German Contribution to the Early History of the USA

A large number of Americans have German ancestors. More than 25% of U.S. Americans are either completely or partly of German descent. There was even some talk after the War of Independence about whether English or German should be the national language! In the mid-1700s, Benjamin Franklin grumbled about Philadelphia's bilingual street signs and complained that the Pennsylvania parliament would soon need German-English interpreters. In the late-1700s the parliamentary records of Pennsylvania and new state laws were published in both English and German, and the parliament of Maryland decided to publish a German-language version of the Constitution. The fact that official bilingual publishing of parliamentary business slackened off in the 1800s had more to do with the fact that the German-language newspapers of the US were then reporting parliamentary news in detail. Much of the technical and cultural innovation that has come out of the USA would not have been possible without the contribution of German immigrants, whose influence on the USA began in the 1600s.

A small number of German tradesmen (glassmakers, carpenters, sawmill wrights, and mining experts) were taken with the first settlers to the Jamestown colony in Virginia in the years 1608 to 1620, however, they all probably died without leaving descendants. Settlers' chances of survival in that period at Jamestown were low due to hunger, diseases and attacks from the native Americans.

From 1626 to 1632 a German, Peter Minuit from Wesel on the Rhine, was employed by the Netherlands to organise and govern their American colony of New Amsterdam. He built the successful foundation for the greatest metropolis on the American continent, which later became known as New York. Peter Minuit later went to work for the Swedish government and in 1638 built Fort Christina (named after the Swedish queen) as the central point of the colony of New Sweden on Delaware Bay. The Swedish colony was keen to attract German immigrants, and in May 1654 Johann Rising, secretary of the Chamber of Commerce of Elbing, led 100 German families to New Sweden, the first group of German emigrants to North America. A few years later the Dutch from New Amsterdam took the Swedish colony by force, and in 1664 New Amsterdam and New Sweden went into English control.

Germantown, Pennsylvania

The English Quaker William Penn received a large area of land west of the Delaware from the English government as payment of a debt owed to his father by the government. He named it Pennsylvania and declared it a place of refuge for all Europeans who felt persecuted on the basis of their religion. The capital of Pennsylvania was named Philadelphia (city of brotherly love). Penn knew German and could preach in German, and had frequently been in Germany in the 1670s. He had contact with the Mennonite community in the area of the lower Rhine and in Frankfurt. Many of them were interested in emigrating to Pennsylvania and did so in autumn of 1683 on the ship "Concord", the journey taking 70 days. A large piece o f land was sold to them by Penn and named Germantown, today a suburb of Philadelphia. The second bible to be printed in America was the German bible printed in Germantown by Christoph Saur in 1743. View the cover of the bible (size: 73K).

The settlement of the Mennonites resulted in other German religious sects seeking refuge in America.

The community leaders of Germantown wrote the first protest against the slave system on American soil (appealing in the name of humanity and of the Christian religion), almost 200 years (18th February 1688) before the Civil War. The Annual Conference of the Quakers in Pennsylvania did not wish to go into the politically tricky issue raised by their German brothers. Only 30 years later did the Pennsylvania Quakers speak out against the slave trade.

In the 1770s a third of the population of Philadelphia was German. A study by Albert Faust came to the conclusion that in 1775 10% of the population of the American colonies was German, though they were distributed unevenly amongst the 13 colonies. Dr Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), a Philadelphia doctor, signer of the Declaration of Independence, surgeon general of the Continental Army during the early part of the American Revolution (1776-1783) and member of Congress, was curious about the prosperity of Pennsylvania and decided that the German farmers there had much to do with it. He wrote a study listing what he thought were the reasons why the German farmers were better farmers than the non-German farmers in Pennsylvania. When the War of Independence began, Pennsylvania farms were producing enough food to feed the American Army and the allied French Army for the duration of the war. Most of the grain was provided by Pennsylvania-German farmers. Dr Rush wrote that the Pennsylvania farms produced millions of dollars, which after 1780 made possible the founding of the Bank of North America (chartered in 1781).

The famous Declaration of Independence was available to the public in a printed German translation before it was released in English. It was a one-page broadside print published by Steiner and Cist of Philadelphia. Large numbers of Germans lived in the Pennsylvania area. Look at a picture of the Declaration of Independence in German! (size: 161K)

On July 5, 1776, the "Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote" was America's first paper to announce that the Declaration of Independence had been adopted. The text reads as follows (there are some old-style German spellings in it):

• Chronology of Germans in America from the Library of Congress
• Well-known Americans of German descent

References -
Albert Bernhardt Faust: The German Element in the USA. The Steuben Society of America, New York 1927
Paul Rohrbach: Das Deutschtum über See. Wilhelm Schille & Co., Karlsruhe 1931

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