Before the Revolution the Gospel was preached in sixteen German churches in the colony, and at the outbreak of the Revolution the German Fusiliers was the name given to an organization of German and German-Swiss volunteers which still exists. As early as 1766 a German Society was founded in Charleston and numbered upward of 100 members at the beginning of the Revolution. It gave 2,000 pounds to the patriotic cause, and after the conclusion of peace erected its own school, at which annually twenty children of the poor were taught free of charge. Dr. Griffis speaks of the ship “Phoenix,” from New York, “which brought Germans, who built Jamestown on the Stone River.”
Many of the Palatine Germans and Swiss had already settled in the Carolinas, he continues; now into Georgia came Germans from farther East, besides many of the Moravians. In the Austrian Salzburg, prelatical bigotry had become unbearable to the Lutherans. Thirty thousand of these Bible-reading Christians had fled into Holland and England. Being invited to settle in Georgia, they took the oath of allegiance to the British King and crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
In March, 1734, the ship “Purisburg,” having on board 87 Salzburgers with their ministers, arrived in the colony. Warmly welcomed, they founded the town of Ebenezer. The next year more of these sober, industrious and strongly religious people of Germany came over. The Moravians, who followed quickly began missionary work among the Indians. After them again followed German Lutherans, Moravians, English immigrants, Scotch-Irish, Quaker, Mennonites and others. “Thus in Georgia, as in the Carolinas and Virginia, there was formed a miniature New Europe, having a varied population, with many sterling qualities.”
The first whites to settle within the territory comprising the present State of Ohio were the German Moravians who founded the towns of Schoenbrunn, Gnadenhütten, Lichtenau and Salem. David Zeisberger on May 3, 1772, with a number of converted Indians, founded the first Christian community in Ohio. Mrs. Johann George Jungmann was the first white married woman. She and her husband came from Bethlehem, Pa. At Schoenbrunn and Gnadenhütten, Zeisberger wrote a spelling book and reader in the Delaware language which was printed in Philadelphia.
In Gnadenhütten was born July 4, 1773, the first white child in Ohio, John Ludwig Roth; the second child was Johanna Maria Heckewelder, April 16, 1781, at Schoenbrunn, and the third was Christian David Seusemann, at Salem, May 30, 1781. The Communities, largely composed of baptized Indians, in 1775 numbered 414 persons, and their record of industry and peaceful development is preserved in Zeisberger’s diary, now in the archives of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio at Cincinnati.
The peaceful settlements excited the jealousy of powerful interests,and the British Commissioners, McKee and Elliot, and the renegade, Simon Girty, reported to the commander at Detroit that Zeisberger and his companions were American spies. The German settlers and their Indian converts were carried to Sandusky in 1781, where they suffered great privations until permitted, after winter had come, to send back 150 of their Indian wards—all of whom spoke the German language—to gather what of their planting remained in the fields. But a number of lawless American bordermen under Col. David Williamson, acting on a false report that the peaceful Indians had been concerned in a raid, surprised the men in the fields and after disarming them by a trick, murdered men, women and children in cold blood. The details, as related by Eickhoff (“In der Neuen Heimath,” Steiger, New York, 1885, and by Col. Roosevelt in “The Winning of the West”) are among the most ghastly on record and make the blood run cold. Some of these slain had German fathers and all were peaceful, industrious and well-behaved natives who had learned to sing Christian hymns and German songs in their humble meeting houses.
Independent of these communities, the first settlement of Ohio at Marietta was the work of New Englanders, in April, 1788; but the second, that of Columbia, was under the direction of a German Revolutionary officer, Major Benjamin Steitz, the name being later changed by his descendants to Stites.
Space is lacking for fuller details regarding the great share of the Germans in settling the Middle West and West. German names predominate in the history of early border warfare in the fights with the French and the Indians; the Germans were among the most conspicuous of the pioneers, as they continued to be for generations in settling the Far West and Northwest, the great number of Indian massacres culminating in that of New Ulm in 1862, in which German settlers again formed the outposts of American civilization.
One thing is notable in the annals of our early history, the striking fact that the frontier settlements in Pennsylvania and the West and also the Northwest teemed with Germans, and that every Indian massacre and every border fight with the French, before the Revolution as well as after, brings into prominence German names. In the defense of the borders against Indians and French, forts were built by the German settlers above Harrisburg, at the forks of the Schuylkill, on the Lehigh and on the Upper Delaware. They bore the brunt of the Tulpehocken massacre in 1755, just after Braddock’s defeat; the barbarities perpetrated in Northampton county in 1756, and the attack on the settlements near Reading in 1763. Against these forays the Germans under Schneider and Hiester made stout resistance. As early as 1711 a German battalion, mainly natives of the Palatinate, was part of the force, a thousand strong, which was to take part in the expedition against Quebec.
Berks, Bucks, Lancaster, York and Northampton were then the Pennsylvania frontier counties, and from them came the men who filled the German regiments and battalions in the Revolutionary War. In the South, Law’s Mississippi scheme brought more than 17,000 Germans from the Palatinate, who made settlements throughout what was then the French colony. Theirs was a life of hardship and constant battle with the Indians.