USA > Pennsylvania > The making of Pennsylvania; an analysis of the elements of the population and the formative influences that created one of the greatest of the American states > Part 11
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coach- and saddle-horses and slaves, and one book is said to have the significant entry, "The Hamptons, 32 horses." The entries at the Sun were somewhat similar.
" 1801 June 20. A gent. & lady in a chair.
" July 4. A gent. in the stage. One glass of punch.
" July 12. A lady dressed in black.
" 15. A company of French gentlemen with a servant. Four suppers, four breakfasts, four dinners. 5 bottles porter, 2 bowls punch, I pint Lisbon.
" Nov. 28. General Lee, 6 horses, and 4 servants. Five dinners, I bottle Madeira, 5 quarts beer, 514 pints brandy.
1802 Sept. 18. The President of Cambridge University."
During the Revolution, troops were constantly pass- ing and repassing through Bethlehem. It was inland and out of the way of the British, who usually confined their movements to the lines of travel through New Jersey. After the battle of the Brandywine was fought, September II, 1777, Washington was uncertain whether Howe would be content with taking Philadelphia, or would follow up his success by pursuing the Continental army. Bethlehem was selected as a place secluded and easily fortified, to which the army could retreat and make a stand. The stores and ammunition were sent there, and seven hundred wagons with their horses and attendants encamped opposite the town where South Bethlehem now stands. The houses of the brothers and sisters were taken for a hospital. Lafayette, wounded in the battle, was sent there, and spent several weeks, by no means unpleasantly, recovering, and reading many books. Congress also made it their refuge, and the town was several times the head-quarters for the Continental hospital.
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In all the accounts of this occupation the respect with which Congress and the officers of the army treated the Moravians, and the care that was taken not to inflict too heavy burdens upon them, are quite remarkable. The Moravians were opposed to war, but, like the Quakers, they often made exceptions. They had no objection, of course, to caring for the sick and wounded. On the contrary, they were glad to do it. Their women pre- pared a beautiful silk flag, which they presented to Pulaski's regiment, an event celebrated in a poem by Longfellow. In their dealings with the Indians they had not hesitated to carry arms for protection, and in the Revolution they declared their principles in such a way that while they were placed in the position of non- combatants, they were, at the same time, shown to be favorable to the American cause.
From the time of the Revolution until after the Civil War Bethlehem was a summer watering-place for Phila- delphians, and also for people from New York, who not only found the climate agreeable, but were interested in the ways of the Moravians, their buildings, their an- tiquities, and their history.
Soon after the Revolution the school for girls at Bethlehem began to receive pupils of every creed from all parts of the Middle and Southern States. The Mo- ravians had always been remarkable for their success in a certain kind of elementary education. One of their bishops, Comenius, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, wrote books on education, which contained suggestions a hundred years in advance of his time, and which have only lately been put into practical use. These principles, as well as those enforced at Bethlehem,
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were of a kind intended to affect conduct, rather than to accomplish a very high intellectual training. But so far as they went they were very successful, and among the five or six thousand alumni of the school can be found the names of prominent people from almost every part of the Union, together with the names of daughters of Continental officers and others, who became familiar with the peace and rest of Bethlehem in the Revolution .*
* De Schweinitz's Unitas Fratrum; L. T. Reichel's Early Moravians ; W. C. Reichel's Memorials of the Moravian Church, Moravian Seminary, Essays, etc .; Henry's Moravian Sketches; Martin's Moravian Church ; Ritter's Moravian Church in Philadelphia; Memoirs of the Moravian Historical Society.
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CHAPTER VI.
THE SCOTCH-IRISH AND THE PRESBYTERIANS.
BESIDES being the chief seat of the Quakers and the Germans in colonial times, Pennsylvania was also the home of the Presbyterians,-the place where their first American Presbytery was established in 1705, and the first place on the continent where they became numerous and powerful. There were two divisions of them. The Eastern Presbyterians lived mostly in the eastern part of the province, and, while largely Scotch-Irish, had many English among them. The Western Presbyterians were almost exclusively Scotch-Irish, always sought the frontier, and advanced with it westward. In religion there was but little difference between the two divisions, but in character and temperament the Western Scotch- Irish were more excitable and violent.
It would be hard to conceive of a greater contrast in thought and feeling than was presented in these Presby- terians living in the same community with the Quakers. The eagle and the dove, the lamb and the lion, suggest themselves at once as proper similes. But, curiously enough, in this instance the dove was in power, and all through the colonial period kept the eagle in control. The dove was not inclined to be at all tyrannical to her enemy, but at the same time her love of peace was very exasperating to the men who were passionately fond of war.
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The feelings of dislike or hatred on one side and con- tempt on the other usually spent themselves, when occasion arose, in abusive language and pamphlet warfare. The Scotch-Irish in one instance, however, seem to have had the full intention of attacking the Quakers for protecting the Indians, and they marched with arms in their hands to Germantown. The Quakers were ready for them, and had no hesitation in arming themselves and fortifying Philadelphia, for the chance of a shot at a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian was too much for their scruples of religion.
In the minds of the Quakers the Presbyterians in Pennsylvania were a part of the Massachusetts Puritans who had whipped Quakers at the cart's tail and put four of them to death, and they were human enough to want to square that account. But besides this very strong cause for dislike, and the continual attacks of the Presbyterians on their peace policy with the Indians, the Quakers saw in the religion of their opponents all that was contrary and shocking to their own. The Presby- terians had been one of the conservative sects of the Reformation, and were far behind the Quakers in advanced ideas. They were a part of the great Calvin- ist or Reformed movement which during the sixteenth century spread over a large part of Europe. In England people who inclined to this mode of thought were called Puritans while they remained a party within the Church of England. When separated from it some of them became known as Presbyterians and others as Indepen- dents and Congregationalists.
The Calvinists differed radically from the Quakers in being by no means ready to get rid of dogmas. It
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is true they rejected a great deal of the Middle Age methods, the Pope and his temporal power, image worship, ceremonies, ritual, tradition, modern miracles ; and they gave their laity a share in church government, and confined their worship to hard-headed, logical preaching. Yet to the one or two dogmas which they retained they clung with a persistency which made them the most dogmatic of all the divisions of Protestants. They could not give up, and some of them cannot yet give up, the central idea of the old system,-the doctrine of exclusive salvation. They simply transferred it from the Roman Church to themselves.
They also took one of the dogmas of the old belief and carried it to new conclusions. It had always been held in the Middle Ages, that by the fall of Adam the whole human race had become corrupt, and every individual of it would be consigned to eternal fire unless he were saved by baptism and faith in the creeds of the Church. This taint from Adam was called original sin. The Calvinists went a step farther and said that not only were the descendants of Adam naturally corrupt, but they were completely and utterly so, and that it was impossible for them, unless elected and saved by grace, to escape the tortures of hell. Thus original sin became total depravity.
The development went on. God, it was said, being omnipotent and all-wise, had from the foundation of the world foreseen and foreordained the fall of Adam and the subsequent corruption and damnation of all his descendants, and had arranged the fate of every indi- vidual beyond the power of change. This was predesti- nation. And then was added the next step, the doctrine
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of election, which held that out of this rotten and lost mass of humanity some were by God elected or foreor- dained at the foundation of the world to be saved, and the rest were foreordained to be damned; that those chosen to be damned would be damned in spite of good deeds, and those chosen to be saved would be saved in spite of evil deeds. Such, it was maintained, was the pleasure and will of God.
But if our fate in the future life, as well as all our actions in this, are foreordained beyond the possibility of change, what is the use of prayers, and strivings, and good deeds ? And the answer usually given was, that the prayers, and strivings, and good deeds were also foreordained, and therefore, must be performed. The arguments in favor of predestination are of great force until they reach the question of moral responsibility, when they become extremely subtle. They are, however, a valuable mental discipline to those who indulge in them, and, indeed, the whole Calvinistic theology was well calculated to develop keenness of mind.
It was also, in the doctrine of election, productive of a severe and cruel tone of thought; for, in order to have the whole theory consistent, the Creator was made to appear vindictive and furious. God, as the Calvinists described him, was a monarch who, for the gratification of his pleasure and absolute sovereignty, had foreor- dained a large part of mankind to torture. He delighted not only in the eternal punishment of sinners, but also in the eternal burning of innocent children who had died unbaptized.
These Puritans, who fled from kings and professed to have a holy horror of arbitrary government, ascribed
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to the God whom they worshipped qualities which made him more arbitrary, tyrannical, and absurd than any earthly monarch that ever reigned. Jonathan Ed- wards, whose whole life was passed in benevolence, de- lighted, nevertheless, in describing the fierceness and the relentless cruelty of God. He loved to depict his Maker as trampling on the sinners, and " staining all his garments with their blood." He had gradually wrought his mind into such a state that he believed that he loved a God of this sort, and declared he would willingly be damned to gratify his rage.
It is the fashion now to ridicule these old Calvinistic doctrines, and the sects that once held them are softening them down and adopting changed beliefs. But they had their advantages. They made men hard and stern, it is true, but they also made men strong. There was no dreamy spiritualism about them. No one could be a saint in that religion, no one could say that he had achieved any excellence until he had convinced himself that he was willing to go to hell for the sake of those who should be saved, and for the glory of God.
Whatever may be our opinion of the divine origin of such doctrine, it was certainly a powerful means of disci- pline. It created self-contained, steadfast, aggressive na- tures, who remained of that character long after they had lost faith in the belief which created it. Such people have formed and still form a large and important part of the English-speaking race, and have had a vast influence on the destinies of America. The thought and enterprise of New England have been built up entirely by Congrega- tionalists, well on to one-half of the social fabric of Penn- sylvania has been built up by Presbyterians, and there is
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scarcely a State in the Union where the influence of Calvinism has not been powerfully felt.
But the Quaker could not persuade himself to look at it in this light. To his spiritual mind such belief was horrible and disgusting, and when he saw some of the results of it, the whipping and hanging of his own sect in Massachusetts, the Salem witchcraft, not to mention the banishment of Roger Williams and Mrs. Anne Hutch- inson, together with other cruelties, his dislike and dis- approval were turned into a violent feeling for which he scarcely had a name in his gentle vocabulary. He must have often, in his secret heart, regretted that he had founded his colony on the broad principles of religious liberty. It was bad enough to see the Episcopalian and the ordi- nary English Presbyterian enter under the protection of that beneficent law; but when the Scotch-Irishman came, with his violence and contempt, and his belief that the Old Testament was still in force and commanded the destruction of the heathen Indians, the patience of the Quaker was sorely tried.
The Scotch-Irish were Scotch and English people who had gone to Ireland to take up the estates of Irish rebels confiscated under Queen Elizabeth and James I. This same James, who was King of Scotland as James VI., encouraged his Presbyterian subjects to emigrate to Ireland and occupy the confiscated lands. The migra- tion was numerous, and began in the early part of the seventeenth century, about seventy-five years before the founding of Pennsylvania. Towards the middle of the same century the confiscation of Irish lands by Crom- well increased the emigration to still greater proportions, and after this many Englishmen joined the movement.
II
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These people, English and Scotch, who occupied Ireland in this way have usually been known in England as Ulstermen, and with us as Scotch-Irish, and are, of course, totally different in character as well as in religion from the native Irish. Even those who came to Ireland from Scotland were not Celtic Scotch but people of Eng- lish stock who had been living for many generations in Scotland, so that neither the name Ulstermen nor the name Scotch-Irish is at all descriptive of them.
They became famous in history for their heroic defence of Londonderry against James II. They were more thrifty and intelligent than the native Irish. They took the land on long leases, and began to make it blossom like a garden. They were, however, soon put to a severe test by the persecutions of Charles I., who, after coming to the English throne in 1625, attempted to force the Scotch people in both Scotland and Ireland to conform to the Church of England. At the same time the native Irish rose to expel the Scotch, and succeeded in killing a few thousand. So between their two persecutors these settlers, already sturdy from their race and religion, were not with- out the additional discipline of suffering and martyrdom.
Many of them emigrated to America, especially when the long leases on which they held the Irish land began to expire. The movement began about the year 1700! and continued for forty or fifty years. Some of them went to Maryland and a great many went to Virginia, where they still constitute a distinct element in the population. In Virginia, as elsewhere, most of them sought the frontier. In fact, in colonial times, they could be found on the whole American frontier from New Hampshire to Georgia.
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They did not, however, all seek the frontier, as has been sometimes supposed. Many of them, especially in Pennsylvania, remained in the East. In modern times many of them have settled in the southwestern section of Philadelphia, which is now largely populated by them. But city life has a very quieting effect on their tempera- ment. They flourish better in the country, and best of all on the frontier. Their most striking and peculiar qualities seem to have been developed by contact with the wilderness, and the frontier Ulsterman has become so conspicuous that his less demonstrative, though prob- ably equally efficient, brother has been thrown into the shade.
They wanted the land as their own, and would have no neighbors but their own people. When the Ger- mans began to move into some of their settlements in Pennsylvania, it was found difficult for the two nation- alities to live together, and the proprietors asked the Scoth-Irish to move farther west, a suggestion which they always eagerly accepted. They were delighted when, in 1768, the land west of the Alleghanies was opened for settlement, and they immediately began to throng through the mountain passes to reach it.
The larger part of the Scotch-Irish migration to America appears to have come to Pennsylvania attracted probably by the fame of the colony for religious liberty and fertile soil. They scattered themselves to some ex- tent all over the State, and members of the race can now be found in almost every part of it. A large number of them went up on the Lehigh. Some of the first arrivals went into Bucks County and Lancaster County. They also occupied Octorara Creek, Pequea, Donegal, and
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Paxton. But the greater part congregated in what is now known as the Cumberland Valley. This valley was, in colonial times, known as the Kittochtinney, afterwards changed into Kittatinney, and now Cumber- land. It includes that triangular shaped country in the southern central portion of the State, with the Susque- hanna on one side, the Tuscarora Mountains on the other, and the Maryland boundary on the south. It is the same country which the Union and Confederate armies trampled over in manœuvring for the battle of Gettysburg, and contains the flourishing towns of Cham- bersburg, Gettysburg, Carlisle, and York.
Fighting had become part of the religion of the Scotch-Irish, as peace was part of the religion of the Quakers, and they used the rifle to settle difficulties with the Indians which the Quakers settled by a treaty. Rough, independent, and vigorous, they sometimes car- ried these qualities to excess, and became connected with a great deal of the disorder which marked the his- tory of the colony. They were the instigators of the Whiskey Rebellion, which Washington put down soon after the Revolution, and in the records of the colonial period we usually find them described as uncivilized and cruel. In his "Introductory Memoir to the Journal of Braddock's Expedition," Sargent has a passage which, although the Scotch-Irish have objected to it, is a very fair description of them at that time :
" They were a hardy, brave, hot-headed race, excitable in temper, un- restrainable in passion, invincible in prejudice. Their hand opened as impetuously to a friend as it clinched against an enemy. They loathed the Pope as sincerely as they venerated Calvin or Knox, and they did not particularly respect the Quakers. If often rude and lawless, it was partly
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the fault of their position. They hated the Indian while they despised him, and it does not seem, in their dealings with this race, as though there were any sentiments of honor or magnanimity in their bosoms that could hold way against the furious tide of passionate, blind resentment. Impatient of restraint, rebellious against everything that in their eyes bore the semblance of injustice, we find these men readiest among the ready on the battle-fields of the Revolution. If they had faults, a lack of patriotism or of courage was not among the number."
There is no doubt that the Scotch-Irish were rough, but roughness is not always a serious vice, and there are various degrees of it. They had had the lands of the Irish rebels given to them; they had entered on them with a strong hand, and they had grown accustomed to maintaining themselves among a hostile population from whom they expected but little consideration. They were not much addicted to politeness, or to asking leave for what they took, and they entered Pennsylvania in a manner that was rather irritating to the proprietors. Large numbers of them marched to the " York Barrens," in what was then Lancaster County near the Maryland boundary line, without first offering to buy the land from William Penn. When spoken to on the subject, they replied that Penn had solicited colonists and they had come accordingly. A more serious offence was their settling without purchase on the lands of the Indians, an intrusion which is generally believed to have caused several massacres.
In 1743 the proprietors began to eject them from the unpurchased lands, and as a preliminary proceeding ordered a careful survey to be made. The surveyors and their assistants were resisted, their instruments broken, and they were compelled to retire. The Scotch- Irishmen insisted that the land was theirs, because they
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had expended time and labor in its improvement. But when legal proceedings were begun, they submitted, accepted leases, and in the end many of them purchased the land ; and this submission has been considered by some of their descendants as an act of remarkable graciousness.
Shortly after the French and Indian Wars they dis- covered that some traders were crossing the Alleghany Mountains with a supply of goods for the Indians, con- sisting largely of lead, hatchets, knives, and gunpowder, although there was a law of the colony, passed only a few years before, which strictly prohibited any one from furnishing the savages with weapons or military stores. A party of Scotch-Irish pursued the traders and begged them to desist. They refused, and another party followed them, shot the horses, and burned the goods. The traders appealed to Lieutenant Grant, a royal officer in command at Fort Loudon, who promptly arrested a number of people in the country who had been in no way concerned in the affair. Immediately three hundred armed rangers appeared before the fort, and Grant had to surrender his prisoners. He kept some of their guns, however, and shortly afterwards, on going into the coun- try, he was seized by the inhabitants and held till he gave up the guns.
On another occasion a German, Frederick Stump, together with his German servant, barbarously murdered ten Indians, four men, three women, and three children. There was no doubt of his guilt, and he was arrested and confined. But a warrant was issued from Philadel- phia commanding him to be brought to that city to answer for his crimes. Immediately the spirit of the
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Scotch-Irish arose. Murdering Indians was not a very serious offence in their minds, and in this attempt to remove Stump they saw an attack on their civil rights. If the guilty could be taken to Philadelphia for trial, so could the innocent, and liberty would be in jeopardy. Seventy of them went to the jail, released Stump and his servant, took them to a place of safety, whence they fled to Virginia, and could never again be found.
They could take care of themselves, these Scotch- Irish. They became impatient and rebellious at the first suggestion of injustice, and raised their rifles at the slightest provocation. But their culminating offence, the offence for which their most ardent admirers can find but slight excuse, was what was known at the time of its occurrence as the Western Insurrection, afterwards called the Whiskey Rebellion. It occurred about ten years after the Revolution, and was an organized and deliber- ate attempt to overthrow the laws of the United States, persisted in for a period of three years.
But though entirely unjustifiable, there was one characteristic of it for which the Scotch-Irish deserve credit. Though very fond of tarring and feathering their opponents, they did not take a single human life. They lost some of their own number,-the two or three killed in the attacks on the revenue-inspector's house, and the two killed by the army on its march to Carlisle. But they showed no desire to avenge themselves for their losses, and when their enemies fell into their hands they allowed them to escape. Indeed, although they had no respect whatever for the life of an Indian, they had great regard for the life of a white man. This may seem like rather doubtful and negative praise; but it
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appears in better light when we consider the frightful disregard of human life that has been shown in modern times in Pennsylvania. To relate the history of all the rioting and disorder that have troubled our Common- wealth would be a long task and not a very pleasant one. But it is some satisfaction to know that most of the worst outrages have been committed by for- eigners.
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