their Bibles and having plenty of schools and schoolmasters. In
the little Mennonite meeting house at Germantown, on the 18th of
February, 1688, they declared against the unlawfulness of holding
their fellowmen in bondage, and raised the first ecclesiastical
protest against slavery in America. In Penn’s Colony also the first
book written and published in America against slavery was by one of
these German Christians. The Penn Germans also published the first
Bible in any European tongue ever printed in America. It was they
who first called Washington “the father of his country.” In their
dialect, still surviving in some places, made up of old German and
modern expressions, some pretty poems and charming stories have
been written. Tenacious in holding their lands, thorough in method,
appreciative of most of what is truest and best in our nation’s life,
but not easily led away by mere novelties and justly distrustful of
what is false and unjust, even though called “American,” the Germans
have furnished in our national composite an element of conservatism
that bodes well for the future of the republic.... Here worked
and lived the first American astronomer, Rittenhouse, and here
(Pennsylvania) originated many first things which have so powerfully
influenced the nation at large.... Here lived Daniel Pastorius,
then the most learned man in America. (“The Romance of American
Colonization,” by Dr. William Elliot Griffis.)
The disposition of the New England school of historians, with some
distinguished exceptions, to glorify everything of Puritan origin
and belittle everything of non-English origin in American life,
is strongly manifest in their writings about the early Palatine
immigration. They were merely hewers of wood and drawers of water, or
coolies. But the evidence of Franklin, Washington and Jefferson is to
the contrary, and their history in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia
and North and South Carolina puts the New England historians to
shame. With their disparaging comments may be contrasted the words in
which Macaulay describes the same people:
Honest, laborious men, who had once been thriving burghers
of Mannheim and Heidelberg, or who had cultivated the wine
on the banks of the Neckar and the Rhine. Their ingenuity
and their diligence could not fail to enrich any land which
should afford them an asylum.
Sanford H. Cobb says: “The story of the Palatines challenges our
sympathy, admiration and reverence, and is as well worth telling
as that of any other colonial immigration. We may concede that
their influence on the future development of the country and its
institutions was not equal to the formative power exerted by some
other contingents. Certainly, they have not left so many broad and
deep marks upon our history as have the Puritans of New England, and
yet their story is not without definite and permanent monuments of
beneficence toward American life and institutions. At least one among
the very greatest of the safeguards of American liberty--the Freedom
of the Press--is distinctly traceable to the resolute boldness of a
Palatine.” (“The Story of the Palatines,” Putnam’s Sons, 1897, p. 5,
Introduction.)
And very emphatic are the words of Judge Benton in his “History of
Herkimer County:”
The particulars of the immigration of the Palatines are
worthy of extended notice. The events which produced the
movement in the heart of an old and polished European
nation to seek a refuge and a home on the western
continent, are quite as legitimate a subject of American
history as the oft-repeated relation of the experience of
the Pilgrim Fathers.
Germans were among the first immigrants in the South along with
the English, and many a proud Virginian has German blood in his
veins. President Wilson’s second wife is a Bolling. The first
attempts to colonize Virginia were discouraging failures. Of the
first 105 bachelor colonists sent out from England in 1606, half
called themselves “gentlemen,” young men without a trade and with
no practical experience as colonists. The others were laborers,
tradesmen and mechanics, and two singers and a chaplain. Among the
leaders Capt. John Smith was the most noted as he was the most able.
The Jamestown colony was reduced to forty men when Captain Newport
on his return from England brought additional numbers of colonists,
and the “Phoenix” later arrived with seventy more settlers and the
languishing colony was still later reinforced by seventy immigrants,
among whom were two women. The marriage of John Laydon and Ann Burras
was the occasion of the first wedding in Virginia.
“Better far than a batch of the average immigrants,” writes Dr.
Griffis, “was the reinforcements of some German and Polish mechanics
brought over to manufacture glass. These Germans were the first
of a great company that have contributed powerfully to build up
the industry and commerce of Virginia--the mother of states and
statesmen! There still stands on the east side of Timber Neck Bay,
on the north side of the York River, a stone chimney with a mighty
fireplace nearly eight feet wide, built by these Germans.”
American’s great historian, George Bancroft, in his introduction
to Kapp’s “Life of Steuben,” writes: “The Americans of that day,
who were of German birth or descent, formed a large part of the
population of the United States; they cannot well be reckoned at
less than a twelfth of the whole, and perhaps formed even a larger
proportion of the insurgent people. At the commencement of the
Revolution we hear little of them, not from their want of zeal in the
good cause, but from their modesty. They kept themselves purposely
in the background, leaving it to those of English origin to discuss
the violations of English liberties and to decide whether the time
for giving battle had come. But when the resolution was taken, no
part of the country was more determined in its patriotism than the
German counties of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Neither they nor their
descendants have laid claim to all the praise that was their due.”
In 1734 a number of German Lutheran communities were flourishing in
Northern Virginia, and in a work dealing with Virginia conditions,
which appeared in London in 1724, Governor Spotswood is mentioned
as having founded the town of Germania, named for the Germans whom
Queen Anne had sent over, but who abandoned that region, it seems,
on account of religious intolerance. The same work mentions a colony
of Germans from the Palatinate who had been presented with a large
section of land and who were prosperous, happy and exceedingly
hospitable. Many of their descendants attained to fame and fortune,
as B. William Wirt, remembered as one of the most distinguished
jurists in America, and Karl Minnigerode, for many years rector of
St. Paul’s Church in Richmond, among whose parishioners was Jefferson
Davis.
Many Germans immigrated to the Carolinas from Germany as well as
Pennsylvania, before the Revolution. A large number came from
Pennsylvania in 1745, and in 1751 the Mennonites bought 900,000 acres
from the English government in North Carolina and founded numerous
colonies which still survive. One colony on the Yadkin, known as
the Buffalo Creek Colony, at the time sent abroad $384 for the
purchase of German books. After 1840 the interrupted flow of German
immigration was resumed.
When the German immigration into South Carolina began is a matter
of dispute, but when a colony of immigrants from Salzburg reached
Charleston in 1743, they found there German settlers by whom they
were heartily welcomed. As early as 1674 many Lutherans, to escape
the oppression of English rule in New York, settled along the Ashley,
near the future site of Charleston.
It is probable from printed evidence that the first German in South
Carolina was Rev. Peter Fabian, who accompanied an expedition sent by
the English Carolina Company to that colony in 1663.
In 1732, under the leadership of John Peter Purry, 170 German-Swiss
founded Purrysburg on the Savannah River, and were followed in a year
or two by 200 more. Orangeburg was founded about the same time by
Germans from Switzerland and the Palatinate. Likewise Lexington was
founded by Germans, and in 1742 Germans founded a settlement on the
island of St. Simons, south of Savannah. In 1763 two shiploads of
German immigrants arrived at Charleston from London.
Before the Revolution the Gospel was preached in sixteen German
churches in the colony, and at the outbreak of the Revolution the
German Fusiliers was the name given to an organization of German
and German-Swiss volunteers which still exists. As early as 1766 a
German Society was founded in Charleston and numbered upward of 100
members at the beginning of the Revolution. It gave 2,000 pounds to
the patriotic cause, and after the conclusion of peace erected its
own school, at which annually twenty children of the poor were taught
free of charge. Dr. Griffis speaks of the ship “Phoenix,” from New
York, “which brought Germans, who built Jamestown on the Stone River.”
Many of the Palatine Germans and Swiss had already settled in the
Carolinas, he continues; now into Georgia came Germans from farther
East, besides many of the Moravians. In the Austrian Salzburg,
prelatical bigotry had become unbearable to the Lutherans. Thirty
thousand of these Bible-reading Christians had fled into Holland and
England. Being invited to settle in Georgia, they took the oath of
allegiance to the British King and crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
In March, 1734, the ship “Purisburg,” having on board 87 Salzburgers
with their ministers, arrived in the colony. Warmly welcomed, they
founded the town of Ebenezer. The next year more of these sober,
industrious and strongly religious people of Germany came over. The
Moravians, who followed quickly began missionary work among the
Indians. After them again followed German Lutherans, Moravians,
English immigrants, Scotch-Irish, Quaker, Mennonites and others.
“Thus in Georgia, as in the Carolinas and Virginia, there was formed
a miniature New Europe, having a varied population, with many
sterling qualities.”
The first whites to settle within the territory comprising the
present State of Ohio were the German Moravians who founded the towns
of Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhütten, Lichtenau and Salem. David Zeisberger
on May 3, 1772, with a number of converted Indians, founded the first
Christian community in Ohio. Mrs. Johann George Jungmann was the
first white married woman. She and her husband came from Bethlehem,
Pa. At Schoenbrunn and Gnadenhütten, Zeisberger wrote a spelling book
and reader in the Delaware language which was printed in Philadelphia.
In Gnadenhütten was born July 4, 1773, the first white child in Ohio,
John Ludwig Roth; the second child was Johanna Maria Heckewelder,
April 16, 1781, at Schoenbrunn, and the third was Christian David
Seusemann, at Salem, May 30, 1781. The Communities, largely composed
of baptized Indians, in 1775 numbered 414 persons, and their record
of industry and peaceful development is preserved in Zeisberger’s
diary, now in the archives of the Historical and Philosophical
Society of Ohio at Cincinnati.
The peaceful settlements excited the jealousy of powerful interests,
and the British Commissioners, McKee and Elliot, and the renegade,
Simon Girty, reported to the commander at Detroit that Zeisberger and
his companions were American spies. The German settlers and their
Indian converts were carried to Sandusky in 1781, where they suffered
great privations until permitted, after winter had come, to send back
150 of their Indian wards--all of whom spoke the German language--to
gather what of their planting remained in the fields. But a number
of lawless American bordermen under Col. David Williamson, acting
on a false report that the peaceful Indians had been concerned in a
raid, surprised the men in the fields and after disarming them by a
trick, murdered men, women and children in cold blood. The details,
as related by Eickhoff (“In der Neuen Heimath,” Steiger, New York,
1885, and by Col. Roosevelt in “The Winning of the West”) are among
the most ghastly on record and make the blood run cold. Some of
these slain had German fathers and all were peaceful, industrious
and well-behaved natives who had learned to sing Christian hymns and
German songs in their humble meeting houses.
Independent of these communities, the first settlement of Ohio
at Marietta was the work of New Englanders, in April, 1788; but
the second, that of Columbia, was under the direction of a German
Revolutionary officer, Major Benjamin Steitz, the name being later
changed by his descendants to Stites.
Space is lacking for fuller details regarding the great share of
the Germans in settling the Middle West and West. German names
predominate in the history of early border warfare in the fights
with the French and the Indians; the Germans were among the most
conspicuous of the pioneers, as they continued to be for generations
in settling the Far West and Northwest, the great number of Indian
massacres culminating in that of New Ulm in 1862, in which German
settlers again formed the outposts of American civilization.
One thing is notable in the annals of our early history, the
striking fact that the frontier settlements in Pennsylvania and the
West and also the Northwest teemed with Germans, and that every
Indian massacre and every border fight with the French, before the
Revolution as well as after, brings into prominence German names. In
the defense of the borders against Indians and French, forts were
built by the German settlers above Harrisburg, at the forks of the
Schuylkill, on the Lehigh and on the Upper Delaware. They bore the
brunt of the Tulpehocken massacre in 1755, just after Braddock’s
defeat; the barbarities perpetrated in Northampton county in 1756,
and the attack on the settlements near Reading in 1763. Against
these forays the Germans under Schneider and Hiester made stout
resistance. As early as 1711 a German battalion, mainly natives of
the Palatinate, was part of the force, a thousand strong, which was
to take part in the expedition against Quebec.
Berks, Bucks, Lancaster, York and Northampton were then the
Pennsylvania frontier counties, and from them came the men who filled
the German regiments and battalions in the Revolutionary War. In the
South, Law’s Mississippi scheme brought more than 17,000 Germans from
the Palatinate, who made settlements throughout what was then the
French colony. Theirs was a life of hardship and constant battle with
the Indians.
In 1773 Frankfort and Louisville, Kentucky, were settled by Germans,
the former by immigrants from North Carolina, and led to “Lord
Dinsmore’s war” in which they fought the Indians and gained a
foothold.
In 1777 Col. Shepherd (Schaefer), a Pennsylvania German, successfully
defended Wheeling from a large Indian force. In the operations under
Gen. Irvine, to avenge the massacre of the Moravian settlers in Ohio,
his adjutant, Col. Rose, was a German, Baron Gustave von Rosenthal.
At the outbreak of the Old French War (1756-1763), the British
government, under an act of Parliament, organized the Royal American
regiment for service in the Colonies. It was to consist of four
battalions of one thousand men each. Fifty of the officers were to
be foreign Protestants, while the enlisted men were to be raised
principally from among the German settlers in America. The immediate
commander, General Bouquet, was a Swiss by birth, an English officer
by adoption, and a Pennsylvanian by naturalization. This last
distinction was conferred on him as a reward for his services in
his campaign in the western part of Pennsylvania, where he and his
Germans atoned for the injuries that resulted from Braddock’s defeat
in the same border region.
The German settlers were ardent American patriots before and during
the Revolution. In 1775, says Rosengarten, the vestries of the German
Lutheran and Reformed churches at Philadelphia sent a pamphlet of
forty pages to the Germans of New York and North Carolina, stating
that the Germans in the near and remote parts of Pennsylvania have
distinguished themselves by forming not only a militia, but a select
corps of sharp shooters, ready to march wherever they are required,
while those who cannot do military service are willing to contribute
according to their ability. They urged the Germans of other colonies
to give their sympathy to the common cause, to carry out the measures
taken by Congress, and to rise in arms against the oppression and
despotism of the English Government. The volunteers in Pennsylvania
were called “Associators” and the Germans among them had their
headquarters at the Lutheran schoolhouse in Philadelphia. In 1750 the
German settlers in Pennsylvania were estimated at nearly 100,000 out
of a total population of 270,000, and in 1790 at 144,600.
The Springfield (Mass.) “Republican,” although an outspoken
pro-British paper, since the outbreak of the war paid deserved
tribute to the share of the German settlers in the early history of
the Republic, rebuking the spirit of envy and detraction evinced in
certain quarters, by saying that those who hold these belittling
views can have no knowledge of the history of the Palatines who
settled the Mohawk Valley. Anyone having a cursory acquaintance with
the elementary text books of American history, the paper thinks, must
recall the massacre of Wyoming and the Cherry Valley. Neither in New
York, nor in Pennsylvania nor in the South did the Germans evade the
dangers and hardships of the wilderness. It is not generally known
how large a share they had in the settling of the West. They poured
into Ohio from the Mohawk Valley as well as from Pennsylvania. On the
dark and bloody ground of Kentucky they vied with Daniel Boone in
fighting the Indians--Steiner and the German Pole, Sandusky, preceded
Boone in Kentucky. One of the most famous among the pioneers was the
“tall Dutchman,” George Yeager (Jaeger), who was killed by Indians in
1775, continues the “Republican.” In the valleys of Virginia there
were more German pioneers than any other nationality. Along the whole
border line from Maine to Georgia they occupied the most advanced
positions in the enemy’s territory, and their large families included
more younger sons who went forth to look for new lands than of all
others. A Kentucky observer declared at the close of the eighteenth
century that of every twelve families, nine Germans, seven Scotchmen
and four Irishmen succeeded when all others failed.
Michael Fink and his companions were the first to descend the
Mississippi on a trading expedition to New Orleans, where the
officials in 1782 had never heard of their starting point, Pittsburg.
Germans again--Rosenvelt, Becker and Heinrich--were the first to
descend the Ohio in a steamboat in 1811. (Rosengarten.)
“In our Colonial Period almost the entire western border of our
country was occupied by Germans,” writes Prof. Burgess. “It fell to
them, therefore, to defend, in first instance, the colonists from the
attack of the French and the Indians. They formed what was known in
those times as the Regiment of Royal Americans, a brigade rather than
a regiment, numbering some 4,000 men, and the bands led by Nicholas
Herkimer and Conrad Weiser.”
=Germany and England During the Civil War.=--The attitude of England
during the Civil War contrasted strangely with that of the German
States, and this attitude is rather clearly shown by the “Investment
Weekly,” of New York, for June 21, 1917, though not intended as a
reproach to England. In the course of an article, headed “Bond Market
of the Civil War,” the “Investment Weekly” says:
Another difference is that the United States until recently
had been the greatest neutral nation in the world, whereas
then Great Britain was the greatest neutral nation. Still
a third difference is that whereas Great Britain was able
to borrow freely from us even before we entered the war,
our government during the Civil War was unable to obtain
any help from Great Britain. In March, 1863, an attempt
was made to negotiate a loan of $10,000,000 there, but the
negotiations utterly failed.
The significance of this paragraph will appear from reflection
on the state of distress prevailing in 1863, a period when the
outlook for the success of the Union was veiled in gloom, and many
of the most stout-hearted trembled for the outcome. England was
sending fully-equipped and English-manned warships over to aid the
Confederacy; the “Alabama” and the “Florida” were sinking our ships
and sweeping American commerce from the seas. Justin McCarthy, in
“The Cruise of the ‘Alabama’” (“A History of Our Own Times,” II,
Chap. XLIV), says:
The “Alabama” had got to sea; her cruise of nearly two
years began. She went upon her destroying course with the
cheers of English sympathizers and the rapturous tirades of
English newspapers glorifying her. Every misfortune that
befell an American merchantman was received in this country
with a roar of delight.
At that time England was on the eve of entering the war on the side
of the South, and only the news of General Grant’s decisive victory
at Vicksburg and Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg brought the House of
Commons to a more sober reflection.
McCarthy shows that a motion for the recognition of the Southern
Confederacy, which Minister Adams had said would mean a war with the
Northern States, was already in process of passing in the House of
Commons, for he writes:
The motion was never pressed to a division; for during its
progress there came at one moment the news that General
Grant had taken Vicksburg, on the Mississippi, and that
General Meade had defeated General Lee, at Gettysburg, and
put an end to all thought of a Southern invasion.... There
was no more said in this country about the recognition of
the Southern Confederation, and the Emperor of the French
was thenceforth free to follow out his plans as far as he
could, and alone.
It was during these dismal hours of trembling hope that Germany
proved herself the friend of the Union. Whereas England would not
loan the Lincoln administration $10,000,000, six times that amount
was forthcoming from Germany.
When in 1870 a disposition developed here to supply France with arms
against Germany, some heated debates took place in the Senate, in
which events of 1861-65 were naturally brought up for review, and it
is interesting to quote from the debates of that period as reported
in the “Globe Congressional Record,” 3rd Session, 41st Congress. Part
II. From pp. 953-955:
Mr. Stewart, Senator from Nevada: “Allow me to call the
attention of the Senator from Tennessee to the fact, which
he must recollect, of the amount of our bonds that were
taken in Germany at the time we needed that they should be
taken, and =when they were prohibited from the Exchange in
London and from the Bourse in Paris, and not allowed to be
on the markets there at all= on account of the state of
public opinion there, =while Germany alone came in and took
five or $600,000,000 at a time when we needed money more
than anything else, to sustain our credit=. That is a fact
showing sympathy, certainly.”
Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, quoted on p. 954, said:
They (the Germans) sent us men; they recruited our armies
with men; they helped to save the life of this nation.
Though the French were our ancient allies, the Germans have
been our modern allies.
And well did Senator Charles Sumner put it when he declared in the
United States Senate, (“Congressional Record,” 3rd Session, 41st
Congress, Page 956): “We owe infinitely to Germany.”
A formal acknowledgement of our debt to Germany during the most
critical stage of our history was made by Secretary of State William
H. Seward through the American Minister at Berlin, in May, 1863, as
follows:
You will not hesitate to express assurance of the constant
good will of the United States toward the king and the
people who have dealt with us in good faith and great
friendship during the severe trials through which we have
been passing.