First City. Gary B. Nash

Чтение книги онлайн.

      From the beginning, Penn’s colony attracted settlers from many parts of Europe, including many who had already sojourned in other West Indian or North American colonies. Speaking many languages and practicing many religions, they represented part of a tremendous worldwide redistribution of British, European, and African peoples, and their arrival gave early Pennsylvania a mélange of tongues, complexions, and religious beliefs. Penn tried to build a bedrock of tolerance to support this diverse population. He never entirely succeeded, but while prejudice and tensions sometimes flared into name-calling and near violence, Pennsylvania was spared the seething ethnic and religious hostilities that wracked Europe and many North American colonies in the seventeenth century.²³

      The collections of the Historical Society, Library Company, and Philosophical Society came to include rich evidence of Pennsylvania’s patchwork of cultures. Though most of these institutions’ leaders were alarmed by the late nineteenth-century wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, they still paid some attention to the region’s colonial ethnic past. Swedes were the first Europeans to live in what was to become Pennsylvania. Some fifty of them came to the Delaware Valley in 1638, and from that first experience came journals and drawings that provided a basis for Tomas Campanius Holm to write in Swedish what would later be translated as A Short Description of New Sweden. Published in Stockholm in 1702, Holm’s Short Description includes the earliest known pictures of the Lenape—in family groups, trading with Swedish settlers, battling other Indians, and burying their dead.

      The Swedes’ arrival gave the Lenape their first experience with European intruders, and the contacts were bittersweet. The Indians welcomed trade, and the Swedes symbolized their peaceful intentions by translating Martin Luther’s writings into a volume in the Lenape language or in a trade pidgin. Philadelphia’s American Swedish Historical Museum, founded in 1926, and built with funding from wealthy Swedish-American industrialists, holds a copy of the book. But as in so many other cases of European-Indian contact, trade was often accompanied by mistrust and violence. It was also almost always accompanied by the exchange of culture. One vivid example of this is an infantry helmet, probably made in Sweden in the early seventeenth century, that became a prized possession of an Indian who was found buried with it near the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County. How it found its way to the Historical Society is unknown, a phantom gift that came “over the transom,” in the parlance of curators.

      The Swedish influence in Pennsylvania waned after the arrival of the English. The descendants of the initial Swedish settlers were not numerous, and Philadelphia’s cultural arbiters wanted the master narrative to begin with the English. But Gloria Dei, the “Old Swedes Church” in Philadelphia, became a revered sanctuary for people of many national origins. Its minister, Andreas Hesselius, was the brother of the colony’s premier colonial painter.

      Far more numerous than the Swedes—in fact, the most numerous of all immigrant groups to early Pennsylvania—were the Germans. Some 80,000 poured into Pennsylvania during the colonial era, most of them fleeing “God’s three arrows”—famine, war, and pestilence—in their homelands along the Rhine. Although most of them moved through Philadelphia to take up farming, hundreds stayed in Pennsylvania’s commercial center, taking up positions as artisans, innkeepers, printers, merchants, and clergymen.²⁴

      To Pennsylvania came Germans of many types, and they were among the earliest immigrants recruited by Penn, who had traveled through the Netherlands and the Rhineland and published his promotional tracts in German as well as English. Some of the earliest German settlers, like Johannes Kelpius, were pietists, seeking in Pennsylvania a refuge where they could put themselves beyond the scorn and abuse of their neighbors. In 1694, Kelpius led a settlement of some forty German pietists who purchased land in Germantown and became industrious members of that community. Christopher Witt’s ink drawing of the mystic Kelpius, done about 1705 and purchased by the Historical Society 177 years later, may be the first portrait rendered in Pennsylvania.

      Following the Peace of Utrecht in 1714, ending a series of Anglo-French wars that hampered immigration, German sojourners to Pennsylvania poured ashore. More numerous than the pietists were the Moravians, whose main settlement was in Bethlehem. Like the Quakers, the Moravians dressed conservatively, garbing themselves in grays and browns and avoiding ruffles or other evidences of vanity. Unlike the Quakers, who wished for peace with native peoples but had no desire to convert them to Quakerism, the Moravians were among the most fervent missionaries to the Indians.

      Though Pennsylvania became dotted with pietistic German communities, the most numerous of the German immigrants were the industrious farmers and artisans of the more worldly Lutheran and German Reformed churches. Settling in the western parts of Bucks and Chester Counties and more thickly in Lancaster, York, and Berks Counties, they left behind a tradition of folk craftsmanship and art that is immensely popular today. The painted furniture German artisans produced shows how the culture of the homeland could persist when transplanted to an environment that did not despise or attack cultural diversity. The painted chest (Figure 12) was often the most important storage item found in rural southeastern Pennsylvania households well into the nineteenth century. Holding clothing, linens, bedding, and even tools and food, it was frequently used as well for seating or as a table surface. The chests, to be found in every German household, were highly individualized with carving, inlay, and painting. They played a key role in each family’s migration. Many were inscribed with the name of the owner, thus marking a chest as the personal property of the immigrant and signifying how humble peasants began to see themselves as individuals. Many owners pasted their taufschein (baptismal certificate) inside the lid of the chest.²⁵

      The Historical Society, Philosophical Society, and Library Company had few members of German descent in the early years, partly because most German Americans lived in the counties west of Philadelphia and also because Philadelphia’s Germans had a thriving historical and literary society of their own, founded in 1763. Therefore, the collecting of material relating to Pennsylvania Germans did not figure prominently in the minds of the city’s collecting institutions at first. The Historical Society in 1882 received a rich collection of manuscripts, illustrated hymn books, German language pamphlets, and records of the Ephrata Cloister collected by Abraham H. Cassel, a descendant of Pennsylvania’s most famous German printer of the colonial era—Christopher Sauer. In 1904, the Library Company acquired a collection of about one thousand German imprints, including some 150 from the press of Sauer, including the first Bible printed in German in North America. Already, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, founded in 1877, had been gathering a few examples of German American pottery and then, by the early twentieth century, systematically began acquiring pieces from regional dealers who purchased them from rural homesteads. The public’s interest in German American folkways had been whetted in the 1864 Great Central Fair where a recreated Pennsylvania-German kitchen, with a huge banner reading “Grant’s Up To Schnitz,” captivated visitors. Philadelphia’s German-Americans built on this interest two decades later with a massive bicentennial celebration of the first arrival of German immigrants in 1683. But not until 1926, when DuPont beneficence allowed the Museum of Art to install a kitchen and bedroom from a German American miller’s house, did the public have regular access to the aesthetic taste and craftsmanship of the state’s largest ethnic group.