Franz Daniel Pastorius and German, Dutch and English Colonization.—What the Mayflower is to the Puritans, the Concord is to the descendants of the Germans who were among the pioneer settlers of America. It was this vessel that bore to American shores the first compact German band of immigrants, under the leadership of Franz Daniel Pastorius.

While the first Dutch settlement, that of Manhattan Island, or New York, was founded in 1614, and that of Plymouth by the Puritans in1620, that of Germantown, Pennsylvania, occurred in1683, although long prior to that date Germans in large numbers were settled in the New World, and there is evidence that there were Germans among the Jamestown pioneers and those of the Massachusetts Bay colony.

But German immigration is reckoned to have begun with the arrival of thirteen families from Crefeld under Pastorius. They embarked July24, 1683, on the Concord, and arrived October6, 1683, in Philadelphia.

Pastorius was born September26, 1651, at Sommernhausen Franconia, 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 October24, 1685. (See “Germantown Settlement.”)

The principal occupation of the settlers was textile industry, farming and the establishment of vineyards. Pastorius was elected mayor in1688 and the next year the town was incorporated. In1688 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 to1752, 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 of1778, the victory of1648 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 in1891, “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 in1917 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, April18, 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, in1836:”

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,” page220, 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 in1775-76 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 March19, 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.45ff.)

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 350freemen 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 in1630, 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. In1656 they persecuted the Quakers; in1692 they hanged witches. Harvard College was founded in1636 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. In1638 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. In1692 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 in1610:

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, of1659, 1662 and1693, 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 tous.

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.”