"Miserable Germans" and Fries's Rebellion: Language, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Early Republic

In August of 1788 the Pennsylvania Gazette published an address to "the friends of religion, morality and useful knowledge" calling for "the propagation of useful knowledge among the citizens of Pennsylvania who are of German birth or extraction." According to the author, Philanthropos, Germans were known as "lovers of liberty," yet Pennsylvania's Germans did not compare favorably to their illustrious brethren in Europe because their humble origins required them to "apply immediately to laborious employments" upon arrival in America leaving them with "no time for education." Although many Germans supposedly could not even add up the value of their property, understand American laws, or read the German Bible, they were nevertheless "valuable citizens." Not only were Germans known for their "genuine honesty" and industry, and their aversion to debt, they were also "least addicted to ardent distilled liquors." Perhaps most importantly, Germans were model citizens of the Republic because they paid their taxes faithfully, obeyed the government, and were sincere in their observance of morality and religion. Still, their political power as voters and as office holders made educating Germans absolutely vital. Philanthropos warned "of the real danger to liberty, property and peace" as a result of uninformed Germans.¹

The specter of ignorant Germans, despite their praiseworthiness as industrious, honest people, was often raised in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, before and after the American Revolution. Scholars are also very familiar with the connection between Republicanism, virtuous citizens, and education.² Yet the urgency of calls for instructing Germans and concerns about them as viable and desirable citizens increased dramatically in the early Republic.³ Now equal fellow citizens under a government based on consent, rather than subjects in a monarchy, Pennsylvania Germans might endanger the survival of the Republic if they did not understand the laws of the land or, worse, were duped into voting for the wrong political candidate. In addition, their non-British ethnic heritage made them suspicious in the eyes of Anglo-Americans outside of Pennsylvania who had long emphasized the importance of homogeneity. Many here will recall Thomas Jefferson's misgivings about the influx of immigrants who "render[ed the United States] a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass." He and other founding fathers equated homogeneity with a "more peaceable, more durable" government.⁴

Nowhere in the early Republic was the predicament of heterogeneity and ignorant Germans more apparent than in the events surrounding Fries's Rebellion of 1799. This popular resistance to a new federal tax law was led by John Fries, a bilingual man of undetermined ethnic origin, born in Montgomery County in 1750, who earned a living as an auction crier. He had been part of the militia troops sent by Washington during the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 and had served as captain in the Continental Army.⁵ The rebellion he led took place in counties where at least 40 percent of the population were German speakers, only surpassed by Lancaster County where they made up 68 percent of the residents.⁶ Based on surviving court records and contemporary observers, most of those involved in refusing to have their properties assessed and almost all of the men who participated in Fries's Rebellion were of German descent. Consequently, John Adams and others attributed the unrest to "miserable Germans [who were] as ignorant of our language as they were of our laws."⁷ In blaming Germans and excluding them from the nation through the references to "our language" and "our laws," Adams pointed to the importance of ethnicity and language in the early Republic.

The events of the late 1790s illustrate the contradictions and tensions between two conceptions of American nationalism and citizenship that had existed prior to the rebellion. On the one hand, German-speakers and other Pennsylvanians claimed a revolutionary and Republican–based nationalism that made military service in the war against Britain and a belief in government founded on consent its most important criteria. On the other hand, many Anglo-Americans and especially members of the ruling elite outside of Pennsylvania based belonging to the American nation on ethnicity and...