The author of manuscript “Ms f 15”, kept at the André Malraux multimedia library is anonymous, a man whose life would never have attracted the attention of historians if it had not been for the discovery of his “work”. Georg Daniel Flohr’s modest fame comes from his “Account of the Land and Sea Expedition in America of the Acclaimed Deux-Ponts Regiment”. Unlike numerous authors of war diaries or travel accounts, Flohr does not mention the reasons for enlisting, nor his life prior to departure, or his relationship with his peers, topics that are addressed by Guillaume de Deux-Ponts, Joseph Plumb Martin or the Baron von Closen, to mention just a few authors who participated in the same military campaign as Flohr. Generally speaking, Flohr is nowhere to be seen in his account and in the description of the expedition his regiment undertook. When trying to retrace his life story before and after this experience, historians have to face the silence of the archives and the enigmas surrounding this historical figure, starting with his year of birth. Parish records state that it was 1756, Pastor Tabler 1759, the regimental records 1758 and 1760, and finally the year 1762 appears on the tombstone of Reverend Flohr.1

Georg Daniel Flohr was originally from the Deux-Ponts duchy in the Palatinate. Regimental records provide a few further indications: “born in 1760 in Annweiler in the Deux-Ponts province, Bergzabern jurisdiction, six feet three inches in height, black hair, dark eyes, long and narrow face, of the Lutheran faith.”2 But historian Robert A. Selig3 estimates that Flohr was born in Sarnstall, in the vicinity of Annweiler, on August 27, 1756 and baptized in the Lutheran church on August 31. According to Selig, the Flohr family was part of the village’s middle class, the father of Georg Daniel was a butcher and farmer. He believes that the Flohr family left northern Bavaria around 1741. Johann Paul Flohr, the father, born in Rothenburg ob der Tauber (in Bavaria) in 1695, supposedly died when Georg Daniel was five years old. The type of education young Georg Daniel or his half brothers and sisters (five in all) were given is not known, although it is likely they attended the small school in Sarnall or in Annweiler.4

On June 7, 1776, when he was a young man who had just turned twenty, he enlisted in the fourth company of the Royal Deux-Ponts regiment, otherwise known as the “Von Böse company” after the head officer, for a total of eight years. Flohr entered the regiment with the status of rifleman.5 At that stage, his life path looked like that of many other young Frenchmen or Germans born to working-class families in a predominantly rural society and drawn by the possibilities offered by a military life (training, pay, travel or adventures).

The expeditionary force placed under the command of Count Rochambeau left the port of Brest on May 2, 1780 and headed for America. Flohr was on board the ship La Comtesse de Noailles. In his account, we find the young soldier in a music hall in Newport, visiting the fields and forests surrounding Williamsburg, Virginia, and even fighting against the effects of poisonous plants in the Venezuelan jungle. The only personal experiences he mentions, denoted in the account by the use of the first person, are anecdotes unrelated to the military context. These experiences give us a glimpse of a young man interested above all in nature, its vegetation and animals, the natives’ traditions, religious practices and hospitality, and of course the “local curiosities”: the Indian and slave populations. There are no elements in the text nor anything in the archives that could suggests that Flohr distinguished himself in any particular way during the campaign or even that he participated directly in combat. His career in the army came to a close with the end of his eight-year contract on August 10, 1784, a little more than a year after his regiment returned to Europe (the Royal Deux-Ponts returned to Landau on September 4, 1783).

Once Flohr left the Royal Deux-Ponts regiment, the only biographical indications available are those in the manuscript, at the end of the short text written in approximated English and placed at the beginning of the volume: “Strasbourg, June 5, 1788”. Flohr likely spent a few years in Strasbourg for reasons unknown. He was perhaps in the service of one of the members of the Deux-Ponts family, of which one of the most illustrious members, Maximilien, owned a private mansion at 13 Rue Brûlée; it is possible that he met up with one of the members of his family, perhaps the Georg Flohr6 mentioned as being the owner of the manuscript in 1800; he also could have come to Strasbourg to collect the documentation necessary for writing his work, as is suggested by the presence of precise information in his account.7

Florh's text stands out compared to other witness accounts. His “Description of the Land and Sea Expedition in America of the Acclaimed Deux-Ponts Regiment” is one of the only military diaries written by a simple soldier who, a few years later, crossed the Atlantic again. In a 1907 monograph dedicated to the German presence in the southwest of Virginia, we learn that “Georg Daniel Flohr was born in Germany in 1759. He was a student of medicine in Paris in 1793, and a witness of the many crimes of blood committed in the name of liberty. After coming to America he studied theology under Mr. Carpenter, in Madison County, Virginia; and a year or two prior to 1799, entered upon a long term of ministerial and pastoral service in Wythe County and adjacent sections of southwest Virginia. He died in 1826.”8 If we believe John W. Wayland, the excesses of The Reign of Terror of the French revolution convinced Flohr to emigrate. Unfortunately, this author does not cite his sources but suggests that a collection of sermons by Reverend Flohr of Wytheville, preceded by a preface with biographical information, did exist.9 The Reverend John T. Tabler, the author of the collection’s preface, who took up the pastoral duty left unfilled after Flohr’s death, said that “the morning of the execution of Louis XVI, the accidental, but awful death of an individual close to Mr. Flohr, so operated on his mind as to render him averse to the further prosecution of his medical studies. This change of purpose may no longer create surprise in the reader, when told that a part of the mangled body happened to fall onto Mr. Flohr”.10

In the above-cited article, Selig confirms that the soldier and the reverend were the same person thanks to a comparison between the handwriting of the diary of 1788 and some of Flohr’s letters that were found in Wytheville. Flohr could therefore have left France for Virginia just after 1793. There can only be speculation about this period of this life. Nonetheless, in a letter dated August 1, 1799, he informed one of his friends of his arrival in the west, in Wythe county where he acted as a pastor before being given the official title in 1803 in Baltimore. On October 5, 1802, Flohr married Elizabeth Holsapple. He also became the owner of a large piece of land and a house six years later. Having no children of their own, the couple adopted a young girl named Polly Hutzle around 1810, then another child by the name of Elizabeth Kegley in 1820.11 George Daniel Flohr was the first Lutheran pastor in the region of Wytheville. His death on April 30, 1826, left the community that he served for 25 years in mourning. The tombstone of the soldier and Reverend Flohr, paid for by the congregation, can be seen in the cemetery of the Old Saint-John’s Church.

Flohr was a minor player in the American War of Independence. He is one of many Germans from Rhineland who tried to emigrate to America at the end of the eighteenth century. The son of a farmer from Palatinate, Georg Daniel Flohr ended his life as a pastor on another continent. If, unlike La Fayette, he is not a “hero of the Two Worlds”, his life remained inseparable from the “Atlantic world”.