Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier by James Van Horn Melton (review)

Scholars of the eighteenth-century American South have long known of the Salzburghers, German-speaking colonists in Ebenezer, Georgia. Although famous for their 1739 petition to ban slavery in Georgia, little else was known about this elusive community on the margins of the British Empire. In Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, James Van Horn Melton rescues the Salzburghers from obscurity. In particular, the author draws on his expertise as a historian of early modern Germany to illustrate how the experiences of the Salzburghers in the Holy Roman Empire conditioned their immigration and community building in North America. As Melton states, Georgia’s Salzburghers allow us to “reconstruct the transatlantic worlds of simple folk whose humble and obscure lives often resist detailed investigation” (5). This statement in and of itself reveals the novelty as well as the limitations of Melton’s work. On the one hand, he aptly demonstrates how early America cannot be understood without its European contexts—that, in a sense, early American history is by nature Atlantic history. On the other, the analytic breadth and nuance that Melton provides for the Salzburghers in Europe does not carry over into his analysis of North America, revealing the disconnect within this and other transatlantic histories.

As scholars such as Rosalind J. Beiler, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Patrick Griffin, and others have established, the history of European immigration to colonial North America is unequivocally a transatlantic narrative in two parts.¹ Melton’s book follows this pattern. The first half of his work revolves around the alpine mining communities of the Bad Gastein valley in Austria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These German-speaking people were noted for their community insularity, but also for a religious and cultural flexibility that included their covert resistance to Catholicism, despite living within a predominately Catholic region and at a time of Catholic resurgence during the Counter-Reformation. From a highly formalized, clandestine book culture and the smuggling of Lutheran devotionals and treatises in and out of their communities to the subversive appropriation of lyrics from Catholic hymns during church services, the people of the Bad Gastein valley continually defied Catholic conformity and power. However, in the 1720s and 1730s, the prince-archbishop of Salzburg went on the offensive and, with the support of the Jesuit order, imposed his temporal authority and enforced Catholic doctrine throughout the principality. The subsequent conflict between Protestants and Catholics produced “the largest religious expulsion in eighteenth-century Europe and the last major paroxysm of religious persecution in the Holy Roman Empire” (1). The plight of the Protestant Salzburghers was a “cause célèbre” (8) throughout Europe, as tens of thousands signed petitions in support of the Bad Gastein people and demanded the prince-archbishop end his prosecution of Protestants within his state. Eventually, it was German Pietists (such as Samuel Urlsperger and Johann Martin Boltzius) and Anglican laymen, led by members of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in England, who reached out to the Salzburghers and raised the funds necessary to resettle that refugee community in Georgia. All of these experiences in Europe conditioned how the Salzburghers reorganized their community across the Atlantic and also shaped their interactions with other Europeans, Native Americans, and African slaves in North America during the early to mid-eighteenth century.

The research and analytic breadth of these first chapters is impressive. Melton is well versed in the archives and sources related to the history of the alpine communities of Salzburg, having mined both national and regional repositories in Germany and Austria, as well as those in England and Georgia. Clearly, he is uniquely suited to reconstruct the confessional and material worlds of the people who occupied the Bad Gastein valley during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, Melton utilizes prosecution records and interrogation reports to trace the underground traffic in Protestant...