USA > Pennsylvania > York County > The Beginnings of the German Element in York County, Pennsylvania > Part 11
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25 Col. Rec., IV: 78. This sentiment concerning the "spirit" of the Germans was echoed a few months later by the governor and council of Maryland in a communication to the King dated February 18, 1737, in which they say the government of Pennsylvania "was pleased to issue a
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squatters would not have ventured in the first place, where the enslaved redemptioners could not have gone, where the Germans of New York would have been compelled to flee, and where the peaceful Mennonites east of the Sus- quehanna because of their religious convictions would have refused to resort to force, the Germans of York County firmly stood their ground in the maintenance of their rights and in following the dictates of their consciences. Their independence and aggressiveness of spirit is therefore of no small importance in the history of their county and state and in the history of German Americans in general.
Similar qualities of character and disposition are found in prominence also among the early German settlers on Digges's Choice. This is evident from the account of the beginnings of that settlement as given in Chapter IV.26 These settlers had ventured farther out on the frontier, but in many respects their fortunes, as we have seen, paral- leled those of their countrymen in the eastern part of the county. A few references will suffice to indicate the same unquenchable spirit of independence and the same unwill- ingness to endure imposition.
With keen discernment they conclude from Digges's conduct in refusing to survey the bounds of his tract and from inconsistencies in his utterances, that he cannot make
proclamation under the specious color of preserving peace, but really to inflame and incite the inhabitants of those borders (which that government then acknowledged was filled with people of more than ordinary spirit) to the commission of horrid and cruel violences."
The Lancaster County authorities had had occasion to test this spirit of the Germans. For during the short time that they had acknowledged the jurisdiction of Maryland the German settlers did not scruple to resist the Lancaster County officers when they felt they were being imposed upon. See, for example, the incident of the rescue of John Lochman from Sheriff Buchanan, supra, p. 56; also Col. Rec., IV: 194.
26 Vide supra, pp. 69-85, for the facts referred to here.
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good all of his claims. They coolly plan to have his bounds surveyed on their own account, and this determina- tion they carry into effect despite Digges's opposition. When it thus becomes clear that they had been imposed upon, they proceed to take out warrants under Pennsyl- vania. Then when their lands are still claimed by Digges under a resurvey, they petition the Pennsylvania author- ities for advice how to proceed.27 A warning from the secretary of the province does not deter Digges from try- ing to force some of the Germans to pay him for their lands. Then they meet force with force, and drive off the officers that try to carry them to Maryland. They ex- press in no uncertain terms their determination to stand on their defense and to insist upon their rights.28 Several times they make petition for authoritative adjustment of matters, on the ground that they do not wish to be put in the position of resisting government but that they cannot tolerate the abuses which are being practiced on them.29 And several instances are on record of strenuous resistance to what they regarded as the injustice of Digges. The dealings of Adam Forney with the Maryland officers and the shooting of Dudley Digges may serve as examples of the tenacity of these Germans in maintaining their rights. Thus they manifest much the same stern qualities of char- acter which their countrymen in the Kreutz Creek Valley manifested, though, of course, with less vital consequences for the future of the province.
27 Archives, I: 680 f. and 683. " The people hope that Your Honor [i. e., the governor] will direct inquiries to me made into the true state of this matter and give them your directions for their behavior with Mr. Digges." 28 Vide supra, p. 83 f.
29 " For we are no people that are willing to Resist government, but rather to semit, if we do but know how, and whare; and further Beg you would advise us how to behave most safely in the main Time." Archives, I: 724.
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Another characteristic of the early Germans in York County is worthy of note in this connection. It was one that they shared with all of the early Germans in this country with the possible exception of the Germantown settlement. They were at a great disadvantage, both so- cially and politically, because they could not speak the English language. For while the provincial authorities of Maryland recognized the Germans of our county as a resolute, determined people whose resistance it was almost impossible for them to break, and while the provincial authorities of Pennsylvania recognized those hardy Ger- mans as a very fit element with which to withstand the encroachments of the Marylanders, nevertheless there is unmistakable evidence that on both sides of the line those who made the laws and enforced them looked down upon these Germans with a certain degree of contempt and dis- dain. The records of the unhappy incidents growing out of the boundary dispute between the provinces indicate very clearly that the spirit of nativism was already at work in that early day and that the Germans were regarded as "ignorant and unfortunate Dutchman," the helpless vic- tims of circumstances and suitable objects for the com- miseration of their English-speaking superiors.
In a deposition of December 2, 1736, John Starr relates an interview that he had with the governor of Maryland a few months previous in the course of which "the Gover- nor said that there were some Unfortunate Dutch Men that had lately Apply'd themselves to him for those Lands, & that he went there & Settled them, & and that he con- doled the Misfortune of the sd Dutch Men for declining to be Subject to the Government of Maryland, & turning to the Proprietors of Pennsylvania, And that the sd Dutch
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Men had Revolted through Ignorance or Perswasion, And that the Governor further said that if the sd Dutch Men did not Return again to the Government of Maryland he would not Suffer them to Live on those Lands any Longer. . .
"30 This was evidently the general attitude of the Marylanders towards the Germans. For ten days later Edmund Jennings and Daniel Dulaney, the two Maryland commissioners who had come to Philadelphia to treat with the Pennsylvania council concerning the troubles west of the Susquehanna, in the course of a lengthy communication to Logan and his council observe concern- ing the Germans: "they must certainly be ignorant For- reigners or they would never have been so far deluded as to imagine it to be in their power to divest the Lord Pro- prietary of Maryland of whom they received their posses- sions, of the Rents and Services due from them as Ten- ants."31 And in the communication of the Maryland authorities to the King on February 18, 1737, they declare that they have exercised " the utmost care to disabuse these deluded people," and that " this government might reason- ably conclude these unfortunate people had been privately encouraged by some persons daring enough to protect them against any prosecution."32
Much the same attitude of lofty superiority towards the Germans was held by their fellow-citizens in Lancaster and Philadelphia, though without the element of bitterness which naturally entered into the feelings of the Mary- landers. When in August, 1736, they decided to re- nounce the authority of Maryland in the Kreutz Creek
30 Archives, I: 509.
31 Col. Rec., IV: 132.
32 Md. Archives, for 1736.
.
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Valley and to acknowledge the jurisdiction of Pennsyl- vania in those parts, they sent several representatives to state their case to Samuel Blunston and to ask his advice. Shortly thereafter Blunston reported the matter in person to the provincial council at Philadelphia and in explanation of their conduct stated that they were "ignorant people who had been seduced, and now being sensible of it, were desirous to return and live under our proprietor who alone they believed could truly be their landlord." He said that he " told them, since it was their ignorance, and the false information of others, and not malice by which they had been misled, they need not doubt but they would be re- ceived and treated as the other inhabitants."33 A few weeks later the Pennsylvania council in a letter to Gov- ernor Ogle of Maryland remarked concerning the "natu- ral Honesty and Simplicity" of "those Palatines " and then added: "they have been made Sufferers by their Weakness and Credulity in believeing those busie Emis- saries."34 Repeatedly they are referred to by the council simply as "those poor people."35 And on one occasion the council wrote of them as "those poor ignorant for- eigners who had transported themselves from Germany into Pennsylvania."36
In a petition to the King, dated December II, 1736, the Pennsylvania council charged Cressap with having persuaded "some innocent German people lately come into Pennsylvania, who were ignorant of our Language and Constitution " to take possession of Lancaster County lands under Maryland jurisdiction, and in the same docu-
33 Col. Rec., IV: 57.
34 Col. Rec., IV: 77.
35 E. g., Col. Rec., IV : 114, 122.
36 Col. Rec., IV : 122.
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ment these Germans are referred to as "the miserable people."37
It would appear then that the "misfortunes" of these "poor Dutchmen " were due primarily to their "igno- rance " (they themselves called it "want of better infor- mation ") and this in turn was due to their lack of famil- iarity with the English language.38 This ignorance made them susceptible to plausible pretences and the objects of wilful machinations. Their ignorance of the language of the government had led the government authorities to take special precautions to secure their allegiance. Hence the oath of allegiance to which they were obliged to sub- scribe upon landing at the port of Philadelphia. When in the course of the negotiations concerning the difficulties in the Kreutz Creek Valley the Maryland commissioners protested against these previous "engagements of Fidelity to the Proprietor of Pennsylvania "39 the Council of Penn- sylvania made reply :
The Germans who yearly arrive here in great numbers, wholly ignorant of the English Language & Constitution, are obliged, on
37 Col. Rec., 126 f.
38 In all their negotiations with the authorities in those first few years of their settlement in York County, their leader and spokesman was Michael Tanner. He was a young man, had been associated with the English at Parnell's in '1728, and certainly was better acquainted with the language of the government than most of his countrymen. This quality alone was sufficient to make him one of their chief leaders.
The Germans as a rule employed an interpreter in their dealings with the authorities. As late as 1747 before the Provincial Council in Phila- delphia, " Nicholas Perie desired that as he was a German & did not understand the English Language, that he might be permitted to speak by an interpreter " and received the assistance of "Mr. Christian Grass- hold, who is usually employed in this Service by the Germans." The "incivility of his Language " was excused on the ground that "it was owing to his Ignorance of the English Language." Col. Rec., V: 218 f. 39 Col. Rec., IV: 132.
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Account of our too near northern Neighbors, the French, whose Language many of them understand, not only to swear Allegiance to our Sovereign, but as a farther Tie upon them they promised Fidelity to our Proprietors & this Government, a Practice only used with them & no others.40
Their chief offense therefore seems to have been in the fact that they could not speak English immediately upon their arrival from Germany, and that some of them knew somewhat of French.
Very similar was the attitude towards the Germans in the southwestern part of the county. In 1747, when Adam Forney was arrested on Digges's Choice by a Bal- timore County sheriff,41 the correspondence indicates that the secretary of Pennsylvania, Richard Peters, after a personal examination of Forney, is not a little fearful that the witnesses who will attend the Annapolis court will be unable to make themselves understood. He writes to Thomas Cookson, surveyor of Lancaster County, that the witnesses who are to accompany Forney to his trial must be able to testify "in a clear, positive manner, and there- fore they must be sensible people, and people who know Digges' tract well, and Adam Furney's house, and can give a satisfactory account of things, so that the Court may understand them. I must, therefore, beg of you to attend Adam Furney in finding out such persons, and examine them yourself and be satisfied that they will answer the purpose effectually by giving a plain evi- dence." 42 The difficulty, it would seem, was to get per- sons as witnesses who would be able to speak English well enough to be understood in Maryland. For, a few days
40 Col. Rec., IV: 138.
41 Supra, page 83.
42 Archives, I: 728.
IO
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later Cookson replies to Peters that he has now had op- portunity to examine certain citizens from Forney's gen- eral neighborhood. "They are clear, intelligible men, and speak English well." This leads Cookson to a differ- ent conclusion from that which had been reached upon examining Forney himself.43 Whereupon Peters writes to Annapolis and dismisses the counsel he had retained for Forney's case and says: "Mr. Cookson had examination of some sensible people in Furney's neighborhood."44 The inference is that Forney was not sensible, clear or intelli- gent. This was because of his lack of facility with the English language, a fact that is very manifest from his own letter to Cookson on this occasion. 45 This corre- spondence, therefore, is one instance of several which show that the Germans were often regarded by the gov- ernment officials and by their English-speaking neighbors as unintelligent and unreasonable, simply because they were unskilled in English.
The Governor of Maryland had thought that "the Dutch Men had revolted through Ignorance or Perswa- sion." But the clear logical arguments which they put forth in support of their action, and their emphatic dis- avowal of outside persuasion, showed that they were not so ignorant or so easily persuaded as the governor had supposed. And the subsequent determination of the boundary by the highest authorities completely vindicated them in this action. The governor had spoken of them as "unfortunate Dutch Men" whose misfortunes he con-
43 " Let Adam Forney defend his own Cause, since he has entirely mis- represented the situation of the place where he was arrested." Archives, I: 731.
44 Ibid.
45 Archives, I: 725.
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doled. But the decision of conduct and the tenacity of purpose which they manifested in the course of the con- troversy, as well as the outcome of the whole difficulty, showed that his commiseration was quite superfluous.
The conditions imposed upon them by their pioneer life and their critical position in the conflict between the two provinces, together with the fact that they did not as a class speak the language of the governments under which they lived, naturally tended to diminish the respect in which they were held by those in the distance who were more comfortably established. But their "natural hon- esty and simplicity " and the fortitude and hardiness which they manifested in their difficult circumstances did not fail of appreciation, and those who knew these Germans well did not regard them as helpless creatures and objects of pity. For in their own county they have from the begin- ning been the most important single racial factor, polit- ically, socially, and industrially.
MERCY JUSTICE
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CHAPTER VII.
THE LIMESTONE SOIL.
N setting forth the original settlement of the primitive soil in this country and the subse- quent readjustment of communities the effort is not infrequently made to show a relation between the preponderating nationality of a given settlement and the geological formation of its soil. The attempt has sometimes been made to indicate that such a general relationship applies to the German farmers of the eighteenth century. Thus it has occasionally been asserted in a general way that the Germans who came to this country before the Revolution regularly settled on limestone soil. Professor Faust says that when we study on a map the location of the Germans in America before the Revolution we are impressed with the fact that "the Germans were in possession of most of the best land for farming purposes. They had cultivated the great lime- stone areas reaching from northeast to southwest, the most! fertile land in the colonies. The middle sections of Penn- sylvania were in their possession, those which became the granaries of the colonies in the coming Revolutionary: War, and subsequently the foundation of the financial 1
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The Limestone Soil.
prosperity of the new nation."1 This tendency to settle a particular kind of soil, he says, was manifest among the' Germans in other colonies as well as in Pennsylvania .; "They continued to settle in limestone areas in every new territory, as for instance in Kentucky, where they entered the Blue-Grass Region in very large numbers during and immediately after the Revolutionary War. It is an inter- esting experiment to examine the geological maps of the counties in Pennsylvania where there were both German - and Irish settlers, such as Berks or Lancaster counties. The Germans are most numerous where the limestone ap- pears, while the Irish are settled on the slate formations. This phenomenon is repeated so often that it might create the impression that the early settlers had some knowledge of geology."2
Professor F. J. Turner is a little more specific when he says : "The limestone areas in a geological map of Penn- sylvania would serve as a map of the German settlements. First they filled the Limestone Island adjacent to Phila- delphia, in Lancaster and Berks counties ; then they crossed the Blue Ridge into the Great Valley, floored with lime- stone. This valley is marked by the cities of Easton, Bethlehem, Allentown, Reading, Harrisburg, etc. Fol- lowing it towards the southwest along the trough between the hills, they crossed the Potomac into Central Maryland and by 1732 following the same formation they began to occupy the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia."3 "The
1 " The German Element in the United States," Vol. I, p. 265.
2 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 34.
3 " Studies of American Immigration," by Frederick Jackson Turner, in the Record-Herald's "Current Topics Club," Record-Herald, Chicago, August 28 and September 4, 1901, " German Immigration in the Colonial Period." Cited in Faust, Vol. I, p. 138.
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limestone farms of the [Pennsylvania] Germans became the wheat granaries of the country."4
Another keen observer of conditions among the Penn- sylvania Germans, Professor Oscar Kuhns, testifies to this same general fact. "The best soil in Pennsylvania for farming purposes is limestone, and it is a significant fact that almost every acre of this soil is in possession of Ger- man farmers. . . . It is due to the fact that Lancaster County is especially rich in limestone soil and is largely inhabited by Mennonites that it has become the richest farming county in the United States."" This author also cites in this connection the statement of the late Eckley B. Coxe that a letter from Bethlehem written to his grand- father asserts that in Pennsylvania, if you are on limestone soil, you can open your mouth in the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect and you will always be understood.6
Still another writer points out this same general fact and shows its effect upon the Lutheran Church in the United States. Dr. Sylvanus Stall in an article on "The Relation of the Lutheran Church in the United States to the Limestone Districts,"7 shows how the Germans who
4 Faust, Vol. II, p. 34.
5 " German and Swiss Settlements of Pennsylvania," p. 86 f.
6 Sometimes this observation that the Germans followed certain natural features of the country is expressed in terms of timber rather than in terms of soil. Then the comment is that the Germans selected districts that are heavily wooded. Mrs. Kate Asaphine Everest Levi, in " How Wisconsin Came by Its Large German Element" (1892), p. 17, says: " Thus the Germans are seen to be massed in the eastern and north central counties, a position that corresponds markedly with that of the heavily- wooded districts; they have shown their preference first for the wooded lands near the main routes to travel, namely the eastern counties, and from there have spread to the north central parts of the State into the deeper forests."
7 Lutheran Quarterly, Vol. XIII, 1883, pp. 509 ff.
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had been placed at Newburgh on the west bank of the Hudson in 1708 were dissatisfied with the soil there and gradually migrated to the limestone districts of that state. He also shows how the Palatine refugees whom the Eng- lish government had located on the east bank of the Hud- son in 1710, speedily removed to the Schoharie and Mo- hawk valleys with their clear water and their limestone rock. "When the migrations of this colony of Germans who constituted the beginnings of the Lutheran Church in the state of New York are followed, it will be found that when they moved in any considerable numbers their even- tual settlement was upon the choicest lands, and when uncontrolled by foreign circumstances, it was upon lime- stone bottom. The same is true in Pennsylvania. These tendencies of the earlier immigrants are to be found not only in Lancaster County, but are clearly defined in the broad limestone belt which sweeps across the State, including in its area the cities of Easton, Allentown, Read- ing, Lebanon, Lancaster, York and Harrisburg. The in- fluences may alike be followed in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana and other States, and may account in a large measure for the absence of Lutheran congregations in New England."
Now these general statements concerning the prefer- ences of the Germans for the limestone soil have never been verified by more exact determination. They are, however, confirmed in a remarkable way by the location and distribution of the Germans in York County. A study of the German settlements in this county in their relation to the geology of the county and in their relation to other nationalities, reveals the fact that ethnologically York County is an epitome of the country at large. The rela- tions of the Germans in our county serve to bear out the
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general observations noted above concerning the Germans in other parts of Pennsylvania and in other states of the union.
The geological map of York County furnishes an inter- esting analogy to the geological map of the whole United States.8 Each of the five great areas of geological time has its representatives within the borders of our county and they occur in much the same order and the same manner of contact in which they occur in the country at large. We have in this small compass parts of the ocean bottoms that were formed during each of the five geolog- ical ages. The general trend of the formations is from northeast to southwest. They are, in a general way, the continuation of the geological plains of Lancaster County and in their turn they merge into the formations in Adams County and Maryland. A brief survey of the geology and topography of the county is necessary to an under- standing of the early German settlements in their relation to the soil and to other nationalities.
The oldest part of the county belongs to the Eozoic period. It constitutes a broad belt in the southern part of the county. Its southeastern boundary is on a line with the last course of the Muddy Creek. Its northwestern boundary lies approximately on a line beginning at the southeastern extremity of Lower Windsor Township ex-
8 Professor Persifor Frazer (professor of chemistry, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia) who supervised the Second U. S. Geological Survey of York County, says, "In a rough and general way, York County is a partial imitation, on a very small scale, of the United States; inasmuch as, like that part of the American continent, it consists of a belt of Archaan rocks in the northwest, of another in the southeast, and its intermediate portions are made up of newer formations containing fossils." And this analogy he carries into great detail. Vide Gibson's "History of York County," p. 463.
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