Palatine, Hessian, Dutchman: Three Images of the German in America – Part I

December 7th, 2015

Awake Goy

by Dr. Don Yoder (1980)

[Part I of III]

When General Eisenhower landed at Frankfurt Airport in 1951 as head of NATO, he made one of his characteristic off-the-cuff speeches for which he was to become even more famous as president of the United States. In reply to the greetings of welcome given him by German officials, he made the statement, “Germans are good soldiers. I am very happy to have Germans under my command. Everyone, that is, except Hessians.” [1]

This shocking, gauche, and undiplomatic statement can only be understood in the American context. In Eisenhower’s statement were reflected long generations of deeply engrained attitudes which cast the “Hessian” — since the days of the German mercenaries in the American Revolution — in a negative and unpleasant role. In the larger American context of ethnic history, which is exciting most Americans at the present time, the negative term “Hessian,” which we will analyze shortly, is, however, only one of several general terms used by Anglo-Americans for the German emigrants who “invaded” English-speaking areas of the United States over the past three centuries. Of these terms, the three most important are “Palatine,” “Hessian,” and “Dutchman.” Let us look in turn at each of these, setting each in its historical and emotional context.

The term “Palatine,” used throughout colonial America for the German emigrant, is the least negative of the three terms. It has wrapped up in its form and sound the least pejorative attitude toward Germanness and German ethnicity. With a few exceptions the word is usually used in a friendly or at least a neutral sense, as a cover-all designation for all German emigrants of the colonial era, whether or not they came from the Rhenish Palatinate.

The term “Palatine” has a long background in England, before Americans used the term to describe their German-speaking neighbors in the thirteen colonies. Recently I have been reading several new books on the relation of England and Germany in the 17th and 18th Centuries — among them Frances Yates’ The Rosicrucian Enlightenment [2] and Maria Kroll’s edition of the Letters of Sophie, Electress of Hanover, mother of George I of England. [3]

As an American who had studied the usual truncated American version of our history, a parochial view of our development, I was amazed at the many ties between the English ruling house, the Stuarts, and the English churches, with the electors of the Palatinate and the Palatine Reformed Church. Not only were the ruling houses closely related, but their relationship symbolized the underlying spiritual ties between English and German Protestantism. It was out of the sympathy of English Protestants for the subjects of the Elector, who had suffered during the several French wars of the 17th Century, that the English term “Palatine,” often expanded into “suffering Palatine” or “poor Palatine,” came into use. By 1709, when Queen Anne housed, fed and provisioned the many thousands of Rhineland refugees who encamped on Blackheath near London until their transshipment to Ireland and New York, the term was fully established. It was used in a great many pamphlets, broadsides, and other printed ephemera which appeared in England during the period 1709-1711. [4]

It is this English usage which was followed in America. “Palatine,” despite the fact that it was inaccurate (not all the emigrants were specific subjects of the Kurpfalz), became the first general term used in America to designate a German, a German emigrant.

The term was used through the middle of the 18th Century. The emigrants were referred to as “Palatines” in New York, Pennsylvania, Carolina, and elsewhere. The early council minutes of the province of Pennsylvania contain many references to “Palatines” and the “Palatine question.” The Philadelphia newspapers listing arrivals of emigrant ships also spoke of the newly arrived settlers as “Palatines.” In addition, place names in areas settled by the “Palatines” reflected the term. For example, there is a town in New York State called Palatine Bridge, in the midst of the 18th Century Palatine settlement of the Mohawk valley, above Albany.

Beginning in 1727 when the Pennsylvania government required registration of all non-English emigrants on arrival at the port of Philadelphia, the ship lists (now published in the three-volume work, Pennsylvania German Pioneers) used most commonly the cover-all expressions “Palatines” or “Foreigners.” Occasionally the captains were more specific, as evidenced in the following headings: “Palatines & Switzers” (1740), “Inhabitants of the Palatinate & Places adjacent” (1747), “from Zweybrech, Nassau, Wirtemberg, & Palatinate” (1749), and “from Hanau, Wirtermberg, Darmstand, Isenburg” (1749), and from “the Palatine & Mentz [Mainz]” (1754). [5]

Disease among the incoming “Palatine” emigrants from Europe did not increase their popularity here during the 18th Century. The year 1741, according to the historian of Philadelphia, was “an unhappy year” for the city. In addition to discontent, wars, and rumors of wars, there was an outbreak of yellow fever. Despite the fact that this probably came from the West Indies, “the disease was called the Palatine fever, and two hundred and six of these emigrants fell victims to it.” [6] Again in 1748 and 1754 fever among the Palatine emigrants spread fears of epidemic through the city. [7]

As the emigration increased toward mid-18th Century, with thousands of German-speaking emigrants arriving each year and settling over wide areas, alarm was expressed on the part of the English authorities. In 1754 Benjamin Franklin made a much-quoted statement referring to the emigrants as “Palatine boors,” asking rhetorically why they should be allowed to settle among us in such large numbers that they force out the English language. [8] Obviously Franklin thought them about to take over the province.

Franklin was no friend of the Germans, at least politically. In a lengthy letter of 1753, he expresses his fears on the results of the increased emigration. “Those who come hither,” he writes, “are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation,” and “not being used to Liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it…”

…Few of their children in the Country learn English: they import many Books from Germany: and of the six printing houses in the Province, two are entirely German, two half German half English, and but two entirely English. They have one German Newspaper, and one half German. Advertisements intended to be general are now printed in Dutch and English; the Signs in our Streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German: They begin of late to make all their Bonds and other legal Writings in their own Language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our Courts, where the German Business so encreases that there is continual need of Interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will be also necessary in the Assembly; to tell one half of our Legislators what the other half say; In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to the other Colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon outnumber us, that all the advantages we have will not [in My Opinion] be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious. [9]

Yet he was “not for refusing entirely to admit them into our Colonies.” What was needed was “to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English, [and] establish English Schools where they are now too thick settled…” He repeats, “I say I am not against the Admission of Germans in general, for they have their Virtues, their industry and frugality is exemplary: They are excellent husbandmen and contribute greatly to the improvement of a Country.” [10]

Fortunately for Pennsylvania and other colonies the non-English emigration was never restricted, and linguistic problems eventually settled themselves in the typical one-sided American manner of anglicizing the emigrant. For some time in the 19th Century, in Pennsylvania, the state laws and governmental reports were issued in German as well as English. But today, after almost three centuries of acculturation, High German has no official status anymore, although German dialects are still spoken, unofficially of course, in Pennsylvania and other states.

Fear of the German-speaking settler on the part of the English reached its height during the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War) when some Germans were, wrongfully it appears, suspected of collaboration with the French and Indians. It is just as well that the English colonists knew nothing of the interest of the French governor at Quebec who held an Indian conference in 1756 involving the Indian tribes of Canada and New York colony (where Palatines were settled). In the reports of the conference, preserved in the Quebec archives, one of the Indian chiefs speaks of “a Nation which is neither French nor English, nor Indian, and inhabits the lands round about us.” These were the New York Palatines, and the Governor of Canada is said to have offered them lands in Canada if they were to desert the British and join the French (and Indian) side of the conflict. [11]

By the latter half of the 18th Century the use of the term “Palatine” as a general term for all German emigrants retreated in linguistic usage and was finally replaced by the terms “German” and “Dutch.” There is one exception — in New York State in the lovely Mohawk Valley where one still speaks of “Palatine” Country, and New Yorkers are still very conscious and proud of their “Palatine” heritage. [12]

In the 19th Century the Palatines of the Mohawk Valley in New York continued as a separate ethnic group, with their own customs and mores which invited comment from the European and American travelers who passed among them. A New England clergyman named Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, visited the area about 1800. His comments reveal his Yankee and Puritan prejudices. After describing their history, the migration of 1709, he writes:

Their distance from other settlements prevented them also from all those benefits of knowledge and improvement which are derived from civilized society. The settlers themselves were extremely ignorant. Their children became, if possible, more and more ignorant, for they were destitute for a long time even of the means of a parochial education. Their own language they spoke with increasing imperfection, and the English they scarcely spoke at all. [13]

But it is their “moral” condition that distressed the Puritan.

An observing traveler could not fail to conclude that those people must be extensively destitute both of knowledge and morals. If the information which, from respectable sources, I received on the spot may be credited, low vices are unhappily prevalent among them. Fathers have not unfrequently been seen at the gaming table with their sons, endeavoring to win money from each other, swearing at each other, charging each other with cheating and lying, and both at very late hours intoxicated. [14]

Among the pleasures of these rustic innocents are horse races, at which the participant “becomes a mere brute; swears, curses, cheats, lies, and gets drunk; extinguishing at once virtue, reason, and character.” “Horse racing is the box of Pandora from which more and greater mischiefs flow than any man ever counted or measured.” [15]

But most of all the Yankee visitor was shocked at the sight of German women doing “men’s work,” dressing flax in the open air. He admits that in his New England childhood he had “seen women in a small number of instances busied in the proper labor of men, particularly in raking hay immediately before a shower when the pressing nature of the case demanded extraordinary exertions,” but that he had not seen for thirty years. New England women “are employed only in and about the house, and in the proper business of the sex. I do not know that I was ever more struck with the strangeness of any sight than with the appearance and business of these German females.” [16]

He concludes with the generalization, “The Germans who settled themselves in this state were among the most ignorant inhabitants of their native country, and a great part of them have transmitted this unfortunate characteristic to their descendants.” [17]

New England had spoken. The passages quoted from President Dwight reveal the common American failing, indeed the common human failing of finding it difficult to understand the “strangeness,” the difference of ethnic groups within our midst. In Pennsylvania the Pennsylvania Dutchman turned the tables. Throughout his history, but particularly in the 19th Century when Pennsylvanian and Yankee came frequently into confrontation, the Pennsylvanian cordially hated the Yankee and all his works.

Today among descendants of the Palatines there is a renewed Palatine consciousness. There is a Palatine genealogical project to recover European origins of the New York Palatines of the 1709 emigration, and there are Palatine Societies now organized, in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, to promote the study of American-German emigrant backgrounds.

[1] According to Karl Scherer, Director, Heimatstelle Pfalz, Kaiserslautern, West Germany, this statement was reported in the West German newspapers following Eisenhower’s visit. The New York Times dates the Frankfurt section of Eisenhower’s NATO Inspection Tour on January 21, 1951.
[2] Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1972).
[3] Maria Kroll, Sophie, Electress of Hanover: A Personal Portrait (London, 1973).
[4] The Oxford English Dictionary, VII, 389-390.
[5] Don Yoder, “Problems and Resources in Pennsylvania German Genealogical Research,” Genealogisches Jahrbuch, XIII (1973), 5-27; The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine, XXXI:1 (1979), 1-26.
[6] J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia 1609-1884 (Philadelphia, 1884), I, 209-210.
[7] Scharf-Westcott, I, 217, 246.
[8] Albert B. Faust, The German Element in the United States (Boston, 1909); Arthur D. Graeff, “Palatine Boors,” ‘S Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch Eck (Allentown Morning Call), April 12, 1941.
[9] The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Leonard W. Labaree, IV (New Haven, 1961), 483-485, letter to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753.
[10] The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, IV, 485.
[11] Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, edited by Edmund B. O’Callaghan, X, 513-514.
[12] There are of course other Palatines in the United States; cf. Palatine, Illinois, named for a 19th Century settlement. Many placenames in the Pennsylvania German Country reflect Palatine backgrounds. There are several townships named Manheim and Heidelberg in Eastern Pennsylvania. Smaller Palatine placenames are also represented: Hochstadt (Host Church), even Sinsheim. In the 18th Century there was a Pennsylvania town christened Landau. In the 19th Century the Reformed Church founded an institution named Palatinate College, at Myerstown Pennsylvania.
[13] Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, edited by Barbara Miller Solomon with the assistance of Patricia M. King (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969), III, 122.
[14] Dwight, III, 119.
[15] Dwight, III, 119.
[16] Dwight, III, 142.
[17] Dwight, III, 375.