USA > Pennsylvania > Chronicles of Pennsylvania from the English revolution to the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1688-1748, Vol. II > Part 6
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The most numerous of those opponents of Rome who have never impressed their idea upon a National Church have been the Antipædobaptists, or opposers of infant baptism, deeming baptism in a state of actual or ripe faith required. They have arisen independently at various places and times. Their refusal to initiate children as members of Christ's Church, and their re- baptizing those so initiated, horrified Lutheran and Calvinistic, as well as Roman and Greek, theologians; and therefore there has been hardly a region in Chris- tendom except Pennsylvania and Rhode Island where these contraveners of the general ecclesiastical law have not been punished at some time or other as crimi- nals. In tracing the history of the various sects of this kind, it should be borne in mind that mere agree- ment, even close agreement, is not sufficient, without further evidence, to give the opprobrium or the honor of relationship as founders or successors or one teach- er's fellow disciples. Any two thinkers, particularly
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those who must derive their premises from one store- house, the Bible, may reach the same conclusion without communication with each other, just as they may reach different ones after comparing notes.
It has been shown in preceding chapters that Rhode Islanders and Englishmen and Welshmen calling them- selves Baptists came to Pennsylvania, and planted several congregations. These Antipædobaptists had embraced the doctrine of the necessity of immersion, and so practised rebaptizing, even upon those sprinkled when adults. Immersion has been shown to have been adopted by a branch of the followers of George Keith. It was not insisted upon by the earliest Germans who denied the validity of the baptism of infants. There will be occasion later to speak of various Germans who were immersionists.
There do not appear to have been in the days of Luther any large companies which were Baptist socie- ties pure and simple, i.e. started for the purpose of administering what was deemed proper baptism. The name "Anabaptists," or rebaptizers, was applied to certain persons of that day who marked themselves off by a second baptism. These came together to repro- duce the Apostolic community, chiefly for correcting the injustice to the poor, and furthermore to withdraw themselves from the ungodly, in anticipation of the im- minent Millenium. The primary idea would have caused the initiation by either sprinkling or immersion of those baptized as adults, as well as of those bap- tized as children, but the baptism of infants was classi- fied by these extreme dissenters from the old Church among her corrupt and vain practices. The efforts of some of these Anabaptists, beginning with the Peasants' War, to revolutionize society by force, and, moreover, the excesses of certain leaders, have cast discredit upon the name, while the mere adoption by many of those who did not baptize infants of the prin-
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ciple that goods and possessions should be in common, and that usury, tithes, and tribute should be abolished, and that magistrates would be useless in the Kingdom of Christ about to be established, was a cause other than ecclesiastical why the civil authority took meas- ures of suppression.
The great preacher among the non-militant believers in most of these theories, and the gatherer to such com- pany of a number who had been brought up as Walden- sians, was Menno Simons, a native of Friesland, who was ordained a Roman Catholic priest after Luther started the Reformation, but who resigned, and sub- mitted to rebaptism and reordination about 1536, and the date of whose death is given as Jany. 13, 1559. Gaining proselytes by softening down some of the doc- trines, and getting rid by vigorous discipline of the dissolute, of some blasphemous pretenders to Divine favor, and of the refractory, he made the Mennonisten, Menists, or Mennonites, as the Anabaptists who did not immerse came to be called, a widespread denomination, the congregations of which were independent one of another. Their officers when they developed their polity were presbyters (some called bishops), teachers, and deacons, or presbyters (none called bishops) and deacons. The Mennonites excluded from membership persons employed in civil government, disapproved of capital punishment, would not take oaths, and refused to bear arms, and thus were deemed "undesirable" inhabitants by secular politicians, after most states had ceased to enforce strictly theological or ecclesiastical ideas. Except in the peculiarities mentioned above, and in general washing of one another's feet, and in a vary- ing degree of simplicity in living, the Mennonites were rather in agreement with the Reformed. The repre- sentatives of Mennonite congregations of the Nether- lands, including that at Crefelt, subscribed to articles of faith at Dordrecht in 1632, expressing the funda-
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mentals of Orthodox Christianity, and acknowledging the duty to pay taxes. The same acknowledgment was in the Confession furnished to the Regents and Burgo- masters of Amsterdam in 1710 by the Mennonite preachers from Switzerland.
Persecution of the Mennonites ceased in the United Netherlands a few years after Menno's death, but at times during the next hundred years drove persons from Switzerland and certain parts of Germany; so that by the time our history opens there were Mennon- ite families at Crefeld and in its vicinity not of local origin. Then or later, persons born in Switzerland may have been there. Swiss or children of Swiss were in Alsace and the Palatinate, and these contributed to the earlier Continental emigration to Pennsylvania. De- parture from other countries than Switzerland was not directly caused by active religious persecution, but, before 1688, by a desire to seek temporal advantage, and afterwards primarily by the devastation made by the wars of Louis XIV.
Hon. Samuel W. Pennypacker, in his articles The Settlement of Germantown and The Dutch Patroons of Pennsylvania, has told how the Crefeld group at Ger- mantown received accessions from various places of the Lower Rhine region and the Low Countries, Men- nonites and Quakers predominating, Willem Ruettyn- huysen building in 1690 on a branch of the Wissahickon the first paper mill in America, and how Van Bebber's Township on the Skippack Creek (covering part of the present Perkiomen Township) was taken up by Men- nonites and others, Matthias Van Bebber conveying in 1727 all the unsold part of his 6166 acres to Lodowick Christian Sprogell from Quedlinburg, Holland. Spro- gell, we find, had been naturalized by an Act of the British Parliament. He gave on Dec. 24, 1728, a large collection of books to the library of Christ Church, Philadelphia. His widow and children conveyed in
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1731 all that remained unsold of the aforesaid land to Hendrick Pannebecker (now Pennypacker), being about 2800 acres. The aforesaid Ruettynhuysen, of whom and whose descendants, the Rittenhouse Family, Daniel K. Cassel has written a History, was a native of Mühlheim on the Rahr, and took oath on June 23, 1678, to become a citizen of Amsterdam, of which Cassel prints the certificate; which oath, it has been overlooked, would indicate that he was not then a Mennonite, unless it can be supposed that the clerk obligingly certified the promise as an oath.
Of all foreigners who came while William Penn was Proprietary, only the Mennonites, and not including the very earliest of them, had a religious organization separating them from the English. Daniel K. Cassel's History of the Mennonites mentions the arrival in Ger- mantown in 1700 of four families, two single men, and one widow from the Hamburg-Altona Mennonite Con- gregation, and also mentions a letter to the heads of said families and one of the single men from the Bishop and three ministers of the aforesaid Congregation, authoriz- ing, in response to an appeal, the installation of Ritting- huysen, or Ruettynhuysen, as Bishop for these Ameri- cans. The Mennonites, separated as they were from the Quakers by adherence to the sacraments, from Lutherans, Anglicans, and Presbyterians by rejecting infant baptism, and from the Baptists by not prac- tising immersion, had become sufficiently numerous by the end of 1702 to have a site in Germantown secured for a church. Edwards gives the date as May 23, 1708, for the organization of the congregation at Germantown with members headed by Rittenhouse, the aforesaid Bishop, and Jacob Godshalk (formerly Gaet- schalck), a preacher who came in 1702. In 1708 there was built in Germantown (on the site aforesaid) the first Mennonite house of worship, as far as we know, in the United States. Another was built at Skippack
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in 1725, on a tract of 100 acres conveyed by Matthias Van Bebber in 1717 to Henry Sellen, Claus Jansen, Henry Kolb, Martin Kolb, Jacob Kolb, Michael Ziegler, and Hermannus Kuster and the survivor in fee, in trust for a school house and burial ground for Bebber's Township.
All foreigners who dwelt in or near the city of Philadelphia became practically Englishmen. The in- habitants of New York, like the Swedes and Dutch on the Delaware, had become subjects of the King of England at the conquest. The early settlers of Ger- mantown and vicinity and Johannes Bleikers of Bucks Co. were by name in the Act of Assembly of Sep. 29, 1709, mentioned in a preceding chapter, empowered to hold land, and to sue and defend actions, by making before Mch. 1, 1710, the declarations of faith allowed to those who could not swear, or by otherwise qualify- ing as the Court of Quarter Sessions should require. Special acts were subsequently passed for naturalizing certain individuals. As some of these natives of High or Low Germany moved towards the settlements of those arriving later, the process of assimilating them with the English ceased; but in two or three generations the posterity of the rest married into the English race.
Switzerland appears to have sent the earliest emi- grants to those parts of the province where a colony of alien nationality could live in isolation. No longer moving as adventurous individuals, or in company with the residents of an adopted land, natives of the Cantons after 1705 were leaving them, and seeking a district in such numbers as would make a Swiss quarter or township.
Those who found their way to Pennsylvania, were, like the earlier settlers of the race, mostly Mennonites. The measures repeatedly taken until after the death of Penn, particularly by the Canton of Berne, to force the Mennonites to apostatize, were causing them to flee,
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and the ravages of war were sending them further than the former stopping-places of the persecuted. Depor- tation was one of the measures employed by the afore- said Canton, involving the finding of a country to re- ceive such a peculiar people, and we are told that the government employed agents for this purpose. Penn was looking out for such opportunities to get settlers. He entered into negotiations about 1703 to secure Men- nonites or other Protestants from Switzerland, and, as an investigator, a Swiss, Francis Louis (Luys or Lud- wig) Michel (called in our records Lewis Mitchell), who was some time a partner or assistant of Christopher de Graffenried, made at least two visits to Pennsyl- vania, and took notice of the stories or indications of ore in the unappropriated lands. The stopping of his exploration on the branches of the Potomac has been mentioned in another chapter. The settlers next to be mentioned do not seem to have been sent by him.
It is suggested in Dr. J. G. De Hoop Scheffer's article on The Mennonite Emigration to Pennsylvania (Penna. Mag., Vol. II, p. 117) that the nine or ten families re- ported on April 8, 1709, as having arrived at Rotter- dam from the neighbourhood of Worms and Franken- thal were the eight families spoken of in a letter from London of Aug. 6 as having gone to Pennsylvania. A couple of months before the latter date, the Yearly Meeting of the Quakers in London contributed £50 to "Mennonites of the Palatinate who had fled from the persecution of the Calvinists in Switzerland," and Penn, on 4mo. 26, speaks of the Palatines, divers Men- nonites, coming over in the same vessel as his letter. So it is no violent supposition to identify the heads of these eight families with John Rudolph Bundely, Mar- tin Kendig, Jacob Muller, Hans Herr, Martin Oberholtz, Hans Funk, Michael Oberholtz, and Wendel Bowman, called Swissers in the warrant hereafter mentioned, but referred to as Palatines in the accounts of Penn's real
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estate agents. These immigrants proceeded to the fron- tier, and were the first group of white men to settle within what is now Lancaster County. Subsequently they obtained a warrant, which is printed in Rev. Dr. J. I. Mombert's Authentic History of Lancaster County, p. 414, and bore date, 8mo. 10, 1710, for 10,000 acres, to be divided among them, on the northwesterly side of a hill about twenty miles east of Connystogoe (sic) near the head of Pecquin (sic) Creek. Bundely was the leader of the party; and a warrant, dated the day following, for him alone for 500 acres adjoining said tract, was granted to him on very easy terms, men- tioned in the Penn day-book, "in recompense for ser- vices done by his being instrumental in bringing over sundry families of Switzers to this province." The large tract was surveyed on Oct. 23, and the 500 acres, about the same time, and the surveyor measured also a tract of 2000 acres which were engaged for Maria Warenbur, widow, and finally patented to her two sons, Daniel Fierre and Isaac Le Fevre. According to the Appendices to Rupp's List, hereafter quoted, these three had gone to New York for the settlement started under Rev. Joshua Kockerthal, a Lutheran, but the widow's certificate shows her to have been a French Calvinist. The accounts of the said real estate agents say that she also was. "late of the Palatinate of the Rhine." Rupp, in his History of Lancaster County, mentions among the settlers at this time Hans Meylin and his son Martin, and says that the company had Hans Herr as pastor. Rupp, in his List, names thirty- seven foreigners in 1709 in what was afterwards Lan- caster County, and twenty-three others there in 1712. Stophel, or Christopher, Franciscus took up land in or before 1712. The large district received the name of Strasburg or New Strasburg, which is no longer pre- served for a township. As mentioned in another chap- ter, Gov. Gookin, at Conestoga in June, 1711, told the
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Indians at Conestoga that William Penn required of them friendship for the Palatines settled near Pequea, and the Indians replied that where the Palatines were, they would be safe. Hans Meylin, called Mayly in the day-book, took up 700 acres in Strasburg at the end of 1713.
Perhaps it was in the summer of 1709, when Michel was in London, that Penn made a contract with him "for lands &ct." for fifty or sixty Swiss Mennonites. Fearing that when these arrived in Holland the Estates General would not let them pass to Pennsylvania, Penn wrote to Lord Townshend on 2mo. 4, 1710, to have such action prevented or changed.
This company may have been in view when Penn ordered Gookin, as the latter told the Indians at the aforesaid interview at Conestoga, to acquaint them that Penn was about to settle some people on the branches of the Potomac. The Indians expressed fear that they would be blamed if any injury happened to such set- tlers, the location being in the path of the war with the Tuscaroras and other Indians. This project of a set- tlement beyond the Susquehanna was not carried out.
Martin Kendig (name spelt variously in the records, probably Kündig) returned to Europe, and, perhaps not confining his solicitations to Mennonites, brought back Swiss and Germans, some of the latter being of Swiss descent; and Rupp names a large number of residents under the date of 1719. The minutes of the Commissioners of Property (Penna. Archives, 2nd Series, Vol. 19, p. 574) say that Samuel Guildin, "late of the Canton of Bern, in Switzerland, Minister to the Switzers," agreed to take up 800 acres in Strasburg, near the rest of his countrymen; and a warrant for the same was granted on 1, 1, 1713-4. He had been min- ister of the three chief Reformed congregations in the city of Bern, but had been transferred to a less impor- tant position by the authorities, because of objection,
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it is said, to the doctrinal leaning of his preaching. Perhaps he was inclined to the Mennonites. He did not pay for this land, and it was patented to Kündig. Gulden (as the name is generally given) took up his residence with the hermits of the Wissahickon. In the latter part of 1717, about 6000 acres about the Cones- toga and Pequea Creeks were distributed by warrants and surveys among "relations, friends, or acquaint- ance" "lately arrived" of "Martin Kundigg, Hans Heer, and Hans Ffunk," "the Palatines," say Minute Books H and I of the Commissioners of Property. The recipients were honestly warned, that, under certain laws of England, if in force in Pennsylvania, aliens could not transmit to their children, nor convey to others, unless an Act of Assembly should be passed conferring such capacity. The dependence upon the justice of the legislature turned out to be well founded. Apparently all the former subjects of the Emperor of Germany in Lancaster County who were Protestants, and came between 1700 and 1718, and acquired land, were naturalized by Act of 1729.
As among all those called Mennonites there had been differences as to the effect of excommunication &ct., so we are told that in 1620 the non-immersing Ana- baptists of Switzerland had divided according to the strictness with which the idea of separation and demarcation from the world was followed. As a ten- dency to assimilate in life with persons outside had gained headway in Switzerland and the Palatinate by 1690, Jacob Ammon, or Amen, a native of Amenthal, Switzerland, some time resident in Alsace, undertook in that year to restore the former simplicity and strictness, he and Christian Blank, as elders, expelling those who did not appear, and prove conformity to the old principles (see Barthinius L. Wick's pamphlet on the Amish Mennonites). Those who adhered to Amen became known as the Amish. After fashion in
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Europe and European colonies had abolished beards, the men of this sect made a remarkable appearance, from their rule, still followed, of never shaving. The Amish of Pennsylvania of our own day wear a particu- lar dress, using hooks and eyes instead of such orna- ments as buttons. Amish probably were among the Swiss or Palatines arriving in Pennsylvania at the times before mentioned, if they did not comprise all of some of the groups of Mennonites : but they are first mentioned in our records in the days of Gookin's suc- cessor, Lt. Gov. Keith. Under date of May 20, 1718, there was a petition to the Proprietor and his Deputy Governor from the Amish, saying that they had been invited by William Penn, but their faith had not been respected, they did not vote, nor enter courts of justice, nor hold office, and they provided for their own poor, and so they thought it a grievance that they should be subject to military and civil jurisdiction, and, as appears to be the point of the matter, that they should pay for the maintenance of convicts. The conciliatory Lieutenant-Governor sent orders to mitigate the civil duties imposed upon the peace sects in the Conestoga Valley.
The tie of religion connected the Swiss with some of the residents of Germantown and vicinity, tending to encourage particularly those furthest from the city in holding aloof from the Quakers, and clinging to the German tongue. The Amish and the other Mennonites worshipped together, and the signers in 1727 of the Confession of Faith, published in English the following year at Philadelphia, representing five congregations, Skippack, Germantown, Conestoga, Great Swamp, and Manatant (Manatawny), seem to have come with vari- ous immigrations. We may assume to have been a Mennonite, although not of Berne, Jacob Stauber, late of Zürich, Switzerland, who received a warrant in 2nd
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mo., 1713, for 500 acres on or near the west side of the Schuylkill between French Creek and the River.
The movement of people from the valley of the Rhine in the latter years of Penn, and after his death, was not confined to Mennonites, nor to Swiss or the children of Swiss. What inhabitants, native or newly come, remained in the Palatinate after the attempt of the French in 1688 to make it a wilderness, and the second invasion by them in 1692, and the measures of the Elector Johann Wilhelm against Protestants, were again in danger from fire and sword by the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1707, Marshall Villars came with an army, and the Protestants, with those of Swabia, began to flee, although Johann Wilhelm by edict threatened death to those who attempted to emi- grate from his dominions. About the beginning of 1708, a small number of Lutherans from the lower Palatinate reached London "in the utmost want," being reduced "by the ravages committed by the French," praying the Queen of England to send them to one of the American plantations. Those being sent to New York, other Palatinates, after arriving at Rot- terdam, proceeded to England, where an Act of Natu- ralization, passed in 1708, encouraged such as were Protestants, and would take the oaths, and receive the sacrament, to settle. Committees and societies in the Netherlands aided the poorer ones to leave that stop- ping-place speedily. In the early months of 1709, many thousands came to London. In the summer of that year, Michel and Christopher de Graffenried were in London with several hundred Swiss refugees (see Rev. Sanford H. Cobb's The Story of the Palatines, p. 89) : and probably Penn induced some, preferably, however, the Mennonites, to come to Pennsylvania, and evidently bargained for others to follow from Switzerland, al- though de Graffenried and Michel had undertaken to make a large settlement in North Carolina. By the
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end of 1709, and for a year or so longer, partly by the procurement of philanthropists, busybodies, and com- mercial agents, who circulated in the Rhine country cards and papers bearing Queen Anne's portrait, and setting forth a land of refuge, London was overwhelmed with these foreigners, who arrived mostly starving, to whom the Queen was allowing 9d. per day each for subsistence until departure, to whom private individ- uals were giving enormously, and who were being shel- tered in tents, warehouses, and barns, and as to whose ultimate distribution various measures were being taken without keeping pace with the increase from arrivals. A reaction in English sentiment took place, the Naturalization Act was repealed in 1712, and peace came to Germany by the treaty of Utrecht in the fol- lowing year.
Various German-speaking persons, some richer, some poorer, some of any kind of religion, singly or in crowds, sought the domain of Penn. Several Germans had bought land from one Frederick de Redegoldt or Rhedegelt, who described himself in at least one of his deeds as "Colonel and Essay Master General of Penn- sylvania and Territories Annexed," and who claimed to have bought 10,000 acres from the Proprietary. This claim appearing as unfounded as the designation of his office, the Land Commissioners were wary of setting out land to the purchasers. One of these, Herman Groet- hausen, having bought 9000 of the 10,000 a., and having started on his way to the Province, met Penn in London, and accepted in exchange a lease and release of Dec. 30 and 31, 1709, for 500 a., with the understanding that they should be in the inhabited region. The Commissioners seeing no authority except for a warrant for distant land, Groethausen seated himself on Springfield manor (Springfield Township, Montgomery Co.), but the Com- missioners in 1712 ordered him to remove by a certain time. He went over to England, and secured from
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Hannah Penn the right to have 500 acres in the manor.
In or before 1714, as we find a deed of that year to Matthias Bowman of Oley, planter, and not so late as Sachse states, Matthias Bauman, a native of Lambs- heim in the Palatinate, who believed that in his trances he had been transported to heaven, and received a message to preach, settled at Oley, announcing his re- generation and impeccability. Those whom he could bring to such supposed spiritual condition rejected the sacraments as unnecessary. He frequently went to Philadelphia, and spoke from the court house steps. As his disciples, who were known as Baumanites, but called themselves Neugeborene, were advised not to marry, the sect died with those who had been converted by him or his successors, Kuhlwein and Jotter (John Yoder?).
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