Book Description

From the FOREWORD. Singularly little is known of the magnitude of the German emigration to America in colonial times. The very fact of such a movement is commonly unknown to the American at the present day; and even the descendants of these Teutonic pioneers are often ignorant or-more inexcusably-ashamed of their progenitors, and have sought by anglicizing their names and lightly passing over the fact of their descent from "Dutchmen" to conceal the wide and deep traces which this movement has left on American life. Yet this Volkerwanderung (for it merits the name) brought to our shores in the century before the Revolution one hundred and fifty thousand people, one-half of the population of the great province of Pennsylvania, besides large settlements in the provinces of New York, the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, not to mention the small and ill-fated colonies of Law on the Mississippi and those in the State of Maine. Nor is their history lacking in interest, containing as it does the peaceful picture which Whittier has immortalized in his "Pennsylvania Pilgrim;" the self-sacrifice of the Moravian missionaries among the Indians; the dramatic fire of Muhlenberg throwing off his pastor's gown for a Continental uniform and calling to his flock that "the time to fight had come;" and the tragic resolution with which the embattled farmers of Oriskany held back, with the sacrifice of their own lives, the English rifle and Indian scalping-knife from their Mohawk Valley homes. Or we may turn to the quaint Rosicrucians, the hermits of the Wissahickon, or the cloisters of Ephrata for a life almost unknown among the more practical English colonists. If we would sup full of the horrors of war, pestilence and famine, or religious persecution with stake and fire and noisome prison, with midnight flight for conscience' sake, we can find these told in simple pathos in the stories of the Palatines of the Rhine, the Mennonites of Switzerland, the Moravians, or the tiny sect of the Schwenkfelders. If we would meet with good men or great, we may see here the gentle Pastorius, first protestant against American slavery, or Conrad Weiser, whose adventurous life was largely filled with embassies to mighty Indian chiefs and nations, whom he held back from war from the white men's frontier, or, last but not least, William Penn, whose mighty figure dominates the history as its counterfeit presentment does the city he has builded beside the Delaware. And indeed "time would fail us to tell" of the many people and incidents, interesting, pathetic, humorous, or containing in them the germs of our present American development, which fill the annals of those "Pennsylvania Germans" and their kin in many States, whom the New England historian, Parkman, slurred over with the description, "dull and ignorant boors, which character their descendants for the most part retain." How many even of these same descendants know that to this people belong, by ancestry more or less remote, some of the first scientific men of America, such as the Muhlenbergs, Melsheimer, the "father of American entomology," Leidy, and Gross, the great surgeon; Herkimer, the hero of Oriskany; "Moll Pitcher," the heroine of Monmouth; Post, the Indian missionary, to whom Parkman himself pays a noble tribute; Heckewelder, the Moravian lexicographer of the speech of the Delawares; Armistead, the defender of Fort McHenry in the war of 1812, whose flag, "still there," inspired the "Star-Spangled Banner;" Barbara Frietchie; and General Custer? ...."