In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Birds of Different FeathersRecent Publications from the Max Kade Series
  • Bethany Wiggin (bio)
Citizens in a Strange Land: A Study of German-American Broadsides and Their Meaning for Germans in North America, 1730–1830 hermann wellenreuther University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013 352 pp.
A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America Edited by jan stievermann and oliver scheiding University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013 284 pp.

In late summer 1764, on the eve of the fall elections to the colonial Pennsylvania Assembly, an anonymously authored and published German-language campaign pamphlet (“Anmerckungen über ein noch nie erhört und gesehen WunderThier in Pennsylvanien, genannt Streit-und Strauß-Vogel”) decried the appearance of a previously unknown, nasty, and invasive species it called a Streit-und Strauß-Vogel, literally a “fighting and dueling bird”: a particularly aggressive, if metaphorical, bird of prey. It was in fact a bird of many feathers. Some eight months earlier, just before the New Year of 1764, the Philadelphia region had been shocked by the arrival of the “Paxton Boys”—or the “Pecksen Bey,” as they were known in German—a group of men whose numbers swelled to 250 by the time they reached Germantown on the city’s outskirts. This episode is well known by historians, and the “Boys” were aggressive indeed, its members having sunk their claws into the Christian Conestoga Indians at Christmas, killing and scalping twenty innocent and defenseless men, women, and children.1 These European men—Scots-Irish and some German settlers from Paxton [End Page 153] Township (near present-day Harrisburg)—were bent on revenge for losses European settler communities had suffered in the French and Indian War and then in Pontiac’s War. They laid blame at the feet of the Quaker-led assembly, decrying its failure to authorize militias to defend their remote settlements (not infrequently on land whose title was not clear). The mob was prevented from carrying out its rumored plans to slaughter Moravian Indians on Province Island (south of Philadelphia in the Delaware River) only by the combined efforts of prominent colonists—Quakers, Moravian Germans, Benjamin Franklin, and others—who scrambled to gather supplies and to provide a guard for the Indians and who further promised that the Assembly would give the mob’s grievances a hearing.2

An unprecedented war of pamphlets in the colony’s two main languages about the “Boys” and their actions marked the following weeks and months, and the uproar finally caused the long-simmering conflict between the colony’s Quaker party and the interests of the proprietors, the Church of England sons of Quaker founder William Penn, to boil over. At stake was who should pay the bill for the colony’s defense, and the parties had deadlocked about who was responsible, a fact noted by the Paxton Boys pamphleteers. In late March, in an attempt to outmaneuver the Penn family, the assembly passed a series of resolutions to petition the British Crown to make Pennsylvania a royal colony. They thought to circumvent the proprietary refusal to pay taxes on vast landholdings, yet hoped they might nonetheless preserve the colony’s Charter of Privileges famously guaranteeing freedom of conscience and the right not to bear arms. Benjamin Franklin was deputized to London to broker the tricky deal.

The plan was obviously not uncontroversial, and in the run-up to the fall elections, the anonymous Strauß-Vogel pamphlet styled Franklin’s mission in London as a cuckoo in the nest, yet one more feather in the plumage of this dangerous new bird intent on spreading mayhem in Penn’s formerly peaceful kingdom. It was quite possibly written and published by Christoph Saur II, an astute observer of colonial politics and now, after the death of his father, Christoph Saur I, six years earlier, at the helm of the colony’s second-most famous press.3 The pamphlet sketched out the ominous bird’s various attacks:

Wie unpartheyisch verständige Mitbürger sagen, so ist der erste und gefährlichste Anfall, durch den grösten Theil unserer Assembly Herren [End Page 154] geschehen. Unsere alte unschätzbare Gerechtigkeit und Freyheit, ist von ihnen...

pdf