[page 24]
Nation gehalten. Was die Religionen anbelangt seynd die Reformierten welches die Hauptreligion ist : wiedrum seyn Lutheraner, Catholischen gibt es auch aber sehr wenig.
Was die Seckten anbetrifft hat es sehr viele alda welche seyn neuverbesserten Reformierten, wiedrum neuverbesserten Lutheraner, Quacker, Tuncker, Widertäuffer, Badißten, Juden Harianer Preßpritrioner, Marianische Brüder, Sieben-Tager Tertzianer, Freymaurer welche ihre Ceremonien öffentlich halten, welche ich auch viele Mahl gesehen zur Begräbnüß gehen alle in weissen ledernen Schurtzfellen nebst ihrem Handwerckszeuge in den Händen.
Was die Reformierten anbtrifft haben eine schöne neue Kirch alda mit einem schönen Thurn wie auch die Luthraner ; die Chatolischen aber haben keine ; es sind auch keine wohnhafft alda. Die Seckten haben alle ihre Kirche aber ohne Thüren und ist ihnen auch nicht erlaubt zu bauen.
Die Weiber haben auch grosse Freyheit alda dan es darf sie kein Mann nicht schlagen bey hoher Straffe. Die Maidlen haben auch eine solche Freyheit alda : Wann sie 16 Jahr alt seyn darff ihnen Vatter und Mutter nichts mehr verbieten, haben ihnen auch nichts mehr zu befehlen in keinen Stücken wann sie einen Carrasanden haben kan er frey und franck bey sie gehen ohne ihnen etwas zu sagen. Bald darauf machte unser General zu Wasser eine Ausfahrt und hat eine schöne Prieße gemacht von 4 Schiffen welche mit Räbenschies geladen waren welche als Gefangnen nach Newport geführet wurden diese waren mehr Weibs- als Mans-Leute etc.
Die Schiffe aber nahme der General mit nach Neuport biß auf eins welche sie verbranten und
[réclame]
sich
Strasbourg, Médiathèque André Malraux, ms f 15, p. 24.
Notes
63. Since nationalism strengthened in the nineteenth century, notably in Germany after Napoleon’s conquests, it has long been forgotten that the national spirit was born during the modern era and developed in the eighteenth century. In search of founding myths, the German humanists looked in Tacitus's Germania for the origins of a people that was never unified. Arminius, because he had defeated Varus’s Roman armies in the year 9 AD, became the mythic hero of the German nation. Justus Möster dedicated a book to him in 1749, a date that Sandrine Kott and Stéphane Michonneau consider as the starting point of the affirmation of German nationalist feelings and an attempt to define what German qualities are: courage, perseverance, integrity, frugality, resistance, and the spirit of industry. These qualities began to give rise to clichés that circulated in the eighteenth century and explain the reputation that Germans could have had across the Atlantic. Stéphane Michonneau and Sandrine Kott, “Origines et renaissance nationales”, Dictionnaire des nations et des nationalismes, Paris, Hatier, 2006, p. 279-290.
64. Contrary to the Lutherans who quickly found the support of German universities like Halle to train pastors who would hold services in the American colonies, the Calvinists, who periodically held synod, were numerous but lacked pastors (4 for 53 churches in Pennsylvania, for example). In 1776, two thirds of the 200 Lutheran and Protestant churches were located in Pennsylvania. Van Ruymbeke (Bertrand), L’Amérique avant les Etats-Unis. Une histoire de l’Amérique anglaise (1497-1776), Paris, Flammarion, 2013, p. 333. Starting in the middle of the 1670s, the Huguenots fleeing France joined the Calvinist churches, but many of them entered more structured neighboring communities, and in the southern colonies they had to conform to Anglicanism.
65. Lutherans under the influence of Pietism. These groups of Neo-Calvinists or Neo-Lutherans transposed confessional fractures from the German world and the Netherlands to the New World, with branches formed from successive divisions due to differences of theological or cultural opinion, exacerbated in the period of the Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s.
66. At the end of the 1640s in England, George Fox chose to become a travelling preacher addressing those remaining faithful to the true principles of Christiniaty, which had been corrupted as much by the Anglican Church as by the Puritans. He claimed to have a quasi-mystical and direct experience with God that intermediaries like the clergy or the sacraments did not allow one to obtain. Accused of blasphemy, he “trembled” before his judges, hence the name “Quakers”. The Quakers, who were numerous in England, were persecuted and were victims of discrimination, just like the colonies of New England. In 1682, William Penn founded Pennsylvania that would serve as a refuge for them, to the point of being nicknamed “the Quaker State”.
67. Flohr’s text also mentions Tunker, translated by Dunkers, from the verb “to dunk”. This nickname derives from the practice of immersion baptism. Also nicknamed the Church of Brethren or New Baptists (Neue Täufer), this community is a branch of Anabaptism which was founded in 1708 in Germany, and arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1720s. arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1720s. Twenty communities existed in America at the dawn of the Revolution in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland.
68. Fond of adult baptism that they judged to be better than that of children, the Anabaptists developed at the beginning of the Reformation in Switzerland, and spread throughout the Germanic world and the Dutch Republic between 1525 and 1550. The Amish and the Mennonites came from this movement.
69. Founded at the beginning of the seventeenth century in London by Puritan pastors returning from exile in Amsterdam, the Baptist church did not have a large presence in America at first and was divided by internal struggles. The number of believers increased following the convening of a council to organize the Church and the Great Awakening in the 1740s. In 1750, there were 132 Baptist communities. In 1764, they obtained a charter founding the Rhode Island College in Providence, the ancestor of Brown University.
70. The Jews in the American colonies had a more enviable status than the Catholics: the law voted by the British Parliament in 1740 to facilitate the naturalization of foreigners settled in the colonies concerned them but excluded the Catholics. Few in number, they represented 1% of the population at the dawn of the War of Independence. These 2,000 Jews attended five great synagogues in Philadelphia, New York, Newport, Charleston, and Savannah.
71. Translation note: There is no doubt that the German word written by Flohr spells harianer. In all likelihood this “harianer” refers to “Arians”, several Protestant sects that brought a debate that had actually been closed by the early Church on the human or divine nature of Jesus Christ back into fashion.
72. Attached to a pyramid-like organization of their Church into multi-level councils, which distinguishes them from Puritanism and from Anglicanism, Presbyterians were few in number and even shared their places of worship with other Protestant groups. Serious conflicts over doctrine and concerning the training of ministers tore apart the Presbyterians who split into two groups, the Orthodox in Philadelphia and the Pietists in New York. These two rival synods were finally reunited in 1758, though the Pietist version seems to have prevailed among the Presbyterians.
73. This is a reference to the "Moravian brothers", “Herrnhutter” in German, from the name of the fiefdom of Count Zinzendorf, their leader. It is a community of Pietists who placed great importance on worship and chanting. Three Moravian communities existed in the Thirteen Colonies: Bethlehem and Nazareth in Pennsylvania, and Wachovia in North Carolina. According to Van Ruymbeke (Bertrand), L’Amérique avant les Etats-Unis. Une histoire de l’Amérique anglaise (1497-1776), Paris, Flammarion, 2013, p. 334, there are 3,000 of them in 1775. They have gone down in American history as missionaries who managed to convert many Native Americans to Christianity, while their attempt to reunite all the Protestant sects was a failure.
74. The Seventh Day Baptists arrived in the American colonies in 1671, breaking with the Baptist churches of Rhode Island. They observe the Lord’s Day from Friday night to Saturday, like a Christian Sabbath, and had an important presence in Pennsylvania.
75. Translation note: The original German term has been kept, because it could cause confusion according to historians such as Robert A. Selig: “It is unclear to which group ‘Tertzianer’ refers”. “A German soldier in America, 1780-1783, the journal of Georg Daniel Flohr”, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 50, n°3, July 1993, pages 575-590.
76. The Masonic Brotherhood was apparently not seen as a opposed to religions, but as complementary in this instance.
77. This passage is taken up again and developed on diary page 128. See note below.
78. The relative freedom that young people enjoy, particularly young girls, is a subject that drew the attention of all the writers interested in American values. Here, Flohr’s testimony matches numerous accounts left by officers of the Rochambeau corps (Alexandre Berthier, Ségur, Clermont de Crèvecoeur, and others) who had the chance to meet young American girls, most often in Virginia, and to maintain relations with the girls who were “in general much more free in their manners than are our French girls, without being less well-behaved” (Du Perron de Revel, in Journal particulier d’une campagne aux Indes Occidentales (1781-1782), in Bodinier Gilbert, Les officiers de l’armée royale, combattants de la guerre d’indépendance des Etats-Unis de Yorktown à l’An II, SHAT, Château de Vincennes, 1983, p. 204). They were completely free to see their suitors, however these relations generally remained platonic and were limited to the curious practice (for the French officers concerned) of bondelage which is “the permission given by the parents to be alone in a bedroom with the young girl, to give her tender caresses, but to reserve those that only marriage has the right to allow”, Clerment-Crèvecoeur, Journal des guerres faites en Amérique pendant les années 1780, 1781, 1782, 1783, p. 69-70, in Bodinier, op. cit., p. 205.
79. Flohr is referring here to the population from the valley of Gabon. This waterway is presented in the geographical dictionaries of the time as having its source in Benin and running into the Gulf of Guinea.