History of Lehigh county, Pennsylvania and a genealogical and biographical record of its families, Vol. I, Part 9

Author: Roberts, Charles Rhoads; Stoudt, John Baer, 1878- joint comp; Krick, Thomas H., 1868- joint comp; Dietrich, William Joseph, 1875- joint comp; Lehigh County Historical Society
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Allentown, Pa. : Lehigh Valley Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 1158

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the same year, a statement acknowledging his error in the forgery charge. Later at Lancaster in August was given him two hundred Spanish dollars and the value of two hundred pounds of goods.

Five years after the occurrence of the walk the last of the Delaware Indians reluctantly re- moved from the Forks westward and at the time of this writing, are, as a nation extinct.

CHAPTER IV.

THE GERMAN PIONEERS IN PENNSYLVANIA REV. GEORGE WARREN RICHARDS, D.D. Professor of Church History in the Theological Seminary of the Reformed Church in the United States at Lancaster, Penna.

National Elements in America in the Eighteenth Century

It is not my purpose to take the part of a eulogist, an apologist or a satirist, in the discus- sion of this subject. A plain, unvarnished tale of their character, conflicts and achievements is the best vindication of a people. Of the Germans in Pennsylvania, Hildreth, the historian, has said: "The result of their labors is eulogy enough; their best apology is to tell their story exactly as it was."

To understand the significance of the German emigration to America and to estimate its contri- bution to Republic and Commonwealth, we must view it in its relation to the larger historic move- ments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A prophet in the middle of the eighteenth cen- tury would have confidently predicted that North America was destined to be a Catholic country. The French had built their trading posts from Nova Scotia to the headwaters of the Mississippi. They had the key to the two great water courses of our country. The Spaniards had established a line of towns and missions from Florida to California. True, England had begun her work of colonization, but it was overshadowed by the continental powers and the papal missionaries on the north and on the south. After thirteen years of the second half of the eighteenth century had elapsed the map of America had to be recon- structed. In the Treaty of Paris, signed Febru- ary 10th, 1763, France ceded to England Nova Scotia, Canada and the country east of the Mis- sissippi as far as Iberville. A line drawn through the Mississippi, from its source to its mouth, was henceforth to form the boundary between French and English territory in the West. The town and island of New Orleans were not included in this cession. Spain ceded to Great Britain Flor- ida and all districts east of the Mississippi, recov- ering the Havanna and all other British con- quests. An appeal to Providence is usually satis- factory to the appellant only, and not to the plaintiff. But the enthusiastic protestant or the champion. of Anglo-Saxondom can hardly pass by the Paris treaty without pointing to the hand of God in history.

From the St. Lawrence to the Gulf the New

World was now in Anglo-Saxon hands and under Protestant influence. Though the Swedes and the Dutch experimented in colonization and left permanent marks on our national history, Great Britain was the dominant power in the colonial period. The Teuton found his Canaan in the lands discovered by the romance explorers. Far be it from us to undervalue the greatness of brave little Holland, and the heroism and chivalry of Sweden ; yet no one will deny that the two na- tions which were the bone and sinew of the Teu- tonic stock were those which speak the German and the English languages. These two to-day, more than any others, shape the destinies of two continents. These two are the leading elements in our national history.

After Hengst and Horsa had led their warlike bands across the English Channel, they drove the Highlanders from England; but, after the man- ner of Englishmen, they remained masters of the country. They became the nucleus and forma- tive principle of the British nation. Cut through the national strata of Britain and you will find Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Dan- ish layers. Out of this congeries of tribes the English people have sprung. The controlling element in the development of the nation was Anglo-Saxon, though the tribes which preceded and followed wielded no small influence. The English Channel did not flow in vain between Britain and the continent. From the earliest times a distinct civilization and religion flourished on the Isles. Among Europeans their people repre- sented a distinct national genius. Continental Protestantism passed through the British people, and became a distinct product in Cavalier and Puritan, Catholic and Quaker. Located on the borders of the Western ocean, Britain became naturally a leader in colonization, an empire on whose dominions the sun never sets.

But, while the tribes of the Isles crystalized into a homogeneous nationality, the heteroge- neous hordes on the continent also assumed na- tional forms. About the close of the third century a multitude of tribal names disappeared from his- tory, absorbed by four dominant nations: the

HISTORY OF LEHIGH COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.

Alemanni, the Franks, the Saxons and the Goths. Many kindred characteristics still bound them together, chief of which was that of language. But in the course of centuries, under the influence of natural environment, of molding personalities, and of the intermixture of blood, they became distinct nations, representing various types of the Teutonic stock. The Franks overran Gaul and became the ancestors of the French. The Goths dwelt in the regions north of the Danube and were a menace to decadent Rome. The Saxons settled northward on both sides of the Elbe and westward as far as the Lower Rhine. Their name is perpetuated in modern Saxony. The Alemanni, chiefly of Suevic origin, with an ad- mixture of smaller tribes, occupied the territory extending from the Main to the Danube. They enlarged their borders westward beyond the Upper Rhine into Alsace and Lorraine, and southward into the adjacent sections of Switzer- land. The Alemanni became the progenitors of many of the Germans who eventually settled in Pennsylvania. They repeatedly repulsed the Ro- man legions. When the latter had spent their force, the former became conquerors, and in Ger- man history maintained an influential and inde- pendent political existence. In the twelfth cen- tury the political State of the Palatinate was founded under the royal house of Hohenstaufen. Prince Conrad was invested with the electoral dignity by his brother, the Emperor Frederick I. For seven hundred years, until 1801, it remained a distinct realm. By the Treaty of Luneville, dictated by Napoleon, the Rhenish Palatinate was parcelled out between Hesse-Darmstadt, Baden, Leiningen-Dachsburg and Nassau, while the Rhine itself became the eastern boundary of France until the downfall of the Man of Destiny.

Thus the Teutonic tribes were differentiated by the intricate process of history into the nations from which were destined to come the founders of the United States. The leaders among them were the English and the Germans. The Eng- lish received valuable recruits in the colonies from the Scotch the Irish and the Welsh. With the Germans we must associated their kinsmen, the Swiss, the Dutch and the Swedes. We observe that they all belong to the Aryan family, and were therefore sufficiently related to Greece and Rome to become the heirs of their civilization and culture. They were Teutons, and therefore of such kinship that they might be welded into a united republic. They were distinct nationalities, and could therefore contribute specific ideals for a new nation-the child of them all.

It is beyond our scope to follow the migration of the English into the New World. Suffice it to say that they preceded the Germans by almost a

century. They had precedence not only in the order of time, but they were supported also by a mother country and a mother Church. They did not come into a foreign land, but into a land of their own possession. They occupied the Atlan- tic border from Maine to Georgia. They dif- fered in creed, but were largely of British blood.

The German came as a stranger into a strange land. He had to take an oath of allegiance to a foreign government. He settled in the provinces by the grace of God and the English proprietors. Though there were German groups in a number of the colonies, Pennsylvania seems to have been the goal of their pilgrimage and the circle of their influence. We read of German glass-blowers sent to the Virginia colony as early as 1608 for the glass works which were there established. A small band was led to New York by the German Joshua, Kocherthal. About the same time a com- pany of 700 was sent to North Carolina. Both in Virginia and in New Jersey there were Ger- man settlers. Yet, if we would understand the way in which the German nation entered the ter- ritory of the Union and found the earliest center of influence in this country, we must follow the Pennsylvania pioneers. Dr. Seidensticker says: "Should it be asked when the German immi- gration in America had its beginning, the answer must be in the year 1683, the year of the Cre- felders' arrival in Germantown." Whether the German landed on the coast of Massachusetts or New York, Virginia or Georgia, he gravitated to the land of Penn. When the lands beyond the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies invited the more restless and adventurous spirits of the coast, Penn- sylvania again was the distributing center for the Germans in the United States. John Fiske says : "But for Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, Pennsylvania was the door for immigrants. Pennsylvania was the temporary tarrying place and distributing center for so much that we now call characteristically American." The key, therefore, to the history of the German life in the Union is the history of the German pioneers in the Keystone State. What they have done in a small way in the building of a single common- wealth they have done in a large way in the con- struction of a nation. Though they came with- out form and comeliness, despised and rejected, men of sorrows and acquainted with grief, they were none the less the slender thread drawing after it the stronger bonds which bind us insep- arably to a German Fatherland. They were the bearers of a spirit and a message which were to aid in the nurture and culture of unborn millions. Dr. Rush, in his booklet on the "Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania," in 1789, exhorts the legislators as follows: "Do not con-

THE GERMAN PIONEERS.

tend with their prejudice in favor of their lan- guage. It will be the channel through which the knowledge and discoveries of the wisest nations in Europe may be conveyed into one country. . . .. Invite them to share in the power and offices of the government; it will be the means of producing a union in principle and conduct between them and all those enlightened fellow citizens who are descended from the other na- tions." These words were prophetic then ; they are actual history of the contribution of the Ger- mans to the nation now. Through them we, their descendants and followers, have received an invaluable heritage in philosophy, science, art, and domestic economy. Through them has been effect- ed an organic union of the two great branches of Teutonism in the New World which are separat- ed by a stubborn and unruly channel in the Old.

To define the character of the German pio- neers and their relation to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, we shall briefly answer three ques- tions, viz: Why did they come? What did they bring? What have they done?

EARLY GERMAN MIGRATIONS TO AMERICA

We are told that colonies are planted by the uneasy. In a general way poverty and financial reverses, political changes and religious troubles, a thirst for novelty and a love for adventure, all these combined, are the causes for the great mi- grations in history. The motives in individuals and groups vary according to circumstances. Now the dominant cause may be religious perse- cutions, again political tyranny, and then eco- nomic distress. The general unrest and discon- tent in Germany were the cumulative product of centuries. Since the Reformation Europe was in a state of religious, political, and social ferment. The Protestant was arrayed against the Catho- lic, the Lutheran against the Calvinist, Protestant and Catholic against the Anabaptist, the Human- ist against the Reformer, and the peasant against the noble. The reason for it all was that the principles of Protestantism, which had been dis- cerned in a German monastery and practiced in a Swiss pastorate, had to be fought out on fields of blood before they could become the common possession of mankind.

In the name of religion, though for anything but for the good of religion, Germany became the seat of devastating wars. For thirty years hostile armies, some foreign and some native, ravaged the provinces, turned the Rhinelands into a desert, and decimated the population. At the close of that inhuman struggle two-thirds of the German nation had perished. The Palatinate was reduced from 500,000 citizens to 50,000. University halls became army barracks. Fields

ripening for harvest, blossoming orchards, vine- clad hills, towering castles, happy hamlets and busy cities fell before the ruthless blows of the invader. It is said that "the Elector Palatine beheld from his castle at Manheim six cities and twenty-five towns in flames where lust and rapine walked hand in hand with fire and sword." The treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, was only a tem- porary respite from the desolation of armies. Scarcely had the industrious peasants and burgh- ers of the Rhine healed some of the wounds of a generation of war and recovered some of the former glory of their country, when the armies of Louis XIV. began their work of destruction. That most Christian king said to his marshal, Melac, "Ravage the Palatinate!" In obedience to orders, 1,200 towns and villages went up in smoke and fell in ashes. The former scenes of horror and crime were re-enacted, and with an occasional intermission they continued through the war of the Spanish succession, ending with the peace of Utrecht in 1713.

The effect of these disasters was not only to impoverish Germany's resources, but also her manhood. Peasants in their desperation became robbers, murderers, cannibals. "Freemen became serfs; rich burghers became narrow-minded shop- keepers; noblemen, servile courtiers ; princes, shameless oppressors." The internal political and social conditions of Southwest Germany were as ruinous as foreign foes. "The provinces were full of misgovernment and of sectarianism, filled with tiny principalities, old religious foundations, secularized or still remaining, free cities of the moribund empire, and even free villages ; courts, princes and lords of all kinds, who caricatured Louis XIV., sometimes by the dozen to the square mile, and kept the fruitful land in an artificial condition of perpetual exhaustion."

The general conditions were at hand for the operation of specific causes which brought about a German exodus into America. To understand the immediate reasons for early German immi- gration, it is necessary to study the history of the several groups which composed it. For our pur- pose the popular division into sects and church people is most satisfactory. We might add a third class and call it the nondescripts. In each of these groups there was a dominant motive, not, however, to the exclusion of the other motives mentioned above.

The sects who came to Pennsylvania were the Mennonites, the Tunkers, the Schwenkfelders, and a number of lesser bodies, such as the Soli- taries at Ephrata, the Woman in the Wilderness on the banks of the Wissahickon, and the Labad- ists. Baron von Reck, who visited Philadelphia in 1734, wrote: "It is the abode of all religions

HISTORY OF LEHIGH COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.

and sects: Lutherans, Reformed, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Seventh-day Baptists, Separatists, Boehmists, Schwenkfeldians, Tuchfelders, Wohl- wuencher, Jews, heathen, etc."

Their relation to the Church and the State in Europe was one of dissent. They were the op- pressed people of Christ. By the provisions of the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, Roman Catho- lics, Lutherans, and Reformed were given legal recognition. They were known as the Churches by law established. But the Anabaptistic and Quietistic sects were equally obnoxious to Catho- lics and Protestants. Princes and bishops, priests and preachers, united in destroying these supposed children of perdition. They were accordingly driven from one country to another, finding a temporary asylum here and there until they had to flee elsewhere from the wrath of a capricious prince. A company of Mennonites had settled in peace in Crefeld, Germany, where they were employed as linen-weavers. While not in im- mediate danger, these children of persecution al- ways had the sword of Damocles suspended over- head. They therefore welcomed the offer of an asylum beyond the seas, where they might worship God without further molestation. On the ship Concord, October 6th, 1683, came thir- teen Mennonite families who became the found- ers not only of Germantown, but of German colonization in Pennsylvania. Until 1710 the German immigrants came as individuals or in small groups; "partly for conscience' sake and partly for temporal interests," says Proud. Dieffenderfer estimates that there were about three or four thousand Germans in Pennsylvania in the year 1709, making an average of about one hundred immigrants a year since 1683. The Quakers, Schwenkfelders, and the lesser groups came after the Mennonites, migrating largely for religious reasons, and attracted to Pennsylvania by the tolerant policy of Penn.

The second period of German immigration be- gan with the arrival of the Lutherans and the Reformed, who were accompanied by a third class, the nondescripts. They did not leave their homeland because of religious persecutions at the time of their departure, for among them, espe- cially in the Palatine band in England, were re- presentatives of the three Established Churches. The chief reason for their discontent at home was the economic distress resulting from continuous wars, from a desolating winter, and financial re- verses. The first company of Palatines came by way of London, whither they went in large mul- titudes. They reached Pennsylvania after sore hardships and cruel treatment by way of the Schoharie Valley in New York. In an address to the English people in 1710, the Palatines plead

their own case. They say: "We, the Poor, Dis- tressed Palatines, whose utter ruin was occa- sioned by the merciless cruelty of a Bloody Enemy, the French, whose prevailing power, some years past, like a torrent, rushed into our country and overwhelmed us at once; and being not content with money and food necessary for their occasions, not only dispossessed us of all support, but inhumanly burnt our houses to the ground, whereby being deprived of all shelter, we were turned into open fields, there with our families to seek what shelter we could find, were obliged to make the earth our repository for rest and the clouds our canopy or covering." These were the conditions, not only of the Palatines who came to London, but doubtless of a large proportion of those who went directly to Penn- sylvania. The winter of 1708-09 was so severe throughout Europe that hundreds died of cold and starvation. Birds froze in mid-air, beasts in their lairs and men fell dead on the way. Of their financial troubles an eye-witness wrote: "Nobody could pay any more because nobody was paid. The people of the country, in consequence of exactions, had to become insolvent. Com- merce dried up and brought no returns. Good faith and confidence were abolished."

Thus gradually the ties of home, country, and society were loosened, and the newly established colony of Penn became a refuge for the distressed Germans, called, regardless of their provincial origin, Palatines.

The nondescripts fled prison rather than re- ligious persecutions or social troubles. They were criminals and felons and the scum of the population, which the mother country dumped upon the new province. The jails were emptied of their inmates and sent to the colonies. So threatening did this element become that the Provincial Assembly, in 1722, imposed a tax upon every criminal landed in the province, and held the ship-owner responsible for the future good conduct of his passengers. A promiscuous ele- ment was gathered also by the Newlanders, or soul-sellers, who went over Germany enticing men, women, and children to the paradise of a new world.

The Moravians alone profess to have come to America for purely missionary purposes. One of their historians, Paul De Schweinitz, writes: "Their sole object was to provide the red men and the white men with gospel privileges. The Indians they endeavored to make Christians. The Lutherans they endeavored to gather to- gether in Lutheran congregations and provide them with pastors of their own mode of thought. They tried to do the same for the Reformed ; and the Germans scattered about, who would ac-

THE GERMAN PIONEERS.

knowledge neither of these faiths, they tried to

own from any infringement on that account." gather into free congregations, served by an. The Great Law, as the modified code was called, awakened pastor, without defining church con- nections." We do not question this high motive of what has proven itself one of the greatest mis- sionary churches in the kingdom. Though com- ing comparatively late, about 1740-41, from Georgia to Bethlehem, they added a strong Ger- man element during the formative period of the Commonwealth.

While these various causes constrained the Pal- atine to leave his fatherland, there was a specific reason for his entrance into Pennsylvania. One of the first pamphlets published by the German Pastor Kocherthal, and circulated in two edi- tions, 1706 and 1709, among his kinsmen, was entitled, "Full and Circumstantial Report Con- cerning the Renowned District of Carolina in English America." He advocated the Carolinian region as the most favorable district for the Ger- man. But his plea for the South was not recog- nized. Other American provinces held out tempting inducements on the continent for set- tlers within their bounds. But none of these made a favorable impression. The man who gave direction to the tiny rivulet, which later became a stream and almost a torrent of German pioneers into Pennsylvania, was William Penn. He, too, was a dissenter, a sectarian, and a martyr. His religious views were so nearly like those of the German sects that Barclay said: "So closely do these views ( referring to the Mennonites) cor- respond with those of George Fox, that we are compelled to view him as an unconscious expo- nent of the doctrines, practices, and discipline of the ancient and stricter party of the Dutch Men- nonites." He was half a Hollander through his mother, could speak the German language, and found the Dutch and German sects good ground for Quaker missions. After he received the Prov- ince of Pennsylvania he at once sent his agent, Benjamin Furly, into the Rhineland, who organ- ized land companies, one at Crefeld, the other at Frankfort-on-the-Main. Pamphlets were circu- lated recounting the advantages of the new Prov- ince, and in a short time the sectaries were con- vinced that Penn's land was the haven of peace for them.

But he was not limited to the Quakers in Eng- land or to the sects in Holland and Germany in his benevolent designs. The spirit of the man and of the religious policy of his province is ex- pressed in his own words when he says: "I went thither to lay the foundation of a free colony for all mankind that should go thither, more espe- cially those of my own profession; not that I would lessen the civil liberties of others because of their persuasion, but screen and defend our

not only established religious liberty, but "ex- tended the suffrage, reduced the death penalty to a minimum, secured the people against oppression, simplified all legal processes, and made an at- tempt to establish a perfectly moral State." Sharpless says: "Peace, liberty, and fertile soil were the great arguments which brought in the English of the Quaker counties, the Germans of the central belt, and the Scotch-Irish of the frontiers in unprecedented numbers." With the way opened by the tolerant Penn, with the ground broken by the earliest German settlers, and with the land companies active in the heart of the Palatinate, it was a comparatively easy matter to turn the tide of future immigrants to the land of their prosperous kinsmen. It also ex- plains the reason why, in three years after its set- tlement, Philadelphia gained more than New York in half a century.

Had Pastorius and his little band been stranded on a New England coast, what would have been their fate? Who can foretell the Mennonites' fate in the land of the Pilgrim and Puritan, where Quakers were called "fit instruments to propagate the kingdom of Satan," where the crime of bringing one of that sect into the colony was punishable with a fine of one hundred pounds, and where the victim himself was whipped with twenty stripes? Had he come be- fore 1656, when these comparatively mild re- strictions prevailed, he might have borne the un- favorable surroundings. But in 1683, when he came to Philadelphia, the New Englanders had so thoroughly convinced themselves that the world belonged to the saints and that they were the saints, that the fine for harboring a Quaker was increased to forty shillings an hour. The male Quaker was to lose one ear on his first con- viction; on the second the other, and both male and female on the third conviction were to have their tongues bored through with red-hot iron. The distinguished Governor of Massachusetts gave vent to his feeling, when he was foiled in his effort to expel Roger Williams, in verse:

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History of Lehigh county, Pennsylvania and a genealogical and biographical record of its families, Vol. I, Part 9

Author: Roberts, Charles Rhoads; Stoudt, John Baer, 1878- joint comp; Krick, Thomas H., 1868- joint comp; Dietrich, William Joseph, 1875- joint comp; Lehigh County Historical Society Publication date: 1914 Publisher: Allentown, Pa. : Lehigh Valley Publishing Co. Number of Pages: 1158

Author: Roberts, Charles Rhoads; Stoudt, John Baer, 1878- joint comp; Krick, Thomas H., 1868- joint comp; Dietrich, William Joseph, 1875- joint comp; Lehigh County Historical Society
Publication date: 1914
Publisher: Allentown, Pa. : Lehigh Valley Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 1158