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 7
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They had been terribly persecuted by both Catholic and Protestant in Silesia, reduced to poverty, and had been sent to Pennsylvania by the benevolence of some merchants in Amsterdam. They were a rather old sect. Their founder, Kaspar Schwenkfeld, was born in 1490, and they grew up in the times when John Huss was preaching the earliest doctrines of the Reformation. But they went far beyond Huss, adopted the views after- wards held by the Quakers, were opposed to war, oaths, and all the ancient sacraments.
Before they came to Pennsylvania they had been hunted from place to place for two hundred years, and so strong had the habit of concealment and hiding
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grown upon them, that for fifty years after they settled in Montgomery County they never had a church or meeting-house, but congregated for worship in each other's dwellings, as in the old days of persecution. They settled in a body on the head-waters of the Perkio- men, where they can still be found, the only Schwenk- felders in the world, with many of the peculiarities of dress and custom which they brought from Europe nearly two hundred years ago. They are said to have been more generally well educated than any of the other German sects, and were much devoted to transcribing in beautiful writing the various volumes of their religious books, which are now highly prized as curiosities.
There were numerous other sects, which it is hardly necessary to describe. The Separatists were peculiar in holding that all church government and organization was wrong ; but they appear to have had no objection to their own existence. Then there were the Amish, the United Brethren, and the smaller sects of Labadists, New Born, New Mooners, Zion's Brueder, Ronsdorfer, Inspired, Quietists, Gichtelians, Depellians, Mountain Men, and in modern times the River Brethren, Brinser Brethren, and two or three divisions of the Mennonites, each em- phasizing some peculiar phase of German mysticism which was deemed important.
In Lancaster County alone, the number of sects has at different times been estimated at from twenty-two to over thirty. But such lists, which have often been pre- pared out of curiosity, are not supposed to be complete, and it would now be, probably, utterly impossible to give a list of all the religious divisions that have existed among the Pennsylvania Germans. The German mind,
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at that time, was in a ferment, and threw off sects almost every day. Their own writers describe them as countless and bewildering. Many of them existed only for a few years and disappeared, and new ones were formed. Large numbers of the people were of no religion at all. "Atheists, Deists, and Naturalists," says Muhlenberg, "are to be met with everywhere; in short, there is no sect in the world that has not followers here."
They had been accustomed to a very strict paternal government in Germany ; everything had been done for them ; and when they found themselves free in the forests of Pennsylvania they were more disordered than ever. There was an advantage in this, however ; for the feeling among them in favor of establishing a distinct German State within the English colonies was rather strong, and their great numbers might have given force to the idea if it had not been for their disunion and divisions.
Some of those who came in with the sects, and with the Lutherans and Reformed, were Roman Catholics, and it was the general belief at that time that there were more Romanists among the German settlers than among the English. In the French and Indian wars they were strongly suspected, even by some of the Germans, of being in league with the French in Canada. They could not at best have been very numerous, for all the Catholics in the province in colonial times are supposed to have been not over two thousand. Most of the English Catholics were congregated in Philadelphia at the mission of St. Joseph, on Fourth Street.
A considerable number of Frenchmen came in with the Germans. Most of them were probably Huguenots, and among them we find such names as De Turck,
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Bertolet, and De la Plaine. Their descendants are still to be found in the counties of Lancaster and Mont- gomery. Some of them were Catholics, and among these we find Le Tort and two brothers named Besalion, Indian traders, who were always suspected of tampering with the Indians in the interest of the French in Canada.
The Mennonites, and other sects that arrived up to the year 1702, were in many respects of a better class than the German immigrants that followed them for the next sixty or seventy years. They were possessed of more property, were less uncouth, and of much better education and intelligence than the great mass of peas- antry which came afterwards. It would be a great mistake to judge of the whole German immigration by what we read of the gentle Schwenkfelders, the peaceful and peculiar Tunker or Mennonite, or the men of education or prominence who accompanied them.
Many of the Lutheran and Reformed were very rough, as Schlatter and Muhlenberg discovered to their sorrow. Even among those who were fleeing from cruel perse- cution, and deserved the sympathy and assistance of every enlightened man, there appear to have been large numbers whose appearance was not at all unlikely to arouse prejudice among English colonists. They had come from mountain fastnesses or from obscure country districts, where they had been hiding; they had suffered hardships in reaching the sea, and still greater hardships on the two months' voyage. Their dress was peculiar ; many of them were staring and strange like wild animals, carried weapons, and spoke an unintelligible dialect ; they wore huge wooden shoes; and the men who settled in Lancaster were described as wearing long red caps,
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land the women without either hats or caps, tying a string over their heads to keep the hair from their faces.
In fact, this German migration was largely composed ¡of peasants, many of them very much like the peasants whom we have seen in our own time landing from the emigrant ships at New York. They were the first of that class to reach American soil, and were utterly unlike the English yeomanry that settled Virginia, New Eng- land, and most of the other colonies.
The reason for the change of character in the German immigrants after 1702 seems to have been the adoption of a new policy by Queen Anne, who ascended the throne in that year. Anne and her ministry seem to have been impressed with the idea that it would strengthen the British Empire to keep the English more at home on their island and fill up the colonies with Germans, or any unfortunate and cheap people from the Continent, provided they were Protestants and hostile to France and Spain.
To this end efforts were made to collect all the discontented Germans, oppressed by war, poverty, persecution, and a disunited and broken country, and transport them to the colonies. In this attempt the Quakers as a sect do not seem to have taken much part. Their attention was confined chiefly to encour- aging the peace sects who were in sympathy with them- selves, and they cared nothing about the Lutherans and Reformed or the masses of the rough German peasantry.
The British government circulated books and papers in the Palatinate and other provinces to encourage emigration. The books had a picture of the queen, and a title-page in gold letters, and were long known
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among the poor people whom they were intended to influence as the Golden Books. They produced a great effect, and there was soon what has been called a land- slide of humanity in the German population. During the two years 1708 and 1709 over thirty thousand of them crossed over to England.
The Golden Books and the devastation of war and persecution had been assisted by a very severe winter, in which birds and animals were frozen in the fields and men fell dead on the roads. For a time the govern- ment had more success with its new plan than it desired, for these people were utterly destitute, and created no little alarm and considerable riot among the lower classes. They were sheltered in tents on the commons and fields near London, and the process of transporting them to Pennsylvania, New York, and the Carolinas was begun.
Several thousand, including most of those who were Roman Catholics, were picked out and sent back to Germany. About three thousand were sent to Ireland. They settled in a part of Limerick County, where, it is said, their descendants are still to be found retaining many of their old customs and, to some extent, their language. The rest were sent to America, and nearly everybody who had a land scheme, or a colony on their hands, took a few of them as a cheap way of developing values. The famous John Law got several thousand for his project in Louisiana, and might have obtained many more if he had not allowed his first cargo to perish in the marshes of Mobile.
After the greater part of these unfortunates had been disposed of, the policy of importing other Germans
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to the colonies was continued in a more regular and systematic manner, and seems to have found favor with English statesmen for the next seventy years. Burke, in his "Account of the European Settlements of America," speaks of it approvingly, but with the qualification that the imported should be compelled to learn the English language and customs.
For many years large numbers continued to go to England to be shipped. But as time went on it became more and more the habit to transport them direct from their own country. The vessels that carried them from Germany usually touched at an English port to be cleared and have their cargo justified under the authority of the British government. A regular emigrant trade sprang up, and vessels were chartered to proceed to Rotterdam and load Palatines for Pennsylvania just as they were chartered for cargoes of rum, molasses, or negroes. The owners and captains were not altogether unlike the typical slavers, and the Palatine voyage to America was not far removed from the horrors of the middle passage.
The small snows and brigs carried from fifty to a hundred people; other vessels between two and three hundred, and the large ships between five and six hun- dred. In one year as many as twelve thousand arrived. By the year 1717 the traffic had so much increased that Governor Keith became uneasy, and called the attention of the Provincial Council to the great numbers of Ger- mans, ignorant of the language and laws, that were flocking into the province, and dispersing daily through- out the country without giving any account of themselves or their intentions. They had no license from Great
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Britain, and made no application for any to the Colony, which was a dangerous practice, and might let in enemies as well as friends.
The Council took some heed of the governor's warn- ings, and ordered all captains who had lately imported such people to appear and give an account of them. It was also ordered that the foreigners recently landed should take an oath of allegiance, and that hereafter no inward-bound vessel should be given an entry until her master had given a list of his passengers.
Apparently, these regulations were not enforced at all, or were not well enforced until 1727, when they were made more elaborate, and after that there seems to have been a systematic regulation. The captains turned in lists, and the immigrants were all sworn or affirmed on a long oath of allegiance. This change was brought about by Governor Gordon, who, like Keith, called the attention of the Council to the possible danger from such immi- grants, who, he said, were settling the country as a dis- tinct people. The minutes of the Council also show the same distrust :
" The Board taking the same into their serious Consideration, observe, that as these People pretended at first that they fly hither on the Score of their religious Liberties, and come under the Protection of His Majesty, it is requisite in the first Place they should take the Oath of Allegiance, or some equivalent to it to His Majesty, and promise Fidelity to the Pro- prietor & obedience to our established Constitution; And therefore, until some proper Remedy can be had from Home, to prevent the Importation of such Numbers of Strangers into this or others of His Majesties Colonies it is ordered" &c. (3 Colonial Records, 282.)
The lists furnished by the captains usually contained the names of all the male passengers above the age of sixteen years. Marks are said to have been made oppo-
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site those who had died or were sick ; but there is some evidence that this precaution was often neglected, which gave the shipping-agents and sailors an opportunity to plunder the dead.
Other lists were made on shore of those who took the oath of allegiance. These also contained only the names of males above the age of sixteen, and they are pecu- liarly interesting, because they are the autograph signa- tures of the immigrants who could write. Those who could not write had their names written for them by a clerk. All these lists were preserved in the Secretary's office; but in recent years they have been much muti- lated, and many of them stolen. It was by copying the autograph lists and commenting on them that Rupp made up his valuable book, " Thirty Thousand Names of German Emigrants." As we turn its pages and read the entries of the vessels and other details, we seem to be brought nearer to this old German immigration, and realize more fully its meaning :
" Oct. 1, 1754, Ship Phoenix, John Spurrier, Captain, from Rotterdam, last from Cowes .- Inhabitants from Franconia, the Palatinate, and Zwei- brucken,-seventeen Roman Catholics, twenty-five Mennonites .- 554 passengers."
The condition in which the immigrants reached Phila- delphia was shocking. The ships were floating hospitals and pest-houses, filled with small-pox and all the other diseases of crowding and dirt, which gathered frightful intensity from the voyage of two or three months. One ship reached the coast, after a voyage of six months, with the surviving passengers living on rats and vermin. Vessels often lost on the passage one-third of their
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human freight, and one ship is said to have arrived after having lost two hundred and fifty.
Sauer said that in one year two thousand of the Ger- mans had died in crossing the Atlantic, and this estimate does not seem to be excessive. The Palatine ship that was wrecked on Block Island in 1738, and celebrated in Whittier's verse, is said to have started out with four hundred passengers, who at the time of the wreck were reduced by a malignant fever and flux to one hundred and five, and of this remnant ten died a few days after they were taken ashore.
The delays in the voyage were numerous. Before reaching the ship the people had to pass through thirty or forty custom-houses on the Rhine, at each of which they were delayed often several days, so that this Rhine journey usually consumed five or six weeks, and com- pletely exhausted their slender stock of money and provisions. Other delays of five or six weeks occurred at the seaports, and the poor immigrants, starving and desperate, sold themselves as redemptioners to the cap- tains and shipping-agents. Mittelberger, in his " Journey to Pennsylvania in 1750," has described what they suf- fered on the voyage.
" In Rotterdam and Amsterdam they begin to pack the people in like herring, and since the ships insist on carrying not less than four, five, or six hundred souls, besides enormous cargoes of household utensils, chests, water-casks, and provisions, many are obliged to occupy berths scarcely two feet wide by six long. . . .
" It is not, however, till the ship has raised its anchor for the last time and started on its eight, nine, ten, eleven, or twelve weeks' sail for Phila- delphia that the greatest misery is experienced. Then there are heart- rending scenes ! The filth and stench of the vessels no pen could de- scribe, while the diverse diseases, sea-sickness in every form, headaches,
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biliousness, constipation, dysentery, scarlet-fever, scrofula, cancers, etc., caused by the miserable salt food and the vile drinking water are truly deplorable, not to speak of the deaths which occur on every side.
" In addition to all this, one invariably meets with an actual scarcity of every kind of provisions, with hunger, thirst, frost, severe heat, an ugly wet vessel, murmurings, complaints, anxiety, loathsome contagious dis- eases, and other innumerable varieties of tribulations, such as lice in such numbers that they can literally be taken in quantities from the bodies of the passengers, especially of the sick. Forlorn, though, as the situation is, the climax is not yet reached. That comes when, for the space of two or three days, all on board, the sick and dying as well as those in health, are tossed mercilessly to and fro, and rolled about on top of one another, the storm-tossed vessel seeming each moment as if in the next it would be engulfed by the angry, roaring waves. . . .
" Even those who escape sickness sometimes grow so bitterly impatient and cruel that they curse themselves and the day of their birth, and then in wild despair commence to kill those around them. Want and wicked- ness go hand and hand, and lead to trickery and deception of every kind. One blames another for having induced him to undertake the voyage. Husbands reproach their wives, wives their husbands, children their parents, parents their children, and friends their friends, while all de- nounce the cruel Newlanders whose trade it is to steal human beings.
" Many heave deep drawn sighs, and exclaim, mournfully, ' O God ! O God ! if I only had a piece of good bread or one drop of fresh water !' or cry out in the anguish of their souls, ' Oh, if I were only at home and lying in my pig-sty !' The wailings and lamentations continue day and night, and, as one body after another is committed to a watery grave, those who induced their unfortunate companions to leave their old home in search of a new are driven to the verge of despair.
" The sufferings of the poor women who are pregnant can scarcely be imagined. They rarely live through the voyage, and many a mother with her tiny babe is thrown into the water almost ere life is extinct. During a severe storm on our vessel one poor creature who, owing to the trying circumstances, was unable to give birth to her child, was shoved through an opening in the ship and allowed to drop into the water, because it was not convenient to attend to her. . . .
" It is little wonder that so many of the passengers are seized with sickness and disease, for, in addition to all their other hardships and mis- eries, they have cooked food only three times a week, and this (it is always of a decidedly inferior quality, and served in very small quantities) is so
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filthy that the very sight of it is loathsome. Moreover, the drinking water is so black, thick, and full of worms that it makes one shudder to look at it, and even those suffering the tortures of thirst frequently find it almost impossible to swallow it."
The Quakers were obliged to provide for the immi- grants and prepare hospitals to receive them, and the physicians who made Philadelphia famous as a centre of medical education gained some of their first experience in this way. The ships as they arrived were held at arm's-length as long as possible, detained below the city under inspection, and when allowed to come up abreast of the town, compelled to anchor in the middle of the stream and discharge the Palatines in boats. These long detentions often caused much suffering, and on : at least one occasion brought on disputes between the i governor and the Assembly; each charging the other with unnecessary delay.
The numbers arriving seem to have varied considerably at different times. But on the whole it was a systematic and, for many years, an almost continuous movement of immigration, with many of the characteristics to which we have become accustomed in the similar system of our own time, which has reached such huge proportions. The greater part of it was of the assisted sort, and the ! assistance and encouragement came in great measure from the shipping-agents, who were interested in the freight.
In the recent investigations of Congress it has been discovered that the principal part of modern immigration is induced by the steamship lines, who have thousands of agents scattered all over Europe, who paint the glories of America, persuade the peasant, and are paid a com-
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mission on the number of tickets they sell. In the German immigration to Pennsylvania there was a similar system, and a class of men sprang up usually called newlanders, and sometimes soul-sellers, who are much complained of by Rupp, Seidensticker, and other German historians. They passed to and fro and scattered them- selves over Germany, working up the traffic and man- aging the people by every trick and device that suggested itself. They had no hesitation in getting men drunk, or getting them to sign papers they had not read, if they could accomplish their purpose, and their profits were in proportion to the number they deluded.
The early immigration of Mennonites and Tunkers that settled Germantown does not appear to have been assisted in this way, and it is probable that a large pro- portion of the sects came independently of any regular system of ship-owners. But, as a general rule, from the year 1705 to the Revolution most of the German immi- grants were uprooted from their native soil at first by the Golden Books of Queen Anne, and after that by the systematic encouragement of men who enjoyed the profits of transporting them.
Mann, in his "Life of Muhlenberg," says that the shipping-agents had discovered that the Germans mi- grated more easily if they knew that one of their clergy was to go in the ship, and the agents were on the alert to persuade such men, or men who would pass as such, to take passage. This may, perhaps, partially account for the charlatan preachers who gave Muhlenberg so much trouble, and also for the large number of schoolmasters who were often half preacher.
Besides their legitimate profit in passage money, the
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shipping people enjoyed the proceeds of selling many of the immigrants as redemptioners, and the poor creatures were also regularly plundered of their clothes and goods. Their money was taken from them, their sea-chests rifled, and those possessed of means compelled to pay the pas- sage of the poorer ones. Although attempts were made by the provincial government to regulate the traffic, they were usually directed to preventing the spread of dangerous diseases on shore, and to limiting the numbers that could be carried on a single ship. The plundering and ill-treatment seem to have continued down to the Revolution, for in 1774, Lewis Weiss sent a memorial to the provincial council describing the evils as still in full force .*
Rupp has described very explicitly the method of selling the redemptioners :
" The usual terms of sale depended somewhat on the age, strength, and health of the persons sold. Boys and girls usually had to serve from five to ten years till they attained the age of twenty-one. Many parents were necessitated, as they had been wont at home to do with their cattle, sell their own children. The children had to assume the passage, both their own and that of their parents, in order that the latter might be released from the ship. Children under five years of age could not be sold. They were disposed of gratuitously to such persons as offered to raise them, and let them go free when they attained the age of twenty-one." (Rupp's Note to Rush's Manners of the Pennsylvania Germans, 8.)
This redemption system, which seems now like a species of white slavery, was not considered a very serious evil, even by people who at that time disap- proved of negro slavery. There is no trace of any stigma or disgrace attaching to a redemptioner. Re-
* 4 Penna. Archives, 473.
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spectable families, well thought of by their neighbors, have descended from such people; and Germans of means are said to have voluntarily sold themselves to contract labor of this sort for the sake of more quickly becoming familiar with the methods of the new country.
The way in which this assisted immigration was dis- tributed among the colonies was very significant. It is probable that the British government wished it dis- tributed among all of them, but, as a matter of fact, a small part of it went to the Carolinas and Georgia, some to New York, and the principal part to Pennsyl- vania. Americans at that time were by no means all convinced of the benefit of encouraging alien immigra- tion. It was the general feeling to expect immigrants only from Great Britain, and they were spoken of usually as new-comers, while those of other nationalities were called foreigners, and had to be naturalized.
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