Sweet Land of Liberty: The Ordeal of the American Revolution in Northampton County, Pennsylvania

15 Eve Yoder and Esther Bachman

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . After the British captured Philadelphia in September 1777, Pennsylvania’ s Revolutionary government instituted draconian measures to wring loyalty from the state’s inhabitants. The Act for the Attainder of Divers Traitors punished persons who assisted or joined the army of the King of Great Britain.1 The Act for the Further Security of the Government amended the Test Act,which required all men to swear allegiance to the state.2 These laws prescribed that persons who violated them forfeit all personal and real property to the commonwealth.3 The Attainder Act explicitly set forth the method of the law. The amendment to the Test Act, however, granted magistrates discretion in dealing with persons who refused to take the oath. In Northampton, discretionary judgment gave rise to prosecutorial malfeasance . Here, in this frontier county, the cunning interpretation of a law that purported to safeguard the“welfare and happiness of the good people of the commonwealth”enabled appointed officials to victimize countless persons, among them,as will be seen,two Mennonite women,Eve Yoder and Esther Bachman. In the spring of 1778, the actions of Northampton’s Lieutenant John Wetzel and Justice Frederick Limbach gave Vice President George Bryan a headache. The state needed zealous patriots who supported the cause of freedom. Wetzel and Limbach, however, used their appointed positions to line their own pockets at the expense of Moravians, who, because they refused to bear arms and swear allegiance to the state, were forced to pay excessive fines. In fact, the turmoil in Northampton so concerned some assemblymen and congressmen that they prompted the vice president to reprimand Wetzel. “Moravians and Schwenkfelders are not to be feared, either as to numbers or malice,” Bryan advised Wetzel. “Therefore, it is the wish of the government not to distress them by any unequal fines,or by call- ing them to take the oath at all.”4 Wetzel immediately responded to his superior . “Sir,”he said, “I can with pleasure assure you that I . . . will ever endeavor to suppress anything that would tend to give our Council or Assembly disturbances or trouble.”5 Lieutenant Wetzel lied. The commander of Northampton’s militia had already plotted with Limbach to dangle the Test before Mennonites. Were these two men so obtuse that they missed the fact that Bryan’s injunction, by extension, included Mennonites? Not at all. Wetzel and Limbach simply chose to ignore the vice president. They probably foresaw that the commotion generated by the death of the state’ s president, along with the upcoming British evacuation of Philadelphia , would shield their activities from official scrutiny. Therefore, the conspirators proceeded against the Mennonites shortly after June 1, 1778, the deadline established by the Assembly in the amendment to the Test Act for swearing allegiance to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In the first week of June, constable Yost Walp traveled through Upper Saucon Township and summoned eleven Mennonite men to appear at quarter sessions court in Easton.6 On June 17, the bailiff herded the Mennonites into the dock of the courthouse. Justice Limbach ordered the men to swear allegiance to the state. The Mennonites, however, refused the proffer because they had religious scruples against swearing oaths, whereupon Limbach ordered them to forfeit their personal property and leave the state within thirty days. Drafters of the amendment to theTest Act failed to specify who should dispose of forfeited property, an omission that Wetzel and Limbach had intended to turn to their advantage. But Colonel Stephen Balliet, citing authority granted to him by the Assembly, stepped in ahead of Wetzel and Limbach and seized the Mennonites’estates. A month earlier, the twentythree -year-old colonel, who had led a battalion of Northampton militia in the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown, won an appointment under the Attainder Act as one of Northampton’s agents for confiscated estates.7 Balliet chose two men, Joseph Kooken and Simon Snyder, who had served under him at Brandywine to inventory and appraise the Mennonite properties .8 Balliet also ordered Captain John Stahl, one of his company commanders , to muster men from Northampton’s Second Battalion, seize the Mennonites’ goods, and guard Kooken and Snyder while they performed their task. Thirteen members of Sixth Company, Second Battalion, volunteered for the special duty. Because most of these men,and their families before them, had toiled alongside the convicted Mennonites for decades,what . . . . . . . . . motivated them to help carry out this mission? Patriotism...