the academically inspired egg-­ and-­dart pattern; on the second floor, the fireplace was located in an elaborately paneled wall. To the other side of the passage on the first floor, there may have been a stove-­heated room. Thus, with regard to floor plan, New York’s Palatine population built houses that were similar to yet different from Pennsylvania German houses in important ways. The best room in both open-­and closed-­plan houses tended to be larger and undivided. Entries or passages often provided an added division between interior and exterior spaces. Both features may have been responses to the climate: the lack of division allowed for more even heating, and the entry kept out the cold. But undivided rooms also more closely followed continental German prototypes and, as a result, suggest a traditional

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approach to household space—one that may have been appreciated not only by the Palatines but also by their British and Dutch neighbors. Finally, a large room, especially one combined with an entry or passage to control access, allowed for gatherings, a use that may have been of more importance in New York, where settlements were scattered and only churches provided alternative meeting places. The isolation of Palatine settlements in New York affected not only how living spaces were conceived but also the materials that were available for building and furnishing. Surveying surviving eighteenth-­century structures gives a skewed impression of construction practices. Because wood is liable to decay over time, many of the buildings in both Pennsylvania and New York that still exist from the period before the American Revolution are of masonry construction. However, in both colonies, the majority of eighteenth-­century buildings would have been wooden. A more complete analysis of building materials is possible in Pennsylvania because in 1798, as the new United States prepared to become involved in international conflict, the federal government instituted a real estate tax requiring that all buildings be assessed based on physical characteristics such as size and materials. Federal Direct Tax returns from Pennsylvania describe the majority of houses as log in 1798.25 There are no known surviving Federal Direct Tax returns for central New York, so it is difficult to look comprehensively at the type of building materials that were used there. Documentary sources and sketches indicate that log houses were common in the valleys, but the few surviving wooden structures, such as the Hartmannsdorf house, are framed with posts and beams rather than being constructed of horizontal timbers.26 In either case, wood was a locally available material that did not have to be transported over long distances, and wooden members could be joined together by the same house carpenter who constructed floors, stairs, doors, and perhaps even some simple furniture forms. The difference in materials between the houses built by people of German descent in New York and in Pennsylvania is more noticeable in terms of materials other than wood, such as clay and iron, which required more elaborate manufacturing facilities. In Pennsylvania, for example, at least some roofs were sheathed in red clay tiles, which had to be formed and then fired in a kiln. The use of a heavy strut-­supported roof structure, common on many eighteenth-­century buildings in areas of Pennsylvania settled by German speakers, may have been necessary to support the extra weight of clay tiles as opposed to lighter wooden shakes.27 In New York, there are no signs of

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the strut-­supported roof system that scholars have associated with clay-­tile roofing. It is likely that eighteenth-­century New York Palatine houses were sheathed with simple wooden shakes, which required only trees and the tools to cut and split them rather than extensive infrastructure for manufacturing. The lack of facilities for converting soft clay to durable ceramic made even brick hard to obtain on the New York frontier.28 In surviving Palatine houses in the Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys from before the American Revolution, brick is used for chimneys and occasionally decorative elements but seldom for whole walls. Nicholas Herkimer’s house on the Mohawk River was particularly noteworthy because the sizable building was brick. Given the lavish use of the uncommon material, some have speculated that Herkimer must have constructed a brickyard on his property to manufacture bricks in such quantity. However, records of Herkimer’s purchase of one thousand bricks in 1769 indicate that he did not have the ability to make brick, only the wherewithal to buy the expensive, refined material.29 While making bricks or clay roof tiles required capital expenditures to create kilns for firing, ironwork demanded industrial facilities that could first refine the metal from iron ore and then cast it to create products such as stove plates or firebacks. Palatine settlers could not do without iron; they needed nails and hardware, as well as tools for farming, cooking, and cutting wood. In addition to bricks, Nicholas Herkimer bought nails, sheep shears (perhaps of imported steel), and an iron fireback in the 1760s.30 When his brother George’s possessions were inventoried in 1789, eight iron pots were together valued at over £4, two “Iron bound Waggons (old)” at £12, and a “Plow and Iron for 1 Do.” at £7.31 For people of German descent living in British North America, iron played another critical role. One of the defining spaces within a German house was a stove-­heated room, or Stube. While stoves could be fashioned from masonry or clay tile, the most durable material was cast-­iron plates, which were used to form a five-­plate stove installed at the rear of the kitchen fireplace. The prevalence of stoves in the eighteenth-­century Palatine dwellings of upstate New York’s river valleys is evidenced today by patched stonework in rear fireplace walls, wear on floorboards behind the kitchen fireplace, and fireplace and stove supports in the basement. Surviving iron stove plates indicate that five-­plate stoves were available within the region, but they were likely produced in other places, such as Pennsylvania, where iron ore and the furnaces to process it were plentiful. One surviving example, now used as a fireback in an eighteenth-­century house in

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Fig. 4.11  Pharisee and publican stove plate, 1742, cast iron. This stove plate formed one side of a five-­plate closed stove. At least ten examples of plates of this pattern have been documented in Pennsylvania, and a plate of the same design still exists in a house in Schoharie County, New York. Collection of the Mercer Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, artifact 11526.

Schoharie, is of the same pattern as stove plates that Henry Chapman Mercer documented in Lancaster, Lebanon, Germantown, Lehigh County, and Bucks County, Pennsylvania (fig. 4.11).32 Mercer, who knew of seven stove plates from the Kingston, New York, vicinity, believed that they were all imported from either Pennsylvania or Europe.33 One of the primary reasons that New York’s Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys did not support iron furnaces, pottery kilns, or similar manufacturing facilities was that the region was ravaged by international conflicts through much of the eighteenth century.34 Because the Mohawk Valley is the major break in the Appalachian Mountains, it was a coveted piece of real estate during the colonial period. German settlers in the river valleys were repeatedly plagued by outbreaks of violence among Europeans and Iroquois during both the

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Seven Years’ War and the Revolutionary War. In 1757, Iroquois and French forces destroyed the village of German Flatts on the Mohawk River, burning roughly sixty houses and barns, killing at least eight Palatines, and taking over one hundred more hostage.35 During the Revolutionary War, in October 1780, New York governor George Clinton reported, “Almost the whole of the intermediate country on both sides of the Mohawk River from Fort Herkimer to Fort Rensselaer at the upper end of Canajoharie, including the settlement of Stone Arabia is burnt and laid waste. On a moderate computation we have lost . . . two hundred dwellings. Schenectady may now be said to become the limits of our western frontier.”36 How New York Palatine settlers dealt with the violence that raged around them is an important historical question. As tensions between the French and British began to turn into open conflict in upstate New York in the mid-­ eighteenth century, British colonial officials reported that the Palatines had entered into a “private Neutrality” with the Mohawk and other Indians that would keep them out of any fighting.37 Yet attacks on the Palatine settlement at German Flatts in 1757 proved that detachment from the conflict was not an option in the long run. Two decades later, as the revolutionary crisis once again brought violence to the contested Mohawk Valley, the descendants of Palatine immigrants could not help but be involved. The Palatines’ physical environment reflected a need to be prepared if and when violence erupted, even in the early stages of the Seven Years’ War. By 1756, a palisaded wall and trench surrounded Johan Jost Herkimer’s house, which served as a fortified garrison as well as a safe haven in case of attack.38 When German settlers built in the mid-­eighteenth century, they often chose to incorporate loopholes in exterior walls for defensive purposes. The openings, wider on the interior than the exterior of the building, allowed occupants to see out and defend themselves. While some of the houses built by continental Europeans in Pennsylvania, most notably that of transplanted New Yorker Heinrich Zeller, have come to be called “forts,” presumably because of their unofficial role as strongholds during the Seven Years’ War, the term is applied with more regularity and substantiation in New York. There, most surviving eighteenth-­century stone buildings, including the dwellings of Johan Peter Wagner, Peter Ehle, Hendrick Frey, and Johannes Klock, as well as the Reformed church in Schoharie, have been given the designation. Yet, in addition to preparation, material culture also demonstrates the spirit of relief, and even celebration, produced by the end of hostilities. The chests and boxes created for Jacob Kniskern and his nieces Elizabet and

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Fig. 4.12  Johannes Kniskern (1746–1846?), low chest, Schoharie County, New York, marked 1778, paint on pine with iron hasp, key, and hardware, 19¾ × 47 × 21 in. Jacob Kniskern’s chest, as well as smaller boxes labeled with the names of his nieces, includes a distinct checkerboard pattern and the date 1778. The Kniskern chest is exceptional among surviving New York chests, with its applied architectural elements, colorful painted decoration, and well-­crafted joinery. It may have been made as a commemorative object, perhaps by family member Johannes Kniskern, to help the Kniskern family celebrate following the conclusion of the turbulent Revolutionary War years. Collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, promised gift of Ralph Esmerian, P1.2001.184. Photo © 2000 by John Bigelow Taylor, New York.

Margreda provide tangible evidence of how one German family dealt with destruction, imprisonment, and treason during the American Revolution and later used material culture to permanently commemorate the events of the war. Jacob Kniskern’s chest is an exceptional piece of furniture, the only known chest from New York to include applied architectural elements (fig. 4.12). Jacob Kniskern was the grandson of immigrant Johann Peter Kniskern, who had established the village of Kniskerndorf on the Schoharie River where the Cobleskill empties into it. Jacob Kniskern’s chest clearly demonstrates his family’s prominence in the region, and, labeled with his name and the date 1778, it also speaks to personal endurance and pride.39 Usually when chests are labeled with a date, it is assumed that the year simply references when the chest was made. However, in this case 1778 held much greater significance for the Kniskern family, as that date marked the beginning of a three-­year period of destruction and chaos. In the spring of

Houses, Chests, and Stove Plates  105

1778, the nearby settlement of Cobleskill was destroyed by the British and their American Indian allies. The skirmish left nineteen area residents dead, destroyed ten houses and barns, and killed horses, cows, and sheep. Two years later, following a devastating series of attacks by Loyalists John Johnson and Joseph Brant, the New York governor was informed that “the Enemy have burnt the whole of Schohary.”40 At least one member of the Kniskern family was taken as a prisoner to Canada.41 More fighting ensued in the valley in the spring and summer of 1781. This time one of the Kniskerns was accused of assisting the British in the destruction.42 While it is possible that Jacob’s chest was produced in 1778, it seems more likely that it was made to commemorate that date after the violence had ceased.43 Period correspondence repeatedly refers to the lack of basic necessities during the war years. Kniskern’s neighbors pleaded with the governor in 1779, “We are destitute of Cloathing, Provisions, and Every Necessary to Support our Destressed families.” Local militia leaders echoed their sentiments the following year, noting, “The distressed Situation of this frontier Settlement urges us to call upon your Excellency for Relief.”44 The repeated burning of houses, barns, and crops destroyed existing household and agricultural goods and made the creation of elaborate new ones unlikely. Further supporting the idea of the chest as a commemorative object are the smaller boxes made for Jacob’s twin nieces, Elizabet and Margreda. The two were born in 1775, and each was later presented with a box marked 1778 and decorated with her name and a checkerboard pattern similar to that on her uncle’s chest. Construction details make it clear that the three objects were not made by the same woodworker at the same time. Jacob’s chest is well constructed with wedged dovetails, pegged moldings, and decorative strap hinges. Margreda’s box in particular was made by someone who had not mastered furniture making—the dados for the till box, for instance, were chiseled into the wrong end of the sides, and the dovetails were randomly spaced. But despite the differing qualities of woodwork, the decorator certainly intended the three objects to be united visually. It seems likely that after years of suffering, the Kniskern family chose to remember surviving the devastating year of 1778 in a permanent way. The names and dates painted on Mohawk and Schoharie Valley chests help us understand not only issues of commemoration but also the relationships built among residents in a region marked by great ethnic diversity. In New York, data from the first U.S. census in 1790 show that people with German surnames did not constitute the dominant population in any part of the state.

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Where they were most concentrated in the counties of Ulster in the Hudson Valley and Montgomery in the Mohawk Valley, they accounted for no more than a fifth of the total population. In parts of Pennsylvania, on the other hand, Germans lived in communities that were more ethnically homogeneous. In some counties, particularly Lancaster and Berks, people of German descent made up almost three-­quarters of the white population. Even in counties with more diverse inhabitants, such as Chester, landholding patterns indicate the creation of distinct ethnic enclaves. When Aaron Fogleman used 1790 census data to compare the level of ethnic segregation by county among people of German descent living in Pennsylvania and New York, he found that in New York Germans were more likely than their Pennsylvania counterparts to live in proximity to non-­Germans of English, Scots Irish, or Dutch descent. The least amount of segregation existed among German and Dutch New Yorkers.45 Material culture helps explain the effect of these demographic realities on everyday life. In Pennsylvania, the names on painted chests are often written in German script. Even when they are not, they typically follow German grammatical constructions, including the addition of “in” to the end of a woman’s surname to make it feminine.46 Germans in Pennsylvania were familiar with the German language; decorative objects as well as documents attest to its use. In New York, where inhabitants were more likely to come in contact with others who did not speak or write German, communication had to be more creative. Often on chests only initials were used to signify a name, perhaps reflecting a practice among area residents of referring to themselves by single letters that could be understood by more people, even those who could not read or pronounce distinctly ethnic names. In other instances, both given names and surnames were boldly spelled out in Roman lettering, a technique suggesting familiarity with English writing. The German convention of making a last name feminine with the addition of “in” was not common.47 The complexity of naming in a region dominated by multiple ethnic groups is demonstrated by a chest produced for Cadarina Greh in 1773—the earliest known dated chest from New York (fig. 4.13). The blue chest itself has construction characteristics typical of furniture produced by Germans in America, including wedged dovetails and through-­tenons. The name on the chest, despite the lack of the feminine “in,” seems to indicate a German owner; even the surname uses a German, as opposed to English, spelling. Yet the story of the chest’s owner does not suggest a simple German-­English dichotomy. Cadarina Greh was also Catherine Gray, the daughter of Adam Gray, an Irish immigrant, and Maria Elizabeth Horning, a Palatine woman.48

Houses, Chests, and Stove Plates  107

Fig. 4.13  Chest, marked Cadarina Greh, 1773. More restrained in its decoration than Jacob Kniskern’s chest, Cadarina Greh’s nevertheless provides important evidence about life in the Mohawk Valley. The chest’s physical form and painted decoration attest to the ethnic diversity of the region and complex interactions among its residents. Collection of the Herkimer Home State Historic Site, Little Falls, New York. Photo by author.

While the chest implies that Cadarina (or the chest’s decorator) may have preferred the German pronunciation and spelling of her name, the execution of the lettering in Roman characters suggests that the English language was also used in the Gray household. A few years after the chest was made, Cadarina married a man of German descent, Johannes Michael Schmidt, who sometimes also went by John M. Smith.49 The Greh-­Gray and Schmidt-­Smith naming variations indicate a sense of hybridity that had been developing among upstate New York’s population since the Germans arrived in the river valleys. Certainly in other places German speakers also varied how they rendered their names as circumstances warranted. In late eighteenth-­century Jonestown, Pennsylvania, for example, members of the furniture-­making Seltzer family labeled their decorated chests by scratching their names in paint. In at least two cases, Christian Seltzer and his son John Seltzer signed the same chest twice, once using the German form of their names written in German script and once using the English form of their names printed in English Roman characters.50 The

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dual signatures may have increased recognition, and therefore commissions, among a population that included people who could read English or German but not necessarily both. Yet, in New York, naming variations did not just appear when they promoted business or were required or preferred for government records. Cadarina Greh’s chest was a personal item, seldom seen by people outside of her family. Through the rendition of her name painted on its front, her chest expressed her own background as the child of British and Palatine parents within a region where multiple ethnic groups came together. The plurality of people in New York’s river valleys created a cultural fusion of which Cadarina Greh’s chest is just one manifestation. In a mid-­eighteenth-­ century meeting of French and Iroquois people, the Native Americans referred to the Germans as “a Nation which is neither French, nor English, nor Indian.”51 All of these groups, as well as the Dutch, had a stake in central New York. Africans or people of African descent, who were held as slaves by prosperous Europeans, added further to the cultural mix.52 John Jacob Ehle, a clergyman trained in Heidelberg and ordained in England, who came to the Mohawk Valley to minister to the Iroquois population, demonstrates the extent to which cross-­cultural interactions could occur. The main portion of the Ehle house, built in 1752 according to a date stone, was constructed for Peter Ehle, the son of the minister and his wife, a Dutch woman named Johanna Van Slyke. Unfortunately, while the building survived into the age of photography, it is not extant today (fig. 4.14). Photographs do show that it may have been similar to the nearby Hendrick Frey house. One of the Ehle house’s noteworthy features was the masonry patterning found on each of the gable ends. Known in America as tumbling, mouse toothing, or braiding, the triangular areas found at the top of the end walls, where they met the roof, were designed to facilitate the construction of the angled surface and create a tight fit with the roof rafter. Laid in either stone or brick, they also provided a decorative element. In New York, tumbling is generally associated with Dutch settlers.53 Its use on the Ehle house, as well as the houses of Hendrick Frey and Johannes Klock, suggests a relationship between valley residents of different ethnic groups. While it can be speculated that a Dutch stone mason may have introduced the style among New York’s Palatine population, it is also possible that immigrants saw the construction technique in Europe, or, in Peter Ehle’s case, that his mother, Johanna, suggested it. The use of Dutch features was not limited to tumbling or even to the exterior of dwelling houses. Physical evidence suggests that some Palatines in New York used jambless fireplaces, which consisted of a hearth with a hood over it

Houses, Chests, and Stove Plates  109

Fig. 4.14  Peter Ehle house, Nelliston, New York, 1752. While the Ehle house no longer exists and its interior plan was never documented, exterior photographs show some intriguing features of the building, including tumbling on the gable ends of its main section. While it is tempting to attribute this decorative element to the Dutch background of Peter Ehle’s mother, other Palatine houses in the Mohawk Valley have similar detailing. Photo by Thomas T. Waterman for the Historic American Buildings Survey, 1937. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, HABS NY, 29-­NEL, 1-­1.

to help capture smoke and carry it to the chimney. Unlike most colonial-­era fireplaces, jambless fireplaces were open on the sides, with a stone wall only at the rear of the hearth. Their use in New York is so closely tied to the Dutch that one author writes, “A jambless fireplace is a sure cultural identifier of a Dutch house.”54 Yet, at the Hartmannsdorf house, a jambless fireplace in the Küche was likely used in conjunction with a closed stove in the Stube, combining features associated with two different European ethnic groups. It is not surprising to find this type of composite culture in New York’s Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys in the eighteenth century. Evidence of cooperative cultural contact and interpersonal alliances, including marriage, is often made manifest through objects. Despite conflicts that pitted various European and Iroquois groups against one another, Palatine immigrants and their descendants did forge relationships with British, Dutch, and Iroquois people, which sometimes are evidenced by creolized material forms.55 Personal papers decorated with watercolor and ink designs provide yet another, more intimate example. In Pennsylvania, literate German-­speaking

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artists, often schoolteachers or clergy, created colorful birth and baptismal certificates and other texts referred to today as Fraktur. As demand increased, printed forms that could be filled in and decorated conveyed similar information, which in most cases continued to be rendered in the German language well into the nineteenth century.56 In New York, artists who bridged cultural groups created different forms. British schoolteacher William Murray, the best documented example, fashioned family registers for Palatine families and other area residents (fig. 4.15).57 Unlike birth and baptismal certificates, which recorded vital information for one child, usually in a horizontal format, family records served a larger family group and highlighted the role of the patriarch, often in a vertical format. Unlike Pennsylvania artists, Murray typically provided names and dates in English and prominently labeled his work. The differences between New York Palatine and Pennsylvania German buildings and belongings such as Murray’s family records make manifest the different conditions the two groups faced in terms of settlement patterns, neighbors, and even weather. Yet members of the two groups did share a common parent culture. Just as Weaver has shown that Pennsylvania German houses diverged from southern German examples, New York Palatine and Pennsylvania German material culture took on different features as a result of the different cultures experienced and shaped by their owners. The variations demonstrate how the two groups made their way in two very distinct New World frontiers. While the Pennsylvania objects may at this point be better documented and command higher resale values on the open market, artifacts made and used by the Palatines of New York have a different and important story to tell about pluralism, persistence, and perseverance. By looking not just at one type of object but rather at the constellation of household goods made and used in New York, we gain a better understanding of the texture of the Palatines’ existence in a multiethnic society situated along an important transportation route in what was an international war zone throughout much of the eighteenth century. We know from documentary sources that the areas that Germans settled in New York and Pennsylvania were physically, socially, and politically distinct; differences continued to grow as the eighteenth century progressed. In Pennsylvania, European settlers often lived in ethnic enclaves where they had limited contact with members of other European groups. In other cases, they inhabited booming towns such as York, Lancaster, and Reading. While the threat of violence due to international conflict was present, actual destruction was a rarity.58 In New York, the population was more diverse, settlements were scattered in the river valleys,

Houses, Chests, and Stove Plates  111

Fig. 4.15  William Murray, Weller Family Record, 1799, watercolor and ink on paper, 19¼ × 16½ in. Highlighting Frederic’s name in bold print in the center of the document, Murray also included Frederic’s wife Elizabeth’s name below his inside the heart. The names and birth information of their children, in English, fill the red circles and empty space between the decorative elements. Collection of the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, N0099.1975. Photo by Richard Walker.

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and hostilities were common and severe. Material culture provides a greater knowledge of how these conditions affected area residents’ lives and their history and thus also provides details not typically found in written sources. Objects, ranging from whole houses to illustrated personal papers, can help us uncover how the Palatines related with their neighbors—be they Dutch, Mohawk, English, or other Palatines—and how they communicated using both words and visual signs. The fact that the Seven Years’ War and the Revolutionary War obliterated much of the eighteenth-­century built environment, as well as agricultural and consumer goods, challenges the researcher, but it also adds important information about the trials of living in upstate New York during that period. Overall, surviving artifacts, examined in conjunction with other types of sources, provide details of life in the eighteenth century. Household objects and buildings articulate the language, color, pattern, and experience of the Palatines in New York and help us understand how their lives varied from the lives of Pennsylvania Germans farther south.

notes 1. Twentieth-­century anthropologists working in the field of linguistics developed the concepts of “etic” and “emic” to distinguish between what outsiders studying a given culture observe and what the participants in that culture perceive. Perhaps most easily understood as the terms apply to the ethnographic study of contemporary cultures, the distinction between etic and emic approaches is also helpful in understanding the past. See Marvin Harris, “History and Significance of the Emic/Etic Distinction,” Annual Review of Anthropology 5 (1976): 329–50. 2. For a history of the Palatines as they traveled from the Palatinate to London to the Hudson Valley to the Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys, see Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 3. Discerning the intention of the author in the creation of primary sources is a fundamental skill of the historian. For one recent explanation of its importance and practice, see Martha C. Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 4. Otterness, Becoming German, esp. 56–59, 126–27. 5. Ulrich Simmendinger, True and Authentic Register of Persons Still Living, by God’s Grace, Who in the Year 1709, Under the Wonderful Providences of the Lord Journeyed from Germany to America or New World and There Seek Their Piece of Bread at Various Places, trans. Herman F. Vesper (St. Johnsville, N.Y.: Enterprise and News, 1934), vii. 6. Jules David Prown, “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction?,” in American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture, ed. Jules David Prown and Kenneth Haltman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000), 13–14; James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life, rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 10–11; Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 8–9. 7. Ken Ames discusses the benefits of studying objects as part of “horizontal constellations or clusters” in Kenneth L. Ames, “Meaning in Artifacts: Hall Furnishings in Victorian America,” in Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, ed. Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 241.

Houses, Chests, and Stove Plates  113 8. Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 57, 62–70; “AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (2009): 1355–64. 9. E. McClung Fleming, “Artifact Study: A Proposed Model,” Winterthur Portfolio 9 (1974): 154–61; Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison, “Shaping the Field: The Multidisciplinary Perspective of Material Culture,” in American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field, ed. Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), esp. 16, 18; “AHR Conversation,” 1362. 10. For one genre of scholarship—major museum publications on the Pennsylvania Germans— see Beatrice Garvan, The Pennsylvania German Collection (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982); Beatrice Garvan and Charles Hummel, The Pennsylvania Germans: A Celebration of Their Arts, 1683–1850 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982); Scott T. Swank et al., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans (New York: W. W. Norton for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1983); Wendy A. Cooper and Lisa Minardi, Paint, Pattern, and People: Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725–1850 (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 2011). 11. James Gregory Cusick, citing Randall T. McGuire, details three types of studies of ethnicity in the field of historical archaeology, and all three can be found in the scholarship on Pennsylvania German material culture. They are “studies concerned with assimilation or acculturation, studies focusing on a group frequently neglected by mainstream history, and studies that seek to identify specific groups with specific material correlates.” James Gregory Cusick, “Archaeological Perspectives on Material Culture and Ethnicity,” in Martin and Garrison, American Material Culture, 321–22. For a concise history of the study of Pennsylvania German decorative arts, see Cooper and Minardi, Paint, Pattern, and People, xxi–xxiv. 12. Stephanie Grauman Wolf, “Hyphenated America: The Creation of an Eighteenth-­Century German-­American Culture,” in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-­Hundred-­Year History, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 1:66–84; Don Yoder, “The Pennsylvania Germans,” in Trommler and McVeigh, America and the Germans, 1:41–65; Scott T. Swank, “The Germanic Fragment,” in Swank et al., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, 4–5. 13. Sally McMurry and Nancy Van Dolsen, eds., Architecture and Landscape of the Pennsylvania Germans, 1720–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 7. 14. Cooper and Minardi, Paint, Pattern, and People, xxiv, 1–4. 15. Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, 33–34; Henry Glassie, “A Central Chimney Continental Log House,” Pennsylvania Folklife 18, no. 2 (1968–69): 33–34. 16. Robert Bucher, “The Continental Log House,” Pennsylvania Folklife 12, no. 4 (1962): 14–19; Glassie, “A Central Chimney Continental Log House.” 17. William Woys Weaver, “The Pennsylvania German House: European Antecedents and New World Forms,” Winterthur Portfolio 21, no. 4 (1986): 253, 264. 18. Gabrielle M. Lanier, The Delaware Valley in the Early Republic: Architecture, Landscape, and Regional Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 35–36, 57–68; Bernard L. Herman, Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2005), 79, 95–97; Cynthia G. Falk, Architecture and Artifacts of the Pennsylvania Germans: Constructing Identity in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 88–94, 184–87. 19. Weaver, “The Pennsylvania German House,” 262. 20. Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 40–41, 44–46; Marianne S. Wokeck, “The Flow and the Composition of German Immigration to Philadelphia, 1727–1775,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 105, no. 3 (1981): 258–61; Thomas L. Purvis, “The National Origins of New Yorkers in 1790,” New York History 67, no. 2 (1986): 142, 148–49; Otterness, Becoming German, 78.

114  Material and Intellectual Cultures 21. Nathaniel S. Benton, A History of Herkimer County (Albany: J. Munsell, 1856), 43–46; Otterness, Becoming German, 143. 22. Otterness, Becoming German, 123–25, 142–43; “Summary of M. de Belletre’s Expedition, the 28th November, 1757,” in The Documentary History of the State of New-­York, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan, 4 vols. (Albany: Weed, Parsons, 1849–51), 1:515–16; Richard Smith, A Tour of Four Great Rivers: The Hudson, Mohawk, Susquehanna, and Delaware in 1769, ed. Francis W. Halsey (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 33. 23. Cynthia G. Falk, “Mohawk Valley Architecture: Cultures in Stone and Wood,” in “Frontier Style: Culture at the Edge of Empire: Mohawk Valley, NY, 1700–1800” (preprints of papers presented at the 2011 Western Frontier Symposium, Johnston, New York), 119–22; Dell Upton, ed., America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups That Built America (Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1986), 51, 55–57; Roderic H. Blackburn and Ruth Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria: Dutch Arts and Culture in Colonial America, 1609–1776 (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1988), 114–15. 24. John J. Vrooman, Forts and Firesides of the Mohawk Country, New York (Philadelphia: Elijah Ellsworth Brownell, 1943), 168–69. Regrettably, the building was demolished in the mid-­nineteenth century. 25. Swank et al., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, 24–27. Pennsylvania returns for the 1798 Federal Direct Tax are accessible at the National Archives, Washington, D.C., records group 58, and on microfilm publication M372. 26. On the presence of log houses in New York, see, for example, William Johnson to Thomas Gage, April 16, 1764, in Sir William Johnson Papers, ed. Edward H. Knoblauch (Albany: New York State Library and University of the State of New York, 2007), CD-­ROM, 11:132; William Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, April 25, 1764, in Sir William Johnson Papers, 11:161. For images, see the Rufus Grider Collection, collection no. VC22932, Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York State Library, Albany, N.Y. 27. Philip E. Pendleton, Oley Valley Heritage: The Colonial Years, 1700–1775 (Birdsboro, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society; Oley, Pa.: Oley Valley Heritage Association, 1994), 63–66. 28. Archaeologists believe that even farther east in the Hudson Valley brick and clay roof tiles used in seventeenth-­century buildings were imported rather than locally made. See James W. Bradley, Before Albany: An Archaeology of Native-­Dutch Relations in the Capital Region, 1600–1664, New York State Museum Bulletin 509 (Albany: New York State Education Department, 2007), 93, 105; Blackburn and Piwonka, Remembrance of Patria, 127. 29. Frey Papers, vol. 1, chap. 14, p. 195, Montgomery County Archive, Fonda, N.Y. A second reference to Nicholas Herkimer buying bricks can be found in John G. Waite and Paul R. Huey, Herkimer House: An Historic Structure Report ([Albany?]: New York State Historic Trust, 1972), 8. 30. Frey Papers, vol. 1, chap. 14, p. 195. 31. George Herkimer, probate inventory, 1789, in Herkimer Family Portfolio, collection no. SC11965, item 11, Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York State Library. For comparative purposes, George’s desk and weaving loom were each valued at only £2. 32. Henry C. Mercer, The Bible in Iron (Doylestown, Pa.: Bucks County Historical Society, 1914), 62–63. 33. Ibid., 146. 34. On iron manufacture in early New York, see, for example, “James de Lancey to the Board of Trade, December 1, 1757,” in Documentary History of the State of New-­York, 1:731. Writing during the Seven Years’ War, de Lancey specifically stated that upon the conclusion of the conflict and with the encouragement of Parliament, iron production could increase in New York. 35. Otterness, Becoming German, 159. Cadwallader Colden reported slightly higher figures, including approximately twelve fatalities and two hundred prisoners. Cadwallader Colden to Peter Collinson, December 31, 1757, in “The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden,” in Collections of the New-­York Historical Society for the Year 1921 (New York: printed for the Society, 1923), 54:213. 36. Letter from Governor Clinton, October 29, 1780, as quoted in Vrooman, Forts and Firesides, 159.

Houses, Chests, and Stove Plates  115 37. Colden to Collinson, December 31, 1757. 38. Benton, History of Herkimer County, 54, map between pages 52 and 53. 39. Andrew Albertson, “A Stately Chest Befitting Its Owner: Jacob Kniskern’s Schoharie County Chest,” Folk Art 30, no. 3 (2005): 46–50. 40. Col. V. Veeder to Governor Clinton, October 18, 1780. Also William Dietz, Thomas Cheson, and Jost Becker to General Starke, May 30, 1778; Abraham Wempel to General Ten Broek, June 6, 1778. All in Edward A. Hagan, War in Schohary, 1777–1783 (Middleburgh, N.Y.: Middleburgh News Press, 1980), 11, 41. 41. Jeptha R. Simms, History of Schoharie County and Border Wars (Albany: Munsell and Tanner, 1845; reprint, Cobleskill, N.Y.: Schoharie County Council of Senior Citizens, 1974), 467. 42. Hagan, War in Schohary, 46. 43. For another example of a commemorative chest, see the one made for Maria Eitenyer in 1835 and marked with her birth year, 1789. Cooper and Minardi, Paint, Pattern, and People, 146–47, 256. 44. Adam Schefer et al. to Governor Clinton, January 7, 1779; Peter Vrooman et al. to Governor Clinton, April 12 and July 24, 1780. All in Hagan, War in Schohary, 23, 26, 29–30. 45. Purvis, “National Origins of New Yorkers,” 141; Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 81–85; Cynthia G. Falk, “Symbols of Assimilation or Status? The Meanings of Eighteenth-­Century Houses in Coventry Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania,” Winterthur Portfolio 33, no. 2/3 (1998): 112–13. 46. For examples of Pennsylvania German painted chests, see Monroe H. Fabian, The Pennsylvania-­German Decorated Chest (New York: Universe Books, 1978; reprint, Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 2004); Garvan, Pennsylvania German Collection, 18–25. 47. For examples of New York painted chests, see Mary Antoine de Julio, German Folk Arts of New York State (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1985). 48. William V. H. Barker, Early Families of Herkimer County, New York: Descendants of the Burnetsfield Palatines (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1986), 108. 49. Royden Woodward Vosburgh, ed., Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Herkimer in Town of Herkimer, Herkimer County, New York (Herkimer, N.Y.: Herkimer County Historical Society, 1986), 52. 50. Benno Forman, “German Influences in Pennsylvania Furniture,” in Swank et al., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, 144–46; Esther S. Fraser, “Pennsylvania German Dower Chests,” pt. 1, The Magazine Antiques 11, no. 2 (1927): 121, and pt. 3, The Magazine Antiques 11, no. 6 (1927): 474–75. The trend of dual shop labels in German and English was noted in Philadelphia by Henry Wansey. He observed, “A great many Germans settled at Philadelphia; on the signs over their shop doors they have their names and trades expressed both in English and German text, viz. Alleyne Innis, Hat Maker. Alleyne Innis, Huth Maker.” Henry Wansey, An Excursion to the United States of North America, in the Summer of 1794 (Salisbury, England: J. Easton, 1798), 173–74. 51. “Conference Between M. de Vaudreuil and the Indians,” in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan, 15 vols. (Albany, 1856–87), 10:513, as quoted in Otterness, Becoming German, 155. 52. Cynthia G. Falk, “Forts, Rum, Slaves, and the Herkimers’ Rise to Power in the Mohawk Valley,” New York History 89, no. 3 (2008): 221–34. Information in this article on slaveholding among the Palatines greatly benefitted from the research of Tobi Voigt. 53. Harrison Meeske, The Hudson Valley Dutch and Their Houses (1998; reprint, Fleischmanns, N.Y.: Purple Mountain Press, 2001), 178, 190. 54. Ibid., 266. 55. On the relationship between the Palatines and the Iroquois, see David L. Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 77–85 (Mohawk), 180–90, 204–11 (Oneida). 56. Frederick S. Weiser, “Fraktur,” in Swank et al., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, 230–32; Garvan and Hummel, Pennsylvania Germans, 95–96, plate 64.

116  Material and Intellectual Cultures 57. Arthur B. Kern and Sybil B. Kern, “Painters of Record: William Murray and His School,” Clarion 12 (Winter 1986/87): 28–35. 58. Delaware Indians did attack the Pennsylvania settlement at Tulpehocken on December 15, 1755. Ironically, this area was inhabited by Palatines who had relocated from New York. See Otterness, Becoming German, 158.

Five

(Re)Discovering the German-­Language Literature of Colonial America Patrick M. Erben

In a 2004 editor’s column in the journal Early American Literature, David Shields commented on the paucity of scholarship on the German-­language literature of colonial America: “I was put in mind of the strangest inadequacy in the understanding of early American literary culture: the lack of comment about the eighteenth-­century Germans who came to North America heeding the promise of religious liberty.”1 Taking his cue from John Joseph Stoudt’s 1956 anthology Pennsylvania German Poetry, Shields pointed to the immense poetic production of Moravians, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, the Ephrata Cloister, and other radical Pietists.2 Indeed, the 85,000 to 110,000 German-­speaking immigrants who arrived in North America during the colonial period brought with them rich literary, cultural, and religious traditions, recorded their immigration and settlement experience, and formed an immigrant culture in conflict and cooperation with their English, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, French, Spanish, Swedish, Native American, and African American neighbors.3 German-­speaking immigrants wrote in a variety of genres, including poetry, hymnody, promotional literature, ethnography, captivity narratives, ghost stories, political tracts, personal memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, didactic literature, theological tracts, commonplace books, martyrologies, sermons, histories, and fiction. This literature constitutes one of the largest untapped research fields in early American studies.

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Yet scholarship has not always neglected this literary culture. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German American scholars led the charge to establish the German-­language literature of North America as a field of academic inquiry. In hindsight, their scholarship was marred by nationalist agendas.4 Nevertheless, they also saved many writers and sources from oblivion, assembled bibliographies, and initiated scholarly publishing venues. Resentment of German cultural nationalism in the wake of World Wars I and II prevented their recovery work from having a profound effect on the increasingly English-­only canon of American literature. Attention to German-­language literature in America was overshadowed by the ascendency of the exceptionalism model in American studies, based on a New England Puritan founding mythology. In response, some German American scholars attempted to establish German-­language literature in colonial America as a countertradition.5 Other scholars—especially Hans Galinsky, Harold Jantz, and Christoph Schweitzer—stressed interconnections between German and English literary productions in colonial America and their indebtedness to early modern European models. More recently, the multilingual turn in American literary studies has revived an interest in German and other non-­ English language traditions. Historical scholarship is now pointing the way for literary scholars by focusing on the transplantation of religious groups, the formation of transatlantic networks, and the circulation of spiritual motives across linguistic, denominational, and protonational borders. Yet mainstream American literary and cultural studies as well as college curricula remain ignorant of the contributions of German-­language writing and culture. This essay proposes scholarly approaches and highlights research opportunities that situate German-­language literature and culture in colonial America within a multilingual and postnational American literary history. Scholarship must attend to the transatlantic and hemispheric relationships among cultures, literatures, politics, and economics that characterized the transformation from early modern to modern subjectivities in the eighteenth century; it must also seek to understand how local conditions and communal formations allowed for a flourishing of translingual influence and locally unique immigrant cultures. Such a recovery does not aim at competing with the Perry Miller model of New England exceptionalism as the foundation for American literature. My argument for incorporating the German-­language literature of early America thoroughly into an American literary and cultural history is also not a call for assimilation into the hegemonic narrative of Anglophone traditions. At the same time, a rediscovery of the German-­language literature

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of America must avoid the trap of ethnicization that would interpret German culture in America as caught between the poles of assimilation to English-­ language culture and cultural isolationism. Rediscovering the German-­ language literature of early America does not mean filling in a more or less complete picture of the early modern Atlantic and early America. It instead proffers a model for rewriting American literary history. The following two case studies describe interrelated avenues for refashioning American literature through the rediscovery of its German-­language authors and texts. In my readings of the literary relationships between German and English supporters of the Quaker Friendly Association during the French and Indian War, especially the Schwenkfelder Christopher Schultz and the Quaker Israel Pemberton, I emphasize the connections between and mutual development of English-­and German-­language literature through translation and multilingual exchange. Resting on similar spiritual and intellectual foundations, English and German mystics, pacifists, and religious radicals in the province used translation and literary exchange to create a similar understanding of society. This approach focuses on concrete personal and literary relationships and analyzes them paradigmatically within larger literary, cultural, and social currents. In so doing, I want to encourage scholars to utilize history-­of-­the-­book methodologies to uncover the interconnected worlds of reading and writing among German-­and English-­speaking people in early America. Reestablishing the significance of German-­language writing in the period must begin by painting a more complete picture of the spaces between German-­and English-­speaking writers that could be crossed by means of translation and translingual textual exchange. Beyond the confines of this essay, researching genealogies of reading, translation, and translingual textual exchange reveals an Atlantic republic of letters not structured exclusively along linguistic or protonational lines. The reformist enthusiasm of Civil War England and post–Thirty Years’ War continental Europe, for example, spurred a widespread embrace of utopian ideals (such as Jan Amos Comenius’s pansophist notion of a universal reformation of education, language, and religion) and created a cosmopolitan and translingual sphere of intellectual exchange extending to America. English and German authors were joined by a kinship rooted in early modern theories and movements, such as pansophism, religious alchemy, and the rejuvenation of orthodox religion through individualistic and emotional relationships between believers and their redeemer. Further comparative and translingual literary analyses will call attention to the ways in which writers belonging

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to specific regional groups and denominations explored spiritual and literary contact points and differences. The second case study compares two poets—the Pennsylvania German radical Pietist Johannes Kelpius and the New England Puritan Edward Taylor. Their common foundations in early modern spiritualism, interests in alchemy and pansophism, and Baroque poetic sensibilities point toward a deep connectivity and defy a linguistically or ethnically exclusive American literary history. A more sustained analysis of Kelpius’s and Taylor’s spiritual poetics could lead to a larger literary history of religious poetry in early America that not only expands the traditional bias toward New England Puritanism but further traces the roots of American culture in esoteric traditions in early modern Europe and their flourishing in New World environments. Comparing English and German writers who worked during the same period interferes with the continuing desire among literary scholars to establish transhistorical trajectories and teleologies. Had Kelpius and Taylor personally known each other, they would have found plenty of reasons for debating the finer points of difference between Lutheran Pietism and Calvinist Puritanism; yet reading each other’s poetry, they might have been surprised by their similar poetics of religious desire—tropes representing their mystical, corporeal, and erotic advances toward a union with Christ, the heavenly bridegroom. Finally, this essay suggests research opportunities and describes scholarly desiderata. Rather than trying to define a “field” or “discipline,” I wish to communicate a sense of openness and accessibility for an emerging study of early American literature written in German. I especially encourage editorial and translation projects that would save many texts from obscurity and make them objects of study for scholars and students with or without German-­ language skills. Beyond textual recovery, scholarship on the manifold texts, authors, and genres represented in the German-­language literature of early America must participate in the variety of critical and theoretical approaches represented in work on Anglophone literature—from history of the book, to autobiography studies, to ecocriticism, material culture studies, gender criticism, and postcolonialism.

Literary Friendship, Book Exchange, and Translation The role played by colonial German-­language writings in the development of a larger transnational and translingual literary landscape can only be grasped

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in tracing the multiple textual and personal connections facilitated through translation and literary exchanges among congenial individuals and groups. Throughout much of the eighteenth century, for example, the translation and exchange of books between religious groups such as Quakers and radical German Protestants—including Mennonites, Schwenkfelders, Dunkers, and Moravians—created a mutual reading culture on religious and literary subjects. During the French and Indian War, such exchanges especially informed their mutual activism for peace. Soon after the establishment of the Quakers’ Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures in 1756, its founder, Israel Pemberton (1715–1779), engaged in a lively correspondence with the Schwenkfelder leader Christopher Schultz (1718–1789). A university-­educated pastor to the Schwenkfelder immigrants in Pennsylvania, Schultz became their principal spokesperson and liaison to other political and religious groups, both English and German, during the colonial and early national period.6 Schultz became central to the project of defending the Schwenkfelders’ principle of pacifism to pro-­war factions during the French and Indian War and the Revolutionary War. In a letter to Schultz, Pemberton revealed that the Schwenkfelder and Quaker support of the Friendly Association relied on translation networks and book exchanges: “Loving friend, I have just recd. [received] thy Letter with the Translation of Hopkin’s Address; I am told Christ. Sour has gott it translated & printed already, but have not seen any of them, intend to write to him ab. [about] it. The Abridgment of Sergeant’s Memoirs is in the Press & which I expect be printed next week, when it is done I purpose to send thee some of them.”7 Pemberton passed English texts on to Schultz, received his translations in return, had them published by Christoph Saur and other German printers, and finally disseminated the printed results back among the Schwenkfelders, Mennonites, and so forth. The texts Pemberton is referring to reflect precisely the ideals to which Quaker and Schwenkfelder supporters of the Friendly Association subscribed: the descriptive subtitle of Samuel Hopkins’s Address to the People of New-­England (published in Boston in 1753 and reprinted by Franklin and Hall in 1757) stated its goal of “representing the very great importance of attaching the Indians to their interest; not only by treating them justly and kindly; but by using proper endeavours to settle Christianity among them.”8 Hopkins’s book also included “an account of the methods used for the propagation of the Gospel among the said Indians, by the late Reverend Mr. John Sergeant.” Through the mediation of Pemberton and Schultz’s friendship, as well as

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Schultz’s translation work, English-­language works on friendly relations with Native Americans penetrated German-­language groups. Vice versa, a letter Schultz wrote to Pemberton on April 15, 1768, encapsulates the interest of the Quakers in Schwenkfelder history and religion as well as the broader tradition of German spiritualism and radical Protestantism. Schultz refers to an earlier letter in which he had provided Pemberton with an overview of a classic text of mystical Pietism, Gottfried Arnold’s Unparteyische Kirchen-­und Ketzer-­Historie (Impartial history of the church and heretics), and he refers Pemberton to the sections in the book dealing with Caspar Schwenkfeld.9 Contact and book exchange with German radical Pietists such as the Schwenkfelders provided Pennsylvania Quakers with insight into the cosmopolitan world of religious ideas in the Atlantic world and created a common reading culture. Schultz further mentions having sent Anthony Benezet (1713–1784)—his second most active correspondent among the Quakers and a notable abolitionist, educator, and peace activist—“some short Account of ye Historie of C.  S. and his Followers, which if thou pleases I hope he will let thee see.”10 Commenting on a manuscript draft of Samuel Smith’s “History of Pennsylvania,” Benezet, in turn, asked his Quaker friend to mention the principles and conduct of the German peace sects.11 Benezet’s communication with Moravians and Schwenkfelders made him a connoisseur of German mystical literature, such as the writings of medieval German mystic Johannes Tauler, which he translated from a French version into English. In his preface, Benezet evoked an ecumenical spirit mediated by a mystical communion linking different periods, languages, and faiths: “Tho’ the reader is not to expect elegancy of language, in writings of that age; yet, it is thought, the plainness of honest simplicity of the author, who had solely the amendment of the hearts of his readers in view; and the divine unction which attends his writings, will make it acceptable and profitable to the awakened, unprejudiced inquirers, of every religious denomination.”12 By translating and disseminating the writings of a German mystic, Benezet pursued a threefold project: to promote an interior faith, to cast spiritual writings as the outpourings of the divine mind, and to create an ecumenical unity among Christians. One of the most widespread yet scarcely acknowledged phenomena in colonial America, therefore, is the publication and circulation of a variety of texts in translation—especially of anything relating to spirituality and religion. English readers read a variety of religious works translated from the German and created a large market for such materials, and German printers

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such as Christoph Saur, Anton and Gotthard Armbrüster, and Henry Miller filled a demand among German readers for translations of English spiritual works. For example, a German-­language work that was popularized through translation among English readers was Johannes Kelpius’s Kurtzer Begriff oder leichtes Mittel zu beten, oder mit Gott zu reden (translated as A Short, Easy, and Comprehensive Method of Prayer). Johannes Kelpius (1667–1708) was a native of a German-­speaking enclave in Transylvania, studied theology at the University of Altdorf, and eventually came into contact with radical Pietists such as the ostracized Lutheran pastor Johann Jakob Zimmermann. In 1693, Zimmermann, Kelpius, and a total of forty mystical seekers left Germany for Rotterdam with the goal of establishing their so-­called Chapter of Perfection in Pennsylvania and presumably awaiting the advent of the millennium. After Zimmermann passed away in Rotterdam, the rest of the group continued on to London, where they met with the members of the Philadelphian Society. They eventually arrived in Pennsylvania in 1694, where they settled in a celibate community on Wissahickon Creek outside of Philadelphia.13 Kelpius apparently wrote his Method of Prayer in the first decade of the 1700s as a digest of at least two significant European contributions to a spiritualist notion of inward prayer by August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) and the Quietist French mystic Madame Guyon (1648–1717). Although one printed edition of Kelpius’s work may have been published before his death in 1708 by the Philadelphia printer Reynier Jansen, the first extant edition appeared in German in 1756, at a time when war and internal pressure on pacifist sects to abandon their testimony mounted. The German edition was quickly followed by two English editions published by the German printers Henry Miller (1761) and Christoph Saur Jr. (1763). According to an English inscription in an extant copy of the Miller printing, Kelpius’s German original was translated by Christopher Witt, who also produced the English translations of Kelpius’s hymn texts. The German and English printings as well as the English inscription point toward a translingual audience for a book that appealed to several spiritual ideals championed by nonresistant, pacifist groups and a variety of sectarian, radical Pietist Protestants.14 The literary exchanges between German and English activists for the Quakers’ Friendly Association in the 1750s and 1760s, and the dissemination of Johannes Kelpius’s Method of Prayer among German and English readers, evince the translingual construction of American literature in the colonial period. German-­language writings on religious and nonreligious issues did not develop in an ethnic enclave but rather as a vital part of the larger, transnational development of colonial

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culture. Even in the absence of direct literary exchanges, English and German writers in colonial America frequently drew from a common storehouse of knowledge, ideas, and aesthetic sensibilities in Europe. Comparative analyses of well-­known English-­language authors and German-­language authors writing in similar periods, genres, and sensibilities may enhance our knowledge of the interaction between literary and linguistic traditions. A case in point is the religious poetry of New England Puritan poet Edward Taylor (1642–1729) and Pennsylvania German poet and hymnist Johannes Kelpius (in collaboration with Christopher Witt as translator).

Comparative Poetics—Edward Taylor and Johannes Kelpius Edward Taylor and Johannes Kelpius lived and created devotional and meditative poetry in colonial America at roughly the same time. Taylor composed his Preparatory Meditations—a collection of poems designed to probe the mystery of the incarnation and union between Christ and the believer through the Lord’s Supper—during his service as minister in Westfield, Massachusetts, from 1671 until his retirement in 1725.15 Kelpius wrote numerous hymns—devotional poems focusing on the love and desired union of the soul with Christ—from 1694 to his death in 1708. Intellectually and spiritually, Taylor and Kelpius were rooted in the esoteric, spiritualist, and alchemical currents of seventeenth-­century European Protestantism that sought a relationship between the individual believer and Christ based on affective, inward transformations of the self. Both also wrote poetry typifying Baroque aesthetic conventions. In their mystical thought and poetic endeavors, Taylor and Kelpius invoked alchemical principles of purification and transmutation that had been popularized in Germany and England during the Rosicrucian furor of the mid-­seventeenth century. These principles were used to interpret the agency of divine grace in the refinement of the soul and its eventual union with the divine.16 Taylor and Kelpius looked to alchemy for “a physical process of refinement utilized as metaphor for the spiritual experience of the imitatio Christi.” In their poetry, “the transformation of lead, dross, or dung into gold corresponds to the aspirant’s gradual sublimation of the desires of the flesh into the virtues of Christ.”17 Moreover, both poets revived and retooled the long-­ standing Christian tradition—following the Song of Songs (or Canticles)—of eroticizing the relationship between the individual soul (the bride) and Christ (the bridegroom). While scholarship has separately noted these currents for both poets, no comparative analysis exists. This case study

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situates Taylor’s and Kelpius’s poetics in their common historical and theological moment and then presents a literary analysis and comparison. A comparison between Taylor and Kelpius contributes to a better understanding of the ways in which English and German immigrants transplanted spiritual and literary traditions and tropes from seventeenth-­century Europe to America and adapted them to their specific ecclesiastic, communal, and personal situations. Rather than simply validating a more or less neglected German-­language poet through association with a widely studied Anglo-­ American counterpart, such a comparative analysis overcomes insular concepts of the religious, cultural, and literary development of early America. In locating the efflorescence of esoteric and mystical sensibilities in two different colonies at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a comparison between Taylor and Kelpius also challenges scholarly assumptions about the ascendency of Enlightenment epistemologies. The poetry of Taylor and Kelpius places neo-­Platonist, alchemical, and Rosicrucian ideas in the cultural and intellectual landscape of eighteenth-­century America and reveals such points of view not as declining but as flourishing in this place and time. German poets such as Kelpius played a key role in the transmission of esoteric sensibilities and must stand out in histories of this process. Granted, literary comparisons between the poetry produced by writers belonging to different denominational traditions—such as Taylor’s New England Calvinism and Kelpius’s radical Pietism—potentially overemphasize similarities between poetic tropes and sensibilities originating from discrepant theological, ecclesiastical, and even liturgical notions and practices. Rooted in distinct branches of the Protestant Reformation, Taylor and Kelpius obviously differed in particular doctrines and respective morphologies of salvation. While New England Puritanism retained an emphasis on predestination and unconditional election, Lutheran Pietism (even in Kelpius’s more radical variant) claimed a path to grace open to everyone through the word of God (sola scriptura) and participation in the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Yet such doctrinal distinctions are often too generalizing. In fact, the common denominator of many radical Protestant reform movements of the seventeenth century was their desire to leave behind the formal, doctrinal religions established by the first wave of Protestantism in the sixteenth century and stress more common elements of reformed religion, such as experiential faith and practical piety. Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651–1719), the Lutheran-­Pietist-­turned-­Quaker and founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania, thus considered denominational differences as mere signifiers distracting from the core of true Christian faith:

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Quietisten, Pietisten, sind nur Nahmen, wahre Christen, müssen doch mit furcht u. beben Phil. 2:1 streben still und fromm zu leben. 1. Tim. 2:2. (Quietists, Pietists, those are but names, True Christians must with fear and trembling Phil. 2:1 Strive to live quietly and piously. 1 Tim. 2:2.)18 For Pastorius, dwelling on the names or doctrines of these newly emerging religious movements distracted from the quiet and pious dedication to Christ they originally denoted. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, reform movements within many of the mainline Protestant churches stressed a more inward, pious, and Christ-­like life of the individual believer. Regarding the subject of preparationism, New England Calvinists as well as the members of Pietist denominations who settled in colonial Pennsylvania differed as much from their respective coreligionists as they did from outsiders. Among radical Pietists, preparations for receiving the workings of the Holy Spirit affecting conversion within the individual ranged from the laborious and even painful Busskampf and Durchbruch championed by August Hermann Francke, to the ecstatic and erotic longings of Nicolas Ludwig von Zinzendorf and the Moravians, to the reclusive and mystical meditations of Johannes Kelpius and other members of his Chapter of Perfection. Kelpius composed his most emphatic treatment of his notion of preparation in a letter to a female Quaker preacher, Hester Palmer of Flushing, Long Island. In the letter, Kelpius patterns the process of preparation on the book of Revelation and outlines three distinct “wilderness states.” Following the flight of the woman into the wilderness described in Revelation 12, the church, as well as each individual believer, had to follow this desertion of the carnal world. Each “wilderness state” represented a step in the approach toward a perfect union with God. The movement from the first, the “barren wilderness,” to the second, the “fruitful wilderness,” could be accomplished by human beings who strove to dedicate themselves to spiritual perfection. The third, the “wilderness of the elect of God,” however, could only be reached by a chosen few. Addressed to a “Public Friend,” Kelpius’s outline of a three-­tiered process conflicted with the authorization of individual testimony through the inward light within the Society of Friends. Kelpius even criticized the supposed self-­ delusion of gaining access to divine communications without a gradual preparation and approach to the mystery of God:

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And what a great presumption it is . . . to go forth without being thus duly prepared beforehand. For though such many have inspirations, Revelations, Motions and the like Extraordinary Favours . . . yet they will effect and build nothing, but only destroy. . . . Yea, there is no small Danger of loosing themselves and to bruise and grind that good seed, which was not designed for Meat but for increase, not for to be sent forth but to be kept in an honest and Good Heart.19 It is unclear whether Kelpius meant to imply that Palmer herself was not spiritually ready to spread God’s word and first needed to work—in seclusion— on approaching a spiritual union; even though the letter is addressed to her, Kelpius’s comments criticize a lack of preparation among many Christians in general. In any case, Kelpius’s spiritual poetry served as a tool for scrutinizing the soul’s state and mapping its journey through various stages, from being beholden to a carnal world, to self-­denial, to the desire for spiritual perfection, to various degrees of dejection and exultation in the quest for divine union. For New England Puritans, the issue of preparation took a central role in debates over the terms of church membership. Edward Taylor and his neighboring minister Solomon Stoddard, for instance, parted ways over the preparation necessary for admission to the Lord’s Supper. As David L. Parker convincingly argued, this controversy needs to be understood in the context of the two ministers’ “fundamentally opposite views of the relationship between preparation and effectual conversion.” Whereas Stoddard was concerned that preparation might be mistaken for an actual sign of conversion, Taylor believed that “aid offered by the Spirit to man’s natural faculties in the preliminary stages of conversion”—that is, in the preparatory process—should be considered as “savingly gracious.” The goal of preparation, for Taylor (as well as for Kelpius), was to gain a proper “aversion from sin.”20 Taylor’s own Preparatory Meditations, rather than ever claiming a state of assurance, reflected a fundamental dilemma in the Puritan morphology of grace: preparing for the Holy Spirit to affect conversion certainly required an abandonment of sin in the individual, yet conversion also demanded that the soul curb its ambition to gain such an elevated state. This required self-­denial and abandonment of an autonomous spiritual agency, affected by a thorough revulsion against one’s sinfulness and unworthiness to enter a union with the divine, which, therefore, stood in tension with the equally necessary function of preparation to increase the desire of the soul, or bride, for Christ, the bridegroom. Despite

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doctrinal and ecclesiastical differences between Puritans and radical Pietists, Taylor and Kelpius similarly reflected in their poetry on the paradoxical relationship between an active weaning of the soul from self-­love and its passive opening to receive the blessing of God’s grace. A comparison of Taylor’s and Kelpius’s poetics demonstrates how related mystical and alchemical concepts of purification, perfection, and divine union gave rise to similar poetic representations of the subject of divine love. Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations and Kelpius’s hymnody, especially his bilingual collection “Die klägliche Stimme der verborgenen Liebe / The Lamenting Voice of the Hidden Love,” exhibit a common poetics of holy love or desire.21 Both trace the journey of the soul through stages of the mystical process of achieving union with the divine and thus deploy a gamut of paradoxical emotions and literary devices. Such a poetics of devotional desire in Taylor’s and Kelpius’s work situates both poets within a larger tradition of sacred eroticism that simultaneously operates on metaphorical and corporeal levels. Taylor’s and Kelpius’s experience of holy love, especially their desire for a union with Christ, stretched their physical and spiritual faculties to their limits. In their poetry, readers encounter poetic subjects who are at once sick and ecstatic in their longing for the heavenly bridegroom. Following their mutual grounding in Baroque aesthetics, Taylor and Kelpius display in their poetry a penchant for metaphysical and mystical conceits or tropes; the more unusual or even strained the comparison, the better. Thus, both used the paradox as their most frequent poetic device. The paradox not only supported their taste for tropes that challenge intellectual and affective faculties, but also reflects the inherent tensions of the mystical process and the poetic subject’s desired union with Christ. Kelpius and Taylor grapple with the central paradox between the poetic attempt to use language to woo Christ and the ultimate inadequacy of any human performance to express divine love or sway the divine bridegroom. Dejection and lament are the modes best expressing the intensity of religious and emotional longing as well as the utter lack of human agency to achieve union with the divine. Yet Taylor and Kelpius relish sometimes startlingly sensual tropes that flaunt the degree to which the individual is consumed by this love. In spite of the absence of distinct stages toward the achievement of a mystical union, contact points in the poetics of holy love exist between Kelpius and Taylor. Their poems often begin by contemplating the mystery of divine love, especially the union between God and humanity in the incarnation. In Meditation 1.1, for example, Taylor exclaims,

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What love is this of thine, that Cannot bee In thine Infinity, O Lord, Confinde, Unless it in thy very Person see, Infinity and Finity Conjoyn’d? What hath thy Godhead, as not satisfide Marri’de our Manhood, making it its Bride?”22 Similarly, Meditation 1.10 marvels, “But how it came, amazeth all Communion. / Gods onely Son doth hug Humanity, / Into his very person.”23 Kelpius constructs a “friend” who virtually diagnoses the poetic speaker’s condition of holy love: “I know what troubles thee / What makes thee sick, ’tis Love, which now thou canst not see.” The speaker’s response reveals his dilemma and explains the source of Taylor’s exasperation: “And oh! how can I be so bold this Grace to do me? / That I do Love deserve, or yet encline unto me / The High & Holy Mind such Favours me to do; / Poluted as I am, should yet be gracious too?”24 Neither Taylor nor Kelpius actually doubts the possibility that God could join humanity through Christ. They ask whether they (or “Humanity” in general) deserve the favor of divine grace embodied in the incarnation. Their poetry thus abounds in tropes of pollution or self-­deprecation and calls for a divine alchemy to cleanse or refine the soul, making it worthy to be wedded to Christ. Kelpius struggles to comprehend or literally see God’s love: “Since my unworthyness, & my unfaithful wise, / The Mountain of my Sins still comes before my Eyes.”25 Taylor imagines his own impurities as a direct impediment to a divine union; even the alchemical process of purification leaves a repugnant store of excrement: Nature’s Alembick’t is, Its true: that stills The Noblest Spirit terrene fruits possess, Yet, oh! the Relicks in the Caldron will Proove all things else, Guts, Garbage, Rotteness. And all its pipes but Sincks of nasty ware That foule Earths face, and do defile the aire. A varnisht pot of putrid excrements, And quickly turns to excrements itselfe, By natures Law: but, oh! there therein tents A spark immortall and no mortall elfe.

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An Angell bright here in a Swine Sty dwell! What Lodge of Wonders’s this? What tongue can tell?26 The thinking, here, is circular: in contemplating God’s incarnation—the union of the divine with human flesh in Christ—Taylor is forced to look upon his own imperfections; yet the process of alchemical purification, alluded to by the “Alembick,” “Caldron,” and “pipes,” only yields more filth and thus intensifies the conundrum of why divinity would inhabit such a state. The solution is that Christ cleans or heals from within: “This now doth raise the Miracle apace, / Christ doth step in, and Graces Art improove. / He kills the Leprosy that taints the Walls: / And sanctifies the house before it falls.”27 For Kelpius, this inward transformation or refinement process happens in seclusion and over a long period of time: Consider precious Gold, how deep it lies infused I’th Bowels of the Earth, & shall it once be used: So must it through the fire its greatest heat be born, Then may it after be as Crown and Septer worn. How sweet-­wine must ferment, thou may’st thy self be thinking, Before the fæces can be to the bottom sinking: How long it lies, stopt up, before it springs i’th Glass; Before it Nectar like, the Heart & Mind rejoice.28 The speaker follows up with a list of petitions calling God to perform processes of purification and refinement: “Make me as Living Gold,” “Make me as the New Wine,” “Make a new Heart in me.”29 Yet, for both Kelpius and Taylor, overcoming their own sinfulness or lackluster love requires more than heating or fermentation but rather a form of divine violence. As self-­love is considered the greatest obstacle for divine love and thus for a union with Christ, the individual has to court an outward physical sickness, which serves as a conduit to and metaphor for an inward wounding—a mortification of the self through pain and weakness that breaks down the capacity of the soul to love itself and thus leads to an utter abandonment to God. Kelpius writes, This Secret Love is like to sharp-­Sword-­pointed weapons, Which Inward every where does wound thee, as now Happens:

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But when out of thy self, thy Lover thou shall wound, Then will thy Body be, with Soul & Spirit found. The secret Jesus love is like one deeply wounded, Whose Inward Bleeding flux, deep in the Heart is founded: Nothing can ease this Pain, & nought can give it Rest, Till it’s into the Heart of it’s Beloved prest. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Come wound me more & more, by thy loves sacred power, That I may find its strength, & working every hour: For killing of my strength, till through the Red-­Sea Shore, I press to thee, therefore come, wound me more & more.30 Similarly, Taylor asks for a kind of holy impalement to mortally wound his sinful nature: Blesst Lord, my King, where is thy golden Sword? Oh! Sheath it in the bowells of my Sin. Slay my Rebellion, make thy Law my Word. Against thine Enemies Without within.31 Elsewhere, he seeks a holy cleansing of a type of congestion in the spiritual channels that would allow him to receive divine love: Had not my Soule’s thy Conduit, Pipes stopt bin With mud, what Ravishment would’st thou Convay? Let Graces Golden Spade dig till the Spring Of tears arise, and cleare this filth away. Lord, let thy spirit raise my sighings till These Pipes my soule do with thy sweetness fill.32 It would seem that for both Kelpius and Taylor, such mortal wounding would result in an ecstatic flooding of the soul with divine love. Yet here the paradoxical nature of divine love becomes apparent: the soul must fear a precipitate or premature satisfaction as much as, or even more than, a lack of desire. While falling short of directly comparing divine love to sexual desire, both Kelpius and Taylor construct implicit analogies between them. Kelpius features a virtual lover’s game—full of doubt, hope, anxiety, and

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jealousy—between the soul and Christ: “So very seldom have the loving ones contentment. / They cannot conquer quite Surprise, fear, & Resentment: / Since Conquest makes them Weak, & strength does make them fear, / The best which they esteem is Nothingness, most dear.”33 A too rapid development of love, “Conquest,” is counterproductive to the desire that invites a union with the beloved. The self-­reflective admiration of love for its own sake makes the soul lose sight of its ultimate goal. In spite of both poets’ repeated petitions to open channels for love to pour out, they ultimately court weakness and nothingness. As in human relationships, acquiring the object of one’s desire— or merely the delusion of such a conquest—may induce the loss of interest. Taylor, while first complaining of God hiding his love, has to remind himself that the union with the divine must be deferred to the hereafter; during our earthly existence, love must remain measured: What placed in the Sun: and yet my ware, A Cloud upon my head? An Hoodwinke blinde? In middst of Love thou layst on mee, despare? And not a blinke of Sunshine in my minde? Shall Christ bestow his lovely Love on his, And mask his face? allowing not a kiss? .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . But listen, Soule, here seest thou not a Cheate. Earth is not heaven: Faith not Vision. No. To see the Love of Christ on thee Compleate Would make heavens Rivers of joy, earth overflow. This is the Vale of tears, not mount of joyes. Some Crystal drops while here may well suffice.34 The soul, and thus the poetry expressing the soul’s love for divine union, constantly has to negotiate between its anxiety to be loved and receive tokens of divine love on the one hand and the curbing of desire on the other hand. Kelpius repeatedly enjoins the soul to follow but not get ahead of Christ; imitatio Christi must never result in the surpassing of Christ. The soul must love, but not more ardently than God; the soul must suffer, but not more painfully than Christ. Divine love, in other words, must never be an end in itself. The paradox between longing for love and curbing one’s desire in Kelpius’s and Taylor’s poetry points toward a larger tension in mystic theology between apophatic and cataphatic language of mysticism (also known as via negativa

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and via positiva). The former states by way of negation and the latter by way of affirmation the nature of divine love and the union with the divine. Apophatic notions of mysticism stress the unknowability of God and the demand for self-­denial to remove physical or fleshly obstructions to the mystical union. Yet both Taylor and Kelpius fear that complete passivity in the soul’s pursuit of divine love will result in too much cooling of the relationship and eventually a complete separation. While affirming Christ’s role as elusive beloved and assigning him sole agency in initiating the union, the individual must nevertheless continue to generate desire. Both poets, therefore, create a variety of erotic images of Christ and of the condition of holy love. Kelpius generates various metaphors to stress the reciprocity of divine love—with the trigger inducing the ultimate union reserved for Christ. The soul’s love must grow in secret but wait until called upon or literally touched by the beloved in order to release its fruits. One of Kelpius’s favorite images is the “Senceable Plant” (i.e., a plant with seed pods that burst upon touch and expel their seeds): “See the Senceable Plant, how if it be but touched, / It straitway sheds its Seed, altho in Pods ’tis couched: / It will by Heavens Dew be touched quite alone, / And only lookt upon but by the shining Sun.”35 To put it in the erotic terms suggested by Kelpius’s language, the soul must be properly aroused but not reach its climax until stimulated by the chosen lover. Their union must be both secretive and exclusive. Though fearing too much ardor elsewhere in his poetry, Kelpius frequently chooses the seraphic way to mystical union (through love) over the cherubinic way (through knowledge): In Jesus loving frind! What love does thou inherit! How glows, & burns thy Heart in true drift of the Spirit! In truth a Seraphim has thus thy Soul inflamed, And has with his bright Glance, & Beams upon thee gleamed. Thy tongue does really drop with Honey, sweet affected And ev’ry syllable is with a kiss directed: And that beloved pair, & Eyes to run with Wine, With which, they droping, wet, & Moisten ev’ry line.36 The soul stricken with holy love is likened to a person filled with intense desire for his beloved; the poet representing such a condition writes verses dripping with both sweetness and lovesickness. The liquefacient imagery here

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is to be matched by the groom’s “Radiant Beam” shining down upon the poet’s “Stream.”37 Similarly, Taylor anticipates a reciprocal lovemaking featured in quite physical terms: I dare not say, such ardent flames would rise Of true Loves passion, in its Blinks or Blisses, As in thy Holy Spouse’s heart that cries Oh! let him kiss mee with his orall kisses. Should he but stop such acts of love and grace Making dark Clouds mask up his brightsom face.38 Though tempered by the anticipation of abandonment and withdrawal, Taylor’s vision nevertheless displays a cataphatic wooing of Christ. In comparison to Kelpius, Taylor’s poetry stands out for its preponderance of this state; rather than self-­denial, Taylor is more concerned with an impotent pen that is incapable of producing adequate illustrations for his desire: It grieves mee, Lord, my Fancy’s rusty: rub And brighten’t on an Angells Rubston sharp. Furbish it with thy Spirits File: and dub It with a live Coale of thine Altars Spark. Yea, with thy holly Oyle make thou it slick Till like a Flash of Lightning, it grow Quick.39 Taylor’s call for spiritual and poetic arousal is juxtaposed with Kelpius’s fear of such a quickening of desire and poetic vision; for Kelpius, secrecy and a dampening of desire must prevail: “So, Cover thou the Root begotten from thy fountain, / And sink it deeper down, when thou s[h]alt see it mounting: / That covered it may ’bide, & bring its rip’ned fruit. / In D[r]outh, & Wetness too, So cover thou the Root.”40 Ultimately, both poets play with the vagaries of holy desire and the illustrative analogies between spiritual and physical concupiscence. Whether they ultimately imagine an erotic union with the divine beloved matters little; both use erotic imagery to heighten the significance of their spiritual dilemmas. Such literary comparisons between poets belonging to different denominational and linguistic traditions enhance our understanding of theological differences and similarities that might not be visible through strictly theological analyses. In fact, a comparison of Kelpius’s and Taylor’s spiritual poetry

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reveals a notable degree of inter-­denominational affinities, in contrast to contemporaneous intra-­denominational quarreling (such as the Taylor-­Stoddard controversy). Beyond mining spiritual poetry to answer questions about the complex religious landscape of the British colonies in North America, comparative literary analyses reveal even more about complex literary genealogies. If we seek contact points primarily along linguistic and denominational lines, exclusionary and more or less linear trajectories will inevitably come to the fore. In crossing denominational and linguistic lines, as in the Taylor-­ Kelpius comparison, we may find that literary phenomena have a higher degree of transferability, in the sense that they may have an appeal to members of other religions, cultures, and ethnic groups beyond the contexts and beliefs in which they originated. Translingual literary comparisons between German and English religious poetry—as well as a host of other genres—demonstrate the efficacy of literary expression in reaching and functioning across linguistic differences and establishing interrelated sensibilities that would be deemed impossible along strictly theological lines. The higher translatability of literary tropes and features knit together writers, groups, traditions, and beliefs that would otherwise have been at odds. A thorough evaluation of the German-­language poetry of colonial America could make visible linkages that would otherwise remain hidden behind seemingly more substantive religious or cultural differences.

Desiderata Any advances in critical scholarship and comparative analyses of German and English writers will fail if original source texts remain inaccessible to most readers, especially anyone without fluency in German and trained in reading German script. A thorough recovery of the contributions of German-­language literature requires advances in textual scholarship. We need scholarly textual editions and translations—in print as well as open-­access, peer-­reviewed websites—that recover archival material but also demonstrate connections between authors, genres, and national/linguistic traditions. Anthologies and textual editions following thematic or genre-­specific principles have several advantages: they would allow the inclusion of various authors, reveal developments across time, distinguish regional and denominational differences, and encourage scholars and students to explore intersections with other linguistic traditions. For example, an updated and expanded version of Stoudt’s

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anthology Pennsylvania German Poetry could focus on various German-­ language writers composing religious poetry, even beyond Pennsylvania. Another area calling for a comprehensive collection of primary materials— supplemented with a historically informed introduction and annotations—is the journalism and editorial writings of German-­language printer-­publishers, especially Christoph Saur Sr., Christoph Saur Jr., and Henry (Heinrich) Miller. In newspapers, almanacs, advice literature, and political pamphlets, these printer-­publishers mediated the flow of information from abroad as well as local news and events in order to assist German immigrants and residents with the difficult negotiation of their place in pluralistic New World societies. Following on the heels of Katherine Faull’s collection of Moravian women writers, a more broadly conceived collection of personal narratives and autobiographies would help insert the voice of German-­language speakers into the scholarly consideration of life-­writing in the formation of colonial American identities and literary sensibilities.41 Even beyond the Moravians, German-­language speakers wrote personal accounts, memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies in a variety of contexts. Though many more subjects warrant focused primary-­source editions, the area of knowledge transmission among and advice literature produced by German-­language speakers in colonial America stands out as one of the most crucial needs. Scholarship must overcome distinctions between folk knowledge and elite, academic knowledge that have been instituted with the rise of modern higher education but did not exist in the same registers during the early modern age. A case in point are the manuscript books of Francis Daniel Pastorius. Although scholars have paid most attention to the intellectual and spiritual digests of contemporary knowledge that Pastorius produced in his encyclopedic “Bee-­Hive,” his apiary metaphor beckons to be taken literally: for Pastorius, the scholar or poet must equally become a steward of practical knowledge, such as beekeeping, gardening, agriculture, and medicine. His dazzlingly detail-­oriented manuals on these subjects link and modulate European knowledge and traditions with New World know-­how, including Native American herbal medicine. Pastorius’s extensive legal writings, translations, and practical manuals reveal the importance of a well-­regulated civic culture for early American social experiments, and they allow conclusions about the adaptation of European legal culture to the pluralistic conditions in early America, especially colonial Pennsylvania.42 Pastorius also prominently contributed to the pedagogical literature of colonial Pennsylvania; he wrote several educational texts in manuscript, but only his published New Primmer

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(1698) is extant.43 Pastorius initiated a vibrant tradition of advice literature and formal or informal knowledge transmission—in manuscript and print— among German-­speaking immigrants in colonial America. Christoph Saur Sr. and Jr. published legal, linguistic, and other practical advice manuals, as well as guides for German immigrants to learn the English language.44 The German immigrant concern with education and child rearing is particularly prominent in the writings of Johann Adam Grube, including his Gewissenhaffte Vorstellung vom Mangel rechter Kinder-­Zucht (1740).45 The tradition of pedagogical writings among German-­language speakers in colonial America reached its zenith with Christopher Dock’s innovative Schul-­Ordnung (1770).46 Many more printed and nonprinted advice manuals, schoolbooks, commonplace books, and other media of knowledge transmission can be found in the archives of early German-­language immigration to colonial America. A modern edition might publish key selections that demonstrate the intersections between the preservation of European traditions, American innovations, and the impact of cross-­cultural contact on the knowledge system of German-­speaking immigrants. The preparation of modern editions of German-­language source material raises the crucial issue of translation and the editorial representation of the original and translated languages in the resulting publication. The increasing integration of German-­language literature of the colonial period into the literary history and canon of American literature makes the translation of these materials indispensable. Only through translation will these writings become accessible to a primarily English-­speaking readership. Whenever possible, editors should utilize translations produced by the original writers themselves or by their contemporaries in colonial America. In these cases, the English translations may in fact be riddled with a larger number of errors or linguistic difficulties than a modern translation; nevertheless, these contemporaneous translations reverberate with the historical, communal, social, and spiritual meanings and idiosyncrasies of the original and thus constitute “originals” in their own right. Modern translations and their representation on the printed page have the unique obligation to preserve and reveal traces of their original sources. As Julie Tomberlin Weber argues regarding her own translation of David Zeisberger’s mission diaries, translation functions like a prism in that it “involves a similar transformation of a source text into a modern text that illuminates multiple discourses, both contemporary and historical.”47 Such a layering of present-­day and historical, as well as source-­language and target-­language, meanings and contexts can be achieved in several ways:

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most obviously, the inclusion of the original with the translation—either in a dialogic edition or with the original in the footnotes—highlights the open-­ endedness of translation as a process and directly invites bilingual readers to collaborate with the translator in finding alternate meanings and ambiguities. If such an inclusion of the original is not feasible, translators and editors should make visible the translated nature of the published text in English. To use Weber’s words, modern English editions of colonial-­era German-­ language writings should insist on “respecting the untranslatable.”48 In researching the hidden treasures of German colonial literature, especially in manuscript, literary scholars must work at archives previously considered only within the purview of church historians, including a variety of small church or denominational archives in the sectarian traditions. Following the concept of the “phenomenology of the book” advanced by history-­of-­ the-­book scholarship, scholars may, for example, examine the large variety of fly-­leaf inscriptions, variant title pages, manuscript illustrations, and marginalia revealing individuals’ responses to their reading experiences and interaction with books circulated through linguistically and denominationally diverse networks of readers.49 Such an approach may yield intriguing interconnections between archives and may result in closer partnerships between researchers and the archivists who know the collections intimately. In focusing on specific genres, such as poetry or nonfiction prose, literary scholars should bring German colonial literature into conversation with colonial Anglo-­American forms and paradigms, while emphasizing distinct contributions. For a recognizable field of colonial German literary studies to emerge, literary scholars need to bring a full range of textual, theoretical, and historicist approaches to bear on the literary archive. We need to evaluate both how literature actively expressed cultural sensibilities and how cultural transmission and change in America created a German literary sphere that was in constant contact with the Anglo-­American side. For example, the promotional literature about the establishment of early Pennsylvania has predominantly been mined by historians for evidence on migration history. Other genres that have been more or less fully evaluated in the Anglo-­American tradition still lie fallow on the German immigrant side: poetry and hymnody, travel and exploration narratives, personal diaries and communal chronicles, homiletics, advice literature, journalist writings, and pseudo-­scientific and scientific writings. The crucial role literary scholars can play in rediscovering the German-­language literature of colonial America is to allow the often “hidden voice”—to use Johannes Kelpius’s words—of these individuals and

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communities to speak to us more directly and distinctly. I underscore the necessity of preparing and publishing textual and documentary editions that could unlock the often mysterious colonial German writings for a variety of present-­day readers in both Europe and America and help these writings claim their place within an American literature as well as a larger transatlantic world of letters.

Bibliographic Appendix Bibliographies Karl John Richard Arndt and Reimer C. Eck, eds., The First Century of German Language Printing in the United States of America: A Bibliography Based on the Studies of Oswald Seidensticker and Wilbur H. Oda, comp. Gerd-­J. Bötte and Werner Tannhof, vol. 1, 1728–1807 (Göttingen: Niedersächsische Staats-­und Universitätsbibliothek, 1989); Karl John Richard Arndt and May E. Olson, German-­American Newspapers and Periodicals, 1732–1955: History and Bibliography (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1961); Paul Ben Baginsky, German Works Relating to America, 1493–1800: A List Compiled from the Collections of the New York Public Library (New York: New York Public Library, 1942); Gerd-­J. Bötte and Werner R. Tannhof, “Germanica-­Americana 1729–1830 in den Bibliotheken der Vereinigten Staaten und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Ein überblick über die wichtigsten Sammlungen zur frühen deutschsprachigen Druckkultur in Amerika,” Yearbook of German-­American Studies 23 (1988): 173–92; Horst Dippel, Americana Germanica 1770–1800: Bibliographie deutscher Amerikaliteratur (Stuttgart: J.  B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1976); Gerhard Friedrich, “The A.  H. Cassel Collection at Juniata College” American-­German Review 7, no. 6 (1941): 18–21; Hartmut Fröschle, ed., Americana Germanica: Bibliographie zur deutschen Sprache und deutschsprachigen Literatur in Nord-­und Lateinamerika (Hildesheim: Olms Presse, 1991); Ilse E. Kramer, Die wunderbare Neue Welt: German Works in the John Carter Brown Library (Providence, R.I.: John Carter Brown Library, 1983); Library Company of Philadelphia and Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Germantown and the Germans: An Exhibition of Books, Manuscripts, Prints, and Photographs from the Collections of The Library Company of Philadelphia and The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, October 1983 to January 1984 (Philadelphia: Library Company, 1983); Emil Meynen, Bibliographie des

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Deutschtums der Kolonialzeitlichen Einwanderung in Nordamerika, Insbesondere der Pennsylvanien-­Deutschen und Ihrer Nachkommen, 1683–1933 (Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz, 1937); Philip Motley Palmer, German Works on America, 1492–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952); Henry A. Pochmann and Arthur R. Schultz, eds., Bibliography of German Culture in America to 1940 (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus International, 1982); Oswald Seidensticker, The First Century of German Printing in America, 1728–1830; Preceded by a Notice of the Literary Work of F. D. Pastorius (1893; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1966); Don Heinrich Tolzmann, German-­Americana: A Bibliography (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1975). Late Nineteenth-­and Early Twentieth-­Century Recovery Scholarship Albert Bernhardt Faust, The German Element in the United States, with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence, 2 vols. (1909; reprint, New York: Houghton, 1927); Albert Bernhardt Faust, Francis Daniel Pastorius and the 250th Anniversary of the Founding of Germantown (Philadelphia: Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, 1934); Julius Goebel, ed., “Zwei unbekannte Briefe von Pastorius,” German American Annals, n.s., 2 (August 1904): 492–503; Friedrich Kapp, “Einleitung,” in Beschreibung von Pennsylvanien, by Franz Daniel Pastorius (Crefeld: Kramer & Baum, 1884); Marion Dexter Learned, “From Pastorius’ Bee-­Hive or Bee-­Stock,” Americana Germanica 1, no. 4 (1897): 67–73; Marion Dexter Learned, The Life of Francis Daniel Pastorius (Philadelphia: Campbell, 1908); Julius Friedrich Sachse, The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania, 1694–1708 (1895; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970); Julius Friedrich Sachse, The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 1708–1742: A Critical and Legendary History of the Ephrata Cloister and the Dunkers (1899; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1971); Julius Friedrich Sachse, The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania, 1742–1800: A Critical and Legendary History of the Ephrata Cloister and the Dunkers (1899; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1971); Julius Friedrich Sachse, Justus Falckner, Mystic and Scholar: Devout Pietist in Germany, Hermit on the Wissahickon, Missionary on the Hudson: A Bi-­centennial Memorial of the First Regular Ordination of an Orthodox Pastor in America, Done November 24, 1703, at Gloria Dei, the Swedish Lutheran Church at Wicaco, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1903); Julius Friedrich Sachse, The Music of the Ephrata Cloister; Also Conrad Beissel’s Treatise on Music as Set Forth in a Preface to the “Turtel

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Taube” of 1747, Amplified with Fac-­simile Reproductions of Parts of the Text and Some Original Ephrata Music of the Weyrauchs Hügel, 1739; Rosen und Lilien, 1745; Turtel Taube, 1747; Choral Buch, 1745, etc. (1903; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1971); Julius Friedrich Sachse, ed. and trans., Letters Relating to the Settlement of Germantown in Pennsylvania, 1683–4, from the Könneken Manuscript in the Ministerial-­Archive of Lübeck (Philadelphia: printed for the author, 1903); Julius Friedrich Sachse, ed. and trans., Daniel Falckner’s Curieuse Nachricht from Pennsylvania: The Book that Stimulated the Great German Immigration to Pennsylvainia [sic] in the Early Years of the XVIII Century (Lancaster, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1905); Oswald Seidensticker, Bilder aus der Deutsch-­pennsylvanischen Geschichte (New York: E. Stieger, 1885). Mid-­Twentieth-­Century Scholarship Hans Galinsky, Amerika und Europa: Sprachliche und sprachkünstlerische Wechselbeziehung in amerikanischer Sicht (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1968), esp. “Kolonialer Literaturbarock in Virginia: Eine Interpretation von Bacons Epitaph auf der Grundlage eines Forschungsberichtes,” 137–80; Hans Galinsky, Amerikanisch-­deutsche Sprach-­und Literaturbeziehungen: Systematische Übersicht und Forschungsbericht, 1945–1970 (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1972); Hans Galinsky, “Three Literary Perspectives on the German in America: Immigrant, Homeland, and American Views,” in Eagle in the New World: German Immigration to Texas and America, ed. Theodore Gish and Richard Spuler (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), 102–31; Harold Jantz, The First Century of New England Verse (1944; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1962); Harold Jantz, “Pastorius, Intangible Values,” American-­German Review 25, no. 1 (1958): 4–7; Harold Jantz, “German-­American Literature: Some Further Perspectives,” in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-­Hundred-­Year History, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 283–93; The Harold Jantz Collection at Duke University: A Selected Bibliography, with an Introduction by Dr. Jantz (Durham: Center for International Studies, Duke University, 1979); Christoph E. Schweitzer, ed., Deliciæ Hortenses, by Francis Daniel Pastorius (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1982); Christoph E. Schweitzer, “Excursus: German Baroque Literature in Colonial America,” in German Baroque Literature: The European Perspective, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (New York: Ungar, 1983), 178–93; Christoph E. Schweitzer, “Francis Daniel Pastorius, the

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German-­American Poet,” Yearbook of German-­American Studies 18 (1983): 21–28; Austin Warren, “Edward Taylor’s Poetry: Colonial Baroque,” Kenyon Review 3 (Summer 1941): 355–71. The “Multilingual Turn” in Literary Studies Alide Cagidemetrio, “ ‘The Rest of the Story’; or, Multilingual American Literature,” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 17–28; Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, eds., The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Sollors, Multilingual America. Atlantic World and Communication Networks The Max Kade German-­American Research Institute Series has taken a trailblazer role. See, for example, Rosalind Beiler, Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650–1750 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); Mark Häberlein, The Practice of Pluralism: Congregational Life and Religious Diversity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730–1820 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009); Hartmut Lehmann, Hermann Wellenreuther, and Renate Wilson, eds., In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in Eighteenth-­ Century Europe and America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Renate Wilson, Pious Traders in Medicine: A German Pharmaceutical Network in Eighteenth-­Century North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). Other historiographic works in this area include Rosalind J. Beiler, “Distributing Aid to Believers in Need: The Religious Foundations of Transatlantic Migration,” Pennsylvania History 64 (Summer 1997): 73–87; Rosalind J. Beiler, “From the Rhine to the Delaware Valley: The Eighteenth-­Century Transatlantic Trading Channels of Caspar Wistar,” in Lehmann, Wellenreuther, and Wilson, In Search of Peace and Prosperity, 172–88; Rosalind J. Beiler, “Bridging the Gap: Cultural Mediators and the Structure of Transatlantic Communication,” in Atlantic Communications: The Media in American and German History from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Norbert Finzsch and Ursula Lehmkuhl (Oxford:

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Berg, 2004), 45–64; Rosalind J. Beiler, “German-­Speaking Immigrants in the British Atlantic World, 1680–1730,” OAH Magazine of History 18, no. 3 (2004): 19–22; Michele Gillespie and Robert Beachy, Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007); Hans-­Jürgen Grabbe, Colonial Encounters: Essays in Early American History and Culture (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2003); Hans-­ Jürgen Grabbe, ed., Halle Pietism, Colonial North America, and the Young United States (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008); Sabine Heerwart and Claudia Schnurmann, eds., Atlantic Migrations: Regions and Movements in Germany and North America/ USA During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century (Hamburg: Lit, 2007); Claudia Schnurmann, Atlantische Welten: Engländer und Niederländer im amerikanisch-­atlantischen Raum, 1648–1713 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998); Hermann Wellenreuther, “Continental-­European Scholarship on Early Modern North American and North Atlantic World: A Report,” Early American Studies 2, no. 2 (2004): 452–78; Hermann Wellenreuther and Norbert Finzsch, eds., Visions of the Future in Germany and America (Oxford: Berg, 2001). German-­English Translingual Relationships in Colonial America Patrick M. Erben, “Book of Suffering, Suffering Book: The Mennonite Martyrs’ Mirror and the Translation of Martyrdom in Colonial America,” in Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 191–215; Patrick M. Erben, A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Winfried Fluck and Werner Sollors, German? American? Literature? New Directions in German-­American Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2002); Jan Stievermann, “A ‘Plain, Rejected Little Flock’: The Politics of Martyrological Self-­Fashioning Among Pennsylvania’s German Peace Churches, 1739–65,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66, no. 2 (2009): 287–324; Julie Tomberlin Weber, “Translation as a Prism: Broadening the Spectrum of Eighteenth-­Century Identity,” in Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America, ed. A.  G. Roeber (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 195; Bethany Wiggin, “ ‘For Each and Every House to Wish for Peace’: Christoph Saur’s High German American Almanac and the French and Indian War in Pennsylvania,” in Gregerson and Juster, Empires of God, 154–72;

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Bethany Wiggin, Germanopolis: Postcolonial Figures in Colonial American History (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming). German and European Baroque Robert M. Browning, German Baroque Poetry, 1618–1723 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), esp. “Hymnists, Mystics, and the Poetry of Meditation,” 37–87; A. G. de Capua, German Baroque Poetry: Interpretive Readings (Albany: SUNY Press, 1973); Gerald Gillespie, German Baroque Poetry (New York: Twayne, 1971); Gerhart Hoffmeister, ed., German Baroque Literature: The European Perspective (New York: Ungar, 1983), esp. Joseph B. Dallet, “The Mystical Quest for God,” 270–91; Volker Meid, Barocklyrik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986); Jeffrey L. Sammons, Angelus Silesius (New York: Twayne, 1967). For the application of the “Baroque” as a literary and historical period and aesthetic sensibility to colonial America, see Hans Galinsky, Amerika und Europa: Sprachliche und sprachkünstlerische Wechselbeziehung in amerikanischer Sicht (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1968), 137–80; Christoph E. Schweitzer, “Excursus: German Baroque Literature in Colonial America,” in Hoffmeister, German Baroque Literature, 178–93. Alchemy and Edward Taylor Reiner Smolinski and Kathleen B. Freels, “ ‘Chymical Wedding’: Rosicrucian Alchemy and Eucharistic Conversion Process in Edward Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations and in Seventeenth-­Century German Tracts,” in Transatlantic Encounters: Studies in European-­American Relations, ed. Udo Hebel and Karl Ortseifen (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1995), 41. For Baroque, esoteric, and alchemical influences on and features in Edward Taylor’s poetry, see also Randall A. Clack, “Transformation of Soul: Edward Taylor and the Opus Alchemicum Celestial in Meditation 1:8,” Seventeenth-­Century News 50 (1992): 6–10; Randall A. Clack, “Edward Taylor and Transmutation of Soul,” in The Marriage of Heaven and Earth: Alchemical Regeneration in the Works of Taylor, Poe, Hawthorne, and Fuller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), 13–39; Joan Del Fattore, “John Webster’s Metallographica: A Source for Alchemical Imagery in the Preparatory Meditations,” Early American Literature 18 (1983–84): 231–41; Cheryl Oreovicz, “Edward Taylor and the Alchemy of Grace,” Seventeenth-­Century News 34 (1976): 33–36; A. Warren, “Edward Taylor’s Poetry: Colonial Baroque,” Kenyon Review 3 (Summer 1941): 355–71.

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Johannes Kelpius Edythe L. Brooks, “A Re-­evaluation of the Significance of Johannes Kelpius and the ‘Woman of the Wilderness,’ ” (M.A. thesis, University of South Florida, 1996); Klaus Deppermann, “Pennsylvanien als Asyl des frühen deutschen Pietismus,” in Pietismus und Neuzeit: Ein Jahrbuch zur Geschichte des Neueren Protestantismus, vol. 10 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 190– 226; Elizabeth Fisher, “ ‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 3 (1985): 299–333; Julius Friedrich Sachse, The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania, 1694–1708 (1895; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970). For biographical information on Kelpius, see Biographisch-­Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, s.v. “Kelpius, Johann,” by Claus Bernet, vol. 23, cols. 778–86, www .bautz.de/bbkl/k/kelpius_j.shtml; Karl Kurt Klein, Magister Johannes Transylvanus, der Heilige und Dichter vom Wissahickon in Pennsylvanien (Hermannstadt, Romania: Honterus Buchdruckerei, 1931); Ernest Schell, “Hermit of the Wissahickon: Johannes Kelpius and the Chapter of Perfection,” American History Illustrated 16, no. 6 (1981): 24–28, 48. Moravian Writings Katherine Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs: Their Related Lives, 1750–1820 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997). Faull is also constructing a website collecting these texts, entitled Moravian Women’s Memoirs, at http:// www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/faull/memoirs/index.html. For her scholarship on Moravian memoirs, see Faull’s “The American Lebenslauf: Women’s Autobiography from Eighteenth-­Century Moravian Bethlehem, Pa.,” Yearbook of the Society for German-­American Studies 27 (1992): 23–48; “Self-­Encounters: Two Eighteenth-­Century African Memoirs from Moravian Bethlehem,” in Crosscurrents: African-­Americans, Africa, and Germany in the Modern World, ed. C. Aisha Blackshire-­Belay, Leroy Hopkins, and David MacBride (New York: Camden House, 1998), 29–52; “Relating Sisters’ Lives: Moravian Women’s Writing from Eighteenth Century America,” in Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society 31 (2000): 11–27; “The Life of Johann Georg Jungmann (1720– 1808): Faith and Providence in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World,” in The Distinctiveness of Moravian Culture: Essays and Documents in Moravian History in Honor of Vernon H. Nelson on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Craig Atwood and Peter Vogt (Nazareth: Moravian Historical Society, 2003), 173–202.

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notes 1. David S. Shields, “Editor’s Notes,” Early American Literature 39, no. 3 (2004): 613–14. 2. John Joseph Stoudt, Pennsylvania German Poetry, 1685–1830 (Harrisburg, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Folklore Society, 1956). 3. See Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 2; “Migrations to the Thirteen British North American Colonies, 1700–1775: New Estimates,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 4 (1992): 691–709; Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginning of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 45–46. 4. See, for example, the work of Albert Bernhardt Faust, Julius Goebel, Marion Dexter Learned, Julius Friedrich Sachse, and Oswald Seidensticker. 5. Stoudt, Pennsylvania German Poetry, xxiii, xxxi. 6. Don Yoder, “The Schwenkfelder-­Quaker Connection: Two Centuries of Interdenominational Friendship,” in Schwenkfelders in America, ed. Peter C. Erb (Pennsburg, Pa.: Schwenkfelder Library, 1987), 116–17. 7. Israel Pemberton to Christopher Schultze, Philadelphia, July 9, 1757, Pemberton Letters, Schwenkfelder Library, Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. 8. Samuel Hopkins, An Address to the People of New-­England: Representing the Very Great Importance of Attaching the Indians to Their Interest; Not Only by Treating Them Justly and Kindly; but by Using Proper Endeavours to Settle Christianity Among Them . . . Printed in Boston, 1753 . . . with an Account of the Methods Used for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Said Indians, by the Late Reverend Mr. John Sargeant. Now Recommended to the Serious Consideration of the Inhabitants of Pennsylvania, and the Other Colonies (Philadelphia: Franklin and Hall, 1757). 9. Gottfried Arnold, Unparteyische Kirchen-­und Ketzer-­Historie: Vom Anfang des Neuen Testaments Biß auff das Jahr Christi 1688 (Frankfurt: Fritsch, 1700). 10. Yoder, “The Schwenkfelder-­Quaker Connection,” 127. 11. Anthony Benezet, “To Samuel Smith. Philadelphia the 17th. 1st [?] mon: 1765,” Anthony Benezet Letters, 1750–1936, Ms. Coll. 852, Quaker Collection, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania. 12. Johannes Tauler, The Plain Path to Christian Perfection . . . , trans. Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1772), iii. A second edition was printed in 1780. 13. Elizabeth Fisher, “ ‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 3 (1985): 299–333. 14. See August Hermann Francke, Schrifftmäßige Anweisung recht und Gott wolgefällig Zu beten: Nebst hinzugefügten Morgen-­u. Abend-­Gebetlein und einem Kielischen Responso, Die Gewißheit und Versicherung der Erhörung des Gebets betreffend (Halle: Schütze, 1695). Sachse assumes that Daniel Falckner could have brought copies of Francke’s book back from Halle upon his return to Pennsylvania in 1700. See Julius Friedrich Sachse, The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania, 1694–1708 (1895; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1970), 103. See also Madame Guyon [Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Mothe], Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison (Paris: Warin, 1685). The three extant printings of Kelpius’s text are as follows: (1) Johannes Kelpius, Kurtzer Begriff oder leichtes Mittel zu beten, oder mit Gott zu reden ([Philadelphia: Anton Armbrüster, 1756] or [Germantown, Pa.: Christoph Saur, 1756]). The tract is ascribed to Armbrüster by Seidensticker, Hildeburn, and Evans, and to Saur by Miller. The tract was advertised in Pennsylvanische Berichte on June 1, 1756. (2) Johannes Kelpius, A Short, Easy, and Comprehensive Method of Prayer. Translated from the German. And Published for a Farther Promotion, Knowledge and Benefit of Inward Prayer, by a Lover of Internal Devotion (Philadelphia: Henry Miller, 1761). (3) Johannes Kelpius, A Short, Easy and Comprehensive Method of Prayer. Translated from the German. And Published for a Farther Promotion, Knowledge and Benefit of Inward Prayer. By a Lover of Internal Devotion. The Second Edition with Addition (Germantown, Pa.: Christoph Saur, 1763). A facsimile of the inscription is produced in Johannes Kelpius, The Diarium of Magister Johannes Kelpius, ed. Julius Friedrich

German-Language Literature of Colonial America  147 Sachse (Lancaster, Pa.: Pennsylvania-­German Society, 1917), 98–99: “Christian Lehman, Favore, Christophori, De Witt, Natus, 10th November 1675 in Wiltshire in England. Given xbr: 5th Ao Dom. 1763, Denatus at Germantown, January 30th, Ao Dom 1765 Buried February 1st 1765, Etatis Sue 89 years 2 months 20 days Natus 10th Novembr A. D. 1675. [last page] The foregoing was originally composed in the German Tongue by John Kelpius a German and was Translated into English by Christopher Witt who died January 30th 1765, aged 89 yrs 2 mo. 20 days.” 15. Donald E. Stanford, introduction to The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xvii. 16. Randall A. Clack, The Marriage of Heaven and Earth: Alchemical Regeneration in the Works of Taylor, Poe, Hawthorne, and Fuller (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), 1. 17. Reiner Smolinski and Kathleen B. Freels, “ ‘Chymical Wedding’: Rosicrucian Alchemy and Eucharistic Conversion Process in Edward Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations and in Seventeenth-­ Century German Tracts,” in Transatlantic Encounters: Studies in European-­American Relations, ed. Udo Hebel and Karl Ortseifen (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1995), 41. 18. Francis Daniel Pastorius, “Silvula Rhytmorum Germanopolitanorum, #36” [poetic miscellany], in “Bee-­Hive,” Ms. Codex 726, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 19. Johannes Kelpius, The Diarium of Magister Johannes Kelpius, ed. Julius Friedrich Sachse (Lancaster, Pa.: Pennsylvania-­German Society, 1917), 94. In manuscript, Kelpius’s journal (Diarium) is bound together with his letter book. See Johannes Kelpius, Briefbuch, bound with Journal, MS. Am. 0880, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Kelpius’s letter was originally written in English. 20. David L. Parker, “Edward Taylor’s Preparationism: A New Perspective on the Taylor-­Stoddard Controversy,” Early American Literature 11, no. 3 (1976/77): 259, 263. 21. Edward Taylor, Preparatory Meditations, in The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Johannes Kelpius, “The Hymn Book of Magister Johannes Kelpius” [facsimile reproduction of the original manuscript], trans. Christopher Witt, in Church Music and Musical Life in Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, Publications of the Pennsylvania Society of the Colonial Dames of America 4 (Philadelphia: printed for the Society, 1926), 21–163. For the original manuscript, see Johannes Kelpius, “Die klägliche Stimme der verborgenen Liebe / The Lamenting Voice of the Hidden Love,” trans. Christopher Witt [HSP catalogue entry: “Hymnal. Collection of Songs, Chiefly composed and all arranged by John Kelpius. Copied German and English. English by Dr. De Witt.”], Ms. Ac. 189, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. In the following analysis, I use the only widely available edition of some of Kelpius’s poems: David Shields, ed., American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Library of America, 2007), 284–98. The original manuscript of “The Lamenting Voice” features facing-­page translations, with Kelpius’s German compositions on the left and Christopher Witt’s corresponding English translations on the right. Shields’s anthology only reproduces the English translation. In the notes, I reproduce the German version from the manuscript facsimile found in Kelpius, “The Hymn Book of Magister Johannes Kelpius,” 21–163. Readers should keep in mind that the English version is not a literal translation of the German but rather a poetic rendering of the same ideas in English. 22. Taylor, Meditations 1.1, 5. Citations are to series and meditation number, followed by the page number in Stanford’s edition. 23. Ibid., 1.10, 21. 24. Johannes Kelpius, “Of the Wilderness of the Secret, or Private Virgin-­Cross-­Love” [Von der Wüstung der Jungfräulichen Himmlischen Creutzes Liebe], in Shields, American Poetry, 284–85. German: “. . . ich seh was dich betrübt, / sag uns wohl was dich kränkt; sag uns, du bist verliebt. . . . Und ach! wie kan ich mich erkühnen, doch zu dencken daß ich / Noch liebens werth? Ich werd zuletzt noch lencken den Heilig / Hohen Sinn zu mir? Der ich unrein und lauter Sünde bin / solte mir gnädig stimm” (Kelpius, “Hymn Book,” 27–28). 25. Kelpius, “Of the Wilderness,” 285. German: “Mein Unwürdigkeit, mein unterbrochne Pflicht, Mein / Großer Sündenberg, mir kommet zu Gesicht” (Kelpius, “Hymn Book,” 28).

148  Material and Intellectual Cultures 26. Taylor, Meditations 2.75, 209. 27. Ibid. 28. Kelpius, “Of the Wilderness,” 286. German: Denck wie das Goldt so tieff im Eingeweid der Erden Verborgen wachsend lieg; und soll es nützlich werden So mus es in der Gluth wie Wetterstrahlen blitzen Dan kans an Hand und Stirn wie Cron u. Scepter sitzen. Denck wie der süße Wein nur in sich selbst mus jehren Wenn die Unreinigkeit sich soll zu Boden kehren Wie lang er lieg verstopft eh er im Glaß aufspringt Eher dem Nectar gleich mit Wonn das Hertz durchdringt. (Kelpius, “Hymn Book,” 30) 29. Kelpius, “Of the Wilderness,” 292. German: “Mach mich wie lebend Gold,” “Mach mich wie Neuen Wein,” “Ein Neues Hertz” (Kelpius, “Hymn Book,” 37–38). 30. Kelpius, “Of the Wilderness,” 285–86, 290. German: Geheime Lieb ist wie der scharffen Schwerdter Spitzen die in dich Eingekehrt dich überall zerritzen: doch wenn verkehrt aus Dir dein liebster wird verwundt so wird zur Stundt dein Leib Sein Geist und Seel gesundt. Geheime Jesus-­Lieb ist wie die tieffen Wunden ihr immer Bluten wird im Hertzen nur/nur in der Seel empfunden, Nichts heilet ihre Pein, nichts ist das sie versüst, biß sie sich in das Hertz des Liebsten ausergießt. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . Verwunde mich noch mehr, durch deiner Liebe Stärcke Daß ich nur dieser Krafft und Wirkung in mir mercke Töd[t]ung meiner Krafft! biß ich durchs Rothe Meer Zu dir eindring, darum verwunde mich noch mehr. (Kelpius, “Hymn Book,” 30, 36) 31. Taylor, Meditations 2.16, 108. 32. Ibid., 1.4 (“The Reflexion”), 14. 33. Kelpius, “The Paradox and Seldom Contentment of the God Loving Soul” [Das paradox und seltsame Vergnügen der göttlich Verliebten], in Shields, American Poetry, 295. German: “So seltsam gar ist der Verliebten ihr Vergnügen / Sie können nie der Angst und Furcht getrost obsiegen / Weil solcher Sieg sie schwächt und Stärcke furchtsam macht / Drum ist beÿ ihnen nur die Ohnmacht hochgeacht” (Kelpius, “Hymn Book,” 60). 34. Taylor, Meditations 2.96 (“Meditation. Cant. 1.2. Let him kiss me with the Kisse of his mouth”), 225–26. 35. Kelpius, “Of the Wilderness,” 287. German: “Denck an empfindlich Kraut, wenn dießes wird berühret, / Wird in sich kehrend . . . ?, wies seine Saat verliert: / Es will vom Himmel Thau allein berührt sein / und angescheinet nur vom reinen Sonnen-­schein” (Kelpius, “Hymn Book,” 32). 36. Kelpius, “The Paradox and Seldom Contentment,” 293–94. German: In Jesu liebster Freund! Wie groß ist deine Liebe! Wie glüt und brennt dein ❤ [Herz] im rechten Geistes Triebe! Fürwahr ein Seraphim hat deine Seel erhitzet Und dich mit seinem Glantz & Strahlen angeblitzet.

German-Language Literature of Colonial America  149 Es drieffet Deine Zung von Honig Süßigkeiten Ein Jede Silbe muß ein liebes-­Kuß begleiten Und daß verliebte Paar die Augen giesset Wein Mit dem ein jede Zeil muß wohl befeuchtet sein. (Kelpius, “Hymn Book,” 58) 37. Kelpius, “Of the Wilderness,” 290. The German rhymes “Genuß” and “Fluß.” 38. Taylor, Meditations 2.97, 227. 39. Ibid., 2.92, 219. 40. Kelpius, “Of the Wilderness,” 291. German: “Verdeck die Wurtzel gar aus deinem Stamm erzeuget / Versencke sie noch mehr wenn sie zur Höhe steiget / Und daß zur vollen Frucht sie unverletzt beharr / In Dürr und Näße, so verdeck die Wurtzel gar” (Kelpius, “Hymn Book,” 38). 41. Katherine Faull, Moravian Women’s Memoirs: Their Related Lives, 1750–1820 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997). 42. See Alfred L. Brophy, “ ‘Ingenium est Fateri per quos profeceris’: Francis Daniel Pastorius’ Young Country Clerk’s Collection and Anglo-­American Legal Literature, 1682–1716,” University of Chicago Law School Roundtable 3, no. 2 (1996): 637–734. 43. Francis Daniel Pastorius, A New Primmer or Methodical Directions to Attain the True Spelling, Reading, and Writing of English (New York: Bradford, [1698]). 44. Christoph Saur, ed., Eine Nützliche Anweisung Oder Beyhülfe Vor die Teutschen Um English zu lernen (Germantown, Pa.: Christoph Saur, 1751). 45. Johann Adam Gruber, Gewissenhaffte Vorstellung vom Mangel rechter Kinder-­Zucht, und zugleich wie solche zuverbessern wäre ([Germantown, Pa.]: [Christoph Saur], 1740); Johann Adam Gruber, Kinder-­Stimme, oder, Anleitung zum kindlichen Lob und Tugend-­Uebungen der Kinder: Durch Antrieb der Gnade Gottes verfasset Von einem Der nach dem kindlichen Geist Christi in Aurichtigkeit des Hertzens sich sehnet ([Büdingen], 1717). 46. Christopher Dock, Eine Einfältige und gründlich abgefaßte Schul-­Ordnung (Germantown, Pa.: Christoph Saur, 1770). 47. Julie Tomberlin Weber, “Translation as a Prism: Broadening the Spectrum of Eighteenth-­ Century Identity,” in Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early North America, ed. A. G. Roeber (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 195. 48. Ibid., 196. 49. Matthew P. Brown, The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Six

“Runs, Creeks, and Rivers Join” The Correspondence Network of Gotthilf Henry Ernst Mühlenberg Matthias Schönhofer

Despite his famous family name and his great accomplishments as a botanist, almost no one today remembers Gotthilf Henry Ernst Mühlenberg (1753–1815). While his contributions to early American botany once enjoyed some scholarly notice,1 his extensive transatlantic correspondence has thus far eluded historians. The man remains overshadowed by his own father’s paramount reputation as the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in America and by the military and political careers of his two brothers, Johann Peter Gabriel (1746–1807) and Frederick Augustus Conrad (1750–1801). These personalities combined to eclipse his fame as the alleged “American Linnaeus” of the early republic’s fledgling scientific community.2 To recover Gotthilf Henry Ernst’s real profile, however, historians of science today insist on reconstructing his collaborations with other learned men of his generation. He himself observed in a 1792 letter to William Bartram, “A true Flora of a Country is not the work of one Man, but Hands must be joined.”3 To William Baldwin, he acknowledged some twenty-­three years later, “Let Mr Le Conte, and others join. Runs, creeks, and rivers join—and are then very strong.”4 Over the years, his communication network gradually changed from one almost exclusively composed of family and relatives living in the mid-­Atlantic region to a transatlantic network of botanical contacts. Finally, it took the shape of a national network whose main purpose was to bring American botanists into a common discourse and to collect botanical specimens for Mühlenberg’s two

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major publications, the Catalogus Plantarum Americae Septentrionalis (1813) and the posthumously published Descriptio Uberior Graminum et Plantarum Calamariarum Americae Septentrionalis Indigenarum et Cicurum (1817). This essay describes Mühlenberg’s use of correspondence as a tool for scientific research and organization in the republic of letters, as well as for the development of his web of contacts.5 The term “republic of letters” refers to the early modern form of scientific organization, which Franz Mauelshagen has described as an “imagined community without territory, fixed geographical or social boundaries, with ideals and moral codes in lieu of a legal system, with idols instead of a government.”6 A major obstacle to any rediscovery of Mühlenberg has been the dispersal of his correspondence to archives across Europe and the eastern United States. With the use of modern technology and online archives, this obstacle has been overcome, and all extant letters from and to Mühlenberg have been retrieved and transcribed.7 In the end, Mühlenberg’s ideas of professional and American national identity, as well as changes in the larger cultural context in which his botanical work was carried out, emerge from these letters.

Mühlenberg’s Life and Network of Correspondence The third son of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg (1711–1787), Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Mühlenberg (“Henry”)8 was a member of Pennsylvania’s most prominent German American family at the time. Destined to follow in his father’s footsteps in the Lutheran ministry, the ten-­year-­old went to Europe in 1763 to undergo a comprehensive theological education at the Halle Orphanage’s Lateinschule and returned to Pennsylvania in 1770 to be examined and ordained in Philadelphia’s newly built Zion Church in early October of that year. Over the following decade, he gained experience in the ministry in Pennsylvania and, after 1774, as adjunctus to his father in Philadelphia. After a falling-­out with his brother-­in-­law Johann Christopher Kunze (1744–1807) and a faction of Philadelphia’s Lutheran lay leaders, the main cause of which was his flight from the city during the British occupation, Mühlenberg succeeded Justus Heinrich Christian Helmuth (1745–1825) as minister of the Lutheran church at Lancaster, at that time Pennsylvania’s second-­largest town. He remained there until his death in 1815, and it was there that he attempted to combine his ministerial duties, trade in Halle medicines, and botanical interests. Three years after Mühlenberg had accepted the call to Lancaster, in

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late October 1783 Franconian physician and zoologist Johann David Schöpf (1752–1800) passed through. His visit opened the doors to European science for Mühlenberg and allowed him to extend his hitherto rather limited correspondence with scientists, researchers, and botanists on both sides of the Atlantic.9 This demonstrates that even in those times of nascent postal services, far-­reaching and complex correspondence networks were established and maintained. To date, 109 correspondents10 of Mühlenberg have been identified, with a total of 998 letters exchanged with him from 1771 to 1815.11 In what follows, particular attention will be paid to the continuous transformation of the Mühlenberg correspondence.12 There was no stable “master network” in existence from 1770 to 1815, but rather changing sets of correspondents with whom Mühlenberg was in and out of contact at different times. In order to arrive at a nuanced account of the dynamics of Mühlenberg’s web of correspondence, one must follow its six consecutive phases,13 for the web’s internal configuration changed every four to seven years due to deaths or the exit and introduction of new correspondents, subsequently remaining in a temporary state of relative stability for another four to seven years. Each of the six phases of relative stability was distinct in social composition, in the constellation of correspondents, and sometimes even with regard to thematic aspects. Across these different phases, one must focus on the evolution of pivotal relationships over time, the identification of key positions in the network, and the impact of specific “major” correspondents and contemporary botanical discourses on Mühlenberg’s networking. Key characteristics—including correspondents’ national origin, the specific nature of their connection to Mühlenberg (kinship tie, commercial tie, professional tie, or scientific tie), and their commitment to or negligence of the ideals, values, and collaborative practices associated with the early modern republic of letters—provide crucial context for interpreting the correspondence.14

A Prelude: Mühlenberg’s Correspondence from 1770 to 1784 Although Mühlenberg began to receive and send occasional letters as soon as he returned from Europe in 1770, his serious letter-­writing and networking activities started after the end of the War of Independence in late 1783. Three years before, he had answered a call to minister to the Lutheran church in Lancaster, granting him, for the first time, relative independence from his father. During these pivotal years, from 1770 to 1784, Mühlenberg sent and

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  153

received fifty letters, most of which were exchanged with his father, who kept a keen eye on his youngest son.15 It was during these years that the younger Mühlenberg became increasingly aware of the communication channels of Halle Pietists in North America, which his father had helped bring into existence after 1742. The network of August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), the founder of the Francke Foundations, “spanned continents and oceans”16 and enabled the flow of the information and money necessary to maintain global missionary efforts. Trade in Halle books and medicine was the financial backbone of the Halle Orphanage throughout the eighteenth century. Products from the Medikamentenexpedition, where the medicines were concocted, had long been household names in the Old World and the New, and they provided Lutheran pastors with an important supplementary income to augment their often meager ministerial stipends.17 In Pennsylvania, trade in medicine was dominated by a small group of Halle Pietist pastors and their wives, which included the Mühlenbergs, their sons-­in-­law Christopher Emanuel Schultze (1740–1809) and Johann Christopher Kunze, and Halle’s two mandatarii (trustees), Justus Heinrich Christian Helmuth and Johann Friedrich Schmidt (1746–1812). Although Helmuth seems to have largely monopolized the distribution of Halle medicine in the early 1770s, it was only after the war that he and Schmidt finally attained their positions as official mandatarii.18 Helmuth in particular proved an excellent choice for this position, for his marriage into the Keppele family brought excellent new trading connections to the Halle network, as Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg was keenly aware.19 John Henry Keppele (1716–1797) was a Philadelphia-­based merchant with strong trade connections to Europe, specifically in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. As an active member of the local Lutheran community, Keppele was also a close personal friend of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg and the godfather of his firstborn son, Johann Peter Gabriel.20 Nevertheless, with the exception of one letter to Sebastian Andreas Fabricius (1716–1790), who took responsibility for Halle’s transatlantic trade after 1783, Henry Mühlenberg was not personally active in the importation of medicine.21 Henry Mühlenberg’s correspondence in the 1770s and early 1780s was clearly dominated by family contacts, a characteristic that only began to change after his father’s death in 1787. His brothers, Peter and Frederick, had shrugged off their father’s plans for them and devoted their lives to military and political careers, respectively.22 In the meantime, Henry Mühlenberg continued in the ministry at Lancaster with the heavy burden of being the

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only one left to walk in his father’s footsteps. Nevertheless, the Mühlenbergs’ family life in the years before the outbreak of war in April 1775 and before the elder Mühlenberg’s death in 1787 was characterized by relative harmony. The frequent letters between the patriarch and his sons, who simultaneously gathered firsthand experiences and reported back to their father, all carry strong professional overtones, revealing no distinction between familial and collegial roles.23 With his two elder brothers, Henry maintained cordial relationships, although occasional remarks suggest profound differences in character and talents from Peter—differences that would later divide the oldest and youngest brothers.24 Unlike his correspondence with Frederick, with whom he stayed in loose contact throughout his life, not a single letter between Henry and Peter survives.25 After the war, their relationship appears detached, at times completely shattered, as Henry refused to address Peter in any form other than that of his military rank, “der General.”26 Mühlenberg maintained friendly relations with his two brothers-­ in-­law, Kunze and Schultze, during the early 1770s, which only changed after Philadelphia’s lay leaders insisted on Kunze as his father’s successor.27 Kunze and Mühlenberg’s relationship soured on account of the dispute.28 While few letters were exchanged with Kunze after that, Mühlenberg continued a steady correspondence with Schultze, who would become his closest family contact after his father’s death. Until then, his father tried to exert his influence on his only son who remained a minister. “By the way, my dearly beloved son,” he wrote to Lancaster in April 1780, “it is a great joy for me to see that the Lord’s merciful providence has put you into your proper element again, that you have a large congregation to take care of. . . . If you give your life to this task, it will bring you infinitely more blessing and gracious reward in return than all research into still unknown variants or doing Linnaean botanical science.”29 Yet time would prove the father’s misgivings correct: very soon his son’s botanical correspondences were to claim most of his time.

Phase 1: Confederate Botany, 1784–1790 After a few years of solitary introductory studies to botany, Johann David Schöpf ’s visit to Lancaster in late October 1783 finally brought Mühlenberg into contact with an Erlangen botanist and student of Linnaeus named

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  155

Johann Christian Daniel Edler von Schreber (1739–1810), who was to exercise a profound influence on the development of Mühlenberg’s correspondence.30 Given that 26 of the 71 letters written in the phase from 1784 to 1790 were exchanged with these two correspondents, Schöpf and Schreber emerged as the most important and intense contacts during these years. For Mühlenberg, this meant the end of lonely studies, as he began to send plant specimens to Schreber, who routinely returned nomenclatural information in Linnaean code, which was to form the basis of Mühlenberg’s own herbarium.31 For Schreber, in turn, the contact meant access to hitherto untapped sources of entirely new botanical specimens and the promise of new publications and fame. Mühlenberg, Schreber, and Schöpf ’s mutual enthusiasm about their new contact continued until the end of the 1780s. During this time, Mühlenberg seems to have enjoyed a quasi-­monopoly in the business of supplying North American plant specimens to Erlangen.32 With their exchange, the three men took part in the contemporary botanical community, a scientific republic of letters comprising epistolary communication and the exchange of books, seeds, and dried and live plants, as well as tea, bacon, chocolate, wine, and natural curiosities. The economic nature of these “learned friendships” is conveyed in the Latin term commercium litterarium. Reciprocity of exchange was one of the republic’s core ideals, as botanizing in the field and the shipment of plants entailed considerable financial expenses, and the work of plant identification was a time-­consuming and difficult activity.33 Throughout the 1780s, Mühlenberg’s exchange with Erlangen appeared to be based on mutual appreciation. Around 1790, however, Schöpf ’s and Schreber’s increasing neglect and tardiness in responding to him led the Lancaster pastor to reconsider his opinion. Regular trade in Halle medicines began to pick up again after the war as well. Until the death of Sebastian Andreas Fabricius in 1790, practically all commercial activity between Halle and Pennsylvania was conducted and organized by Fabricius in Halle, Friedrich Willhelm Pasche (1728–1792) in London, and the mandatarii Helmuth and Schmidt in Philadelphia.34 Pasche had taken the place of Friedrich Michael Ziegenhagen (1694–1776) at the London relay station in Halle’s international trade, while Fabricius took care of business at the Halle Orphanage.35 Companies such as the Altona-­based family firm of Van der Smissen and the Frankfurt book trader Carl & Hermann provided for the safe transport of goods and commodities from and to seaport towns.36 A total of 19 out of this phase’s 71 letters37 directly relate to business contacts with Halle, making trade in medicine the second most

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important issue in Mühlenberg’s correspondence from 1784 to 1790, after trade with Erlangen. Mühlenberg placed his first independent orders for Halle medicines with Fabricius, including books for the Lancaster merchant Ludwig Laumann (d. 1797).38 Mühlenberg also profited from Halle via his access to the large and reliable Pietist communication network, a decisive “network asset” for mail transport. That access he could offer to his correspondents.39

Phase 2: Transatlantic Botany, 1790–1797 Despite the outbreak of the French Revolution, the signature feature of Mühlenberg’s network after 1790 was its rapid, almost sudden, growth on both sides of the Atlantic.40 At the time, Mühlenberg was very active in acquiring new contacts.41 With his father’s death in 1787, correspondence with kin lost its importance, while the deaths of Pasche and Fabricius, who was succeeded by Gottlieb Friedrich Stoppelberg (d. 1797) in early 1790, changed Halle’s transatlantic trading network significantly.42 At the same time, problems lay ahead in Mühlenberg’s first link to scientific Europe: Erlangen. The incorporation of the margravate of Ansbach-­Bayreuth into Prussia in 1791 forced Schöpf to discontinue his regular contact with Mühlenberg.43 With the governmental changes, Schreber found himself increasingly engaged in administrative duties and soon after 1791 began to neglect his American correspondent.44 Sensing Mühlenberg’s growing frustrations, he finally wrote in 1796, “So if you desire to make use of my services in researching the plants of your country again in the future, you will have much less cause to be dissatisfied with me.”45 Mühlenberg, however, had already found other sources of botanical expertise. Georg Franz Hoffmann (1761–1821), a former student of Schreber, had left Erlangen for Göttingen in 1791 after a falling-­out with the “Prince of Erlangen Sciences,” as Schreber liked to style himself.46 “With Professor Schreber in Erlangen, there is no easy way of getting along on account of his character, which makes me happy about the improvement and change of my situation in retrospect,”47 Hoffmann remarked with regard to his new position at the University of Göttingen.48 Schreber had first made Mühlenberg aware of Hoffmann in May 1787, a move that he surely regretted later.49 From 1791 on, Hoffmann engaged in botanical correspondence following Schreber’s example: Mühlenberg was to send him specimens, and Hoffmann would primarily

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  157

provide plant identifications in return. In consequence, Schreber and Hoffmann began to compete for Mühlenberg’s services. “The cryptogamic [specimens] will come next,” Schreber promised in May 1792, “and possibly I will be able to send you more than Professor Hoffmann could.”50 However, nothing much came of this promise in the coming years, and Hoffmann succeeded in taking over Schreber’s position as Mühlenberg’s correspondent, specifically with regard to cryptogamic research. This research was to develop into Mühlenberg’s second-­favorite botanical study, after his primary interest in grasses and sedges. Mühlenberg’s interest in cryptogamic research, however, dramatically increased with another former contact of Schreber: Johann Hedwig (1730–1799). Hedwig, who held the chair of botany at the University of Leipzig from 1789, was contacted by Mühlenberg sometime in the early 1790s. At the time, Hedwig was the undisputed international authority on Cryptogamia, a taxonomic term referring to flowerless plants reproducing by spores. The twenty-­ fourth class of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, in Linnaeus’s day it represented a neat compromise to close a gap in his system. Unable to detect reproductive organs with the naked eye in mosses, worts, and ferns, the Swede had lumped them together with all other plant organisms he failed to classify according to his sexual system. Hedwig discovered that the mosses were not asexual, however, earning him the title “Linnaeus of Mosses.” A microscope provided by Schreber and twenty years of almost solitary research allowed him not only to discover plant sexuality in mosses and worts but also to make further groundbreaking discoveries in bryology, the study of mosses and worts, and affiliated disciplines of natural history.51 A new subdiscourse in botanical science emerged from his work, remaining one of the main fields of advanced plant studies in the late eighteenth century and also informing Mühlenberg’s web of botanical correspondences.52 Naturally, their brief contact focused on this subject. Hedwig was Mühlenberg’s first “specialized” contact, chosen for the express purpose of gathering knowledge on mosses.53 Across the English Channel, another botanical authority had attracted Mühlenberg’s attention. James Edward Smith (1759–1828), the owner of Linnaeus’s original herbarium and founder of the Linnaean Society of London, was probably Mühlenberg’s most prominent contact throughout his career.54 The two men exchanged a total of 34 letters from 1792 to 1813, 16 of which were written and sent before 1797, suggesting that the mid-­1790s was the most active and intense phase of their contact. Through Smith, Mühlenberg

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enjoyed access to Linnaeus’s original specimens, acquired by Smith after the death of Linnaeus’s son Carl Linnaeus the Younger (1741–1783). By dint of these, he hoped to clear up the identification of some doubtful plants in older publications on American flora.55 Two years into their exchange, Mühlenberg confessed that his discontent with Schreber was his main reason for having contacted Smith: “The unhappy Troubles in the old Countrie have broke up all my Correspondence with my German Friends. O may I find a new and constant Correspondent in your Person.”56 Once again, delays and frustrations with his European correspondents were a decisive factor in his decisions to extend his network in new directions. Mühlenberg simultaneously increased the volume of his North American botanical correspondence. After the war, American scientists prioritized their European contacts over contact with their American colleagues. Still, it is surprising to see that Mühlenberg almost completely ignored his immediate neighbors in and around Philadelphia. He established contact with the likes of William (1739–1823) and John Bartram (1743–1812), Humphry Marshall (1723– 1801) and his nephew Moses Marshall (1758–1813), William Hamilton (1749– 1813), and Benjamin Smith Barton (1766–1815) only around or shortly after 1790. In 1791, William Bartram published Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida. As the Cherokee country fascinated Mühlenberg, it provided a reason to focus more on local botanists, and he eagerly solicited Bartram for information about his findings.57 With nearly all of his subsequent American contacts, the pattern of exchange reversed itself: Mühlenberg was the expert, giving lectures to his fellow Americans. “I confess my ignorance in Botany,” even William Bartram confessed humbly in November 1792, “particularly in the Cryptogamia of Linné. I have very little knowledge in the Ferns, Mosses & Alga.”58 With Benjamin Smith Barton, however, Mühlenberg made his first negative acquaintance in the botanical exchange, as he soon became aware of Barton’s intrusive networking techniques.59 With Frederick Kampmann (1746–1826) and Samuel Kramsch (1756–1824), two Moravian missionaries to North America entered his network.60 Nevertheless, Europe remained Mühlenberg’s focus until the turn of the century, as his contact with Schreber and Schöpf had proven helpful for his first botanical publication, the Index Florae Lancastriensis, which he submitted to the American Philosophical Society in 1791.61 From 1791 to 1797, Smith, Hedwig, and Hoffmann, in turn, aided him in the production of the supplement to this index, published in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society of 1797.62

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  159

Phase 3: A Network in Transition, 1797–1802 With the death of Stoppelberg in 1797 and Joseph Friedrich Nebe’s (1737–1812) assumption of all transatlantic commerce, Mühlenberg’s contact with the Halle Orphanage changed for the last time, and the new connection remained stable until Nebe’s death in 1812. The outbreak of open war with Great Britain that year prevented the reestablishment of contact, and Mühlenberg’s own death in 1815 came before communication could be reopened. Other than the change with Halle, the new century was primarily marked by Mühlenberg’s rising fame in the world of science, the declining intensity in his European correspondence, and the paramount importance of two new American contacts, the Moravians Christian Friedrich Denke (1775–1838) and Jacob van Vleck (1751–1831). Although only 6 American correspondents actually exchanged letters with Mühlenberg from 1797 to 1802, their 52 letters compare well with the 60 letters from 17 European correspondents during the same period.63 It was over the course of these four years that Mühlenberg gradually began to put more effort into his American correspondence, finding himself more and more disillusioned with transatlantic exchanges. Nevertheless, in the years after Johann Hedwig’s death in 1799, he developed a European “cluster of interest” centering around cryptogamic interests, although Smith and Hoffmann began to annoy him, rekindling his ideas of American collaboration and botanical independence. Conditions were favorable for such an undertaking, as Mühlenberg had already gained a reputation in the field of botanical science. Table 6.1 shows a significant rise in the number of correspondents directly seeking contact with him, a trend that continued in the coming years. Despite Mühlenberg’s initial excitement over the opportunity to correspond with Hoffmann, Smith, and Hedwig, which helped him accomplish what Schreber’s and Schöpf ’s contributions had failed to do, he found himself equally dissatisfied with their performance in the mid-­1790s. After 1795, Hoffmann only managed to send him one more letter, dated 1801 and filled with excuses about why he was unable to respond properly.64 In contrast to their six letters from 1790 to 1797, only three letters were exchanged from 1797 to 1805. Their contact ceased altogether after 1805, when Hoffmann moved to Moscow to assume a new position at the Russian Academy of Sciences.65 James Edward Smith, with whom correspondence dropped from sixteen letters in 1797 to merely five letters in 1802, was also hindered by personal and professional difficulties. Fulfilling a wish of his wife, Pleaseance, the Smith family moved to

160  Material and Intellectual Cultures Table 6.1  Instances of active versus passive contact, 1784–1815 Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 (1784–90) (1790–97) (1797–1802) (1802–5)

Phase 5 Phase 6 (1805–11) (1811–15)

Mühlenberg seeking contact

0

7

0

1

3

3

Mühlenberg being contacted

2

2

5

8

1

8

Norwich, and Smith cut back on writing letters to devote more time to original research.66 As in Hoffmann’s case, excuses and pretexts for delayed plant identifications began to fill his letters, primarily as his new major project, the multivolume Flora Britannica, demanded his full attention.67 Johann Hedwig in Leipzig never disappointed Mühlenberg, but he died in 1799. In his diary, Mühlenberg noted, “Today I receive a sad letter dated April [17]99 that tells me that my friend Hedwig has died in his sixty-­eighth year in the beginning of [17]99. May he rest in peace. . . . Now I have to contact another one, named Willdenow.”68 Karl Ludwig Willdenow (1765–1812) joined several others as new correspondents in the wake of Hedwig’s death. In another diary entry, dated January 27, 1801, Mühlenberg listed Hedwig’s son Romanus Adolph Hedwig (1772–1806), Christian Friedrich Schwägrichen (1775–1838), and Kurt Polycarp Joachim Sprengel (1766–1833), only omitting the bryologist Christiaan Hendrik Persoon (1761–1836).69 The latter correspondent, especially, was to occupy a prominent position in this “cryptogamic circle,” whose participants all had ties to the late Hedwig and to one another, along with a focus on cryptogamic research. With Willdenow alone Mühlenberg exchanged a total of eight letters on the subject from 1797 to 1802, which made him Hedwig’s genuine successor, while Mühlenberg’s contacts with Romanus Hedwig, Schwägrichen, Sprengel, and Persoon also promised new perspectives.70 “To the young Doctor Hedwig, I have already written,” Mühlenberg acknowledged to Nebe in 1800, also mentioning a letter by Schwägrichen, which had obviously confused him as to who would be Hedwig’s official “scientific heir.”71 Very soon it turned out that Schwägrichen and young Hedwig would collaborate directly to carry on Hedwig’s work.72 Sprengel’s motivation to contact Mühlenberg arose from his new position at the Halle University botanical garden in 1799, for which he sought seeds and live plants.73 Sprengel is remembered more for his contributions to the historiography of sciences than for his

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  161

achievements in cryptogamic research. Nevertheless, his exchange with Mühlenberg did include mosses that Sprengel used to challenge Johann Hedwig’s scientific findings.74 The last individual in Mühlenberg’s cryptogamic circle was Persoon, “an industrious, very lively young man studying . . . at Göttingen,” as Johann Hedwig had introduced him to Mühlenberg in 1797.75 Persoon moved to Paris in 1802, after which actual correspondence with Mühlenberg began on a regular basis. By 1800, Mühlenberg was utterly fed up with his other European correspondents’ unreliability, negligence, and war-­ related transport problems. Schreber, who sent only one letter to Lancaster in the five years after 1797, received the brunt of his discontent, being Mühlenberg’s senior correspondent. Mühlenberg listed his complaints in his diary: “1. Smith would be most useful but answers too negligently. 2. Schreber is completely careless and only seeks to extend his herbaria. 3. Hoffman has made me discontinue our correspondence, as he undertakes too many things and really finishes nothing. 4. Hedwig the elder died too soon for me.”76 To Dawson Turner (1775–1858), Smith’s assistant and one of Mühlenberg’s marginal correspondents, he further wrote in 1803, “Doctor Hoffman at Gottingen has received from me whatever I could get in Pennsylvania, but he is too slow for me in his Descriptions, and begins too many works at one time. My other correspondents Schreber and Willdenow have promised to describe our numerous cryptogamia which I sent to them but hitherto nothing has appeared.”77 Mühlenberg’s correspondence with Schwägrichen, Persoon, and the others was, as yet, too fresh to make up for the loss of reliable partners across the Atlantic. For the first time, he had to take a closer look at his immediate surroundings for new correspondents. His newly won authority in cryptogamic research made the task rather easy for him. The two Moravian ministers turned out to be Mühlenberg’s strongest American contacts from 1797 to 1802. With Christian Friedrich Denke and Jacob van Vleck, he exchanged an astonishing 33 out of a total of 52 American letters. Taking over from Kramsch and Kampmann, who went to Hope, New Jersey, in 1797, Denke and van Vleck gave Mühlenberg access to the sophisticated Moravian communication network and their own expertise in natural history.78 They sent plant specimens, roots, seeds, and live plants to Lancaster in return for their identification. “Here now you receive the seventh package,” Denke wrote in 1798. “In grasses I am very weak, and I owe you a thousandfold my most sincere thanks for the love you have shown me in this, for I still do not dare to identify a single grass by myself.”79 Denke and Mühlenberg in

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particular developed a kind of teacher-­student relationship in the subsequent months, reflecting Mühlenberg’s new role in his own growing American network. By now, he had become a central multiplicator of botanical information gathered from Europe. “The hours in your highly cherished presence were especially dear to me,” Denke thanked him in late 1798. “Many things I forgot to ask you to teach to me.”80 Their correspondence was Mühlenberg’s most intense American exchange up to this point, but it only lasted from May 1798 to November 1799, when Denke was ordered to move from Nazareth Hall to Fairfield, Canada.81 Despite the relatively short duration of Denke’s and van Vleck’s correspondence with Mühlenberg, it surpassed the number of letters he exchanged with family and kin at the turn of the century. With his two brothers-­in-­law, Schultze and Kunze, Mühlenberg exchanged twelve letters. With his brother Frederick, whose political career was gradually coming to an end, he exchanged only two. Ten years after his father’s death, the global community of scientists had become his new family.

Phase 4: Network Strategies, 1802–1805 Mühlenberg’s network changed after Johann Hedwig died in 1799, followed by Schöpf in 1800. Denke and van Vleck left Nazareth in early 1799, to resume contact again only in 1807. The extent of his American correspondence now nearly equaled that of his European correspondence, although the number of his European contacts exceeded his American contacts (table 6.2).82 A closer look at the data shows that Mühlenberg’s American correspondence grew in intensity, making up for what it lacked in quantity. With the exception of Nebe in Halle, Mühlenberg exchanged an average of no more than two or three letters with correspondents in Europe, while John Brickell (1749–1809), Constantine Rafinesque-­Schmaltz (1783–1840), and yet another Moravian, Gustavus Dallmann (life dates unknown), each received an average of fourteen letters at their American homes. This Americanization of the network corresponds with a change in Mühlenberg’s botanical outlook and in the rhetoric of his letters: “My desire to know every N[orth] American plant with certainty is insatiable,” he confided to Dawson Turner in 1803. “As for foreign plants, let others explore them, there is Room for all to study and admire the great variety.”83 To Schreber he had written in 1802 that he preferred plants that “can persist in our free air.”84 These were no longer the words of someone interested in serving the interest of European scientists.

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  163 Table 6.2  Number of European versus American correspondents, 1784–1815 Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 (1784–90) (1790–97) (1797–1802) (1802–5)

Phase 5 Phase 6 (1805–11) (1811–15)

European correspondents

6

15

17

21

15

17

American correspondents

7

15

6

15

29

38

Meanwhile, the Halle Orphanage and its trade in medicines veered into trouble. In the early 1790s, Mühlenberg had become Halle’s major client and distributor in the United States.85 To the Medikamentenexpedition, the largely unregulated North American market for medicines grew in importance, as commercial privileges were discontinued following the death of Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) and legal reforms in the medical market and changes in public taste began to encroach upon Halle’s European sales figures.86 For Mühlenberg, this was both good and bad news. He had benefitted from his access to the Pietist network from the very beginning of his independent networking, but his pivotal position in Halle’s transatlantic trading system now allowed him to take full advantage of it for his own ends. In his letters to Fabricius, Mühlenberg hardly, if ever, had dared to ask for botanical books. In his correspondence with Stoppelberg and Nebe, however, he became very explicit about his scientific interests, making demands.87 In both cases, he often added requests that they forward or receive botanical letters and packets, contact scientists, or run other related errands. Mühlenberg thus combined his professional and botanical interests and guaranteed a relatively safe transatlantic passage, which other American botanists lacked at the time. The election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800 brought a naturalist and the author of Notes on the State of Virginia (1781) to the presidency. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 initiated the biggest scientific project of the young republic so far: the exploration of the western territories from the Mississippi to the Pacific.88 Although Mühlenberg was not personally involved in the planning, several of his correspondents were. Benjamin Smith Barton, to whom Mühlenberg had taken an intense dislike by now, was a central figure in the crash-­ course education of Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809).89 Barton remained a marginal figure in Mühlenberg’s network, but Mühlenberg continually feared that Barton was making clever use of his network to tap the flow of information in his correspondence. “Rafinesque and Barton correspond very often,”

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he noted in his diary in 1804, “and this way all my knowledge is being used by others. So I will rather set myself completely apart and will excuse myself on the pretext of having too much work, so that I have not collected in vain.”90 Barton had an obvious habit of publishing others’ original scientific research under his own name, while being extremely protective of his own work. This irritated Mühlenberg, as he continued to champion the free exchange of ideas among American scientists for the common goal of the growth of knowledge. “With D[octor] Barton I correspond but seldom, except when he puts some queries to me,” he wrote to William D. Peck (1763–1822) in Boston in 1812, looking back on more than twenty years of troublesome relations with the eccentric doctor. “I could never persuade him to let me see his Herbarium although he has seen mine twice. His principle seems to be ‘it is more blessed to receive than to give.’ ”91 Mühlenberg resolved to be even more attentive and less generous in his communications. In fact, his subsequent attitude in botanical exchanges challenges the validity of one of the core ideals of the republic of letters—the often proclaimed “reciprocity of exchange.”92 From about 1790, Mühlenberg had kept close track of his correspondence in the form of “balance accounts,” wherein he neatly recorded what he had sent to whom and what he expected in return, often later noting in the margin whether his expectations had been fulfilled.93 After more and more frustrating experiences, especially with Europeans, Mühlenberg’s caution developed into a regular “network strategy,” by which he sought to minimize the risk of being taken advantage of. Consequently, his correspondence with the aforementioned Rafinesque-­Schmaltz, a French German botanist born in Constantinople in 1783, was taken up with considerable reluctance on his part. Rafinesque had come to the United States in 1802 and soon applied for a job on the scientific staff of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. With the application pending, he began to travel the country and tried to establish himself as a scientific authority, with some success. After a visit to Lancaster, the two men began a brief but intense botanical exchange of sixteen letters from 1803 to 1805, which consisted of Rafinesque asking Mühlenberg repeatedly and abruptly to hand over all unpublished materials for the sake of a quick publication and the promotion of botanical science.94 Mühlenberg did not respond in the way Rafinesque had hoped. Two years later Rafinesque left for Europe, deeply disappointed by Mühlenberg and by Jefferson, who had not permitted him to join Lewis and Clark. To John Brickell, one of Mühlenberg’s two major American correspondents, Mühlenberg confided much later, “Don’t let foreigners like Mr Rafinesque carry off our

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  165

imperfect dried Specimen. How imperfect are many of Linné’s and Willdenow’s Descriptions!”95 Mühlenberg’s continued efforts to encourage American botanists to collaborate96 now took on a distinct “nationalistic” character that undercut the originally supranational and universal ideals of the republic of letters.

Phase 5: An American Network, 1805–1811 In 1805, Heinrich Adolf Schrader (1767–1837) succeeded Georg Franz Hoffmann both as professor at Göttingen and as Mühlenberg’s correspondent. Their contact was ill fated from the beginning due to Europe’s dire political situation. Schreber sent a final letter in February 1807 from Erlangen, which had been occupied by French troops and practically cut off from outside communication since September 1806.97 The Napoleonic Wars, the Continental System, and eventually the War of 1812 combined to diminish Mühlenberg’s transatlantic correspondence even further after 1805. “From Europe I had only 2 Letters this year,” he wrote in 1809 to his new American contact Stephen Elliott (1771–1830) in Charleston. “All Correspondence seems to be stopped.”98 This situation also affected Mühlenberg’s cryptogamic circle, composed of Willdenow, Romanus Adolph Hedwig, Schwägrichen, Sprengel, and Persoon, although the constant warfare was only one reason why the circle became less active. “If you have not seen a single line from my hand in a long time,” Willdenow tentatively expressed his regret in May 1804, “so this was not due to a lack of diligence or sympathy . . . but on account of other businesses I had to tend to.”99 At the University of Leipzig, Schwägrichen and Romanus Hedwig kept up their work but soon embarked on other professional careers. Schwägrichen sent a last note in May 1803 and Romanus Hedwig died in early 1806, ending their contact with Mühlenberg. Nebe informed Mühlenberg that nothing more was to be expected from Sprengel;100 Persoon, from whom Mühlenberg had expected so much, seemed to be impossible to contact in Paris. Mühlenberg finally turned to his American colleagues. Consequently, the number of letters he exchanged with correspondents within his native country from 1805 to 1811 exceeded those exchanged with Europeans for the first time: 50 letters were exchanged with 14 Europeans during these years, while 103 letters were exchanged with 29 Americans.101 At this critical juncture, the German gardener and botanist Frederick Traugott Pursh (1774–1820) was entrusted with scientific work on the Lewis and Clark specimens, adding

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a competitive element to the relations between European and American scientists. In September 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s (1770–1838) Corps of Discovery returned to Saint Louis with natural specimens, animals, plants, and seeds from the Pacific coast and the western parts of the continent in tow. Among Mühlenberg’s correspondents, Benjamin Smith Barton, Benjamin Rush (1746–1813), and Caspar Wistar (1761–1818) were involved in the planning of the expedition from beginning to end, giving basic medicinal, geographical, ethnographical, and botanical instruction to Lewis. America’s nascent scientific and educational community had the infrastructure to handle the planning but ultimately failed to organize the scientific work on the specimens.102 The Philadelphia seedsman Bernard McMahon (1775–1816) and gardener William Hamilton were in charge of raising the seeds,103 while Barton assumed responsibility for all scientific publications. Soon it became obvious that Barton had once again promised too much. He failed to produce anything in the following years and began personal feuds with several of his colleagues.104 Mühlenberg, who closely followed the fate of the Lewis and Clark specimens through his correspondence, first learned about Pursh’s involvement from Stephen Elliott in October 1809: “With regard to Gov[ernor] Lewis’ work I understood from Dr Barton that in consequence of a dispute between Gov[ernor] L[ewis] and himself the work was suspended and no person could be engaged to conduct the Scientific part of it. D[octor] B[arton] complained much of ill usage and seemed . . . displeased with McMahon. Since I returned home [I] heard from Wilson the Ornithologist a very different story. W[ilson] says the Botanical part is progressing under the care of a German named Bush or Brusch and is nearly completed and that the whole work will probably be ready for the press in the course of this winter.”105 Lewis’s death just a few weeks later further complicated matters, and after a final engagement and dispute with David Hosack (1769–1835) in New York, Pursh left for London, taking with him seeds and specimens purloined from McMahon, Barton, and Hamilton.106 Mühlenberg tried to retrieve the seeds. “Pray have you specimens of any of Lewis’ plants?” he asked William Baldwin (1779–1819) in 1811. “I have tried every method to get a sight of them,—but in vain. My friends at Philadelphia have denied me the pleasure of seeing them in flower. I would wish to add them to my catalogue, without any description:—leaving that to the compilers of Lewis’ work. I am afraid the description will be made in England, and Lewis’ work will come too late.”107 American botanists had failed to

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  167

work together, and a significant contribution to American botany would be produced in Europe. To Mühlenberg, this was both a frustrating and motivating experience, accelerating the Americanization of his network.

Phase 6: Toward Botanical Independence, 1811–1815 In the final years of his life, Mühlenberg’s network became essentially American, with 313 letters passing to and from 38 American correspondents and 37 letters sent to 17 Europeans from 1811 to May 1815.108 This was paralleled by an unprecedented growth of his correspondence from an average of 21 letters per year from 1794 to 1811, to an average of 82 per year from 1811 to 1815.109 Mühlenberg exchanged most of these letters with William Baldwin (93 letters), Zaccheus Collins (1764–1831, 83 letters), and Stephen Elliott (36 letters), who were also closely interconnected. “I came to Georgia in the first week in January and had the pleasure of meeting Dr Baldwin in Savannah,”110 Elliott wrote to Mühlenberg, who in turn often wrote about “our mutual Friend Mr Collins.”111 Mühlenberg’s American letters became more intense not only in number and frequency but also in content. Many of the letters sent to Elliott, Baldwin, Collins, and other Americans resemble protocols of his current botanical communications, sharing information on the development of his personal network. “The Cryptogamia I have not yet received, nor any Answer to a Number of Letters I wrote to Europe last Spring,” he informed Elliott in 1811. “I fear our Intercourse will be long stopped, and we must do as well as we can. Perhaps we can help ourselves, if only Naturalists would join. I have tried since New Year to animate a Number of my former Correspondents but without much success. D[octor] Barton hardly ever answers and when a Letter comes it contains nothing but Queries. W[illiam] Hamilton is still alive but very weak. Mr Lyons is well. One new Correspondent I gained [in] Doctor Baldwin in Wilmington Delaware St[ate] who promises fairly to send me the new Plants of Delaware which are numerous.”112 Considering his earlier negative experiences, which had taught him to limit information in his letters, this new frankness is remarkable. Some of the bitter diatribes against European haughtiness in his letters, however, suggest that Mühlenberg was hoping to set an example for free exchange of thought in American science. “We ought to be jealous for our American names,” he wrote to William Baldwin in January 1811. “Why should we have the trouble of finding, and other nations the honor?”113 Mühlenberg was resolved to close the ranks of American botany.

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In his European letters from this period, however, Mühlenberg was much less aggressive, still quoting the war as an explanation for the worsening transatlantic relations during the last four years of his life. To Smith he lamented in 1813, “It seems an Age to me since I had any Letter from You or of any of my former botanical Correspondents, and Botany has suffered as much as almost every Science by the unhappy Interruption of mutual Communications. Nullo Salus bello, pacem te pocimus omnes.”114 Persoon (10 letters), Olof Swartz (1760–1818, 4 letters), and Palisot de Beauvois (1752–1820, 3 letters) were his other principal European contacts at the time. Mühlenberg’s other major link to Europe, the trade with Halle, also suffered greatly from the war, especially when England’s Orders in Council (1807–9), Jefferson’s Restrictive System, the Non-­Intercourse Act of 1809, and the Non-­Importation Act two years later brought commerce to a halt. “Whether more medicines will arrive is very uncertain considering the sad situation Europe is in and the bad outlooks for trade,” Mühlenberg had warned his brother-­in-­law Schultze in 1807.115 In October 1809, Nebe sent the last letter that Mühlenberg was to receive from Halle, three years prior to Nebe’s death in 1812.116 The Halle link was now severed, as it could not be resumed in the short time between the Treaty of Ghent, which officially ended the war with Great Britain, and Mühlenberg’s own death on May 23, 1815.

The American Linnaeus Mühlenberg never saw the creeks and rivers of American botany actually flow together during his lifetime. Not until the mid-­nineteenth century did the conditions for scientific work and publications in the United States approach European standards, facilitating the collaboration of John Torrey (1796–1873) and Asa Gray (1810–1888), whose work remains a cornerstone in the history of botanical science in America.117 The basis for their research, however, had been laid by an earlier generation of scientists, among whom Mühlenberg represented the German-­speaking part of the early republic’s intellectual elite. Apart from a sound European college education, it was his access to the Halle communication network that allowed him to enter the transatlantic botanical discourse and tap European sources of botanical knowledge for the sake of his own country. The development of his network thus mirrors the status quo of American science during the early republic, caught between the desire to fulfill the promise of independence in the fields of culture, science, education,

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and economy, on the one hand, and a prolonged factual dependence on England and Europe, on the other. The gradual Americanization of his network was due to a combination of the shortcomings of contemporary mail transport and communications, personal botanical interests, botanical subdiscourses, and the rise of nineteenth-­century national states. It unfolded across a historical threshold that separated early modern society, structured along confessional boundaries and estate hierarchies, from modern society, shaped along national lines. The republic of letters, driven by universal ideals such as interconfessional and supranational collaboration, came to be replaced by national schools of science and thought, which slowly redefined the parameters of scientific collaboration. For Mühlenberg, correspondents like Smith, Pursh, and others gradually left America and became foreigners. Moravians like Kramsch, Denke, and Dallmann, however, became American botanists, irrespective of their confession and beliefs. Aside from his constant efforts to instill a spirit of mutuality in his American colleagues, Mühlenberg’s most important contribution to this emancipatory process of American botany rested in his herbarium, which continued to be in use for thirty years after his death. In 1840, Moses Ashley Curtis (1808–1872) wrote to his fellow botanist Elias Durand (1794–1873), “I did not succeed in getting sight of Muhlenberg’s Herbarium though I called several times at the Philosophical Rooms.”118 A handwritten note by Asa Gray, dating from November of the same year, testifies to his examination of specimens from the genera Kuhnia, Cacalia, and Vernonia in Mühlenberg’s herbarium.119 His contemporaries agreed that this was his greatest achievement, although William Baldwin primarily praised his “unbounded liberality of sentiment . . . which ought ever to distinguish the genuine Christian philosopher, and Naturalist, from the narrow-­minded despot in science who would exalt all his own fame at the expense of those around him.” Baldwin wrote these lines to Mühlenberg’s son Frederick Augustus Hall Mühlenberg (1795–1867) in the same letter containing the well-­known reference to Mühlenberg as the “Linnaeus of our Country.”120 However, in his continuous efforts to collaborate in a disinterested manner for the sake of science, Mühlenberg ultimately met with failure. In retrospect, insurmountable difficulties conspired against him and his dream of building a national botanical tradition from scratch, as he was faced with an underdeveloped scientific and educational infrastructure, constant warfare, and unstable conditions for transatlantic communication. That accomplishment was to be reserved for the later rise of professional botanists, who could rely on cable transmissions, new and well-­funded scientific

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institutions, and sound roads and railways leading far into botanically unexplored western territories that lay beyond the grasp of Mühlenberg and his contemporaries.

notes 1. See J. M. Maisch, Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Mühlenberg als Botaniker: Vortrag gehalten vor dem Pionierverein zu Philadelphia am 6. Mai 1886 (New York: Gustav Lauter, 1886); Henry Melchior Muhlenberg-­Richards, “Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg, D.D.,” Pennsylvania German 3 (1902): 147–55; Herbert H. Beck, “Henry E. Mühlenberg, Botanist,” Papers of the Lancaster County Historical Society 32 (1928): 99–107; Shiu-­Ying Hu and E. D. Merril, “Work and Publications of Henry Muhlenberg, with Special Attention to Unrecorded or Incorrectly Recorded Binomials,” Bartonia 25 (1949): 1–67; Paul A.  W. Wallace, The Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950); Wolf-­Dieter Müller-­Jancke, “Der ‘Linneaus Americanus’ und seine Beziehungen zu deutschen Botanikern: G. H. E. Mühlenberg. Beiträge zu amerikanisch-­deutschen Beziehungen in den Naturwissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts,” Deutsche Apotheker-­Zeitung 117, no. 33 (1977): 1323–29; James Mears, “Some Sources of the Herbarium of Henry Muhlenberg (1753–1815),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122, no. 3 (1978): 155–74; William Cahill, “The Bartram-­Muhlenberg Correspondence (1792, 1810),” in William Bartram: The Search for Nature’s Design, ed. Thomas Hallock and Nancy Hoffmann (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 381–425. 2. This title comes from William Baldwin, who called him the “Linnaeus of our Country” in a consolation letter to Mühlenberg’s own son Frederick Augustus Hall Mühlenberg. Quoted in Herbert H. Beck, “Henry E. Muhlenberg,” Castanea: The Journal of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Club 3/4 (1938): 45. 3. Mühlenberg to Bartram, September 13, 1792, Bartram Family Papers, 1684–1841, Collection 36, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter HSP Bartram Papers), vol. 4. Mühlenberg speaks here of his lifelong ambition to write a comprehensive flora of the United States. 4. The reference is to John Eaton LeConte (1784–1860). Mühlenberg to Baldwin, January 20, 1815, in William Darlington, ed., Reliquiæ Baldwinianæ: Selections from the Correspondence of the Late W. Baldwin . . . with Occasional Notes and a Short Biographical Memoir (Philadelphia: Kimber and Sharpless, 1843; reprint, New York: Hafner, 1969), 156. 5. The essay is based on data collected for my dissertation. See Matthias Schönhofer, “The Correspondence Network of the German American Botanist Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Mühlenberg” (diss., University of Bamberg, 2011). 6. Franz Mauelshagen, “Netzwerke des Vertrauens: Gelehrtenkorrespondenzen und wissenschaftlicher Austausch in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Vertrauen: Historische Annäherungen, ed. Ute Frevert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 119. Unless otherwise specified, all translations from German texts are my own. See also Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet, La République des Lettres (Paris: Belin, 1997), 23; Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 385. 7. My dissertation was part of an ongoing research project entitled Atlantische Korrespondenzen: Genese und Transformation deutsch-­amerikanischer Netzwerke 1740–1870, financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The project was responsible for retrieving, transcribing, and digitizing Mühlenberg’s letters. I want to express my gratitude for the funding received from the DFG. 8. Subsequently, I will simply refer to him as “Mühlenberg,” except in passages that discuss other members of his family, where he will be referred to as “Henry.” 9. Mühlenberg’s biography has been presented several times in greater detail. See especially Mark Häberlein, The Practice of Pluralism: Congregational Life and Religious Diversity in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1730–1820 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), chaps. 5 and

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  171 6; Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717–1793, vol. 1, Pastors and Congregations (Breinigsville, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1980), 94. See also n. 1. 10. Mühlenberg corresponded with 107 individual persons and 2 institutions, which are counted as individuals here. There was a single anonymous letter. For 21 correspondents, no letters could be located, which leaves us with a corpus of 693 extant letters from 88 correspondents. 11. This number includes 693 actual letters and 297 reconstructed letters, which must, at this time, be presumed lost or destroyed. Reconstructed letters were traced by information and references retrieved from the actual source corpus of 693 letters and Mühlenberg’s botanical diaries at the American Philosophical Society Archives in Philadelphia. There are also 8 undated letters. This entails a data-­loss rate of 29.76 percent. As those 297 reconstructed letters presumably contained more references to lost letters, this rate must be even higher. A complete list of correspondences, containing both existing and reconstructed letters, appears in the appendix to my dissertation. The earliest letter is dated December 4, 1771, and was written by Mühlenberg to his father, Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg. See Kurt Aland, ed., Die Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mühlenbergs aus der Anfangszeit des deutschen Luthertums in Nordamerika, vol. 4, 1769–1776 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993), letter 575. The last letter was written by Sophie Bensen (life dates unknown), the widow of Mühlenberg’s cousin Carl Daniel Heinrich Bensen (1761–1805), half a year after Mühlenberg’s death in May 1815. Bensen to Mühlenberg, September 2, 1815, Henry Muhlenberg Correspondence, 1779–1815, Mss.Film 1097, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 12. See Alexander Pyrges, “Religion in the Atlantic World: The Ebenezer Communication Network, 1732–1828,” in Pietism in Germany and North America, 1680–1820, ed. Jonathan Strom, Hartmut Lehmann, and James Van Horn Melton (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 54. 13. A thorough examination of all eighty-­eight correspondents and their exchanges with Mühlenberg has revealed that his circle of contacts underwent significant changes six times. These transitions were roughly located at 1784, 1791, 1797, 1801, 1806, and 1811. However, clear-­cut separations into phases are hardly ever feasible. In the case of some already established contacts, which continued from one phase to the next, these blurry boundaries often come with the tricky problem of deciding which letters fall into which phase. 14. Lorraine Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,” Science in Context 4, no. 2 (1991): 367–86. 15. For the period preceding phase 1 (December 4, 1771–January 2, 1784), there were 36 letters exchanged with his father, 4 letters exchanged with his brother Frederick Augustus Conrad Mühlenberg, and 10 exchanged with seven other correspondents, most of whom were relatives, such as his brother-­in-­law Christopher Emanuel Schultze. Four letters were sent to Europe and 46 to North American locations. 16. Thomas Müller-­Bahlke, “Communication at Risk: The Beginnings of the Halle Correspondence with the Pennsylvania Lutherans,” in In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in Eighteenth-­Century Europe and America, ed. Hermann Wellenreuther (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 139. 17. Renate Wilson, Pious Traders in Medicine: A German Pharmaceutical Network in Eighteenth-­ Century North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 4, 71. 18. Wilson, Pious Traders, 143. Well into the War of Independence, the elder Mühlenberg repeatedly referred to himself as the “Mandatarius of Halle” and kept abreast of financial flows and shipping opportunities. See, for instance, H.  M. Mühlenberg to Kunze, November 24, 1777, in Kurt Aland, ed., Die Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mühlenbergs aus der Anfangszeit des deutschen Luthertums in Nordamerika, vol. 5, 1777–1787 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002), letter 718. 19. Justifying his wish to invest Helmuth with more responsibility for the Halle trade, the elder Mühlenberg wrote to Friedrich Willhelm Pasche at Kensington in early 1772, “To wish for Mr. Helmuth as by-­attorney is based on the following reasons: He is hopefully a good friend of our venerable fathers, friends, and benefactors in Halle and London, a capable correspondent, and a resident as it were on account of his family connections.” (Die Ursach warum den Hn. Helmuth zum Mit-­Attorney wünschte, enthält folgende Gründe: Er ist hoffentlich ein guter Freund von unsern hochw. Vätern, Freunden, und Gönnern in Halle und London, geschickt zur Correspond[ence], ist

172  Material and Intellectual Cultures so zu sagen ansäßig wegen der Familien Connexion etc.) H. M. Mühlenberg to Pasche, February 18, 1772, in Aland, Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mühlenbergs, vol. 4, letter 482. 20. See Wilson, Pious Traders, 143, 146n42; Wallace, Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania, 95–96. 21. G. H. E. Mühlenberg to Fabricius, January 5, 1775, AFSt/M 4 C 17 : 26, Missionsarchiv der Francke’schen Stiftungen, Halle (hereafter AFSt/M). 22. For internal relations of the Mühlenberg family during the revolutionary years, see Paul A. Baglyos, “The Muhlenbergs Become Americans,” Lutheran Quarterly 19, no. 1 (2005): 43–62; Wallace, Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania, chap. 19. 23. For the letters of Johann Peter Gabriel and Frederick Augustus Conrad to their father, see Aland, Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mühlenbergs, vol. 4. 24. “We study together as much as possible,” Henry wrote to his father in 1772, “but often very basic things set us apart. I think Peter would make quicker progress in Greek, but he holds Latin to be more important and useful.” G. H. E. Mühlenberg to H. M. Mühlenberg, January 6, 1772, in Aland, Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mühlenbergs, vol. 4, letter 576. 25. Noting that there are no extant letters from Peter during this period, Aland adds, “In any event, he does not seem to have been an avid letter writer, as even his family often complains about his negligence to send news about himself.” Aland, Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mühlenbergs, 4:11. 26. Henry wrote to Schultze in 1798, “With the general, whom I have paid off in full, I have exchanged pretty sharp letters.” (Mit dem General den ich voll ausbezahlt, habe ich ziemlich scharfe Briefe gewechselt.) Mühlenberg to Schultze, March 26, 1798, Muhlenberg Family Papers, 1769–1866, Mss.B.M891, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (hereafter APS Muhlenberg Papers). Probably the first appearance of Peter’s moniker, “der General,” appears in H. M. Mühlenberg to Kunze, January 1, 1784, in Aland, Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mühlenbergs, vol. 5, letter 923. Throughout the 1780s, Peter is only rarely mentioned. 27. Following Henry’s flight from occupied Philadelphia. 28. Vestiges of the bitter conflict between Kunze and Mühlenberg abound in the letters from the late 1770s. For instance, Kunze wrote to his brother Johann Carl Kunze in Germany about Mühlenberg’s behavior during the Revolutionary War: “My father-­in-­law was forced to repair to the backcountry. When the British seized this city, I was all alone with our congregation. Had I chosen to go to the country as well, as my colleague Mühlenberg jun. has done, it would have been my fault if our beautiful Zion church had been turned into a hospital, and St. Michaelis might have been turned into one as well.” (Mein Herr Schwiegervater war genöthight, sich ins Land zu wenden. . . . Als die Britten diese Stadt besetzten, war ich ganz allein an der Gemeine. Hätte ich ins Land gehen wollen, wie mein Kollege Mühlenberg jun. so würde ich die Schuld davon getragen haben, daß unsre schöne Zionskirche zum Hospital gemacht ward und die Michaeliskirche wäre vielleicht auch dazu gemacht worden.) Johann Christopher Kunze to Johann Carl Kunze, November 11, 1782, AFSt/M 4 C 20 : 5. 29. “Übrigens, hertzlich geliebter Sohn ist mirs eine hertzliche Freude, daß Gottes gnädige Vorsehung Dich wieder ins rechte Element versetzet, daß Du eine große Gemeine zu versehen . . . hast. Wenn Du Dich darin verzerest, das wird Dir unendlich mehr Segen und Gnaden=Lohn zu wege bringen als alle noch verborgene Varianten oder Linaei Kräuter Wißenschafft aus zu forschen.” H. M. Mühlenberg to G. H. E. Mühlenberg, April 3, 1780, in Aland, Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mühlenbergs, vol. 5, letter 787. 30. For phase 1 (January 1, 1784–December 14, 1789), there were 42 letters exchanged with 6 European correspondents and 29 letters with 7 American correspondents, for a total of 71 letters. 31. Mühlenberg to Schreber, November 1, 1785, Briefnachlass Schreber (1921), Universitätsarchiv Erlangen (herafter UAE Briefnachlass Schreber). 32. Schöpf to Mühlenberg, September 1, 1786, Henry Muhlenberg Papers, 1781–1816, Collection 0443, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter HSP Muhlenberg Papers). No letters from other American correspondents could be found within the near complete bequest of Schreber’s letters and manuscripts at the University Archives of Erlangen. For Schöpf, no central corpus of letters exists.

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  173 33. Wilfried Barner, “Gelehrte Freundschaft im 18. Jahrhundert. Zu ihren traditionellen Voraussetzungen,” in Frauenfreundschaft—Männerfreundschaft: Literarische Diskurse im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfram Mauser and Barbara Becker-­Cantarino (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991), 38–39. Reciprocity was held high as an ideal of the republic of letters, but from a modern perspective it is almost impossible to judge the contemporarily appropriate counter value for a packet of dried plants, a tin of seeds, or a shipment of botanical books. Therefore, Franz Mauelshagen has suggested that this “trade in scientific goods” should not be treated in terms of economic rationality or abstract alleged market rules, but within the dynamics of individual social webs and networks. See Mauelshagen, “Netzwerke des Vertrauens,” 141–42. The development of individual commercia litteraria is traced in my dissertation in the form of exchange charts, in order to analyze the information flow over time. 34. Johann Friedrich Schmidt joined Helmuth in Philadelphia in 1785, after serving first at Germantown. 35. For the role of Halle’s intermediaries in their transatlantic trade, see Schönhofer, “Correspondence Network,” chap. 2.1, “The Lutheran Context—A Pietist Network,” especially the subchapter “Halle’s Private Intermediaries.” 36. H. M. Mühlenberg to Fabricius, October 24, 1778, in Aland, Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Mühlenbergs, vol. 5, letter 715. 37. These are the letters by Fabricius (6 actual letters + 2 reconstructed), the book trader Carl & Hermann (4 + 2), and Helmuth and Schmidt in Philadelphia (4 + 1). 38. See Mühlenberg to Fabricius, June 18, 1787, AFSt/M 4 D : 20. See also Mühlenberg to Fabricius, November 1, 1785, AFSt/M 4 D : 20. For Laumann, see Häberlein, Practice of Pluralism, 185, 208, 213. 39. See Mühlenberg to Schreber, November 1, 1785; Schöpf to Mühlenberg, September 1, 1786; and Schreber to Mühlenberg, April 4, 1786, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 40. For phase 2 (January 18, 1790–May 9, 1797), there were 80 letters exchanged with 15 European correspondents and 57 letters with 15 American correspondents, for a total of 137 letters. 41. In the case of 40 of his 88 correspondents, it could be established who contacted whom first. Throughout the 31 years of his correspondence from Lancaster, Mühlenberg actively contacted 14 correspondents and was contacted 26 times. 42. Additionally, a number of irregularities in Fabricius’s bookkeeping were detected, which caused some initial irritation. Stoppelberg wrote to Lancaster in August 1791, “It was a mistake that is only now coming to our attention that we have left the blessed Fabricius without support in his yearly increasing and lately so visible frailty of age, he having repeatedly wished for an assistant whom he could confide in and work with on this matter. . . . Now I am very aware of the consequences.” (Es ist ein Fehler, der jetzt erst recht merkbar wird, daß man den sel[igen] Fabr[icius] bey der von Jahr zu Jahr zunehmenden und in der letzten Zeit so sichtbaren Schwäche des Alters ohne Unterstützung gelassen, da er wohl mehrmals sich einen Gehülfen gewünscht, dem er alles sagen und mit ihm gemeinschaftlich die Angelegenheiten besorgen könte. . . . Jetzt empfinde ich die Folgen davon vorzüglich.) Stoppelberg to Mühlenberg, August 10, 1791, AFSt/M 4 D : 3. See also Wilson, Pious Traders, 152. 43. Prince Friedrich Karl Alexander (1736–1806) of Brandenburg-­Bayreuth, to whom both Schreber and Schöpf directly reported, abdicated in 1791 in favor of Friedrich Willhelm II (1744– 1797). Schöpf, whose main subsistence came from his position as court physician, had to seek new sources of income. For Schreber, this entailed no consequences. Christine Glas, Johann Jacob Palm (1750–1826): Ein Erlanger Verleger und Buchhändler; Mit einer Verlagsbibliographie von 1780 bis 1826 (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1988), 11; Johann Georg Veit Engelhardt, Die Universität Erlangen von 1743–1843 (Erlangen: Barfus’sche Universitätsdruckerey, 1843; reprint, Erlangen: Univ.-­Bund Erlangen-­Nürnberg, 1991), 75. 44. In 1787 and 1791, Schreber was elected prorector, which increased his extra-­scientific workload considerably. See Ludwig Glaßer, “Personalbibliographien der Professoren der Medizinischen Fakultät der Universität Erlangen von 1743–1792” (diss., University of Nuremberg, 1967), 77. Furthermore, upon the death of Heinrich Friedrich Delius (1720–1791), Schreber succeeded him

174  Material and Intellectual Cultures as first professor of medicine and president of the German Academy of Naturalists Leopoldina, located at Erlangen at the time. Walther Jaenicke, “Naturwissenschaften und Naturwissenschaftler in Erlangen 1743–1993,” in 250 Jahre Friedrich-­Alexander-­Universität Erlangen-­Nürnberg, ed. Henning Kössler (Erlangen: FA Universität Erlangen-­Nürnberg, 1993), 635. Schreber wrote in 1792, “The assumption of this position [of president], which caused an unavoidable growth in business, has prevented me from composing the index to the last two of your plant packages.” Schreber to Mühlenberg, May 30, 1792, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 45. “Wenn Sie also künftig sich meines Dienstes in Erforschung der Gewächse Ihres Landes wieder werden bedienen wollen, so wird Sie weniger Ursach haben mit mir unzufrieden zu sein.” Schreber to Mühlenberg, September 16, 1796, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 46. The quotation has been preserved by Schreber’s colleague Heinrich Friedrich Delius. Quoted in Renate Wittern, “Aus der Geschichte der Medizinischen Fakultät,” in Kössler, 250 Jahre Friedrich-­ Alexander-­Universität Erlangen-­Nürnberg, 324. 47. “Mit H[er]rn Prof[essor] Schreber in Erlangen lässt sich wegen seines Characters nicht gut in der Nähe bekannt sein, so dass ich mit der Verbesserung und Veränderung meiner Lage schon in der Rücksicht zufrieden bin.” Hoffman further wrote to Mühlenberg, “I have heard that Mr. Schreber has received one list and two American oak tree seeds from you. Have you included something for me? If so, I can hardly hope to receive it, as we do not communicate with each other and Schreber’s character is nothing less than communicative to others.” (Wie ich höre so hat Hofr[ath] Schreber erst kürzlich über Hamburg eine Liste und zwei amerikanische Eichsamen von Ihnen erhalten. Ist etwas für mich dabei? So glaube ich aber kaum es zu erhalten da wir in kein weiter Verbündnis miteinander stehen und Schrebers Character nichts weniger als mitteilend ist.) Hoffmann to Mühlenberg, January 5, 1794, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 48. According to Engelhardt, Hoffmann was promoted to extraordinary professor in 1790, not 1789 as Glas suggests. Engelhardt, Universität Erlangen, 59; Glas, Johann Jacob Palm, 90. See also Gerhard Wagenitz, Anfänge der Botanik an der Georgia Augusta im Spannungsfeld zwischen Haller und Linné (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 15. 49. “I am attaching Mr. Hoffmann’s—a young man with good botanical knowledge and much skill in drawing—description of the willows.” (Ich füge des H[er]rn Hofmanns, eines jungen Mannes der gute botanische Kenntnis und viel Geschicklichkeit im Zeichnen hat, Beschr[eibung] der Weide bei.) Schreber to Mühlenberg, May 1, 1787, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 50. “Die kryptogamischen sollen hernach auch an die Reihe kommen und vielleicht werde ich Ihnen davon mehrere, als der Herr Professor Hoffman . . . liefern können.” Schreber to Mühlenberg, May 30, 1792. A margin note in one of Mühlenberg’s botanical diaries reveals that he actually compared Hoffmann and Schreber/Schöpf: “Hofman, Palm, and Carl have answered me. Schreber and Schöpf not yet.” (Hofman Palm u[nd] Carl haben mir geantwortet. Schreber u[nd] Schöpf noch nicht.) Henry Muhlenberg, “Flora Lancastriensis: Botanisches Tagebuch von 1790,” March 16, 1793, APS Muhlenberg Papers. 51. Around or after 1760, Hedwig had contacted the young Schreber, who sent him the microscope. Hedwig’s eventual discoveries furthered his scientific career at Leipzig. Jan-­Peter Frahm, “The Life and Work of Johannes Hedwig,” Nova Hedwigia 70, nos. 1–2 (2000): 5–6. 52. Hedwig first published his observations in his “Vorläufige Anzeige meiner Beobachtungen von den wahren Geschlechtstheilen der Moose und ihrer Fortpflanzung durch Saamen,” in Sammlungen zur Physik und Naturgeschichte von einigen Liebhabern dieser Wissenschaften, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Dykische Buchhandlung, 1778). In 1910, Hedwig’s posthumously published Species Muscorum Frondosorum (Leipzig: Barth, 1801) was declared to be the starting point for bryophyte nomenclature, making his herbarium a type herbarium. Only American botanists disagreed, sticking with Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum (Stockholm: Salvius, 1753) for this purpose. See Frahm, “Life and Work of Johannes Hedwig,” 9; Gerhard Wagenitz, “ ‘Es scheint, als verrücke die Botanik in Mannheim allen . . . den Kopf ’: Johannes Hedwig und die Botanik seiner Zeit im Spiegel hier erstmalig edierter und annotierter Briefe der Jahre 1790–1792,” Acta Historica Leopoldina 46 (2006): 431, 433; A. G. Morton, History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day (London: Academic Press, 1981), 287–88.

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  175 53. See Hedwig to Mühlenberg, August 6, 1798. See also Hedwig to Mühlenberg, August 27, 1797, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 54. “Honoured and dear Sir,” Mühlenberg introduced himself in 1792. “Pardon a stranger that intrudes upon your Studies. An enthusiastical Love of Botany and irresistible Desire to know the Plants of my native Country stimulate me to do it. Since a Number of Years I have endeavoured to explore the regnum vegetabile Americae Septentrionalis in particular of Pensilvania media. Partly I have been successfull and have gathered pretty near all the Plants of my Neighbourhood being upwards of 1200 in less than 10 Square Miles.” Mühlenberg to Smith, December 1, 1792, Linnean Society of London Correspondence of American Scientists, 1738–1865, Mss.H.S.Film.6, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (hereafter APS Linnean Society). 55. “The ‘learned candid and ingenious Possessor of the Herbarium, Library and Manuscripts of the 2 Linnaei,’ ” Mühlenberg quoted a work by Jonathan Stokes (1755–1831) in a letter to Smith, “could be my Oracle if his Time and Multiplicity of his Labours would permit him to assist me. I would send all the Plantas adversarias & Nondescriptas in good Order, numbered and beg of him to favour me with his Judgement, which of the Plants are allready described and by what Name, and which are not described. Perhaps it would not be disagreeable to him, to have even some of the described Plants in his noble Herbarium, N[ova] S[pecies] certainly would be pleasing. So every Doubt would be cleared up and the Adversaria Americana be lessened.” Mühlenberg to Smith, December 1, 1792. 56. Mühlenberg to Smith, June 12, 1794, Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection [1793–1795], Mss.Ms.Coll.200, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. In 1793, Mühlenberg forwarded an interesting inquiry to Smith, obviously to test Schreber’s reliability. “[Schreber] sent last Fall a Box with natural Curiosities for me to Mr White Bookseller in London,” Mühlenberg explained to Smith, “but I have never heard, whether Mr White has forwarded it to Philadelphia or not, and fear it is lost. Should you be able to hear any Thing of it or to give him further Directions to forward the Box to Philadelphia, I will be under great Obligations to you for your Kindness.” Smith’s answer was negative and probably confirmed Mühlenberg’s worst expectations. “Mr White says he never received any box from Prof Schreber for you,” Smith replied in May. Mühlenberg to Smith, June 5, 1793, APS Linnean Society; Smith to Mühlenberg, May 7, 1794, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 57. “I shall be extremely obliged to you for any Information on those Plants or any others you think undescribed in your Travels,” he told Bartram. “You as the first Finder ought to have credit for the finding and none of your Names should be changed in a later work.” Mühlenberg to Bartram, January 29, 1810, HSP Bartram Papers, vol. 4. 58. Bartram to Mühlenberg, November 29, 1792, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. Mühlenberg believed that his few years working with Schreber and Schöpf had put him in a superior position with regard to his herbarium and his botanical knowledge. “I feel with you the many Difficulties we are under to come to a Certainty in Respect of many Plants,” he consoled Bartram in December 1792. “And it gives me some sort of Satisfaction that your plantae adversariae are or have been mine. However by assisting one another we may do more. If I have cleard up a single Doubt of yours it shall be great Satisfaction to me. By comparing Notes we will go on cleverly.” Mühlenberg to Bartram, December 10, 1792, HSP Bartram Papers, vol 4. 59. “My index went to Philadelphia in November 1790 and was in Barton’s hand, and it is an interesting question whether he uses my index just as he uses my specimens. From now on, I shall be extremely cautious with him and not let him see my herbarium or monographs until I hear further. His admonishment not to send anything out now becomes clearer to me, and he tries to live off of other peoples’ sweat.” (Mein Index ist im Nov[ember] 1790 nach Philadelphia gegang u[nd] in [Bartons] Hand gewesen ob er ihn nicht so wie meine Specimen fleissig gebraucht, das ist eine große Frage. Ich werde von nun an äusserst zurückhaltend mit ihm sein u[nd] weder Herbarium noch Monogr[aphia] zeig bis ich weiter höre. Seine Warnung nichts hinauszuschick werd mir jetzo einleuchtend u[nd] er sucht von Freund Schweis zu leb.) Mühlenberg, “Botanisches Tagebuch von 1790,” November 2, 1792. 60. Renate Wilson, “The Second Generation: Pietist Clergy, Commerce, and the Commerce Scientifique in the New Republic, 1780–1820,” in Halle Pietism, Colonial North America, and the Young

176  Material and Intellectual Cultures United States, ed. Hans-­Jürgen Grabbe (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008), 245. For the history and development of the Moravian congregation at Lancaster, see Häberlein, Practice of Pluralism, chap. 2 and 98–99. 61. “When I did not find a name in Linneaus’s system,” Mühlenberg acknowledged of his Index Florae Lancastriensis, “I took it from recently published works or Dr. Schreber’s letters, with whom I maintain a correspondence.” (Wenn ich keinen Namen in Linné’s System fand, so entnahm ich denselben anderen kürzlich gedruckten Werken, oder Dr. Schreber’s Briefen, mit welchem ich eine Correspondenz unterhalte.) Quoted in Maisch, Mühlenberg als Botaniker, 21. See also Henrico Muhlenberg, Index Florae Lancastriensis, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society: Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge, vol. 3 (Philadelphia, 1793; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1966), 157–84. 62. “With great satisfaction,” Mühlenberg declared in the foreword, “I acknowledge the assistance I had from some of my friends, in making this supplement, in particular from D[octo]r James Edward Smith, the learned, the candid, and ingenious possessor of the Herbarium of the two Linnæi; from D[octo]r Hoffman, in Göttingen, and from D[octo]r Hedwig in Leipzig, both well known by their excellent works on Lichens and Mosses.” Henrico Muhlenberg, “Supplementum Indicis Florae Lancastriensis,” in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society: Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge, vol. 4 (Philadelphia, 1799; reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1966), 242. 63. For phase 3 (June 6, 1797–January 9, 1802), this came to a total of 112 letters. 64. “My best thanks for everything sent to me. But unfortunately I have lost the [reference] numbers for many of these and cannot give any information on them.” (Meinen herzlichsten Dank erhalten Sie für alles mir zugeteilte. Aber unglücklicherweise sind von vielen dieser die Nummern verloren und ich kann also darüber keine Auskünfte geben.) Hoffmann to Mühlenberg, January 9, 1801, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 65. According to Hoffmann, his main reason for this move was discontent with his situation at Göttingen: “I already received an advantageous appointment to the Russian Academy in May of the preceding year, but I have only accepted now. For fourteen years already I have been living and working in Göttingen without great advantages, a salary of 400 rt [reichstaler], and no place to stay included. You shall receive letters from Moscow.” (Ich habe auf diese . . . Russische Akademie schon im Mai a. p. ein vorteilhafte Berufung erhalten, aber jetzt erst angenommen. . . . Ich habe bereits 14 Jahr in Göttingen ohne besondere Vorteile . . . zugebracht . . . mit 400 rt Gehalt u[nd] keiner Wohnung als Garçon. . . . Von Moskau aus sollen Sie Briefe erhalten.) Hoffmann to Mühlenberg, April 8, 1804, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. Glas, Johann Jacob Palm, 90; Müller-­Jancke, “Der ‘Linneaus Americanus,’” 1326. 66. Margot Walker, Sir James Edward Smith M.D., F.R.S., P.L.S., 1759–1828: First President of the Linnean Society of London (London: Linnean Society, 1988), 27. 67. “I acknowledge myself, my dear Sir,” Smith finally explained himself in 1798, “to be a very unworthy correspondent to you, but I will not take up your time with all the excuses I could reasonably make. The principal is that I spend every moment I can upon my Flora Britannica, a work that I want very much to complete & have long promised, & I had made a resolution that nothing should put me aside from it, but your claim I neither could nor would deny.” Smith to Mühlenberg, December 4, 1798, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. First excuses actually arrived shortly after Smith’s move to Norwich. See, for instance, Smith to Mühlenberg, June 14, 1796, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 68. “Heute bekomme ich die traurige Nachricht im April [17]99 datiert dass mein Freunde Hedwig im 68 Jahr im Anfang des 99 Jahres gestorb! Er ruhe sanft. . . . Ich muss mich so gleich an einen anderen namentl[ich] Willdenow wend.” Mühlenberg, “Fortsetzung meines Journals,” July 30, 1799, APS Muhlenberg Papers. 69. “5. Hedwig the younger must answer first so I get to know him better; he might be very useful to me. 6. Schwägrichen, barely so, is less helpful. . . . 7. Willdenow according to my wishes; if he continues like that he is the man I need. He doesn’t tire. . . . 8. Sprengel willing, useful for seeds; I will be able to judge him better from future letters to me.” (5. Hedwig der junge muß mir

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  177 erst antwort damit ich ihn näher kennen lerne, er könte mir sehr nützlich [sein] 6. Schwägrichen, gerade so, kann weniger helf[en]. . . . 7. Willdenow bisher nach meinem Sinn, wenn er so fortfährt, mein Mann. Er ermüdet nicht. . . . 8. Sprengel willig, brauchbar für Sämereien, ihn werde ich aus zukünfthig Antwort beßer beurtheil könn[en].) Ibid., January 27, 1801. 70. Apart from Willdenow (4 actual letters + 4 reconstructed), 4 letters (3 + 1) were exchanged with Romanus Hedwig and 1 each with Schwägrichen (0 + 1), Sprengel (1 + 0), and Persoon (1 + 0). With 15 letters out of 60, Mühlenberg’s “cryptogamic correspondence” accounts for a quarter of all of his European correspondences from 1797 to 1802. 71. “An den jungen H[er]rn D[octor] Hedwig habe ich schon geschrieben.” Mühlenberg continued, “I don’t know what to think of him as of yet. A short time after old Hedwig’s death a young doctor from Leipzig named Schwägrichen wrote to me, sent the content of a work by Hedwig on mosses, and reported that he was supposed to publish the work and to make supplements; he also asked for several mosses. I sent him some 60. Now the son writes that he will do the supplements. Who might be the real publisher?” (Ich weiß nicht, wie ich mit ihm daran bin. Bald nach des sel[igen] Hedwigs Tode schrieb ein junger Doctor aus Leipzig Schwägrichen an mich, schickte mir den Inhalt eines Hedwigsch Werks über die Moose und meldete daß er bestimt sei das Werk herauszugeben und Supplemente zu machen, bat um mehrere Moose. Ich schickte ihm etliche 60. Nun schreibt der Sohn, er werde die Supplemente machen. Wer mag der eigentliche Herausgeber sein?) Mühlenberg to Nebe, August 4, 1800, AFSt/M 4 D : 5. 72. “I have since sent a great number of specimens to .  .  . Romanus Hedwig and his Editor D[octor] Schwagrichen, because I heartily wish our mosses fully described,” Mühlenberg reported to Dawson Turner in 1803. Mühlenberg to Turner, February 21, 1803, private property of Dr. Dan Weinstock, Geneva, N.Y. 73. See Sprengel’s introdution to his Der botanische Garten der Universität zu Halle im Jahre 1799 (Halle: C. A. Kümmel, 1800), xviii: “The aim of our site [the botanical garden] can only be advanced by an extended exchange. The writer of these lines found, upon entering his office, that this trade and the associated correspondence had been almost fully neglected for years. So he sought numerous new connections in Germany and abroad, by whose help he has managed to bring together as many rare plants as can hardly be found in a lot of other European gardens.” (Dieser Zweck unserer Anlage kann nur durch einen ausgebreiteten Tauschhandel befördert werden. Der Verfasser fand beim Antritt seines Amtes, dass dieser Handel und der damit verbundene Briefwechsel fast ganz vernachlässigt worden war. Er suchte sich daher zahlreiche Verbindungen in Deutschland und dem Auslande zu verschaffen, durch deren Hülfe es ihm gelungen ist, so viel seltene Gewächse zusammen u[nd] bringen, als in sehr wenigen Gärten Europens vorhanden seyn können.) 74. “First and foremost, I want to thank you for the cryptogamics sent to me, which I have tried to identify on the accompanying note. I beseech you to send more specimens of these that I have underlined.” (Zuvörderst danke ich Ihnen aufs verbindlichste für die übersandten kryptogamischen, die ich auf den beiliegenden Zetteln zu bestimmen gesucht habe, und ersuche Sie, wo möglich, von den unterstrichenen neuen Arten mit noch mehr Exemplare zukommen zu lassen.) Sprengel to Mühlenberg, November 20, 1809, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 75. “An industrious, very lively young man studying . . . at Göttingen right now and whose name is Persoon has occupied himself with this subject very much for some time; alas, he starts too much at a time and misses the mark just as the others do.” (Besonders hat ein junger fleissiger sehr lebhafter Mann . . . der gerade à Göttingen studiert u[nd] Persoon heißt, sich seit einiger Zeit sehr damit abgegeben: allein er fängt zu viel ander dabei an, und trift eben so wenig als die anderen.) J. Hedwig to Mühlenberg, August 27, 1797. One year later, Hedwig’s verdict already sounded much more favorable: “Persoon’s work on fungi will probably be finished by St. Michael’s day. . . . This young man has made [fungi] his main subject, and therefore much good may be hoped from him.” (Persoons Werk über die Pilze wird vermutlich zu Michaelis fertig werden; . . . Dieser junge Mann hat diese Gegenstände hauptsächl[ich] Geschäfte gemacht, daher sich viel gutes von ihm hoffen lässt.) J. Hedwig to Mühlenberg, August 6, 1798. 76. “1, Smith wäre am nützlichst[en], antwortet aber zu nachläss[ig], 2, Schreber ist völlig nachlässig und sucht nur Vermehrung seines Herbarii 3, Hoffman hat mich genöthiget mit ihm

178  Material and Intellectual Cultures abzubrech weil er zu vielerlei unternimmt u[nd] nichts recht vollendet 4, Hedwig der alte starb mir zu früh.” Mühlenberg, “Fortsetzung meines Journals,” January 27, 1801. 77. Mühlenberg to Turner, February 21, 1803. 78. See, for instance, Pyrges, “Religion in the Atlantic World.” Kramsch was presumably Denke’s teacher. See Mears, “Sources of the Herbarium,” 164; Joseph Ewan and Nesta Dunn Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton: Naturalist and Physician in Jeffersonian America, edited by Victoria Hollowell, Eileen P. Duggan, and Marshall Crosby (St. Louis: Missouri Botanical Garden Press, 2006), 811. 79. “Nun empfangen Sie die 7t. Sendung. . . . In Gräsern bin ich ganz schwach u[nd] bin Ihnen tausendmal den aufrichtigsten Danck schuldig für die Liebe die sie mir dabey beweisen, denn ich getraue mich noch nicht ein Gras zu bestimmen.” Denke to Mühlenberg, December 10, 1798, Violetta Delafield–Benjamin Smith Barton Collection, 1783–1817, Mss.B.B284d, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia (hereafter APS Barton Collection). 80. “Aber ganz besonders schäzbar u[nd] groß waren mir diejenigen Stunden die ich in Ihrem liebreichsten Umgange botanisch verwendete. Darin viel habe ich vergessen Sie zu fragen, u[nd] mich belehren zu lassen.” Denke to Mühlenberg, November 1, 1798, APS Barton Collection. 81. Eleven years later, in 1810, Denke answered another letter from Mühlenberg, which affirms that their contact had been abandoned in 1799. Denke to Mühlenberg, October 4, 1811, APS Barton Collection. See also Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, 811. 82. For phase 4 (January 21, 1802–August 29, 1805), there were 60 letters exchanged with 21 European correspondents and 57 letters with 15 American correspondents, for a total of 117 letters. 83. Mühlenberg to Turner, February 21, 1803. 84. Mühlenberg explained, “Actually, given my limited time, I do not want to occupy myself with foreign plants as much, if they do not have any particular use in medicine or economy. To know a single local plant for sure is much more important to me than a hundred foreign ones, which I happily leave to your fellow countrymen.” (Überhaupt ist es mir bei meiner so sehr eingeschränkten Zeit nicht so viel um ausländische Gewächse zu thun, wenn sie nicht einen besonderen Nutzen in der Medizin oder Öconomie haben. Eine einzige hiesige Pflanze gewiß zu kennen ist mir mehr angelegen als hundert ausländische, die überlaße ich gern ihren Landsleuten.) Mühlenberg to Schreber, October 4, 1802, UAE Briefnachlass Schreber. 85. Müller-­Bahlke, “Communication at Risk,” 144; Wilson, “Second Generation,” 255; Wilson, Pious Traders, 29. 86. According to Renate Wilson, net profits dropped from 34,000 reichstalers in 1765 to 7,000 in 1799. Wilson, Pious Traders, 93–96. 87. “As soon as Bartsch’s book on fungi is available again, I beg you to get hold of the work for me,” he wrote to Stoppelberg in 1794. “In my spare time, I have begun to engage in botany.” Mühlenberg to Stoppelberg, December 22, 1794, AFSt/M 4 D : 3. For another large book order, see Mühlenberg to Stoppelberg, February 28, 1797, AFSt/M 4 D : 4. He likewise told Nebe in 1797, “Botany is a science I practice in my recreational hours.” Mühlenberg to Nebe, November 24, 1797, AFSt/M 4 D : 4. 88. Mühlenberg was very candid in his support for Jefferson. To George Logan (1753–1821), he wrote in February 1806, “With infinite Satisfaction I daily hear, that the Gentleman I so long respected, Mr. Jefferson, the Friend of the People and Sciences is indefatigable in preserving national Prosperity and Dignity, and enlarging the Boundaries of Science, expecially natural History.” Mühlenberg to Logan, February 14, 1806, Logan Family Papers, 1664–1871, Collection 379, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 89. Ronald H. Petersen, New World Botany: Columbus to Darwin (Ruggell: A.  R.  G. Gantner Verlag K. G., 2001), 342. In 1803, Lewis also came to Lancaster to take some surveying lessons with Andrew Ellicott. 90. “Rafinesque u[nd] Barton conferiren sehr oft u[nd] dad[urc]h werd[en] meine Kentnisse von andern benutzt. Ich werde mich also besser lieber völlig losmach und mich mit der Menge meiner Arbeit entschuldigen damit ich nicht umsonst gesamlet habe.” Mühlenberg, “Fortsetzung meines Journals,” January 6, 1804. Seven years later, Mühlenberg noted, “Barton now has a catalogue of North American plants with English descriptions in the press and is trying to beat me by being

Correspondence of G. H. E. Mühlenberg  179 quicker than I am. Well, he may do so. The more the better. . . . Barton has received my nomenclature from Enslin, Lyon, and others—and through my own generosity. He is a true monopolist.” (Barton läßt jetzt einen Catalogum von N[ord] Am[erikanischen] Pflanzen mit English Beschreibung drucken und sucht mir also zuvorzukomm. Er mag es nur thun. Je mehr je lieber. . . . Durch Enslin, Lyon u[nd] andre hat Barton meine Nomenclatur so wie durch meine zu große Offenherzigkeit. Er treibt ein wahres Monopolium.) Henry Mühlenberg, botanical notebook, undated entry in January 1811, APS Muhlenberg Papers. Similar entries can be found from 1790 on. 91. Mühlenberg to Peck, May 19, 1812, APS Linnean Society. 92. See Bots and Waquet, République des Lettres. 93. These entries always follow the same pattern: “What is the current state of my correspondence? 1. Georgia—Oemler—too much hot air—also contributing something. 2. Carol[ina] Elliott good but too slow. 3. Cherok[ee Country] Mrs. Gambold, very industrious in sending. 4. Natchez H. Moore good. 5. N[orth] Car[olina] Kramsch tardy. 6. Virg[inia] I miss Billy. 7. Ohio Müller good.” (Wie stehts jetzt mit meiner Correspond[enz?] 1. Georgien—Oemler—zu viel Wind—doch etwas beitragend 2. Carol[ina] Elliot gut aber zu langsam 3. Cherok[ee Country] Fr. Gambold fleissig im schick[en] 4. Natchez H. Moore gut 5. N[orth] Car[olina] Kramsch träge 6. Virg[inia] ich vermiße Billy 7. Ohio Müller gut.) Mühlenberg, botanical notebook, October 16, 1810. 94. “I am working on the Index of my Descriptive Catalogue & will mention you all the plants of it which are not in yours but why will you not be kind enough to favor me also with your these [sic] of the Plants you have found since . . . ?” an apparently puzzled Rafinesque asked in 1803. Rafinesque to Mühlenberg, May 23, 1803, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. Hu and Merril found Rafinesque’s treatment of Mühlenberg “not too ethical.” Hu and Merril, “Work and Publications,” 26. See also Petersen, New World Botany, 346; Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, 260; Wallace, Muhlenbergs of Pennsylvania, 314. 95. Mühlenberg to Brickell, January 23, 1806, Scientists Collection, 1563–1973, Mss.509.L56.17, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 96. It was only in phase 2, after 1790, that Mühlenberg began to promote the idea of American collaboration intensely in his letters. To Manasseh Cutler (1742–1823), he wrote in 1792, “Let each one of our American Botanists do something and soon the Riches of America will be known. Let Mechoux [Michaux] describe South Carolina and Georgia, Kramsch North Carolina, Greenway Virginy and Maryland, Barton Jersey, Delaware and the lower Parts of Pensylvania, Bartram, Marshall Mühlenberg their Neighbourhood, Mitchill New York, and you with the northern Botanists your States, how much could be done! If then one of our younger Companies (I mention D. Barton in particular whose Business it is) would collect the different Flora’s in one how pleasing to the botanical world! We could exchange our plantas adversarias with one another and in a short Time all would be perfect.” Mühlenberg to Cutler, November 12, 1792, Manasseh Cutler Collection, Mss# 9, Ohio University Library, Athens. 97. Erlangen was to remain under French control until 1810, when it became a part of the Kingdom of Bavaria. Glas, Johann Jacob Palm, 11; Engelhardt, Universität Erlangen, 86. 98. Mühlenberg to Elliott, November 8, 1809, Stephen Elliott Letters, Gray Herbarium Library, Harvard University Herbaria, Cambridge (hereafter HUH Elliott Letters). 99. “Wenn Sie von mir in dem langen Zeitraume eines Jahres keine Zeile gesehen haben, so waren nicht Mangel des Eifers und der Freundschaft die mich davon zurückhielten an Sie zu schreiben, sondern lediglich . . . Geschäften, die mich drükt und die mir so wenig Zeit erlaubte, daß ich bis dahin nur so viel zu meinem Vergnügen habe verbinden können als dringend nothwending war.” Willdenow to Mühlenberg, May 4, 1804, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 100. “Professor Sprengel sends his regards. . . . Unfortunately, nothing is ready yet . . . to be sent to you.” (H[err] Prof Sprengel empfiehlt sich. . . . Leider ist nichts fertig . . . Ihnen etwas zu schicken.) Nebe to Mühlenberg, May 16, 1803, AFSt/M 4 D : 5. 101. For phase 5 (October 25, 1805–January 2, 1811), this came to a total of 153 letters. Taking his Halle correspondent Joseph Friedrich Nebe out of the calculation, Mühlenberg exchanged an average of 2.2 letters with each of his European correspondents during phase 4 (44 letters with 20 correspondents), versus an average of 3.38 letters during phase 5 (44 letters with 13 correspondents).

180  Material and Intellectual Cultures 102. Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, 304, 541–45. 103. Ibid., 501. Mühlenberg also received seeds from Lewis and constantly kept abreast of developments in Philadelphia. See Mühlenberg to Elliott, June 16, 1809, HUH Elliott Letters. 104. Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, 304–5, 542–45. 105. Elliott to Mühlenberg, October 21, 1809, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. See also Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, 544. 106. Ever since, Pursh has frequently been called a “traitor” to American botany; see Petersen, New World Botany, 305. See also Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, 516. Pursh’s book carries a reference to Mühlenberg in its foreword: “My first object after my arrival in America was to form an acquaintance with all those interested in the study of botany. Among these I had the pleasure to account one of the earliest and ever the most valuable, the Rev. Dr. Muhlenberg of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania.” Quoted in Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, 501. 107. Mühlenberg to Baldwin, May 22, 1811, in Darlington, Reliquiæ Baldwinianæ, 32–33. 108. For phase 6 (after January 7, 1811), this came to a total of 350 letters. 109. The first figure (letters exchanged from 1794 to 1811) is rounded up; it came to 20.57 per year. From 1784 to 1811, there were 576 letters in 28 years; from 1811 to 1815, there were 328 letters in 4 years. The total average is 28.25 letters per year (904 letters in 32 years). 110. Elliott to Mühlenberg, February 14, 1812, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. A while later, Elliott wrote, “Since my last Letter to you of March 13. I had the Pleasure to receive a small Packet of Cryptogamia Plants chiefly Mosses from our mutual Friend D Baldwin, brought from Savanna by M. Kin.” Elliott to Mühlenberg, July 6, 1812, HSP Muhlenberg Papers. 111. Mühlenberg to Elliott, November 15, 1814, HUH Elliott Letters. 112. He continued, “I have made the Beginning in Sending Grasses and Cryptogamia. He is a Pupil of D Barton but laments that in those 2 Classes he received no Information at all.” Mühlenberg to Elliott, January 2, 1811, HUH Elliott Letters. See also Mühlenberg to Elliott, October 10, 1814, HUH Elliott Letters. 113. Mühlenberg to Baldwin, January 18, 1811, in Darlington, Reliquiæ Baldwinianæ, 19–20. Embittered, he wrote to Elliott in 1812, “Swarz has sent a large Packet of cryptog and other Plants, but this is not yet come to Hand. The Swede Correspondents are by far more exact and quick, and do not let us wait as Smith, Turner, Willdenow and others do from 10–15 Years! I have sent off another Packet a few Days ago to Sweden.” Mühlenberg to Elliott, May 10, 1812, HUH Elliott letters. 114. “Nulla salus bello, pacem te poscimus omnes” means “Nothing good is there in war, peace is what we all seek.” Mühlenberg to Smith, December 28, 1813, APS Linnean Society. 115. “Ob ferner Arzenei kommen wird ist bei der traurig Lage von Europa und der finstern Aussicht von dem Handel sehr ungewiß.” Mühlenberg to Schultze, April 3, 1807, APS Muhlenberg Papers. 116. Nebe to Mühlenberg, October 12, 1809, AFSt/M 4 D : 6. 117. See, for instance, Petersen, New World Botany, 493–94. Joseph Ewan has even labeled the forty years immediately following Mühlenberg’s death the “Torrey and Gray Epoch.” Joseph Ewan, “Early History,” in A Short History of Botany in the United States, ed. Joseph Ewan (New York: Hafner, 1969), 27. 118. Curtis to Durand, March 17, 1840, Autograph Letters of Naturalists, 1744–1894, Mss.Film.628, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 119. In Asa Gray Papers, Manuscripts #6, Gray Herbarium Library, Harvard University Herbaria, Cambridge. In contrast to Mühlenberg’s herbarium, Barton’s contained a mere third of Mühlenberg’s specimens and was limited in its regional variety of specimens—a clear sign of Mühlenberg’s strong network. Both herbaria were sold and resold several times until they reached their final abode at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, where they are still housed today. Mears, “Sources of the Herbarium,” 155–56; Beck, “Henry E. Muhlenberg,” 49–50; Ewan and Ewan, Benjamin Smith Barton, 570. 120. Baldwin to F. A. H. Mühlenberg, June 28, 1815, in Darlington, Reliquiæ Baldwinianæ, 177.

Part 3

Negotiations of Ethnic and Religious Identities

Seven Divergent Paths

Processes of Identity Formation Among German Speakers, 1730–1760 Marie Basile McDaniel

On May 27, 1743, Jacob Kimmerlin married Sarah Lewis in Philadelphia’s First Presbyterian Church.1 The remaining records of that church contain no other mention of Jacob Kimmerlin, Sarah Lewis, or any Kimmerlin in the name’s variant spellings. They did not appear as parents in the lists of those baptized or as sponsors for other baptisms, nor did they appear in tax lists, lotteries, or the Presbyterian burial records. Nevertheless, while otherwise unremarkable, the marriage record of Jacob and Sarah speaks to an often ignored aspect of early American history: the various ways in which German-­speaking immigrants and their descendants formed and reformed ethnic and religious identities and communities.2 The story of our couple is complicated by other records. A Jacob Kimmerling had sailed to Philadelphia from Rotterdam on the ship Samuel nine years earlier, at the age of twenty-­four, and took an oath of allegiance.3 Only one other Kimmerlin, or its variants, appeared in colonial American records before 1750. The paucity of Kimmerlins in the records suggests that the two Jacobs—the Kimmerlin married in the First Presbyterian Church and the Kimmerling in the ship records—might have been the same man. According to the nineteenth-­century minister Reverend H. J. Welker, the Jacob Kimmerling who arrived in Philadelphia in 1733 was, by 1752, the founder of St. Jacob’s Reformed Church in Tulpehocken, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. He married a woman named Maria Catharina (a common name among German

184  Ethnic and Religious Identities

speakers)4 and had one daughter, Eva Elisabeth, who married a John Maas or Maess (another surname of German extraction).5 If the two Jacobs were, in fact, the same man, then this man initially married an English-­speaking woman in an English-­speaking church and later, after his first wife’s death or abandonment, married a German-­speaking woman and established a German-­speaking church. This would reflect the flexible nature of associations and identity in colonial America. If the Jacobs were two separate men, then they represent two of the many paths available to German-­speaking immigrants in the mid-­eighteenth century: to participate in a preexisting English-­speaking culture, or to associate with other German speakers and, in the process, create a new German-­speaking community. Either way, this case reveals that some German-­speaking immigrants either willfully chose to marry outside the German-­speaking community or simply did not have access to potential spouses from within that community. Jacob Kimmerlin’s marriage to Sarah Lewis suggests that a probable German speaker married a probable English speaker in an English-­speaking and culturally Scots Irish church: the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. The record raises several questions: Why did Kimmerlin and Lewis marry? Did they share a religious belief that superseded ethnic differences? Did they perceive each other as having different ethnicities at all? Was their marriage accepted by their families? The record does not provide answers to those questions; however, the rate of occurrence of marriages like that of Kimmerlin and Lewis indicates that this couple was not exceptional in their decision. The rate of ethnic outmarriage among German speakers is substantially higher than previous scholars have estimated, although no other scholars have examined ethnic outmarriages in an eighteenth-­century city.6 Before 1745, approximately 50 percent of Philadelphians of German-­speaking backgrounds married English speakers in English-­speaking churches.7 The commonness of these marriages suggests that German speakers encountered a series of factors encouraging intermarriage with non-­German speakers. Approximately 50 percent of German speakers in Philadelphia before 1745 and almost 70 percent between 1745 and 1775 associated with other German speakers in German-­speaking churches.8 German speakers thereby created a German-­speaking identity and community in Philadelphia that became known as German, before a German nation existed. The presence of other German speakers and German-­speaking institutions as a minority population, others’ mostly negative perceptions of the linguistic group, and personal connections may have influenced these German speakers to associate

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  185

with others of similar backgrounds and, in doing so, create a community that helped solidify a German culture and identity. Other German speakers, like Jacob Kimmerlin, associated with English speakers in English-­speaking churches and therefore did not participate to the same degree in that newly formed German identity or community. These German speakers may have lacked personal connections to other German speakers or institutions, or they may have rejected the “othering” of German-­speaking Pennsylvanians by non-­German-­speaking Pennsylvanians. A few German-­speaking immigrants followed alternative paths with regard to marital choices, including marrying another German speaker in an English-­speaking church, marrying an English speaker in a German-­speaking church, or marrying a Swede in a dual-­ language church. In Philadelphia, German speakers associated with people from a variety of linguistic and religious backgrounds, which was made possible by the diversity of the city and influenced by the lack of other German speakers and institutions or personal connections to them. As such, some associated and identified with other German speakers and therefore became “German,” while others did not.9 Through an examination of marriage records, this essay questions the assumption that all German-­speaking immigrants identified as German when they arrived or settled in the colonies. Building on the recent scholarship on the formation of identity among German-­speaking immigrants by Philip Otterness, Aaron Fogleman, and Marianne Wokeck, who have convincingly shown the importance of transatlantic German culture, this essay reexamines the context in which German speakers became German and concludes that not all German speakers in Philadelphia did so.10 Unlike the Palatine immigrants of 1709 or many of the eventual settlers in the backcountry of Pennsylvania, many German-­speaking immigrants who came to Philadelphia in the mid-­eighteenth century did not have preexisting German networks when they stepped off the boat. Instead, they relied on the people they encountered for the first time in Philadelphia. Some German-­speaking immigrants to Philadelphia associated with other German speakers and joined Pennsylvania German institutions and communities, while others associated with English speakers (or other non-­German speakers) and became acculturated into other ethnic or religious communities.11 Focusing on the mass immigration of German speakers to Philadelphia in the 1730s, 1740s, and 1750s, this essay explores how the presence of other German speakers (and their gender balance), German-­ speaking institutions, and availability of German-­speaking networks aided or discouraged

186  Ethnic and Religious Identities

associations between German speakers. German-­ speaking immigrants adhered to a range of possible ethnic identities, not just a German identity. Therefore, in this essay I argue that German identity reflected the personal availability, strength, familiarity, and appeal of German individuals, communities, and institutions for incoming immigrants; it also reflected German speakers’ repulsion for the diversity of Philadelphia, and the assertion of otherness by Anglo-­Pennsylvanians. These German speakers found it easier to become German when a German community and German institutions already existed. At the same time, an increasing number (although a decreasing percentage) of German speakers did not follow this pattern and chose not to join the growing German community. Speculatively, these non-­Germans were more likely to be servants (or former servants) without familial connections, have little or no access to the growing German community, or have stronger religious affiliations that superseded ethnic considerations. Therefore, ethnic identity became contingent on the immigrants’ experience, partly determined by timing and luck. In a collection of essays on identity in early America, Greg Denning noted that “we should think of identity as being those snapshots of self, inevitably different by the time and the occasion they are taken. Living is the moving film made out of a series of stills.”12 This statement points to the ephemeral nature of identity. While that may discourage some scholars from using it as a category of analysis, it is that very quality that clarifies how early Americans, and specifically German-­speaking immigrants, understood the world around them.13 As first defined by Enlightenment thinkers, identity is a conceptual framework that simplifies selves or others in order to categorize and note resemblances between objects or people. According to Locke, individuals define themselves in opposition to other people and practices. Those definitions are shaped by their geographical location, historical events, and the people around them.14 In addition, according to Hume, individual identities change in relation to their environment. Moments and places of increased interaction with others create greater opportunities for self and group definition.15 If we follow this logic, then the emerging diversity of early America created such circumstances. As Denning articulated, “The mutual otherness of all the groups made a space without a space, a time without time, a limen, a place of much inventiveness.”16 In Philadelphia, the diversity of the immigrants formed a permanent state of liminality in which the city’s residents continually defined and redefined their identity in relation to their neighbors.

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  187

Marriage records are some of the only remaining documents that provide “snapshots” of identity in colonial Philadelphia. While early Americans established identities through everyday moments of personal interaction, such as talking, participating in market transactions, and sharing a church service, their marriages were legal procedures that coupled two individuals into a single named identity and therefore reinforced looser cultural associations. More than other records, these marriage records represent individuals’ significant choices pertaining to identity. Since nearly 80 percent of Philadelphia’s eighteenth-­century population is represented in the marriage records, they also provide enough data on individual decisions to observe patterns and changes over time.17 Historian Nancy Cott has discussed how marriages grouped individuals into families, congregations, and community networks. These communities, in turn, often regulated marriages through approval or objection; thus marriages self-­propagated a group identity even as they reflected broader cultural attitudes and local circumstances.18 Marriages also reflected changing personal perceptions and communal attitudes toward others. Most colonists recognized marriage as the basic construction of a household and hence the social structure.19 However, during the eighteenth century, as historian Richard Godbeer points out, colonists often disagreed on the requirements for marriage and acceptable relationships.20 The colonies imposed laws against premarital and extramarital sex. Religious and civil institutions also limited who could get married. Explicit and implicit limitations revealed the values of individuals, churches, and society, and included a range of cultural, religious, racial, and economic considerations. Godbeer argues that “early Americans worried about sex because they believed that it embodied, quite literally, their identity and worth, individually and collectively.”21 Religious and civil institutions as well as parents or guardians had to sanction marriages. Therefore, marriage choices reflected social and personal expectations of acceptable partners, and they became a vehicle for self and community identity.

Immigration of German Speakers Many German speakers in the mid-­Atlantic region established or lived in German communities and created or retained uniquely American German forms of language, religion, and traditions in both cities and rural areas. Some German speakers developed a collective identity through recognition of their

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linguistic similarities or common experiences. Some migrated in large families, settled with the church congregation from their home region, and farmed in regions with only one church or pastor. Philip Otterness has shown that, while still aboard ship, some immigrants formed communities and new ethnic identifications characterized by language and ancestral origins, especially if they traveled in families or as a town.22 These settlers shared a common language and migratory experiences, which created what Steven Nolt has designated a “linguistically based ethnic designation” that evolved over time and across localities into identifications as groups or ethnicities.23 While the immigrants attempted to recreate European traditions, demographic reality forced them to accommodate ethnic differences, thereby redefining their previous provincial identities as new colonial identities that sometimes bore little resemblance to those in Europe. Jacob Kimmerlin represents one, or two, of the large number of German speakers, Irish and Scots Irish, English, colonials, and Africans of varying ethnic and economic backgrounds and religious persuasions who migrated to and settled in Philadelphia in the early to mid-­eighteenth century. While Philadelphia was already linguistically and religiously diverse, the waves of immigration made it much more so. According to demographic historian Susan Klepp, from 1710 to 1770, Philadelphia’s Caucasian population grew by about a third each decade, principally through immigration.24 In 1710, at the start of the influx, Philadelphia contained 2,684 residents. By 1740 that number had tripled to 10,117, and by 1775 the population had tripled again to 32,073.25 For much of the eighteenth century, the small city of Philadelphia measured approximately one mile long (eight blocks) and a half mile wide (five blocks), giving it roughly the same density as New York City in 2008.26 The tax lists of the 1740s and 1750s suggest that the compact, crowded city did not provide isolation, privacy, or anonymity. Nor had ethnic neighborhoods been created by the early federal period.27 Instead, colonial Philadelphia provided opportunities for mixed experiences, for an ethnic fluidity that did not exist to the same extent in rural areas. Between 1710 and 1770, nearly 76,000 immigrants from German-­speaking areas in Europe arrived at the port of Philadelphia. As Marianne Wokeck has noted, periodic waves sometimes brought in as many as 2,000 immigrants per year.28 Although nearly 90 percent of German-­speaking immigrants moved directly into the countryside, approximately 8,400 remained in the city long enough to contribute to population growth before 1770. Nearly 20 percent of the 76,000 German-­speaking immigrants arrived in the 1730s, 25 percent in

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  189

the 1740s, and close to 45 percent in the 1750s.29 Most arrived on ships from Rotterdam and occasionally Amsterdam. They traveled to these ports from their homes in the Palatinate, northern Kraichgau, Württemberg, Westerwald, Rhineland, Hesse, Hanau, Franconia, Baden, and Alsace, among other places.30 In the eighteenth century, German speakers in Philadelphia grew from 15 percent of the total population in 1730 to 25 percent in 1740 and 35 percent in 1750, finally peaking at 45 percent in 1760.31 The arrival of so many immigrants changed the cultural dynamics within the city; it altered the city’s linguistic composition, the popularity of churches, and the types of printed materials. These immigrants eventually created German-­speaking churches and volunteer associations, which developed as the population grew. Concurrently, a greater percentage of German speakers became German. Many of these German-­speaking immigrants prospered and found abundant opportunities in Pennsylvania, and they quickly encouraged their families and friends to follow in their footsteps. In a letter to his brothers and friends in Germany written within a few months of his arrival in 1724, Christopher Sauer emphasized the religious freedom in Philadelphia: “All inhabitants of this country are free to live quietly and piously by themselves and everybody may believe what he chooses.”32 He also praised the city’s economic prosperity: “There are people who have been living here for 40 years and have not seen a beggar in Philadelphia.”33 Sauer, like other immigrants, appealed to fellow German speakers to travel to Pennsylvania and join them, thereby increasing their community networks. Coming from disparate territories, some German-­speaking immigrants adhered to local identities and initially lacked a unifying German identity.34 Overwhelmed, some of the immigrants disliked the linguistic and religious diversity. For instance, in 1736 (a year after her arrival), Esther Werndtlin wrote to her friends and family in Switzerland that “among so many religions, Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic, Dunkards, Mennonites, Pietists, Quakers, Sabbatarians, Atheists, there are also those who call themselves nothing, who do not believe in religion, worship, churches, schools, not even in God, the devil, heaven, or Hell.”35 The wife of a minister who died en route, Werndtlin was averse to the religious diversity in Pennsylvania. Yet she specifically only mentioned those religions with German-­speaking adherents and ignored predominantly English-­ language churches. It was the religious diversity among German speakers, a group she may have unconsciously acknowledged through her list, that bothered her most. She noted other forms of diversity as

190  Ethnic and Religious Identities

well, observing “so many kinds of languages, English, Swedish, Welsch,36 high German, low German, Dutch; there are so many Negroes, who are being sold here now as slaves for life; the native heathen living amongst us in the bushes are heinous people, brown and truly godless heathens.” Werndtlin did not like the diversity she saw, but she recognized multiple denominations and multiple ethnicities. She believed that “the religions and nations are innumerable, this land is an asylum house for all expelled sects, a refuge for all delinquents of Europe, a confused Babel, a receptacle for all unclean spirits, a shelter of devils, a first world, a Sodom.” To Werndtlin this diversity meant that the colony could not be godly: not all denominations could be part of God’s congregation. Therefore, in Pennsylvania the godly mixed with the degenerate. Werndtlin then linked those religious degenerates to ethnic categories: “What is most unfortunate is that in the whole of America one encounters a lot of Swiss, that is, Germans from all towns, regions and villages of Switzerland. These are all Swiss who about 30 or 40 years ago fled to the Palatinate because of a famine, and have now come to this country; and many of them have apostatized to all manner of diverse sects due to the lack of God’s word [i.e., orthodox preaching].”37 Werndtlin conveyed a reluctance to accept the diversity of America, maybe especially in Pennsylvania. She moved to Bergen, New Jersey, where she worshipped in a German Reformed church with her nine children. Six of them married German speakers, only one of whom came from Switzerland. The others married German speakers of different regional backgrounds, which points to an acceptance of a broader German identity even outside Philadelphia. In response to so much diversity, some immigrants clung to familiar languages, traditions, religions, and communities. German-­speaking immigrants were probably able to communicate with one another despite dialectical differences. Certainly, their different versions of German and Dutch bore a greater resemblance to each other than to the English, Gaelic, French, and Swedish spoken by the other residents of Pennsylvania. As Nolt notes, many German speakers in Pennsylvania gravitated toward one another because of language, but outsiders also identified them as a separate group, referring to them as both “Pennsylvania Dutch” and “Pennsylvania German.” Eighteenth-­ century Pennsylvania residents recognized and accepted these terms as synonymous categories and used the terms to self-­identify.38 For instance, in the letter to his brothers and friends, Sauer compared Philadelphia to Mainz and Cologne, cities over one hundred miles apart, and referred to his fellow travelers as Palatines and Schwarzenau people.39 Yet,

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  191

near the end of the letter, he writes that “the farther the Germans and English cultivate this country, the farther the Indians retreat.” He referred to Germans again, saying that the Indians “would rather harm their own king than a German.”40 Like many other immigrants, Sauer quickly adapted to a shared ethnic identity in response to English or Indian identity but maintained religious distinctions among fellow “Germans.” While some German speakers chose religious affiliations over ethnic ones, the recognition of a shared ethnic identity increasingly characterized the politics of and about Pennsylvania Germans throughout the eighteenth century.41 Few of these immigrants would have characterized themselves as “German” prior to their arrival in Pennsylvania. However, as Philip Otterness notes, the process of ethnic identity formation did begin before arrival. Immigrants might have identified themselves by their local regions, dialects, religious persuasions, or economic status. But the process of immigration separated them from their former neighbors, and they became “refugees” or “immigrants” to the New World or to a certain colony. Once in Pennsylvania, immigrants quickly created identities around language and religion determined by their fellow immigrants, the ethnic composition of their neighborhoods or villages, and the attitudes of the colonial leaders.42 From the first decade of the eighteenth century through the 1730s, immigrants sometimes traveled in family groups or followed earlier immigrants and settled with them to get help in establishing households in the new colony. Marianne Wokeck has noted that at least 35 percent of German-­speaking immigrants traveled in family groups.43 This familial and chain immigration reveals the strong desire of colonists to draw in others from Europe.44 New immigrants relied on these contacts in America to pay for their ship passage. In a process called “redemption,” they signed contracts by which they received ship passage in exchange for either labor or payment at the end of the voyage. These immigrants hoped that a friend or kinsman would pay for the voyage upon their arrival. Germans often redeemed other German-­ speaking immigrants, even strangers, in recognition of their common (albeit newly invented) background.45 Even those German-­speaking immigrants rich enough to avoid the redemption process moved into the hinterland, following the footsteps of family or friends who helped them procure land.46 Immigrants often wrote of the ready welcome they received when they stepped off the ships in the port of Philadelphia. In 1717, Caspar Wistar arrived in Philadelphia as a free but poor man. Although he did not understand English, he followed his fellow German-­speaking shipmates when they went to

192  Ethnic and Religious Identities

find food, and eventually he found work. Wistar took advantage of a German-­ speaking network that developed during his voyage, but not all immigrants used that network. In his 1724 letter, Sauer reported not only on the unpleasant voyage across the Atlantic but also on his joyous arrival in Philadelphia on October 1, 1724. He wrote that “a great crowd of people came running to see the newcomers. Then people came and brought apples to divide among the people, others brought fresh bread and the like.”47 Sauer was impressed with the friendliness of the Philadelphians. However, he was even more impressed when he “went ashore [and] a man came up to me and asked whether I was free and did not owe anything. I said I did not owe the captain anything, but I had to pay something to a Palatine for brandy. The man went to get 20 Florins with which I was to pay and make my start.”48 Sauer encountered a probable German-­speaking network (the man was probably a German speaker, since Sauer could not speak English) that tried to ameliorate the shock of first arrival. Others reported similarly positive experiences and explicitly encouraged friends and family to join them, thereby adding to an extensive German-­speaking community—so much so that in the 1740s and 1750s German officials in Europe confiscated some of the letters sent to Germany for being too positive and thus contributing to German mass emigration. These positive accounts stand in contrast to the Provincial Council’s and Provincial Assembly’s irritated responses to immigrants. Despite the prosperity that immigrants brought to Pennsylvania, Philadelphians, especially those in positions of wealth and authority, often distrusted new non-­English arrivals and worked to either limit their numbers or assimilate them into an English culture. The welcoming Philadelphians in Sauer’s account were clearly not the elite Philadelphians who tried to limit immigration. In 1717, the governor, Sir William Keith, recommended that the Provincial Assembly not “lose any Time in securing yourselves, and all the People of this colony, from the inconveniences which may possibly arise by the unlimited Number of Foreigners that . . . have been transported hither of late.”49 He believed that immigrants could cause harm to existing Philadelphians, possibly by raising crime rates or levels of poverty. He went on to emphasize the importance of limiting immigration to ensure “Publick Welfare” for the good of “your own People.”50 In 1718, James Logan, at this point an elite businessman who held the friendship of the Penn proprietors, stated, “We are resolved to receive no more of them.”51 In 1727, the Provincial Assembly asserted that “the great Importation of Foreigners into this Province . . . who are subjects of a foreign Prince, and who keep up amongst themselves a different Language, may, in Time,

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  193

prove of dangerous Consequence to the Peace.”52 To the Provincial Assembly, foreign immigrants were symbols not of a prosperous economy but of a danger. The governor, Provincial Council, and Provincial Assembly feared that immigrants would not be loyal to the Crown—a loyalty created through language, tradition, and law. Thus, although some Pennsylvanians welcomed immigrants, the wealthy and powerful among them seemed to think that the immigrants would do more harm than good. These elite Philadelphians categorized immigrants who came from German-­speaking territories as “Germans” or “Palatines.” They rarely categorized individuals but rather applied these generalizations to groups, whose ancestral origins were clear from the ships’ ports of departure. In a letter to John Penn in 1727, James Logan noted, “I am now informed on very good Grounds, that six thousand Palatines are to be imported hither next summer.” Logan believed that “this must be prevented by an Act of Parliament or these Colonies will in time be lost to the Crown. They are a warlike and morose People.”53 Logan ethnicized the immigrants even before their arrival. Eleven months later, Isaac Norris complained, “This country was begun and for a considerable time Improved by a sober Industrious people. . . . Of late years Great numbers of the ordinary and profligate have been imported [and so] the burden on our land is very great, among who may in great part seem to be the very scum of mankind.” Blaming current problems on immigrants, Norris rhetorically set them apart as others. At the end of the letter, he claimed that “the Disproportionate increase of others is what gives a melancholy prospect to us and our society.”54 Logan and Norris were not alone in broad ethnicizations that laid blame for economic problems at the feet of newcomers. Leading Pennsylvanians perceived the foreigners as the cause of any problems, especially in regard to tensions with Native Americans, land disputes, economic hardships, or political infighting. These elites worried about their lack of control over a non-­naturalized and therefore non-­voting and non-­ landholding population. The Provincial Council tried to assuage elite fears by controlling immigration. In 1717, in between taxing wolf and fox pelts and deciding on a tax for cider and beer, the Provincial Council imposed a tax on all incoming Palatines.55 In 1718, the Provincial Council requested that ship captains list their passengers and decreed that all foreigners must swear an oath to the king, a requirement not always faithfully observed. These two acts did not curtail immigration from Europe. In 1725, Sir William Keith requested that “in Behalf of some Protestants from the Palatinate and other Parts of Germany,

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who having a great Desire to enjoy equally with us the inestimable Benefits of an English Government .  .  . [they be granted] the common Privilege of Naturalization, on the same Terms upon which it has been usually granted in England.”56 The governor believed that, to calm popular fears, the immigrants should be assimilated into an English culture. He also equated the new German ethnic identity with a hitherto nonexistent national origin. After 1725, German-­speaking immigrants swore oaths of loyalty to the king within three days of their arrival.57 Despite the official policy of religious tolerance in Pennsylvania, the presence of ethnically different residents scared Pennsylvania elites, who subsequently wanted to diminish cultural differences and push Germans to become English. This created two groups of Philadelphians: those who supported German speakers as German and those who tried to make German speakers English.

Philadelphia’s German Community Before 1740, few records reveal German communities in Philadelphia. Based on immigration records in comparison with birth and death rates, German speakers constituted between 15 and 25 percent of Philadelphia’s population in the 1720s and 1730s.58 Nineteenth-­century sources recorded German-­ speaking institutions, such as a German Lutheran and a German Reformed church, as early as the 1730s. Unfortunately, while some of those church records survived, most, including vital records, did not. The missing records of the German Lutheran and German Reformed churches would reveal members of the newly formed German community. Only nonvital records of these churches, excepting one communion list in 1733 and a membership list in 1735, survive. However, existing records of the non-­German-­speaking churches, including Anglican, Presbyterian, Quaker, and Baptist, reveal some German speakers being married, baptized, or buried there. By comparing the number of German speakers in those churches with the expected German-­speaking population of the city, it becomes clear that a large number of German speakers did not participate in those churches. German speakers only accounted for between 9 and 13 percent of the marriages in the existing records before 1740; this should have been closer to 20 percent by the 1730s.59 This means that the English-­speaking churches conducted marriages of approximately 80 percent of German speakers who could marry in 1710; this decreased to 55 percent of

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  195

German speakers who could marry in 1740. The difference reveals a subgroup of German speakers, increasing from approximately 100 in 1710 to 1,200 in 1740, who decided not to get married in an English-­speaking congregation. The few remaining records of the German Reformed and German Lutheran churches before 1740 reveal a strong ethnic association. For instance, in 1733, St. Michael’s (German) Lutheran Church comprised 326 communicants, both men and women, and all but 3 of them were clearly of German-­speaking origin. This record, although limited, suggests that before 1740 some German speakers participated in German churches with other German speakers. When the German-­speaking churches in Philadelphia began consistent record keeping in the mid-­to late 1740s, they documented a well-­formed German-­speaking community. Increasingly throughout the eighteenth century, German speakers married other German speakers and participated in a German community. However, of the German speakers in the English and Scots Irish churches, between 70 and 80 percent married non-­German speakers. This latter group, constituting 57 percent of Philadelphia’s overall German-­speaking population in 1710 and decreasing to 45 percent in 1740, did not become German. The remaining 43 percent of German speakers in 1710, increasing to 55 percent in 1740, did become German; this figure significantly exceeds the total number of German speakers in Philadelphia, who accounted for about 20 percent of the overall population. If German speakers married other German speakers in proportion to their share of the total population, this would reveal a lack of ethnic preference in marriage. However, German speakers married other German speakers at twice the rate that one would expect if people married at random. Therefore, they either sought out other German speakers to marry or their interactions occurred predominantly with other German speakers, suggesting an existing German community.60 This German community divided its religious adherence among three churches formed in the 1730s: German Reformed, German Lutheran, and German Catholic. The recollections of nineteenth-­century Philadelphians make it clear that the German Reformed church did not have a regular building or minister until 1740, but a group of Reformed Germans began to meet as early as 1729, sharing a meetinghouse (the old barn house) on Fifth Street below Arch Street with the German Lutherans.61 The two denominations squabbled often and did not share services. In 1740, disagreements between them led to a split and establishment of their own premises. Until the arrival of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg at the German Lutheran church in 1742

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and Michael Schlatter at the German Reformed church in 1745, members of these denominations relied on any itinerant or available minister to provide religious services. A series of Lutheran ministers preached before the German Lutheran congregation, including Johann Caspar Stoever, Anthony John Hinkle, John Peter Miller, John Philip Streiter, the Reverend Faulkner, and the Reverend Valentine Kraft (the last two primarily served the Swedish Lutheran congregation); according to local memory, none lasted very long.62 Despite these disadvantages, both churches maintained connections to European traditions and authority by writing to church leaders in Halle, London, Heidelberg, and Amsterdam, pleading for more ministers, schoolteachers, and books. The self-­appointed Reformed synod deputy in Philadelphia, Jacobus van Ostade, spoke for all churches, but especially the German Reformed congregation in Philadelphia, when in 1731 he wrote to Gerard Bolwerck of London (a Reformed representative who forwarded the letter to Amsterdam) requesting aid. He noted that “a great number of Germans from the Palatinate and elsewhere have been transferred to Pennsylvania, and have there already multiplied to many thousands.” This resulted in too many parishioners and not enough ministers, so the synod made “three to four requests . . . of the Reverend Christian Classis of Amsterdam, and afterwards also of the Reverend Christian Synods of South Holland as well as of North Holland, to sustain the refugee brethren in the faith by counsel and action.” In their straits, German Reformed congregations needed help from any corner, “in order that the Reformed religion, according to the Palatinate Confession of Faith in particular, may be brought among them into a well regulated condition, and upon a firm basis.” The deputy further requested that “ministers and schoolmasters be sent, yes, also churches and schoolhouses may be built, as necessity and the best edification of the churches may demand,” and he passed along the request for “more ministers from the great Consistory of Heidelberg.”63 Despite the lack of response, Philadelphia’s Germans continued to organize, write letters, and appeal to the Philadelphia Synod, New York Synod, and church leaders in Europe. At least six other denominations with religious leaders existed in Philadelphia, yet the German Reformed and German Lutherans in particular wanted their own ethnic and denominational services. German churches lacked institutional support, and they feared for the continuation of their community, insisting on German sermons and German hymns. Patricia Bonomi argues that they “responded to [the] diversity [in Philadelphia] with a positively sharpened religious self-­awareness and an enhanced attachment to the doctrinal uniqueness of their own denomination.”64 The few

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  197

records available before 1740—two vital lists, one from the German Lutheran church in 1733 and one from the German Reformed church in 1735, as well as a handful of marriages documented in family Bibles, itinerant records, and ministers’ notes—reveal a strongly ethnic community, where just under 99 percent of the affiliates were German. After Mühlenberg’s arrival, he noted that parishioners were “in danger of being seduced by numerous plausible and respectable sects.”65 Yet, instead of assimilating into other religious cultures, the German Lutherans and German Reformed retained their cultural and religious community and maintained ethnic barriers. Some of the seventy wills left by German-­speaking Philadelphians before 1740 corroborate the existence of a German community. A few include German executors and witnesses. For instance, the will of Philadelphian Claus Oblinger, originally written in German, named Henry Funk, Christian Allebacker, and Conrad Reif as “guardians or executors over my wife, children and all the goods which I left behind, and it is my prayer and desire that they shall take so much care of the same as they possibly can.”66 No other Philadelphia records of Oblinger remain; however, the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania traced him to a ship that arrived in 1724 from Schwarzenau, which means he could have been a German Baptist or Dunkard, although he did not join the Baptists in Philadelphia.67 Other branches of the family, including his granddaughter, were eventual members of the German Reformed church in Philadelphia, and his five children all married descendants of German speakers, as did his grandchildren.68 Of those Oblinger deemed trustworthy to handle his estate, Henry Funk migrated from the Palatinate in 1717 and had three sons, only one of whom adopted an anglicized name; Christian Allebacker disappeared from the record but was presumably a German-­speaking immigrant; and Conrad Reif appeared in the record several times in the 1730s for redeeming German-­speaking immigrants.69 Henry’s son Jacob Funk put Oblinger’s will together, probably signaling his greater facility with the British legal system. Martin Hauser (who immigrated in 1727 from Alsace) and Samuel Meier witnessed the will.70 Clearly, Oblinger associated with other men of similar backgrounds, albeit from different regions, as Schwarzenau was 250 miles northeast of Alsace and 100 miles due north of the Palatinate region. Although Oblinger died young, he left his wife and children in comfortable conditions. His sons moved westward as soon as they were old enough, but his daughters remained in Philadelphia, marrying German-­speaking men and participating in the larger German community that Oblinger relied on after his death.

198  Ethnic and Religious Identities

Non-­German German Speakers When confronted with a plethora of “others,” approximately half of the German-­speaking immigrants in Philadelphia followed the above pattern and became German, while the other half associated to some degree with the broader English-­speaking culture. Without a substantial group of immigrants from one specific region, German speakers sometimes chose to affiliate with German speakers from other regions and eventually self-­identified as German. But some—between 40 and 57 percent of the German-­speaking population—chose to affiliate with English speakers and associate less with the German-­speaking community. Between 1720 and 1775, a decreasing percentage (but still increasing number) of German speakers in Philadelphia opted not to marry other German speakers. Like Jacob Kimmerlin and Sarah Lewis, none of these men or women gave reasons for not marrying within the growing German community. Nor did these couples appear in many other documents that could add to our understanding of who intermarried and why. Instead, we must infer their interests and the factors that contributed to their becoming non-­ German from limited documents and patterns of intermarriage over time. For instance, the increasing population of German speakers in Philadelphia after 1730 made it easier for immigrants to find ethnically similar marriage partners and community networks. As the German-­speaking population increased, the rate of German speakers’ outmarriage decreased. The population rise also increased the number of German-­centered religious institutions, which made it easier for Germans to meet and marry other German speakers. In addition, nearly half of the European immigrants to Pennsylvania arrived as indentured servants, often without families, connections, or netspeaking immigrants, the ship lists and works.71 Among these German-­ records of indentureship indicate a nearly equal gender ratio. Many servants worked for masters of different ancestral origins from their own. Friends and kin sometimes disappointed immigrants, who then had to sell their labor or, more often, their children’s labor, to English settlers for a term of four to seven years in order to pay for their voyages.72 Some of these redemptioners worked in the city, while others worked on backcountry farms. Even those who arrived in Pennsylvania without debt often arrived without familial connections. As James Lemon has found, those without kin, friends, or assets in Pennsylvania usually lacked the resources to move to the countryside and thus stayed in Philadelphia.73 Without a German-­speaking network, these German-­speaking

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  199

immigrants may have relied on other communities. Speculatively, the male and female German speakers who married in the non-­German Philadelphian churches were more likely to be these recent immigrants who lacked German connections. Some non-­German-­speaking religious institutions, such as the Society of Friends or Quakers, welcomed members of varied linguistic backgrounds, which opened the possibility of religious networks that superseded ethnic networks. Quakers required couples who married within their denomination to be religious adherents, and therefore the marriages between German speakers and non-­German speakers reflected the priority of religious affiliation over linguistic preferences. When English-­born Samuel Boone married Elizabeth Cassel, an American-­born German descendant in 1745, twenty-­three Quakers witnessed and approved their marriage. When Samuel Boone died in 1748, Elizabeth Cassel Boone married Joseph Yarnall, another American-­born English Quaker.74 However, very few German-­speaking immigrants joined the Society of Friends or married within that denomination after the 1720s. Quaker immigrants from before 1710 supplied most of the wills of German speakers in Philadelphia. For instance, Caspar Hoodt’s will from 1732 mentions several non-­German speakers, including James Debayslaine, William Fishbourne, and John Jones.75 Hoodt arrived from a German-­speaking area sometime before 1701. He became naturalized in 1701 and was married within the Quaker faith to Sarah Coleman. His children also married within the Quaker faith, and the executors of his will were Sarah and their son-­in-­law Daniel Smith Jr., who had married Hoodt’s daughter Mary in the Philadelphia Quaker meetinghouse in 1719.76 The will of another German speaker from Philadelphia, George Gottshick, who died in 1729, listed his wife, Elizabeth Oliver, a Welsh Quaker whom he married within the Quaker faith in 1697.77 He gave most of his possessions to his wife and adopted daughter and to help the poor afford burials in the Quaker Grave Yard in Philadelphia. But he also mentioned his sister and nieces remaining in the city of Lindau, in what is now Bavaria, and his cousins in the city of Ulm, in what is now Baden-­ Württemberg. Hoodt and Gottshick came to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s as Quakers and were incorporated into Quaker hegemony, and they retained those networks. Many other early German-­speaking immigrants were likewise Quakers; however, most of the German-­speaking immigrants of the 1720s and 1730s were not. A majority—more than 80 percent—of German-­speaking outmarriages occurred in Philadelphia’s most broadly welcoming institutions: Anglican, German Lutheran, and Swedish Lutheran churches. The marriages within

200  Ethnic and Religious Identities

these churches reveal a gendered component to German-­speaking outmarriage. German-­speaking women married non-­German speakers nearly 50 percent of the time in the Anglican churches and only 25 percent of the time in the German Lutheran or German Reformed churches. German-­speaking men, on the other hand, married non-­German speakers over 50 percent of the time in the German Lutheran church and only 30 percent of the time in the Anglican, Presbyterian, or Baptist churches. This confirms the patriarchal structure of churches and religion in early America. Both German-­speaking and English-­speaking men occasionally outmarried, but they brought their wives into their (the men’s) church. Despite this overall pattern, German-­speaking men who outmarried in English churches became the easiest to trace genealogically and therefore constitute the greatest number of examples in this case study, although they reflect the path taken by only some early German-­speaking Philadelphians. For example, on June 12, 1753, Frederick Fetzer, a recent German-­speaking immigrant, married Rachel Brittain, an American-­born English descendant, in the Anglican Christ Church in Philadelphia. After their marriage, they moved to Chester County and had one son, Isaac, who married an English-­ speaking woman, Suzanne Frampton (Yates). Frederick Fetzer may have adhered to or converted to the Anglican tradition, or he may have found the Anglicans more accepting of intermarriages. His son’s marriage to an English-­ speaking woman suggests that Frederick never fully associated or identified with the German community, and instead associated and identified with the English American community. In another example, Jacob Schartel married Anne Eaton in Philadelphia’s Presbyterian church on April 28, 1742. The remaining records reveal that Jacob Schartel had arrived from Rotterdam on November 25, 1740, aboard the ship Loyal Judith and immediately took an oath of allegiance.78 Like Jacob Kimmerlin and Sarah Lewis, Jacob Schartel and Anne Eaton do not reappear in Philadelphia’s records. Other Schartels and Kimmerlins appear as part of the German community in Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth century, but there is little evidence that these two couples in Philadelphia became part of that community. Perhaps they, like other immigrants, changed their ethnicized names, had no children, or simply moved to another colony, thereby making them much more difficult to trace. The divergent ethnic choices of German-­speaking immigrants are best exemplified by the experiences of two young German-­speaking men in the 1770s: John Frederick Whitehead and Johann Carl Büttner. Whitehead and Büttner wrote about their experiences as recent immigrants to Philadelphia

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  201

many years after the fact, and in the process revealed German-­speaking immigrants’ struggles with Pennsylvania’s German community. While both immigrants arrived on the same ship, Büttner quickly returned to his familial and cultural connections in Europe, later writing his narrative in German. Whitehead, however, remained in Pennsylvania, lived among English speakers (mostly Quakers), adopted an English name, and married an English-­ speaking woman named Ann Thompson. He even wrote his narrative in English. Thus, of two men arriving on the same ship at the same time, one returned to Europe without becoming English or German, and the other became English American. The differences in their experiences derived in large part from their access to the German community. Whitehead spent his indentured servitude with an English-­speaking family and by necessity learned English.79 When his six and a half years of servitude were over, he contracted out his labor to another English speaker, and when he decided to move to Philadelphia to become a shoemaker, he relied on his English-­speaking contacts to find connections and work. Whitehead eventually fell in love with the English-­speaking Ann Thompson and married her in the German Lutheran church.80 They had nine children: Sarah, John, Lydia, Michael, William, Anna, Jesse, Maria, and Esther.81 Whitehead may have retained his religious persuasion, but his ethnicity became closer to English than German. Conversely, Büttner established stronger connections with other German speakers, which convinced him to return to Europe. Although he got along with his Quaker English master, upon visiting the German Lutheran church in Philadelphia, he “met a group of German servants who were having a very bad time at the hands of their masters.”82 They convinced Büttner to run away, but he was later caught and returned to his master. When his master attacked him for breaking a plow, Büttner ran to a German cooper, who helped him talk to a judge about the attack. Under a new master, Büttner subsequently met with several Hessians fighting for the British in the American Revolution and decided to join the Continental Army. He became part of a volunteer regiment of German servants recruited in Pennsylvania under Major von Ortendorff.83 When captured, he pretended to be a Hessian and joined the British side. In the course of the American Revolution, Büttner switched sides two more times. At the end of the conflict, he decided to return to Europe. Despite his interactions with other German speakers, he “did not find happiness” in America.84 While Whitehead remained for the opportunities he discovered there, Büttner was not willing to do the same.

202  Ethnic and Religious Identities

Conclusion The experiences and choices of John Frederick Whitehead and Johann Carl Büttner, along with Jacob Kimmerlin (and Jacob Kimmerling), Christopher Sauer, Esther Werndtlin, Caspar Wistar, Claus Oblinger, Caspar Hoodt, George Gottshick, Elizabeth Cassel, Frederick Fetzer, Jacob Schartel, and the other German speakers in Philadelphia, reveal the range of paths toward ethnic identity for early Americans. Not all of these German speakers became German. Some associated with other German speakers and participated in a German-­speaking community through personal interactions or church affiliation. Others married non-­German speakers in non-­German churches, learned English, and networked with non-­Germans. And a very small percentage occupied a liminal space between both groups, evidenced in the few marriages between two German speakers in an English church, or in a German church’s incorporation of an English-­speaking woman whose children also spoke only English but attended German churches. Germans expressed their identity through their choices of names (their own and their children’s), marriage partners, executors of their wills, church affiliation, and types of work. Their chosen identity reflected the personal availability, strength, and appeal of German neighbors or friends, communities, and institutions, as well as their experience of rejection by Anglo-­Pennsylvanians. Their interactions reveal the creation of a German community, though that community was not universally appealing or accessible to all German speakers. The remaining records show that Pennsylvania’s German speakers were not a monolithic group: some became German, and others did not.

notes 1. “Marriage Record of the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, 1702–1803,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (hereafter HSP). 2. Standard methods for uncovering ethnic compositions are fraught with problems, especially if historians assign each person a single ethnic identity based on surnames. Instead of doing this, I assigned each person in a 33,000-­person database of marriages in Philadelphia a probable ethnic association based on names, immigrant information, and any ancestry available. I made the assumption that if a name of German extraction appeared in an English record, recorded by an English minister, it was unlikely to refer to a person of non-­German background—and vice versa. This revealed a statistical ethnic breakdown for Philadelphia as well as the rate of inmarriage and outmarriage, which is the statistical basis for this essay. I use the term “German speakers” to denote those individuals who were probably of German background, regardless of their personal ethnic identification. 3. Colonial Records: Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania; From the Organization to the Termination of the Proprietary Government, vol. 3 (Harrisburg: Theo. Fenn, 1840), 515.

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  203 4. Women were rarely identified by their patronymic names, but rather by their first and baptismal names. 5. Thomas S. Stein, Centennial History of Lebanon Classes [sic] of the Reformed Church in the U.S., 1820–1920 (Lebanon, Pa.: Sowers, 1920). Available at http://files.usgwarchives.net/pa/lebanon/ church/kimmerref01.txt. 6. See Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Stephanie Grauman Wolf, Urban Village: Population, Community, and Family Structure in Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1683–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 7. Data derives from a statistical analysis of the marriages in Philadelphia’s English-­speaking churches: see Anna Miller Watring, Early Quaker Records of Philadelphia, vol. 1, 1682–1750 (Westminster, Md.: Family Line, 1997); “Marriage Record of Christ Church, Philadelphia, 1709–1806,” HSP; “Baptisms, Marriages, and Deaths, 1689–1773; Treasurer’s Notes, 1766–1773; Miscellaneous Letters and Marriage Licenses,” HSP; David Spencer, The Early Baptists of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: William Syckelmoore, 1877); “Marriage Record of the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, 1702–1803.” 8. Data derives from a statistical comparison of Philadelphia’s German-­speaking population with its corresponding population in the existing church records: see “Communicants Register,” St. Michael’s and Zion Lutheran Church, transcription, XR/680, HSP; “Old First Reformed Church Records, 1741–1976,” coll. 3010, ser. 2, box 32, folders 15–16, HSP; Records of Rev. John Casper Stoever: Baptismal and Marriage, 1730–1779 (Harrisburg, Pa.: Harrisburg Publishing, 1896); St. Michael’s and Zion Lutheran Church, original records, XCh/43:1, HSP; “St. Michael’s and Zion Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, Marriages,” Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd ser., vol. 9, available at http://www .usgwarchives.org/pa/1pa/paarchivesseries/series2/paarch2-­ 9toc.html; “Marriage Record of St. Michael’s and Zion Lutheran Church, 1745–1800,” HSP. 9. This process is not uniquely German, and other scholars have examined it for other immigrant groups in Pennsylvania. See Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots-­Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ned Landsman, “Roots, Routes, and Rootedness: Diversity, Migration, and Toleration in Mid-­Atlantic Pluralism,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2, no. 2 (2004): 267–309; Judith Ridner, A Town In-­Between: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Early Mid-­Atlantic Interior (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Liam Riordan, Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-­Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Anita Tien, “ ‘To Enjoy Their Customs’: The Cultural Adaptation of Dutch and German Families in the Middle Colonies, 1660–1832” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1990). 10. For discussions on transatlantic German culture and identity, see Rosalind Beiler, Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650–1750 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); Aaron Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Charles Glatfelter, Pastors and People, vol. 2, The History (Breinigsville, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1981); Steven Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land: Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Philip Otterness, Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); A. G. Roeber, “ ‘The Origin of Whatever Is Not English Among Us’: The Dutch-­Speaking and the German-­Speaking Peoples of Colonial British America,” in Bailyn and Morgan, Strangers Within the Realm, 220–83; Marianne S. Wokeck, “German and Irish Immigration to Colonial Philadelphia,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133, no. 22 (1989): 128–43; Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Immigration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

204  Ethnic and Religious Identities 11. For information on ethnicity, religion, marriage, and identity among later immigrant waves, see Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-­Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 12. Greg Denning, “Introduction: In Search of a Metaphor,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections of Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 3. 13. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity,’ ” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 1–47; Wendy F. Katkin, Ned Landsman, and Andrea Tyree, eds., Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 14. See John Locke, “On Identity and Diversity,” chap. 27 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). 15. See David Hume, “On Personal Identity,” part 4 of A Treatise on Human Nature (1739). 16. Denning, “Introduction,” 4. 17. Marie Basile McDaniel, “ ‘We Shall Not Differ in Heaven’: Marriage, Order, and Identity in Eighteenth-­Century Philadelphia” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 2010), 39, 145. 18. Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 21. 19. For further examinations of the importance of marriage to early Americans, see Joyce Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Levy, Quakers and the American Family; Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1997); Beverly Prior Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem: From Communal Mission to Family Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 20. Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 8. 21. Ibid., 11. 22. Otterness, Becoming German. 23. Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land, 46. 24. Susan E. Klepp, “Demography in Early Philadelphia,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133, no. 2 (1989): 108. 25. Ibid., 103–5. 26. New York City’s 2008 census shows a population density of approximately 26,000 people per square mile. In 1740 the population density of Philadelphia was approximately 20,000 people per square mile. 27. Mary M. Schweitzer, “The Spatial Organization of Federalist Philadelphia, 1790,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, no. 1 (1993): 46–51. 28. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 45. 29. McDaniel, “ ‘We Shall Not Differ,’ ” 295–310; Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 89; James Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Klepp, “Demography,” 104–8; Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 45, 172; Wokeck, “German and Irish Immigration,” 141. 30. For a detailed description of the German-­speaking immigrants see Annette K. Burgert, Eighteenth-­Century Emigrants from German-­Speaking Lands to North America (Birdsboro, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1985); Glatfelter, Pastors and People. 31. McDaniel, “ ‘We Shall Not Differ,’ ” 321. 32. Johann Christoph Sauer, “An Early Description of Pennsylvania. Letter of Christopher Sower, Written in 1724, Describing Conditions in Philadelphia and Vicinity, and the Sea Voyage from Europe,” comp. R. W. Kelsey, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 45 (1921): 249.

Identity Formation Among German Speakers  205 33. Ibid., 251. 34. Otterness, Becoming German, 7–36. 35. Letter from Esther Werndtlin, 1736, in “Documents in Swiss Archives Relating to American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 22 (1916): 124. 36. This probably refers to people from parts of modern France or Italy who spoke Romance languages. 37. Letter from Esther Werndtlin, 124. The original German is as follows: “Unter so viel Religionen, Reformierten, Lutheranern, Catholischen, Tumblern, Mennisten, Pietisten, Quackern, Siebentaegeren, Atheisten, auch die sich nennen Nichts, die kein Religion, kein Gottes-­dienst, kein Kirchen, kein Schulen, ja kein Gott, kein Teuffel, kein Himmel, kein Hoell glauben, auch so vielerley Sprachen, Englisch, Schwedisch, Nordwelsh, Hochteutsch, Niderteutsch, Hollaendisch; da sind viel Niger, die warden nun hier fuer Sclaven verkaufft fuer ihr Lebtag; die hielaendischen Heiden wohnen under uns in Bueschen, sind sehr abscheuliche Leuth, braun recht gottlose Heiden, sie schlagen einander zu tod, wie die Hund, gehen nachend, geschminckt mit roth und gruen und Gall-­Farb, haben Ring an Ohren und Nasen; Ich foercht sie sehr; Summa, der Religionen und Nationen is hier kein Zahl, dies Land ist ein Zuflucht-­Haus vertriebener Secten, ein Freystatt aller Ubelthaeter in Europa, ein verwirrtes Babel, eine Behaltnus aller unreinen Geistern, eine Behausung der Teuflen, ein erste Welt, ein Sodom, das bedauerlichste ist, dass sie alle in gantz America lauter Schweitzer, was Deutsche aus Staeeten, Landen und Doerfern des gantzen Schweitzer Lands treffen wir hier Lueth an. Es sind lauter Schweitzer die vor etwann 30. oder 40. Jahren, vor Hungers-­Noth aus der Schweitz in die Pfaltz gezogen, nun aber in dis Land gekommen, und viele wegen Mangel des Wort Gottes abgefallen zu allerhand Secten.” 38. Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land, 4. While Nolt predominantly refers to German speakers in rural Pennsylvania, many of the German speakers in Philadelphia moved to rural areas and vice versa. Philadelphia presented different opportunities than rural areas, but the people were not necessarily different. 39. Schwarzenau refers to a community of German Neutäufer, who later became the Church of the Brethren (Dunkers) in America. Sauer is already making a distinction between “church Germans” (Palatines) and sectarians (Schwarzenau). 40. Sauer, “An Early Description,” 248. 41. See McDaniel, “ ‘We Shall Not Differ’ ”; Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 3–37. 42. For more information on ethnicity among rural German arrivals, see Otterness, Becoming German; Oscar Kuhns, German and Swiss Settlements of Colonial Pennsylvania: A Study of the So-­Called Pennsylvania Dutch (Harrisburg, Pa.: Aurand Press, 1945), 231–40; Thomas L. Purvis, “Patterns of Ethnic Settlement in Late Eighteenth-­Century Pennsylvania,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 70, no. 2 (1987): 107–22. 43. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers, 52, 186. 44. Wokeck, “German and Irish Immigration,” 138. 45. For a discussion of redemptioners’ experiences in Philadelphia, see George W. Neible, “Account of Servants Bound and Assigned Before James Hamilton, Mayor of Philadelphia, 1745,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 31 (1907): 195–206; Patricia Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 122, 134; Wokeck, “German and Irish Immigration,” 131. 46. Lemon, Best Poor Man’s Country, 42–48. 47. Sauer, “An Early Description,” 243. 48. Ibid., 254. 49. “Votes and Proceedings,” Pennsylvania Archives, 8th ser., vol. 2 (Pennsylvania, 1931), 1223. 50. Ibid., 1224. 51. Quoted in Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude,” 86. 52. Quoted in ibid., 90. 53. James Logan to John Penn, November 28, 1727, James Logan Letterbook, HSP. 54. Isaac Norris Sr. to Joseph Pike, October 28, 1728, Isaac Norris Sr. Letterbook, HSP. 55. “Votes and Proceedings,” 1235.

206  Ethnic and Religious Identities 56. Ibid., 1695; italics in the original. 57. It is also because of this law that so many records of German immigrants exist. See Ralph B. Strassburger, Pennsylvania German Pioneers: The Original Lists of Arrivals in the Port of Philadelphia, 1727–1808, ed. William J. Hinke, 3 vols. (Rockland, Mass.: Picton Press, 1992). 58. McDaniel, “ ‘We Shall Not Differ,’ ” 82–83. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 100. 61. J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, A History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: J. H. Everets, 1884), 2:1409. 62. Ibid., 2:1419. 63. Jacobus van Ostade to Gerard Bolwerck of London, regarding the churches in Pennsylvania, September 30, 1731, box 1, William J. Hinke Collection, Miscellaneous Letters and Documents Relating to the Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, 1700–1806, Evangelical and Reformed Historical Society, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 64. Bonomi, Under the Cope, 73. 65. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg in Three Volumes, trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania and Adjacent States and Muhlenberg Press, 1942), 1:381. 66. Will of Claus Oblinger, Register of Wills, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Will Book E, p. 135, HSP. 67. Pennsylvania German Society: Proceedings and Addresses, vol. 53 (Norristown, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1948), 5. 68. William H. Rinkenbach, “Descendants of Claus Oblinger,” RootsWeb, http://freepages.gene alogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~oplifam/Descendants%20of%20Claus%20Oblinger.html. 69. Neible, “Account of Servants,” 99. 70. F. Edward Wright, ed., Abstracts of Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, Wills, 1726–1747 (Westminster, Md.: Heritage Books, 2007), 28. 71. For factors contributing to indentured servitude, see Farley Grubb, “Fatherless and Friendless: Factors Influencing the Flow of English Immigrant Servants,” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 1 (1992): 85–108; Farley Grubb, “Servant Auction Records and Immigration into the Delaware Valley, 1745–1831: The Proportion of Females Among Immigrant Servants,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 133, no. 2 (1989): 154–69. 72. Wokeck, “German and Irish Immigration,” 138. 73. James Lemon, Best Poor Man’s Country, 42. 74. Ella Hazel Spraker, The Boone Family: A Genealogical History of the Descendants of George and Mary Boone Who Came to America in 1717 (Rutland, Vt.: Genealogical Publishing, 1922), 49–50. 75. Wright, Abstracts of Philadelphia County, 51. 76. Watring, Early Quaker Records of Philadelphia, 176, 220. 77. Michael Tepper, ed., New World Immigrants: A Consolidation of Ship Passenger Lists (1979; reprint, Baltimore: Clearfield, 2008), 306. 78. Strassburger, Pennsylvania German Pioneers, 2:284. 79. Jacob Frederick Whitehead, “The Life of John Frederick Whitehead Containing His Travels and Chief Adventers,” in Souls for Sale: Two German Redemptioners Come to Revolutionary America: The Life Stories of John Frederick Whitehead and Johann Carl Büttner, ed. Susan E. Klepp, Farley Grubb, and Anne Pfaelzer de Ortiz (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 146–49. 80. Ibid., 151–55. 81. Ibid., 168–69. 82. Johann Carl Büttner, “Narrative of Johann Carl Büttner in the American Revolution,” in Klepp, Grubb, and Pfaelzer de Ortiz, Souls for Sale, 227. 83. Ibid., 227–31. 84. Ibid., 248–49.

Eight

Defining the Limits of American Liberty Pennsylvania’s German Peace Churches During the Revolution Jan Stievermann

Scholars have long ignored the experience of Pennsylvania’s German Peace Churches during the American Revolution. The few who have examined these groups have tended to view them through the interpretative lens of loyalism.1 Following the lead of angry Patriots, historians have regarded the Mennonites, Amish, Brethren (Dunkers), Schwenkfelders, and Moravians as either closet Tories, hiding their support for the king under the guise of religious scruples, or passive Loyalists, who were set against the independence movement even though they had scruples about actively opposing it.2 Only in the last quarter century has more serious interest been shown in religiously motivated dissent against the Revolution, which complicates this overly simplistic outlook. A focus on the English-­speaking Quakers has revealed that the stance of aloofness and noncooperation assumed by the majority of Friends must be clearly distinguished from loyalism,3 an insight that needs to be brought to bear on the German sectarians of Pennsylvania as well. Anne Ousterhout’s survey of opposition to the Revolution in Pennsylvania offers some general theoretical reflections that are helpful for studying the German Peace Churches. Ousterhout convincingly argues that the labels “Tory” and “Loyalist” are, in most cases, misleading for analyzing the variegated forms of antipathy toward the Revolution. According to Ousterhout, the Pennsylvania archives yield evidence only for a relatively small faction of ideologically driven, active Loyalists “who were primarily motivated by

208  Ethnic and Religious Identities

affection and preference for the mother country and its government and who faithfully adhered to England during the imperial struggle.”4 The attitude of the majority of dissenters is better described as “dissatisfaction with” rather than “loyalty to.”5 For the majority of Friends, the primary, if not the only, reason for dissent lay in their inability to harmonize a violent rebellion with their peace testimony. Since they never directly wielded any political power in the colony and were much less concerned with transatlantic trade interests, the German sectarians present an even clearer case of religiously motivated alienation from the Whig supporters of the war that had little, if anything, to do with loyalism. Richard MacMaster and Donald Durnbaugh6 argue that the vast majority of Germans belonging to the nonresistant sects attempted to remain genuinely neutral in the conflict, assuming a stance of passivity until God decided the matter one way or the other. No doubt, most of the German pacifists in Pennsylvania were of that large and heterogeneous group Ousterhout calls the disaffected. They longed for the quiet old days and were highly critical, even resentful, of the revolutionaries, who threw their world into turmoil and hounded them for their convictions. But, except for a few cases, including the cause célèbre of the Philadelphia printer Christoph Saur III,7 little evidence of active loyalism can be found, even during the British occupation of Philadelphia. The Patriots never managed to convert more than a few German sectarians to their cause or to force significant numbers into service, despite resorting to extreme measures. This refusal of the vast majority of German pacifists to take sides even under duress cannot, as MacMaster points out, be properly understood in terms of secular ideologies, party politics, or material interests. Instead, “the real significance of the wartime experience of the historic peace churches is theological, because the issues involved were theological issues.” What was at stake between 1775 and 1783 was not a politically motivated aversion to involvement in the Revolution “so much as the sectarian concept of discipleship as a distinct way of life.” The war and the regime change it entailed brought into sharp focus “the essential conflict between the sects and the state” (CC, 214). For their refusal to commit fully to the Patriots and perform their new civic duties, the German sectarians, like the English-­speaking Quakers of Pennsylvania, were harassed throughout the revolutionary period and subjected to double and triple taxation, heavy fines, and, in a number of cases, imprisonment and confiscation of entire estates. They were even stripped of

German Peace Churches During the Revolution  209

basic civic rights for more than a decade. The sectarian experience thus calls into question the “consensus” model of the American Revolution, according to which the Revolution was “the product of enlightened leaders who confidently led a united white population into revolt.”8 Instead, the harsh treatment of the Quakers and German sectarians highlights the high degree of dissent and coercion utilized in the movement for independence and reveals the very limits of liberty inscribed into the concept of citizenship as it was being defined during the Revolution. This essay argues that the passive neutrality of Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, and Moravians, widely perceived as disloyalty and treason by the Patriots, can be fruitfully interpreted as the result of fundamental conflict between the traditional denominational identity of the Peace Churches and the revolutionary ideology, with its concepts of representative government and republican citizenship. This concept of citizenship, implemented in the state constitutions adopted during the Revolution, including the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, promised equal civil rights and liberties, including liberty of conscience, for all who fit the “ascriptive conceptions” of Americanness in terms of race, gender, and class.9 Yet American citizenship, as defined by the various states, also demanded that everyone conform to a normative civic identity that implied certain duties, not least of which was the obligation of all white male adults to participate in the military defense of the state. Thus, the experience of these conscientious neutrals throws into relief the paradox that James Kettner identified in the thought and actions of the American Patriots, who, in the name of representative government, were “demanding allegiance and coercing loyalty from individuals who were unwilling participants in the struggle for independence.”10 For the German sectarians, the new civic identity was unacceptable because the notion of American liberty, in contrast to what the old Pennsylvania Charter had offered, was predicated, as a joint remonstrance by Mennonites and Dunkers put it in 1775, on the “Freedom of Conscience to take up arms” (CC, 266). Moreover, the concept of American citizenship, as it was interpreted in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, required full identification with and unconditional loyalty to the state—a loyalty that implied enmity to those who stood against the state-­defined interests of the people. The sectarian concept of discipleship forbade adherents to identify with any state or any people of this world and to give allegiance to a government if this interfered with their higher loyalty to Christ, who commanded them not to

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fight or mix in worldly struggles. In response to the increasing pressure to commit to the Revolution and integrate into the emerging Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the German Peace Churches drew together, defining themselves as an ethno-­religious community apart: a brotherhood of Christ’s suffering witnesses for the nonresistant love of Christ. The inherited language of nonresistant martyrdom was essential for the creation and expression of this cross-­denominational solidarity in the face of great hardship and oppression. Religious historians of Pennsylvania generally use the term “German Peace Churches” as an umbrella term for the various Anabaptist and Pietist communities of pacifist persuasion who mostly emigrated from the German-­ speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland.11 By far the largest of the German Peace Churches were the Mennonites, along with some Amish. The Peace Churches also comprised a number of radical, separatist groups of Pietists. Largest among these were the so-­called Neutäufer, that is, the Dunkers or Brethren (later called the Church of the Brethren). In smaller numbers the Moravians embodied the Pietist reincarnation of the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren) and had far-­reaching ties among the sectarians, including Mennonites, the Dunkers of Schwarzenau, and the Schwenkfelders. These followers of the sixteenth-­century radical reformer and mystic Kaspar Schwenk­feld von Ossig (1489–1561) had found temporary refuge on the Herrnhut estate of Count Nicolas of Zinzendorf (1700–1760) in Lusatia, Saxony, before immigrating to Pennsylvania in the 1730s. Although multiple connections between these groups did exist in Europe, the collective noun “German Peace Churches” and the communality that it suggests were a product of the New World environment. After they settled in Pennsylvania, these diverse Anabaptist communities and radical Pietist groups of pacifist persuasion developed a certain degree of ecumenical group consciousness as a single ethno-­religious minority. This sense of solidarity was the product of outside pressure and of their similarly marginal situations both within Pennsylvania’s English-­dominated society and within the Pennsylvania German-­speaking population, which was predominately Lutheran and Reformed.12 Of the roughly 100,000 German-­speaking people who immigrated to Pennsylvania during the colonial period, more than 90 percent were Kirchenleute, or “church Germans.” Thus, on the eve of the Revolution, there were perhaps 10,000 members of the German Peace Churches living in Pennsylvania.13 Among these, the shared experience of liminality, proximity, and a

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shared print market for devotional literature fostered an increased awareness of doctrinal and stylistic commonalities. The different Peace Churches retained and indeed highlighted their peculiar creedal distinctions, so internal sectarian controversies and conflicts did not disappear. Still, outside pressure on the German pacifists combined with their religious worldviews to form at least a temporary community of solidarity. Two aspects of the resulting identity are crucial as foreground to understanding their collective response to the American Revolution. At the heart of their communal understanding of discipleship lay the principle of nonresistance, which went hand in hand with a shared martyrological mentality in which the notion of the Christian’s meek suffering offered central testimony to the truth of Christ. A crucial medium for the creation and continuation of this mentality was a discourse of nonresistant martyrdom that proliferated among Pennsylvania’s Peace Churches in the mid-­eighteenth century.14 Central to this discourse were several monumental martyrological works produced by the German sectarians during the eighteenth century, notably an expanded edition of the sixteenth-­century Anabaptist hymn collection Ausbund (1742), which contained a wealth of martyr songs; the 1748 High German edition of Thieleman J. van Braght’s five-­hundred-­page Der Blutige Schau-­Platz oder Martyrer-­Spiegel der Tauffs Gesinnten oder Wehrlosen Christen (The Martyrs Mirror); and the Schwenkfelder Church’s 1762 Neu-­Eingerichtetes Gesangbuch (Newly arranged hymnbook), in which the theme of meek suffering also loomed large.15 During the Revolution, the discourse of nonresistant martyrdom provided the German Peace Churches (as it had done during the French and Indian War) with a common language to express their solidarity with one another as well as to voice their dissent from the ideology and actions of their nonpacifist neighbors. The principle of nonresistance meant, most importantly, a commitment to pacifism. The principle of noncombatancy translated into a range of practices, a spectrum, from strict passivity to the acceptance of basic measures of self-­defense, along which communities among the German Peace Churches positioned and repositioned themselves differently. All were united, though, in their conscientious objection to participating in any military service. Nonresistance further entailed a specific attitude and behavior toward “the world” and its institutions that was modeled after their understanding of primitive Christians. As much as the true disciples of Christ should inwardly or morally shun the world, they must not actively resist it but instead patiently suffer its

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evils and afflictions. While the Peace Churches unambiguously rejected the state churches as anti-­Christian monstrosities, as a consequence of this attitude, they entertained a complex, equivocal relationship to civil governments. The German sectarians taught a negative doctrine of the state. For the Peace Churches, no government could ever be truly godly, because the use of coercive power inevitably violated the principle of Christian love. Even the best governments were necessary evils, instruments of God that he used to restrain and punish the wicked, as well as to correct and test the faithful. But although true Christians, whose ultimate loyalties belong to the kingdom of God, must never directly participate in the corruptions of the worldly state, they have the absolute duty, in accordance with Romans 13:1–7 and 1 Peter 2:13–14, to subject themselves to any government God had preordained as their temporary ruler. Based on their interpretation of the Sermon of the Mount, the German Peace Churches thus objected to holding any kind of civil office and to taking oaths. At the same time, they felt bound to abide by all laws as long as these did not interfere with their nonresistant faith. For them, the obligation to subject oneself “unto the higher powers” because “the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1) implied that although the government might be tyrannical, the only admissible way of responding to the evils of this world is with the nonresistant love of Jesus. Following the biblical precept to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:21), both the Anabaptist and the Pietist groups were also prepared to pay taxes and consented to extra duties for being conscientious objectors. This traditional consent to commutation fees reflected a situation in which subjects had no insight into, let alone control over, the ways in which a ruler actually used their money. In the eyes of the pacifist sectarians, their impotence as feudal subjects relieved them from moral responsibility for any acts of violence that the government might undertake with the help of the dues they had rendered. Indeed, in whatever territory the Peace Churches had found a ruler willing to tolerate their conscientious objections and offer a protective privilegium, they had often established acceptable, if always revocable and volatile, arrangements with the state. In addition to regular taxes, they had paid extra dues in return for not having to attend the established churches, for exemption from military service, and for protection from hostile neighbors. Once the German Peace Churches had transplanted themselves into a society where citizens had the right to participate in the government through representation, and where the use of tax money was thus, at least to some degree, controlled by the people, this distance became much harder to

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sustain. Consequently, Pennsylvania’s pacifists became more conscious and conscientious about the designation and use of commutation fees—an issue that became highly contentious during the Revolution. While they treasured Pennsylvania’s constitutional guarantee of religious liberty, the German pacifist groups also faced new and quite unexpected difficulties in the New World. Besides the many practical problems and hardships, one of the greatest challenges for them was finding how to adapt their traditional understanding of discipleship to the new political situation. Maybe even more than the church Germans, the sectarians brought to Pennsylvania a feudal, negative concept of freedom as a privilege derived from the sovereign’s store of power that granted various kinds of exemption. According to this concept, freedom was above all measured by the absence of duties, services, or religious coercion. Into the second half of the eighteenth century, the German immigrants predominantly conceived of America as a freies Land, “meaning, simply, little government and no taxation. What this description also suggested was an absence of obligation toward the land and its protection.”16 However, by the mid-­eighteenth century, the English-­speaking colonists of North America were developing different concepts of freedom and subjecthood that were informed by ideas of social compact and natural rights.17 Building on the Lockean theories of contractual government and natural liberties, Americans increasingly came to think of the mutual ties between society and government as resting on individual consent and compact. Pennsylvania, in particular, offered something more akin to the concepts of representative government and freedom associated with modern citizenship: here freedom was positively defined in terms of constitutionally guaranteed civic rights, including the franchise for all freeholders, even though the colonial charter was ultimately still a privilege granted by the monarch. The freedom Pennsylvania offered implied a new understanding of civic responsibilities to participate in public political life and to contribute to the well-­being and safety of the commonwealth. Although church Germans and sectarians readily seized the opportunity to be naturalized, both groups struggled to give positive meaning to their new identity as Pennsylvanians. For Lutheran and Reformed communities, the Seven Years’ War had proven to be the decisive catalyst in the process toward fuller integration into Pennsylvania’s political culture, as their men readily joined militia forces to actively defend the colony alongside their English-­speaking neighbors. The Revolution would be the second catalyst. For the Peace Churches, this path toward integration remained closed.

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From the beginning of the sectarian immigration to Pennsylvania, representatives of the Peace Churches voiced concern that they would be implicated in the evils of temporal power as a price for unprecedented religious freedom and the new possibilities of political participation. The overriding fear was that if Pennsylvania became embroiled in war, the men would have to violate their peace testimony either by being coerced into militia service or by having to pay fees in lieu of personal service. As long as Pennsylvania’s government was still dominated by the pacifist Quaker party, this fear did not materialize. Even when the colony came under attack during the French and Indian War, the Pennsylvania Assembly did not impose a coercive militia act, but restricted itself to levying additional taxes that were used to build defenses and support the voluntary troops. In contrast to their feelings about paying fees in direct substitution for military service, the sectarians generally had no qualms about paying these taxes or supporting the community in other ways. They cared for refugees or the wounded and furnished wagons and horses, as long as these did not transport weapons and were not directly designated for military purposes. Applying as best as they could the standards set by their predecessors in Europe, the German Peace Churches between the 1740s and 1760s were thus able to negotiate an uneasy compromise between their nonresistance faith and a new civic identity, allowing for limited social involvement and even political participation. Because the colony’s charter exempted conscientious objectors from swearing an oath of loyalty to the king, they were free to become naturalized and to vote. While they refused to hold political offices, they used their franchise to support the Quaker party in the Assembly, and they cooperated with the English-­speaking Friends in other ways to work for peace. In the most striking example, German-­speaking pacifists and Quakers cooperated between 1756 and 1763 to organize and fund the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures.18 For the majority of German-­speaking sectarians, however, their carefully circumscribed civic engagement under the protection and guidance of the Quakers ultimately did not really amount to a thoroughgoing assimilation into the English Whig idea of self-­government. That step was only taken by a small, educated elite among the members of the Peace Churches, such as the Mennonite Benjamin Hershey (1697–1789) and the Schwenkfelder Christopher Schultz (1718–1789), who would defend the privilege of liberty of conscience in the language of natural rights. By contrast, most of the pacifists never fully metamorphosed into English freemen and in many ways

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continued to behave like feudal subjects who traded votes with the Quakers “for pacifist privileges, much as in Europe they had traded money, in the forms of special taxes and gifts to protective princes, for these privileges.”19 Whether and how that metamorphosis could have continued became a moot question, since after the French and Indian War the pacifist orientation of Pennsylvanian citizenship was abandoned and the Peace Churches quickly withdrew from their tentative embrace of citizenship. With the downfall of the Quaker party in the mid-­1760s and the beginning of the conflict between the colonies and the British government, the conditions under which the German Peace Churches had been able to achieve the precarious balance between a mentality of suffering for peace and an active citizenship disappeared. During the prolonged prerevolutionary struggle over burdensome taxes and arbitrary laws, the rank and file of the German pacifist communities mostly took a wait-­and-­see attitude. In numbers roughly proportionate to other ethnic and religious groups, members of the sectarian elite initially even supported the Patriot cause as long as its main goal was to redress grievances within the old imperial system. In late 1774, some leaders, such as Christopher Schultz, were still actively engaged in the committees of observation and inspection that were organized under the Continental Association to boycott American exports to Britain and the importation of English goods in order to force the British government to concede to the colonists’ demands and achieve reconciliation.20 However, when the goal of the Patriots began to shift toward independence and when their extralegal military bodies, called Associations, effectively began to set up an alternative government structure across the colonies, pressuring the population to support the cause and enforcing congressional and state committees’ policies, both Quakers and German sectarians withdrew. As the opposition to king and Parliament threatened to turn violent, the German pacifists, like the Friends, “began distancing themselves from the independence movement, arguing that Americans needed to employ less combative measures and appeal instead to the British conscience.”21 As the conflict escalated into armed contest and open revolution at Concord and Lexington, Pennsylvania’s Patriots, who in the spring of 1775 had begun to organize in the Associations, increasingly exerted power over the more conservative Assembly. To prepare the colony for self-­defense, they moved the Assembly to create a provincial Committee of Safety and pressured all adult males to gather into companies and train. In accordance with

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the ideas of representative government and republican citizenship that they were propagating, the Whigs also wanted to claim the mandate of all Pennsylvanians to give legitimacy to their actions, especially the move toward independence. While mustering and drilling obviously served a military purpose, they simultaneously coerced people to support the Revolution, and this in turn ensured the loyalty of the population. The Association pledge drawn up by the Lancaster County Committee in May 1775 powerfully illustrated the amalgamation of politics and religion in the thought and rhetoric of the American Patriots, expressing as it did “the deepest sense of our duty to God, our country, our selves and posterity, to defend and protect the religious and civil rights of this and our sister colonies, with our lives and fortunes, to the utmost of our abilities, against any power whatsoever, that shall attempt to deprive us of them” (CC, 232). Typical of the new discourse of patriotism, the people of “this and our sister colonies” were imagined as a community of solidarity. The duty toward this community and the duty toward God were symbolically welded together, and the obligation to defend “the religious and civil rights” became a sacred one. By this logic, nonassociation became a sacrilege, and whoever was not willing to bear arms in defense of these rights excluded himself from the newly formed community. Whatever sympathies individual members of the German Peace Churches might have initially had for the Patriot cause, when the call came to gather into Associations and when the Patriots’ aims shifted toward active resistance, the irreconcilable difference between resistance and the Peace Churches’ traditional understanding of discipleship became manifest and initiated the process of (self-­)exclusion. For the sectarians, government traditionally was not based on contractual consensus that could be withdrawn under certain conditions, but instead was an instrument of God’s providence to which one had to submit until God changed it. At the same time, no earthly ruler could demand its subjects’ most sacred sense of obligation, which was reserved for the kingdom of God. The Peace Churches could not pledge to defend America’s liberties, as the Lancaster County Committee had put it, “to the utmost of our abilities,” regardless of how highly they might have valued these liberties, for they understood their most holy duty to be one of obedience to Christ’s command of nonresistance. Drawing on precedents from the French and Indian War, some of the leaders of the Peace Churches actively sought to negotiate alternative ways of supporting the American cause and thus of proving their good citizenship.

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In Lancaster County, representatives of the Mennonites, Amish, and Church of the Brethren met with the County Committee in July 1775. They declared themselves “highly sensible of the Calamities & Misfortunes under which British America now labours, & being on all Occasion sincerely & cheerfully disposed to contribute to the Common Cause otherwise than by taking up Arms,” and thus they agreed to “contribute towards the Support of the Rights & Liberties of their Country” (CC, 245–46) through voluntary offerings of £3 10s., plus a sum equal to provincial tax assessment. No direct purpose was specified for these contributions. This was basically the modus operandi that had been suggested by the Pennsylvania Assembly in June and seconded by the Continental Congress in July (CC, 243). The pragmatism of the last Assembly under the colonial charter could only temporarily alleviate the underlying conflict in the arrangement. This conflict flared up immediately over the interpretation and usage of the voluntary contributions. The Peace Churches wanted them to be understood as charitable donations for the needy, but the Associations instead tended to treat the contributions as fines paid for failing to train with the  companies and used the money to equip the militia. This practice was the main reason why many German sectarians were reluctant to contribute to the provincial Committee of Safety. A York County Committee report noted that “after the County Committee separated, the Committee of Correspondence were informed by some who are People of that Persuasion, That it was equally against their Conscience to subscribe or pay any thing towards the Present Measures Carrying on, as to bear Arms.” Apparently, representatives of the Peace Churches attempted to point out that most of their members were conscientiously opposed to paying fines in lieu of military service, while they made “it a Matter of Conscience to pay the Provincial Tax,” following the old practice of rendering to Caesar. The obvious solution to this problem, as the York County Committee suggested in accordance with a sectarian proposal, was to increase the provincial tax for conscientious objectors. However, at this point the prevailing mood had already turned against accommodating people who had long been objects of suspicion and who now, in the words of the report, refused “to shew, that they are friends to liberty.” Increased feelings of outrage in many quarters targeted “the Glaring impropriety of one part of the Community defending the whole in a Struggle where every thing dear to Freemen is at Stake must Strike every thinking Person” (CC, 248). In Lancaster County, where great numbers of German sectarians settled, the County Committee reported as early as May 1775 “that divers Persons, whose religious

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Tenets forbid their forming themselves into Military Associations have been mal-­treated, and threatened” (CC, 236). While open violence (usually in the form of tarring and feathering) against nonassociators remained the exception, militiamen everywhere demanded that fines be levied against conscientious objectors, and most committees obliged. During the autumn of 1775, a great number of petitions from Patriots reached the Assembly, demanding that it “oblige every Inhabitant of the Province either with his person or Property to contribute towards the general Cause, and that it should not be left as at present, to the Inclinations of those professing tender Consciences” (CC, 260). The leaders of the Peace Churches responded with a remarkable demonstration of cross-­denominational unity. Setting a pattern for the entire revolutionary period, they came together to write joint declarations and remonstrances in which they explained their position and protested against their treatment. The initial meeting between representatives of Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, Schwenkfelders, and Moravians took place in Reading on September 1, 1775. A resulting remonstrance to the Berks County Committee came from the hand of Christopher Schultz, a Schwenkfelder preacher in the Upper District of Montgomery County and a widely respected leader of his church. Schultz was well known for his initial sympathies for the Patriot cause, having served as a member of the Berks County Committee and of the 1775 Pennsylvania Convention. The text that Schultz wrote, or helped write, is remarkable for the poignant manner in which it appeals to the Pennsylvania Charter and points out the contradictions in the revolutionary rhetoric in order to argue for an accommodation of the conscientious scruples of the Peace Churches. After declaring solidarity with the cause to redress the infringement of colonial liberties, the remonstrance deplores the recent change in the County Committee’s policy of dealing with conscientious objectors. The decision of the Berks County Committee and other committees to impose a heavy fine on nonassociators would not add more German sectarians to the militia but would rather impoverish the families of many, because taking up arms was not an option for these conscientious objectors. The remonstrance does not stop at calling the new regulations excessive and cruel. In a dramatic move, the text proceeds to chastise the fines as an unlawful violation of the Pennsylvania Charter, which protected “the Priviledge of Conscience” that “is One of the foremost in the Dictates of humanity and sound reason and is indeed the foremost amongst them all, that are established and mentioned in our Province Charter.” Citing the charter word for word, Schultz (and his coauthors) declared the fines

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constitutionally “void in effect” (CC, 256–57). To them, having to pay money in direct compensation for military service violated their pacifist consciences because it would have made them complicit in the aggression. The remonstrance then turns the logic of radical Whig rhetoric against the Patriots. Casting the revolutionary committees in the role of the tyrant and the pacifists in the role of the defenders of liberty, it announces that they [the pacifists] find themselves as in Duty bound to their Country, themselves, and their Posterity, to protest against the said Resolves of the sd. last Convention, and that we are unwilling and cannot Submit to the same, as being unconstitutional and Subversive of our most dearest Rights of civil and religious Priviledges, tearing our Charters, taking our Property from us without our Consent, subjugating us under a military Despotick, arbitrary yea military Government Execution, depriving us of the choisest most precious Pearl of a free People, the Trial by Juries and of the protection of the civil Law. (CC, 258)22 By branding the rule of the committees as a “Despotick, arbitrary yea military Government Execution” that deprived Pennsylvania freemen of their civil and religious liberties, the leaders of the Peace Churches pointed to two fundamental contradictions that, from their perspective, began to take shape as the conflict with the motherland moved toward open warfare. First, they revealed the contradiction involved in coercing people in the name of consensual government, which, in the words of the remonstrance, acted “without our Consent.” Second, in the name of fighting for American freedom and the permanent securing of rights that had been curtailed by the British government, the revolutionaries were subjugating a vulnerable religious minority and impinging on its liberty of conscience and charter rights. The manner in which the remonstrance argued constitutional rights with the County Committee, assuming liberty of conscience not to be a feudal privilegium but “a Sacred Right and Property to every Person inhabiting in this Province” (CC, 257), shows how far leaders like Schultz had come in their cultural development since the German Peace Churches had first settled in Pennsylvania. Freedom, here, is no longer conceived in negative terms but in terms of inherent religious and civil rights that need to be watched and defended by active citizens. As long as the Patriots respected the conscientious objections of the Peace Churches, their leaders were willing to be active citizens and support the cause for the restoration of these rights by all means

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available to them. If, however, the Patriots continued to limit liberty to those able to bear arms, the sectarians announced their determination to protest via passive disobedience in demand of a more comprehensive understanding of liberty. In a letter to Edward Burr, a member of the Berks County Committee, Schultz recounted a meeting with John Bechtel, minister of the neighboring Mennonite church in Hereford Township. After some deliberations, he and Bechtel resolved that they and their communities would make a “virtuous Standing unto the Last Extremity, to the Peaceful Maxims, under which this Province hath been founded, and by which we have been till now safely protected and preserved by divine Providentz in several most imminent Dangers” (CC, 228). The German sectarians were thus prepared to become martyrs for the sake of religious freedom and to thereby prove that they were good Pennsylvanians, ready to witness to the original principles on which the colony was founded.23 The traditional language of nonresistant martyrdom was also employed in a joint declaration that Mennonites and Dunkers sent to the Pennsylvania Assembly on November 7, 1775. The language of the declaration, originally drafted by Benjamin Hershey, directly echoes the preface of Thieleman J. van Braght’s The Martyrs Mirror, the famous Anabaptist martyrology that in 1748 had been translated into High German and reprinted at the behest of Mennonite communities.24 At this critical moment on the eve of war, the sectarian leaders mobilized their shared rhetoric of humility and meek suffering for Christ to strengthen the ecumenical bonds between the Peace Churches and to affirm their communal position vis-­à-­vis the authorities. Repeatedly begging “the Patience of all those who believe we err in this Point,” they explained that they were “by the Doctrine of our Saviour Jesus Christ . . . persuaded in their Consciences to love their Enemies, and not to resist Evil” (CC, 266–67). No matter how unjustly or harshly a ruler treated or taxed them, they felt that true Christians were not entitled to overthrow a bad government or install a better one. While the revolutionaries argued that the systematic violation of their rights had voided their obligation to be loyal to the king since their subjecthood was based on consent and mutual obligations, the sectarians made it clear that only their consciences could set limits they recognized to their duties as subjects to the state. As long as a government did not demand that they act against their understanding of discipleship, they would not be disobedient. They could not actively resist, for, as the declaration puts it, they did

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“not find Freedom of Conscience to take up arms” or to participate in military activities by subsidizing it: “We have dedicated ourselves to serve all Men in every Thing that can be helpful to the Preservation of Men’s Lives, but we find no freedom in giving, or doing, or assisting in anything by which Men’s lives are destroyed or hurt.” Rather, their Christian duty remained “to pray to God, who has Power in Heaven and on Earth, for us and them.” The Peace Churches declared their readiness to pay any taxes and to help “those who are in Need and distressed Circumstances,” as long as they were not directly contributing to the military (CC, 266–67). The petition made little impression on an Assembly increasingly under the sway of radicalized Patriots. A day after it was read, the Assembly decided to make militia service obligatory and to demand from nonassociators the pecuniary “Equivalent of the Time spent by the associators in acquiring the military Discipline.” Shortly after, the fine was set at £2 10s. annually, a considerable sum, increased several times during the revolutionary period. The surviving list of associators shows that these fines forced the vast majority of nonassociators to comply, including many future Loyalists, and left only the conscientious objectors to pay (CC, 285–88). One could argue that the fines for nonassociators were determined by the demands of internal security and the practical necessity of raising troops and collecting money desperately needed to outfit them. Upon closer inspection, however, a symbolic element surfaces, for it was not necessary to impose a fine in lieu of military service. From a purely practical point of view, an additional tax, as originally envisioned by the Berks County Committee, would have served the same purposes. The substitutionary fines instead made it clear to everyone that military service was now an essential obligation of all Pennsylvania citizens and that conscientious objectors would be penalized and marked as transgressors and outsiders. To make this statement, the Patriots were ready to violate the liberty of conscience as guaranteed by the Pennsylvania Charter. In May 1776, the Continental Congress called upon all colonies to establish new governments, and in July independence was declared. In contrast to the old charter, Pennsylvania’s new framework of government gave only limited consideration to the consciences of pacifists. The constitution adopted in September 1776 incorporated the existing practice that guaranteed religious liberty and exempted conscientious objectors from having to bear arms. At the same time, “they would have to pay a special tax, the equivalent of a substitution fee,”25 even if paying such a fee was religiously unacceptable to them. In November, the Pennsylvania Convention determined that every able-­bodied

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man between the ages of sixteen and fifty who did not associate would have to pay 20s. per month. Every nonassociator over the age of twenty-­one was to be charged 4s. per pound on the assessed annual value of his property. In February 1777, the new Assembly returned to the £3 10s. fine.26 Eventually, however, the formal break with the mother country and the ensuing civil war threw the sectarians into even greater trouble than did these financial burdens, because the question of their loyalty and their communal affiliation assumed new significance and urgency. Patriots in all former colonies introduced and then enforced a modern concept of republican citizenship based on the ideas of consensual government and volitional allegiance that no longer allowed for the kind of reserved commitment to the state that had been guaranteed under the charter. The Revolution would, over time, give birth to the idea of the American people as one people comprising different republican states, formed out of the former colonies. Such notions merged the various subgroups of white freemen into one large, uniform body of citizens, from whose consent the government derived its authority. Inversely, these citizens owed unconditional allegiance to the new states because they resided therein and received the protection of state laws. If citizens, by being part of this body politic, were endowed with the same liberties and rights, they also had the same obligation to perform civic duties, including the duty to defend their state and, during the Revolution, the Confederation. Thus, the regulation of the Pennsylvania Constitution can be seen as an expression of the new concept of citizenship, which could neither tolerate noncommitment nor grant the possibility of exemption from what was regarded as an essential civic duty. Beginning in March 1777, this duty was enforced with much greater strictness by a new, comprehensive Militia Act, which made it compulsory for every freeman (exempting a few special groups, such as ministers and judges) between the ages of eighteen and fifty-­five to either associate and muster or to furnish a substitute. Whoever refused to comply was required to pay a fine for each training day for the hire of a substitute. Under the Militia Act, the Assembly also commissioned lieutenants and sublieutenants for each county who would organize the companies and battalions, and who were given the authority to collect the money, by force if necessary, with the help of the town constables. In April 1777, the fine for nonassociators was raised to £3 10s. Together with the double taxation the Assembly imposed in June on all who refused to serve, the fines put a heavy financial burden on conscientious objectors.

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The almost unanimous response among Mennonites, Amish, the Church of the Brethren, and Schwenkfelders was noncompliance, as it was among most Quakers. Some Quakers even refused to pay general or mixed taxes because they too might be used for military purposes, but this much-­debated position was never adopted as a general policy of the Society of Friends. No such debates occurred among the German Peace Churches. While these groups unanimously accepted the additional general taxes on nonassociators, they only paid the fines for nonservice under coercion. Since many did not have the money the collectors asked for, their livestock and goods were confiscated instead. If these proved insufficient, the nonassociators were imprisoned. Some members of the Peace Churches, usually more well-­off, actually served as town constables and were required to enforce the fines. Refusing to cooperate in collecting fines, they suffered additional penalties. Two documents clarify the sectarian position. “A Candid Declaration of Some So-­ Called Schwenkfelders Concerning Present Militia Affairs” was drafted by Christopher Schultz on May 1, 1777. The declaration invokes the “liberty of conscience” the pacifists had traditionally enjoyed under the charter and that both the Assembly and the Continental Congress had initially affirmed in the early days of the Revolution. Next, Schultz and his cosigners make it clear that they are not Loyalists and regard themselves as citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, prepared to fulfill their civic duties and pay any taxes as far as their consciences allow. Finally, the declaration announces that the Schwenkfelders could not voluntarily comply with the stipulations of the Militia Act that did not make allowance for the well-­known scruples of Pennsylvania’s pacifist citizens about substitutes and substitute money. Thus, the signers “have mutually agreed, and herewith united themselves to this end that they will mutually with each other bear such fines as may be imposed on account of refusal for conscience’s sake to render military service” (CC, 312). The second document is a memorandum from the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania Church of the Brethren in 1781. It reaffirms the resolution from the previous year, when apparently it had been unanimously concluded that the Brethren “should not pay the substitute money,” and it then exhorts “all brethren everywhere to hold themselves guiltless and take no part in war or bloodshed, which might take place if we would pay voluntarily for hiring men; or yet more if we become agents to collect such money” (CC, 369). Indirect evidence suggests that Mennonites agreed, since the position they took on the Militia Act was virtually identical to that of the Schwenkfelders and Dunkers. Most revealing is the retrospective self-­defense of Christian Funk,27

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a former bishop in the Franconia congregation who was shunned in 1778 for endorsing the payment of the substitute money, a practice that, according to Funk’s account, was rejected by most of his fellow ministers. The insistence on giving the money or goods collected in lieu of military service only under duress might have seemed an overly scrupulous and pointless nicety to Funk. The majority of German sectarians, however, recognized a critical difference between voluntary and involuntary payment, which throws into relief the basic conflict between their understanding of discipleship and the concept of citizenship being imposed upon them: voluntarily paying the fine would have implied at least some degree of consent and, like hiring a substitute to serve in the militia, a recognition of military service as a duty owed to the state. Moreover, it would have made the sectarians complicit in the attempt to overthrow a legally constituted government, something they held to be God’s prerogative alone. The Moravians showed less uniformity in response to the Militia Act. This is not altogether surprising since the Unitas Fratrum had traditionally been less strict in its pacifism. Although strongly leaning toward the principle of noncombatancy, it allowed for a variety of positions, from total nonresistance to the admittance of military self-­defense. It was left to each individual to decide whether he would serve in person, provide a substitute, or pay the fines. The Brethren living in the major Moravian centers generally maintained their peace testimony and refused to serve in the militia, whereas the Brethren from scattered and outlying settlements were more ready to serve in person, either because they identified with the cause or simply to avoid the costs of substitutes or fines. Additionally, the leadership of the different centers divided over the legitimacy of providing substitutes, so regional differences combined with “contradictory views on the subject of war to create a highly complex pattern of behavior among the membership throughout the war years.”28 John Ettwein (1721–1802), chief administrator and spokesman of Bethlehem and the neighboring settlements, held the great majority of his community to a strictly pacifist position despite some internal opposition. Under his direction, the Brethren at Bethlehem “unanimously resolved not to pay the fine willingly, but to wait until it was taken from them,” as Ettwein reports in “A Short Account of the Disturbances in America and of the Brethren’s Conduct and Suffering in This Connection.”29 Ettwein explained his views in a letter (probably dating to June 1777) to the leader of the Lititz Moravians, Bishop Matthew Hehl. Although Hehl, like Ettwein, had successfully kept

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most of his men from personally serving in the militia, he allowed them to provide for substitutes. In an earlier letter to Ettwein, Hehl had defended this practice, arguing that “it is not so dangerous for one’s conscience to pay a man to act as one’s substitute.” To this Ettwein responded by saying that this voluntary compliance with the Militia Act could not be morally justified: “I am not the only one who emphatically considers going to war in person or providing a substitute to be one and the same wrong (n.b. I refer to Brethren), only, in the one case, one’s own life and ease are better safe-­guarded than in the other.” Similar to the stance taken by most Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, and Schwenkfelders, Ettwein regarded it as a violation of Christian discipleship “that I am to reward someone, whether by my wish or contrary to my wish, to destroy people or to do them other violence and wrong in my name and in my stead.” With the Militia Act, voluntary subjection to the powers could no longer be reconciled with Christian discipleship. Just as Schultz and other sectarian leaders had done with their communities, Ettwein pushed Hehl and the Lititz Moravians to abandon their compromises and pragmatism and to accept “some suffering for the sake of our principles and freedom.” In an emphatic mobilization of the rhetoric of nonresistant martyrdom, he insisted that the Moravians, too, should find the courage to become persecuted witnesses for the liberty of conscience: You write: “We are entangled in the present state of affairs no matter what we should like to do, etc.” That is indeed so. No one can advise us or help us under these circumstances save our d. Lord. If only our Brethren would look to Him in simple-­minded trust, there would be no danger. Should he permit anything to come upon us, He would surely give us a confident heart and patience in suffering. But what I fear is the tendency to let selfwill, greed, ease, and a desire to escape the cross dictate [our course]. . . . If we now endure some suffering for the sake of our principles and freedom, we shall approve ourselves in the sight of God and man; if we permit ourselves to be frightened and unmanned by threats, we must continue a shameful existence; and our adversaries will be encouraged to force us to renounce our faith and place ourselves on the level of this world.30 Even if the Brethren complied and attempted to provide substitutes, they would not, Ettwein argued, escape the burden of ruinous payments, distraint, or prison. Already in Northampton County and elsewhere, the militia

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lieutenants were willfully abusing the Militia Act, which gave them the right to determine the equivalent to the costs of procuring a substitute if nonassociators were unable to provide someone within three days. Especially in areas with a high concentration of conscientious objectors, this usually proved impossible, and often openly hostile lieutenants could charge the German pacifists whatever they deemed reasonable. “In Bucks-­County, the officers immediately put the pay at £15 for 2 months, and in Conshohocken they have paid £25,” Ettwein reported. “How can a poor Brother pay such sums, even if he felt free in his conscience to hire such a [substitute]? Why should one first corrupt the Brethren, and spare oneself more than other peaceful, well-­intentioned people do in this land?” The Unitas Fratrum should stand in solidarity with the other Peace Churches, as the “consequences of our maintaining our position or giving ground and yielding are too important.”31 Many members of the Peace Churches had to endure the abuse of the Militia Act. In Northampton County, Lieutenant John Wetzel, a lapsed Moravian turned ultra-­Patriot, and Justice of the Peace Frederick Limbach ruthlessly oppressed the sectarians, enriching themselves in the process. The Militia Act, Ettwein complained in “A Short Account of the Disturbances in America,” “gave opportunity to much corruption.” Wetzel and his peers regarded the act as a golden opportunity, telling prospective substitutes, “This is your chance to make money; I need a man for —— and for ——; ask as much as you please; they have to pay it.”32 The lieutenants, Ettwein bitterly complained, “have laid exorbitant, immoderate fines. . . . They did not consider justice and equity but exacted ten times the sum of an equivalent of personal service.”33 Where conscientious objectors refused to comply, they were fined for every time they did not turn out to drill, and penalties accumulated to as much as £100 or £200 a year. In Northampton and elsewhere, nonassociators from whom such sums could not be exacted were thrown into prison until their church communities could bail them out. In May 1778, Ettwein wrote a petition on behalf of the Moravians both to the Continental Congress and to the Pennsylvania Assembly. In it he pleaded for his distressed Brethren who, for no other reason than exercising their “Liberty of Conscience,” “were fined & fined again, for not exercising in the Use of Arms; They have been enrolled, drafted with several Classes & in Nhampton County exorbitant Fines exacted from them & no Plea of Disability of Estate accepted; the Justices of the Peace signed Warrants to commit their Bodies to the Common Goal, if they did not pay the Fines; their Houses, Workshops & other Property was invaded & they to their great Loss & Damage turned out of their Trades.”34 Ettwein also used his personal

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friendship with Henry Laurens, president of Congress from November 1777 until 1778, to lobby for the Moravians. The Militia Act, however, remained in force, and the large sums of money squeezed from the pacifists not only made a substantial contribution to the financing of the war in Pennsylvania but also filled the pockets of embezzling officers. Money and the demands of internal security were not the only reasons the authorities were so unrelenting in their enforcement of the Militia Act. Ensuring the support of the population, of which large parts remained uncommitted, and flushing out Tories were crucial for the military and political survival of the revolutionaries in a civil war. Armed service was also regarded as an essential civic duty and as an expression of allegiance to the new republican government, which needed to demonstrate that it held the people’s support. The German Peace Churches’ refusal to abjure the king and unconditionally declare their volitional allegiance to the new authorities thus brought the greatest troubles upon them. This new idea of citizenship was further solidified in a resolution of the Continental Congress on June 24, 1776, shortly before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. The Continental Congress announced that “all persons residing within any of the United Colonies, and deriving protection from the laws of the same, owe allegiance to the said laws, and are members of such colonies.”35 By expressing and exercising such volitional allegiance, all white men were transformed, nolens volens, from subjects of the British Crown into citizens of their respective colonies, which, as the United Colonies, would soon announce their independence. Consequently, continued allegiance to the king now constituted treason. Two additional resolutions called upon the legislatures of the former colonies to make their citizens swear allegiance and to punish nonjurors. In accordance with the understanding of the republican state and citizenship, the congressional resolutions of June 24 and the state treason statutes that followed asserted that everyone residing in the territory of the new republics owed allegiance to the independent states. Building on the notion that citizenship was based on consent, it was assumed that all individuals had to choose allegiance once independence was declared and that the revolutionary governments, with the (alleged) support of the majority, had begun to construct new states. In the thinking of the Patriots, election occurred either explicitly when individuals abjured the king and “acknowledged the legitimacy of the new states or, implicitly, when they accepted the protection of the new constitutions and laws. The time limit for election thus depended upon when legitimate, protective laws came into

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being in the respective states.”36 In Pennsylvania, as in other states, the adoption of the new state constitution normally marked this time limit for election in later treason indictments. Once this period had passed, the revolutionary leaders presumed that the mandate of the majority gave them the authority to impose jurisdiction over those who had refused consent. When General Howe offered to pardon all who renewed their allegiance to King George in November 1776, and with the successive advances of the British army, the necessity of people willing to declare their allegiance assumed crisis proportions, since the revolutionaries knew that many were either opposed or indifferent to the cause. Early in 1777, the Patriots increased pressure, adopting measures that would allow them to smoke out the Loyalists. On June 13, 1777, the Pennsylvania Assembly passed its version of the so-­called Test Act, “obliging the male white inhabitants of this state to give assurances to the same.” The Pennsylvania Test Act explicitly spelled out the concepts of consensual government and volitional citizenship, declaring that “allegiance and protection are reciprocal; and those who will not bear the former, are not (nor ought not) to be intitled to the benefits of the latter.” Everyone in Pennsylvania receiving the protections of its laws was therefore required to swear or affirm that they would “be faithful and bear true allegiance to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a Free and Independant state”; they were required equally to swear or affirm that they did “renounce and refuse all allegiance to George the Third, King of Great-­Britain, his heirs and successors” (CC, 408–9). True to the notion of volitional allegiance, individuals were asked to subscribe to the test of their own free will, and only persons suspected of being spies or active Tories were to be summoned before a justice of the peace to subscribe to the test. Nonjurors were deprived of their right to vote, to hold office, to serve on juries, to sue for debts, and to transfer real estate by deed. Ardent Patriots criticized the law for being too soft on nonjurors. With the military defeats suffered by the Continental Army and the occupation of Philadelphia in the fall of 1777, the general anxiety and resentment increased to a point where a majority of assemblymen concurred. In November, the Assembly enacted a first revision of the Test Act, obliging nonjurors to furnish food and clothing for the army. On April 1, 1778, an addendum was passed imposing on anyone who did not subscribe by June 1 double taxation and a fine of £10. Nonjurors were also forbidden to engage in trade, commerce, law, medicine, surgery, pharmacy, or education. They now faced the permanent loss of civil rights enjoyed by citizens. They would be denied access to courts, could no longer demand any rights or protection of law, and were declared

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incapable of making a will, receiving an inheritance, or acting as guardian, executor, or administrator. Ultimately, nonjurors were even threatened with banishment.37 As with the Militia Act, the almost unanimous reaction from the German Peace Churches was noncooperation. Before the intensified penalties of April 1778 brought some members to their knees, there were virtually no voluntary subscriptions. Why did the sectarians find the demand made by the new authorities so unacceptable? After all, the Test Act, drawing on the model of the naturalization procedure used for conscientious objectors in colonial Pennsylvania, accommodated their religious aversion to oaths by allowing them to affirm rather than swear allegiance. The real problem the Test Act posed to the Peace Churches lay in “the transference of allegiance that it represented from the rightful monarch to the newly constituted Revolutionary authorities, a change that was, moreover, being affected by the arbitrament of war.”38 Moreover, their reluctance to transfer allegiance was rooted not so much in active support for George III but in theological convictions about the nonresistant relationship between a Christian and the state, which was essential to the sectarian understanding of discipleship. These theological convictions informed virtually all of the sectarian responses to the Test Act, but they are expressed most clearly in response to the imprisonment of two German pacifists by Wetzel and Limbach in Northampton County. One of the men who had been summoned to subscribe was Georg Kriebel, a Schwenkfelder and cousin of Christopher Schultz; the other was Henry Funk, a former Mennonite preacher who, like his brother Christian, had been shunned for recommending the voluntary payment of substitutional money. Like all sectarians who were stripped of their civil rights, fined, or imprisoned under the Test Act, Kriebel and Funk objected to having to renounce allegiance to the British king and his successors. Asked why he would not abjure, Kriebel replied, “I have promised allegiance to him when I was naturalized and I am afraid I might be guilty of Perjury before God and in my Conscience, and moreover it is very uncertain upon which side the Victory will fall and therefore I can’t do it for the Present Time.” From this, Limbach immediately inferred that Kriebel was a Tory, which Kriebel emphatically denied, exclaiming, “No Sir! I don’t declare myself for him.” Insisting on his neutrality in the military conflict, Kriebel assured the magistrate of his perfect obedience to the new authorities and declared his readiness to affirm that he was a faithful subject of the republic of Pennsylvania and “would be true to the State as much as were in my Power in Paying any

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Lawfull Taxes or other Charges . . . except in bearing Arms which was against my Conscience” (CC, 413–14). Funk’s interrogation throws additional light on the sectarians’ theological convictions. He, too, refused to renounce the king but offered to affirm that he would “be true to the State according to the Doctrine of S. Paul Rom. 13, be subject to the higher Powers, &c.” He explained to Wetzel and Limbach that he was conscientiously opposed to renouncing “because we shall be at Peace with every body and forgive all Men etc” (CC, 415). Funk’s statement shows that the pacifists regarded abjuration not only as perjury but also as an act of belligerency. Both were inconsistent with the nonresistant love demanded by Jesus. For Wetzel and Limbach, the explanations by Kriebel and Funk made no sense except as poor attempts to cover up their loyalism. They were jailed until Christopher Schultz, in another remarkable instance of interdenominational cooperation, wrote a petition to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (CC, 419–20), which consequently reprimanded Limbach for exceeding the penalties stipulated in the Test Act and ordered the release of the two men. Kriebel’s and Funk’s statements reveal that discipleship could not be adjusted to the political situation created by the Revolution and the volitional concept of citizenship to which it gave birth. The revolutionaries forced all freemen to take a side and choose their loyalty. From the sectarian viewpoint, Christians had no business pulling down governments or building new states, but rather had the sacred duty to bear everything that could be borne in good conscience. Thus, in keeping with the principle of nonresistance, the members of the Peace Churches were ready to unconditionally subject themselves to the new authorities who had assumed de facto power in Pennsylvania, but for the moment they were not ready to abjure the king and acknowledge the republican state and its institutions as the legitimate government that God had chosen for them. So long as the power struggle continued and the political situation was undecided, they regarded abjuration (to them an irreversible renunciation of the king’s government) as perjury and an act that violated their sacred duty of neutrality, actively involving them in the hostilities. The Peace Churches therefore insisted that their faith demanded that they wait before renouncing the king and affirming their new loyalty until the conflict was over and it had become obvious whether the republic of Pennsylvania and the Confederation were indeed ordained by God to govern the people. The sectarians regarded the postponement of abjuration as a matter of conscience almost as important as their objection to bearing arms. In his letter to Matthew Hehl, John Ettwein writes, “I would rather permit myself to

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be hacked to pieces than go to war . . . [and] swear that I owe no obedience to K. G., that I desire to help maintain the independence of Pennsilv., until and before time and circumstances make it clear and incontestable that God has severed America from England.”39 The German Peace Churches published declarations, remonstrances, and petitions in which, with frequent recourse to the language of nonresistant martyrdom, they explained their position and asked to be exempted from having to abjure. As early as 1776, the Franconia Conference of the Mennonite Church issued a declaration announcing that they were “a defenseless people and could neither institute nor destroy any government, they could not interfere in tearing themselves away from the king.”40 On the basis of this principle, the Mennonite churches across Pennsylvania refused to subscribe with great unity, shunning those members who did. The Church of the Brethren defined its stance in similar terms at its annual meeting at Conestoga in 1779 (CC, 436). Under Schultz’s leadership, the Schwenkfelders wrote a petition to the Pennsylvania Assembly in October 1777, which was signed by about 1,500 people from the different Peace Churches, including the Bethlehem Moravians.41 After recounting their history of religious persecution in Silesia, the Schwenkfelder petition reminded the assemblymen that “the only reason for our journey over the great ocean [was to] become partakers of the benefits of the just and well-­known religious freedom as well as civil rights in Pennsylvania.” Suggesting that the revolutionary government was infringing on this freedom, the petition then demanded that conscientious objectors be exempted from the obligation in the Test Act to renounce the king and be given the right to wait to transfer their allegiance until the matter had been settled. They believed this right to be guaranteed by their constitutional liberty of conscience, because “according to our Christian and ecclesiastical principles such a deed would deeply violate our conscience, because it is not in harmony with those principles. We fear the consequences of undertaking such a decision, which the ‘Highest Council’ has preserved unto Himself.” At the same time, the petition assured the authorities of the signers’ willingness to give assurance of their “loyalty to the state” and abstain from all actions harmful to it (CC, 425). In early May 1778, when the supplement to the Test Act had been passed, the Unitas Fratrum wrote one petition to the Continental Congress and another to the Pennsylvania Assembly. The structure and the arguments of the Moravian petitions (both drafted by Ettwein) are very similar to the

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petition by the Schwenkfelders: an evocation of the church’s history and reasons for coming to Pennsylvania (“liberty of Conscience without Restraint”) was followed by a declaration of why the abjuration demanded in the Test Act was “against our Conscience and moral Obligations.” To the reasons shared by all of the Peace Churches, Ettwein added an additional concern of the Unitas Fratrum, namely that renouncing the king would likely disrupt “our Union & Connexion with the Brethrens-­Church” in England and hinder “her calling to propagate the Gospel amongst the heathens” in other parts of the British Empire.42 After criticizing the penalties and imprisonments that had already taken place, both petitions beg the revolutionary governments to grant them relief from the Militia Act and the Test Act, lest they ruin innocent Moravian communities. There was neither a practical reason nor a constitutional justification to treat conscientious nonjurors as “Enemies of the Country” who were “excluded from the Rights of Freemen, disqualified for Elections, denied Justice against Thieves & Robbers. Why should you deny unto them Constitutional Liberty of Conscience? Before you find them guilty of treasonable Practices against this & the other States, which by the Mercy of God will never be the Case!” No Moravian or other German pacifist was working against the new government, “and none will scruple solemnly to promise ‘That he will not do any Thing injurious to this State or the United States of America & that he will not give any Intelligence, Aid or Assistance to the British Officers or Forces at War with this & the other States.’ ” If Pennsylvania thought it had reasons “to exclude us from the Rights of Freemen of this State,” Ettwein continued, why couldn’t the state at least stop harassing the sectarians and “grant us to enjoy a Tolerance as peaceable Strangers”? While Ettwein pleaded for mercy, he made it clear that his community would not compromise and was ready to suffer as martyrs for religious freedom. If “any of us,” he wrote, “by the Operation of your Laws; suffers Imprisonment or the Loss of his Property. We declare before God & men; That we do not suffer as headstrong, wilful or disobedient Persons or Evildoers, but for Conscience Sake.”43 Congress did not respond, and the Assembly rejected all petitions. The minutes from the Assembly session on May 13, 1778, in which the assemblymen had debated the petitions, record the official reasons for this rejection. To insist on the abjuration was absolutely necessary since many Tories are “screening themselves from the notice of government, by a professed neutrality,” and thus “a proper discrimination” was needed “that may distinguish our friends from our enemies.” Citizenship had to be rooted in volitional

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allegiance, and the assurances of the sectarians that they were obedient subjects of the state even though they could not abjure simply made no sense, “because it cannot be conceived that any person can bear true allegiance to the united states of America, and at the same time refuse to renounce his allegiance to that power” (CC, 426–27). When the minutes were published in the General Advertizer, Ettwein wrote an outraged reply in which he contested the assumption that abjuration was an effective means to distinguish enemies from friends. Tory spies would have no scruples about faking a renouncement of the king to preserve their cover. In the final analysis, however, such distinctions proved fruitless. They changed nothing about the fundamental clash between the government’s need to assure itself of the loyalty of the citizenry, and thereby of its own legitimacy, and the sectarian wish to maintain a “perfect Neutrality in pulling down the old & setting up a new Gouvernment,” even where the pacifists promised to assist “the Country in all lawful Ways” and never be “active against the Liberties of America.”44 Apart from a few cases, such as that of Christoph Saur III, members of the German Peace Churches did not engage in active forms of loyalism, such as signing pro-­British loyalty oaths, engaging in Tory propaganda, supplying provisions to the Royal Army, or working as spies or civilian auxiliaries in support of the Crown. The German pacifists had already shown on many occasions and in many different ways that they would make good on their promises of assistance to their fellow citizens. Besides their readiness to pay general taxes, they willingly supplied teams and wagons and other provisions for caring for the sick and wounded. Ettwein’s Bethlehem settlement served as a hospital for revolutionary soldiers for many months. Yet these actions were not deemed satisfactory.45 Schultz authored the most striking text written in protest of the Test Act and put his finger directly on the fundamental issues underlying the treatment of the German pacifists. On August 12, 1777, he sent a letter to his friend Sebastian Levan, with whom he had served on the Berks County Committee and in the 1775 Pennsylvania Convention, and who was now a member of the Assembly. The occasion of the letter was the imprisonment of Georg Kriebel, but Schultz quickly cut to the fundamental question raised by the coercion and oppression of his fellow believers: the question of representation. With great frankness and aplomb, Schultz wrote that if the government to which he belonged “gives laws to the citizens . . . and also without taking counsel of their consciences forces these laws upon the said inhabitants by force of arms,

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fines, imprisonments, exclusion from all civil rights,” he could not regard it as a legitimate republican government based on the consent of the governed. “If you would be looked upon as representatives of the citizens of Pennsylvania and would act in their behalf, you inevitably have the duty resting upon you to take to heart the true welfare of each and every class of said inhabitants . . . in so far as they have not occasioned it [their suppression] through malicious unfaithfulness or wickedness” (CC, 416). This was clearly not the case with the pacifists, Schultz argued, “who constitute a great part of the most respectable, the well-­established and irreproachable citizens.” Why, then, Schultz demanded, do you rob us of all civil liberty and freedom of conscience in so much that we are to hold nothing as our own, we are not allowed to trade on God’s earth, or move about or even to live—merely because we take into consideration what may be helpful to the rest and peace of our souls and minds; because we are unwilling to take oath concerning things that are of the utmost uncertainty whether we can remain true to the same and yet we are to bind ourselves by oath. This is the sum of the whole matter that you expect things of us in this respect and impose them upon us with loss of all that one holds dear in the world, things that no tyrant, nor tartar nor turk much less a Christian government in former times demanded, namely that in the midst of the hottest warfare and before the conclusion of the matter a former lord is to be denied under oath. . . . Have we not always been willing to bear our full proportion of the public burdens as far as might be done consciously [sic], that is without preparation for manslaughter. Why is it that you are continually speaking of fines or, that what is demanded of us must be paid under the name fine? Are you here our true representatives? (CC, 417) As he had done in the remonstrance to the Berks County Committee, Schultz once more laid open the incongruities involved in the revolutionary transference of power: How could a government claim to be representative, and hence legitimate, if it had to coerce loyalty from substantial groups of individuals who were unwilling, at least for the time being, to fully and finally acknowledge its rightfulness by abjuring the old ruler? And how could a government claim to be protecting the civil and religious liberties of its citizenry if it took away those rights from individuals who, for conscientious reasons, could not affirm their allegiance by armed service or abjuration but otherwise

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behaved loyally? To be sure, “Lockean contract theory assured Americans that once a society was formed, the majority could command the obedience of minorities,” but what was to be done with those individuals—those neighbors—who refused from the beginning to accept the new contract?46 The pacifists embodied this conundrum in a most uncomfortable way, and authorities could not or would not think of another solution other than riding roughshod over the conscientious objectors’ rights. In the end, all attempts of the sectarians failed, and they were not acknowledged as neutrals or passive bystanders. During the war, the government agents, along with many of their nonpacifist neighbors, were either unable or unwilling to acknowledge “the subtle distinction between such a neutral stance and an out-­and-­out Toryism.”47 Whoever wanted to be recognized as a loyal citizen of Pennsylvania and the United States had to define his allegiance in the prescribed manner, without equivocation. According to the logic of the new notion of citizenship, the German pacifists could also not be treated, as Ettwein had suggested, as “peaceable Strangers.” These nonassociators and nonjurors fit the ascriptive conceptions of American citizenship in terms of race, class, and gender. From the perspective of the new government, their continued residence within the boundaries of the state after independence evinced their “choice” to adopt citizenship. Thus, their refusal to renounce the former ruler proved them to be disloyal citizens. This disloyalty by noncompliance, in the eyes of the revolutionaries, had to be penalized by the denial of essential civil rights. Even those Patriots who were not principally hostile to the sectarians felt compelled by this logic. George Bryan, vice president and acting president of the Supreme Executive Council, intervened on behalf of pacifists hounded by Wetzel and Limbach, admonishing the latter not to unnecessarily impose the test on conscientious objectors or to treat them with excessive cruelty. Yet Bryan also thought that the abjuration clause could not be dispensed with and that the petitions of the sectarians had been rightly rejected. In a letter to John Thorne, written on May 25, 1778, he argued that only those who were under suspicion of being spies or active Tories should be tendered to take the test, conceding that, as far as he could see, “no Moravian, Sweinkfelder or Mennonist” would be among these. Still, he held that the state was justified in taking away basic civic rights from those who did not voluntarily declare their unconditional loyalty and who refused to abjure the king. Such a refusal demonstrated that the sectarians lacked a proper understanding of the duties inherent in their new status as citizens, as they “declared themselves ready

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to attest” allegiance but did not understand that such declarations already committed them to a “denial of all other authority.” On the grounds of their misunderstanding of citizenship, Bryan contended, they were not worthy of enjoying its full privileges. Bryan explicitly argued for stripping the pacifists of the right to vote and hold office, lest they “disturb the plans layed for the defense of the State.” At the same time, he warned against overly harsh treatment of them, for then “they may assume the complaint of persecution, & become fixed in stiff opposition to us, a situation of the most inconvenient nature, as consistency in conduct will dispose them to persevere” (CC, 429– 30). Bryan knew that such treatment was being carried out in many places. With respect to the response of the Peace Churches, his words proved remarkably prophetic. If the fines imposed on nonassociators were already painfully high, the more severe penalties for nonjurors threatened the very livelihood of many German sectarians and destroyed the means of existence for some families. While the imprisonment of pacifists was usually of relatively short duration, the loss of property, including tools and essential household goods, through fines and confiscations was permanent. Francis Fox has reconstructed in detail some of the cases of expropriation and even banishment that occurred in Northampton County under Wetzel and Limbach, who used the opportunity to drive sectarian families into bankruptcy, skim off considerable sums of money, and appropriate land.48 The worst excesses were curbed after the Assembly examined the arrest of ten Northampton County Mennonites. The petition of two of their wives, Eve E. Joder and Esther E. Bachmann, on behalf of the distressed families on September 9, 1778, led to the investigation. Joder and Bachmann wrote that their husbands and the other men were good subjects “who have always beheaved peaceably & quietly and never intermedled in State Affairs But paid their Taxes & Fines, furnished Horses & Teams for the continental Service when ever demanded.” Without having given cause for any suspicion of being active Tories, they “were summoned to appear at the Court . . . and the test being tendered to them, by the said Court, which said Test they conscientiously scrupled to take (being of the Religious Society called Mennonists).” For this refusal, the court sentenced them to banishment within thirty days and ordered that “all their personal Estate be confiscated to the State.” As the two women explained, everything was taken from their families, including “Beds, Bedings, Linen, Bibles & Books,” “their Iron Stoves,” and “all their provisions,” which were together “sold by the Sheriff to the amount of about forty thousand Pounds.” As a result, they were now in the

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most desperate situation, “deprived of every Means” of feeding and “Keeping their Children warm in the approaching Winter” (CC, 441). Following the investigation, which basically confirmed what the petition had reported, the Assembly passed another amendment to the Test Act on December 5, 1778, limiting the penalization of nonjurors to double taxation, disenfranchisement, and the loss of the right to hold office. This reform, however, provided only slight relief. The hardships imposed under the Test Act eventually forced a good number of German sectarians to capitulate. By the summer of 1778, Christopher Schultz and his Schwenkfelders had given up.49 Despite the efforts of diehards such as Ettwein, most Moravians followed. While some individual Mennonites, Amish, and Dunkers also broke down under such enormous pressure and reluctantly took the oath, the great majority belonging to these communities seem to have held out and suffered the penalties (CC, 400–402). The long-­term consequences were perhaps even graver. For the church Germans, active participation in the War of Independence was a decisive step toward integration, and “the Revolutionary experience became a means to claim a more central place for themselves in the new nation.”50 By contrast, the Revolution renewed the withdrawal of the German Peace Churches from broader social interaction. When their civil rights were restored in 1789 with the repeal of the Test Act, most members of the German Peace Churches did not wish to assume the role of full citizens. Their experiences during the Revolution heightened their sense of separation from their neighbors and caused them either to enter into a kind of diasporic existence of increasing cultural isolation or to leave Pennsylvania altogether for the Western wilderness and Ontario. In contrast to Penn’s charter, the new Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 (and its successor of 1790) made it clear that the test of one’s full allegiance and capacity as a citizen lay in the readiness to bear arms in the defense of the state. As article 8 of the 1776 Pennsylvania Bill of Rights had explicitly stated, every citizen had a right to be protected in life, liberty, and property, but was therefore obliged “to contribute his proportion to the expenses of that protection, and yield his personal service, when necessary, or an equivalent thereto.”51 With a view to these pacifists, it is not entirely correct to argue, as Sally Schwarz and others have, that with their new constitution “Pennsylvanians reaffirmed the guarantees of liberty and conscience and equality of all white settlers articulated by William Penn almost a century earlier.”52 When the new constitution was debated, an attempt to repeal a special fine

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on conscientious objectors failed, 39 to 23. Article 20 of the new Pennsylvania Bill of Rights stated “that those who conscientiously scruple to bear arms shall not be compellable to do so, but shall pay an equivalent for personal service” (CC, 535). The delegates knew that the pacifists had conscientious objections to such a regulation. Apparently, the demand for “an equivalent for personal service” was considered too important a message, with regard to the proper duties of citizenship, to accommodate the sectarians with some other solution. Thus, as J. William Frost observes, “the convention continued to repudiate the Quaker-­sectarian definition of religious liberty.”53 Unlike Penn’s original colony, the new state was no longer committed to the principles of pacifism. In the eyes of most of the German pacifists, this made it necessary to once again refrain completely from participating in the political life of the state by either holding office or voting. One could therefore argue that members of the Pennsylvania Peace Churches were pushed into second-­class citizenship, since they felt that they were unable to avail themselves of their full civic rights under the new definition of citizenship. The same held true elsewhere, notably in Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, notwithstanding its Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), which famously declared that no man “shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or good, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief.”54 While it exempted conscientious objectors from the obligation of personal service in the militia, the 1784 Virginia Militia Law, despite petitions from Quakers, Mennonites, and Dunkers, retained the requirement of paying a fine as an equivalent to personal service. The new constitutions of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York also explicitly demanded an equivalent to personal service. Under neither the Articles of Confederation nor the subsequent U.S. Constitution could this dilemma find resolution, since the radical definition and federal implementation of liberty of conscience—which James Madison, among others, favored—did not prevail. If the Madisonians had been able to make their extensive understanding of liberty of conscience binding on the state level, this potentially would have ruled out the offensive substitutional fines, because, as sectarian petitioners explained time and again, they violated the consciences of the pacifists. Madison’s original proposal for the Bill of Rights contained a clause on conscientious objectors, but, as Kent Greenawalt writes, “that idea was dropped, in part because conscription was considered a state rather than federal function.”55

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The national legislators were fully conscious that the German Peace Churches and the Quakers were conscientiously opposed to the fines in lieu of personal service that many state constitutions adopted. In fact, the “failure of the United States Constitution to include a specific provision granting exemption from military service to the members of the nonresistant sects was one of the many points discussed and debated in the different state conventions that met in 1787 and 1788” (CC, 532). The great majority of American politicians involved in these debates were of the opinion “that military service was an obligation of every citizen. If some citizens could not fulfill their military obligations because they saw participation in war as inconsistent with the teaching of Jesus, their protest could be dismissed as no more than ‘a religious persuasion’ ” (CC, 535). Conscientious objectors could be tolerated and they could enjoy exemption from personal service, but no one would oblige them to the extent that their position on substitutional fines was to be accommodated. Indeed, in the newly founded United States, “pacifism would be permitted as a religious peculiarity, [but] not enshrined as a fundamental right. . . . It remained something to be indulged rather than honored. Seldom, if ever, was it portrayed as an instance of religious liberty.”56 Under the new Pennsylvania Constitution, which did not protect their liberty of conscience as fully as the colonial charter had, and within the context of a rapidly changing society, the German pacifists found it impossible in the long run to maintain the doctrinal purity of earlier days. By the mid-­ nineteenth century, the Moravian churches in the state had completely given up their peace witness. For those Mennonite, Amish, and Dunker communities that remained in Pennsylvania, the substitutional fines eventually became a necessary and acceptable evil. By the time of the Civil War, such payments were voluntary. Revisionist historians of the revolutionary era and theoreticians of citizenship have done much over the past few decades to draw attention to the restrictive norms of race, class, and gender, which, from the very beginning of the conflict, were inscribed into the definition of American citizenship despite the universalist rhetoric with which it was proclaimed.57 In examinations of the marginalizing practices by which Africans, Native Americans, women, and servants were forcefully barred from the rights (or parts of the rights) of citizenship, the ascriptive conceptions of American identity have been brought into view. Although everyone living within the jurisdictions of the former

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thirteen colonies was inescapably made American in the sense that they were now subject to the power and laws of the various states in the Confederation and then the Federal Union, the full privileges and liberties of citizenship were reserved to property-­holding white men. The experience of the German Peace Churches offers an interesting and complementary perspective on these normative formations of American civic identity. Whereas other marginalized groups were excluded from the newly formed body of the American people or relegated to the lower tiers on the grounds of race, sex, or class, male members of Pennsylvania’s Peace Churches were, for almost two decades, denied civil rights for religious reasons. Since these men fit the bill of ascriptive Americanness—they were white, they were male, and most held property—they were expected to prove their unconditional allegiance to the state and assume the new civic identity the revolutionaries were creating. This civic identity, however, was inextricably intertwined with the duty to wield arms when called on to do so by the state. Many black slaves, for instance, “admired the principles of the Revolution, yet they were largely excluded from armed service in the patriot cause” because they were not eligible for citizenship on account of their race.58 The pacifists, by contrast, could not reconcile the principle underlying the Revolution with the principles of their faith and were thus forced by their consciences to exclude themselves and suffer the consequences. In so doing, the sectarians revealed the limits of liberty inscribed into the new definition of citizenship: The revolutionary government made participation in the military, whether by service or substitutional payment, an essential component and duty of all adult male citizens, who also had to declare their allegiance under the Test Act. Those who conscientiously objected to these obligations could not fully participate in the new body of citizens. Instead, they drew together as an interdenominational minority group centered around the traditional language of nonresistant martyrdom. While the dramatic injustices and infringements ceased after the Revolution and the basic rights of the conscientious objectors were eventually restored, the U.S. Constitution and the revised Pennsylvania Constitution of 1790 did not fully resolve the underlying conflict between republican citizenship and sectarian discipleship. Although exemption from military service was offered, the special fines that the Pennsylvania and other state constitutions demanded of conscientious objectors in lieu of personal service could not be harmonized with a Christian peace testimony as traditionally understood by the German pacifists and violated their liberty of conscience. Intended as a

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compensation for a failure to do their duties as citizens, the fine told pacifists that they might be tolerated but were not regarded as equal to arms-­bearing citizens who fulfilled the norms inscribed into the new civic identity. Just as the new state withheld from them recognition as equal citizens, those among the German Peace Churches who continued to stand by a traditional peace testimony refused to acknowledge the modern concept of citizenship on which this state was founded. During the early republic and beyond, conservative Mennonites, Amish, and Schwenkfelders continued to behave like feudal subjects within the first republican nation: they saw themselves as subject to authorities but remained unwilling to participate in political life because their idea of discipleship was in principled opposition to the state. The modern nation-­state, however, demands the quasi-­religious loyalty and identification of its citizens. Additionally, democratic representation makes any sharp distinction between the nonresistant Christian and sword-­bearing state impossible since, at least in theory, the people grant civil authorities the right to use power, a problem of no small difficulty for conscientious objectors then and now.

notes 1. Claude Halstead Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution (1902; reprint, Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1959); William H. Nelson, The American Tory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); Robert McCluer Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York: Harcourt, 1965); Wilbur Henry Siebert, The Loyalists of Pennsylvania (1864; reprint, Boston: Gregg, 1972); Paul H. Smith, “The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 25, no. 2 (1968): 259–77. These works deal with the German sectarians only in passing, if at all, and do not clearly distinguish them from other opponents of the Revolution. For a more recent and nuanced approach, see Joseph S. Tiedemann, Eugene R. Fingerhut, and Robert W. Venable, eds., The Other Loyalists: Ordinary People, Royalism, and the Revolution in the Middle Colonies, 1763–1787 (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), esp. the chapter by A.  Glenn Crothers, “Northern Virginia’s Quakers and the War for Independence: Negotiating a Path of Virtue in a Revolutionary World,” 105–31. 2. In line with the practice of most modern historians, this essay will use the terms “loyalism/ Loyalists” and “Toryism/Tories” interchangeably, varying them for stylistic reasons. However, only “Toryism” and “Tories” were widely used among contemporaries. 3. Arthur J. Mekeel, The Quakers and the American Revolution, rev. ed. (1979; York, England: Sessions Book Trust, 1996); Dorothy Gilbert Thorne, “North Carolina Friends and the Revolution,” North Carolina Historical Review 38 (July 1961): 323–40; Robert F. Oaks, “Philadelphians in Exile: The Problem of Loyalty During the American Revolution,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 96, no. 3 (1972): 298–325; Steven Jay White, “Friends and the Coming of the Revolution,” Southern Friend 4 (1982): 16–27; Joseph S. Tiedemann, “Queens County, New York Quakers in the American Revolution: Loyalists or Neutrals?” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 52 (1983): 215–27; Karen Guenther, “A Crisis of Allegiance: Berks County, Pennsylvania Quakers and the War for Independence,” Quaker History 90, no. 2 (2001): 15–34. See also William C. Kashatus III, ed., Conflict of Conviction: A Reappraisal of Quaker Involvement in the American Revolution (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990); Liam Riordan, Many

242  Ethnic and Religious Identities Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-­Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 55–57, 93–98. 4. Anne M. Ousterhout, A State Divided: Opposition in Pennsylvania to the American Revolution (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 2. 5. The very different degrees of ideological commitment and the broad range of attitudes among the so-­called Loyalists are also emphasized in Maya Jasanoff ’s Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011). 6. Richard MacMaster, Land, Piety, Peoplehood: The Establishment of Mennonite Communities in America, 1683–1790 (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1985), esp. 249–81; Donald F. Durnbaugh, Fruit of the Vine: A History of the Brethren, 1708–1995 (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Press, 1997), esp. 143–65; Donald  F. Durnbaugh, “The Brethren in the Revolution: Neutrals or Tories?” Brethren Life and Thought 22 (1977): 13–23. Throughout, this essay relies heavily on MacMaster’s superb collection of primary sources: Richard Macmaster, ed., Conscience in Crisis: Mennonites and Other Peace Churches in America, 1739–1789: Interpretation and Documents, with Samuel L. Horst and Robert F. Ulle (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1979), hereafter cited in the text as CC. For more sources, see Donald F. Durnbaugh, ed., The Brethren in Colonial America: A Source Book on the Transplantation and Development of the Church of the Brethren in the Eighteenth Century (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Press, 1967). See also James O. Lehman, “The Mennonites of Maryland During the Revolutionary War,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 50, no. 3 (1976): 200–230; William J. Bender, “Pacifism Among the Mennonites, Amish Mennonites, and Schwenkfelders of Pennsylvania to 1783,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 1, no. 4 (1927): 21–48; Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 259–329; Roger E. Sappington, “North Carolina and the Non-­Resistant Sects During the American War of Independence,” Quaker History 60, no. 1 (1971): 29–47. 7. Stephen Longenecker, The Christoph Sauers: Courageous Printers Who Defended Religious Freedom in Early America (Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Press, 1981). 8. Crothers, “Northern Virginia’s Quakers,” 106. 9. Roger M. Smith, “Citizenship,” in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (London: Blackwell, 1995), 121–24, esp. 121. 10. James Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 188. See also Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). Bradburn emphasizes that the states emerged from the American Revolution as the agencies that primarily controlled the meaning of American citizenship. 11. For the historical and religious background of these groups, see MacMaster, Land, Piety, Peoplehood; Durnbaugh, Fruit of the Vine; A. G. Roeber, “Der Pietismus in Nordamerika im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Der Pietismus im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 2 of Geschichte des Pietismus, ed. Martin Brecht and Klaus Deppermann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 666–99; Hans Schneider, “Der Radikale Pietismus im 18. Jahrhundert, “ in Der Pietismus im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, 107–97; Stephen L. Longenecker, Piety and Tolerance: Pennsylvania German Religion, 1700– 1850 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994); F. Ernest Stoeffler, ed., Continental Pietism and Early American Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1976); Marcus Meier, Die Schwarzenauer Neutäufer: Genese einer Gemeindebildung zwischen Pietismus und Täufertum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008); Gillian Lindt Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds: A Study of Changing Communities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967); Beverly Prior Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Craig D. Atwood, Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Jesus Is Female: Moravians and the Challenge of Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Howard Wiegner Kriebel, The Schwenkfelders in Pennsylvania (Lancaster, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1904); Horst Weigelt, Von Schlesien nach Amerika: Die Geschichte des Schwenckfeldertums (Köln: Böhlau, 2007); Peter C. Erb, ed., Schwenkfelders in America: Papers Presented at the Colloquium on Schwenkfeld and the Schwenkfelders, Pennsburg, Pa, September 17–22, 1984 (Pennsburg, Pa.: Schwenkfelder Library, 1987).

German Peace Churches During the Revolution  243 12. A. G. Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Thomas J. Müller, Kirche zwischen zwei Welten: Die Obrigkeitsproblematik bei Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg und die Kirchengründungen der deutschen Lutheraner in Pennsylvania (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994); Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717–1793, 2 vols. (Breinigsville, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1980–81). 13. About 125,000 German-­speaking people immigrated to the Thirteen Colonies by the eve of the Revolution, about 80 percent of whom settled in Pennsylvania. Of these immigrants, fewer than 10 percent did not belong to the established churches. How many European-­born converts or American-­born members joined the sectarian groups during the course of the eighteenth century cannot be determined with certainty, but the total number of their communicants in colonial Pennsylvania certainly never exceeded 10,000, with Mennonites and Amish making up about 6,000, Dunkers about 2,000, Moravians about 1,000, and Schwenkfelders a few hundred. See Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 45–46; Georg Fertig, “Transatlantic Migration from the German-­Speaking Parts of Central Europe, 1600–1800: Proportions, Structures, and Explanations,” in Europeans on the Move: Studies on European Migration, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 192–235, esp. 201; Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), esp. 100–126. 14. For a fuller treatment, see Jan Stievermann, “A ‘Plain, Rejected Little Flock’: The Politics of Martyrological Self-­Fashioning Among Pennsylvania’s German Peace Churches, 1739–65,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66, no. 2 (2009): 287–324, and the literature cited there. 15. Ausbund. Das ist: Etliche schöne Christliche Lieder . . . Allen und jeden Christen, welcher Religion sie seyen unpartheyisch fast nüzlich . . . (Germantown, Pa.: Christoph Saur, 1742); Der Blutige Schau-­Platz oder Martyrer-­Spiegel der Tauffs Gesinnten oder Wehrlosen Christen, . . . von Christi Zeit an bis auf das Jahr 1660. Vormals aus unterschiedlichen Chronicken, Nachrichten und Zeugnüssen gesammelt und in Holländischer Sprach heraus gegeben von T. J. B. Braght. Nun aber sorgfältigst ins Hochdeutsche übersetzt und zum ersten mal ans Licht gebracht, 2 vols. (Ephrata, Pa.: Drucks und Verlags der Brüderschafft, 1748). 16. A.  G. Roeber, “ ‘The Origin of Whatever Is Not English Among Us’: The Dutch-­Speaking Peoples of Colonial British America,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 276. 17. Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 8. 18. Theodore Thayer, “The Friendly Association,” PMHB 67 (1943): 356–76. 19. MacMaster, Land, Piety, Peoplehood, 230. 20. Kriebel, Schwenkfelders, 149. For information on Schultz, see the memorial issue Schwenkfeldiana 1, no. 1 (1940): 1–59, which also gives a list of his publications. 21. Crothers, “Northern Virginia’s Quakers,” 120. 22. The words in italics were struck through in the original draft. 23. The discourse of nonresistant martyrdom was also a means of expressing solidarity with the English-­speaking Quakers. See Patrick Erben, A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 24. Especially striking are the echoes of the Anabaptist confessions included in van Braght’s preface. Cf., for example, the language in Der Blutige Schau-­Platz oder Martyrer-­Spiegel, 1:40. 25. J. William Frost, A Perfect Freedom: Religious Liberty in Pennsylvania (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 65. 26. For a short period during the summer of 1776, the fine was raised to £1 a month before this enormous increase was repealed. 27. Christian Funk, A Mirror for All Mankind (Norristown, Pa.: Winnard, 1814), 10–15. The original German version was published as Spiegel für alle Menschen (Reading, Pa.: Johann Ritter, 1813). See also CC, 366–69. 28. Brock, Pacifism in the United States, 304.

244  Ethnic and Religious Identities 29. There are two manuscript versions of Ettwein’s account of the sectarian experience during the Revolution, one in the Universitätsarchiv at Herrnhut and the other in the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. See Kenneth G. Hamilton’s English translation, John Ettwein and the Moravian Church During the Revolution (Bethlehem, Pa.: Times Publishing, 1940), 131–234, quote on 163. 30. Ibid., 238–43, quote on 240–41. 31. Ibid., 241. 32. Ibid., 178. 33. Memorandum on the Militia Law, Ettwein Papers, late 1777(?), 6:1297, quoted in Francis S. Fox, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Ordeal of the American Revolution in Northampton County, Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 85. 34. The two petitions are printed in Hamilton, John Ettwein and the Moravian Church, 197–203, quote on 200. 35. Quoted in Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 179. 36. Ibid., 194, also 187. 37. As Owen Ireland has shown, the Test Act must, of course, also be seen as a tool that was used for immediate strategic purposes in Pennsylvania politics, which, after 1778, became increasingly polarized between the so-­called Constitutionalists and the so-­called Republicans. The Constitutionalists, whose main constituency was Scots Irish Presbyterians and the German Reformed, were, most of all, united in their support for the state constitution of 1776, with its powerful unicameral legislature that had enabled their rise to power. Their opponents, the Republicans, comprised a motley coalition of Anglicans, Lutherans, Quakers, and German sectarians. For the Constitutionalists, who dominated the Assembly in the late 1770s and early 1780s, the Test Act was a means to disenfranchise a portion of their opponents by excluding those who refused to abjure their oath of allegiance to the British Crown from the right to vote. Throughout the 1780s, the two parties were locked in bitter struggles, in which the Test Act was one of the main bones of contention. See Ireland, Religion, Ethnicity, and Politics: Ratifying the Constitution in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). See also CC, 402–6. 38. Brock, Pacifism in the United States, 262. 39. Hamilton, John Ettwein and the Moravian Church, 242, emphasis added. 40. Funk, A Mirror for All Mankind, 10–15. 41. See Ettwein’s remark in Hamilton, John Ettwein and the Moravian Church, 178. 42. Ibid., 200. 43. Ibid., 200–201. 44. Ibid., 235. 45. The buildings in Bethlehem were first used as a prison for British prisoners of war in the fall of 1777, and then, for more than nine months, other buildings were seized for use as a hospital for wounded Continental soldiers. See Ettwein’s account in ibid., 172–75. After the Battle of the Brandywine, about five hundred wounded soldiers of the Continental Army were also quartered and nursed in the sectarian community of Ephrata at the order of General Washington. Lamech and Agrippa, Chronicon Ephratense: A History of the Community of Seventh Day Baptists at Ephrata, Lancaster County, PA., trans. J. Max Hark (1889; reprint, New York: B. Franklin, 1972). See also E. G. Alderfer, The Ephrata Commune: An Early American Counterculture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 166. 46. Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 174. 47. Brock, Pacifism in the United States, 262. 48. Fox, Sweet Land of Liberty, esp. 73–97, 147–57. 49. Kriebel, Schwenkfelders, 157. See also the Schwenkfelder Chronicle in Benjamin Trexler, ed., Skizzen aus dem Lecha-­Thale: Eine Sammlung von nachrichten über die erste Ansiedlung der weißen in dieser Gegend (Allentown, Pa.: Trexler & Härtell, 1896), 51. 50. Riordan, Many Identities, One Nation, 43. 51. Journals of the House of Representatives of Pennsylvania, 1776–1781, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1782), 66.

German Peace Churches During the Revolution  245 52. Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 196. 53. Frost, Perfect Freedom, 75. 54. Quoted in Michael W. McConnell, John H. Garvey, and Thomas C. Berg, eds., Religion and the Constitution, vol. 1 (New York: Aspen, 2002), 69–71. 55. Kent Greenawalt, Religion and the Constitution, vol. 1, Free Exercise and Fairness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 50. See also Charles A. Lofgren, “Compulsory Military Service Under the Constitution: The Original Understanding,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33, no. 1 (1976): 61–88. 56. Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 151. For Pennsylvania specifically, see Frost, Perfect Freedom, 68–72. 57. Linda Kerber, “The Meaning of Citizenship,” Journal of American History 84, no. 3 (1997): 833–54. 58. Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 570.

Nine

Pennsylvania German Taufscheine and Revolutionary America Cultural History and Interpreting Identity Liam Riordan

The emergence of cultural history as a means for reassessing the past provides untapped opportunities for early American Pennsylvania German specialists to position themselves and their subjects at the center of scholarly debate about the broad revolutionary era. The relatively recent embrace of “culture” as itself a causal force that constitutes reality has fecund implications for how we conceptualize the creation of colonial societies with their clashing, innovative, and derivative local and transatlantic cultural practices. To the extent that competing and overlapping cultural models constituted and created colonial societies, German-­speaking people in British North America should be understood as central actors in fashioning its thoroughgoing multicultural diversity. Pennsylvania Germans plainly articulated an “ethnic” sensibility of remarkable durability, and this dynamic expression changed over time and drew upon varied resources that were personal and public as well as material and spiritual.1 Traditional historical analysis of early America has emphasized politics, war, the state, and law, which all implicitly (and often explicitly) made Anglo-­American subjects these studies’ near exclusive terrain of inquiry, but,   The author benefitted enormously from the presentations and discussions with participants at the conference organized by this volume’s editors in Mainz in fall 2009 and would especially like to thank Cynthia Falk, Martha McNamara, and Me Me Riordan for further assistance in improving this essay.

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as the essays gathered here emphasize, the cultural landscape of early America was far more variegated than mere British (much less English) domination. More recent interpretive departures, such as social history’s use of quantitative evidence as well as literary studies’ textual rigor, have usefully broadened our purview, but these modes have often unwittingly supported the view that early American German speakers were isolated, atypical, or exceptional. Cultural history should not merely aim to provide a linear improvement on these past and ongoing methods of scholarly inquiry, but should aspire to synthesize the insights in preceding work while also addressing some of its shortcomings. Cultural history shares with more traditional methodologies a commitment to what happens in public and was broadly shared throughout society, and, in common with more recent research priorities, it also reaches beyond foremost leaders in the past to assess a fuller range of human experience, endeavor, and self-­understanding. Calling for historical cultural analysis—by which I mean prioritizing evidence of human expression that was not primarily political or economic—to be more central to our interpretive endeavor may yet yield a wholly new awareness of major forces shaping long-­ term developments in North America.2 How might a cultural approach to German speakers in predominantly English-­speaking revolutionary America help us understand that period, and perhaps even our present, in new ways? This essay responds to that question by analyzing taufscheine, distinctive pictorial and textual works on paper that celebrate the birth and baptism of a child. Careful consideration of this object type and its contextualization within a specific time and place of production and consumption attend to the importance of style by striving to develop an elusive period eye. Recognizing style as central to social experience is necessary for interpreting the forceful visual messages expressed by taufscheine. Their overall design (often even their type of font) contributes to the genre’s forcible association with Pennsylvania German ethnic identity—a deeply embedded theme that this popular expressive form still communicates today. As we shall see, the ethnic force of taufscheine was not particularly traditional or nostalgic, but rather it voiced the potent self-­fashioning of a middling people in a small town and rural hinterland that was commercial, forward looking, and engaged in the gradual creation of a more modern industrial society by the middle of the nineteenth century. Three key terms require further explanation: taufscheine, “Pennsylvania German,” and “folk art.” All three inform one another, and each poses definitional challenges that will be explored throughout this essay. Taufscheine, the

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most specific term of the trio, refers to popular documents usually written in Pennsylvania German dialect, often with a broken-­letter fraktur font, that always provide specific birth and parental information about an individual.3 This text-­based definition, however, is incomplete, for taufscheine derived their meaning from equally important visual elements, especially a bright color palette and use of distinctive iconography, as demonstrated by the images reproduced below. The “Pennsylvania German” group fundamentally associated with these artistic documents took shape in large parts of colonial British America in the first half of the eighteenth century. Eastern Pennsylvania was its heartland and Lutherans and German Reformed congregants were its dominant members, although this geographic and religious core did not (and does not) include all people in the group.4 Finally, “folk art” provides the most daunting terminological challenge of all by combining two words that have sometimes been seen as oppositional. In a large field of often contentious multidisciplinary scholarship, the insights of folklife studies scholar Henry Glassie are especially valuable. In a landmark 1972 essay, he stressed “folk” as a significant category fundamentally shaped by romantic nationalism and offered a tripartite classification system for assessing objects by their creators’ relationships to public culture whereby folk was conservative, popular was normative, and elite (or academic) was progressive.5 As will be explored below, taufscheine are considered here as cultural expressions that crossed these conventional boundaries. They could be conservative assertions of traditionalism (as they have certainly become more recently), but in their original historical moment they were more often popular and commercial and had a progressive dynamism far richer than the mere preservation of an Old World form. While this exploration of taufscheine is deeply indebted to anthropologically informed historical ethnography, it is also crucial that the second term in “folk art” be appreciated so that the form’s aesthetic qualities receive interpretive weight. While the practices of folklore scholars were once pitted against those of art museums, collectors, and connoisseurs, cultural history as practiced here seeks to overcome this unfortunate dichotomy.6 Glassie compellingly celebrated the importance of the aesthetic dimension of folk art in a book-­length museum-­catalogue essay in 1989. Here folk modalities of nationalistic, radical, and existential origins were matched with artistic modalities of medium, function, and process. Recognizing the fundamental dualism contained in the folk art concept makes a crucial analytical intervention by combining the artistic exaltation of individual creativity with the commonplace

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and shared forms of the folk. This essay considers taufscheine as Pennsylvania German art that was, in Glassie’s words, among “the most important expressive forms of a group bound by a sense of identity.”7 Key terms and conceptual frameworks provide necessary starting places, but they can also obfuscate. A representative taufschein example offers a more certain way to move toward an object-­centered analysis that can convey a deeper appreciation of the aesthetic force that this folk art still expresses and encourages an interpretive humility born of recognizing the form’s complexity. A taufschein by an anonymous artist recording the birth and baptism of Eron Meier in 1818 compellingly introduces an important manifestation of this Pennsylvania German genre (fig. 9.1). Made entirely by hand, using a bright color palette, and including symbolic and textual elements popularized by some of the most prolific taufschein producers of the period, this birth and baptismal certificate meets all the core requirements of the form. The bright-­yellow crown with red stripes at its top center, as well as the striped triangles in its bottom corners, are clearly akin to the work of immigrant artist and schoolteacher Friederich Krebs (active ca. 1784–1812). Similarly, the floral rosettes in each corner and the large stylized flowers at the top resemble the work of Martin Brechall (active ca. 1783–1830), who was also an immigrant schoolteacher and almost as prolific as the legendary Krebs. While the Meier taufschein is somewhat basic (with greater open space and a simpler composition than better-­known examples), it was clearly crafted with care: it used fraktur lettering throughout (except for the bottom signature of Joseph Stiekel) and exhibited a fluent understanding of the genre’s textual, stylistic, and iconographic norms. Art historians and folklorists have estimated that 80 percent of all surviving handcrafted Pennsylvania German material culture was produced between 1770 and 1840. This predominance suggests that the people who created these objects acted with increased vigor and self-­consciousness during the broad revolutionary era, and by doing so they claimed a more public space for themselves in the postcolonial nation.8 Pennsylvania Germans created and purchased taufscheine to reflect their newly assertive sense of ethnic particularity, and, just as important, these objects engaged non-­Germanic cultural expression and used technological developments in an innovative and even commercial manner. Taufscheine were not fading expressions of isolated folk traditions soon to pass, but a bold hybrid form that took advantage of mechanical reproduction and numerous Anglo-­American visual elements that made this folk art genre vital well into the twentieth century, even while

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Fig. 9.1  Anonymous, taufschein for Eron Meier, ca. 1818. Library Company of Philadelphia, P.8736, Box *Fraktur 7974.F.11–P.9400.

remaining immediately recognizable as non-­English. Just as the increasing use of printed taufschein forms and an inclusive iconography demonstrates powerful Pennsylvania German interaction with other cultural groups and contemporary social practices, this essay will shift in its closing pages from the close analysis of specific examples to consider the wide geographic distribution of one itinerant artist’s work and will insist that the large-­scale production of mixed pictorial-­textual taufscheine deserves a more central place in our understanding of the American past. Because taufscheine are highly coveted by collectors of folk art and Americana, they have been the subject of considerable artistic and genealogical analysis, yet there are surprisingly few assessments of this strikingly effective means of preserving and expressing individual and ethno-­religious identity by historians.9 David Jaffee’s A New Nation of Goods, which gathers his vibrant scholarship over many years, provides a promising point of entry in its exploration of the crucial role of artisan-­entrepreneurs and the objects they crafted in pioneering the gradual emergence of industrial America in the early

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Fig. 9.2  Friederich Krebs, taufschein for Elisabetha Kostenbader, ca. 1805. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Prints, Drawings, and Photographs Department, bequest of Lisa Norris Elkins, 1950-­92-­243.

nineteenth century. Jaffee contends that “objects enable the world to happen” and focuses on the agency of their producers and consumers in a transitional period of social and cultural fluidity that connected the more hierarchical late eighteenth-­century world with the more regimented industrial one that followed. This essay is indebted to his wonderfully evocative view of alternate possibilities from 1790 to 1840 that have heretofore been underappreciated.10 Although his work emphasizes the distinctive contours of New England, we share a similar chronological subject and both stress the crucial place of marketing and commercialization for a small town and rural hinterland that interacted closely with more cosmopolitan U.S. cities and transatlantic forces of change. The methods and interpretive priorities of cultural history that look beneath the level of the masterpiece to examine what was popular are especially well suited to studying taufscheine and exploring how Pennsylvania Germans used them to make a clear and lasting mark on the public consciousness of the

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revolutionary era and beyond. Related to this argument about Pennsylvania Germans as interactive participants in early American society and culture is a substantial methodological claim that cultural history can be most effective when it not only recovers stories about specific cultural artifacts but also considers their social roles as larger sets beyond the single individual item, especially, in this case, as expressive objects that constituted and communicated ethnic identity. The public launch in fall 2009 of the extraordinary Fraktur Digital Collection, an online database created by the Free Library of Philadelphia, marked a turning point in our ability to interpret taufscheine and other fraktur work. This database permits a sophisticated assessment of more than one thousand examples of Pennsylvania German work on paper created before 1845. Not only are high-­quality images available online, but the website also provides a full transcription and translation of all text on these items and permits keyword searching within eleven data fields, including personal names, place of creation, stylistic elements, and dates.11 The analysis that follows expands upon my previous study of Pennsylvania Germans in the town of Easton, the seat of Northampton County, Pennsylvania.12 More than sixty fraktur artists were active in Northampton County prior to 1850, yet their dynamic and varied work is not well known outside specialized scholarly circles.13 As was the case across the large Pennsylvania German zone that arced around Philadelphia from northern New Jersey, slanting across the interior of Pennsylvania on into Maryland and then to the Virginia and the Carolina backcountry, most of the German-­speaking settlers here were “church Germans” (Kirchenleute)— that is, Lutheran and German Reformed congregants, who typically shared a common “union church” (gemeinschaftliche Kirchen) building.14 Unlike the various “sect Germans,” whose wartime persecution Jan Stievermann thoughtfully assesses elsewhere in this volume, the much more numerous church Germans used revolutionary mobilization and American independence to forge a more central place for themselves in the new United States. Four prominently displayed eighteenth-­century objects in the First United Church of Christ in Easton, Pennsylvania, highlight the rich material expression of early Pennsylvania German culture. This religious building was raised in the 1770s as a union church and was shared by a German Reformed and a Lutheran congregation for nearly six decades. Today a museum display case to the right of the altar holds three pewter pieces that formerly were in regular use: a chalice made by the Rhineland-­born William Will, who immigrated

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to New York City as a boy in 1752 and worked there and in Philadelphia; a German-­made flagon from the first half of the eighteenth century by an unidentified artisan; and a tankard with the stamp of Gregory Ash and William Hutton, whose Bristol, England, partnership was active from 1741 to 1768. These three church pieces, and especially the graceful chalice by Will, highlight the cosmopolitan sophistication of Pennsylvania German ethno-­ religious expression, and the transatlantic connections that these objects in motion brought to this congregation.15 The central item in the cabinet, however, is the most impressive: a large Bible given to the Reformed congregation by the Swiss-­born missionary Michael Schlatter, who had been sent by the Synod of Holland to aid struggling spiritual institutions in the middle colonies in the late 1740s. It stands open to show the Basel-­printed Bible’s lavish two-­page frontispiece, which was distinctively decorated by Johannes Ernst Spangenberg, Easton’s schoolteacher, scrivener, and an active taufschein artist, in the 1770s. His handwritten text combines German (in mostly black fraktur letters) and Latin (in red cursive script), and he filled the page’s borders with colorful stylized birds, flowers, and a portly trumpeter, all in characteristic Pennsylvania German style.16 Just like the church pewter that stands alongside it, this Bible highlights the cosmopolitan ties of people in a small frontier town of the late eighteenth century to multiple European national, cultural, and religious traditions. Taufscheine might initially seem to be different sorts of objects than these communally owned vessels and Bible with their formal religious and public roles. Were the carefully crafted birth and baptismal certificates more private and personal? Were they talismans of a peculiar people who felt alienated from the dominant Anglo norms of their society? At first glance, this view seems plausible, and the connotations of “folk art” once led it to be treated as primitive, naive, provincial, and parochial.17 The broken-­letter fraktur script suggests a strong tie to continental forms, and consistent (though not exclusive) use of German seems to make these powerful expressions of central European traditions. While there are important continental precursors for taufscheine that we continue to learn more about as transatlantic scholarship grows, most specialists agree that they are a distinctive New World form rather than a continuous practice carried across the Atlantic and maintained in colonial settings. As Frederick S. Weiser remarked in 1973, while there is a “very clear lineage in Europe,” “Pennsylvania Taufschein represent a clear departure from Old World prototypes.” Much like ethnic awareness itself, with which taufscheine are so intricately intertwined, migration and

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household and community formation in wholly new circumstances required cultural creativity and the expression of a hybrid self-­understanding that drew on past practices in dynamic and unanticipated ways.18 The novelty of taufscheine revolves around their intensive focus on the specific individual information about a person’s date of birth, place of birth, and parentage. The familial information occupies the vital center of the document, for even while the familiar term for the genre emphasizes baptism as its key element, the fuller term geburts-­und taufschein is more accurate, since it is birth information, above all, that is essential. These colorful papers document a key moment in life that is simultaneously about spirituality, domesticity, and generational transition. Thus they met a crucial need to record basic information about individual identity in a fluid New World context that lacked the ordering structures of established church, robust government with meaningful coercive power, legally sanctioned social privileges, and intergenerational ties to place that defined most European societies in the eighteenth century. As Don Yoder has noted, American taufscheine directly filled the void left by a lack of official birth records with legal seals (geburtsbrief), which had been issued by churches as government institutions in central Europe.19 The central meaning of the form that fuelled its long-­term popularity, which far outpaced all other kinds of fraktur work, arose from the basic need it met to document birth and family identity. That taufscheine were also widely used by members of German religious sects that did not practice infant baptism further underscores their primacy as records of birth information and domestic ties.20 The careful documentation of a child’s identity sets American taufscheine decisively apart from its varied central European antecedents. The anonymous artist who produced the Meier taufschein (fig. 9.1) worked in a tradition that shared a visual and textual repertoire made famous by more prolific artists such as Martin Brechall and Friederich Krebs. This close relationship is nicely demonstrated in the certificate that Krebs made for Elisabetha Kostenbader (fig. 9.2). Most important is the prominent crown that appears at the top center of both images. Also striking on the Kostenbader taufschein, and immediately recognizable as the work of Krebs, are the large “parrots” (the Carolina parakeet, actually, then quite familiar in the mid-­ Atlantic) flanking the central text. These were likely first used to effect by taufschein artist (Johann) Henrich Otto.21 The producers of these objects clearly participated in common social, aesthetic, communication, and commercial networks and regularly sampled one another’s work.

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Like so many taufschein makers, Krebs was an immigrant, and the fraktur work that he sold, along with hatboxes made from cardboard and wallpaper, helped supplement his income as a schoolteacher in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. His known certificates reveal that he was active from 1784 to 1812, and he created an enormous number of images—perhaps more than any other single artist—and traveled intensively across the cultural region, as known examples include taufscheine for children born in seven Pennsylvania counties and an eighth county in northern New Jersey.22 Perhaps most revealing of all, however, is the collaboration of several different artists on the Kostenbader taufschein. Krebs did the freehand artwork and colored its borders, but the general three-­heart form upon which he worked and its black fraktur text were printed by a newspaper letterpress. This printed template included substantial blank spaces within the large central heart that were filled in with personal information about Kostenbader by two different people (one of them, perhaps, Krebs) who both wrote in loose script letters (i.e., non-­ fraktur, unlike the handwork in fig. 9.1). This handwritten text is not impressive calligraphy and seems unlikely to have been the work of a professional scrivener. What was professional, indeed forcefully market-­oriented, was the printed form upon which Krebs colored and others inserted details about Elisabetha Kostenbader’s early life. This widely used three-­heart form was printed and distributed on a mass scale to reach consumers across a region much larger than the face-­to-­face community of even a widely traveled taufschein peddler. Krebs cannot have had close personal familiarity with his far-­flung customers; he enjoyed success across hundreds of miles because his work resonated with the needs, values, and visual sensibilities of people across a large area of shared Pennsylvania German culture. As he moved through this landscape seeking customers, Krebs announced his authorship on the printed form. “Verfertigt von F. Krebs” (Prepared by [or done by] F. Krebs) is printed in medium-­sized font in the bottom point of the large central heart and is set off visually by horizontal lines of symbols above and below this printed “signature.” Starting in 1790, Krebs relied on a German newspaper press in Reading, Pennsylvania (some sixty miles from where he lived), to print his taufschein forms, and his art has been identified on twenty variant printed templates. More extraordinarily yet, because the account books of the Adler newspaper survive, we know that Krebs purchased 6,974 printed forms between 1801 and 1813, and in 1804 alone, his peak purchasing year, he acquired 1,987 forms at three separate points. Even though this craftsman supplied his own paper and was charged

256  Ethnic and Religious Identities

just 53 cents for every one hundred forms, he paid his debt in installments and still owed the printer $2.67 when he died in 1815.23 Krebs was certainly a folk artist—he lacked formal training and created art with a “traditional” style targeted for an ethnic audience—yet he worked on a geographic, technical, and commercial scale that belies the provincial and isolated rural connotations of folk art.24 That only 155 examples of Krebs’s massive output survives—he probably produced more than 7,000 items—challenges us to evaluate taufscheine as a more popular and socially engaged expression than the conceptualization of folk art generally permits. Given the enormous production scale of the undecorated three-­heart printed template favored by Krebs, and used by many other artists as well, it is worthwhile to review the basic composition and design of this particularly influential German-­language form.25 The uppermost text in the Kostenbader example plainly announces that this is a birth and baptismal certificate (“Geburts-­und Tauf-­Schein”), and Elisabetha’s parents’ names follow—with her father, of course, coming first, as reflects patrilineal norms—but an important space is also reserved here to identify the maiden name of her mother. Indeed, the wife’s prior family name almost always appears on taufscheine. The care with which these documents preserve both parents’ family names departs from dominant Anglo-­American norms and may be related to a genealogical conceptualization tied to partible inheritance practices with a stronger commitment to preserving matrilineal awareness. The printed form also leaves blank spaces for date and place of birth as well as the time of day and the astrological sign under which the child was born. While it is clear that English-­and German-­language almanacs in early America both paid careful attention to astrology, including this information on a birth certificate strikingly departs from Anglo-­American practice. The large-­font text in the top two-­thirds of the central heart leaves additional open spaces to insert the date of baptism, the sponsors, and the name of the officiating minister. Below this primary area for entering the crucial personal information related to the child, three blocks of smaller-­font text provide devotional passages—first in the lower register of the main heart, then in the two flanking smaller hearts. The spiritual messages here are the three most frequently repeated passages on taufscheine and remind the reader—that is, if one chose to scrutinize these crowded parts of the document—that death is fundamental to the human condition, and thus one should celebrate the inestimable treasure of baptism. As the text in the bottom-­left heart announces, “I am baptized, I stand united with my God through my baptism. I therefore always

Taufscheine and Revolutionary America  257

speak joyfully in hardship, sadness, fear and need. I am baptized, that’s a joy for me. The joy lasts eternally.”26 This and the other two passages reprinted on this form are taken from Johann Friedrich Starck’s wildly popular devotional book, which was first published in Germany in 1727, became a frequently issued Pennsylvania German imprint starting in 1731, and was only first translated into English in a Philadelphia edition of 1855. As Don Yoder notes, Starck’s book “had a phenomenal circulation in Europe and was undoubtedly the leading prayer book used in private devotions among the Pennsylvania Germans.”27 The combination of personal information, devotional text, and strikingly colored images is fascinating in its own right as a hybrid form that becomes all the more significant when we recall the force of the taufschein’s ethnic expression as a popular and commercial product with widespread distribution. If taufscheine were close to ubiquitous throughout the Pennsylvania German region in hand-­drawn, printed, and mixed hand-­lettered versions, what did they mean to the people for whom they were made? This is, of course, the essential question, but its answer remains elusive. There is no substantial evidence to suggest how these paper forms were preserved and viewed in the domestic context of their recipients’ lives, but it seems unlikely that they were treated as decorative objects to be hung on walls. In place of being able to assess the lived context in which taufscheine were experienced, the close scrutiny of surviving examples is our most promising interpretive course. Looking more closely at the information entered by hand on Elisabetha Kostenbader’s certificate and placing it in the context of other examples moves us toward a more intimate, though still partial, understanding of what taufscheine may have meant for their recipients. After the names of her parents, her place and date of birth in Plainfield Township, Northampton County, on October 9, 1783, and the names of her baptismal sponsors, the spaces for date of baptism and officiating minister were left empty. Consequently, it seems unlikely that this form was made close to the time of her birth and baptism. Since her confirmation by Easton’s Reformed minister Thomas Pomp in 1804 is added as a final freehand entry, squeezed into the space above the first small-­font devotional text, it seems probable that she and her family belonged to the Reformed congregation in Easton, which abuts Plainfield.28 A final handwritten entry, in a different hand from the rest, records Elisabetha’s marriage, on June 15, 1806, to an unnamed person. There are two main departures here from the information requested by the standardizing printed template: first, the exclusion of astrological and

258  Ethnic and Religious Identities

complete baptismal information and, second, the addition of confirmation and marriage data. However, both of these discrepancies appear frequently in other examples of the genre. Although taufscheine preserve a sparse trajectory of a life course, they primarily serve as early biographical life statements—always stressing birth, often including baptismal information, and sometimes adding confirmation or marriage data, but very rarely mentioning death. Importantly, too, in this case the baptismal date and officiating minister are not recorded, but the child’s baptismal sponsors are named, perhaps suggesting the primacy of a spiritual social network over an officially church-­ or minister-­centered one. Because Krebs’s mass-­ produced work challenges many presumptions about folk art generally and Pennsylvania German traditions in particular, it is revealing to turn to an earlier example from 1786 to demonstrate that even at an initial phase of their popularity, taufscheine makers worked across a large geographic terrain and made sophisticated use of mechanical reproduction. This large, dramatic taufschein for Elizabeth Romich (fig. 9.3) is the product of three different makers. The form was printed at the Ephrata Cloister, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for Henrich Dulheuer (active ca. 1780–86), as indicated by his printed name on the bottom-­right corner. Dulheuer had deep religious commitments that inspired him to travel widely in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and the Carolinas, and, as this printed form makes clear, he made Baltimore and Washington County, Maryland, his base of activities for a period. In this example, the scrivener has had to delete Maryland from the printed template and replace it with Pennsylvania, for Elizabeth was born in Upper Saucon Township, Northampton County. Though having the form printed was probably Dulheuer’s sole contribution to this example, and though he was only active as a taufschein publisher and distributor from 1780 to 1786, he was a major figure. As Russell and Corinne Earnest note, he “may properly be called the earliest of the major itinerant scriveners. No free-­ hand certificates made by him are known.”29 His influence as a distributor of printed forms arises particularly from his close, though somewhat elusive, relationship with the master colorist and artist (Johann) Henrich Otto. What is perhaps most remarkable about the Romich taufschein is the role played by Freidrich Deubler (active ca. 1786), who is only known by seven surviving examples—four from Northampton County and three from adjacent Berks County. Deubler added the personal information on this form in distinctive red ink and printed, rather than hand inscribed, the names of the people, dates, and places involved. As early as 1786, therefore, we have a

Taufscheine and Revolutionary America  259

Fig. 9.3  Henrich Dulheuer, Freidrich Duebler, and (Johann) Henrich Otto, taufschein for Elizabeth Romich, ca. 1786. Library Company of Philadelphia, *Am 1786 Tauf [Log 1982.F] #1.

printed form on which specific individual information was also printed (not added by hand) by a second contributor.30 Finally, the elaborate birds and flowers on the left and right sides were added later with woodblocks and then hand colored, while the winged angel at bottom seems hand drawn and the face at the top center seems to have been printed as part of the template and then hand colored. All this decoration was probably done by (Johann) Henrich Otto (active ca. 1762–97), who, like Dulheuer, pioneered the use of printed forms from the Sabbatarian commune at Ephrata, but worked almost exclusively as a nontextual artist and colorist. A 1785 form printed by the same Ephrata press for Otto and marked with his printed signature is quite similar to fig. 9.3 and includes the identical bird and flower woodblock prints on either side with slightly variant coloring done by hand.31 Russell and Corinne Earnest, who have carried out the most systematic evaluation of taufscheine, claim that Otto “influenced American fraktur art probably more than any other single person”; thus, it is “one of the biggest disappointments” in the field that we know so little about

260  Ethnic and Religious Identities

Fig. 9.4  Flying Angel Artist, taufschein for Samuel McFaren, ca. 1790. Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society, Easton, Pennsylvania, 78.10.1.

him.32 What is certain, however, is that by the 1780s printed forms had been in regular use by some craftspeople for at least a decade, and the production of taufscheine involved many people, from printers and distributors to visual and textual artists. On the consumption side there were, again, many people involved, frequently as many as six named people on each document in spaces designated for parents, child, baptismal sponsors, and minister. Finally, the geographic reach of these early printed forms is impressive—here, a quintessentially “Pennsylvania” German document had been produced on a large scale, intended for use in Maryland. The next taufschein example (fig. 9.4) combines typical and atypical qualities in a revealing manner. Initially, it seems to return to the style of the first image discussed, since it is done entirely by hand by an anonymous, though prolific, craftsman who has come to be called the “Flying Angel Artist” (active ca. 1780–1811) due to the frequency of that distinctive character in his work. After Friederich Krebs, this artist was probably the most active taufscheine

Taufscheine and Revolutionary America  261

producer, and his work is found in five Pennsylvania counties—again, a territory that extends far beyond the bounds of the face-­to-­face community that is the nostalgically imagined host to preindustrial rural cultures. In addition to the flying angels in the top corners, this example follows the artist’s standard format, with a large broken circle framing the main text and a small heart at the bottom bearing a devotional text in German (usually “This heart of mine shall be all yours, O dear Jesus”).33 Also typical of this artist’s work is the yellow, red, and brownish-­green color scheme and that the taufschein announces the family’s confessional commitment to the German Reformed Church and baptism therein but does not include the date of baptism. Thus, the visual style and palette of this item are highly representative of the artist and the genre, but what sets the taufschein apart as exceptional is that it recorded the May 1790 birth of Samuel “McFaren,” a decidedly non-­ German name. He was the son of Robert and his lawful wife, Susanna, who had the maiden name Reed or Riedy, based on her being born a “Ridiein,” as it appears on the document with the feminine suffix “in.”34 This classic example of a Pennsylvania German taufschein forcefully reminds us that in large parts of interior Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, and even into the Carolinas, local cultural expression occurred in a multicultural setting whose normative mode could be principally derived from central European traditions. There is no question that a Scots Irish name as the subject of a taufschein is unusual, but it is yet another example of the nonhegemonic nature of Anglo-­ American norms (whatever these might be) in Pennsylvania. Such examples become especially visible when one examines evidence beyond the bounds of formal politics, law, and, of course, English-­language texts.35 A final taufschein moves us well into the nineteenth century and demands that we simultaneously acknowledge the genre’s narrow grammar of standard expression as well as its significant capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.36 This certificate for “Waschengton Andraas Oberly,” born and baptized in 1837, immediately stands apart from the other birth and baptismal documents examined so far in terms of its visual impact (fig. 9.5), and there is little question that this example is not among those most highly prized by art museums and collectors.37 Some key elements of this document are immediately familiar: it is a printed form, its bright colors and personal information are added by hand, its language is German, the printed text is in fraktur letters, and the handwritten text is in script. Yet it also includes a fundamentally Victorian (and perhaps Anglo-­American) tone, with its vertical orientation

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Fig. 9.5  Samuel Siegfried, taufschein for Waschengton Andraas Oberly, ca. 1837. Used by permission of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia, FLP 147.

Taufscheine and Revolutionary America  263

and the use of didactic religious scenes in place of the flowers, hearts, and other iconic Pennsylvania German visual elements so familiar from previous examples. Closer scrutiny, however, encourages us to see these newer elements as enhancing, rather than departing from, a fundamentally Pennsylvania German ethno-­religious expression, just as the child’s birth name, Waschengton Andraas Oberly, announces him as distinctly American and German. Continuities with the older style begin with obvious qualities such as the use of the German language, fraktur letters, and the boldface printed title at the top of the form, which announces this as a “Geburts-­und Taufschein.” They extend to more subtle elements as well, including a familiar color palette of bold red and yellow and even the placement of a bird on the finger of the large angel on the right-­hand side. While there is more devotional text here than on previous examples, it repeats the same three principal texts about baptism that also appeared in the Kostenbader taufschein (fig. 9.2), with the addition at the bottom right of a scriptural account of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan River (Luke 3:21–22). The printer of this form, Samuel Siegfried (active 1810–1820), may have copied the design of the angels in the middle register—the taufschein’s largest visual elements—from the template of the Harrisburg printer Gustav S. Peters and also followed its general composition quite closely. Don Yoder has described the Peters taufschein template as the “most widespread printed example from the first half of the nineteenth century. It turns up almost everywhere.”38 What’s particularly interesting, then, is to compare how Siegfried and Peters developed the genre in similar and divergent ways. The Peters version is more strongly Pennsylvania German, with a pair of large birds in each bottom corner, following the model of earlier vertically oriented taufscheine printed by John (alternately Johann) Ritter in Reading, Pennsylvania. It is also more explicitly American, however, with an eagle at the top center clasping a ribbon in its beak that announces, “E Pluribus Unum.”39 In place of such ethnic and nationalist assertions by Peters, Siegfried favored a more forcefully Christian expression. In addition to the biblical and devotional content described above, he added the phrase “The Peace of God” within the wreath held aloft by the left-­hand angel and included a prompt to the hymn “O Jesu Christ wahres Licht” before the scriptural passage at the bottom right. Samuel Siegfried’s printed taufschein for Waschengton Oberly from the late 1830s clearly was crafted in close dialogue with examples from the Ritter and Peters presses, even though only the large facing angels with lyres, a wreath,

264  Ethnic and Religious Identities

and a bird are immediately recognizable as remaining from the other printers’ work. Above all, Siegfried advanced a more conventionally and explicitly Christian expression of the genre. Yet, when we consider that the Reformed minister at Easton, Thomas Pomp, performed the baptism recorded on the 1837 certificate—as he also did in three of the four main examples discussed earlier in this essay—we are reminded that taufscheine remained a persistent ethno-­religious expression with pictorial, textual, and personal resonance firmly embedded in past practices, even as certain dimensions of the form changed to keep up to date with broadly “American” developments in the 1830s, especially the growing Christianization of U.S. public life.40 While Siegfried was an active entrepreneur, often working with John Dreisbach, a printer in Bath, Pennsylvania, he was also deeply familiar with the roots of the genre, as he demonstrated in the stunning hand-­drawn, hand-­colored, and fraktur-­lettered taufschein that he made for the birth and baptism of his brother Daniel in 1810.41 The intricate details of individual taufscheine and the sophisticated interplay among printers, decorators, scriveners, family members, baptismal sponsors, and officiating ministers are all fascinating and important, yet this type of analysis can be drawn too deeply into the explication of specialized local information that risks drowning in minutiae. This approach can unwittingly reinscribe the inaccurate notion that taufscheine were the esoteric and private possession of a peculiar people who were supposedly isolated from an Anglo-­ dominated national culture that demanded Pennsylvania Germans leave distinctive ethnic expressions behind in order to become fully American.42 As we have seen in the case of the Samuel McFaren taufschein (fig. 9.4), a reverse form of acculturation—what the historian A.  G. Roeber has called “transferred local osmosis”—also occurred, whereby “mainstream” norms across a large region were set by Pennsylvania German imperatives and dominance of everyday life.43 Moreover, as the work of Samuel Siegfried suggested (fig. 9.5), taufschein producers remained successful throughout the nineteenth century by combining traditional and innovative designs as well as pioneering new means of reproduction. Indeed, Currier and Ives, archetypal purveyors of commercial American culture in the industrial age, mass-­produced English-­and German-­language taufscheine to reach a significant market in the nineteenth-­century United States.44 A critical interpretive transition, then, calls for a shift from the close focus on specific examples and their immediate social context to consider the larger

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patterns revealed by taufscheine in revolutionary America. One way to think more broadly about these objects is to move our attention from individual artifacts to consider the geographic range of an especially active itinerant artist. His distinctive work is well known in part because it has been found from the Carolinas to Ontario. Yet this craftsman remains known only by the style of his pen and the characteristic opening lines of many of his certificates, which advise the child to “Honor Father and Mother” (Ehre Vater und Mutter). Thus, this anonymous artist is known as the “Ehre Vater Artist” (active 1782–1828).45 A spatial analysis of this artist’s work suggests two important points about the geography of Pennsylvania German culture in revolutionary America (map 9.1). First, there is a familiar core region in southeastern Pennsylvania that arcs around Philadelphia. While that crescent shape is immediately recognizable as the major zone of Pennsylvania German settlement in British America, the Ehre Vater Artist’s most intensive work occurred northwest of Philadelphia in Northampton County and Berks County (with the top counts of fourteen and six examples, respectively) as opposed to iconic “Pennsylvania Dutch” Lancaster County to the west of the metropolis. Indeed, if we group the three northerly Pennsylvania German counties (adding Bucks to Northampton and Berks), they yield twenty-­four examples, while Lancaster and its adjoining southerly counties of Dauphin and York yield eleven.46 The second main point to be gleaned from this map comes by looking beyond state boundaries to recognize the limitations of the term “Pennsylvania German.” This single artist also did work in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, for a total of sixteen examples, and immigrants who settled around Lake Ontario carried some of his work to Canada.47 While this map reflects the particular pathways and idiosyncrasies of an unusually peripatetic artist and so must be evaluated with caution, it points to the gains to be reaped by assessing Pennsylvania German material culture beyond a single precious artifact and its embedded local community. Perhaps most important, attention to itinerancy reminds us that taufscheine can profitably be considered as “objects in motion.” They call on viewers to make meanings from their relationship with a mixed textual and symbolic form that invokes reflection about how materiality and identity shape each other. A considerable chronological distance separates us today from the original performative context of these objects, their producers, and their initial consumers, yet their material persistence and vastly enlarged audience, given new technologies of distribution and presentation (like the Free Library of

266  Ethnic and Religious Identities

Northampton

4 4

14

6 6

1 2

5 4

3 2

Map 9.1  1810 county map showing the locations and number of occurances of taufscheine by the Ehre Vater Artist. Map by Peg Kearney, University of Maine, based on Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic Information System: Pre-­Release Version 0.1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004), and Russell D. Earnest and Corrine P. Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes: Guide to the Fraktur Artists and Scriveners, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (East Berlin, Pa.: Russell D. Earnest Associates, 1999), 1:225–28.

Philadelphia’s Fraktur Digital Collection), suggest that we reconsider how people and objects interact in both the broad revolutionary era and today. The tool kit of practices that taufscheine made (and still make) available offers us a profitable route for assessing how Pennsylvania Germans made their experience “real” and purposeful in a particular time and place. This concern with practice and performance attempts to rehabilitate the importance of agency and “the social” in our assessment of culture by navigating a course between extreme assertions of an essentialist essence, on the one hand, and an all-­ controlling discursive power, on the other, both of which deny the capacity for individuality that taufscheine so effectively recorded and preserved.48 Future scholarship needs to assess a fuller range of Pennsylvania German culture at the level of entire genres and, even more importantly, explore how different forms of expression shaped one another both within this cultural group and in interaction with other groups—as obviously occurs in lived

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experience. How did published texts like almanacs, manuscript writing of all kinds, musical forms like hymns, easily identifiable foodways, vernacular building traditions, landscape use, medical practices from apothecaries to “powwowing,” and the handmade and mass-­produced visual and textual terrain of fraktur combine to inform, maintain, and transform Pennsylvania German identity in early America? An important body of scholarship in folklife studies and ethnographic cultural anthropology already exists, but a great deal remains to be done to explain the dynamic cultural tradition of Pennsylvania Germans and its significance. This new work should aspire to more than descriptive narrative and the recovery of little-­known examples and forms. A generation of social history research has made us aware of a far more diverse and varied early American reality than we once recognized. The promise of cultural history lies not just in its multidisciplinary examination of wide-­ranging evidence but also in its deep awareness of local variability and the transcendent potential of cultural expression. In place of the sometimes static structures and narrow boundaries of some social history scholarship, cultural historians should pursue how the web of meanings that people imaginatively and creatively crafted to understand themselves and their society could cross rigid lines of exclusion and separation that are foregrounded in much traditional analysis. This kind of engaged interpretive practice is especially promising for those who study German-­speaking people in early America, because its prioritization of the importance of culture as an integrative force makes the interstices of group interaction and boundary maintenance a pressing concern. While ethnicity has long been weighed down by connotations of marginality, subculture, and provincial isolation, this foray into the meaning of taufscheine finds just the opposite. These wondrously evocative forms were expansive and integrated; they contributed to a widely shared common culture in the revolutionary mid-­Atlantic with a much larger hinterland to the south, north, and west than is typically acknowledged. In his recent tour de force about the enormous contribution of craftsmen, their goods, and their consumers for the “Village Enlightenment” of “cosmopolitan communities” in New England between the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, the cultural historian David Jaffee has blazed a trail that scholars of Pennsylvania Germans should enlarge.49 New England cannot stand for all America, and we cannot allow the riches of non-­Anglo early America to continue to be treated as exceptional. Non-­English cultural traditions were crucial from the initiation of the colonial project, and, although creolization was

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not created by colonization, the colonial context combined more radically varied cultural elements as a result of voluntary and coerced transatlantic and continental migrations—all of which dramatically intensified during the long eighteenth century. Paying close attention to cultural persistence, transformation, and interaction in the early modern era is ever more important as we seek a fuller understanding of our own globalized and multicultural present.

notes 1. Although the English word “ethnicity” is of twentieth-­century coinage, the term’s Greek origins emphasized national distinctiveness, as did its use in fourteenth-­century Scotland. Ethnic associations are too deeply rooted in human experience to be properly studied as only recent phenomena; see Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), and John A. Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). For a sophisticated study of colonial ethnicity, although it avoids use of the term, see Ned C. Landsman, Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). A useful conceptual framework can be found in Kathleen Neils Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1992–93): 3–41. The essential historiographic starting point for German-­speaking people in early British America is A. G. Roeber, “ ‘The Origins of Whatever Is Not English Among Us’: The Dutch-­Speaking and German-­Speaking Peoples of Colonial British America,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 220–83. 2. Culture became a widespread interpretive and thematic priority in the historical discipline by the late 1980s. Historian William H. Sewall has described its emergence as a scholarly response to “shifting relations of advanced capitalism,” especially a move “toward a neoliberal emphasis on deregulated markets combined in the context of the dramatically expanded power of media.” See William H. Sewall Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); quotes from Michael Meranze, “Culture and Governance: Reflections on the Cultural History of Eighteenth-­Century British America,” William and Mary Quarterly 65 (October 2008): 742, summarizing Sewall. An early effort to mark the contours of this diffuse movement was Lynn A. Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), and influential recent calls to redirect cultural history include Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005). Also see the four-­scholar forum about Eley’s book in American Historical Review 113 (April 2008): 391–437. For a recent assessment calling for greater attention to eighteenth-­century agricultural meanings of culture, see Meranze, “Culture and Governance,” 713–44. 3. A further note on terminology: fraktur refers to a calligraphic lettering style based on a typeface in German-­speaking Europe created in the mid-­sixteenth century. The term can also be applied more broadly to include a huge range of decorated manuscripts, which need not be written in German or use a broken-­letter fraktur font to still be considered fraktur. Taufschein (and its plural form, taufscheine) refers to the most widespread example of North American fraktur work, the Pennsylvania German birth and baptismal certificate, and is the standard shortened form of geburts-­und taufschein. 4. Note that the eminent folklife studies scholar Don Yoder prefers the term “Pennsylvania Dutch” to identify this group; see his “Palatine, Hessian, Dutchman: Three Images of the German in America,” in Ebbes fer Alle-­Ebber, Ebbes fer Dich: Something for Everyone, Something for You, ed. Frederick S. Weiser, Pennsylvania German Society 14 (Breinigsville, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1980), 107–29. Also see the essay by Cynthia Falk in this collection, which avers that “Pennsylvania German” risks exerting a homogenizing sway over the “Palatine” cultural tradition in New York.

Taufscheine and Revolutionary America  269 5. Henry Glassie, “Folk Art,” in Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1972), 253–80. Reprinted in Material Culture Studies in America, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1982), 124–40. 6. On the polarized field, see Ian M. G. Quimby and Scott T. Swank, eds., Perspectives on American Folk Art (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980). 7. Henry Glassie, The Spirit of Folk Art: The Girard Collection at the Museum of International Folk Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 92. On aesthetic dimensions of folk art, also see David Park Curry, “Rose-­Colored Glasses: Looking for ‘Good Design’ in American Folk Art,” in An American Sampler: Folk Art from the Shelburne Museum (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1987), 24–41. 8. Statistic cited in Scott T. Swank, ed., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans (New York: W.  W. Norton for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1983), viii. In addition to Swank, the most important starting points for Pennsylvania German cultural expression are Don Yoder’s learned and lavishly illustrated The Pennsylvania German Broadside: A History and Guide (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); Cynthia G. Falk, Architecture and Artifacts of the Pennsylvania Germans: Constructing Identity in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008); and Sally McMurry and Nancy Van Dolsen, eds., Architecture and Landscape of the Pennsylvania Germans, 1720–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 9. For a comprehensive listing of more than 1,200 variants of printed birth and baptismal certificates, organized by printers’ locations and including representative reproductions, see Klaus Stopp, ed., The Printed Birth and Baptismal Certificates of the German Americans, 6 vols. (East Berlin, Pa.: Russell D. Earnest Associates, 1997), hereafter cited as Printed BBCs. For genealogical content and an emphasis on the biographies of artists and scriveners who worked by hand, see Russell D. Earnest and Corrine P. Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes: Guide to the Fraktur Artists and Scriveners, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (East Berlin, Pa.: Russell D. Earnest Associates, 1999); artists’ biographical information and dates of active work are drawn from this essential source unless otherwise noted. These remarkable multivolume undertakings aspire to be comprehensive and provide the foundation for this essay, as does the most important monograph on the subject by Donald A. Shelley, Fraktur-­ Writings or Illuminated Manuscripts of the Pennsylvania Germans, Pennsylvania German Folklore Society Yearbook 23 (Allentown, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Folklore Society, 1961). I use the standard title for Shelley here, but the copy that I have examined uses the title of his 1953 dissertation, The Pennsylvania German Style of Illumination. 10. David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), xiv. 11. The Fraktur Digital Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia (hereafter cited as FDC) is found at http://libwww.freelibrary.org/fraktur/index.cfm. When discussing specific items from this collection below, I will cite them according to their “shelf mark,” the most prominent of several item-­level identifications on the website (which typically begins with FLP followed by a number). I am deeply appreciative of this superb online resource: most of its translations were done by Friederike Baer, the project was overseen by Janine Pollock, head of the FLP’s Rare Book Department, and funding was provided by the Barra Foundation. The FDC is a prime example of the kind of scholarly technological innovation that Patrick Erben calls for in his contribution to this volume and is a fitting twenty-­first-­century update to the impressive and still valuable illustrated catalogue by Frederick S. Weiser and Howell J. Heaney, Pennsylvania German Fraktur of the Free Library of Philadelphia, 2 vols. (Breinigsville, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society and Free Library of Philadelphia, 1976). 12. Liam Riordan, Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-­Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), compares and contrasts the trajectory of Pennsylvania Germans in Easton with African Americans in New Castle, Delaware, and Quakers in Burlington, New Jersey, among other cultural groups, from 1770 to 1830. 13. The principal sources for the count of Northampton County fraktur artists are Earnest and Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes, the FDC, and Stopp, Printed BBCs. In addition to these, I have

270  Ethnic and Religious Identities examined Northampton County fraktur at the Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society, Easton Area Public Library, Library Company of Philadelphia, Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Winterthur Library and Museum, where I particularly benefitted from Lisa Minardi’s generosity in guiding me through the rich Winterthur holdings of Pennsylvania German material. 14. On church Germans as constituting about 90 percent of German-­speaking people in British North America, the close relationships of German Reformed and Lutheran congregants, and the ubiquity of the union church as an institution, see Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717–1793, 2 vols. (Breinigsville, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1980–81). 15. For more information and images, see the detailed study of 569 churches in four states by Donald H. Herr, Pewter in Pennsylvania German Churches, Pennsylvania German Society 29 (Birdsboro, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1995), 180, 35–37, and 137. 16. For the important identification of the Easton Bible artist as Spangenberg, see Monroe H. Fabian, “The Easton Bible Artist Identified,” Pennsylvania Folklife 22 (1972–73): 2–14. Images of his work are reproduced there, as well as in Riordan, Many Identities, 130ff., figs. 22 and 23. 17. This was especially the case in museum catalogues that did not employ these terms pejoratively, but valued these qualities for their relationship to avant-­garde modernism, most influentially, Holger Cahill, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932). 18. Frederick S. Weiser, “Piety and Protocol in Folk Art: Pennsylvania German Fraktur Birth and Baptismal Certificates,” Winterthur Portfolio 8 (1973): 8. The Mainz-­based collector Klaus Stopp noted some parallels in taufpatenbrief and an Alsatian visual repertoire, but emphasized that there were no exact European equivalents; Stopp, Printed BBCs, 1:15–18. Weiser and Heaney noted parallels along the Upper Rhine in baptismal sponsors’ gift of a coin (tauftaler) and letter (gottelbrief) in Pennsylvania German Fraktur, 1:xxi–xxii. Earnest and Earnest find the form “decidedly American” in Papers for Birth Dayes, 1:14. Yet Don Yoder offers an important corrective to extreme claims of autochthonous New World origins that stresses the growth of calligraphy among non-­elites in early modern central European villages as a critical precursor for the late eighteenth-­century explosion of taufscheine in Greater Pennsylvania. See his “The European Background of Pennsylvania’s Fraktur Art,” in Bucks County Fraktur, ed. Cory M. Amsler, Pennsylvania German Society 33 (Kutztown, Pa.: Pennsylvania German Society, 1999), 14–41. That a majority of taufschein artists were probably immigrants from central Europe further reinforces the transnational origins of this form. 19. Yoder, “European Background,” 32. 20. I do not mean to insist upon a sharp secular-­sacred dichotomy, for there is no question that popular religiosity deeply informed Pennsylvania German culture in this era. The Lutheran minister and scholar Frederick Weiser has stressed the “secular motivation of the love of decoration” in taufschein iconography and also notes their importance for recording birth data; Weiser, “Piety and Protocol,” 43, also 32, 35. Even in an essay that stresses the spiritual core of fraktur work, Don Yoder notes that taufscheine lacked the “Pietist pessimism” so prevalent in writing exercises (vorschriften); see his “The Fraktur Texts and Pennsylvania-­German Spirituality,” in Amsler, Bucks County, 50, 58. 21. On the parrot and Otto’s influence, see Shelley, Fraktur-­Writings, 84, 89. 22. For biographical information on Krebs as well as a list of all known examples of his work, see Earnest and Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes, 1:460–67. 23. The most detailed assessment of Krebs is Frederick S. Weiser, “Ach wie ist die Welt so Toll! The Mad, Lovable World of Friedrich Krebs,” Der Reggeboge (The Rainbow) 22 (1988): 48–88; for details about his estate and accounts, see 60–62. The important evidence about the scale of Krebs’s production and purchases from this press was first reported by Alfred L. Shoemaker in “Notes on Frederick Krebs, the Noted Fractur Artist,” Pennsylvania Dutchman, November 1, 1951, 3. For more information about Shoemaker as a pioneer of Pennsylvania German folklife studies, see Simon J. Bronner, “Alfred Shoemaker and the Discovery of American Folklife,” chap. 6 in Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998), 266–312.

Taufscheine and Revolutionary America  271 24. For an exploration of “authentic” versus “false” folk expression that rejects that distinction and calls for greater theoretical attention to commercial and even self-­consciously “folk” production, see Regina Bendix, “Folklorism: The Challenge of a Concept,” International Folklore Review 6 (1988): 5–15. 25. The great popularity of and variations on the three-­heart form, which was printed in many different towns and cities, can be traced across a wide region in Stopp, Printed BBCs. 26. An identical copy of the Kostenbader form printed by John (alternately Johann) Ritter in Reading appears in the FDC, FLP 262. I have followed the translation there, which is more literal than the one reprinted in Garvan from an 1855 Victorian translation. For this later English version, see Beatrice B. Garvan, The Pennsylvania German Collection (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982), 339, no. 9, and 338, no. 1; the Kostenbader taufschein is reproduced here on 298, no. 9. 27. Yoder, Pennsylvania German Broadside, 332n7, also 232–33. For a detailed assessment of the increasingly standardized use of specific devotional passages on taufscheine, see Frederick S. Weiser, “The Concept of Baptism Among Colonial Pennsylvania Lutheran and Reformed Church People,” Lutheran Historical Conference 4 (1970): 1–45. 28. I have not been able to find a plausible connection between the lay people named on the taufschein and any individual listed in the records of the Easton German Reformed congregation, which included the neighboring rural townships of Plainfield, Mount Bethel, Dryland, Forks, and Williams in Pennsylvania as well as Greenwich, New Jersey, as reprinted in Henry Martyn Kieffer, Some of the First Settlers of “The Forks of the Delaware” and Their Descendants, Being a Translation from the German of the Record Books of the First Reformed Church of Easton, Penna from 1760 to 1852 (1902; reprint, Westminster, Md.: Family Line, 1990). 29. Earnest and Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes, 1:203. 30. Deubler’s significant role of inserting personal information with some form of portable press was first established by Alfred Shoemaker in the Pennsylvania Dutchman, November 1952, 14. 31. This example by Otto can be viewed in the FDC, FLP 4. 32. Earnest and Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes, 2:594. For biographical information and a list of Otto’s known work, see 2:594–600; for Deubler, 1:184; and for Dulheuer, 1:201–4. I follow the Earnests in seeing the Romich taufschein as made by these three men, but Yoder attributes a larger artistic role to Dulheuer; see Yoder, Pennsylvania German Broadside, 233, 235. 33. For information about the Flying Angel Artist (sometimes identified as the Blowsy Angel Artist in older publications), see Earnest and Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes, 1:283–86. The McFaran taufschein is not listed by the Earnests. The FDC database includes eight examples by this artist as well as a very interesting woodblock that matches this artist’s style closely, although no imprints from it are extant. The translation of the devotional text follows that in the FDC. 34. The Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society (NCHGS) in Easton, Pennsylvania, owns this taufschein. I have relied on the English translation from the German by Lorrie Brownmiller, which is attached to the back of the framed object. I greatly appreciate the generous assistance of curator Andria Zaia and former executive director Colleen Lavdar in helping me examine this item and their other rich holdings. On the lack of the use of the feminine suffix among Palatine Germans in New York, see Falk’s essay in this volume. 35. On Germanic forms intertwining with and sometimes overshadowing Anglo ones in Easton, Pennsylvania, see Riordan, Many Identities, 31–32, 106–16, 268–72. 36. On folk art’s unity of tradition, which still permits significant individual variability, see Glassie, Spirit of Folk Art, esp. 31. 37. The Oberly taufschein is reproduced with a complete German transcription and English translation in the FDC, FLP 147. 38. Yoder reprints the Peters example in color on the front cover of his book. Space limitations prevent its being reproduced here, but several related examples can easily be located in the FDC. Peters and Siegfried both also printed English-­language versions of their religious certificates; see Yoder, Pennsylvania German Broadside, 235–36, 246–47, 193f. (color image). Note that Yoder identifies the Northampton County printer, artist, and scrivener by the name of his brother Solomon (rather than Samuel) Siegfried. For biographical information, see Earnest and Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes, 2:704.

272  Ethnic and Religious Identities 39. This widespread template may have been pioneered by the Ritter press, which also printed taufscheine forms for Friederich Krebs, as discussed earlier. However, Garvan’s attribution of this style to Ritter in 1802–4 seems to be at least twenty years too early. The chief addition by Peters to the Ritter form was the replacement of a putto at the top center with the American eagle. For examples of the Ritter version, see Garvan, Pennsylvania German Collection, 302–3, figs. 21–23. Garvan’s text also includes a copy by the Harrisburg printer John S. Wiestling in the 1820s, with an American eagle and shield in a lower central register (304, fig. 27), as well as versions by the Carlisle shop of Moser and Peters (306, fig. 34) and the Allentown shop of Blumer and Leisenring (308, fig. 42), and, finally, a completely hand-­drawn version clearly modeled on the printed Wiestling example (305, fig. 30). The FDC includes five Ritter examples and eleven from the press of Peters, first in partnership with Moser in Carlisle in the mid-­1820s, and then with Moser and on his own in Harrisburg into the 1840s. This does not exhaust the known variants of this ubiquitous form, which can be traced further in Stopp, Printed BBCs, but it suffices to indicate its geographic breadth, the interaction among numerous printers using this form, and the rich combination of hand and mechanical production, all of which fundamentally shaped the genre. 40. For my discussion of similar themes of Americanization and Pennsylvania German persistence in the 1827 German Reformed confirmation certificate of Jesse Oberly, probably a relative of Waschengton Oberly, see Riordan, Many Identities, 130f., fig. 24, 164–66. On the Christianization of the early national United States, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. 257–88. 41. This signed and dated Siegfried taufschein is in the FDC, FLP 49. 42. For an insightful analysis of ethnicization and Americanization as intertwined processes in this period, see Steven M. Nolt, Foreigners in Their Own Land: Pennsylvania Germans in the Early Republic (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 43. A. G. Roeber, “Pennsylvania Germans and German Speakers,” in Architecture and Landscape of the Pennsylvania Germans, 1720–1920, ed. Nancy Van Dolsen (n.p.: Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2004), 2. 44. I was made aware of the Currier and Ives taufscheine, as well as the deeply Victorian quality of many Pennsylvania German prints, by Don Yoder’s important broadside study. For the “Pennsylvania Dutch” firm of Crider and Brother in York, Pennsylvania, which pioneered the combination of photography and printed marriage certificates on a national scale in the late nineteenth century, see Yoder, Pennsylvania German Broadside, 261, 228. For two blank taufscheine forms (one English and one German) printed by Currier and Ives in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, see FDC, FLP 254 and FLP 256. 45. For the prominence of this phrase in his work, see the FDC, FLP 90 and FLP 1005. Biographical details and a list of fifty-­six known taufscheine by this artist (six without geographic identifiers and one with two locations) can be found in Earnest and Earnest, Papers for Birth Dayes, 1:225–28. 46. Since county lines change over time, it is important to note that the 1810 data used for map 1 predate the creation of Lehigh County from southernmost Northampton County in 1812, as well as the creation of Lebanon County from Lancaster County in 1813 and its expansion in 1821. Lancaster County was originally created in 1729, and Berks and Northampton followed in 1752. These boundary changes are easily examined at http://www.familyhistory101.com/maps/pa-­maps.html. For an emphasis on the distinctiveness of Pennsylvania German culture in Central Pennsylvania (west of the Susquehanna River), with its close ties to Baltimore and Appalachia, see Don Yoder, “The Discovery of Central Pennsylvania,” in Discovering American Folklife: Studies in Ethnic, Religious, and Regional Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990), 185–97. 47. On the Ehre Vater Artist’s work around Wachovia, North Carolina, see John Bivins Jr., “Fraktur in the South: An Itinerant Artist,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 1, no. 2 (1975): 1–23, as well as Klaus Wust, Virginia Fraktur: Penmanship as Folk Art (Edinburg, Va.: Shenandoah History, 1972). On Pennsylvania German folk art in Canada, much of it produced by members of German sectarian groups, see Michael S. Bird, Ontario Fraktur: A Pennsylvania-­German Folk Tradition in Early Canada (Toronto: M. F. Feheley, 1977), and Susan M. Burke and Matthew H. Hill, eds., From Pennsylvania to Waterloo: Pennsylvania-­German Folk Culture in Transition (Kitchener, Ontario: Joseph Schneider Haus, 1991).

Taufscheine and Revolutionary America  273 48. The argument and language in this paragraph are indebted to two thoughtful essays. On the importance of assessing objects in motion as part of an etiquette and aesthetics of everyday life, see Bernard L. Herman, “On Being German in British America: Gravestones and the Inscription of Identity,” an unpublished essay kindly shared by the author. For a compelling call for cultural history to embrace a semantic concern with performance as an accommodation between poststructuralism and social history, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, introduction to Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–32. 49. Jaffee, New Nation of Goods, esp. chaps. 2 and 3.

Contributors Rosalind J. Beiler is Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Florida. She works on the German-­speaking Atlantic world in the early modern period. Her publications include Immigrant and Entrepreneur: The Atlantic World of Caspar Wistar, 1650–1750 (2008) and articles about migration in early modern Europe and to the British colonies. Her current research focuses on the communication networks of early modern religious dissenters and the ways in which they became conduits for information about migration. She has been a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and a senior Fulbright scholar at the Free University, Berlin. Patrick M. Erben is Associate Professor of Early American Literature at the University of West Georgia. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University and is the author of A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (2012). Erben is currently collaborating with Margo Lambert and Alfred Brophy on a selective reader of the published and unpublished writings of Francis Daniel Pastorius, the founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania. Cynthia G. Falk is Professor of Material Culture at the Cooperstown Graduate Program, a master’s degree program in museum studies jointly sponsored by the State University of New York College at Oneonta and the New York State Historical Association. Falk is coeditor of the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s journal Buildings and Landscapes, and she is the author of Barns of New York: Rural Architecture of the Empire State (2012). Her ongoing research concerns Palatine history and material culture in the Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys. Her interest in the topic stems from her work on people of German descent in Pennsylvania for her book Architecture and Artifacts of the Pennsylvania Germans: Constructing Identity in Early America (2008). Falk received her undergraduate training at Penn State University, an M.A.

276  Contributors

from the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, and a Ph.D. in the American Civilization Program at the University of Delaware. Marie Basile McDaniel is Assistant Professor of American History at Southern Connecticut State University, where she coordinates the Secondary Education Social Studies Program and teaches courses on colonial and revolutionary America, American families, and religion in America. Her dissertation “ ‘We Shall Not Differ in Heaven’: Marriage, Order, and Identity in Eighteenth-­Century Philadelphia,” completed at the University of California, Davis, in 2010, examines ethnic and religious identities and their manifestation in prerevolutionary Philadelphia. McDaniel is currently working on revising this manuscript for publication in 2014. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband and son. Philip Otterness is Professor of History and Director of the Fine Arts and Humanities Division at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. He has degrees in history from Cambridge University and the University of Iowa and is the author of Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (2004). His research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Becoming German won the Dixon Ryan Fox Award for the best manuscript on New York state history in 2003. Liam Riordan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maine. He is the author of Many Identities, One Nation: The American Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-­Atlantic (2007) and coeditor of The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (2012). His current book project is a comparative biography of five Loyalists who lived all over the British Atlantic world as a result of their opposition to the American War of Independence. Riordan was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Glasgow in spring 2012. Oliver Scheiding is Professor and Chair of American Literature at the University of Mainz. His research focuses on early American literature, periodical studies, and the early national period. He is the author of Geschichte und Fiktion: Zum Funktionswandel des frühen amerikanischen Romans (History and fiction: The changing cultural functions of the early American novel; 2003) and coeditor of Key Concepts in American Cultural History (2007) and Native American Studies Across Time and Space: Essays on the Indigenous

Contributors  277

Americas (2010). He is currently coediting volume 6 of the Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, entitled The American Register and Other Writings, 1807–1810 (forthcoming from Bucknell University Press), and working on the study “Fictions of America: Early Short Narratives, Print Cultures, and the Transnational Geography of American Literature, 1620–1820.” Scheiding also directs two research projects on early American magazines, both funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Matthias Schönhofer has been a researcher with the DFG project Atlantische Korrespondenzen: Genese und Transformation deutsch-­amerikanischer Netzwerke 1740–1870 (Atlantic Correspondence: Genesis and Transformation of German American Networks, 1740–1870) at the University of Bamberg since 2008. His essay in this book is based on his soon-­to-­be-­published dissertation project, “Das Briefnetzwerk des deutsch-­amerikanischen Gelehrten Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Mühlenberg” (The correspondence network of the German American botanist Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Mühlenberg). Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at the University of Heidelberg. He has written on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including articles for Early American Literature and William and Mary Quarterly. His book Der Sündenfall der Nachahmung: Zum Problem der Mittelbarkeit im Werk Ralph Waldo Emersons (The original fall of imitation: The problem of mediacy in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson; 2007) is a comprehensive study of the coevolution of Emerson’s religious and aesthetic thought. Together with Reiner Smolinski, he edited Cotton Mather and “Biblia Americana”—America’s First Bible Commentary (2010). Stievermann is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled “The Ethnic Fantastic,” that examines issues of spirituality in contemporary ethnic minority literatures. He is also transcribing and editing volume 5 of Cotton Mather’s hitherto unpublished Biblia Americana, the first comprehensive Bible commentary produced in British North America. For the ten-­volume Biblia project as a whole, he serves as the executive editor. Marianne S. Wokeck is Chancellor’s Professor of History at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), where she teaches American history. She is the author of Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (1999), a reflection of her research interest in the

278  Contributors

history of the North Atlantic World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Other professional interests include scholarly editing, to which her additional publications speak: The Papers of William Penn, vols. 3 and 4 (1986–87); Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 1 (1991); The Letters of George Santayana, vol. 5 (in eight books) of The Works of George Santayana (2001–11); and Documentary Editing (the journal of the Association for Documentary Editing, 2001–7).

Index Africans, 108, 188, 289. See slaves Albany merchants, 70. See also Seven Partners Albany, 62, 65, 70–72, 94 almanacs, 136, 256, 267 Alsace, 4, 189, 197 Americanization, 1, 8, 10–11, 162, 167, 169 Americanness, 2, 7, 209, 240 Amish, 16, 207, 209–10, 217–18, 223, 225, 237, 239, 241 Amsterdam, 30, 43, 49, 52, 54, 153, 189, 196 Anabaptist, 30, 53, 210–12, 220 Anne, Queen of Great Britain, 28, 46, 48, 60, 65 Appalachian Mountains, 64, 102 Armbrüster, Anton and Gotthard, 123 Arnold, Gottfried, 122 Articles of Confederation, 238 Ash, Gregory, 253 Atlantic, 2, 6–8, 15, 24, 27–28, 30, 37–38, 44, 46, 55, 58, 87, 91, 119, 122, 150, 152, 156, 161, 187, 192, 253–54, 267 autobiographies, 14, 117, 136 Baden, 4, 189 Baldwin, William, 150, 166–67, 169 Barton, Benjamin Smith, 158, 163–64, 166–67 Bartram, John, 158 Bartram, William, 150, 158 Beauvois, Palisot, 168 Becker, Joseph, 98 Benezet, Anthony, 14, 122 Bern, 13, 43, 46–47, 52–54 Bethlehem, 224, 231, 233 Bible, 197, 253 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, 238 birth and baptismal certificates, 88, 110, 249, 253, 256, 261, 269 n. 9 Boyle, Henry, 47–49, 51 Brandenburg, 45, 54 Brant, Joseph, 105 Brechall, Martin, 249, 254

Brethren, 207, 210, 224–26. See also Church of the Brethren; Dunkers; Neutäufer Brickell, John, 162, 164 British North America, 1, 3–5, 7, 10, 12, 17 n. 1, 29, 44, 63, 68, 101, 246, 277 Bryan, George, 235–36 Bucks County, 102, 226 Burchard, Daniel, 53–54 Canaan, 27, 73 captivity narratives, 14, 117 Carolina(s), 5, 17, 26–28, 35–36, 38, 50, 60–61, 63–64, 75, 252, 254, 258, 261, 265 North Carolina, 3, 50, 54, 59, 61, 74, 75, 265 South Carolina, 75, 265 Catholics, 3, 53, 61, 189, 195 Cayugas (Indians), 65 chests, 88–89, 103–7 Christ, 16, 120, 124, 126–30, 132–34, 209–11, 216, 220, 263 Church of the Brethren, 210, 217, 223, 231–32. See also Brethern; Dunkers; Neutäufer church Germans, 16–17, 210, 213, 237, 252 Kirchenleute, 16, 210, 252 citizenship, 12, 16, 209, 213, 215–16, 222, 224, 227–28, 230, 232, 235–36, 238–41 Clark, William, 166 Collins, Zaccheus, 167 Comenius, Jan Amos, 119 commercium litterarium, 155 Commission for Foreign Needs, 49, 52, 54 Committee of Safety, 215, 217 commonplace books, 14, 117, 137 Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 210, 223, 228. See also Pennsylvania Congress, 227, 232. See also Continental Congress Conrad, Frederick August, 150, 171 n. 15, 172 n. 23 Continental Congress, 217, 221, 223, 226–27, 231 continental-plan house, 89

280  Index correspondence, 15, 52, 105, 121, 150–59, 161–67 Covenant Chain, 65–66 Cryptogamia, 157–58, 161, 167 cultural artifacts, 5, 8, 252 Curieuse Nachricht von Pennsylvania (Falckner), 63 Curtis, Moses Ashley, 169 Dallman, Gustavus, 162, 169 Dayrolle, James, 13, 43–44, 46–53 Defoe, Daniel, 27 Delawares (Indians), 70, 75–16 Denke, Christian Friedrich, 159, 161–62, 169 diaries, 14, 117, 136–38 Dick, John, 31 didactic literature, 14, 117 diplomats, 12–13, 33, 44–50, 52–55, 76 Dock, Christopher, 137 Dulheuer, Heinrich, 258–59 Dunkers, 4, 14, 16, 117, 121, 207, 209–10, 220, 223, 225, 237–38. See also Brethren; Church of the Brethren Durand, Elias, 169 Dutch, 9, 35, 43, 47–49, 52–55, 60, 62–63, 65–67, 69, 73, 95, 100, 106, 108–9, 112, 117, 190. See also Mennonites, Dutch Dutch States General, 13, 43, 52–53 ecumenical spirit, 122 Ehle, John Jacob, 108 Ehle, Peter, 103, 108 Elliott, Stephen, 165–67 emigration, 4, 26–27, 29, 31, 36, 38, 45, 192 England, 3, 27, 45–49, 54, 61–62, 108, 119, 124, 168–69, 208, 232, 253 Ephrata Cloister, 14, 117, 258–59 ethnicity, 2, 7, 9–11, 31–32, 88, 201, 267 ethnicization, 10–11, 15, 119, 193 ethnography, 6, 14, 117, 248 Ettwein, John, 224–26, 230–33, 235, 237 Fabricius, Sebastian Andreas, 153, 155–56, 163 Falckner, Daniel, 27 Curieuse Nachricht von Pennsylvania, 63 Flurküchenhaus, 89, 97 folk art, 16–17, 247–50, 253, 256, 258 Fraktur, 110, 248–49, 252–55, 259, 261, 263–64 Digital Collection, 252, 269 n. 11 France, 45–47 Francke, August Hermann, 123, 126, 153 Franklin, Benjamin, 10, 121 freedom, 4, 86, 189, 209, 213–14, 219–21, 225, 231–32, 234, 238

French, 9, 45 French and Indian War, 16, 119, 121, 211, 214–16. See also Seven Years’ War Frey, Hendrick, 103. See also Hendrick Frey house Friends, 126, 199, 207–8, 214–15, 223. See Quakers Funk, Henry, 197, 229–30 Gabriel, Johann Peter, 150, 153 Gent, Jan van, 49, 51–53 German Flatts, 71–72, 76, 78–79, 93–94, 103 German identity, 10, 13, 15, 185–86, 189–90, 267 German Peace churches, 15–16, 207, 210–12, 214–16, 219, 223, 227, 229, 231, 233, 237, 239–41 German Protestants, 47, 121 German-American folk culture, 9 German-language literature, 14, 117–20, 135, 137–38 Germanness, 9, 11–12, 15 Germantown, 102, 125 Graffenried, Christoph von 61, 74 Gray, Asa, 168–69 Grube, Johann Adam, 137 Guyon, Madame, 123 The Hague, 13, 43, 51–54 Hall, Frederick Augustus, 169 Hamburg, 30, 53–54 Hamilton, William, 158, 166–67 Hanau, 4, 189 Harrsch, Joshua (also Josua), 5, 26, 28, 35, 39 n. 12, 60. See also Kocherthal, Josua Hartmannsdorf, 93 Hartmannsdorf house, 94, 95, 100, 109 Hedwig, Johann, 157–62 Hedwig, Romanus Adolf, 165 Hehl, Matthew (bishop), 224–25, 230 Helmuth, Justus Heinrich Christian, 151, 153, 155 Hendrick Frey house, 96, 108 Herkimer, Johan Jost, 97–98, 101, 103 Herrenhuter. See Moravian; Unitas Fratrum Hershey, Benjamin, 214, 220 Hesse, 4, 189 dukes of Hesse, 43, 47, 54 Hoffmann, Georg Franz, 156–60, 165 Holland, 45, 196, 253 Holy Roman Empire, 4, 59, 210 Hopkins, Samuel, 121 Hosack, David, 166

Index  281 Hudson River, 3, 62, 64–66, 85, 106 Huguenots, 60 Hungary, 4 Hunter, Robert (governor), 3, 61–62, 65–68, 75 Hutton, William 253 hymns, 14, 123–24, 196, 263, 267 Ausbund (hymn collection), 211 hymnbooks 5, 148–49, 211 identity, 2–3, 7–13, 15–16, 31–32, 37, 46, 55, 77–78, 87, 151, 184–91, 194, 202, 209, 211, 213–14, 239–41, 247, 249–50, 252, 254, 265, 267 immigrants, 5, 8–9, 11, 15, 24–26, 28–29, 31–33, 36–38, 39 n. 10, 44, 46–52, 54–55, 58–59, 73–74, 79, 86–87, 89, 93, 103, 108–9, 117, 121, 125, 136–37, 183–86, 188–94, 197–201, 213, 243 n. 13, 265 indentured servitude, 31, 201 indigenous tribes 5, 7 in-group formation, 10 Ireland, 3, 46, 50, 61 Iroquois (Indians), 13, 65–67, 69, 72–73, 75–79, 102–3, 108–9 Five Nations of the Iroquois, 65 Iroquois diplomacy, 72 Jansen, Reynier, 123 Jefferson, Thomas, 163–64, 168, 238 Johnson, John, 105 Johnson, Sir William, 97 Jonestown, 107 Kampmann, Frederick 158, 161 Keith, William (governor), 70, 75, 192–93 Kelpius, Johannes, 14, 120, 123–35, 138, 145 “Die klägliche Stimme der verborgenen Liebe,” 128 Kurtzer Begriff, 123 Keppele, John Henry, 153 King George, 228 Kirchenleute. See church Germans Klock, Johannes, 103, 108 Kniskern, Jacob, 103–5 Kniskern, Elizabet and Margreda, 103 Kniskern, Johann Peter, 104 Kniskerndorf, 93 Kocherthal Josua, 5, 26, 35, 60 Ausführlich- und Umständlicher Bericht, 5, 12, 27, 36, 59 golden book, 26, 35, 60–61, 86 Kostenbader, Elisabetha, 254–57, 263

Kraichgau, 5, 27–28, 35, 60, 189 Kramsch, Samuel, 158, 161, 169 Krebs, Friederich, 249, 254–56, 258, 260 Kriebel, Georg, 229–30, 233 Kunze, Johann Christopher, 151, 153–54, 162 Lancaster, 93, 102, 106, 110, 151–56, 161, 164, 216–17, 258, 265 Laumann, Ludwig, 156 Lebanon, 102, 183 Lehigh County, 102 Levan, Sebastian, 233 Lewis, Meriwether, 163, 166 liberty of conscience, 209, 214, 219, 221, 223, 225–26, 231–32, 238–40 liberty (religious), 117, 213, 219, 221, 234, 238–39 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, 238 Limbach, Frederick, 226, 229–30, 235–36 Linnaeus, Carl, 154, 157–58 Livingston, Robert, 62 London, 3, 13, 27–29, 35, 43–46, 50–51, 54, 60–62, 74, 85, 123, 155, 157, 166, 196 Louis XIV, King of France, 45–46 Louisiana Purchase, 163 Loyalist, 79, 105, 207, 221, 223, 228. See also Revolution, American Lutherans, 4–5, 15–16, 24, 34–35, 60, 120, 123, 125, 150–53, 189, 194–97, 199–201, 210, 213, 248, 252 Madison, James, 238 Mahicans (Indians), 64, 66 Marshall, Humphrey, 158 martyrdom, 16 nonresistant, 210–11, 220, 225, 231, 240 martyrologies, 14, 117 Maryland, 17, 252, 258, 260–61 material culture, 5, 13–14, 16, 32, 85–89, 103–4, 106, 110, 112, 120, 249, 265 McMahon, Bernard, 166 Meier, Eron, 249–50, 254 Melchior, Heinrich, 151, 153, 195 memoirs, 14, 117, 136 Mennonites, 4, 13, 16, 43, 47, 49, 52–54, 121, 189, 207, 209–10, 214, 217–18, 220, 223, 225, 229, 231, 236–39, 241 Brethren, 30 Dutch, 43, 47–49, 52–55 migration of 1711, 52 Swiss, 46–47, 49, 52–55 Michel, Franz Louis, 61 middle colonies, 1–5, 9–10, 59, 253

282  Index migration, 3, 5, 10, 12–13, 23–29, 31, 33–38, 39 n. 10, 44, 46, 49, 52, 55, 68, 74, 79, 85–86, 138, 253, 268 mass migration, 1709, 3–4, 12, 23–25, 29, 36–38, 40 n. 18, 44, 46, 50, 73. See also Palatines migrations, 1709 and 1711, 44, 47, 59–60, 63 Militia Act, 214, 222–27, 229, 232 Miller, Henry, 123, 136 Mittelberger, Gottlieb, 1–2, 8 Mohawks (Indians), 8, 12–13, 58–59, 62–63, 65–79, 112 Mohawk River, 66, 70–72, 76, 93, 97, 101, 103 Mohawk Valley, 13, 59, 69, 71, 73, 75–77, 85–86, 93–94, 96, 101–3, 105–9 monolingualism, 7, 14 Montreal, 65–66 Moravians, 4, 14, 16, 30, 73, 117, 121–22, 126, 136, 158–59, 161–62, 169, 207, 209–10, 218, 224–27, 231–32, 235, 237, 239. See also Unitas Fratrum Mühlenberg, Gotthilf Henry Ernst, 8, 14–15, 150–70, 197 “American Linnaeus,” 14, 150, 168 Catalogus Plantarum, 151 Descriptio Uberior Graminum et Plantarum, 151 Index Florae Lancastriensis, 158 Münsterites (radical anabaptists), 53 Murray, William, 110–11 mysticism, 119, 122–23, 132–33, 210 apophatic, 132–33 cataphatic language, 132 mystical literature (German), 122 via negativa, 132 via positiva, 133 naming variations, 107–8 nation, 2, 7–9, 16, 23, 65–66, 78, 95, 108, 167, 184, 190, 237, 241, 249 Native Americans, 13, 32, 58–59, 63–69, 75, 78–79, 108, 117, 122, 136, 193, 239. See also specific tribe names Nebe, Josef Friedrich, 159–60, 162–63, 165, 168 Netherlands, 44, 46–47, 49, 51, 54–55 Neuse River, 61, 74 Neutäufer, 210. See also Church of the Brethern; Dunkers New England, 2, 14, 31, 118, 120, 124–27, 251, 267 New Jersey, 17, 62, 161, 190, 252, 255 newlanders, 33–34 North Carolina. See Carolina(s) Nova Scotia, 31

Oberdeutsches Haus, 90 Oberly, Waschengton, 261–63 Ohio Valley, 76 Old World, 3, 5, 9, 11, 32, 88–89, 153, 248, 253 Oneida Lake, 72 Oneidas (Indians), 13, 58–59, 65, 70, 72–74, 76–79 Onondagas (Indians), 65 Ontario, 237, 265 othering, 10, 25, 78, 85, 185–86, 193, 198 Otto, Johann Heinrich, 254, 258–59 Palatinate, 3–5, 23–24, 36, 47, 52, 54, 60, 189–90, 193, 196–97 Palatines, 3–5, 8, 12–13, 24, 27–29, 43, 47–48, 50–52, 54–55, 58–79, 85–87, 89, 91–97, 99–101, 103, 106, 108–10, 112, 185, 190, 192–93 Palatine exodus, 35–36 Tulpehocken Palatines, 70, 75–76 Palmer, Hester (Quaker preacher), 126–27 Pasche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 155–56 Pastorius, Francis Daniel, 3, 27, 125–26, 136–37 “Bee-Hive,” 136 New Primmer, 136 Patriots, 16, 207–9, 215–16, 218–22, 227–28, 235. See also Revolution, American Peck, William, 164 Pemberton, Israel, 119, 121–22 Penn, William, 27, 237–38 Pennsylvania, 2, 4–5, 10–13, 16–17, 27, 30, 37–38, 59, 69–70, 74–76, 85, 87–95, 97, 100–103, 106–7, 109–10, 121–23, 125–26, 136, 138, 151, 153, 155, 161, 183, 185–86, 189–94, 196–202, 207–11, 213–16, 219–21, 223, 227–32, 234–35, 237–40, 248, 252–53, 255–58, 261, 263–65. See also Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Assembly, 214, 217, 220, 226, 228, 23 Pennsylvania Bill of Rights, 237–38 Pennsylvania Charter, 209, 218, 221 Penn’s Charter, 237 Pennsylvania Constitution, 209, 222, 237, 239–40 Pennsylvania Convention, 218, 221, 233 Pennsylvania Dutch, 9, 16, 32, 190, 265 Pennsylvania Germans, 2, 6, 14, 17, 32, 70, 88–89, 91–92, 96, 99, 110, 112, 120, 124, 185, 190–91, 210, 246–53, 255, 257–58, 260–61, 263–67 Pennsylvania Supreme Court, 230 Persoon, Christiaan Hendrik, 160–61, 165, 168

Index  283 Peters, Gustav, 263 Philadelphia, 15, 17, 70, 92, 123, 151, 153–55, 158, 166, 183–202, 208, 228, 252–53, 257, 265 philanthropy, 24, 27, 30–31, 37 pietism, 8, 122, 189, 126, 153, 156, 163, 189, 210, 212 Lutheran, 120, 125, 126 pietists (radical), 6, 14, 117, 120, 122–23, 125–26, 128, 210 Pisquetomen, 16 Pomp, Thomas, 257, 264 preference falsification, 12, 25–27 Presbyterians, 5, 183–84, 194, 200 promotional literature, 14, 117, 138 Protestants, 3, 28–29, 46–47, 50, 52–53, 55, 61, 66, 121–26, 193 Prussian King, 43, 54–55 Puritan, 14, 118, 120, 124–25, 127–28 Pursh, Traugott Frederick, 165–66, 169 push-and-pull factors, 4, 26, 37 Quakers, 5, 121–23, 189, 199, 201, 207–9, 214–15, 218, 223, 238–39 Friendly Association, 119, 123 Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace, 121, 214 Quebec, 65 quietism, 123, 126 Rafinesque-Schmaltz, Constantine, 162–64 Reading, 94, 110, 218, 255, 263 redemptioner, 31, 198 Reformed, 4, 15–16, 24, 34–35, 125, 183, 189, 210, 213, 248, 252–53, 257, 264 Reformed Church, 16, 52, 54, 103, 190, 194–97, 200, 261 religion, 2, 15, 46, 52, 54, 73, 119, 122, 125, 135, 187, 189–91, 196, 200, 216 republic of letters, 119, 151, 155, 164–65, 169 Revolution, American, 4, 12, 15, 79, 100, 101, 104, 201, 207, 209, 211, 267 Revolutionary period, 11, 208, 218, 221. See Articles of Confederation; Loyalist; Patriots; Tory Rhine lands, 23, 26, 29, 30, 33, 37 Rhineland, 4, 43, 63, 189, 252 Ritter, George, 48 Ritter, John (Johann), 263 Romich, Elizabeth, 258 Rotterdam, 2, 29–30, 34–35, 43–44, 46–49, 51–52, 60, 123, 153, 183, 189, 200 Runckel, Johann Ludwig, 13, 43, 47–49, 52–53 Rush, Benjamin, 166

Saint Lawrence River, 65 Sassoonan, 75 Sauer (also Saur), Christopher, 121, 123, 136–37, 189–192, 202, 208, 233 Saxony, 30, 210 Schlatter, Michael, 196, 253 Schmettau, Baron von, 54 Schmidt, Johann Friedrich, 153, 155 Schmidt, Johannes Michael (also Smith, John M.), 107 Schoharie Historical Society, 94 Schoharie valley, 13, 62–63, 65–70, 73, 86–87, 93, 101–5, 109 Schöpf, Johann David, 152, 154–56, 158–59, 162 Schrader, Heinrich Adolf, 165 Schreber, Johann Christian Daniel Edler von, 155–59, 161–62, 165 Schultz, Christopher, 14, 119, 121–22, 214–15, 218–20, 223, 225, 229–31, 233–34, 237 Schultze, Christopher Emanuel, 153–54, 162, 168 Schwägrichen, Christian Friedrich, 160–61, 165 Schwenkfeld, Caspar von Ossig, 122, 210 Schwenkfelder Church, 211 Schwenkfelders, 4, 14, 16, 30, 117, 119, 121–22, 207, 209, 214, 218, 223, 225, 229, 231–32, 241 Scots Irish, 5, 9, 106, 184, 188, 195 Seltzer, Christian, 107 Senecas (Indians), 65 sermons, 14, 27, 40 n. 16, 117, 196 settlers, 3, 5, 7, 10, 13, 31, 36, 58–65, 68–70, 73–77, 79, 86–87, 89, 93–94, 101–3, 108, 110, 185, 188, 198, 237, 252 Seven Partners, 70 Seven Years’ War, 12–13, 59, 74–76, 79, 97–98, 103, 112, 213 Siegfried, Samuel, 263–64 Silesia, 30, 231 Simmendinger, Ulrich, 86 slaves, 5, 7, 28, 108, 190, 240. See also indentured servitude Slyke, Johanna Van, 108 Smith, James Edward, 157–61, 168–69 Smith, John M. (also Johannes Michael Schmidt), 107 Smith, William, 10 South Carolina. See Carolina(s) Spencer, Charles, 50 spiritual poetry, 127, 134–35 Sprengel, Kurt Polycarp Joachim, 160–61, 165 Stiekel, Joseph, 249 Stoddard, Solomon, 127

284  Index Stone Arabia, 70–71, 93, 103 Stoppelberg, Gottlieb Friedrich, 156, 159, 163 stove plates, 101–2 Susquehanna River, 76 Susquehanna Valley, 75 Swartz, Olof, 168 Switzerland, 4, 13, 30, 43, 48, 54, 189–90, 210 Taufscheine, 5–6, 16–17, 32, 247–60, 263–67 “Flying Angel Artist,” 260–61 Geburts- und Taufschein, 254, 256, 263, 268 n. 3 “Honor Father and Mother” (Ehre Vater und Mutter), 265 Tauler, Johannes, 122 Taylor, Edward, 14, 120, 124–25, 127–34 Meditation 1.1, 128 Preparatory Meditations, 124, 127–28, 144 Taylor-Stoddard controversy 135 Test Act, 228–33, 237, 240 Thirty Years’ War, 45, 119 Tiononderoge, 66, 68, 71 Toren, Hendrick, 49, 51–53 Torrey, John, 168 Tory, 207, 229, 233, 235. See also Revolution, American trade networks, 8, 15, 37 transatlantic, 2, 7, 12, 139, 153, 156, 159, 168, 185, 208, 246, 251, 253 communication, 37, 150, 165, 169 migration, 24–25, 31, 36–37, 163, 268 networks, 5, 11, 15, 19 n. 7, 29, 118 translation, 64, 119–23, 135, 137–38, 252 translingual literary comparisons, 135 travel narratives, 14, 138 travel writings, 5

Tulpehocken Creek, 70 Tuscaroras (Indians), 74–75 union church (Gemeinschaftliche Kirchen), 252 Unitas Fratrum, 210, 224, 226, 231–32 United Colonies, 227 United Provinces, 29 Unity of Brethren, 210 Van Braght, Thieleman, 211, 220 Virginia, 17, 64, 75, 238, 252, 261, 265 Vleck, Jacob van, 159, 161–62 Vrooman, Adam, 69 Wagner, Johan Peter, 94, 97, 103 Waldo, Samuel, 31 wampum, 72 War of Spanish Succession, 4, 46–47 Weiser, Conrad, 68–70, 76 Weiser, Johann, 68 Westerwald, 4 Wetzel, John, 226, 229–30, 235–35 Whig, 208, 214, 216, 219 whiteness, 59, 77 Will, William, 252–53 Willdenow, Karl Ludwig, 160–61, 165 Wistar, Caspar, 166, 191–92, 202 Witt, Christopher, 123 Württemberg, 4, 47, 189, 199 Zeisberger, David, 137 Zeller, Heinrich, 103 Ziegenhagen, Friedrich Michael, 155 Zimmermann, Johann Jakob, 123 Zinzendorf, Nicolas Ludwig von 126, 210