Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 11, "The German Mayflower"

 III.

The Birth of a German America

11.

The German "Mayflower”

Only about sixty years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, another ship docked on the American coast carrying a very similar cargo: people who wanted to leave the Old World for the sake of their faith and begin a new life of "holy trial" in the New.

This ship was the "Concord". It brought thirty-three Germans to America. This was only about the fourth part of the passengers of the "Mayflower", but subsequently considerably more German Pietists immigrated to Pennsylvania than Puritans to Massachusetts. Why is it that the Puritans were able to give a Puritan character not only to the colony they founded, but to the whole United States, while the traces of the German Pietists seem to have been obliterated to the casual eye even in the areas that were once purely German-Pietist?

To answer this question is to write the history of America, and not only of America, but also of Germany and England. It must not be forgotten that America was then, and for a long time afterward, a colony, in the fullest sense of the word. It was not only materially dependent on the Old World - how long it took for America to become truly self-sufficient in everything and anything! -but spiritually as well. Even the people who had moved away for the sake of their God, who wanted to start anew from everything and everyone and break away from the old, were still completely rooted in the spiritual views of 17th century Europe, in all its judgments and prejudices.

Pietists and Puritans alike were people who believed in serving only God and who put their salvation far ahead of their physical well-being. But the one were Germans, the other British. The latter belonged to a state which, since the days of Queen Elizabeth, Francis Drake and Cromwell, had been uniting ever more strongly in national terms, boldly and strongly stretching out its hand to the newly discovered world. Germany, however, went the opposite way. It sank from world power to impotence. With the Peace of Westphalia, it had ceased to exist as a state. It was about to dissolve into its component parts. Foreign armies stood on its soil, foreign thoughts dominated its soul, foreign customs, foreign language spread.

It is necessary to remember how it looked in Germany at the time when the "Concord" entered the mouth of the Delaware. In the same year 1683 the Turks attacked Vienna. The same people, in whom still lived the terrible atrocities, the horrible misery of the Thirty Years' War, who partly still bore the scars of maltreatment and torture on their bodies, in their souls the dark stains of the memory of ignominy and desecration, now saw themselves threatened by even more horrors. Wherever the Turkish and Tartar horsemen went, there the houses burned, there the barns blazed, there the naked, mutilated corpses of men lay in the streets, over which women and children were driven into slavery.

While the heart of Europe was thus threatened from Asia, the French "Sun King" decided to use the times to his advantage, invaded Alsace, and took Strasbourg by treachery. No sooner had a last joint effort of the disintegrating German Empire succeeded in averting the Turkish danger, in sacking Vienna and driving back the Asiatic hordes, than the French broke into the Palatinate, scorching, burning and murdering, as if they wanted to surpass the Turks in cruelty.

The worst thing, however, was that in the midst of all the Turkish and French distress, the German peoples and princes did not stand together, but fought and plotted against each other, each willing to betray the other to the foreign enemy for the sake of a small advantage. What could be expected of the other German princes, when even the Great Elector soon lent aid to the Emperor against Louis XIV, then formed a secret alliance with him, pledged to vote for the French king or the Dauphin in the next imperial election, and finally allied himself with the Emperor again, as suited his current territorial interests.

What can be expected from the national feeling of Germans who grew up in such a Germany? In addition to national and economic hardship, there was also religious hardship. For the time being, the Reformation had brought full Protestant freedom to only a few. Such a powerful new idea as that proclaimed by Luther never takes hold at one stroke, but needs decades and centuries. Thus, even in the Protestant countries, freedom of conscience existed only for those who blindly professed the prevailing doctrine. But the very essence of the Reformation was the purely personal relationship of the individual to God, and so innumerable people got into struggles of conscience. Precisely because that time was more pious in the Christian and evangelical sense, numerous sects had to form, each of which was convinced that it had the only right way to eternal salvation, and to whom this conviction meant more than any national affiliation.

Thus, at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, people in Germany were ready to emigrate en masse as soon as a way opened up. The Puritans remained strong and proud and British despite all persecution. When they crossed over to the New World, they went as Englishmen to an English country, and when they became Americans over there under the influence of the other soil, the other sun, the completely different circumstances of life, it was self-evident to them that true Americans can only be British Americans, people who govern and administer themselves, but speak English, think and feel English, adhere to English institutions and customs. The German Pietists did not move as conquerors into a new world, but as emigrants into an already English one. When they left the "Concord" and stepped onto the banks of the Delaware, an icy wind did not whistle in their faces like the men at Plymouth Rock, they did not stand strangers on foreign soil, they did not have to come together in steely determination lest they perish with wife and child, but a friendly gentleman approached them, their new "father of the country," William Penn, and welcomed them to the "city of brotherly love." True, only a row of log houses stood; for William Penn himself had not yet been a full year in his foundation. But he had already found a Swedish settlement from the days of Peter Minnewit at the place he had chosen for his colony. So, after all, there was already a friendly little village, even a Lutheran church, which still stands today. The Swedish settlement had come to the Dutch when Fort Christina fell, and later to the English when they in turn brought an inglorious end to the Dutch colony in the New World. The Duke of York had become the owner of the land at the mouth of the Delaware River, and it was from him that William Penn eventually purchased it.

William Penn was the son of a deserving British admiral, at the same time a Quaker. This was actually a contradiction; for in general the Quakers were small, poor people. They formed a sect which had arisen in Cromwell's time and was understandably suppressed by the warlike hero of the Faith. The Quakers were exceedingly peaceable people, but this very peaceableness must have set them at variance with every state authority; for they refused not only military service, but also the payment of taxes for warlike purposes.

William Penn came to his Quaker foundation in Pennsylvania as a result of a debt owed by the king to his father. Young Penn inherited this debt claim of 16,000 pounds. Since it probably could not have been collected in cash, he asked the king to grant him a strip of land in America to found a colony.

There was plenty of land in America at that time, even though the coastline was almost completely occupied. On the other hand, the influx of British settlers began to slow down during this period. There were not too many Quakers in England, but the persecutions of the Puritans had ceased and so had their emigration to America. In addition, the economy was better and the British Isles were no longer considered overpopulated. So Penn had to look elsewhere for colonists.

His eye fell on Germany. The great Quaker had been there several times and had found in the Mennonites and other German sectarians people who thought very much like the Quakers. In Krisheim by Worms there was even a small German Quaker congregation.

On his two trips to Germany in 1671 and 1677, William Penn found the warmest welcome among the German sectarians. He gained followers, both for his teachings and for the idea of a settlement in America to "live a good, decent, and God-pleasing life" in the wilderness. The Frankfurt Society was founded, which bought a large tract of land in Pennsylvania, and the young lawyer Franz Daniel Pastorius sailed over with the first group as a confidant of the German Pietist emigrants.

Thus the Pennsylvania Germans began their life in the New World under the protection and tutelage of the English Quakers. They and those who came later remained loyally devoted to those who had provided them a haven in the New World. This gave the Pennsylvanian Germans their character to this day. The "Mayflower" became the cradle of America in legend, but the "Concord", the German Mayflower, was forgotten.