The Dutch Quaker Founders of Germantown

DUTCH FOUNDERS OF GERMANTOWN83 THE DUTCH QUAKER FOUNDERS OF GERMANTOWN By William I. Hull THE evidence presented (and scattered through 426 pages) in my book on William Penn and the Dutch Quaker Migration to Pennsylvania x shows that Germantown's founders were not German Mennonites but Dutch Quakers. The theory that Germans were the first settlers of the town had been long accepted without question, and I was myself surprised by the inescapable conclusion of this evidence. When I was writing the book, it did not once occur to me that this conclusion would be a cause of offense to people of German blood; but, even had it been so, the historian must accept "truth for authority, and not authority for truth." Among the reviews of the book by English and American writers, I have not seen one which disputes the conclusion; but German and German-American reviewers have denounced it and its author as having attempted to steal from the Germans in America their most cherished historic belief in Germantown as their "nursing mother," in which and from which the spring of German culture arose and spread in the United States. It seems to be in their opinion as intolerable a theft as if some Dutch writer should take from the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock and give to the Dutch of New Netherland the glory of having started the stream of Puritanism flowing over New England and thence throughout our country.2 If the personal equation is to decide the question, it might be argued that since the German immigrants in America were overwhelmingly more numerous than the Dutch, and achieved many notable triumphs in various phases of American life, their historians should be content with these, and should not try to deprive the Dutch of their one ewe lamb—at least in Pennsylvania history. But there is glory enough to go around; and at 1 No. 1 of the Swarthmore College Monographs on Quaker History ; 1935. 2 One German historian (Friedrich Nieper), however, would push the German claim far back of Germantown in 1683, to Gustav Adolf's settlement on the Delaware in 1638. 84 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION various places in my book, cordial praise and full credit are given to the Germans—in so far as space and the treatment of a different subject would admit—for the part which they did play in our history.3 This part was played, however, after 1709, a quarter of a century after the Dutch had founded Germantown. But personal and nationalistic considerations cannot sway the historian, who must hew as best he may to the line of truth, leaving the chips to fall where they may. Let us, then, consider the question on the basis of historic evidence. It is unnecessary in this place to cite and reply to all the reviews and editorials which have come to the author from German sources. But since two of my good German friends (and fellow Friends), Wilhelm Hubben and Alfons Paquet, have stated the main objections which have been advanced from what may be called for the sake of brevity the pro-German point of view, this article will be devoted to a consideration of them. They have been stated, by Wilhelm Hubben in the Bulletin of the Friends' Historical Association (vol. 27 (1938, No. 1), p. 35) and by Alfons Paquet in Der Quäker (xv, 6 (June 1938), p. 180). It need scarcely be said that only the utmost friendliness has marked their criticism, and that this reply to them is conceived in the same spirit.4 These objections and the answers to them relate to the Rhenish city of Krefeld, and are of two kinds, namely geographical and political, and linguistic. From the geographical and political point of view, the founders of Germantown came from the valley of the Rhine River, which, according to super-patriotic Germans of the nineteenth century, is not Germany's boundary, but Germany's river. The settlers of Germantown who came direct from Holland were also from the Rhine valley. Krefeld was in that part of the valley which was inhabited by those Teutons who, after the Treaty of Verdun in...