Three famous families issued from this settlement.The Rittenhausens, who established the first flour and the first paper mill in America and from whom was descended the great astronomer, Rittenhouse; the Gottfrieds, from whom descended Godfrey, the inventor of the quadrant, and the Sauers, of whom Christopher Sauer attained fame as a printer.
There is some analogy between the Puritans and the Crefeld colony in that they were strongly religious bodies, and of the plain people, though the Germans, unlike the Pilgrims, were not forced to leave their native country by intolerable conditions of oppression and bigotry. Another notable incident is the fact that the Pilgrims brought over the political ideas of Holland rather than of England, as they had lived in Holland for twelve years, exiled for conscience’s sake, earning their bread in a foreign land by the labor of their hands.
King James had declared of the Puritans: “I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land.” Their long residence in Holland influenced their future politically, if not in the direction of tolerance, since those who joined them soon practised in America the oppression on their fellows which they had left England to escape.
Dr. William Elliot Griffis agrees with Lowell “that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism.” Dr. Griffis says that the Dutch settlers of that period, a period when England, even down to 1752, was in her calendar, like Russia today, eleven days behind the rest of the world, “brought with them something else than what Washington Irving credits them with. They had schools and schoolmasters, ministers and churches, the best kind of land laws, with the registration of deeds and mortgages, toleration, the habit of treating the Indian as a man, the written ballot, the village community of free men, and an inextinguishable love of liberty were theirs. They originated on American soil many things, usually credited to the Puritans of New England, but which the English rule abolished. They, however who remained, assisted by Huguenot,Scotchman and German, though in a conquered province, fought the battle of constitutional liberty against the royal governors of New York night and day, and inch by inch, until, in the noble State constitution of 1778, the victory of 1648 was re-echoed.”
New York he contends, “is less the fruit of English than of Teutonic civilization.” It was the institutions of Holland, not only directly, but through the medium of the Puritans, that influenced the shaping of those policies which are known as American. “They say we are an English nation,” writes Dr. Griffis in a paper read before the Congregational Club of Boston in 1891, “and they attempt to derive our institutions from England, notwithstanding that our institutions which are most truly American were never in England. The story of Holland’s direct influence on the English-speaking world is an omitted chapter.”
While the Puritans were persecuting those who did not share their narrow views of heaven, setting up blue laws and the stocks, manufacturing iron manacles for the slave trade, and enriching themselves at the expense of the Indians, the Pastorius settlement was spreading the light of intelligence and impressing its stamp upon the American character in a different manner. “Here was raised the first ecclesiastical protest against slavery,” writes Dr. Griffis, “and here the first book condemning it was written. Here, also, was printed the first Bible in a European tongue (German), the first treaties on the philosophy of education, the largest and most sumptuous piece of colonial printing; and here was the first literary center and woman’s college established in America. Pennsylvania led off in establishing the freedom of the press (John Peter Zenger), in reform of criminal law, in reform of prisons, in awarding to accused persons the right of counsel for defense. In not a few features now deemed peculiarly American, besides that of honoring the Lord’s day, the State founded by William Penn is the land of first things, and the shining example. Well, who was William Penn?” continues the writer. “He was the son of a Dutch mother, Margaret Jasper, of Rotterdam. Dutch was his native tongue, as well as English.”
With the greater part of these civic virtues we find the Crefeld settlement closely identified as well as the Dutch—and therefore Germanic, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon—influence, for Pastorius himself was the author of the first protest against slavery on American soil. To this historic pioneer a monument was to be erected in 1917 at Germantown. The statue by Albert Jaegers, sculptor of Steuben in Lafayette Park, Washington, was ready for unveiling in that year but boarded up, as the war between Germany and the United States had been proclaimed in the meantime. For many months a systematic agitation was conducted by certain pseudo-patriotic societies to prevent the unveiling of the monument, on theground that it was designed to serve pro-German propaganda; the proposition was made to destroy it and fill its place with cannons captured from the Germans by troops, including men from Germantown. Among those so agitating were the Germantown Federation, Junior Order United American Mechanics, the Order of Independent Americans, the Stonemen’s Fellowship, the Patriotic Order Sons of America, the Sons of Veterans, the Loyal Orange Lodge No. 39, the Fraternal Patriotic Americans, and others. Petitions and resolutions of protest were addressed to Representative J. Hampton Moore, to whose efforts was due the appropriation of $25,000 for the monument, to Senator Penrose and to the Secretary of War, under whose jurisdiction are all monuments built at the expense of the people. The leader of the campaign was one Raymond O. Bliss. This was not in the heat of the war excitement, but in November, 1919, a year after the armistice had been signed.
Comment is hardly necessary. It almost seems that it is deliberately desired to deny recognition to any American historical character not of English origin, for in Pastorius is embodied one of the strongest spirits that reacted upon the education, refinement and spiritual life of the American people; the protest against human slavery—slavery for which the Puritans were forging the shackles—adopted by the conference of German Quakers, April 18, 1688, is in the handwriting of Pastorius. A better understanding of him and his little band was entertained by John Greenleaf Whittier, when he wrote his “lines on reading the message of Governor Ritner of Pennsylvania, in 1836:”
And that bold-hearted yeomanry, honest and true,
Who, haters of fraud, give to labor its due;