German Immigration and the Quaker Party during the 1720’s and 1730’s
The conventional Pennsylvania historical paradigm characterizes the post-Charter to 1840 period as one in which a “two party” (Penn Proprietary and Quaker Party) evolved out of the chaotic politics of the Penn pre-Charter of Privileges era. We have amended this somewhat and assert the Quaker Party is a proto-political party, populated and dominated with Quakers–but we asset the Penn Proprietor grouping was more the Pennsylvania executive branch of government, and its supporters and allies tagging along mostly for the goodies. This is more accurate once the Penn sons acquired legal control over their father’s colony during the later 1720’s. It is still, in my mind, too much of a leap to compare it to the UK “court” party. In any case that still leaves us within the historical paradigm as we concur the Quaker Party does behave more or less as a semi-modern political party, loosely comparable as a wilderness colony-based British “country” or Whig Party.
In an earlier module we made the case the Party repeatedly capture control over the single-legislature, the General Assembly, and due to the nature of the chaotic politics and its basic, consistent and firm, if not die-hard opposition to the Proprietary led to the development of an exceptionally strong and active Speaker, with a corresponding oligarchy composed of his appointed committee chairs and local “bosses”. Mostly Quaker, although by the 1730’s they were moderate Quakers who did not endorse the belief of fundamental Quakers that Quakerism challenged if not precluded the participation of Quakers in active government. Looking at the “party” structure such as it was, and its decision-making style/tactics (for example a reliance on log-rolling), I further asserted the Quaker Party in practice was “political machine-like” especially by the late 1730’s. I waxed, no doubt eloquently on the Quaker Party being the first in what was a long line of Pennsylvania colony-state policy systems that in practice and structure were political machines.
The conventional Pennsylvania historical paradigm for the 1720’s asserts the Quaker Party garnered votes from newly-arrived German citizens. German support of the Quaker Party is undeniable, as is the indisputable statistics that demonstrate that Germans themselves did not hold legislative office in this period. The assertion is usually made that Germans did not want to be political officeholders and they were quite content to support Quaker politicians as their representatives. As far as this goes, the paradigm seems reasonably congruent with actual Pennsylvania practices, but it does little to explain why Germans acted and thought as they were alleged to by the historians. Subsequent attempts to delve deeper into Quaker Party-German relations does suggest that early migration Pietistic Germans shared with the Quakers a strong tilt toward pacifism-through for likely a bit different reasons–including Germans fled Germany precisely because they did not want to be caught up in somebody’s else’s war. Mennonites, as a matter of doctrine did not desire to hold political office for their “religious scruples” [99] Richard Macmaster, Land, Piety and Peoplehood” in Hutson’s Pennsylvania Politics as explained in Robert Fogleman, Hopeful Journeys, p. 131.
Pietists of the early migration period were replaced by mainstream Lutherans as the years went by–and by a equally strong stream of German/Dutch Reform adherents. These folk were much less bound by doctrine, more mainstream in their Protestantism with the latter sympathetic to Calvinism, and the former a more formal Church structured, yet “enlightened” forgiving pathway to establishing a relationship with Christ. By no means war-loving, we should not confuse these people with Scots-Irish, the later mainstream Germans were less pacifist, and had no particular religious scruples that inhibited involvement in politics or office holding. Still, these much more numerous mainstream religious Germans did not enter into active politics and office holding any more than the Pietistic had. What givers? The answer is important because non-Pietistic Germans greatly outnumbered their Pietistic compatriots. After 1720’s it is to them we must look for answer as to why the German support of Quaker Party officeholders was so enduring and, with important exceptions, so firm.
Fogleman asserts that instead of religious scruples or doctrine, the mainstream religious German settlers brought to America, and the new communities in which they founded and settled, the political culture of the Rhineland German villages and towns from which they emigrated. Penn’s English Quakers had done the same, as we described earlier–and so replication of the politics and political structures of the old world in the new is not a leap of considerable faith. Having said that however, a serious difference in political experience and the political culture between the English and German realities manifested itself. England was in the process of urbanization, early mercantilism, and even proto-manufacturing.. Rhineland Germany much less so. The German village, still feudal in its economic base and politics (German feudal barons with large agricultural manors farmed by serfs or fragile freeman laborers was the German reference point. The Germans in no way sought to copy that in their new world communities–and instead were stoutly determined to make sure it would not occur in their new Pennsylvania townships.
Deference to a feudal lord’s authority did not travel well with these folk. When they arrived in Pennsylvania they came immediately into contact with Penn’s Proprietary which was a pretty close copy of what they were fleeing from. Moreover, they wanted nothing to do with landownership and farming employment that was serf-like. Their American Dream was to own their own household land, free and independent; on this land they would raise their families, earn their living, and form communities with others who thought as they did–and spoke their own German language. Looking ahead to the next chapter on Yankee Puritans, Pennsylvania Germans were quite different in their approach to authority–and to agricultural land ownership. Pennsylvania Germans wanted to own land of their own, and to be left alone to live their lives on it. Expensive land with high taxes combined with a privileged standing of Penn family neighboring parcels was a constant reminder of their old feudal barons–as was a court system still tilted toward Proprietary interests.
The reader no doubt has figured out where I am going with this. Religious mainstream Germans quickly discovered the Proprietary dominated townships and counties. Almost instinctively that predisposed them toward an intense opposition to the Proprietary as local government and its court system perceived with some justification as serving Penn’s interests (or his cronies). Land sales contracts and tax rates and tax collection became an early priority of the Quaker Party whose reform included elections to a assessor/collector offices, and voter control over the bureaucracy. As Germans attempted to charter townships whose population was disproportionately German, they were (1) required to secure the charter from the Penns, who as term of land sale reserved ten percent of the township to Penn’s personal ownership. and (2) the delayed impact of indenture and voting/landowning rights intensified the yearning for the German-version of the American Dream.
So, in a large segment of the German population developed a reaction against slavery, as well as an elite/mass attitudinal legacy (don’t forget increasing numbers of Germans immigrants were indentured servants or former indentured servants as we drifted into the late 1740’s). It did not help, as we have recorded earlier, that from the beginning of German migration, Penn’s governors had taken an early lead in questioning German loyalty to the Crown, and disrespecting Germans precisely because they were German, different and speakers of a different language and holders of a non-English economic, cultural, and political legacy (a bias which also extended to Anglicans and Presbyterians).
Germans once they owned their own land and home brooked little intrusion into their own homestead, and resisted any government decision to which they had not consented–highway construction draft levy for example. This is a recipe for limited, frugal, low tax government with citizen consent for budgets and tax rates as key features of their democracy. While much is made of the English immigrant’s desire for liberty, based much more on individual civil/political rights than the Germans who enjoyed no previous experience with political involvement, elections and democratic principles, instead defined their liberty in terms of land contracts and insulation of their homestead from an intrusive government.
To emphasize this point, immigrant Germans, unlike English transplants, had literally NO experience with an election, voting, democracy, and did not necessarily value it in the same intensity and tone as the typical English colonist. They had little fixation on civil liberties per se, and voting rights, considering the large number of Germans considered as property without voting rights, was not prized. Politics for them was the land of elites–and they had little pretense to demand their participation in it other than to protect their homestead. In German-settled Pennsylvania, a German community and the individuals that resided liberty, therefore, was defined through a prism of individual land ownership as the guarantee of family security and their personal economic well-being. This BTW was not the same definition of liberty that other non-German colonists had.
As we have seen, the Quakers early on had also constructed a definition of liberty centered on religious toleration, limited government which rejected the unification of church and state, and a vast array of individual actions and beliefs that reflected each individual’s Inner Light. Quakers too placed primacy on the family homestead and membership in the community’s meeting house; materialists, they rejected extravagance and intemperateness, avoiding the display of materialistic pretenses that glorified the individual at the expense of devotion to God. Quakers valued hard work, entrepreneurship, and economic success. Other than the primacy of the Quaker meeting house, there was substantial overlap in the priorities each afforded to civic life.
In that Penn’s original Frame defined Pennsylvania’s voting franchise quite broadly as requiring fifty pounds ownership of property and assets (the most liberal of the colonies at the time), it was not difficult at all for German immigrants once they bought their homestead in the hinterland to be eligible for voting. It was also true, however, that the same property requirement was considerable more difficult in Philadelphia where land was much more costly per unit. The German-Quaker alliance took a firm hold in the hinterland core counties, and left for all practical purposes, the Philadelphia municipal corporation to the Quakers, and Anglican-Presbyterian merchants and professions. Germans voting with the Quaker Party served their own self-interests, and in the early years of German migration served as its protector, allowing Germans to settle in and carve their own fortunes and lives in the new world–without having to assume the burden of electing their kin (not an easy task) to elective office.
German tension with the Penn Proprietor was a constant rub and a ever-present opportunity for the Quaker Party to seize advantage. Given the threat of war was constant, and after 1740 visible on the horizon, Germans, whose homesteads were initially in the peaceful three core counties (where treaties had “regularized” Indian relations) were attracted to Quaker pacifism as a barrier to any Pennsylvania’s participation. This almost natural alliance perpetuated the hold of Quakers over the Quaker Party, and logically over time institutionalized elite Quakers into its leadership-converting the Quaker Party, over the next decades, into an elite oligopoly which “brokered” agreement and benefits from its rather diverse constituency of anti-Penn voters.
By 1730 control of the [General Assembly] had passed to long-settled rural areas [the three core counties] thoroughly dominated by local Quaker leaders, and to their allies, the Quaker mercantile elite of Philadelphia. The increasing overrepresentation of original eastern counties in a chamber that avoided major reapportionment helped to secure this control against any challenge from non-Quaker Philadelphia or the newer western counties. ONLY IN 1756 DID MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS BECOME A MINORITY IN THE ASSEMBLY (capitalization mine], and then only because several Quaker lawmakers resigned their seats during the Seven Years War … The mid-century Quaker Party, an unusually stable coalition of Anglican, former Quaker, and worldly Quaker lawmakers, never lost control of the [General Assembly] before the Revolution. … Friends and former Friends with strong Quaker ties, did hold very nearly half of the seats in the [General Assembly] until October 1775 [99] Richard Alan Ryerson, the Revolution Is Now Begun(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), pp. 9-10.
Would it only be this simple and durable an alliance?
Ryerson reflects the conventional historical paradigm of Quaker Party dominance over Pennsylvania colonial politics straight through the Revolution. Once again Ryerson’s quote is accurate–as far as it goes. The Germans are not even mentioned, largely because they declined to elect their own to the legislature, preferring instead to vote for Quaker Party adherents. In point of fact by the late 1730’s the Quaker Party found its hold over the Germans in some question. The delayed and staggered entry of Germans into the voting franchise prevented them from outvoting English and Quaker residents.
The 1739 eruption of the Pennsylvania Great Awakening fractured Quaker consensus and mobilized many a Scots-Irish. By 1739, however, Quakers were in a minority in their core base districts, and in 1740 the Naturalization Act and the potential impact of formerly indentured Germans becoming eligible to the franchise combined to offer a test of this decade long coalition. The “roaring thirties” a feast of prosperity, consensus and growth was abruptly challenged.
Quakers after 1710, evolved from their fractious and contentious pre-1710 politics, settling down a bit and in a period of great economic growth concentrating on their economic interests. Quaker politics was rendered more stable at least until the onslaught of the Great Awakening and War around 1739. The Penn Proprietorship underwent a change in generations with the three Penn son’s assuming legal control and responsibility for the colony’s affairs. John Penn, the oldest, and Thomas, the youngest both came to Pennsylvania in 1732 in an attempt to reform the Proprietary bureaucratic structures to conform with the son’s transition from a Holy Experiment to a profit-seeing enterprise for the family.
The most immediate expression of that transition were their reform of the Land Office, and a series of Indian treaties which greatly increased land owned by the Proprietorship, land which could be subsequently sold to new immigrants. Of necessity, the Penn’s sons reliance on land sales, town-building, and tax collection tilted them toward development of what will be Pennsylvania’s western hinterland (to be considered in a future module). Thomas who lasted until the 1776 American Revolution was the most active in these matters. His most durable success was the “founding” of Reading PA, whose settlement and town-building were administered from England.
It should be observed the Penn brothers until the Revolution were hot and cold in the “governance” of the colony. Plenty of examples can be found of their involvement, but nevertheless, most of Pennsylvania’s affairs, policy-making, and day-to-day governance fell outside their purview or interest. This did not add to the luster and image of the Penns or their Proprietorship–and they remained as had their father and mother the central target of domestic Pennsylvania public opinion. During their fifty year governance, the Quaker Party and the Legislature intensified their efforts to replace the Penns with a royal governor. That it also must be observed runs against the grain of most American colonies which struggled against their royal governors and increasingly drifted to a de facto desire for autonomy from England.
The sons retained reliance on the appointed Deputy Governor for political and administrative governance of the colony. Their choices for governorship were vastly improved given the very low bar set by Penn’s and the Probate period choices. Governors in this period were more competent, congruent to the Penn Proprietary interest, and a bit more prone to successfully navigate through the onslaught of the Quaker Party. What was still a relatively loose cannon was the so-called domestic Pennsylvania Proprietary faction, dominated by our James Logan, and increasingly during the 1730’s by its rising star, William Allen. As Logan lost his luster, and accumulated baggage with his predictable self-serving initiatives, Allen gathered it up. By the end of the 1930’s decade he was ready and able, so he thought, to play ball and give the Quaker Party a challenge it had not faced since 1701.
Allen was one of Pennsylvania’s great leaders. Among the wealthiest merchants of Philadelphia, later in 1762 the founder of Allentown, his claim to fame was the public-private development, financing, and construction of Pennsylvania’s state house during the 1730’s. A Scots-Irish, well-married (himself and his children) he held contacts with key families, various factions including the municipal corporation serving as Philadelphia’s mayor, served in the legislature, and maintained sound relationships with the Penn brothers. An active philanthropist, he will be revisited in our later discussion on Pennsylvania’s contribution to American Community Development. Through them he was able to dominate the Penn appointive decisions, appointments which offered opportunities, status, and resources. Once again, Pennsylvania fragmented politics had facilitated the rise of yet another boss-like powerhouse–this one, however, needed to acquire legislative power in order to establish his power and policy base. In any event by 1740 Allen was ready to launch his assault on the Quaker Party.
The eruption of King George’s War, however, activated Quaker/German pacifism. Penn’s Deputy Governor had on his own enlisted companies of militia to defend Pennsylvania, and he turned to the General Assembly for not only funds to pay them, but to carry out their future activities. Traditional Quakers and most Germans wanted as little to do with the war. The so-called “worldly Quakers” were now on the hot seat, and the preaching of the Great Awakening’s George Whitefield, in the fields of Philadelphia (with his friend Benjamin Franklin in attendance) triggered an intense response as Protestants returned to their doctrinal and Inner Light roots, questioning the relationship with established churches and asserting their own right to a personal relationship with the Almighty.
To be sure, secular Quakers and mainstream German Protestants were not greatly affected by its anti-establishmentarianism, but those of a more fundamental cast of mind, the Pietistic for example, and English Presbyterians (Scots-Irish) were mobilized. Germans, less affected remained more anti-Proprietary, but in view of their increasing access to the franchise and their success in economic endeavors were visibly on the threshold of entering politics on their own dime. The makings of a great electoral tumult seemed in the making. Allen for his part saw divisions caused by the war-Great Awakening among the Quakers to be a once in a lifetime opportunity.
So Thomas Penn returned once more to Pennsylvania (1739) and in 1740 the Proprietary decided to join with Allen, contest the 1740 elections and hopefully break the hold of the Quaker Party on the General Assembly, potentially creating a speed bump in Ryerson’s grand vision of Quaker Party control.
From our perspective, this challenge to Quaker Party dominance in 1740 provides us an opportunity to look deeper into German immigrant political development in Pennsylvania. That development refined and expanded the basis on which German-Quaker Party coalition had heretofore rested. It also resulted in activating Germans to defend their own self-interests and protect the larger German community in Pennsylvania. From this new beginning we will see stirrings not only on German political involvement, but the rise of a German-empowerment community development wing–an early example of the third wing of community development. Finally, with the relationship and understanding between Quakers and Germans, we will see the start of what will become the future Midlands political culture.
Ron W. Coan 