Dangerous Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for Independence by Ken Miller (review)

Dangerous Guests is an exploration of the ways that the American Revolution redefined local identities and exacerbated social and political fissures in the borough of Lancaster. In this thoroughly researched work, Ken Miller builds a convincing picture of diversity and politics in Lancaster to understand the impact of the Revolution on a divided community. The presence of large numbers of British and Hessian prisoners of war served as a catalyst for change.

Nearly fifty years ago Wayne Brockelman and Owen S. Ireland broke new ground with studies of the ethnic-religious dimension of Pennsylvania politics in the era of the American Revolution. In the next few years Sally Schwartz, Dietmar Rothermund, Alan Tully, Anne Ousterhout, and others explored further implications of Pennsylvania’s diversity. Laura Becker, Judith Ridner, and Mark Haberlein focused on Reading, Carlisle, and Lancaster as case studies. Miller draws on this impressive body of scholarship in his first two chapters to ask “whether Pennsylvania’s diverse ethnocultural groups could transcend their ethnic, communal, and provincial attachments” in wartime (39). In the 1760s Lutheran and Reformed settlers moved away from their alliance with pacifist Germans and Quakers. By 1775 “Lancaster’s German associators mustered and marched . . . alongside their English and Scots-Irish neighbors” (56). When militia service became compulsory in 1777 this patriotic ardor cooled. Mennonites, Moravians, and Quakers who declined to associate and drill with voluntary militia companies in 1775 for religious reasons became the target of hostility. The Lancaster Committee of Observation who found a compromise in financial contributions in lieu of service was ousted in a militia riot and replaced by more radical members (61–62).

The first British prisoners, the garrisons of outlying Canadian forts, arrived later in 1775. Officers, as gentlemen, were paroled; enlisted men were hired out as tradesmen and laborers. Both made every effort to escape and a great many returned to the British army. The Hessian soldiers captured at Trenton in December 1776 and in later campaigns had less incentive to rejoin their regiments and fewer of them escaped. Congress believed that these German auxiliaries could be brought over to the American cause and insisted that they be sent to Lancaster where so many Germans lived, but “by proposing that residents welcome the Hessians as kindred, Whig officials ignored the Germans’ cultural and regional differences” and the fact that German-speaking Lancastrians thought of themselves as Pennsylvanians, not Rhinelanders or Swiss (108–9). Initially closely confined for their own safety, nearly all Hessian prisoners were hired out to farmers and artisans and “hundreds of skilled and unskilled captives gratefully embraced the opportunity to leave the barracks and supplement their meager pay” (115).

With more British and Hessian prisoners sent to Lancaster as the war dragged on, “hiring out provided a convenient means of escape for many British prisoners, but it offered a gradual means of assimilation for hundreds of German captives” (163). Efforts to coerce Hessian prisoners into enlisting in the Continental Army were generally fruitless, but “hundreds of others ‘scattered over the country from Philadelphia to Lancaster and Reading’ hoped to make the most of their new circumstances by settling permanently in the United States” (183).

Miller concluded that the presence of so many dangerous guests brought Lancastrians together in new ways; “transcending their more particular divisions and attachments, residents cultivated a shared American identity” (187). But at war’s end there were unresolved differences. Lancaster borough and county became more German after the war as Scots-Irish and English families moved west of the Susquehanna. Churches, schools, and other institutions kept language barriers. Lutheran and Reformed church leaders began Franklin (now Franklin and Marshall) College as a bilingual school in 1787, but enrollment soon dwindled. While somewhat incidental to his main argument, the concerted effort from 1777 to disfranchise and isolate Quakers, Mennonites, and other nonresistant sects set them apart as the quiet in the land...