A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America

Chapter 8: Defining the Limits of American Liberty: Pennsylvania’s German Peace Churches During the Revolution

Eight Defining the Limits of American Liberty Pennsylvania’s German Peace Churches During the Revolution Jan Stievermann Scholars have long ignored the experience of Pennsylvania’s German Peace Churches during the American Revolution. The few who have examined these groups have tended to view them through the interpretative lens of loyalism.1 Following the lead of angry Patriots, historians have regarded the Mennonites, Amish, Brethren (Dunkers), Schwenkfelders, and Moravians as either closet Tories, hiding their support for the king under the guise of religious scruples, or passive Loyalists, who were set against the independence movement even though they had scruples about actively opposing it.2 Only in the last quarter century has more serious interest been shown in religiously motivated dissent against the Revolution, which complicates this overly simplistic outlook. A focus on the English-speaking Quakers has revealed that the stance of aloofness and noncooperation assumed by the majority of Friends must be clearly distinguished from loyalism,3 an insight that needs to be brought to bear on the German sectarians of Pennsylvania as well. Anne Ousterhout’s survey of opposition to the Revolution in Pennsylvania offers some general theoretical reflections that are helpful for studying the German Peace Churches. Ousterhout convincingly argues that the labels “Tory” and “Loyalist” are, in most cases, misleading for analyzing the variegated forms of antipathy toward the Revolution. According to Ousterhout, the Pennsylvania archives yield evidence only for a relatively small faction of ideologically driven, active Loyalists “who were primarily motivated by 208 Ethnic and Religious Identities affection and preference for the mother country and its government and who faithfully adhered to England during the imperial struggle.”4 The attitude of the majority of dissenters is better described as “dissatisfaction with” rather than “loyalty to.”5 For the majority of Friends, the primary, if not the only, reason for dissent lay in their inability to harmonize a violent rebellion with their peace testimony. Since they never directly wielded any political power in the colony and were much less concerned with transatlantic trade interests, the German sectarians present an even clearer case of religiously motivated alienation from the Whig supporters of the war that had little, if anything, to do with loyalism. Richard MacMaster and Donald Durnbaugh6 argue that the vast majority of Germans belonging to the nonresistant sects attempted to remain genuinely neutral in the conflict, assuming a stance of passivity until God decided the matter one way or the other. No doubt, most of the German pacifists in Pennsylvania were of that large and heterogeneous group Ousterhout calls the disaffected. They longed for the quiet old days and were highly critical, even resentful, of the revolutionaries, who threw their world into turmoil and hounded them for their convictions. But, except for a few cases, including the cause célèbre of the Philadelphia printer Christoph Saur III,7 little evidence of active loyalism can be found, even during the British occupation of Philadelphia . The Patriots never managed to convert more than a few German sectarians to their cause or to force significant numbers into service, despite resorting to extreme measures. This refusal of the vast majority of German pacifists to take sides even under duress cannot, as MacMaster points out, be properly understood in terms of secular ideologies, party politics, or material interests. Instead, “the real significance of the wartime experience of the historic peace churches is theological, because the issues involved were theological issues.” What was at stake between 1775 and 1783 was not a politically motivated aversion to involvement in the Revolution “so much as the sectarian concept of discipleship as a distinct way of life.” The war and the regime change it entailed brought into sharp focus “the essential conflict between the sects and the state” (CC, 214). For their refusal to commit fully to the Patriots and perform their new civic duties, the German sectarians, like the English-speaking Quakers of Pennsylvania, were harassed throughout the revolutionary period and subjected to double and triple taxation, heavy fines, and, in a number of cases, imprisonment and confiscation of entire estates. They were even stripped of German Peace Churches During the Revolution 209 basic civic rights for more than a decade. The sectarian experience thus calls into question the “consensus” model of the American Revolution, according to which the Revolution was “the product of enlightened leaders who confidently led a united white population into revolt.”8 Instead, the...