Patrick M. Erben
In the 1990s and early 2000s, American literary studies witnessed a surge in scholarship on the non‐English literatures of early America. Anthologies revised the focus on New England Puritans as the starting point and the American Revolution as the culmination of early American literature by including texts from Spanish, French, Dutch, German, and other non‐English European linguistic backgrounds (Castillo and Schweitzer 2001; Mulford, Vietto, and Winans 2002). Conferences such as the Ibero‐American summits organized by Ralph Bauer and the meetings of the New Netherland Institute centered specifically on non‐English materials. Many non‐English texts – in the original languages and in translation – are increasingly accessible digitally and in print. Yet the newness of the resulting “comparative” and “hemispheric” turns has subsided, and few non‐English texts enjoy staying power in the canon of American literature. Why are research and teaching in the field still circumscribed by English‐language archives and paradigms? Perhaps teachers and rising scholars assume that these texts and writers offer few new insights beyond the familiar articulation of Eurocentrism, racism, and settler colonialism. Like their English‐speaking counterparts, European immigrant groups were motivated by the desire to acquire new land and wealth in the Americas, yet they also experienced unique permutations of loss and the longing for connectedness to Old World cultures. Attending to these aspects of their writings can open up new possibilities for research and new understandings of the historical period.
The benefits of investigating texts composed in languages other than English are many. Scholarly investigations across non‐English immigrant writings, as well as their comparison to early American texts written in English, allow us to differentiate between imperialist and anti‐imperialist discourses. Texts and writers carry the guilt of imperial conquest while espousing sentiments of displacement and alienation. Comparative teaching and research underscores the systemic embeddedness of imperial discourse, but it also reveals counter‐narratives to the logic of possession. Reading colonial American literatures across linguistic traditions disrupts a mode of literary criticism that José Rabasa (2000) challenges for perpetuating “the culture of conquest” (83). Translingual teaching and research helps us understand fractures and inconsistencies in colonial discourse by defamiliarizing well‐known English‐language paradigms and unhinging them from our understanding of colonial subjectivity. In the process, we discover negotiations between the quest for empire and deep‐seated doubts about its goals, tools, and victims.
This chapter analyzes sample Spanish, French, Dutch, and German writings that represent the tremendous allure of exploration, conquest, and settlement in colonial North America, juxtaposing them with other texts that critically inspect the rationales of exploitation, wish‐fulfillment, and the vilification of Indigenous and African peoples. Intriguingly, such tensions and ambiguities often occur within a single text, author, or tradition. I select the complex issue of colonialism to model reading and selecting texts across non‐English traditions. I highlight four literary centers of non‐English immigrant culture: Spanish in the Southwest, French in Louisiana, Dutch in New Netherland, and German in Pennsylvania. The essay focuses on texts written in and about the New World, whether they were published there or not. I do not aspire to comprehensiveness but hope to excite students and researchers to delve into the rich non‐English literatures and archival treasures of early America. Thus, I also suggest genres, archives, and resources that offer opportunities for original research and scholarly discoveries.
The Spanish conquest of the New World earned an early reputation for its brutality, swiftness, and exploitation of Indigenous people and natural resources. Most Spanish imperial writings were indeed concerned with the justification and concrete circumstances of possession – of land and people. According to Rolena Adorno’s Polemics of Possession (2007), these texts were “not merely reflective of social and political practices but were in fact constitutive of them” (4). Adorno posits that Native Americans, whether “colonized or indomitable,” whether as “the object of debates about royal policy or as the fallen hero of literary epics,” are “the common element among all these writings” (5). This focus continued as the Spanish empire expanded its northern reach into the areas that are today the southwestern United States, including Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Seemingly pro‐colonial texts often reveal the greatest sense of horror at the effect of the conquest, whereas the ostensibly benevolent actions and writings of missionaries who cast themselves as friends of the Indians perpetuate the conquest more covertly by cultivating spiritual dependency and a culture of pseudo‐divine authority concentrated in the figure of the self‐sacrificial missionary.
One of the Spanish conquistadors‐turned‐chronicler was Pedro de Castañeda (1510–1570), who served as a soldier in the Coronado expedition that searched for the mythical “Seven Cities of Cibola.” When fabulous riches were not found, Coronado’s men turned to exploiting and oppressing the Pueblo peoples. Writing about the events two decades later, Castañeda (2002) embarked on asserting the “truth,” which, he says, had been distorted by many stories circulated since then (69). In hindsight, it is difficult to ascertain whether Castañeda indeed gained a deeper consciousness of the deprivations wrought by the conquest. He certainly felt the need for a confession, claiming to write “that which I heard, experienced, saw, and did.” The operative mode of his text, then, is the idea of paradise found and lost. In retrospect, the veterans of the expedition realize what “good country they had in their hands, and their hearts weep for having lost so favorable an opportunity” (70). He also revises dominant clichés of the Indigenous population, writing that “there is no drunkenness among them nor sodomy nor sacrifices, neither do they eat human flesh nor steal, but they are usually at work” (73). Though such language failed to halt further imperial conquest, it exposes a discourse of doubt that remains to be explored further in scholarship on the Spanish conquest of the Americas.
Missionaries like the Franciscan Fray Carlos José Delgado (1677–post‐1750) cast themselves in piety and humility, speaking out for the just treatment of the Pueblo Indians. Delgado (2002) assembled a long list of injustices committed against the Indians by the governors or alcaldes mayores (397). Missionaries trying to oppose such atrocities were insulted and denounced for bearing false witness (398). Delgado’s desperate attempts to improve the situation is in contrast to the Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino’s (1644–1711) use of colonialist rhetoric in describing his religious efforts. He claimed a direct part in the “taking possession of California,” while baptizing “in these new conquests and new conversions about four thousand five hundred souls” (2002: 401). Conversion and conquest here are one and the same, extracting either souls or riches from the land. Due to his canonization in 2015, Junípero Serra, missionary and founder of the Franciscan mission system in colonial California, has been the subject of international controversy. According to a biography written by his student Francisco Palóu (2002), Serra believed that the Indigenous people of California should be physically enslaved to ensure their spiritual salvation. Palóu’s biography of Serra reveals the important tools of this spiritual conquest: fear and love (408). The Spanish colonial machine found its pinnacle in the seemingly benevolent conversion of Native peoples and the erasure of their spiritual subjectivity.
Originally neglected by Louis XIV and French‐Canadian elites, French Louisiana was catapulted to the highest importance within French imperialist ambitions in the early 1700s. In order to dig France out of debts incurred by the Sun King, the “Company of the West” under the Scottish financier John Law decided to build a full‐blown plantation economy on the lower Mississippi. Before its dealings were eventually uncovered as an early‐modern Ponzi scheme, the Company of the West shipped French settlers and thousands of African slaves to Louisiana. The governor of French Louisiana, Jean‐Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, directed settlement to his favored location for the capital New Orleans – the river crescent where he had already claimed copious tracts of land (Powell 2013: 46). Besides establishing a slave economy and adopting the infamous “code noir” in 1724, Bienville recognized the key importance of a system of French–Indian alliances. However, one of his successors, Etienne Boucher de Périer, allowed Indian–French relations to sour to the point where the Natchez attacked the French Fort Rosalie in 1729. The massacre in its colonial hinterland beset New Orleans with panic, inducing Périer to attack the Natchez in a genocidal war. Called back in 1733 to handle the colony’s “Indian problem,” Bienville organized two wars that failed to provide a sense of stability. After a brief proprietorship under the Spanish, renewed dreams of French imperialism under Napoleon included French Louisiana as the purported breadbasket for the plantation economy of Saint‐Domingue. These ambitions were dashed by the slave uprising that turned the French plantation island into the nation of Haiti. In spite of French imperial failures, President Thomas Jefferson recognized New Orleans as a key to the United States’ expansionism in the West. With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, New Orleans became part of the United States.
The literature of French colonial Louisiana thus reflects the imperial aspirations of colonial investors, administrators, common soldiers, explorers, natural historians, and even Ursuline nuns sent to educate girls and women in the colony. Colonists prided themselves on their Enlightened or Christian principles in creating a metropolis rivaling Paris, yet they all diagnosed the colony and its people as suffering from degeneration and disorder, making it a colossal failure. Early utopianism and collective ambitions gave way to tropes of disappointment, powerlessness, and even outrage, all the while sublimating the colonists’ complicity in a toxic mix of exploitation and genocide. In surveying key accounts of French colonial Louisiana, one senses each writer’s capacity for recognizing the futility of the colonial project.
The soldier Jean‐François‐Benjamin Dumont de Montigny (1696–1760) used the personal memoir to utter his critique of the incompetence and greed of French colonial society. Dumont’s literary career started with the writing of satirical poems during his initial two‐year stint in Quebec from 1715 to 1717 (Sayre and Zecher 2012: 8). In Louisiana, Dumont began a long epic poem about the history of the colony. Upon his return to France, Dumont revised his poem as a prose memoir that highlighted his “irascible character and personal politics” (Sayre and Zecher 2012: 7). Writing to his patron, Dumont (2012) casts himself as a “French Robinson Crusoe” (71) metaphorically exiled in a strange land. Although Dumont overtly indicts personal enemies and incompetent administrators, his experiences point at a more ominous dimension lurking beneath colonialism.
Dumont’s entire memoir sounds like the recollections of a man returning from the dead, now exerting a form of revenant justice upon those who have wronged him. On his second passage to Louisiana, Dumont describes the German indentured servants on board afflicted by “a contagious illness” that “struck the strongest as well as the weakest, and some sailors who were climbing up the ropes into the rigging found themselves seized by it so suddenly that they fell helplessly and lifelessly into the sea” (134). Dumont falls victim to those fevers, and once they relent, he appears “like a picture of the walking dead” (136). The result of the colonial venture is the opposite of its design: a powerlessness that places one at the mercy of larger cosmic or social forces threatening to obliterate and disperse selfhood and personal autonomy. The capacity of the colonial enterprise to turn men into monsters is epitomized by Chepart, the cruel commander of Fort Rosalie. Dumont describes Chepart violating a formerly symbiotic relationship between the French and their Natchez neighbors (228), ultimately blaming the attack on Chepart’s arbitrary and oppressive governance. Dumont’s eventual return to France is cast as a verdict on the colonial venture: “At last, tired of living in a country like that, and my wife being homesick, I decided to go back to France […] departing a country which, to speak frankly, was half abandoned, some of the habitants having retreated to the capital leaving lands uncultivated and others being exposed to the insults and depredations of the Indians” (276–277). Though Dumont does not recognize the flaws of the colonial enterprise, he dismantles the alluring facade of imperialism propelled by other accounts. Particularly eloquent and even entertaining, Dumont was by no means the only writer critically inspecting the French colonial enterprise in Louisiana. For an introduction to accounts and descriptions of the colony, researchers and students should first turn to the work of Shannon Dawdy (2009) as well as Gordon Sayre and Carla Zecher (2012); for scholars reading early‐modern French and pursuing primary text research, the digital database of the French National Library, Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr), offers thousands of texts and images relating to colonization in North America.
French colonial letter writing constitutes a major share of the texts produced and reveals an intimate impression of colonial experiences. Ursuline nuns charged with educating the female population were especially active in this epistolary exchange. Sister Marie Madeleine Hachard (2002) came to New Orleans in 1727 and began an active correspondence with her father (Dawdy 2009: 45–46). Hachard’s letters show a young woman initially eager to praise New Orleans and Louisiana. Yet she immediately contrasts her praise with a stark reality check: “On the other side of the river is a wilderness of forest in which there are a few cabins where the slaves of the Company of the Indies lodge” (458). The design of the city is predicated upon the dualism between free and enslaved, civilization and wilderness, order and chaos, yet this separation breaks down when civil authorities charge the Ursulines with the education of “girls and women of ill‐repute.” Responding ambivalently, Hachard writes that “[w]e have not yet agreed to this, but they keep telling us that it would be a great service to the Colony. To this end they plan to build a special building at the end of our enclosure to lock up these people” (457). In both Hachard’s and Dumont’s writings, the perceived disorder and enforced order – physically and textually – threaten to collapse. Both writers arrived to gain personal glory and impose standards of the French metropole on the colonial landscape, yet they can only hope to make sense of their experience through a reporting technique that begs – but never quite achieves – the affirmation of patriarchal and parochial authorities. In hindsight, their textual productions provide a valuable service to readers by exposing colonialist and imperialist discourses not as monolithic constructs of European power but as a patchwork of individual actors whose writings externalize fears and pathologies in their very attempts to contain them.
The presence of the United Provinces or Netherlands in North America began with the journey led by Henry Hudson in 1607. An agricultural patronship system was created to incentivize large landholders, such as Kiliaen van Rensselaer, to establish large private settlements in the colony. In 1621, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) was founded to cement the Netherlands’ status as a global trade empire. Based in New Amsterdam (later New York) on the island of Manhattan, several governors of the colony engaged in brutal wars with local Native American peoples. Governor Willem Kieft began “Kieft’s War” in the 1640s, committing massacres in Munsee villages. It is characteristic of the writings about and from New Netherland that settlers rejected the specific methods of Indian warfare yet in turn vilified Native American peoples as savage and doomed to extinction. Even after the arrival of governor Peter Stuyvesant in 1647 and the relative political stability that ensued, Indian wars continued to characterize the colony until the English invasion and takeover in 1664.
Two of the most prominent literary productions to emerge from New Netherland are prose tracts that describe and promote the colony and its people, as well as poetry trying to make meaning and give artistic form to the disparate impulses and experiences of colonization among Dutch settlers. The Dutch Reformed minister Johannes Megapolensis, Jr. (1603–1669) arrived in the colony in 1642 as the minister in residence at Rensselaerwyck and after his six years’ service accepted another ministry in New Amsterdam. Megapolensis maintained a regular correspondence with the authorities of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam (the “classis”), but he is best known for his tract A Short Account of the Mohawk Indians, published in 1644. Megapolensis (2002) fashioned an ideal of converting the Mohawk people to Christianity, and his description assesses their current cultural and social position as well as their potential for proselytizing. Megapolensis made serious efforts to engage his Mohawk neighbors about their faith and cultivate everyday relationships with them, writing, “[w]e live among both these kinds of Indians; and when they come to us from their country, or we go to them, they do us every act of friendship” (704). Such close interaction was perhaps more of a reflection of Megapolensis’s desire at a commensurability between both peoples than a daily reality. Reports of Indian wars tarnished the reputation of New Netherland abroad, but writers living in the colony expressed a perhaps not altogether insincere hope for peace with the Indigenous populations. Megapolensis’s description of the Mohawk people’s culture and customs reflects other ethnographic descriptions by travelers and settlers in early America. Like other European observers, he alleged that the Iroquois possessed no true religion, but admitted their belief in a great spirit and their proclivity to listen to his teachings about Christianity. In these moments, the minister wished for greater facility in the Mohawk language: “This nation has a very difficult language, and it costs me great pains to learn it, so as to be able to speak and preach in it fluently” (704). Megapolensis demonstrated his desire to communicate and establish deeper spiritual access to the Mohawk people, yet his translingual failings simultaneously barred, for the time being, the colonization of Indigenous cosmologies.
Adriaen van der Donck (1620–1655) arrived in New Netherland in 1642 to take the position of law officer on the Rensselaer plantation. Being very independent‐minded, van der Donck purchased a large tract of land north of Manhattan himself. He became involved in politics when he complained to the Dutch government about taxation, the alleged mismanagement of governors Kieft and Stuyvesant, and the inadequate defenses against an English takeover. While in Amsterdam to deliver a petition to the States General, van der Donck published A Description of New Netherland in 1655 (2008), which received widespread attention and was reprinted in 1656. Van der Donck’s Description extensively deals in the hyperbolic tropes of abundance, praising the natural potential of the colony and envisioning New Netherland creating a golden age for Dutch culture and imperialism. His Description sees an inexhaustible storehouse of resources; hickory wood in particular is so abundant that “there will be no shortage for it for a hundred years to come, even if the population were to grow appreciably” (20). For van der Donck, the land has limitless opportunities for expansion through a happy marriage of its raw potential and the cultivation brought by the settlers. Yet he saw no such potential for merging Indigenous and immigrant peoples and cultures; rather, in his description of “the original natives of New Netherland,” van der Donck already projects their disappearance (53). Nevertheless, he also gives voice to the Indigenous people of New Netherland by repeating at length the origin story of Sky Woman and the Turtle.
The epitome of van der Donck’s claims for New Netherland’s imperial promise is his dramatization of his dissection of a beaver carcass to find the gland that provided the highly valuable anal secretion castoreum. The episode fashions van der Donck simultaneously as a proto‐scientist, discoverer, and somewhat of a magician who is able to produce a quasi‐mythical substance through the acuteness of his mind. After several dissections resulting in “nothing but little round balls […] that [were] said in Holland not to be the right sort,” he receives a vital hint from a “knowledgeable Indian […] as he was a great beaver trapper well known to me and who assisted me in all this business.” Dissecting a pregnant female beaver, van der Donck narrates, at last “I found, up against the spine, two glands of the shape I sought, yellowish, oblong like a pear.” Though assured of his final success by his own observation as well as his Indian assistant, van der Donck takes his discovery to a “doctor of medicine” who “judged them to be the true beaver glands” (125). Thus joining old authority with his own scientific investigation, he accomplishes several rhetorical tasks: claiming the ascendency of New World knowledge regimes, producing evidence of commercial possibilities right out of the abdomen of a beaver carcass, and infusing a promotional account with the conventions of a quest narrative – with the prize not being a treasure but rather a substance craved all over Europe. The beaver episode represents van der Donck’s unmitigated belief in imperial acquisition and the power of individual colonists to produce wealth for the Dutch motherland.
Van der Donck never questions the rationale of imperialism and colonization; yet his vision of colonial society is remarkably different from the more common notion of nationally and linguistically unified outposts of imperial power. He depicts New Netherland as a composite of many immigrant peoples contributing to the strength and wealth of the new society. In the “Conversation between a Dutch Patriot and a New Netherlander,” van der Donck suggests that “the Dutch have compassionate natures and regard foreigners virtually as native citizens” and promises anyone, “of whatever trade he may be and who is prepared to adapt,” a place in Dutch‐colonial society (130). Colonization and immigration integrates foreign citizens into a kind of Dutch commonwealth that comprises the motherland as well as the colonies, which van der Donck projects to grow to the same number and wealth as Spain’s overseas possessions. Van der Donck envisioned an amalgamation that seemed far more effortless than suggested by many proponents of English imperialism.
New Netherland also produced many poetic endeavors that are still vastly underexplored. One of the most productive poets was the Dutch Reformed pastor Henricus Selyns, who wrote poems marking important public and private events in the province. A manuscript volume with well over 200 poems is located at the New York Historical Society and awaits scholarly attention. Selyns arrived from the Netherlands in the 1660s in the middle of the First Esopus War. New Netherland’s Indian wars appear in his poem “Bridal Torch” (1663), written for the wedding of a friend and colleague. Selyns dramatizes the backdrop of the nuptials by melding classical tropes – particularly the Cupid figure as bringer of love – with colonial events. According to Selyns, Indians have destroyed all peace and thus the conditions for love: “Alas, house after house posted with Indian monster / Child upon child taken away? Man upon man killed / Barn upon barn consumed. And pregnant women roasted?” (13). Flagging desire for love and marriage in the colony is resolved by the vanquishing of the Indians, and the interrupted weddings resume. The reproduction of social relations in the New World assures settlers and newcomers that alienation can be overcome through a communal military effort; poetry becomes a tool of empire by creating meaning amid jarring experiences of violence.
Selyns’s poetry, however, betrays a consistent sense of loss and alienation that victory over Indian foes cannot easily overcome. As a minister, he specifically lamented the large distances between residents and the poor transportation available in the colony, leading to a separation of individuals from their church community. In the poem “To my Friend, Captain Gerard Douw, residing at his country seat near New York, when he should have been invited to the Lord’s Supper, and there was no wagon by which to send the invitation” (1865), Selyns reveals what he perceives as a breakdown of community and communication:
They rode, and each came for the best,
They ride not now, each in the least;
The sun goes down. Is’t any wonder?
Each digs, toils, moils, pursues his own,
And, to his loss, seeks that alone.
The world goes up; God’s church and worship
going under. (155)
The poem describes disaffection among formerly ardent churchgoers who are now pursuing their economic gain above their spiritual salvation.
Numerous other poets and poetic endeavors in New Netherland remain to be recovered, translated, and published, presenting research opportunities for scholars with bilingual abilities. Even the works of prominent figures such as governor Peter Stuyvesant have been unacknowledged by scholars in the United States. Stuyvesant and his English‐born patron John Farret, for instance, carried on a poetic correspondence in manuscript, which is now located at the Netherlands Maritime Museum in Amsterdam (Shorto 2004: 149–150). The New Netherland Institute has preserved many Dutch colonial records scattered after the British takeover in 1664. In addition, Dutch writing and publishing in America did not cease after 1664; the database Early American Imprints contains a fair number of Dutch publications throughout the eighteenth century, especially on religious subjects (thus demonstrating the continuing linguistic self‐sufficiency of Dutch churches in the English‐speaking colony). Overall, these materials present a rich field of textual recovery and literary interpretation.
Most German‐speaking settlers did not arrive in North America as part of an imperialist venture sponsored by a major European power; rather, many were economic, religious, and political refugees fleeing persecution and poverty in the Holy Roman Empire, a fragmented conglomerate of absolutist principalities. They often heeded the call of William Penn and his “Charter of Privileges” (1701), which granted religious freedom, property rights, and exemption from oppressive taxes and military service. Colonies such as North Carolina and Georgia also set up policies friendly to Nonconformist immigrants and thus attracted German‐speaking immigrants. Many German‐speaking immigrants were pacifists who favored an appeasement policy toward Native Americans and some opposed slavery, such as the Germantown Quakers who protested the institution in 1688. Nevertheless, their migrations increased the pressure on Native Americans communities, and their economic activities became entangled in imperial trade. German immigrants held on to an imagined peaceful coexistence even when shady land deals – such as the infamous 1737 “Walking Purchase” – broke down friendly relations between the Quaker government and Native Americans. Many German‐speaking settlers joined the chorus of colonists calling for military defense; their writings reveal the difficult line between preserving the utopian spirit of early‐modern immigration ventures while struggling with their own implication in the mechanics of imperialism.
One of the first leaders of German immigration was Francis Daniel Pastorius, a trained lawyer who had joined the Pietists in Frankfurt am Main and traveled at their behest to Pennsylvania to establish a settlement. Pietism began in the late seventeenth century as an attempt to reform mainstream Protestantism by promoting a personal faith, an emotional relationship to Christ, and practical Christianity. Though disagreeing on some theological points, Pietists and Quakers hoped to establish a utopian society free from sectarian strife and vanity. German Pietist groups published several of Pastorius’s letters and accounts as promotional tracts. Pastorius’s reports from the settlement he founded – Germantown – try to promote the opportunities of spiritual rejuvenation presented by immigration to Pennsylvania. In the tract entitled Positive News (Sichere Nachricht) (1684/1912), Pastorius inverted the stock features of promotional literature – praising the natural abundance of the land – by casting the responsibility for bringing forth a great spiritual harvest upon the would‐be immigrants from Germany (410). Tempering excessive visions of New World abundance, Pastorius produced a balanced image of the land’s raw potential that would have to be improved by steady labor. Descriptions of fruits and harvests are either diminutive or balanced by accounts of scarcity. While writing a counter‐discourse to the colonialist accounts enticing settlers to seek material wish‐fulfillment, Pastorius nevertheless fell prey to some of the same problematic projections of hopes and desires onto the land that prepared the way for territorial expansion and Native American removal.
Descriptions of the Lenape people of the Delaware valley by German immigrants such as Pastorius and his contemporary Pietist immigrant Daniel Falckner were designed to demonstrate the spiritual compatibility between Quaker and Pietist settlers and their Indigenous neighbors. Pastorius extolled Native American qualities such as honesty, hospitality, and fidelity (1700/1912: 384). Similarly, Falckner noted in his answers to questions by his Pietist mentor August Hermann Francke, first published in Germany in 1702 as Curieuse Nachricht/Curious News (1905), that the Indians were surprisingly free from lewdness, which he found remarkable because of the absence of the laws existing in Europe that were specifically designed to control such behavior (112–113). However, Pastorius’s inability to recognize the tragic consequences of Indian removal for the kind of spiritual community he envisions results from several limitations in his views of Native American life and religion. His fixation on the saving power of Christianity limits his perception of the inherent value of Native American spirituality. He often belittles the Delaware Indians as “creatures in need of help” (“hülffbedürfftige Creaturen”) and describes their mode of worship as a ridiculous show (1700/1912: 434). Native Americans are assigned a limited function as presenting a spiritual allegory of modesty and simplicity and thus work as a rhetorical device for pointing out the moral inadequacy of his European contemporaries.
German‐speaking immigrants thus fashioned themselves into an exception to a brutal stance toward Native American pursued by English colonists (the Quakers excepted). Christoph Saur, the first German‐language printer in North America, promoted such an idealized vision even during the exacerbation of imperial conflicts during the 1740s and 1750s, culminating in the French and Indian War. In 1748 and 1749, Saur authored and printed several pamphlets countering Benjamin Franklin’s call, in his tract Plain Truth (1747), for a defensive militia called “Association.” Franklin had used some French privateer raids on the Atlantic coast as the occasion to instill fear in Pennsylvania’s population that pacifism and inadequate military defense exposed the colony to devastating attacks from the frontier as well as the coast. In contrast, Saur (1748) tied Pennsylvania’s history of peaceful relations with Native Americans and exception from armed conflict with other imperial powers directly to Penn’s founding vision of brotherly love (16). Saur employed various publications for his anti‐militia activism, his efforts to educate and enfranchise German‐speaking residents, and a cultural milieu of Nonconformism and inward spirituality; these publications – a vast but little‐explored treasure trove of early American writings – ranged from his newspaper (Pensylvanische Berichte/Pennsylvanian Reports), to his popular almanac (Der Hoch‐Deutsch Americanische Calender), to the publication of his popular Luther Bible (the first Bible printed in America in a European language), and reprints of devotional tracts, hymnals, and political pamphlets.
In addition to Saur, several of the so‐called German peace churches – Mennonites, Schwenkfelders, and Dunkers – used writing in print and manuscript to promote peace with Native American groups and agitate against an imperialist political and economic agenda. Fears of enforced military engagement triggered the largest printing project completed in the North American colonies (a single book with 1500 pages) – the Mennonites’ Martyrs’ Mirror, which gathers the stories of European Anabaptists who were persecuted, tortured, and killed in Europe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. German‐speaking Mennonites in Pennsylvania believed that a German‐language version of the book, originally printed in Dutch in 1660 and 1685, would strengthen their community’s resolve to resist militarization. Thus, they commissioned the Ephrata Seventh‐Day Baptist community to translate and print the book, which was published in 1748 in a print run of 1200 copies. Mennonites and other radical Protestants among Pennsylvania’s German‐speaking population hoped to resist the larger imperial ideologies and policies that pitched Britain against France and Spain, Europeans against Indigenous and African peoples, and war against the utopian hope for brotherly love; in doing so, they amassed a large textual archive in manuscript and print that still remains to be explored.
Nevertheless, rising imperial tensions and frontier violence compelled many German‐speaking settlers to abandon their pacifist stance. In his widely distributed broadside Ein wohl‐gemeindter und ernstlicher Rath an unsere Lands‐Leute, die Teutschen (A Sincere and well‐meaning Advice to our Country People, the Germans) (1741), Pennsylvania’s Indian negotiator Conrad Weiser calls for German‐speaking residents to vote against the Quaker government blocking military expenses. Weiser paints a dire picture of Pennsylvania Germans living not in a peaceful colonial backwater but in the crucible of global imperial tensions (1899: 520–521). In spite of his own friendship with the Mohawk, among whom he had lived as a teenager to learn their language, Weiser promoted the imperial of agenda of his employers – the proprietary government – and thus urged many German‐speaking settlers to change course and pick up arms.
Similar to those in English‐speaking settler communities, German residents turned to published captivity narratives to articulate frontier and Indian warfare as an existential threat against an immigrant identity and culture, thus falling in line with the prevailing imperialist rhetoric of dispossession and the vilification of Indigenous peoples. The Narrative of Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger, for Three Years Captives among the Indians (1759) perpetuated many tropes of colonial frontier conflict and captivity, especially the graphic descriptions of the Indian attacks on European settlements and the moves of the captives throughout a wilderness punctuated with sufferings at the hands of cruel and savage captors. Taken captive in 1755, Le Roy and Leininger survived an attack that left most of their families dead at the hands of the Indian warriors (2015: 82–83). Their published account is punctuated by descriptions of Indian cruelties, such as the torture and killing of a woman trying to escape (84). Le Roy and Leininger’s captivity narrative locates suffering no longer in the realm of European religious persecution but rather in an imperial conflict: life in America required fighting and dying along binary divisions of faith, race, and nationality that earlier migrants had repudiated.
Though increasingly accepting of imperialist ideology, Pennsylvania Germans continued to deal with the ontological and epistemological problem of living in a state of exile: how did one’s very being or core identity change, and how did one’s way of understanding the world have to be adjusted? Migration and settlement severed the communal bonds that had given meaning to village and town life in Europe. Short narratives, such as “The Ghost of Falkner Swamp” (Anonymous 2015), first published in 1744, revealed the fears and anxieties surrounding the immigration experience. The story tells of two German‐speaking girls meeting the ghost of a German day‐laborer who had died five years earlier. During the encounters, the ghost tells the children of a financial debt that he and his wife had incurred to another woman during their transatlantic passage. The ghost begs the girls to help him repay the debt and finally be at rest. Yet, the ghost’s widow refuses to own the debt, and the woman who had provided the loan could not be found. The neighbors assume that the girls must have misunderstood names and declare the search failed.
Each narrative element in the ghost story pairs with a fundamental issue of the immigrant experience: the unpaid debt displays the fear that unresolved issues from the homeland could burden the immigrant in the new country and thus impede the much‐desired new beginning. The ghost itself emerges from and returns to the burial place that fails to confine him: “When he came to the creek he lifted the underbrush. He went on and soon came to the burial ground on Sieber’s farm; he crawled through the fence. Then the girl saw his grave and in it there was a hole; and the next moment he was gone” (213). As the burial place serves as a powerful marker of identity and rootedness, the hole in the grave designates the immigrant’s lack of connectedness. Already fragmented because of their origin in separate German principalities, the immigrants now lose the ability to speak a common language – the primary means of group identification: “During the time they talked, the girls saw that the ghost had two red fangs protruding from either side of his mouth. She had the feeling they pained him. This condition impaired his speech” (213). The story’s lack of a resolution echoes the immigrants’ uncertainty about their place and fate in the New World. The story tells of immigrants who arrived in America with modest aspiration – peace and a plot of land they could call their own – but often failed to achieve even this limited vision, forever stuck in the space between life and death, home and abroad, human language and beastly utterance.
German‐language writings, especially its far‐flung print culture, represent one of the largest contingent of unexplored archival resources in colonial American literature. The writings and publications of German‐language printers like Christoph Saur, Sr. and Jr., Henry Miller, and Anton Armbrüster comprise a variety of genres and political, cultural, social, and religious viewpoints; primary text databases such as America’s Historical Newspapers, American Periodical Series Online, and Early American Imprints all give easy access to many of these publications. Moreover, Pietist German immigrants composed a profusion of religious poetry and hymnody espousing mystical concepts of spirituality; among them are particularly the writings of Johannes Kelpius and Johann Conrad Weiser. The German‐speaking members of the Moravian church (who settled primarily in Pennsylvania and North Carolina) wrote copious spiritual autobiographies (Lebenslauf), a genre of life writing (beside diaries and letter writing) particularly accessible to women writers and minorities. Increasingly, historical societies and university archives (such as the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book and Manuscript Library) are digitizing their German‐language manuscript holdings; researchers and students making use of these materials should consider completing a course in reading eighteenth‐century German script. The pay‐off will be a plethora of authors, texts, and ideas broadening and diversifying not just our understanding of American literature but the cultural and historical construct of “early America” per se.
German, Dutch, French, and even Spanish writings about and from colonial North America pose a central question about imperialism, migration, and settlement: could colonialist and imperialist writing bear within itself the critique of its own imperatives – the desire for fantastic wealth and eternal wish‐fulfillment, the craving for social recognition and status, and the domination of Indigenous peoples to create a powerful machinery of exploitation of labor and resources? To claim that colonial writers themselves recognized and even critiqued such forces may in itself be a type of wish fulfillment seeking to obscure its mechanics of oppression by creating the illusion of critical examination and even cultural subversion. And yet, to allege that the writers and texts of colonial America were not capable of reflecting upon the internal contradictions of colonialist discourse would be to commit the intentional fallacy all over again: these texts could not possibly be critical of colonialism because their authors did not mean to be critical. Rather, I argue that the diasporic nature – the voluntary or enforced exile – of these colonial writers disrupted the flow of imperial power from the center to the periphery. Reassembling imperial culture and ideology in the distant spaces of the empire caused a disruption of identification that eventually laid bare the manipulations, victimization, and losses of the colonial enterprise. Investigating the non‐English writings of colonial America will also teach a larger public today that migration and immigration defy binary categorizations between those allegedly deserving of the opportunities this continent has to offer and others who threaten to destabilize the United States through self‐serving exploitation and even violence. Sidestepping the oft‐mythologized English‐language stories, we may at last discard the simplistic notion that people arriving on American shores may be split into villains and victims.
See also: chapter 2 (cross‐cultural encounters in early american literatures); chapter 3 (settlement literatures before and beyond the stories of nations); chapter 11 (travel writings in early america, 1680–1820).