BI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE 
 
 Settlement of femantown, Pa„ 
 
 THE BEGINNING OE 
 
 GERMAN EMIGRATION TO AMERICA. 
 
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 in 2017 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates 
 
 https://archive.org/details/addressatbicenteOOpenn 
 
AN ADDRESS 
 
 AT THE BI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE 
 
 Settlement of Sermantown, Pa., 
 
 AND THE BEGINNING OF 
 
 GERMAN EMIGRATION TO AMERICA, 
 
 B7 
 
 SAMUEL W. PENNYPACKER, 
 
 IN THE PHILADELPHIA ACADEMY OF MUSIC, 
 
 ON THE EVENING OF OCTOBER 6TH, 1883. 
 
 1883. 
 
PENNYFACKER & ROGERS, 1018 CHESTNUT 6T. 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen: 
 
 The Teutonic races since the overthrow of the power 
 of ancient Rome, which they brought about, have 
 been in the van of thought and achievement. The 
 only rivals of the German and the Dutchman, in those 
 things which mark broadly the pathway of human ad- 
 vancement, came from the same household. In the 
 sixth century a tribe of Germans found their way across 
 the North Sea to an island which in time they made 
 their own, and to which they gave the name of Angle- 
 land. Like all of their stock, the men of this colony 
 grew in substance and developed in intelligence, but 
 V they have ever since, in times of trial and difficulty, 
 looked back to the Fatherland for guidance and 
 support. In 1471 a man named Caxton was in Cologne 
 learning the art of printing. He returned to England 
 to impart to his countrymen a knowledge of the new 
 discovery, and the literature of Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
 Scott and Dickens became a possibility. The impulse 
 which Martin Luther gave to human thought, when he 
 nailed his propositions to the church door at Witten- 
 berg, beat along the shores of the Atlantic, and the rev- 
 olution of 1688, bringing with it the liberty of English- 
 
men, was one of the results. For the attainment of 
 that liberty England drove her own royal line beyond 
 the seas and made the Stadtholder of Holland her king* 
 From his day down to the present time every king 
 of England has been a German. 
 
 Early in the seventeenth century an English admiral 
 went to Rotterdam for a wife. According to Pepys, 
 who described her later, she was “a well-looked, fat, 
 short old Dutch woman, but one that hath been here- 
 tofore pretty handsome, and, I believe, hath more wit 
 than her husband.” The son of this woman was the 
 Quaker, William Penn. He who would know the causes 
 for the settlement of Pennsylvania, the purest, and in 
 that it gave the best promise of what the future was 
 to unfold, the most fateful of the American colonies,, 
 must go to the Reformation to seek them. The time 
 has come when men look back through William Penn 
 and George Fox to their masters, Menno Simons, 
 the reformer of the Netherlands, Caspar Schwenck- 
 feld, the nobleman of Silesia, and Jacob Boehm, the 
 inspired shoemaker of Gorlitz. In that great upheaval 
 of the sixteenth century, there were leaders who refused 
 to stop where Luther, Calvin and Zuinglius took a 
 successful stand. The strong, controlling thought 
 which underlay their teachings was that there should 
 be no exercise of force in religion. The baptism of 
 an infant was a compulsory method of bringing it into 
 the Church, and they rejected the doctrine. An oath 
 was a means of compelling the conscience, and they 
 
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refused to swear. Warfare was a violent interference 
 with the rights of others, and they would take part in 
 no wars even for the purposes of self-protection. More 
 than all in its political significance and effect, with 
 keen insight and clear view, hoping for themselves 
 what the centuries since have given to us, they for the 
 first time taught that the injunctions of Christ were 
 one thing and the power of man another, that the 
 might of the state should have nothing to do with the 
 creed of the church, and that every man in matters of 
 faith should be left to his own convictions. Their 
 doctrines, mingled as must be admitted with some 
 delusions, spread like wild-fire throughout Europe, and 
 their followers could be found from the mountains of 
 Switzerland to the dikes of Holland. They were the 
 forlorn hope of the ages, and, coming into direct 
 conflict with the interests of church and state, they 
 were crushed by the concentrated power of both. 
 
 There is nothing in the history of Christendom like 
 the suffering to which they were subjected, in respect 
 to its extent and severity. The fumes from their 
 burning bodies went up into the air from every city 
 and village along the Rhine. The stories of their 
 lives were told by their enemies, and the pages of 
 history were freighted with the records of their alleged 
 misdeeds. The name of Anabaptist, which was given 
 them, was made a byword and reproach, and we shrink 
 from it with a sense of only half-forgotten terror even 
 to-day. The English representatives of this move- 
 
 3 
 
ment were the Quakers. Picart, after telling that 
 some of the Anabaptists fled to England to spread 
 their doctrines there, says: “The Quakers owe their 
 rise to these Anabaptists. 1 ” The doctrine of the inner 
 light was an assertion that every man has within 
 himself a test of truth upon which he may rely, and 
 was in itself an attack upon the binding character of 
 authority. The seed from the sowings of Menno, 
 wafted across from the Rhine to the Thames, were 
 planted on English soil by George Fox, and were 
 brought by William Penn to Pennsylvania, where no 
 man has ever been molested because of his religious 
 convictions. Three times did William Penn, impelled 
 by a sympathetic nearness of faith and methods, go 
 over to Holland and Germany to hold friendly converse 
 and discussion with these people, and it was very 
 fitting that when he had established his province in 
 the wilds of America he should urge and prevail 
 with them to cross the ocean to him. 
 
 On this day, two hundred years ago, thirty-three of 
 
 them, men, women and children, landed in Philadelphia. 
 The settlement of Germantown has a higher import, 
 
 then, than that thirteen families founded new homes, 
 and that a new burgh, destined to fame though it 
 was, was builded on the face of the earth. It has 
 a wider significance, even, than that here was the 
 beginning of that immense emigration of Germans 
 
 1. Picart was here cited because he makes the statement directly and In 
 few words. Upon this subject consult Barclay’s Keliglous Societies of the 
 Commonwealth, Hortensius’ Histoire des Anabaptistes, and Penna. Maga- 
 zine, Vol. iv, page 4. 
 
 4 
 
who have since flocked to these shores. Those thirteen 
 men, humble as they may have been individually, and 
 unimportant as may have been the personal events of 
 their lives, holding as they did opinions which were 
 banned in Europe, and which only the fullness of 
 time could justify, standing as they did on what was 
 then the outer picket line of civilization, best repre- 
 sented the meaning of the colonization of Pennsylvania 
 and the principles which lie at the foundation of her 
 institutions. Better far than the Pilgrims who landed 
 at Plymouth, better even than the Quakers who 
 established a city of brotherly love, they stood for 
 that spirit of universal toleration which found no 
 abiding place save in America. Their feet were 
 planted directly upon that path which leads from the 
 darkness of the middle ages down to the light of the 
 nineteenth century, from the oppressions of the past 
 to the freedom of the present. Bullinger, the great 
 reviler of the Anabaptists, in detailing in 1560 their 
 many heresies, says they taught that “the govern- 
 ment shall and may not assume control of questions of 
 religion or faith. 2 ” No such attack upon the established 
 order of things had ever been made before, and the 
 potentates were wild in their wrath. Menno went from 
 place to place with a reward upon his head, men were 
 put to death for giving him shelter, and two hundred 
 and twenty-nine of his followers were burned and be- 
 
 2. “Die Oberkeit soelle vnd moege sich der Religion oderGloubens sachen 
 nijt annemmen.” Der Widertoulferen Vrsprung. p 18. 
 
 5 
 
headed in one city alone. But, two centuries after Bull- 
 inger wrote, there was put into the constitution of 
 Pennsylvania, in almost identical language : “ No human 
 authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere 
 with the right of conscience.” The fruitage is here, but 
 the planting and watering were along the Rhine. And 
 to-day the Mennonites and their descendants are to be 
 found from the Delaware River to the Columbia. The 
 Schwenckfelders, hunted out of Europe in 1734, still 
 meet upon the Skippack on the 24th of every Septem- 
 ber, to give thanks unto the Lord for their deliverance. 
 This is the tale which Lensen, Kunders, Lucken, Tyson, 
 Opdengraeff and the rest, as they sat down to weave 
 their cloth and tend their vines in the woods of Ger- 
 mantown, had to tell to the world. A great poet has 
 sung their story, and you Germans will do well to 
 keep the memory of it green for all time to come. 
 
 It cannot be gainsaid that the influence upon 
 American life and institutions of that German emi- 
 gration which began with thirty-three persons in 
 1683 and had swollen in 1882 to 250,630*, has fulfilled 
 the promise given by its auspicious commencement. 
 The Quakers maintained control of their province 
 down to the time of the Revolution, and they were 
 enabled to do it by the support of the Germans. The 
 dread with which the Germans inspired the politicians 
 of the colonial days was excessive. In 1727 James 
 Logan wrote to the proprietary: “You will soon have 
 a German colony here, and, perhaps, such a one as 
 
 6 
 
Britain once received from Saxony in ye fifth century.”' 
 Said Thomas Graeme to Thomas Penn in a letter in 
 1750, “The Dutch, by their numbers and industry, 
 will soon become masters of the province.” Many 
 were the devices to weaken them. It was proposed to 
 establish schools among them where only English 
 should be taught, to invalidate all German deeds, to 
 suppress all German printing presses and the importa- 
 tion of German books, and to offer rewards for inter- 
 marriages. Samuel Purviance wrote to Colonel James 
 Burd in 1765 that the way to do was “to let it be 
 spread abroad through the country that your party 
 intend to come well-armed to the election, * * * 
 
 and that you will thrash the sheriff, every inspector, 
 Quaker and mennonist to a jelly.” But as a disappointed 
 manager wrote from Kingsessing the same year; “all 
 in vain was our labor. * * Our party at the last 
 
 election have loosed all.” 
 
 The speaker of the first federal House of Repre- 
 sentatives was a German, and with Simon Snyder, in 
 1808, began the regime of the eight German governors 
 of Pennsylvania. To represent her military renown 
 during the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania has put 
 the statue of Muhlenberg in the capitol at Washington, 
 The terrific and bloody struggle with slavery in this 
 country, which ended at Appomattox in 1865, began 
 at Germantown so long ago as 1688. The Murat of 
 the Rebellion, he who afterwards so sadly lost his life 
 among the savages of the west, had traced his lineage 
 
 7 
 
to the Mennonite, Paul Kuster, of Germantown, and if 
 the records were accessible, it could, it may be, be 
 carried still further back to that Peter Kuster who was 
 beheaded at Saardam, in 1 535. Another of the descen- 
 dants of those earliest emigrants, the youngest general 
 of the war, planted his victorious flag upon the ram- 
 parts of Fort Fisher. The Schwenckfelder forefathers 
 of Hartranft, major-general, governor, and once urged 
 by this State for the presidency, lie buried along the 
 Perkiomen. He who reads the annals of the war will 
 find that among those who did the most effective work 
 were Albright, Beaver, Dahlgren, Heintzleman, Hoff- 
 man, Rosecrans, Steinwehr, Schurz, Sigel, Weitzel 
 and Wistar. 
 
 The liberties of the press in America were estab- 
 lished in the trial of John Peter Zenger. Man never 
 knew the distance of the sun and stars until David 
 Rittenhouse, of Germantown, made his observations 
 in 1 769.3 The oldest publishing house now existing 
 on this continent was started by Sauer, in Germantown, 
 in 1738. The first paper mill was built by Ritting- 
 liiiyseh upon the Wissahickon Creek, in 1690. 4 The 
 German Bible antedates the English Bible in America 
 by nearly forty years, and the largest book published 
 in the colonies came from the Ephrata press in 1749. 
 From Pastorius, the enthusiast, of highest culture 
 and gentlest blood, down to Seidensticker, who made 
 
 3. He was born in Roxborough Township near Germantown. 
 
 4. It was on a branch of the Wissahickon. 
 
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him known to us, the Germans have been conspicuous 
 for learning. To the labors of the Moravian mission- 
 aries, Zeisberger and Heckewelder, we largely owe 
 what knowledge we possess of Indian history and 
 philology. Samuel Cunard, a descendant of Thones 
 Kunders in the fifth generation, established the first 
 
 line of ocean steamers between America and England 
 and was made a British Baronet. 
 
 If you would see the Work of the American Germans 
 of to-day look about you. Is there a scientist of more 
 extended reputation than Leidy? Is there a more 
 eminent surgeon than Gross? Who designed your 
 Centennial buildings, and in whose hands did you 
 trust the moneys to pay for them? The president of 
 your University, the most enterprising of American 
 merchants, and the chief justice of your State are alike 
 of German descent. The great bridge just completed 
 after years of labor and immense expenditures, which 
 ties Brooklyn to New York, was built by a German. 
 The financier of the nation during the Rebellion 
 undertook to construct a railroad from the greatest of 
 the inland seas to the widest of the oceans. He fell 
 
 beneath the weight of the task. 'A German com- 
 pleted it. 
 
 But the time allotted to me does not permit me to 
 more than suggest a few points in the broad outlines of 
 German achievement. The hammer of Thor, which, 
 at the dawn of history, smote upon the Himalayas, 
 now resounds from the Alleghenies to the Cascades. 
 
 9 
 
The Germanic tide, which then began to pour into 
 Europe, has now reached the Pacific. In its great 
 march covering twenty centuries of time, it has met 
 with no obstacle which it has not overcome, it has 
 been opposed by no force which it has not overthrown, 
 and it has entered no field which it has not made more 
 fruitful. America will have no different story to tell. 
 The future cannot belie the past. Manners and insti- 
 tutions change, the rock crumbles into dust, the shore 
 disappears into the sea, but there is nothing more 
 permanent than the characteristics of a race. Already 
 the rigidity and angularity which Puritanism has 
 impressed upon this country have begun to disappear ; 
 already we feel the results of a broader scope, a sterner 
 purpose and of more persistent labor. And in the 
 years yet to be, America will have greater gifts to offer 
 unto the generations of men, will be better able to 
 attain that destiny which, in the providence of God, 
 she is to fulfill, because she has taken unto herself the 
 outpourings of that people which neither the legions 
 of Caesar, nor papal power, nor the genius of a 
 Bonaparte were able to subdue. 
 
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