studied law and lived in Frankfort-on-the-Main. By the so-called
Germantown patent he acquired 5,350 acres near Philadelphia from
William Penn and founded Germantown. Acting for a company of Germans
and Hollanders, 22,377 additional acres were acquired under the
Manatauney Patent. Germantown was laid out October 24, 1685. (See
“Germantown Settlement.”)
The principal occupation of the settlers was textile industry,
farming and the establishment of vineyards. Pastorius was elected
mayor in 1688 and the next year the town was incorporated. In 1688
Pastorius and others issued a judicial protest against slavery. He
became a member of the Philadelphia school-board, twice was elected
to the Assembly and also acted as magistrate.
Three famous families issued from this settlement. The Rittenhausens,
who established the first flour and the first paper mill in America
and from whom was descended the great astronomer, Rittenhouse;
the Gottfrieds, from whom descended Godfrey, the inventor of the
quadrant, and the Sauers, of whom Christopher Sauer attained fame as
a printer.
There is some analogy between the Puritans and the Crefeld colony in
that they were strongly religious bodies, and of the plain people,
though the Germans, unlike the Pilgrims, were not forced to leave
their native country by intolerable conditions of oppression and
bigotry. Another notable incident is the fact that the Pilgrims
brought over the political ideas of Holland rather than of
England, as they had lived in Holland for twelve years, exiled for
conscience’s sake, earning their bread in a foreign land by the labor
of their hands.
King James had declared of the Puritans: “I will make them conform,
or I will harry them out of the land.” Their long residence in
Holland influenced their future politically, if not in the direction
of tolerance, since those who joined them soon practised in America
the oppression on their fellows which they had left England to escape.
Dr. William Elliot Griffis agrees with Lowell “that we are worth
nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism.”
Dr. Griffis says that the Dutch settlers of that period, a period
when England, even down to 1752, was in her calendar, like Russia
today, eleven days behind the rest of the world, “brought with them
something else than what Washington Irving credits them with. They
had schools and schoolmasters, ministers and churches, the best
kind of land laws, with the registration of deeds and mortgages,
toleration, the habit of treating the Indian as a man, the written
ballot, the village community of free men, and an inextinguishable
love of liberty were theirs. =They originated on American soil many
things, usually credited to the Puritans of New England, but which
the English rule abolished.= They, however who remained, assisted
by Huguenot, Scotchman and German, though in a conquered province,
fought the battle of constitutional liberty against the royal
governors of New York night and day, and inch by inch, until, in the
noble State constitution of 1778, the victory of 1648 was re-echoed.”
New York he contends, “is less the fruit of English than of Teutonic
civilization.” It was the institutions of Holland, not only directly,
but through the medium of the Puritans, that influenced the shaping
of those policies which are known as American. “They say we are
an English nation,” writes Dr. Griffis in a paper read before the
Congregational Club of Boston in 1891, “and they attempt to derive
our institutions from England, notwithstanding that our institutions
which are most truly American were never in England. The story of
Holland’s direct influence on the English-speaking world is an
omitted chapter.”
While the Puritans were persecuting those who did not share their
narrow views of heaven, setting up blue laws and the stocks,
manufacturing iron manacles for the slave trade, and enriching
themselves at the expense of the Indians, the Pastorius settlement
was spreading the light of intelligence and impressing its stamp upon
the American character in a different manner. “Here was raised the
first ecclesiastical protest against slavery,” writes Dr. Griffis,
“and here the first book condemning it was written. Here, also,
was printed the first Bible in a European tongue (German), the
first treaties on the philosophy of education, the largest and most
sumptuous piece of colonial printing; and here was the first literary
center and woman’s college established in America. Pennsylvania led
off in establishing the freedom of the press (John Peter Zenger), in
reform of criminal law, in reform of prisons, in awarding to accused
persons the right of counsel for defense. In not a few features now
deemed peculiarly American, besides that of honoring the Lord’s
day, the State founded by William Penn is the land of first things,
and the shining example. Well, who was William Penn?” continues
the writer. “He was the son of a Dutch mother, Margaret Jasper, of
Rotterdam. Dutch was his native tongue, as well as English.”
With the greater part of these civic virtues we find the Crefeld
settlement closely identified as well as the Dutch--and therefore
Germanic, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon--influence, for Pastorius
himself was the author of the first protest against slavery on
American soil. To this historic pioneer a monument was to be erected
in 1917 at Germantown. The statue by Albert Jaegers, sculptor of
Steuben in Lafayette Park, Washington, was ready for unveiling
in that year but boarded up, as the war between Germany and the
United States had been proclaimed in the meantime. For many months
a systematic agitation was conducted by certain pseudo-patriotic
societies to prevent the unveiling of the monument, on the ground
that it was designed to serve pro-German propaganda; the proposition
was made to destroy it and fill its place with cannons captured
from the Germans by troops, including men from Germantown. Among
those so agitating were the Germantown Federation, Junior Order
United American Mechanics, the Order of Independent Americans, the
Stonemen’s Fellowship, the Patriotic Order Sons of America, the Sons
of Veterans, the Loyal Orange Lodge No. 39, the Fraternal Patriotic
Americans, and others. Petitions and resolutions of protest were
addressed to Representative J. Hampton Moore, to whose efforts
was due the appropriation of $25,000 for the monument, to Senator
Penrose and to the Secretary of War, under whose jurisdiction are
all monuments built at the expense of the people. The leader of the
campaign was one Raymond O. Bliss. This was not in the heat of the
war excitement, but in November, 1919, a year after the armistice had
been signed.
Comment is hardly necessary. It almost seems that it is deliberately
desired to deny recognition to any American historical character
not of English origin, for in Pastorius is embodied one of the
strongest spirits that reacted upon the education, refinement
and spiritual life of the American people; the protest against
human slavery--slavery for which the Puritans were forging the
shackles--adopted by the conference of German Quakers, April 18,
1688, is in the handwriting of Pastorius. A better understanding of
him and his little band was entertained by John Greenleaf Whittier,
when he wrote his “lines on reading the message of Governor Ritner of
Pennsylvania, in 1836:”
And that bold-hearted yeomanry, honest and true,
Who, haters of fraud, give to labor its due;
Whose fathers of old sang in concert with thine,
On the banks of Swatara, the songs of the Rhine,--
The German-born pilgrims, who first dared to brave
The scorn of the proud in the cause of the slave:--* * *
They cater to tyrants? They rivet the chain,
Which their fathers smote off, on the negro again?
The American author, E. Bettle, in “Notices of Negro Slavery in
America,” says of the above body of men and their action: “To this
body of humble, unpretending and almost unnoticed philanthropists
belongs the honor of having been the first association who ever
remonstrated against negro slavery.”
Though disapproving their habits of drinking and hearty feasting at
weddings and funerals, Dr. Rush, in his “Essays, Literary, Moral and
Philosophical,” page 220, says: “If they possess less refinement than
their Southern neighbors, who cultivate their land with slaves, they
possess also more republican virtue.” They introduced glass-blowing
and iron manufacture as early as colonial conditions would allow,
and the establishment of the first iron foundry in America was the
work of Baron Stiegel. They confuted Franklin’s fear of their growing
influence in determining the policy of the province by responding as
ardently to the call of patriotism in 1775-76 as Massachusetts.
The German newspaper in Philadelphia, the “Staatsbote,” published by
Henry Miller--later the official printer of Congress--was one of the
papers that fanned the flames of rebellion. It was read as far as the
Valley of Virginia. The edition of March 19, 1776, contains an appeal
to the Germans beginning: “Remember that your forefathers immigrated
to America to escape bondage and to enjoy liberty.” (Virginia
Magazine, vol. x, pp. 45 ff.)
History is strangely silent about any similar intellectual and
cultural currents emanating from the English settlements of the early
period, though latterly giving birth to a group of historians and
poets who wove the garb of romance around every green New England
hillside and embalmed every local event in poetic legend. While in
Germantown the printing press was turning out Bibles and works of
science and learning, and the people were laying the foundation
of paper mills and type foundries, a harsh spirit of intolerance,
superstition and religious asceticism was the rule in the Bay Colony.
American colonial history reveals the fact that Englishmen, while
boastful of the liberty of conscience which they claim as a divine
heritage, differed from the Dutch and other Teutonic settlers in
America as foremost in seeking to impose religious restrictions
upon others and in offending against the doctrines of personal and
religious liberty. There was very little of real democracy in the
Bay Colony, but much aristocracy, according to Dr. William Elliot
Griffis; for only church members had a right to vote. These Puritans
could not tolerate the men of other ways of thinking, like the
Quakers and the Baptists who came among them, whom they beat, branded
and hanged. Both in Holland and America, this authority continues,
the Pilgrim Fathers were better treated by the Dutch than by the
Puritans. “Toleration is a virtue which Americans have not learned
from England or from the Puritans of New England. For the origins of
the religious liberty which we enjoy we must look to the Anabaptists,
William the Silent and the Dutch republic.” But the Colony did not a
little trade in slaves, and one of its industries was the making of
manacles for the supply of the African man-stealers and traders in
human flesh.
The influence on American life which flowed from the settlements
of the Puritans and from Pennsylvania under the charter held by
William Penn, was as distinct as night and day. From the ultimate
confluence of these two divergent currents of civilization American
life and institutions received a certain character of harmony which
concretely, may be called Americanism. Had the Puritan current
remained uninfluenced by that which flowed from Pennsylvania and
New York, our country would have had the distinct stamp of bigoted
middle-class England, leavened to some extent by the gentry spirit
of slave-holding Virginia, and we should justly have been called an
English, or even Anglo-Saxon people.
But as numerous writers from other than New England regions, have
shown, those institutions which we have commonly been taught to be
English institutions, did not exist in England, but were brought
to America from Holland and the continent, or developed here. The
written ballot came from Emden in Germany; freedom of conscience was
the common possession of the Teuton peoples, and not of Englishmen.
When the Massachusetts Bay Colony numbered 3,000 settlers, there were
but 350 freemen among them, as the condition of freemanship was made,
not a property or educational test, but a religious qualification.
It was not till 1641 that a code of laws was adopted. Prior to this,
they had been governed by the common law of England and the precepts
of the Bible.
Much has been written of religious and political oppression at home
which drove many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and New York; but
the New England settlement owed its founding and growth entirely to
religious persecutions at home. If James I chastised the Dissenters
with whips, his son Charles chastised them with scorpions. It was
William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, above all men, who visited
bitter persecutions upon the Puritans in the reign of Charles, and
it was Laud who caused the building of the English commonwealth in
the New World. The great migration set in with the ascendancy of
Laud. More than 1,000 came in 1630, and as the policy of the king
and Laud became more intolerable, the tide increased in volume. The
people came, not singly, nor as families merely, but frequently as
congregations, led by their pastors. On March 18, 1919, the British
Consul presented the City of Boston with a casket made from the rails
of the docks in the Old Guild Hall at Boston, England, wherein 1,620
of the Puritan refugees were tried for non-conformist proceedings.
The religious differences which the Puritans fought out--and have
never fought to a conclusion--in the New World, the Germans and
Hollanders had decided in the Thirty Years War. Politically and
religiously, the Puritans were uncompromisingly intolerant to all.
They expelled Roger Williams for denying the right of the magistrate
to punish for violation of the first table of the Decalogue; for
denying the right of compelling one to take an oath, denouncing the
union of church and state and pronouncing the King’s patent void on
the ground that the Indians were the true owners of the soil. In 1656
they persecuted the Quakers; in 1692 they hanged witches. Harvard
College was founded in 1636 by the Puritan clergy. Nowhere in the
world was paternalism carried to such extremes as in New England. The
State was founded on the Hebrew Old Testament and religion was its
life. The entire political, social and industrial policy was built on
religion, and Puritanism was painfully stern and somber.
Had this civilization been gradually extended, uninfluenced by the
institutions which were brought over from the continent by the
Hollanders, German Palatines and Delaware Swedes, we should have to
form a radically different conception of the American of today. The
influence of the Puritans continues to make itself still felt in
manifestations of bigotry and intolerance in the form of prohibition,
blue laws, race antagonism, etc. Out of its midst have arisen many
great and free minds, like beautiful orchids out of a swamp, but
rarely great minds uninfluenced by education flowing from or gained
on the continent of Europe, while the rank and file at heart remains
what it always was, an imponderable mass, excluding light, dealing
with external forms and interpreting the passions of life and the
spiritual institutions of soul and mind by the fixed standards of an
obsolete philosophy, and continues to be harsh, intolerant, hostile
and fanatical.
In 1631, Roger Williams arrived at Nantasket. He was a radical who
claimed that no one should be bound to maintain worship against his
own consent, and that the land belonged to the Indians and they ought
to be paid for it. The Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered Williams to
leave, and when he and five friends took up lands in Rhode Island,
the Plymouth men notified him that the land he had chosen was under
their control and intimated that he must move on. The next person to
come into contact with colonial intolerance was Mrs. Anne Hutchinson,
“a pure woman of much intellectual power,” but for whose preaching
and teaching there was no room in Massachusetts. The General Court,
after deciding that Mrs. Hutchinson was “like Roger Williams or
worse,” banished her. With William Codington and others she bought
Rhode Island from the Indians and began the colonies of Portsmouth
and Newport. In 1638 Rev. John Wheelwright was expelled from
Massachusetts for sympathy with Mrs. Hutchinson.
The Maryland English were more liberal, but their laws did not
protect Jews or those who rejected the divinity of Christ. When
the Commonwealth was established in England, its Commissioners in
Maryland acted in a most intolerant manner, allowing no Catholics
to have a seat in the legislature. They repealed the statute of
toleration and prohibited Catholic worship. In the Carolinas all
Christians lived harmoniously together until Lord Granville attempted
to remove the religious privileges of the Colonists, by excluding
all who were not members of the Anglican Church from the Colonial
legislature.
Massachusetts, in 1656, passed a law pronouncing the death sentence
on any Quaker who, having once been banished, should return to the
Colony. Under this law four were actually hanged. In 1692 hundreds of
people accused of witchcraft were thrown into prison; nineteen were
hanged; one, an old man, was pressed to death, and two died in jail
before the popular madness had run its course.
A valuable contribution to the history of religious intolerance in
our country, the result of English civilization, is contained in
“American State Papers Bearing on Sunday Legislation,” revised and
enlarged edition compiled and annotated by William Addison Blakely of
the Chicago Bar and lecturer at the University of Chicago; foreword
by Thomas M. Cooley. Published by “Religious Liberty,” Washington,
D. C. Here we get the text of the first Sunday law on American soil,
passed in Virginia in 1610:
Every man or woman shall repair in the morning to the
divine service and sermon preached upon the Sabbath Day,
and in the afternoon to divine service and catechising,
upon pain for the first fault to lose their provision and
allowance for the whole week following (provisions were
held in common at that day); for the second to lose the
said allowance =and also to be whipt=; for the third =to
suffer death=. Whipping meant that the offender shall by
order of such justice or justices, receive on the bare back
ten lashes well laid on.
In Massachusetts the law provided various penalties, according to the
gravity of the offense. Ten shillings or be whipped for profaning
the Lord’s day; death for presumptuous Sunday desecration; fines for
traveling on the Lord’s day; boring tongue with red-hot iron, sitting
upon the gallows with a rope around the offender’s neck, etc., at
the discretion of the Court of Assizes and General Goal Delivery.
(“Acts and Laws of the Province of Mass. Bay 1692-1719,” p. 110.) It
was pretty much the same in Connecticut, where the laws explicitly
prohibited “walking for pleasure,” while Maryland provided “death
without benefit of clergy for blasphemy.” Practically every English
colony had similar laws and ordinances. We read in Jefferson’s “Notes
on Virginia” (1788, p. 167):
The first settlers were immigrants from England, of the
English Church, just at a point of time when it was
flushed with a complete victory over the religion of other
persuasions. Possessed, as they became, of the power of
making, administering and executing the laws, they showed
equal intolerance in this country with their Presbyterian
brethren who had emigrated to the Northern government....
Several acts of the Virginia Assembly, of 1659, 1662 and
1693, had made it penal in parents to refuse to have their
children baptized, and prohibited the unlawful assembling
of Quakers, had made it penal for any master of a vessel
to bring a Quaker into the State, had ordered those
already there, and such as should come hereafter, to be
imprisoned until they should abjure the country--provided
a milder penalty for the first and second return, but
=death= for their third. If no capital executions took
place here, as did in New England, it was not owing to the
moderation of the Church, or spirit of the Legislature,
as may be inferred from the law itself; but to historical
circumstances which have not been handed down to us.
William H. Taft, when President, said: “We speak with great
satisfaction of the fact that our ancestors came to this country to
establish freedom of religion. Well, if you are to be exact, they
came to establish freedom of their own religion, and not the freedom
of anybody else’s religion. The truth is that in those days such a
thing as freedom of religion was not understood.”
Just what American freedom was at the time that English influence was
at high tide, unleavened by the liberal and tolerant ideas brought
over from the European continent, may be inferred from the following
extract from the “Columbian Sentinel” of December, 1789, quoted in
“American State Papers:”
The tithingman also watched to see that “no young people
walked abroad on the even of the Sabbath,” that is, on the
Saturday night (after sundown). He also marked and reported
all those who “lye at home” and others who “prophanely
behaved,” “lingered without dores at meeting times on the
Lord’s Daie,” all “the sons of Belial strutting about,
setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the day.”
These last two offenders were first admonished by the
tithingman, then “sett in stocks,” and then cited before
the Court. They were also confined in the cage on the
meeting house green, with the Lord’s Day sleepers. The
tithingman could arrest any who walked or rode too fast
in pace to and from meeting, and he could arrest any who
“walked or rode unnecessarily on the Sabbath.” Great and
small alike were under his control.
Even General Washington while President was interfered with on one
occasion by “the tithingman.”
=Propaganda in the United States.=--It has been charged that though
a large number of American newspapers were controlled in England
through Lord Northcliffe, a joint commission of English, French and
Belgian propagandists was deemed necessary early in the war to create
public sentiment in the United States in favor of intervention on
the side of the European Allies through the process of “retaining” a
number of prominent speakers as attorneys and employing a staff of
well-known writers, novelists and poets to arouse us from our state
of neutrality. A similar policy was followed in other countries,
and in the course of an interview with Vicente Blasco Ibanez, the
Spanish novelist, author of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”
(in which the Germans are pictured in most repellent color), the New
York “Times” of October 18, 1919, printed the following significant
paragraph:
Ibanez said the actual writing of “The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse” was done in four months in time spared from his
official work of writing a weekly chronicle of the war =and
directing the Allied propaganda as an agent of the French
Government=.
This frank statement will tend to cause “The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse,” which was hailed as “the greatest novel of the war” by
the literary critics on the newspapers, and many persons ignorant
of the design concealed within the pages of the novel, to appear in
a somewhat different light from that inspired by a belief in the
untainted integrity of the author.
The English propaganda bureau for the United States, located in
New York, was in charge of Louis Tracy, an English novelist. In an
interview with Tracy, published in the New York “Evening Sun” of
November 10, 1919, the author exposes frankly the methods pursued
by himself and staff in fostering the British cause by attacks on
the German and Irish element in the United States and in furthering
libels of the enemy through the medium of the American press.
Incidentally he is quoted as follows: