Mass Immigration

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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          Immigration, much in the news now, has always been a fact of American life. Just one example: By the time of the American Revolution there were over 100,000 German settlers in Pennsylvania, making up a full one-third of the colony’s population. The man most responsible for that was Francis Pastorius.

          Does that name seem familiar at all? Music buffs might think of the great bass guitarist Jaco Pastorius, who was a descendant. And military history aficionados might recall that Operation Pastorius in June 1942 included landing spies on the beach in Amagansett, New York.

          Back to the annals of immigration: It was 339 years ago this week that the first “Mennonites” arrived in America, when the ship Concord docked in Philadelphia. Mennonites were members of a Protestant sect founded by Menno Simons in the 16th century who were routinely persecuted in Europe. When they heard that William Penn was offering 5000 acres and religious freedom in his colony, a group of them set off from Krefeld, Germany. They would create the aptly named Germantown.

          The man who led them had been born Franz Daniel Pastorius into a prosperous Lutheran family in the German Duchy of Franconi. He was trained as a lawyer in some of the best German universities of his day, including the University of Altdorf, University of Strasbourg, and the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. He began practicing law in Windsheim and continued it in Frankfurt-am-Main. Along the way, Pastorius became dissatisfied with the Lutheran church.

After he had completed his doctorate, Pastorius returned to Windsheim and his law career. Of political note, his family and friends (with Habsburg backing) suppressed a popular insurrection against abuses of oligarchic rule. It was in this context that he left his home in 1679, joined the Lutheran Pietists in Frankfurt, and repeatedly urged adherence to Christ's Golden Rule – which got him in good with the Mennonites. He emigrated to Pennsylvania at the head of that first group of settlers, arriving on October 6, 1683.

In Philadelphia, Pastorius negotiated the purchase of 15,000 acres from Penn, who was the “proprietor” of the colony, and laid out the settlement of what would become Germantown, where he himself would live until his death. As each boatload of immigrants arrived, they were welcomed, until there were over 100,000 of them. Being one of the community's leading citizens, Pastorius served in many public offices. He was the first mayor and was a member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1687 and 1691.

He wrote extensively on topics ranging from beekeeping to religion. He was also regarded as one of the more important poets in early America and his work appears in the New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse. Pastorius's most important book was his manuscript "Bee Hive," which is now in the University of Pennsylania’s rare book room. This contains poetry, his thoughts on religion and politics, and lists of books he consulted along with excerpts from those books. Also of interest is a book published in 1700 under the title Umständige geographische Beschreibung der allerletzt erfundenen Provintz Pennsylvania, which contains many of his letters home to Germany. His manuscripts include treatises on horticulture, law, agriculture, and medicine.

In 1688, he drafted, together with three other men, a document considered the first protest against slavery in America. Pastorius was a cosigner of the first petition against slavery made in the 13 colonies. Before the Civil War, when abolition of slavery was gaining strength, the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier celebrated Pastorius – and particularly his anti-slavery advocacy – in “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim.”

On the domestic side, five years after arriving in Pennsylvania, Pastorius married Ennecke Klostermanns. They had two sons, Johann Samuel Pastorius and Heinrich Pastorius. Over the years in Pennsylvania and as his writing indicates, Pastorius grew increasingly liberal, espousing universalism and moving close to Quakerism. But he did not go so far as to take up the bass guitar.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival. The next collaboration with Bob Drury, The Last Hill: The Epic Story of a Ranger Battalion and the Battle That Defined WW II, will be published by St. Martin’s Press on November 1. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to pre-order a copy.