Professor of German and Humanities at Bucknell University. I have worked with Moravian materials for about the last twenty five years, focusing on issues of gender, sexuality, race in the translation, interpretation and dissemination of these fascinating documents. I am currently working with the North American mission records from the 18th century.
In 2018, a group of Bucknell students enrolled in an advanced seminar on autobiography (HUMN 330) met, interviewed, and recorded the life stories of selected members of the Mother Mary Cabrini parish in Shamokin, PA. This project was undertaken as a community-based learning digital project between the Franciscan friars of the Shamokin Friary and Bucknell University. The goal was to deliver a “digital oral history of the parish” in Shamokin. In so doing, the students fulfilled the learning goals of the class:
Meaningfully compare intellectual materials of different or opposing types: textual with material artifacts; narrative with non-narrative texts; artistic with analytical modes of thought. (6,8)
Appreciate the benefits, problems, and intellectual challenge of comparative study across historical, cultural, or generic boundaries. (5,6)
Demonstrate effective expository skills, both orally and in writing. (7,8)
Project description
Writing a memoir is an activity that “captures and communicates one’s own specific life experience and its individual and social personal and communal significance. Since the author of a memoir is its subject and the subject is its author, such a narrative focuses, deepens, and in some cases, even creates identity” (Gilmour, The Wisdom of Memoir, 13) Thus, creating a memoir is a crucial human experience because it ultimately deepens the author’s understanding of what it means to be him or her. But memoir is also a generative activity–generative of forgiveness, reconciliation, and growth through the act of witnessing: for the author in structuring the past experience and also for the amanuensis in the act of “re-witnessing.” Memoir is a communicative act-it is a reconciliation with the past, with difficult experiences so that one can be forgiven by oneself and others.
Recognizing that memoir can act as an icon or portal between the divine and the earthly or, in a secular understanding, as a portal between the moment captured and the re-witnessing of that moment both by self and others, this project interviewed members of the Cabrini parish over the age of 60 about three aspects: their ethnic background, their faith background, and the role of place in the formation of identity.
In a time of public health crisis in Shamokin, both in terms of physical and mental health, this project attempted to a) capture the memories of the elderly of the town in its heyday and b) serve as a means to develop a “pride of place” for younger generations.
Recognizing these facets of memoir, the seminar students and members of the Mother Mary Cabrini parish worked together to create a “digital oral history” of the parish in Shamokin. Father Martin Kobos selected parish members as candidates for this project and arranged meetings with students.
Questions
Tell me something about your childhood. What was it like growing up around here?
How has the landscape of Coal Country influenced your identity? Do you consider yourself to be a “coal cracker”?
Have you ever been outside Shamokin? Have you moved around a lot in your life? What are your family roots in Shamokin? Are your children/grandchildren still in Shamokin?
What role has the church played in your life? In your family’s life?
The class worked over the course of the semester to contact, meet, interview, film, and edit the video recordings for their final projects. The following summer, library Courtney Hugo worked these videos into an Omeka project called Mining Memory. The resultant digital artefact was shared with Mother Mary Cabrini Parish in Shamokin, which was grateful to have the lasting memorial to its parishioners.
Lecture delivered at the Dietrich Theater, Tunkhannock, PA on October 15, 2023
Thank you for the invitation to speak today at the Dietrich Theater in Tunkhannock, standing on the traditional lands of the Munsee, Lenapehoking and Susquehannock Indians.
I titled this talk “Places of Peace” and intentionally did not add a question mark. As I will try to show, there were certainly tensions on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, both in the Moravian Indian villages of Friedenshütten and Scheschquehannunk between the Mahican and Delaware (Unami and Munsee) residents, and with their neighbours, both settlers and Native Americans, and also in outward-facing discussions with the Haudenosaunee to the north, specifically the Cayuga nation’s chief and the Colonial Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Colonel William Johnson. But, since the outbreak of the French and Indian war and the subsequent Pontiac’s Rebellion, the villages were places of relative peace in comparison with the violence and bloodshed that was occurring as a result of increasing racial tensions between the white settlers and ANY Native Americans further down the Susquehanna River.
What I would like to discuss today is how this place – from the mouth of the Lackawanna up to what is now the New York/Pennsylvania border – was briefly a place of relative stability and environmental wealth for groups of displaced Moravian Indians, Mohican, Unami and Munsee speaking, who were caught up in both the religious awakening that swept up and down the Susquehanna River in the 1740s and the redefinition and renegotiation of tribal identities in Native communities in the Susquehanna Valley.
To help me in this work, I draw on my own long involvement with the records of the Moravian Church in the North American missions, in particular the deep research for my forthcoming book on the Shamokin mission which predated these North Branch missions by 10-15 years but which contains some of the same actors. Common themes for that research project and this one include the historical work of scholars such as Jane Merritt on the contribution of women missionaries to the intercultural exchanges in Pennsylvania, my own work on trade and missions in early Pennsylvania; the recent revisioning of this time and place by scholars such as Richard Pointer, in his remarkable “biography” of Papunhank, the Munsee religious leader that was published in 2020. Also vital to my work is Amy Schutt’s important essay on tribal identities in Moravian missions on the North Branch; and, as we end today, Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly’s reconstructions of the soundscapes of Moravian mission landscapes. Much of this work is based on the deciphering of the archival records of the Moravian Church, held in Bethlehem PA and also available through Gale Cengage online (if you can read archaic German script).
There are also certain central figures that pervade this work:
The Moravian missionary, David Zeisberger
The Munsee “Prophet” (John) Papunhank, baptized into the Moravian Church by Zeisberger
Job Chillaway and his brother Billy, residents and later title holders to the lands of Wyalsuing
John Woolman, a leading Quaker whose work with Papunhank was central to his religious vision
The Moravian missionary couples who worked in Friedenshütten and Scheschquehannunk: Johann and Margeret Jungmann (fluent in Mahican),
Johann and Johanna Schmick (who was fluent in Mahican and wrote a Mahican dictionary)
Johannes and Marie Roth (who was learning Munsee dialect of Delaware)
First, who were the Moravians and why were they establishing missions to the Native Americans of the North East in the Colonial period?
Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf was born in Dresden, the capital of Saxony in 1700. Zinzendorf was a descendent of Protestant Austrian nobility and was raised by his grandmother, Henriette Catharine von Gersdorf after his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage. His grandmother, an educated and talented woman, exercised great influence on the politics and pietism of the day. Zinzendorf was educated at Francke’s school in Halle where he first encountered missionaries returning from the Lutheran mission in Tranquebar, India.
During this period in Halle, he most likely heard about emigration to North America, as in 1702 an entrepreneurial German who had lived in Pennsylvania, Daniel Falckner, had met with the leader of the school and discussed subjects as far-ranging as where the other German settlers lived, to what Native Americans ate, how they hunted, how they raised their children and how one might trade and make money. By 1727 over 20,000 Germans had settled in Pennsylvania in search of financial wealth, and religious and political freedom.
Zinzendorf developed a quite unique approach to mission work. For example, Zinzendorf claimed that the refusal of some missionaries from other denominations to mix with the non-Christians, or to live at their level of poverty, was contrary to the spirit of Christ and accordingly, baptisms were to be performed individually and not en masse, that the individual’s path to salvation was charted by means of frequent “speakings” with spiritual Helpers from the same cultural and linguistic background as the candidate, and that each person was a member of a small band of people who came together regularly to discuss their spiritual growth, exchange confidences about their personal problems, encourage and forgive each other, and help each other. Such an individualistic approach toward conversion had both its benefits and drawbacks. The benefits showed themselves in the success of the missions. The drawback was that the number of converted remained small.
In 1742 Zinzendorf travelled to North America and stayed first in Philadelphia and then came up into the Lehigh Valley. From there he made several trips into Indian Country, first to the Mohican village in Shekomeko, Dutchess County NY, then he visited unsuccessfully the Shawnee in the Wyoming Valley, and also he visited Shamokin and met Shikellamy, Madame Montour and Andrew.
The Moravian mission project was just one of many vectors of colonization of Native American religion and lifeways, but arguably, the most well-meaning. Other groups had already proselytized the Native Americans of the North East, such as the Jesuits and the Presbyterians. Some Native Americans (like Madame Montour) were baptized multiple times and some, like the Oneida, Shikellamy had been baptized in his youth but was drawn to the Moraivans, perhaps especially David Zeisberger, and might well have been baptized before his untimely death in December 1748. The Moravian understanding of conversion and baptism required that each individual non-Christian should feel the call to convert within his or her heart because of the model provided by other Moravians (European or Native American) and also the need to repent. This meant that Moravian conversions were small in number, individualized, and yet also more deeply internalized within Native American communities, to the extent that when asked to move within the vicinity of other non-Chrstian Native villages in the aftermath of Pontiac’s War, leaders such as Papunhank refused, citing the difficulty of maintaining their lives of faith when having to live with non-Christians.
The mission at Friedenshütten was the result of years-long negotiation and discussion with both the Colonial authorities and also with Papunhank, the Munsee religious leader who had built up a substantial town at Wyalusing in the 1750s. Born probably in 1705, maybe in upstate New York, Papunhank’s life has been masterfully pieced together by historian Richard Pointer who draws heavily on many different manuscript sources in the Moravian archives. Pointer outlines not only his biography but also the context in which he lived: an incredibly complex world of colonial expansion, Native American negotiation, betrayal, trickery, increasing racial tension, a discovery of faith, renewal, and alliance building. His story is definitely that of the Delaware peoples, as they were displaced and removed, “adopted” and made into rhetorical women and children by the Six Nations. Renouncing alcohol after the death of his father, Papunhank campaigned to ban the trade in rum. He visited the Society of Friends in Philadelphia (especially Anthony Benezet, the abolitionist and author of influential tracts on the shared humanity of both enslaved Africans and colonized Native Americans) and, according to Pointer, possibly met Shikellamy in Shamokin and witnessed how this effective diplomatic and negotiator for the Six Nations managed to effect a delicate balance between his people’s culture and priorities and the rapidly changing landscape of the Colonial period.
Papunhank desired to found his own village, where his rejection of alcohol and his awakened spirituality could determine the rhythm of life. The availability of good hunting and fertile land and access to the waterways that served as the major routes for trade led him in 1752 to settle on land at Wyalusing and build a substantial settlement. But it was not long before the hostilities of the French and Indian War which erupted in 1755 and the Delawares were split in their loyalties between the French and the British.
The fate of the Indian Moravians who had been expelled from New York state in 1744 and had moved to Gnadenhütten on the Mahoning and Nain near Bethlehem has been told many times. The hostilities of Pontiac’s Rebellion and the ensuing attacks on any Native American groups in 1763-4, converted or not, meant that the safest place for them was deemed by the Colonial authorities to be the barracks in Philadelphia. The attacks of the Paxton Boys as they were known on the Conestoga Indians in Lancaster County and then the ensuing march on Philadelphia made it clear that the “Peaceable Kingdom” that William Penn had envisaged was now an impossibility. The perpetrators of the massacre defended their actions in a remonstrance published in 1764, claiming that the violations of the “distressed and bleeding” frontier were an affront to the brethren and relatives of the murdered whites. They also accused the Moravian Indians of Nain of sending messages to the Shawnee living on the Great Island to plot further murders of the white settlers along the Susquehanna River. According to historian Kevin Kenny, the Paxton Boys were not the only ones to suspect that the Moravian Indians of Nain were secretly trading with enemy Indians and supplying them with guns and ammunition. The Assembly’s commissioners also believed that “there is much reason to suspect the said Moravian Indians have also been principally concerned in the late Murders committed near Bethlehem, in the county of Northampton” (Kenny, p. 133) In response to these accusations, in October 1763 restrictions were placed on purchases of gunpowder in Nain, and the commissioners recommended that the Nain Indians be removed to Philadelphia so that their “behavior may be more closely observed.” (ibid.) To this end, on November 8 1763 a party of 127 Indians from the missions of Nain, Wechquetank, Nazareth and Bethlehem set out for Philadelphia.
As I have discussed in another talk, the non-Indian residents of Bethlehem viewed the departure of the Indians, not only from the mission villages but also from within the very choirhouses of Bethlehem with ambivalence. Kate Carté has argued that the removal of the Nain and Wechquetank Indians was something accepted by the Bethlehem non-Indian residents and that they did not fight this decision because they had never seen them as part of their community (Engel, For Religion and Profit, p. 184) And, a few weeks after the Moravian Indians arrived in Philadelphia on November 11, they were greeted by a furious mob ready to murder them. Afraid that the Philadelphia barracks would not protect them from the mob, the Moravian Indians were moved to a former “pestilence house” on Province Island in the Delaware River. And there they stayed for fifteen months. Conditions were terrible in the prison. Disease was rampant. By the end of 1764, 56 of the Indians had died, nearly half of them children.
The fate of the Nain Indians in the Philadelphia barracks was a constant source of concern for the Bethlehem Moravians. Given the political unrest and racial hatred now rampant in the Pennsylvania backcountry, that was spilling into the crowds of the cities of Philadelphia and Lancaster, it was clear that Nain could no longer be the home of Christian Indians. In September of 1764, before even a clear decision had been made as to the fate of the Indians, plans were drawn up to dismantle the buildings. After the leaders of the Indians in the barracks petitioned for their own release, they were permitted to leave the city and arrived on March 22 1765 back in Bethlehem in deep snow. They were allowed to briefly stop for a week at what remained of their old homes. Six of the fourteen houses were sold to individuals in Bethlehem on March 30, (according to Levering, one was the chapel) and then the following day a farewell lovefeast was held and on April 3 the Moravian Indians left Bethlehem for the apparent safety of Papunhank’s village of Wyalusing on the North Branch.
How come these baptized Indians, Delaware and Mohican, were invited to come to the North Branch? According to Pointer, the Muncee prophet’s village was losing its inhabitants in the early 1760s; some no longer wanted to hear his message, some were worried at the violence on the frontier and as close as the Wyoming Valley where Teedyuscung’s village had been attacked. At this point of crisis, the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger turned up in Papunhank’s village and accepted his invitation to preach. This fortuitous appearance in 1763 led to Papunhank inviting the Moravians to send a missionary to the upper North Branch; also Papunhank requested that Zeisberger baptize him into the Moravian Church. Upon baptism, he received the name, Johannes. Now a Moravian and also still the leader of his village he also recognized the threat that his people were under and for this reason joined the Nain Indians in the Philadelphia Barracks. Negotiating with the Six Nations and also the Colonial authorities, Johannes Papunhank should also be credited with arranging the removal of the remainder of the Nain Indians to Wyalusing. According to Pointer, Papunhank assumed the leadership of this new Moravian community in June 1765, preaching in the Muncee dialect of the Lenape language and also, it is thought, able to communicate with the Mohican Moravians due to his time at the Philadelphia Barracks.
The village that became known as Friedenshütten was built in 1766 in a position closer to the river than Papanhunk’s Wyalusing. The mission diary reveals the day-to-day activities that sustained the community both physically and spiritually. From its beginnings in the spring of 1765, when food was scarce, to its dissolution in the summer of 1772, the town supported itself with its gardens of produce, and seasonal hunting and shad fishing. It hosted numerous parties of visiting Indian nations, some very large and very hungry, many coming for political parley, some coming to visit their family members who had converted. Reading the mission diaries that still exist only in manuscript form, a picture emerges of a vibrant community with a multi-lingual school, a Gemeinhaus (church) complete with oil paintings and a bell, log houses with glass windows, bark houses for those who preferred them, fertile kitchen gardens, and canoes tied up along the river bank.
The numbers in this community kept growing. By the end of 1765 the number was 146, by the end of 1766, 172, and by the end of 1767, 185. The population was made up of almost a third of non-baptized Native Americans, Delaware, Mohican, and also visitors from the Nanticoke, Tuscaroras, and the Cayuga, under whose oversight the lands in Wyalusing fell. Disputes did occasionally arise about the language of worship in Friedenshütten, with the Lenape speakers feeling as though they were at a disadvantage with the preponderance of services being held in Mohican.
And perhaps for that reason in 1769 a delegation of Delaware Moravians discussed the transfer of their members to the already existing village of Schih-shi-quan-nink (a Delaware name meaning a rattle made of a tortoise shell) about 13 miles upriver (or 3.5 hours on a good day). As Amy Schutt has discussed in her work on tribal identities on the Upper Susquehanna, the possible separation of the two congregations into their linguistic groupings in fact went against the Moravian mission philosophy of converted Indians seeing themselves as “one people.” However, the separation into two congregations helped relations between the two groups.
Schechschequanunk was a smaller mission village, numbering only 53 individuals, most of whom were not communicant members, and up to half of whom were not baptized. The geographical location of the village, over 20 miles closer to the Munsee settlements on the Chemung River, meant that it attracted frequent visitors from there, many of whom were relatives of those living in the Moravian village. Some visits were also from the extended family of the Montours, especially the granddaughter of Madame Montour, Esther. The picture of “Queen” Esther that emerges from the mission diaries is not of the bloody avenger of the Wyoming Valley but rather of a leader of the Munsee at a time of political turmoil, colonial negotiation and eventually, with the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the prospect of imminent displacement of Native Americans, Christian or not, to lands either under the oversight of the Cayuga (today’s Ithaca, NY) or further west.
Regardless of the threat of imminent removal (surveying of the lands began in June 1769) in both communities, the inhabitants sustained themselves according to the hunting and agricultural traditions of their cultures. There are frequent mentions of the hunting parties coming back with deer, bear and elk meat; but also of the interdiction of hunting on Sundays and the abolition of the celebration of the “bison” or magic hunting medicine ritual in October 1769. The communities are both plagued by wolves who attack livestock repeatedly and thus necessitate the building of a fence around the Friedenshütten village. In March, the inhabitants (women) would leave for the sugar camps where maple sap was tapped and boiled day and night. Corn was planted in late May, when shad were also fished for. Schoolbooks for English spelling were distributed, and the children were reported to be eager learners, and a new schoolhouse was erected to hold the growing population in Freidenshütten. Johannes Roth would bring communicant members of Scheschquinunk down to Friedenshütten for Communion and Easter celebrations.
But in amongst all this activity directed towards building a secure and sustainable settlement, the Moravian Indians were frequently reminded of the insecurity of their right to be on this land. Job Chillaway had filed a legal claim to the lands with the Colonial authorities; Chief Gagohunt of the Cayuga was encouraging the Delaware to move north out of Pennsylvania; David Zeisberger was heeding the invitation of other Delaware chiefs to move west into Ohio country, where the precarity of the property rights in Wyalusing would be unimportant. Johannes Papunhank was however committed to staying put.
Then in September 1771 out of seemingly nowhere, Job Chilloway and others brought accusations of witchcraft against Johannes Panpunhank. This was the final straw in the fight over the land and rights, and although in October chiefs from the Conoy, Nanticoke, Minisink, and Cayuga all refuted the lies told about Papunhank’s sorcery, the distrust stuck. Three weeks later the moving plan to Ohio country was announced which was to be completed by the end of May 1772. Chief Netawatwees of the Delaware council at Gekelemukpechünk had received reports that the way in which the Indians at Wyalusing could live as both Christians and Indians was good and therefore invited them to come west. The message was delivered through Delaware leader Wangomen and then through another leader, Killbuck.
As the 19th-century historian of the Moravian Church William Reichel writes, “The order for the survey at Wyalusing in favour of Job Cilloway is dated the 20th of May, 1772.” The survey was made by John Lukens, Surveyor General. 16th Sept 1773. As we can see from this beautiful digitally restored image of the original survey, completed by Bob Lissa here in Tunkhannock and donated by David Buck, the land covered 623 acres and began on the eastern side of the North Branch at the mouth of the Wyalusing Creek, extended up the side of the creek 139 perches and then over and back to the river. It was part of the Proprietories “Manor of Pomfret” but was called Dundee Manor. The price was 784 pounds.
Why should we be concerned about this history today?
First, this history of complexity and multi-layered identities compounded by place is still with us today; in the place names, the landscapes, the environment that survives from nearly three hundred years ago. As you know, progress towards restoring the environmental health of the river is being made with the help of DCNR and other non-governmental bodies: dams are being removed and fish ladders are being built to allow for the shad to return. New state parks along the river are being created (Vosburg Neck and PA Highlands – last site of Susquehannock village down in York County).
Also scholars are using the internet to open up new public-facing research. Indigenous artists, filmmakers, musicians, are writing this history from their perspective for the audience of today. An example is this powerful retelling of the Conestoga Indian massacre.
Other recent public-facing work that focuses on the links between contemporary Native American populations and this history of peaceful coexistence can be found in the work of Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly (https://oireader.wm.edu/open_wmq/singing-box-331/).
They write of this project: “Reading more deeply in the mission records made clear that these hymns were a significant element of congregational life in Mohican-Moravian communities such as Shekomeko, New York, and Gnadenhütten, Pennsylvania, in the mid-eighteenth century. They were sung to and by the sick and the dying. They were sung at gravesides. They were sung by men while hunting. They were sung at communal feasts. They were sung for visitors and when traveling to other communities, both Native and European American. They were sung to bring comfort, to call spiritual power, and to create and fortify community.1 And as written documents, the hymnbooks have become important cultural and linguistic records, silently preserving this tradition of Mohican-Moravian hymnody for more than 250 years. As material objects, the hymnbooks in Box 331 are an important, but limited, representation of what was once a living, aural tradition of hymn singing.”
Careful historical research allows us to reconnect and rework the past into the present. Again, Eyerly and Wheeler have worked with the Stockbridge Mohican Munsee population to “resound the compositions of Josua” so we may listen to the past. And in fact today in Nazareth, Dr Eyerly is giving the Zug lecture at the Moravian Historical Society on her book Singing in the Wilderness which includes a collective singing of Moravian hymns in multiple languages. Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do that!
Conclusion
I conclude my talk today on places of peace in amongst daily reports of war from Ukraine and most recently from Israel and Palestine. One could say that both of these conflicts have at their core claims to land, whose claims predate whose, and who has a right to live on which lands. As one political scientist has recently said in relation to the issue of economic development in the Global South, without clear title to land, no one will or can invest in building industries and infrastructure. This problem is at the root of economic underdevelopment in countries like Haiti. And indeed one can say the same for the desire for economic development here in Colonial Pennsylvania.
The survey map I show here, also digitally restored thanks to Bob Lissa here in Tunkhannock, is from a collection published by the State of Pennsylvania in 1895 that brought together as many of the land surveys from the Colonial period that had survived a fire in the state printing shop. The volume is entitled Draughts of the Proprietaries Manors. About ten years ago I was handed a copy of this volume with its cover tattered, some pages missing, others covered in river silt from the 1972 flood after Hurricane Agnes inundated the Susquehanna Valley. The donor told me to take it and make good use of it as he knew that I worked on the history of the Susquehanna River. For a long time, the maps lay on the kitchen table of a colleague of mine, waiting for him to help to locate the places on these beautiful drafts on a map of Pennsylvania today. Well, he never quite got around to it. So I showed the volume to another friend, Dave Buck, and, once, thanks to Dave, Bob’s daughter Alianna had done her digital magic, we could work with digitized printouts of the maps. So together we poured over the maps, trying to work out where each Manor might lie. Dave had been trained as a surveyor so he pulled out a pencil and started making calculations about rods, and perches, and chains (which was all quite foreign to me) and turned the maps this way and that to try to make them fit. But they just wouldn’t. So I did some digging around in some databases and found a very helpful article about surveying in early Pennsylvania that confirmed our fears. Some of these terrains were just so hard to traverse, let alone lay down chains to measure, that the surveyor just made it up. Ugh!
The reason I bring this up is that the non-Native or non-indigenous notion of land ownership is predicated on surveys and measurements and limits and boundaries that give us “rights” over that area. But if those boundaries are fictions then what happens? Wyalusing and Friedenshütten were abandoned because the land on which they stood had been “sold” or signed over by multiple agents; the Proprietaries, the Six Nations, the Chilloways and Johann Papunhank. The places of peace that were for a short time here on the North Branch became sites of contention. When the Moravian Indians left Friedenhütten for Ohio country, they tolled the chapel bell as they floated the canoes down the river until they turned the bend in the river below Sugar Run and lost sight of their homes at the Huts of Peace.
While recent scholarship has focused on knowledge transfer from African cultures to the Americas concerning inter alia rice production (see Judith Carney, Black Rice) there has to date been little work that traces the links between the technology of iron production in West Africa and the small Colonial iron forges of the mid-Atlantic region. This paper asks the question about the connection between labor practices in the nascent Colonial iron industry, enslaved peoples of African descent, and the networks of itinerant (Euro- and African-American) Moravian preachers in the mid-Atlantic area in the mid-18th century.
Using the methodologies of archival research, GIS mapping and network theory, this paper reveals the relationships between enslaved African populations of the Delaware Valley, iron production, and the organization of African American congregations in Philadelphia and New York, and attempts to trace the way in which these populations were agents of material and spiritual change for peoples of African descent in the Colonial mid-Atlantic
There are two beginnings to this paper. One lies in a manuscript memoir I found in the Moravian archives in Bethlehem about 25 years ago that was written by a 20 year old Igbo man who gave his name as Ofodobendo Wooma. The first line caught me: “I, Andrew the Moor, was born in Ibo land in the unknown part of Africa and was circumcised according to the custom of my nation when I was eight days old. My name was Ofodobendo Wooma.”
At that time, I carried out extensive research into the history of West Africa, especially Igboland, to try to understand the context into which I could place this unique document. At that time I was also working on the volume that would become “Moravian Women’s Memoirs” and had already found, transcribed, and translated Magdalene’s memoir, written/dictated by the woman from West Africa who would become Andrew’s wife in 1762. The discovery and subsequent discussion in print of that document invited me into the Atlantic world of the 18th century through African eyes. My article on this memoir and that of Ofodobendo’s later wife, Magdalene, also from West Africa, placed the life writings of these two enslaved Africans firmly within the genre of the slave narrative and traced how Ofodobendo signified (to use Henry Louis Gates’ term) his life in the tropes of the Christian conversion narrative. That interpretive path led me into an examination of that other very famous Igbo life narrative, Olaudah Equiano, the authenticity of which has been most famously challenged by Vincent Carretta. Even prior to Caretta’s work, I had noted with interest that the first chapter of that work echoed or actually quoted Anthony Benezet’s description of the coast and inland of West Africa in his widely read abolitionist work. Where I wondered had Benezet learned about West Africa? From the Africans on the quayside in Philadelphia? From his daughters who lived in Bethlehem as members of the Single SIsters Choir and who lived with Magdalene? And as I began to dig deeper it became more and more clear that the networks of the Colonial period between Quakers, Africans, Moravians, were strong and influential.
The story of Andrew/York/Ofodobendo Wooma is an exciting find. Although the exact date of composition of his memoir is not known, it breaks off after his baptism in 1746, which would mean that he may well have told his life story at the age of 17. His childhood memories are still fresh, telling of how, at the age of 8 he was exchanged for two goats by his brother, and then sold and resold many times before he was transported on a slave ship to Antigua, sold to a captain from New York, sold again and then again. At the age of about 12, Ofodobendo–now named “York”– was purchased by Thomas Noble, a wealthy merchant in New York with whom the Moravians were well acquainted and with whom members of the congregation who were traveling between Europe and North America would stay. This is of course the New York of the infamous “Slave Rebellion” and one wonders, when York describes his life running the streets, how many of the enslaved Africans he met. However, York is deeply affected by the faith and love of the Moravians in New York City and begs to be allowed to go to Bethlehem and be baptized. And then, after numerous entreaties and twists of fate and circumstance, he ends up as the property of Spangenberg in 1746 and is accepted into the congregation in Bethlehem.
Andrew’s baptism was the first of an African by the Moravians in Pennsylvania. The fact of his being the first such fruit meant that a description and indeed transcription of his baptism was sent to Herrnhut. On February 4, 1746, Spangenberg (his owner) opens the ceremony with these words: “Was der liebe Heiland noch weiter unter uns thut, davor sind wir herzlich gebeugt. Er lässt uns die Freude haben , einen schwarzen unter uns zu sehen, den Er ins weisse Kleid will einkleiden.“
We are humbly prostrate before the works of the dear Saviour among us. He has given us the joy of seeing a Black man among us, whom He wants to dress in white robes.”
Spangenberg then goes on to ask whether Andrew wishes to be baptized and performs the rite of exorcism and then baptism
Frage: Is this yet the Desire of thy Heart to be baptized in the Name of Jesus Christ?
York gab Antwort. Yes.
Frage. Wilt thou be saved by that Blood which he has shed on the Cross?
Antwort yes
Frage, wilt thou be ruled by our Saviour and follow his Steps?
Antw. Yes.
Now our blessed Saviour is so gracious and loving to Sinners that whoever will be helpd, and wants to be set free from Satan and all his Power, such a one may be free in the Name of Jesus.
Ges. O Jesu Christ all Praise to thee
Die Gemeine stund auf u. Br. Joseph trat zum Täufling und sprach:
In the Name of our Lord and Master Jesus Christ who has purchased thee with his Blood, that thou dost not belong to the Devil and the World. But thou art his’n. In this pow’rful Name I command all/// the evil Powers to depart from thee (and leave thy heart to be his Temple and Habitation) and in His name thy Sins are Forgiven unto thee
Why was there such joy to see Andrew, the Black man in the white baptismal robes? Why was this account so carefully transcribed and sent to Herrnhut to Zinzendorf? Most obviously, Andrew’s baptism was a milestone in the success of the Bethlehem congregation in fulfilling its mission to proselytize to the enslaved and indigenous populations of North America. Andrew’s desire to join the Moravian congregation was the direct result of hearing the preachings of Awakened ministers, such as George Whitefield, and lay people in New York. But, as I have argued elsewhere, Andrew may well have had his own reasons for wishing to join the Moravians.
Andrew may well have been the Erstling, but he was not the only African to join the Bethlehem and Nazareth communities.
And here we come to the second beginning of this paper. About two years ago I was asked to give an interview to the Moravian Historical Society on Andrew as a new exhibition was being mounted on “Other Voices” in the Moravian settlements of Bethlehem and Nazareth, and Andrew was to be featured as a representative of the enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent in the colonial period. So I looked into the Moravian Archives again for documents about enslaved people and came across a travel diary by Brother Christian Froehlich which recounted his visit to the “Negroes of Brunswick and Long and Staaten Island in February and March 1752. ”
The Moravians had a mission not only to the Native Americans of Pennsylvania and New York but also to the enslaved peoples of the mid-Atlantic. Prominent in this mission was Christian Froehlich, an itinerant preacher, whose “Plan” it was to visit the enslaved Africans who were living on the Eastern seaboard, from the plantations of Virginia’s Tobacco Coast up through Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. In the northern states, many enslaved Africans worked in the forges of Colonial America’s early iron industry, where the iron ore in the hills was extracted and forged into pig iron for export back to England.
Froehlich’s earlier travel journals of his preaching trips to the enslaved peoples of the mid-Atlantic reveal many things: the frequent antipathy and suspicion in the south towards the very goal of the Moravian itinerant preachers along the King’s Waggon Road; the logistical difficulties that needed to be surmounted ; passes that needed to be obtained from the local justices; permission to meet with the enslaved peoples on the plantations or foundries; and fortitude and patience to traverse enormous physical distances, crossing rivers, swamps, and the Chesapeake Bay. These experiences I had already encountered in an earlier 1747 travel diary in which he described his attempt to visit the enslaved peoples on the tobacco plantations on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. that had been the focus of a DH class here at Bucknell.
This 1752 document, however, described Froehlich’s visit to the enslaved Africans of New Jersey and New York, a subject that within Moravian studies has hardly been touched at all. Where there are studies of race and religion, they are of the South and rarely mention the populations of Africans living in the mid-Atlantic. Froehlich’s first stop on his journey is to the “Eisen Schmelze” or iron foundry near Bethlehem, the Durham furnace, owned by Mr Wiliam Allen. He describes his meetings with Africans working in the iron industry. He writes: That evening I came to the Iron Forge. It was night. I saw one of the Negroes who brought me to the overseer. He accepted me in all friendliness. He told me that Master Ellen (William Allen) had spoken to him about the Negro Boston and that he wanted to be baptized. He gave him a good report and said he was worthy. He was looking forward to becoming a Christian. Yes, much more than the so-called Christians. He could trust them all. He had Boston brought to him. He was happy to see me. When I told him that he should be baptized he was beside himself. After supper, I visited the Negroes in their house. I told them something about the dear Lamb and how much he loved also the hearts of the Black people, and that He had spilt his Blood for them also. They were very quiet and attentive and asked me to visit them more and hold an assembly for them. They said they were poor Negroes and nobody asked after them much, and about the welfare of their poor souls. I could do nothing but promise them to visit them more often. But I first had to let their masters know. They said they thought their masters would have nothing against it, if they improved themselves, so I commended them to the little Lamb and laid myself happy down to sleep.
From there Froehlich travels into New Jersey to several other foundries to speak to the Black iron workers, then on to New York, Long Island, Staaten Island to speak to the enslaved peoples who were owned by the Van der Bilt’s and the Van Flecks.
So why was Froehlich’s first stop at the Durham Foundry to discuss the baptism of Baston? I wanted to find out more about this man, so I began to work my way through the baptismal records in the archives for the first 60 years of the community.
According to his memoir and also the baptismal register, Baston or Boston was born in approximately 1715 in Santa Crux, Guinea and was sold at around the age of 13 by his own people to slavers. At that age he endured the Middle Passage with about 300 of his people and was brought to Charlestown in South Carolina. There, according to his memoir, he was bought by a ship’s captain because of his being so handsome and taken to England the year that George II ascended the throne (1727). In 1732 he came back across the Atlantic to Monserrat in the West Indies where he was sold to an American and brought to Durham Furnace in Pennsylvania. It was here, as the property of William Allen, that he married Hannah, the property of the Ysselstein family who had just moved to Bethlehem. This marriage was difficult not least because Boston could see Hannah only when on the weekend he could walk the eight miles from the furnace to Bethlehem to see Hanna. However they had a son, Daniel. Baston was moved by Allen to Maryland to work in a furnace there, but was returned to the Delaware Valley once Allen met Hannah and the child.
So this was the reason Christian Froehlich was visiting the Durham Furnace. Baston, having visited Bethlehem several times, wanted to be baptized. Froehlich was securing his owner’s permission for baptism, which then happened on May 16, 1752 a few months after Froehlich’s visit.
Baston is baptized as Joseph and, after the congregation collects 50 pounds to buy him from William Allen, he is able to join his wife in the congregation. Hannah and Joseph have seven children, none of whom have children. Hannah is bought by the congregation and they require Joseph to pay the interest on the loan for her freedom. If he doesn’t she will be returned to the Ysselsteins.
So what about Andrew? At the end of his memoir the choir helper mentions the fact that he likes to speak with his countrymen about being saved. What however is not mentioned is that at the synod in Germantown in 1747 Andrew petitioned to be Christian Froehlich’s assistant in his ministry to the Africans of the Delaware Valley. In fact, according to the Single Brethren’s Diary Andrew not only visits the slaves in the iron forges of the Delaware Valley, he also goes to Philadelphia in 1749 where he works as the Spiritual Helper of the Black population there.
What effect might Andrew’s ministry have had on both Baston working in the Durham Forge and the other Africans in Philadelphia? According to John Catron, Andrew made numerous trips to Philadelphia between 1748 and 1753, some with either Christian Froehlich or with Brother Boemper and some alone, at times for up to four months. His work in the city seems to have had some effect on the Black population. 25 Black men and women appear in the Philadelphia Moravian church registers at that time, only six of whom were enslaved peoples. The Black members identify themselves as “Igbo”, or from “Guinea” or from St Croix.
That Andrew would have attracted Igbo to the church is not surprising as in later records it is shown that he preferred to keep networks of his “Landsleute” alive and would use Igbo to speak to other Igbo in the Delaware Valley and Philadelphia. In fact, in 1762 he asks to leave Bethlehem so that he can go to these countrymen and live.
African-Iron Forges
In the scholarly literature on the colonial mid-Atlantic iron industry it has been claimed that the Underground railroad, that knowledge network of safe places on the road up North to freedom, would frequently pass by iron forges because of the large African labor force that was known to be working there. In 1752, Christian Froehlich makes a point to visit the forges near Bethlehem where the production of iron necessitated large amounts of timber to be felled and a plentiful supply of freshwater close to the source of the iron ore. One contemporary visitor to the Durham Furnace where Joseph/Boston is working marvels at how efficient the forge is in production as all necessary raw materials are within a close distance from each other and no lengthy hauling is necessary.
For many historians of the Colonial mid-Atlantic iron industry the presence of enslaved Africans is a passing footnote, mentioned as part of the issues with the lack of a skilled and unskilled labor force to work in the industry. However, there is also evidence that the enslaved Africans, such as Joseph/Boston came from West African cultures where the production of iron had been an integral part of the social and economic culture of their societies for centuries. Where the production of iron was embedded in the traditional religions of the Igbo people from whom Andrew came, for example. There is evidence for iron production in West Africa since the 6th century, with major shrines around Ife to the god of iron “Ogun”. Within these traditional religions, the forge was considered to be a female space, to be worked only by a male forgemaster, although women were permitted to perform other tasks outside the forge. (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/iron/hd_iron.htm)
Thus the iron forges of the Delaware Valley were the location of high densities of African enslaved workers, and thus also one of the destinations of Andrew and Froehlich. In the scholarship on labor history in Pennsylvania in the colonial period, researchers have pointed out the problems ironmasters had in keeping white workers in the forges. Pay, hard work and tough conditions coupled with the distance from urban centers all meant that free labor moved away from iron centers quickly. Thus forge owners such as William Allen looked to their enslaved workers to produce iron. However, although earlier scholarship assumed that enslaved Africans would be forced to perform the hard and unskilled labor of extracting and preparing the raw materials, more recent research into the Delaware Valley iron industry draws a contrast with the more southerly Chesapeake iron production industry. In the Delaware Valley ironmasters trained their African workers to refine and draw iron in their forges, to the point, as John Bezis-Selfa argues “that slaves were disproportionately represented among forgemen.” (J. Bezis-Selfa, 277) The presence of so many highly skilled African forgemen has led to speculation that African metallurgical skills played a large role in this phenomenon. Indeed this is another instance of knowledge transfer from Africa to North America.
Looking at the map of West Africa again, this time with the identification of sites of iron making, we see the correlation with Andrew and Joseph’s origins.
Iron had been worked in West Africa since at least 500 CE and European travellers in Africa such as Mungo Park noted the smiths there used tools and methods similar to those in British North America. It is also not lost on me that Bethlehem was to become the site of the largest blast furnaces in the country.
Investigation into Andrew as a paradigmatic figure for the diverse voices in early Bethlehem and Nazareth is a vital step towards asking further questions. There is by some the assumption that slaves would only perform menial forced labor, both in the congregation and outside. But to claim that is to prolong the prejudiced assumption that Africans could only perform menial tasks and brought with them no skilled knowledge from their homelands. That, I argue is an error.
The Helpers Conference minutes show lengthy and in depth discussions about the best way to ensure that EVERY member of the congregation could fulfill God’s (and the Congregation’s) “Plan” for them. Subject to the way in which the Lot decided, like every other member of the Congregation, Africans worked in Bethlehem in the colonial industries, trades, and choir houses. BUT they could also become instrument makers and preachers. They could hold firearms during times of trouble. They were also educated and valued for their national knowledge. Hence Andrew’s “Plan, after baptism, to be Christian Froehlich’s Helper and preach to his “Landsleute”.
Single Brethren’s Diary, 1744-1752, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem
Box marked Slaves, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem
Travel Diary, Christian Froehlich, 1752
Travel Diary, Christian Froehlich, 1744
Secondary sources
John Bezis-Selfa, “Slavery and the Disciplining of Free Labor in the Colonial Mid-Atlantic Iron Industry” Pennsylvania History 64 (1997) 270-286
Arthur Cecil Bining, Pennsylvania Iron Manufacture in the Eighteenth Century (PHMC, 1973)
John Catron, “Early Black-Atlantic Christianity in the Middle Colonies: Social Mobility and Race in Moravian Bethlehem” Pennsylvania History 76.3 (2009), 301-345
Katherine Faull, ““Self-Encounters: Two Eighteenth-Century African Memoirs from Moravian Bethlehem” in Crosscurrents: African-Americans, Africa and Germany in the Modern World, eds. C. Aisha Blackshire-Belay, Leroy Hopkins, and David MacBride (New York: Camden House, 1998), 29-52; reprinted in Michael J. Drexler and Ed White, Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early African-American Literature, Aperçus: Histories Texts Cultures. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008
Michael Kennedy, “Working Agreements: The Use of Sub-Contracting in the Pennsylvania Iron Industry 1725-1789” Pennsylvania History 65.4 (1998), 492-508
Anne Kelly Knowles, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry 1800-1868 (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
Theodore Kury, “Labor and the Charcoal Iron Industry: The New Jersey-New York Experience” Material Culture 25:3 (1993), 10-33.
Jill Lepore, New York Burning: LIberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (Random House, 2005)
Joseph Levering, A History of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 1741-1892 (Times Publishing, 1903)
Ronald Lewis, “Slavery on Chesapeake Iron Plantations Before the American Revolution” 59.3 (1974), 242-254
Harry Stocker, A History of the Moravian Church in New York City, New York City, 1922
John Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World 1250-1820 (Cambridge UP, 2012)
Joseph Walker, “Negro Labor in the Charcoal Iron Industry of Southeastern Pennsylvania” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 93.4 (1969), 466-486
Address given at the dedication of the restored Nain House, 2014
Katherine Faull, Bucknell University
Thank you for the invitation to speak at this significant event that marks the culmination of decades’ worth of work to restore the Nain house. The perseverance and vision of those who have worked to achieve this vision should be noted and rewarded! I would like to speak today about how the physical restoration of the Nain Indian house is not only an achievement for Historic Bethlehem, but also represents a significant moment in the interpretation and representation of the history of Moravian Bethlehem. I will argue that this modest house offers the world of scholars, historians, archivists, and interpreters of Moravian heritage an opportunity to present a different picture of Bethlehem that moves beyond sugar cake and Moravian stars to an interpretive history that reveals the best of Moravian intentions and one of the darkest moments in the era of the founding of the American Republic.
This house, as many of you may know, was sold to “Bethlehem individuals” in March 1765, after the decision had been made to move the Moravian Indians from Nain and nearby Wechquetank to the Upper North Branch of the Susquehanna River, a place that had been traditionally settled by Delaware and Mohican Indians, Machwihilusing. The abandonment of the Nain village, as discussed by Kate Carté Engle, stems from the decision made at the 1765 Bethlehem conference that focused on the future of the Nain Indians. It was at this conference, Engel argues, that the growing rift between decisions made in Herrnhut and the political realities of Bethlehem during the turmoil of the French-Indian war became clear. The end of Nain, argues Engel, signifies the end of the original mission of Bethlehem that was set out by Zinzendorf in 1742.
So, what was Zinzendorf’s original plan? In a document entitled “Heiden Collegia” housed at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, we can see the leader of the Renewed Church’s vision for the mission to the “heathen”. Zinzendorf drew this up after he had made his famous journey through Pennsylvania in 1742 and had already met with the major actors in the Colonial and Woodlands Indian world in this period of early contact. He was one of the first Europeans to traverse Susquehanna Country. Zinzendorf focuses on five places where he knows both the Native leaders, Moravians and Europeans sympathetic to the plan who are already in the area, and the potential for these to belong to a structured world of Moravian missions. Bethlehem was considered to be the center of all mission activities, the place on which depends the direction of all the work in the areas around Bethlehem, the North River (or North Branch of the Susquehanna River), Shamokin at the confluence of the West and North branches of the Susquehanna and at Gnadenstadt, which was envisioned to be settled in the Wyoming Valley. Other places he outlines in this sketch for the mission structure are Ostonwakin, on the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, which consisted of three main villages of mixed Iroquois nations, led by the Montour family. This center of mission activity would allow the Moravians access to the Ohio River watershed and also a pathway, both literally and figuratively, to the council fire at Onondaga of the Iroquois Confederacy. Shekomeko, in upstate New York, was already a Christian village and was to act as the base from which Mahican Christian Indians could be sent to form new mission villages; the Wyoming Valley on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, which was inhabited by peaceful members of several Iroquois Nations, the Mohawks, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga was considered to be a fertile ground for cooperation between the Native peoples and the Moravian missionaries. Finally, the Mahican converts in Shekomeko were to proselytize in New England.
Whereas some of these ambitious plans to organize the mission effort among the Native populations of the mid-Atlantic were realized, most notably the mission at Shamokin and that at Gnadenhütten, both subjects for another talk, the outbreak of the French-‐Indian war had an immediate effect upon the possibility of Native converts living close to or even among any white congregation. The mission at Shamokin was abandoned in 1755 and soon after, Gnadenhütten was razed to the ground. But even as the increase in racial tension between Europeans and Native Americans reached new levels around Bethlehem and Nazareth in the two years that followed these attacks, the decision was approved by Lot in Herrnhut to begin the enterprise of establishing an Indian village in the vicinity of Bethlehem, as this was in accordance with Zinzendorf’s plan, outlined above in the “Heiden Collegia”.
However, 1757 was not 1742 in the Middle Colonies. What might have been perceived as a possibility in the still relatively peaceful earlier era of white settlement, where the Native population was regularly included in the conferences and treaties of the Colonial government on almost an equal footing, in accordance with the utopian vision of the pacifist Quaker William Penn, now flowed almost perversely against the tide of racial separation, suspicion and fear that marked the rivers and valleys of Pennsylvania. In addition, as Brother Martin Mack argues, Zinzendorf’s plan showed no awareness of the cultural needs of Native people to have good hunting grounds close to their settlements. The Indian villages of the converted Moravians were planned out following a European model with kitchen gardens, domestic animals, and separate family houses. Where would the inhabitants of an Indian village on the Monocacy be able to hunt in an area of quite dense Euro-‐American settlement, traversed by the turnpikes that carried wagons of goods to and from Philadelphia, Lancaster, and Reading?
Despite all these obstacles, the Native Americans who were living in Bethlehem, some of whom were residents of the destroyed or abandoned Indian towns listed in Zinzendorf’s original plan, agreed that the building of a town for them outside Bethlehem was desirable and so, with the permission of the Governor of Pennsylvania, the plan was approved. As Levering has discussed in his compendious history of Bethlehem, the construction of Nain had to be done also with the permission of the Iroquois Confederacy and also Teedyuscung, an erstwhile Moravian convert who now agitated against the Moravians and even accused them of holding the Moravian Indians hostage. Only with the permission of these two groups, the Governor argued, could the building of Nain proceed.
And proceed it did! Embracing several hundred acres of the best land in the region, on property owned by the wealthy Quaker Benezet family, the place that had already been given the name of Nain by Zinzendorf was cleared. Providing Bethlehem with firewood for the winter of 1757-8, the land that was being cleared was perilously close to the Reading-‐Easton turnpike and there were fears that this proximity could lead to an escalation in the racially motivated attacks by whites on the Moravian Indians. Mutual suspicion was running high and the Moravian Indians were assured of protection by the Governor and the Bethlehem inhabitants. Teedyuscung decided to spend the winter on the south side of Bethlehem, to keep an eye on the Moravian Indians and the building of Nain.
Beginning in the cold winter of 1758 the lumber and fence rails of the new settlement were prepared, the site for new buildings was selected. The Native Americans living in neighboring Gnadenthal offered to help with the construction work, the town was staked out, and the work progressed nicely into the spring months. As the village was being built, land was also being prepared for growing crops. By the end of May, the fence around the village was finished, the first house was blocked up in June, and the building of houses, some from the lumber of the former Bethlehem chapel, continued on throughout the summer. The new chapel was built, and services of dedication conducted on October 18. Services were conducted bilingually, sometimes tri-‐lingually in Mahican, Delaware and German. Children’s services were held, the Gemeinhaus was built and a house erected for the unmarried missionary. There were 90 Indians present at the dedication service for the chapel and by 1762 there were 14 houses and four huts in the village. The village flourished, crops grew and were harvested, there was an abundance of venison around the end of the first year. All seemed to be going as planned! The missionaries working in Nain, Brothers Schmick, Martin Mack (1758-‐59) and Grube, were all experienced missionaries who had lived with and labored among many of the Indians who lived in the village. The Sprecher of Nain was the Mohican, Josua, Sr. a member of the Wolf clan. The diaries of the mission village reveal a life that centered around the services and liturgical life of many other Gemeinen . Visitors from Bethlehem would come regularly to speak with the choir members of the single brethren, single women, married men and women and widowers and widows. Sister Lawatsch speaks with deep affection of the village on her deathbed in 1760 where she remembers her visits to Nain during the harvest love feast the previous year and asks that she be remembered to them and remind them of her love for the Savior. In the second year of its existence, a house for the Single Brethren was dedicated, as was the Gottesacker. The village slowly expanded, necessitating the building of a new chapel by 1763. Liturgical life was little different from that of the non-‐Indian Gemeine across the Monocacy Creek. Devotional paintings depicting Christ’s life were displayed in the chapel, festival days were marked by trombone choirs, scriptures were read, hymns were sung, lovefeasts celebrated, in Mahican, some in Delaware and some in German.
But this protected existence could not last. Nain village was under the constant surveillance of its white neighbors for signs of drunkenness, unlicensed gunpowder sales, and any other expected infractions of order. This suspicion and hostility increased for the next three years until in December 1763 the infamous Scots-‐Irish Paxton Boys attacked and brutally murdered the peaceable Susquehannock Indians who were still living in Conestoga manor, land granted to the few remaining Susquehannock Indians by the Penn family. The perpetrators of the massacre defended their actions in a remonstrance published in 1764, claiming that the violations of the “distressed and bleeding” frontier were an affront to the brethren and relatives of the murdered whites. It is thought that the Paxton boys actually fell on the Conestoga Indians only after repeated attempts to massacre the Moravian Indians had been thwarted. They accused the Moravian Indians in Nain of sending messages to the Shawnee living on the Great Island to plot further murders of the white settlers along the Susquehanna River. According to Kevin Kenny, the Paxton Boys were not the only ones to suspect that the Indians of Nain were secretly trading with enemy Indians and supplying them with guns and ammunition. The Assembly’s commissioners also believed that “there is much reason to suspect the said Moravian Indians have also been principally concerned in the late Murders committed near Bethlehem, in the county of Northampton” (Kenny, p. 133)
In response to these accusations, in October 1763 restrictions were placed on purchases of gunpowder in Nain, and the commissioners recommended that the Nain Indians be removed to Philadelphia so that their “behavior may be more closely observed.” (ibid.) To this end, on November 8 1763 a party of 127 Indians from the missions of Nain, Wechquetank, Nazareth and Bethlehem set out for Philadelphia. How did the non-‐Indian residents of Bethlehem view the departure of the Indians, not only from the mission villages but also from within the very choir houses of Bethlehem itself? Kate Carte Engel has argued that the removal of the Nain and Wechquetank Indians was something accepted by the Bethlehem non-‐Indian residents and that they did not fight this decision because they had never seen them as part of their community (Engel, For Religion and Profit, p. 184) In some ways this might be true, but the removal of the Indians from Nain and Wechquetank and Bethlehem probably did save their lives. For merely a few weeks after the Moravian Indians arrived in Philadelphia on November 11, greeted by a furious mob ready to murder them, the Paxton Boys murdered the Conestoga Indians. Afraid that the Philadelphia barracks would not protect them from the mob, the Moravian Indians were moved to a former “pestilence house” on Province Island in the Delaware River. And there they stayed for fifteen months. Conditions were terrible in the prison. Disease was rampant. By the end of 1764, 56 of the Indians had died, nearly half of them children. The fate of the Nain Indians in the Philadelphia barracks was a constant source of concern for the Bethlehem Moravians. Given the political unrest and racial hatred now rampant in the Pennsylvania backcountry, that was spilling into the crowds of the cities of Philadelphia and Lancaster, it was clear that Nain could no longer be the home of Christian Indians. In September of 1764, before even a clear decision had been made as to the fate of the Nain Indians, plans were drawn up to dismantle the buildings in the village across the Monocacy. After the leaders of the Indians in the barracks petitioned for their own release, they were permitted to leave the city and arrived on March 22 1765 back in Bethlehem in deep snow.
They were allowed to briefly stop for a week at what remained of their old homes. Six of the fourteen houses were sold to individuals in Bethlehem on March 30, (according to Levering, one was the chapel) and then the following day a farewell lovefeast was held and on April 3 the Indians left Bethlehem for Friedenshütten.
Kate Carte Engel has argued that the end of Nain marks the end of the original mission of Bethlehem. (Engel, p. 195) That might be true in a limited sense, in that Zinzendorf’s original plan which was drawn up in the early days of Moravian presence in the colonies was now clearly no longer operative. However, it is not true that Moravians were no longer working closely with Native peoples. As we know, David Zeisberger and Johannes Ettwein led the families of Nain, after their seven year sojourn in Friedenshütten on the North Branch of the Susquehanna to Ohio, to found another Gnadenhütten, and then up into the territories around the Huron River. The mission of the Moravians to the Native peoples of North America continued well into the 20th century. What had changed however significantly was the possibility that this vision for “a collegium of the converted” would be in any way congruent with the politics of the New Republic. The massacre at Gnadenhütten.,Ohio in March 1782 of around 100 Moravian Indians, many of whom were either related to the Nain Indians or had actually lived there, was in many ways an inevitable and logical escalation of the racially motivated frontier violence that had been witnessed in 1763 in Conestoga and which prompted the interning of the Nain Indians in Philadelphia. The Moravian work among the Native peoples, motivated by a belief that all men and women regardless of race and culture possess a soul that can be ignited for Jesus, became an anomaly in an increasingly binary world of white versus other. In most Native eyes, especially those of the Delaware, Mohicans, and Iroquois, Moravians were considered to be figures of trust, people who took the time to learn their languages, to understand their culture, who respected their worldviews and cosmologies, even if it was with the goal of translating those notions of orenda or Manitou into Moravian Christian concepts of the Holy Spirit as Mother and Christ as the sacrificial Lamb. As scholars such as Jane Merritt have pointed out, the painted scenes of the Passion, the bloody language of the Litanies and hymns were not necessarily that foreign to the Native peoples. in fact the infamous Litany of the Wounds was the most popular litany among the Moravian Indians and records show that as late as 1758 services in Nain were strongly emphasizing sifting period language. But this desire for conversion to Christian faith through the achievement of an individual understanding of salvation became a “third way” in the history of the settling of the United States. As historian Daniel Richter has described it, the Moravian “experiment” did not fit within the binary structures of racial politics and expansionist thrusts that were the hallmarks of American history of the 19th century.
At the beginning of my talk, I suggested that the dedication of the Nain house offers the interpreters of Bethlehem history an opportunity to enter into a new phase of public education. I would like to urge the wonderful societies represented here and the organizations that worked so hard to see this project come to fruition to put behind us the era of Moravian historiography that in 1956 painted a picture of the Nain Indians as passive, powerless and victimized peoples, whom the Moravians taught “thrift and self-‐dependence” and who signed for their wages with “drawings of their totems, .. quaint momentos preserved in the Moravian Archives.” (Elma Gray, Wilderness Christians, 1956, p. ?) In my work on the Moravian Indian village of Friedenshütten to which the Nain Indains moved in 1765 after leaving Bethlehem, I have come into contact with many Native American groups among the Haudensosaunee; Seneca, Tuscarora, Mohawk, Onondaga, who want to know more about this vital part of their own history. The Moravian records reveal details of their forebears’ lives that are preserved nowhere else, they record the words and deeds of those who otherwise have passed into the anonymity of the defeated in history. And I would urge us to work to rebuild those bonds of friendship that were forged by the first Moravian missionaries who set out from Bethlehem over 250 years ago. Thank you!
Paper given in November 2021 to mark Professor Wolfgang Breul’s Birthday. A small portion of the results discussed here are published in the Fall 2022 issue of the Journal of Moravian History.
Thank you for invitation to present a paper on the subject of “Fromme Gefühle” to celebrate Professor Wolfgang Breul’s significant birthday (albeit a year late!) As we share a birth year, I am well aware of the passing of this milestone myself, but am fortunate enough to be about six months older and therefore marked its passing in the company of friends with good food and wine before Covid forced us all into lockdown!
We are here to show our indebtedness to Professor Wolfgang Breul for his lifelong research into aspects of Pietism that were not the norm when he began his academic career. Like him, I am intrigued by the questions of how Pietism, as a religion of the heart both challenged Enlightenment concepts of what it means to be human, whether in terms of reason, writing, and scientific enquiry, and also extended the possibilities of human fulfilment to those denied by the philosophers of reason. Those considered not to be fully human because of their sex and race by thinkers such as Kant and Hume, and who were excluded from arenas of political, educational, cultural and economic agency through the hue of skin, hair type, breadth of forehead, or the possession of a uterus, enjoyed perhaps the liberatory potential of Pietism’s promise of universal salvation through a personal relationship with Christ.
I have devoted much of my professional life to the study of autobiography, gender and race and in particular the genre of the Moravian memoir (Lebenslauf) with its promise to deliver an authentic record of an individual’s life. The custom, introduced by Zinzendorf in the 1750s as a means to bid farewell to the Gemeine, was widely practised throughout the Moravian world and also in the North American congregations of the 18th century.
What I would like to briefly discuss today is whether an examination of specific corpora of memoirs undermines or confirms the notion of “emotional communities” in the ethnic and cultural groups that made up Colonial and early American congregations. Drawing on a North American corpus, written in German and English by Moravians of European, African, and Native American descent can we detect common emotional responses to recorded life experiences? In what ways do these North American documents reveal fundamental differences in the execution of the promise of the Moravian memoir when we include historically disenfranchised and minoritised populations? In this preliminary examination, I will be using both analogue and computational methods of reading and analysis of archival documents from the digitized and manuscript collections of the Moravian Archives in both Europe and North America (moravian.bucknell.edu).
Although an enormous corpus (over 65,000) of memoirs exists and is housed primarily in archives in Herrnhut, Germany and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the US, but also in smaller less researched collections of documents in many of the Moravian settlements across the world, less than 10% of the material composed between 1750-1850 has been published.
Over the last 25 years, scholarly interest in the genre of the Moravian “Lebenslauf” has been fueled by first the recognition of autobiography as a genre worthy of scrutiny and second by easier physical access to the main repository of the manuscript sources in the Unity Archives in Herrnhut, Germany. Concurrent with this have been changes in conceptual models in social and religious history, and gender/race theory that see such “ego-documents” as valuable primary sources to gain a perspective from the social classes that do not usually have a voice in the writing of history, such as women and men of the artisan classes and marginalized peoples who were enslaved or driven from their lands by settler colonists. One constant focus of the critical gaze has been the question of the degree of expressive and emotional freedom allowed each individual to record authentic and unique reflections on lived experience within the memoir. Whereas some critics have argued that the very institutional edict to write a self-narration necessarily limits that act in terms of form, formulation, and individuality, others have argued that the Pietistic environment in which these self-relations were created, encouraged, at least in the 18th century, a balance between the demands of the community and the self. As Peter Vogt has so aptly stated, the Moravian memoir constitutes “a dynamic of reciprocity between individual witness and community identity.” Paul Eakin also discusses such reciprocity in the narration of the self and argues that without a story there is no self, and, in the age of the digital, this self is “not only reported but performed, certainly by any of us as we tell or write stories of our lives, and perhaps to a surprising degree by the rest of us as we listen to them or read them.” (Eakin 2014, 24)
So how does this dialectic between the demands of the individual and the community play itself out in the North American memoir in light of promises of liberty in both the US Declaration of Independence and formalized in the motto adopted by the US Moravian Church, ‘In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, love’? The origin of the motto is thought to have come from the 16th-century thinker, Peter Meiderlin, who apparently adopted it from an earlier Catholic bishop, Marc Antonio de Dominis (1560-1624) himself embroiled in the vibrant disputes of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It is thus a motto that is not exclusive to the Moravian Church but is rather entwined in the confessional and denominational conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries, and, according to Craig Atwood, it is a motto also used by other religious groups, such as the Quakers and Evangelical Presbyterians. It is clearly then not a motto that the 18th-century Moravians would have known, either in North America or in Europe. Considered an attempt to transcend sectarian differences, this dictum was first cited in a Moravian context by Augustus Schulze, a professor at Moravian Theological Seminary in 1902 and was then quickly adopted by the American Moravians, with its obvious echoes of the language and intent of foundational documents of the United States. Despite this external origin, the motto serves as a useful summary of the ethics of the Moravian Church in America: e pluribus unum.
Mottos serve as an externally and internally directed signifier. To outsiders of a group, they signal important beliefs held by the insiders, To the insiders, they act as a reminder of the way in which they live, acting as a kind of shorthand to identity, a glue. Scholars of Moravian history, when analyzing the identity and modes of cohesion of the Moravian Church, draw heavily on Benedict Anderson’s crucial work, “Imagined Communities” (1983). For example, in her foundational study of the “Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine” as a global community, Gisela Mettele (2009) employs Anderson’s concept of the necessity of “simultaneity” and “communication” (highly appropriate for today’s Zoom environment) coupled with the importance of language (German) to construct an intellectually satisfying picture of the Moravian Church as an entity that could thrive in the realization of its motto “In essentials unity, in non-essentials, liberty and in all things love”. Similarly, Peter Vogt, in his essay, “Everywhere at home” (2006) outlines the pillars on which the transatlantic Moravian Church founded its work. For Vogt, these consist in 1) strong leadership, 2) an effective network of communication, and 3) a uniform system of belief and worship. Vogt’s essay outlines clearly those aspects that he considers most important for such unity in belief and worship.
If we think of a unifying force within the Moravian Church, let us take as an example, the terminology of Moravian identity. How many of us Moravian scholars have had to include a glossary of terms in any monograph on or edition of Moravian materials? What to Moravians and non-Moravians who have immersed themselves in this history may not need explanation is quite baffling to outsiders. What is a Lovefeast? A Choir? A Singstunde? A Pedilavium? A Sickwaiter? This specialized terminology which exists in German, English, and many of the other languages of the people of the Church, provides, as Vogt argues, “the connectedness between the members of the community in terms of fraternal kinship ties” (Vogt 2006, 18): a kinship based not on blood ties but on a shared vocabulary of faith. Vogt argues that the very concept of the “Gemeine” “implies the awareness and the concrete experience of being connected to fellow believers” (19).
The organization of the Moravian Church was first held together (argues Vogt) by the charismatic personality of its founder, Count Zinzendorf and after his death the Unity Elders Conference saw the organization of the Gemeine as providing a strong and universally recognizable structure within which members could continue to feel connected globally. This “homogeneity”, Vogt continues, was also present in the unity of worship and faith. The Singstunde in Salem is the same as the Singstunde in Herrnhut, or Neu Herrnhut in Greenland or Australia, or the Singing Hour in Fulneck, Yorkshire. Coupled with this uniformity of ritual structure is the fact of its communication to all other places in the Moravian world through the Gemeinnachrichten or its successor publications. Extracts from mission reports, memoirs deemed of universal interest, diaries, letters were sent out to the Moravian congregations around the globe. These same reports were read out loud to the congregations, if not completely simultaneously to the hour, but on the same Sunday at the monthly Gemeintag (Vogt 24: Mettele, 145-7). In this way, Onondago and Lenape peoples in Central Pennsylvania could hear about the mission to the Inuit in Greenland; a young Friedrich Schleiermacher in Barby could learn about Heckewelder’s travels through Ohio and up to Detroit; and Anna Anders in Bethlehem could hear about the life of the child, Peter West, born in London in 1751 and who was buried in Fulneck in 1760, in the Gottesacker where Anna herself would be buried in 1803. This unifying ritualistic action of writing, reading, and listening to the lives and actions of others provides, according to Vogt and Mettele, the stability and unifying strength of the expanding Moravian Church across the globe.
But what about that other tenet of the North American Moravian motto, “in non-essentials, liberty”? What are such non-essentials, and how did liberty manifest itself in the lives of the Moravians? To return to the 18th century: in the light of the origins of this motto, it is clear that the notions of “essentials” as outlined by Peter Vogt and Gisela Mettele can be agreed upon. But, in an era prior to the political revolutions of the late 18th century, we must remember that “liberty” or “libertas”/Freiheit occurred in more of a confessional realm than political. So how might this motto apply to the memoirs from this early period? Critics, such as Gisela Mettele, Stepahnie Böß, Christine Lost (and myself) have argued for the importance of the Moravian memoir as a social and theological practice within the church. Mettle’s examination of the memoirs that were circulated in the Gemeinnachrichten and later published in the Nachrichten aus der Brüdergemeine argues for the importance of the uniformity of the published lives to show “simultus iustus et peccator”, the publicly communicated salvific history of the individual as sinner and redeemed. Thus, the individual differences in terms of details of where s/he was born, into which social class s/he was born, which language s/he spoke could all be considered insignificant in comparison with the essential consciousness of one’s need for salvation. This last point is especially bewildering to those of us in the 21st century when we read autobiographical documents by enslaved peoples or those whose lands were occupied by settler colonists. The commonality with white Moravians consists in the “slavery to sin” and not in the question of being enslaved or dispossessed and colonized. Within the language and symbology of the Moravian church, there might be a place where some form of liberty has been exercised. I would agree with Peter Vogt about the role of ritual in cementing the far-flung communities together. However, as we have seen from recent work by Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eylerly, Moravian hymns still are expressions of faith whether they are sung in Mohican, Delaware, German or English. But when it comes to the composition of a memoir, there is inherent within that very act the tension between the individual life and the universal pattern of salvation.
The worldwide reach of the Moravian church means that Moravian archives preserve some of the earliest ‘ego documents’ produced by eighteenth-century Africans and Native Americans. And archiving these documents has fulfilled a twofold purpose; that is storing and ordering them in the institutional archival memory of the Church and also, for those who access this archival memory, as a locus of presence and interactivity in the lived memory of the Church. (Haskin 2007, 401) As noted above, the relation of the lives of exemplary believers, as Peter Vogt argues, helped to create “a tangible impression of the invisible church community.” (Vogt 2017, 39) In an examination of several centuries’ worth of Lebensläufe from the Herrnhut archives, Christine Lost describes the communicative structure of Moravian experience. (Lost 2007; Mettele 2009) as both inwardly and outwardly directed; that is, it serves as a means of self-examination for the writing “I”, as well as participating in the construction of a communal identity. This dialectic of individual/community (that so influenced Friedrich Schleiermacher’s concept of religious consciousness and ethical action) reflects very much Zinzendorf’s own understanding of the function of the Lebenslauf. The relation of one’s life within this community serves as an act of witness and testimony to the invisible host of those who had gone before and who were still to come. Additionally, the intersection of religion, cultural and personal memory, (Jan Assmann 2008) introduces a narrative tension into the writing one’s memoir, as the author balances demands of a personal desire to belong to a social group with the lived realities of one life.
And maybe we also need to ask, to what extent can there be liberty, what might it look like, and what role does this balancing act play in creating the “universal history’ of the church, as Zinzendorf envisioned it. What happens when the authors of those self-relations belong to otherwise disenfranchised groups within the 18th century; groups such as the enslaved peoples of Africa, the freed and formerly enslaved, the Christianized indigenous peoples from the Moravian mission movement, and women? In what way can the Moravian memoir act as an “authentic relation of the self” and not instead represent the acquisition of a new argot that signals membership in a new group?
The development of tools in the field of digital humanities affords researchers a way of not only approaching these questions but also of thinking in new ways about how to conceptualize notions of self, narrative, and language. Corpora of memoirs have already been constructed by researchers interested in demographics, religious community, missions, and memoirs in Moravian history (see, for example, Smaby 1988, Mettele 2009, Böß 2016, Lost 2007, van Gent 2012, and Faull 1997 and 2017). The development of digital tools in text analysis, such as Voyant and Antconc, permits the investigation of large corpora in search of topic models, keywords, lexical “keyness” in comparison to non-Moravian corpora. Looking for meaningful patterns in the exercise of distant reading transforms digital tools into integral parts of the process of understanding the study of Christianity. Furthermore, extracting tagged entities from marked-up texts leads to the possibility of both network visualization and geospatial analysis, allowing such work to expand and ask new questions and find new answers. In many ways, re-enacting the archival drive of the Moravians in the 18th century, the methods of DH permit analyses of both the metadata and the text of large amounts of information that allows the other function of memoir to be fulfilled, the function of lived memory in which the archived materials of the past may become present and interact with others. (Haskin 401)
The Moravian Lives project is aimed at realizing the potential of DH approaches to opening up the memoir corpus, namely through the construction of a searchable database of the memoir metadata of all the holdings in the main archives of the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, PA and Herrnhut, Germany, and also linking the metadata visualizations with the facsimile and transcribed memoirs and their extracted named entities.
The Moravian Lives platform provides a means of accessing and analysing corpora with specific parameters of time period, geographical location, gender. As digitized memoirs in the Bethlehem archives have been linked to the search interface, we can access the memoirs of Native American and African American members of the Congregation, members such as Peter and Mary Titus.
For example, if we search for Mary Titus in the map interface we find the record exists and is linked to the digitized original. The transcription has also been completed, and thus we have access to a digital text.
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Similarly, if we search for her husband, Peter Titus, we find his memoir on the transcription desk, and it has already been transcribed and also Andrew’s memoir which I have published and discussed previously.
Much work is to be done on the topic of what I have termed “Black Bethlehem” but we have been able to digitize the memoirs I have been able to locate so far in a collection on the Moravian Lives transcription desk. Being able to make collections of memoirs allows us to create “corpora” or bodies of text on which we can perform computational or algorithmic readings in an attempt to describe and analyse possible patterns of normative expressions.
As Jacqueline van Gent has argued in the context of Moravian ego-documents, the expression of emotion in textual sources (letters, memoirs etc) does not necessarily allow us to know what emotion a subject was feeling at the time of composition. Rather, salient emotions reported in these sources adhere to the language rules and expectations of a linguistic (and emotional) community. In the context of the memoirs of enslaved peoples (Andrew and Magdalene), converted non-European peoples can adopt the emotional vocabulary of the Moravians in order to display their membership in the group. The question as to the authenticity of those emotions is a much harder one to answer. However, as mentioned above, as one part of the unity of the Moravian motto, the “norms” of Moravian language adhere to expectations for norms that are set through specific practices (praxes within the Moravian congregations).
Results for key terms from Bethlehem’s English language memoirsResults from African-descended men’s memoirs in Bethlehem
Furthermore, if there are limits to the authenticity of expression, especially within marginalized groups, then can linguistic expression reveal something about our subconscious states?Given the limitations expressed above as to the use of conscious selection of vocabulary, psychologist James Pennebaker’s methodology provides a multidimensional lens to analyse language that relies not on the “content words” of what we say but on the “function words” or stop words, often stripped out of a text when using distant reading techniques, such as Voyant or Antconc. These function words–the articles, prepositions, pronouns, negations, auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, quantifiers, common adverbs–are those parts of speech that we use unconsciously; they are used at very high rates, they are short and hard to detect, they are processed in a different part of the brain than content words, and they are very social. So can this method overcome the problems I outlined above with other computational (and non-computational) methods in the analysis of Moravian memoirs? Can we access subconscious psychological states through the application of Pennebaker’s methods? Running the corpus through the LIWC software we find: (results here)
Looking at this corpus, Women in Bethlehem Archive (German): there is a significant difference between memoirs by White American women and Native American in terms of positive emotions (including terms such as love, sweet, nice). However, the NegEmo measure (anxiety, sadness, hostility) shows not much variance. Maybe the absence of positive emotion does not necessarily mean that there is a presence of negative emotion. Of the women’s memoirs from Bethlehem that are in English, we find much more variation in the Authenticity measure — Burger, Baker, Powell, Quitt all show distinctly higher values. Of the men from the Bethlehem Archive who are writing in German, the lowest PosEmo scores in the corpus include Andrew’s memoir. However, one of the highest PosEmo scores belongs to Peter Titus. Andrew’s memoir scores among the highest for NegEmo. Of the men in Bethlehem who write in English there is hardly any variation in PosEmo or NegEmo scores.
Moving now to a small corpus of 12 memoirs by Native Americans, how do these subconscious “scores” look? As we know, such texts are very hard to find in the archives. Often the biographical information is hidden behind Europeanized names or racialized monikers, and of this corpus 20 are written in the third person and two in the first person. However, even within the third-person memoirs, we find direct quotations from the speaking or interviewed subject. Running the texts through LIWC we find among the Native American authors that the highest score for “anger” and “negative emotion” is found in “Michael’s memoir (it can be found on the BDHP website).
Michael (we do not have a record of his Native name) came from the Minnisink people and was baptized in Shekomeko by Brother Büttner. Described as a “great warrior” in his memoir, his bravery was depicted on his face in a series of tattoos: a snake, scalps on a pole, two crossed spears and a boar. The Choir Helper of the Single Brethren who records the memoir says “all of it was done very neatly.” Michael, according to the text, refuses to consider the proposed relocation of Christianized Native Americans to the Wyoming Valley. During the French and Indian war, he bolsters up the spirits of the Single Brethren (who were posted on the fences around the Bethlehem settlement) and urges them not to be afraid but rather says, “If you are in good stead with the Savior, you would not be so nervous. Your bad hearts are responsible for your anxiety.” Michael is considered the “crown of all our baptized in this part of the world, because his holiness progressed after his baptism without many changes and transformations.” So we need to ask ourselves where does the negative emotion and anger come from that reveals itself in the use of function words in Michael’s memoir? His resistance to being moved out of Bethlehem? His bravery? His choice to become Christianized?
Or we might look at why the memoir of “Isaac,” a young Mahican/Wampanoag man who died at the age of 18 having been baptized at the age of 11 scores so low for “authenticity?”. His mother and father had both been baptized by the Moravians. By 14 he had lost both his mother and father to smallpox and fever and was taken in by friends who moved with him first to the Wyoming Valley and then to the Moravian mission of Gnadenhütten. He escaped to Bethlehem after the attack on the mission in November 1755 and was taken into the Single Brethren’s house where he died the following year of consumption. On his deathbed, the choir helper notes, “At his request a number of little hymn verses in Indian were sung to him by the Indians present. Shortly before his departure Br. Schmick asked him if he felt Jesus’ Blood in his heart and would gladly go home. To which he responded; “Quame,” that is, “Yes.” After that he stretched himself out, laid his hands on his breast and went to sleep for a while.” What I find so interesting in this description is the language in which the verses are sung and that his last words are recorded in Wampanoag.
Conclusion
If we return to the nature of the practice of unity and liberty within the Moravian Church of the 18th century, can we perhaps test those claims by examining the recorded lives of those who belong to non-European groups, especially women? I have tried to show in this brief talk first, the main ways in which scholars have tried to understand the creation of unity within the Moravian Church of the 18th century, through neologisms, specific linguistic tropes, ritual, and simultaneous communication. Then, I examined one of the main means to create unity, that is the writing of a memoir, that definitely follows a specific narrative and emotional pattern which is composed to be read to others. Beyond reading individual memoirs out of primarily genealogical interest or for the subject’s perceived exemplary significance to the movement, studying the large corpus of Moravian memoirs is only possible if they are published. The Moravian Lives digital project aims to make available through the publishing of the original archival document and its transcription thousands of memoirs. By creating a digital text we make these sources available to scholars to test the claims of universality, of liberty, of unity and love. We make available the lives of those whose very chances at liberty or life at the birth of the United States was not guaranteed and who are indeed still fighting to “become American”.
Back in 2013, I wrote a short piece about the site of the Moravian Indian mission town of Friedenshütten which is in what is today known as Browntown just off Route 6 outside Wyalusing, PA. In that blog, I tried to explore the problems of making invisible history visible to local people in the face of the growing fracking industry in North Eastern Pennsylvania. At that point, the major concern was the rail traffic trundling past the site of the Moravian Indian town that had been dubbed “The Jewel of the Susquehanna” by contemporary luminaries and had inspired the world-famous German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to write a poem about these banks of the Susquehanna River, even though he had never been to America.
Today the threat to this jewel is far more immediate. The land on which the site lies has been sold to New Fortress Energy as part of a proposed LNG plant in Browntown, a plant that will bring huge amounts of truck traffic to the site, both while the plant is being constructed, and beyond, as the liquefied natural gas is transported out of town for export. Currently under public comment, partial plans have been posted to the PA Bulletin by the DEP, and show the extent to which just one of the natural resources (water) in this area will be impacted (see PA Bulletin for May 4, 2019 here). The summary statistics in the report state that the project “will result in 203 linear feet of permanent stream impacts, 18,449 ft2 (0.42ac) of permanent floodway impact, 2,427 ft2 (0.06ac) of temporary wetland impacts, and 28,615 ft2 (0.66ac) of permanent wetland impact.” The original (December 2018) planning application that also lists projected air pollution amounts can also be found on the DEP website.
Anyone who has kayaked this part of the river knows its beauty. Hills rise up on either side of the Susquehanna, eagles circle overhead, and in late summer the current carries you over the riffles of the river bend, downstream towards Laceyville. However, soon this glorious landscape will be overshadowed by the steam (and other less pleasant) gas emissions, truck traffic, and profile of a huge LNG plant (for an interactive overlay map of the site, click here). Since December, when the plan was put before the public, some local citizens have expressed their deep concern about the environmental effects of the plant, the direct destruction of Native American and Colonial American historical sites, and the lack of transparency in the permitting process. This concern has been met with an unwillingness on the part of Fortress Energy to discuss openly these issues.
Golkowsky’s 1768 map of Friedenshütten, near Wyalusing. From the Unity Archives, Herrnhut TS 213.13. All rights reserved. An interactive version can be found by clicking here.
Part of the land on which this plant will stand was once the Moravian Indian town of Friedenshütten, a thriving, busy, and strategically important village from 1765-1772. But like any site where material traces of human culture have been erased, it is difficult to imagine the life that was lived in this place, an enterprise that brought together European settlers and Native Americans (Mahicans, Lenape, and members of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee) in the confusing and tumultuous period around American independence. Manuscript diaries kept by the Moravian missionaries reveal many details that help paint a rich picture of life on that field. From its beginnings in the spring of 1765, when food was scarce and the bears were not, to its dissolution in the summer of 1772, the town supported itself with its gardens of produce, and seasonal hunting and shad fishing. It hosted numerous parties of visiting Indian nations, some very large and very hungry, many coming for a political parley, some coming to visit their family members who had converted to Christianity. Reading the mission diaries that still exist only in manuscript form, a picture emerges of a vibrant community with a multi-lingual school, a Gemeinhaus (church) complete with oil paintings and a bell, log houses with glass windows, bark houses for those who preferred them, fertile kitchen gardens, and canoes tied up along the river bank.
As we look at the empty field today, it is hard to envisage the multilingual and multicultural celebrations that took place here. The Moravian Indians who came here had already endured terrible hardships, as we can read in the detailed account by the missionaries Johannes Schmick and David Zeisberger, now published in the Journal of Moravian History. In the very first year of the mission, 1765, in this soon to be destroyed field, as many as 120 people attended a midnight Christmas Eve service at which the gospels were read in the Lenape language to an attentive congregation. For the next seven years, Christian feast days were celebrated with liturgies in the Lenape language, beeswax candles, and musical accompaniments.
Staking out the drainage ditch at Friedenshütten, May 13, 2019. Photo courtesy of David Buck.
The building in which these remarkable occurrences took place stood at the point at which today we see the historical monument, dedicated to the memory of the Moravian Indian village. As we look westwards, we might have seen a street lined with those log houses and Indian bark dwellings, in which men and women and children lived, and worked, and prayed, and slept. Yesterday, as I walked through the misty rain, I saw the stakes already planted in the ground to mark off the edges of a 50′ wide trench to drain stormwater from the site. This ditch will cut straight through the site of the historical village (for a detailed map, click here).
So why should we care about what looks like just a point on the map, an empty field with a simple obelisk in the middle, marking the site of this Moravian Indian village from the last half of the 18th century? First, history matters. An important part of what makes us human is our ability to learn from the stories of the past, to read and listen to the memories of others, to think about the lives that they led, perhaps to better understand our own. And when those people are no longer here to tell us these stories themselves, our communities need to curate and incorporate them into an understanding of where we are from. If we erase those places and their narratives, we are in danger of not only flattening the land around us, but also diminishing our understanding of ourselves.
Moravian Historical Society monument in Browntown, PA. Photo courtesy of David Buck.
Second, the Native Americans who lived here both before the Moravians came and while they were here have descendants among the current-day Lenape nations in Canada and Oklahoma. Tracing one’s roots back several generations is notoriously difficult for displaced peoples, as anyone who has explored their ancestry knows. Destroying this site will further erase the past of Native peoples who were pushed out of Pennsylvania by Sullivan’s march, the final military act of forced removal of Indians from this state. Mach’wihilusing (the Indian village’s name) and Friedenshütten mark the place of people’s pasts, of their lives and in some cases their deaths. Recognized by the state’s historical commission, this is a place we must work to preserve, this Jewel of the Susquehanna. If we care about the past, a past that brings together settlers from Europe and Native American nations, in order to build a better future, then we need to make our voices heard and write to the newspapers, write to our political representatives, write to the DEP, and demand that a full historical site survey be carried out on this important place in American history.
The project development team at Bucknell University has been very busy in the last few months.
As was reported on the Bucknell University DPS blog at the beginning of the summer, work is continuing on a couple of fronts. Our Bucknell student “super transcriber”, Carly Masonheimer ’21 has been doing a fantastic job of transcribing the English language materials and now, thanks to generous support from both the Bucknell Unversity Center for the Humanities and the Moravian Archives, Bethlehem this June Carly was able to attend the German Script seminar at the Moravian Archives and is transcribing the German script materials! Further transcription work has been done by Marita Gruner, doctoral candidate at the University of Greifswald, Germany.
This fall, Sarah Kannemann, a doctoral student in the field of Church History at the University of Mainz in Germany, will be coming to Bucknell as a visiting scholar to learn “the Bucknell DH method,” and work closely with project leaders, Faull and Jakacki. She will also carry out archival research at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA. Thanks go to Prof. Craig Atwood at the Center for Moravian Studies at Moravian Seminary for supporting Sarah’s stay in Bethlehem. Further cutting-edge platform development is planned this fall at the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz where as part of this exchange, our project developer, Michael McGuire ‘07, will also be teaching a module of the Mainz DH summer school, focusing on the Bucknell “Moravian Lives” project.
New UK Materials
In March 2018, Katie Faull travelled to the Fulneck archives in Yorkshire, UK. Fulneck was one of the most important Moravian communities in the UK in the 18th century, visited at its founding by Zinzendorf, Anna Nitschmann, Spangenberg and other leading figures in the early church. The archives there are well-organized, thanks to the work of Rev. Hilary Smith. While at Fulneck, with the help of her volunteer research assistant, Jane Faull, she was able to digitize the whole as yet uncatalogued collection of Single Sister’s memoirs, as well as a part of the other Choirs’ memoirs. We are very excited to announce that this collection of Single Sisters memoirs is now available for transcription on the transcription desk!
This new Fulneck collection joins the other UK materials on the site. In January 2017, Faull digitized a sizeable proportion of the memoirs in the Fetter Lane collection at Church House, Muswell Hill, London. These have already been partially transcribed and form part of the primary materials corpus for Faull’s HUMN 100 The Humanities Now! course at Bucknell in fall 2018.
Latest Scholarly Output
Faull and McGuire will be using the transcribed materials from the Moravian Lives website as their research corpus for a jointly presented paper “Analyzing Moravian Feelings: Using Computational Methods to ask Questions about Norms and Sentiments in Moravian Lebensläufe” at the 5th International Pietism Congress in Halle, Saxony later in August 2018. We will also be using the opportunity of the Congress to hold our first International Steering Committee meeting for the Moravian Lives project, on which scholars from Germany, the US, Australia, Sweden, and Labrador sit.
Financial support for the Moravian Lives project has come (on the US side) from Bucknell Univesity’s L&IT, the President’s Office, the Bucknell Humanities Center and funds from Faull’s Presidential Professorship. In Sweden, the project has been funded by the Center for Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg and also its Center for Digital Humanities; and in Germany funds have come from the federal state of the Rheinland-Palatinate awarded to the University of Mainz’ Professor Wolfgang Breul.
Moravian Lives research collaborators include the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA, the Unity Archives in Herrnhut, Germany, the Moravian Archives in London and Fulneck, U.K., the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Students who are involved on the project include Carly Masonheimer ‘21, Marleina Cohen ‘21, and Bucknell graduates Khoi Le ‘18 and Michael McGuire ‘07.
Katherine Faull, Bucknell University, Diane Jakacki, Bucknell University
Paper delivered at DH 2018 Mexico City June 27-30, 2018
ABSTRACT
This paper will explore the problem of creating a gazetteer of colonized landscapes, specifically those of the mid-Atlantic in the 18th century, in which the name of a place (toponym) changes depending on the person or political entity who is describing that place. In colonized landscapes, there can be multiple names for one place. Maps of this period are veritable palimpsests of conquests and defeats; and travel diaries, mission records and letters contain accounts of human experience of places that are multiply identified. The task is made more complicated still when one factors time into the equation: when competing spatial identities persist across generations.
The paper proposes a two-phased approach to developing the Moravian Lives gazetteer, which will expand geographically to places beyond North America and will need to resolve polynymic complexities in Central Europe, the Arctic areas of Greenland and Newfoundland, the Caribbean, South Africa and Australia.
This paper explores the problem of creating a gazetteer of colonized landscapes, specifically those of the North American mid-Atlantic in the 18th century, where the name of a place (toponym) changes depending on the person or political entity who is describing that place. Maps of this period are veritable palimpsests of conquests and defeats.
Slide 3 Mattheus Hehl’s Itinerant Preachers Map
They also are the result of travel diaries, mission records and letters that contain accounts of human experience of places. The task of compiling a historical gazetteer is made more complicated still when one factors time into the equation: that is when competing spatial identities persist across generations.
Slide 4 Naming Mountains
Here a detail of the previous map where the mountains are renamed as they are crossed by German Moravian missionaries.
Slide 5 Moravian Lives Gazetteer
Using the case study of the research project “Moravian Lives” we ask how we can create a gazetteer of places using authority IDs, when that very authority is itself the product of a political-historical struggle. Facing the problem of polynymy (multiple placenames for one location) how can we satisfactorily reflect the multiple perspectives and presence or absence of agency of those who name place? If one of our objectives is to make our gazetteer ready for linking with other projects, can we use this approach to create a system of “triples” that will align our place names more effectively.
We argue that the addition of a variable that allows for the designation of agency helps to resolve that problem.
The construction of an historical gazetteer for Moravian Lives involves complexities that arise from not only the naming of places but also how their spatial identities reflect respective, concurrent relationships to those places by Native American peoples, Moravian missionaries, and colonial representatives. There are multiple names for a single place as well as multiple understandings of place names, and these differences depend on who it was who did the naming.
How can we recognize spatial multivalence (or “polynymy”) in the Moravian Lives gazetteer?
How does the scholar act responsibly while acknowledging their own potential complicity in political-historical renegotiations and multiple cultural understandings of place?
Must we not push back at the idea of *an* authority, and work toward a system that recognizes and synchronizes multiple authorities?
Slide 6) Moravian Lives Database
This is the current state of the personography and gazetteer–the metadata of the 60,000 records are in an intraoperable database but not interoperable LOD system, either with the person and place entities in the transcribed memoirs or with a digital cultural heritage infrastructure.
Slide 7 Setting scoped by Period and Place
In examining models for the creation of digital historical gazetteers we have found the one proposed by Grossner, Janowicz and Kessler to be particularly helpful. In order to prepare a gazetteer for broad data linkage, they adapted Peter Bols’ list of requirements for digital gazetteers to consider the complexities of place over time. They employ the term “Place” in a contextual sense, where geographic space provides the location for events as well as artefacts and Earth features. They then use the term “Period” as related to time spans – “containers”, as they explain, for discrete “events or an interval of time.” Grossner and his co-authors then apply the concept of “geosetting” proffered by Michael Worboys and Kathleen Hornsby to account for the complexities of the spatial-temporal.
As shown in their diagram we can, therefore, see the subject/predicate/object structure in which Setting is scoped by both Period and Place where each has a specific type and name. Setting, therefore, provides Temporal and Spatial Scope, supporting a framework for W3C OWL Time and Geospatial ontologies.
While this historical expansion is incredibly useful for distinguishing place names that change over time, it also reifies placename authority in a linear geographical narrative predicated on socio-political understandings of possession. For example, 17th-century Eurocentric names for the areas that would ultimately comprise Pennsylvania were connected to land claims and treaties among Dutch and English powers, all of which had beginning and end dates, and were defined by particular geometries. The “Setting” model as set forward here does not take into account the complexities of socio-cultural understandings and namings of place – often in concurrent and sometimes competing timespans.
Slide 8 Case Studies
Slide 9 Shippen’s Shamokin
An example of this challenge is the town of Shamokin in 18th-century Pennsylvania. From the end of the 17th century to the mid-18th century, Shamokin was known as the capital of the Woodland Indians. Lying at the confluence of the two branches of the Susquehanna River, intersected by over 11 major paths used by American Indians, it marked the southern limit of Iroquoia and was considered by both the Iroquois and the colonial powers to be a location of great strategic significance.
Slide 10 John Smith’s Quadroque
Before the Iroquois Shamokin, this place was the probable site of “Quadroque,” one of the Susquehannock forts marked on Captain John Smith’s 1612 map of his journeys around the Chesapeake.
Slide 11 Shippen detail
Shamokin encompassed the shores of both branches and an island at the river’s fork for Shikellamy, the Oneida emissary of the Six Nations of the Iroquois or Haudenosaunee, who oversaw the Algonquin-speaking nations of the Lenni Lenape, Shawnee, and Mahican in Iroquoia (present-day Pennsylvania and New York), and who lived in the town in the 1740s.
Slide 12 Heiden Collegia
To Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravian Church who visited Shikellamy in 1742, “Shamokin” represented an opportunity to proselytize Christianity to the Iroquois. Shamokin had already loomed large in Zinzendorf’s mind as he planned his “Heiden-Collegia” in Pennsylvania and New York.
Slide 13 Plan of the Western Front
To Conrad Weiser, Palatinate German settler and negotiator between the colonial government in Philadelphia and the Indian nations, “Shamokin” represented a strategic and ultimately military outpost that would become the site of Fort Augusta during the French and Indian War. These “Shamokins” co-existed, with Native American, Moravian, and Colonial inhabitants and visitors relating to it in discrete yet overlapping ways.
A further complication is the existence of present-day Shamokin, founded in the late 18th century, which lies 18 miles to the east of the historic town.
Slide 14 Modification of Grossner’s model
This is a simplified diagram of “setting” defined by Period and Place
Slide 15 Adding Agent
Drawing on the recent work of scholars of new gazetteers (Berman et al 2016), we propose a modification of Grossner et al’s model through the inclusion of consideration of the “agent” of an event that occurs within a particular setting (defined by temporal and spatial scope). By including an agent within this model we thus can deepen the “geosemantic” approach to place that recognizes that a place may be the setting for many events of significance, that significance being dependent on the view of the naming agent. Following Doreen Massey’s dictum that “place is the meeting up of histories in space” (Massey 2005) the inclusion of agent, whether a person or an organization, foregrounds the historical aspect of geo-spatial mapping without imposing a hierarchy on the naming authority of that place. Thus, the colonial practice of renaming “unfamiliar” places with familiar names (Paul Carter, “The Road to Botany Bay” and Faull, “Smooth Rocks in a River Archipelago”) can be recorded and presented as a polynymic practice without granting that colonial name primacy. Pulling on a more metonymic naming practice, the addition of “agent” facilitates the mediation between historical discourse and the spatial world. We reject the suggestion that a historical gazetteer should create a hierarchy of definitions of place, from the mainstream to the marginal (Shaw, 2016) but rather we propose that addition of agent as an entity will allow for the aggregation of naming practices in a metonymic string.
Slide 16 Shamokin Determined as Authority Name
Shamokin offers us an excellent example of how we can benefit from the modification of “agent” in the Setting model. As demonstrated above, there is no one “Shamokin” in the contact period; however, there are multiple names for the place(s) that constituted the geographical area during that timespan – all connected to people or groups of people who lived in or associated with the space, often at the same or in overlapping periods of time. As we develop the gazetteer we are trying to resist the temptation of claiming a naming authority for ourselves that is, resolving to one authority name that we have determined for digital expediency’s sake. Just as we are conscious of the need to recognize different cultural heritage claims to place names, we are concerned about reifying “variants” or in some way deprecating or subordinating others to one name.
In this case, the names we are working with are Shamokin, Fort Augusta, Otzinachson, Sunbury, and Chenastry. Those names are associated with multiple Native American nations, administrative powers and settlers/colonists, and there is no discrete linear temporal distinction between place names (as Grossner’s model asks).
Slide 17: Adding Metonym
The concept of creating “metonyms” works well within our project. While we create unique identifiers for each place name within the Moravian Lives taxonomy we can extend our TEI schema to include an attribute of @metonym under the @naming class. Therefore, we can connect these place names so that:
Shamokin is a metonym of Fort Augusta is a metonym of Otzinachson is a metonym of Sunbury, etc.
Slide 18: Considering Existing Unique IDs
As we create the Moravian Lives entities, we negotiate the difference between place names that need to be “minted” and those that have already been assigned a VIAF, Wikidata, or Geonames ID. So far we have not found such IDs for Otzinachson or Chenastry, so we can establish a Moravian Lives ID and make them unique identifiers on the web (via Wikidata, etc.) Because Fort Augusta already has a Wikidata ID of Q5470761 we can associate our Moravian Lives Fort Augusta with that Fort Augusta via “sameAs”. If we do the same with Sunbury, it has a Geonames ID of 5214814. However, in the Geonames entry Sunbury has an alternative name of “Shamokin” – but without citation or date-range indicator. For the historical and cultural studies scholar, it is inaccurate, misleading, and in some ways, irresponsible then to equate Sunbury with or consider Shamokin to be its variant. As digital humanities projects move into a phase where historical place data is linked, we want to find ways to resist the givenness of authority names; we believe that the metonymic chain of place names need not be fully recognized but is available to all people.
Slide 19: Polynymous Shamokin
Once we have established the idea of metonymy, we can return to the idea of “agent” and how it is through these eighteenth-century agents that we can effectively integrate the gazetteer within the larger Moravian Lives project and then more broadly to other DH projects. As outlined above, our agents are individuals and groups of people.
Mme Montour and Colonial/metis traders ~ Chenastry
Shikellamy and Iroquois nation, Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians ~ Shamokin
Conrad Weiser ~ Otzinachson
British Colonial powers ~ Fort Augusta
Northumberland County administrators ~ Sunbury
As we create our Moravian Lives entities and relationships, therefore, we need to be explicit about establishing links between the Moravian Lives gazetteer places and persons and organizations. So we create a bi-directional link between ML Shamokin and Shikellamy, Zinzendorf, Moravians, and Iroquois; Fort Augusta and John Sullivan, etc.
Slide 20 Conclusion
We recognize that this is just a beginning and we eagerly look forward to further conversation.
Paper delivered at the conference, “Holocaust Writing and Translation” Institute of Advanced Study, University of London, Feb. 2011.
In his provocative 1998 study of the theory and practice of translation, critic Lawrence Venuti makes the following claim for the power of translated texts to disrupt the target culture’s literary and ideological hegemony. Although “foreign literatures tend to be dehistoricized by the selection of texts for translation, removed from their foreign literary traditions where they draw their significance”(Venuti 1998, 67), translation, he asserts, “simultaneously constructs a domestic subject” (Venuti 1998, 68) who can be transgressive or conservative. Translation possesses for him “an identity-forming power” that can change canons and concepts of self-identity by forming new domestic subjects through “a process of “mirroring” or self-recognition: the foreign becomes intelligible when the reader recognizes himself or herself in the translation by identifying the domestic values that motivated the selection of that particular foreign text and that are inscribed in it through a particular discursive strategy.” (Venuti 1998, p. 77) In other words, translated texts, although removed from their historical context in the source culture, retain a transformative power in the target culture because that which was seen to be relevant to the target culture is identified by the new audience.
Venuti takes as case studies two canon-changing translation trends in Classical and Japanese literature. However, I would like to test this claim on perhaps the far thornier literary and historical phenomenon of Holocaust memoir. To what extent could Venuti’s insight help us to understand the complexities of reception of the translated text of personal testimony in Holocaust literature. To what extent does a target culture recognize itself in the translation of the text of witness? To aid me in this inquiry, I will draw on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in a brief examination of Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and the publication history of Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben (1992) and its English version Still Alive (2001).
Recent critical studies of Holocaust memoir have made, what is euphemistically known, as the “linguistic turn”, using either speech act theory, or recent trends in linguistic pragmatics to examine the implicit and explicit assumptions about the truth-value of the utterance of witness and testimony in Holocaust memoirs. Such an approach can be found in Ruth Franklin’s A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, newly issued from Oxford University Press, in which she bravely points out that even “the canonical work of Holocaust literature, involves some greying of the line between fiction and reality.” (p. 11) Alan Rosen in his Sounds of Defiance: The Holocaust, Multilingualism and the Problem of English (Nebraska UP, 2005) problematizes the use of English, both within the camps and in immediate post-war texts of testimony as well as in the proliferation of Holocaust memoirs now written with English as their first language. Piotr Kuhiwczak’s “The Grammar of Survival. How do we Read Holocaust Testimonies” (in Translating and Interpreting Conflict, (2007) pp. 61-73 examines the fascinating phenomenon of using how English, with its status of non-Native language, can access memories of trauma that remain inexpressible in native tongues. (P. 67) All these studies problematize the use of English in critical literature on the Holocaust as well as, for Rosen, examine the potential liberatory value of English in the camps. However, as Franklin’s title would suggest, what is also at stake here is the question of authenticity; the authenticity of the speaking and writing “I” in testimony, the authenticity of the memoir (most famously disproven in the scandalous case of Wolfgang Koeppen’s “ghost-writing” of Jakob Littner’s first-person account “Journey through the Night”) and the examination of the power of, what critic Philippe Lejeune has famously termed the “autobiographical pact.” This pact, he has theorized, is the necessary agreement between reader and author that the grammatical, speaking “I” of the autobiographical text is the same as the experiencing “I” who is the principal character of the memoir. This equation constitutes the classical autobiography. There are variations: where the speaking “I” is not the experiencing “I” and the text, therefore, becomes a “biography in the 1st person;” in other words, a homodiegetic narrative of witness, approaching what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben posits in his examination of the impossibility of writing the testimony of the “Muselmann” in his brilliant study of the ethics of witness and the Holocaust Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Zone, 1999). Or, the writing grammatical subject can be referred in the second person but still be identical with the writing subject, in which case we have an autobiography in the second person, such as we find in Christa Wolf’s Kindheitsmuster. The choice of grammatical speaking and witnessing subject is crucial to the testimonial nature of Holocaust memoir. Given that many critics, from Adorno to George Steiner, consider Holocaust testimony to reside outside the realm of aestheticization or fictionalization, we arrive at a demand for a kind of “radical authenticity” in Holocaust memoir that, as Agamben argues, carries the impossible and tautological burden of bearing witness to the gas chambers, an experience that one cannot survive. For Agamben, “ the value of testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; at its center, it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority.” (Agamben, 1999, p. 33) If then, one cannot bear witness to an event, such as being inside a gas chamber and survive it to write of it, the meaning of testimony has to be sought elsewhere. For Agamben, that meaning is to be found in the ethical decision to write of the (untranslatable) Muselmann, the state of simultaneous being human and non-human.
Let us return momentarily to Venuti’s claim with which I began this paper, namely that the potential for cultural disruption that the translated text possesses lies in its ability to “enable a process of self-recognition”. Now, Venuti here is arguing for a model of [re]cognition that stems from the German Romantics and has been most thoroughly examined in terms of translation studies by Antoine Berman in his work, L’épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique. [Paris: Gallimard, 1984] . Berman identifies in his work the twelve deforming tendencies of translation
Rationalisation,
Clarification,
Expansion,
Ennoblement,
Qualitative impoverishment,
Quantitative impoverishment,
the destruction of rhythms,
the destruction of underlying networks of signification,
the destruction of linguistic patternings,
the destruction of vernacular network or their exoticisation,
the destruction of expressions and idioms,
the effacement of the superimposition of languages
Of these tendencies, the ones that might prove to be of most conceptual use to the study of Holocaust memoir and translation are the “destruction of underlying networks of signification” and those deforming tendencies that deal directly with the inter-lingual translation as also an inter-semiotic one. For example, what would be the linguistic patternings of the source text, the vernacular network, expressions, idioms, the multi-layering of language in Holocaust memoir? In Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, the author makes frequent reference to the “Babel” of the carbide tower of the Buna works, built with its “Ziegel, briques, tegula, cegli, kamenny, mattoni, téglak”, (p. 73) the ziggurat of linguistic brickwork preserved in Stuart Wolf’s translation. German in the camps is a language of survival, English the language of potential liberation, signified by the grinning English POWs in their fur-lined jackets, clandestinely giving the extra-linguistic Victory sign as they pass the lines of slave workers.
But what must also evade deformation in translation is the untranslatable, the sign that cannot be deciphered, to which no equivalent may be found in any target language: the Muselmann. Again, avoiding the deformation of the loss of vernacular networks, Stuart Woolf lists the labels one could assume within the camp system, the “Organisator, Kombinator, Prominent” and if one cannot become one of these, one soon “becomes a musselman” (p. 89) Strangely, Woolf decides to attempt a translation of Muselmann and produces a deformed term—“musselman”, what is this, a collector of mussels? Not even using the lexical equivalent of the German term “Muselmann”=muslim, Woolf produces a neologism, perhaps to exoticize, to alienate, to make the reader stumble over the term. But, I would argue this is not satisfactory, which also seems to be Woolf’s judgment as he switches on the following page between his newly coined and deformed term and the German original.
The “Muselmann” provokes much discussion in both Holocaust literature and criticism. For Agamben, Levi’s account embodies the paradox of witnessing the “Muselmann” in that the ethical moment of Holocaust memoir comes in self-recognition of the witness in the human/non-human whose gaze has now become milky, whose skin has developed sores and whose body displays the edema of severe malnutrition: that gaze of self-recognition that produces the guilt of the survivor and the exhortation to witness. The subversive tendency of translation in this perversely Lacanian mirror-moment would then consist of a disruption of the radical anti-semitism of the Nazis that pro- and re-duces the human to the non-human, that translates the Jew into the “Muslim”, the “Muselmann.”[1] What is left, as an act of permanent restitution, in the sense of Steiner’s fourth hermeneutic motion, would then be to give the “drowned their story” to quote Primo Levi. The untranslatable “Muselmänner” of Auschwitz, etymology better left unknown, present themselves as “the anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.” (Primo Levy, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 90)
The ethical question that Agamben poses, and on a much wider cultural plateau that Venuti echoes, is how to bear testimony to “this inhuman impossibility of seeing.” (Agamben, p. 54) Is then what is recognized as the “tohu-bohu” of preconscious existence? The chaos of the existent world before God moved upon the waters? That state of non-being of which each of us is capable, that is beyond the ethical, the moral, the conscious? And what does that then make of the witness? Not only one who recognizes that this state is present in the other and the self, but also that the presence of this state radically disrupts the moral fabric of those who survive, of the world that continues on after the “non-death” of the Muselmann.
How, then, does the survivor “weiter leben”?
In 1992, Ruth Klüger published her Holocaust memoir, weiter leben. Wildly successful in Germany, selling over 250,000 copies and on the bestseller lists, the book actively engaged the German reader in an interrogation of the Nazi past. Immediately translated into Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, the book did not appear in English until 2001, after the death of Klüger’s mother. However, as Caroline Schaumann has pointed out, Klüger’s English Holocaust memoir was an act less of textual self-translation than a substantive cultural translation.[2] Schaumann has already painstakingly traced many of the linguistic and stylistic changes from the German version to the English and has linked the changes to specific events in the ensuing years after the appearance of the German volume. For example, Klüger’s mother dies, new facts arise as to the actual end of Klüger’s father (in fact from a reader of the German version), Klüger writes the English version in America and not in Germany. There are multiple places within the work where Klüger performs deformations à la Berman of either expansion or clarification, whether dealing with German terms, Jewish, or allusions to American parallels. Schaumann examines the comments made by the author that are specifically targeting her audience, either in Germany or in the US and comes to the conclusion that Klüger’s text is “the first Holocaust testimony devised as a specific dialogue with a culturally specific readership.” (p. 336) Putting the question of primacy aside, I would like to focus on one culturally specific change to the Holocaust memoir that caused Klüger to rewrite the whole work as an English memoir and not as a translation of a German memoir, bearing in mind Venuti’s claims for translation’s potential to form cultural identities.
Klüger was also in Auschwitz. The argot of the camp produced, from nowhere, the term “Muselmann” as referenced above in Levy’s work. In the German text of her memoir, Klüger writes of the importance of not giving up hope in order that one did not become like the Muselmann:
Es gibt eben außer der Hoffnungslosigkeit, die Mut macht und die Borowski über die Hoffnung stellte, noch die apathische Hoffnungslosigkeit, verkörpert in dem Phänomen “Muselmänner”, Menschen, denen der Selbsterhaltungswille im KZ abhanden gekommen war, und die nun wie Automaten reagierten, fast autistisch. Sie galten als verloren, kein Muselmann könne lang überleben, versichterte man mir. (weiter leben, p. 106)
Echoing Primo Levy, Klüger defines the Muselmann as the non-living, the autistic, non-communicative existent, soon to be memorialized in her “aalglatte[r] Kindervers” Der Kamin, which follows, transcribed from memory as the poet had in Auschwitz, of course, neither paper nor pencil.
In the English version, as though suddenly faced with the ontological paradox of translating the phenomenon of the Muselmann, Klüger omits the remembered children’s verse, and writes the following:
Maybe there are two types of despair, the kind that enables you to take risks, as Borowski thought, and which he held in higher esteem than hope, and then the kind of despair that makes you listless, sluggish, impassive. There was a type of prisoner who had given up, whose will to live had been destroyed, who acted and reacted as if sleepwalking. I don’t know the source of the moniker Muselmänner, Muslims, which was used to describe them, but no racial slur was implied, since Islam wasn’t an issue either for the Nazis or for the inmates of the camp. The Muselmänner were walking deadmen who wouldn’t live long, I was told. (Still Alive, p. 90)
Bearing in mind her politically sensitive American audience, Klüger removes the reference to autism, and performs a quantitive and qualitative deformation by substituting “listless, sluggish, impassive” (hardly a PC way out for the readers who knew the German as well as the English!). Faced with the “épreuve” of translation, of the foreign, Klüger (like other prisoners in Auschwitz) denies knowledge of the source of the term “Muselmann,” at the same time as she assures us of its non-racist intentions, removing from its conceptual grid the very irony commented on by others (Mansoor et al). Klüger’s American version has been deformed, with the destruction of the underlying networks of signification, of the vernacular network of the KZ and its idioms. Schumann has identified the places in the American text where Klüger has drawn sometimes uncomfortable parallels between the experience of anti-Semitism and American racism, places that she, Schaumann elevates to the status of a direct interrogation of the target audience. I would disagree. To return to Venuti: the phenomenon of racial discrimination may well be that which the target audience (of which Klüger herself has become one, as an American not German author) sees reflected in the translated text and recognizes as the reason the text speaks to them. But, the ethical moment of translation, is to endure the “épreuve” of the foreign, the gaze of the slave worker, the non-death of the Muselmann.
[2] Caroline Schaumann, “From weiter leben (1992) to Still Alive (2001): Ruth Klüger’s Cultural Translation of her “German Book” for an American Audience” in German Quarterly 77 (Summer 2004), pp. 324-339.
A Conversation with Anna Nitschmann, Eva Spangenberg, Martha Spangenberg, and Erdmuth von Zinzendorf
Moravian Archives, Bethlehem
February 13, 2018
Katherine Faull, Bucknell University
Introduction
Thank you for the invitation to talk this evening on the subject of Moravian women’s work and how it has been “hidden” in the records and from the eye of those who study labor history. I am going to talk tonight about the concept of “labor” in the colonial period of the Moravian Church, with a special focus on where women’s work was deemed to occur, how it was described and valued, and how in the historiography of the church this work has been described. I am going to look at the role that female leaders of the church played in defining what constitutes work in the church and how that contribution was later obscured.
The notion of concealed labor or hidden work is nothing new to scholars of gender and race where in the historiography of knowledge making and invention, the work of women and minorities has been regularly elided. One only needs to look at the history of discoveries in the field of science to repeatedly come across the trope/meme of the white male scientist working with a lab team that is remarkably male and white in a Nobel Prize winning discovery. See, for example, the discovery of the structure of DNA at the Cavendish laboratories at Cambridge University in 1953, credited to James Watson and Frances Crick which in their own relations of the discovery, hid the contributions of Rosalind Franklin’s earlier research into the crystallography . Or the case of the discovery of the Epstein-Barr virus that can lead to lymphoma also leaps to mind, where the hours of work done by both microbiologist Yvonne Barr and Trinidadian electron microscopist Burt Achong in the laboratory also go without recognition.
Within Moravian historiography the contributions of Zinzendorf’s first wife, Erdmuthe Dorothea, have certainly been recognized, probably a product of her class position coming from the nobility. Her contribution to the history of Pietism is investigated in the thoroughly researched, if dated, work of Wilhelm Jannasch. This 1915 biography of the Countess tells the story of her life, marriage with Zinzendorf, her mostly hands off approach to the establishment of the early Gemeine, her willingness for numbers of the Moravian exiles to be employed in her household, her gradual assumption of a working role in the leadership of the congregation, her growing role in the financial management of the church, her assumption of fiscal leadership during the time of Zinzendorf’s exile from Saxony, her assumption of leadership during his time in America, with the travels to London, Denmark, and the Baltic states and then her withdrawal, as Jannasch terms it, upon his return and the ascension of Anna Nitschmann to the role of “Mutter” in the church. etc. Although Jannasch’s work has been more recently supplemented by the appearance of Erika Geiger’s short volume (translated by Julie Tomberlin Weber) it is heavily derivative of the earlier work.
Of far more significance to the revised appraisal of the Countess’s work is the scholarly focus on the correspondence networks and the importance of the Reuss family that is being carried out in the University of Jena by Martin Prell; and also the research being carried out on the Countess’ and Benigna von Watteville’s correspondence, performed by Marita Gruner at the University of Greifswald.
Erdmuthe von Zinzendorf’s willingness to open her household to the members of the fledgling community directly benefited the three other leading women of the early Church I am discussing today. Best known is her support of Anna Nitschmann, who was employed in the Zinzendorf household as a servant and errand girl and then as companion to Benigna von Zinzendorf with whom she later travelled to America. At the same time as Anna Nitschmann is in the Berthelsdorf household, both of Spangenberg’s future wives are also in the fledgling Herrnhut community. Eva Immig, as she was then, was already widowed, was employed as nursemaid to Christian Renatus, and was counted among the first “Laboresses” of the community among the widows. Like Anna, Martha Spangenberg (or Miksch as she was then) came into the service of the Zinzendorf family in 1727. It is interesting to imagine all four of these leading women in the Moravian church living and /or working under one roof in the late 1720s.
As I have outlined in several of my other lectures in Bethlehem last year, evidence of Anna Nitschmann’s work was, after 1760, deliberately hidden by destroying records that pertained to her central role in the leadership and development of the church. Anna’s work consisted of both labor in a material and spiritual sense.
In a series of miniatures, presented to Anna to celebrate her 30 years as Eldress to the Gemeine, Anna is depicted as spinning while also receiving the visitation of several leading male theologians of the time. As I discussed in my Zug lecture, this trope is significant as a representation of the intersection of both material and spiritual realms of work. The image of Anna receiving the two prominent churchmen at the spinning wheel and in front of the floor loom encapsulates the idea, promoted by Zinzendorf, that the choir houses were the workshops of the divine. In the SS choir houses the spinning and weaving of cloth were two of the most prevalent economic and artisanal activities. I would also argue that in addition to producing vital goods (and income) for the Gemeine and the Choir, spinning and weaving as traditional tropes of women’s wisdom, also were imbued with spiritual worth.
Is this idea put into practice within the congregation? Let us turn to Spangenberg’s first wife, Eva Maria. Maria, as she known within the Gemeine, had been born in Dresden and married her first husband Dr. Christoph Immig, a lawyer, before coming to Herrnhut in 1727. They had two children, one of whom “went astray” and the other died. Eva Maria was one of the first 12 Laborers in the new community and then became the nursemaid to Zinzendorf’s son, Christian Renatus. When her first husband died at the age of 77, Eva Maria became the Pflegerin of the Widows Choir for 12 years. During Zinzendorf’s exile Saxony she became the Vorsteherin of the whole Gemeine, assisting Martin Dober for two years. In 1739, she left Herrnhut and went to Wetteravia, where she married Spangenberg in 1740.
Alongside Spangenberg, she was central to the foundation of the Moravian congregations in London and Yorkshire, and worked extensively in England and then in America where she was General-Ältestin from 1744-1749. According to her memoir, which was written by Spangenberg, she was much loved among the mission populations in America, and in the mission diaries and travel journals, Spangenberg is repeatedly asked by members of the Iroquois and Delaware nations alike, where his wife is and how she is doing. When Eva Maria and Spangenberg left Bethlehem in October 1749, the Brothers and Sisters bathed the streets in tears (to quote from her Ll). Eva Maria died in 1751 in Herrnhuth. Before she died, her lost child, the daughter, came back to her and tended to her in her final illness. She was in her 55th year.
So what would have made Eva Maria so beloved to the Bethlehem congregation (although there are signs that this was perhaps not such a universal emotion)?
The Spangenbergs arrived in America in October 1744 and came straight to Bethlehem. Anna Nitschmann had left at the turn of year 1742-3, so the memory of her work at the Forks of the Delaware was still strong, and had been regularly kept alive by the reading of her letters from London and Yorkshire. According to the Bethlehem Diary for 1744, Eva Maria immediately travels to Shekomecko (following in the footsteps of Anna) and celebrates a Love feast with the mission workers (the Büttners and Macks) with rolls and chocolate (which we presume she had brought with her from Bethlehem/New York). Upon her return to Bethlehem on December 2, Eva Maria conducts her first Married Sisters ¼ hour service, and then a blessing for pregnant sisters and nursing sisters, and finally a ¼ hour service for the German and English sisters in Bethlehem. Eva Maria’s work also includes conducting the Speakings for the sisters (of all marital status’), leading Lovefeasts for the children, married sisters, and widows.
All of this is quite expected for a woman leader in the Moravian church at that time. However, Maria also conducts Lovefeasts for specific groups of women workers. Sisters who work in the laundry, or who spin, or weave, or knit, or sew also have a lovefeast dedicated to them respectively, and this appears to have been Maria’s own idea. In Oerter’s translation of the 1745 diary he states, “Mary made some orders and regulations for the Sisters spinning wool, cotton, flax and tow.” (Jan. 4 1745) At these lovefeasts for the different forms of women’s work, Maria apparently speaks so powerfully that the Sisters’ production is significantly increased (for example, on January 29 1745 50 sisters at a spinners lovefeast produced record amounts of yarn and also volunteered to strip feathers for the beds of the newborn).
Putting to one side the resonant echoes of Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber’s appraisal of the Moravians economic activity, (Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) for one moment, I would like to think about the spiritualization of women’s work not in terms of how to produce more for the community but as a foregrounding of the work that the SIsters did. This work, noted in the Diary, is seen as a form of “Gottesdienst”, a service to God and is valued as essential to the mission of the whole community as spiritual work as well as encouraging the ethic of production.
Does this concept of women’s work operate outside the choirhouses? What effect does it have on the missions, for example? I would now like to draw on the manuscript material that informs my work on the Shamokin mission diary. Shamokin, on the forks of the Susquehanna River, was a strategically important point for Native Americans, colonial agents and traders, and Moravians alike. Zinzendorf, Anna Nitschmann, Benigna, and Spangenberg had all visited this place, not least to foster a relationship with Shikellamy, the vice-regent of the Six Nations.
In a conference held at the confluence of the North and West Branches of the Susquehanna River in August 1747, the Moravian married couples, Nathaniel and Anna Hagen and Anton and Catharine Schmidt sat down to discuss how the blacksmith’s shop that was to be established there was to be run. The first article on the agenda that had been drawn up by Spangenberg was the stipulation that “When the Indians bring something for our Sisters to sew, they will accept it with thanks, and willingness and require nothing as payment.”FOOTNOTE: Footnote Five months later, when they were joined by the married couple Joseph and Martha Powell, this same topic appeared as the first item of business in their conference. The Sisters were to accept sewing from the Indians and require nothing in return.
While this might seem like a small incidental detail in the larger artisan economy of the Pennsylvania Backcountry, I would argue that the work and skills of the Moravian Married Sisters who came with their husbands to the “frontier” country of Pennsylvania in the first half of the eighteenth century were central to the Moravian and Native American understanding of how an exchange of services and goods, whether it be sewing, blacksmithing, shoe or mocassin making, grinding corn and baking could take place. The Married Sisters’ participation in an artisan economy both extends the previous notion of “women’s work” that I have outlined and also challenges the long held notion that women’s role in this early settlement period was primarily as part of the “household economy,” in which women were employed in the raising of crops, production of food and clothing, within an autarkic economy of the settlers’ log home.
Because of the Moravian notion of the “marriage militant,” many of these Brothers took their Sisters (wives) with them into the mission field to work with the female indigenous populations . However, the Moravian mission in Shamokin, Pennsylvania (1747-55) was not set up as a mission village but rather as a blacksmith’s shop to serve the Iroquois and their protected tribes, the Delaware, Tutelo, Conoy, and Shawnee. The Moravian smithy at Shamokin was established because of its usefulness to the Six Nations, and, as such, its existence at the confluence of the North and West Branches of the Susquehanna River, the intersection of eleven Indian paths, offers an interesting and anomalous microstudy of the artisan in the backcountry.
Shikellamy was quite explicit in his expectations of how the smithy would be run. In a slightly earlier conference with Brother Martin Mack in April of 1747 held at Shamokin, the Oneida chief and emissary of the Five Nations, stipulated that the work done at the smith for the Five Nations should be done for free when the Iroquois are travelling down river to war with the Catawba. He stated explicitly, “I desire, T’girketonti (Spangenberg’s Iroquois name) my brother, that when something is done to their flints that it is done for free, because they have nothing with which to pay. However, when they return, and they have something done, then they would have to pay for it.”FOOTNOTE: Footnote
In August 1747, at the conference held at Shamokin to set down the conditions of the establishment of the smithy there Spangenberg prescribed that the Moravians were to maintain themselves there “auf Indianisch Art.” That meant that only the Three Sisters (beans, corn, squash) could be planted, no wheat, rye, or oats, and nothing that would make the place seem like a European plantation. All accounts were to be held by Brother Hagen or Joseph Powell; the blacksmith Anton Schmidt had to meet with him at the end of every day and go through the transactions of the day. The price of services had to be set so that one Indian does not get charged more than another, and the accounts were then sent on to the Sozietät für die Heyden (the Society for the Heathen), that paid for the blacksmith’s supplies.
At the Confluence, there was also the presence and agency of the Moravian sisters. In the literature on Moravian artisans and missionaries there is plenty of discussion of the role the men played in the development of settlements, a rural economy that goes beyond that of exchange, but almost no mention of what their wives were doing, what kind of work did they have and did it contribute to this rural economy? While the literature on Moravian missions is large, the multiple challenges and opportunities for cross-cultural trade and knowledge transfer that the Moravian sisters enjoyed, has only recently become the focus of study for historians such as Jane Merritt, Amy Schutt, Gunlög Fur, Rachel Wheeler, and Alison Duncan Hirsch.FOOTNOTE: Footnote In the Shamokin Diary we find evidence of Native, métis and Euro American women’s involvement in trade, care, and mission on an intimate level. Despite the dearth of official records of women’s activities, speech, and agency, from mission diaries we are able to delineate women’s experience as moving beyond the traditional notion of them as refugees for financial, religious, or ethnic reasons or as silent companions of fathers, husbands, masters, or maybe brothers. In Merritt’s discussions of Anna Mack, Anna Smith, and Rowena McClinton’s studies of Moravian women’s mission to the Cherokee women, and Alison Duncan Hirsch’s study of some of the women around the Susquehanna Confluence, the discussion focuses on women and cross-cultural communication, the inter-relation of religious concepts, notions of gender, and medical and pastoral concepts of the body.
Based on evidence from the Moravian mission diary from Shamokin I argue that there existed an artisan economy of sorts in which the skills of both the brothers and the sisters were sought after and exchanged with the Native American and Euro-American population. From the archival records, it is clear that the Married Sisters participated in an exchange economy, where sewing skills, for example, were vital in order to receive gifts of food and medicine from the local Native population. Married Sisters were central to the mission both because of their knowledge of Native American languages, their ability to communicate with the Native women around the blacksmith’s shop, and also because of their own artisanal skills, such as sewing and baking. These skills brought them into an economy of trade and also knowledge.
So how might this relate to the lovefeasts for the knitters, spinners, weavers, and launderers? In her 1995 book on artisans on the North Carolina backcountry, Johanna Miller Lewis argues (somewhat controversially) that women who practiced traditionally female skills such as spinning, sewing, weaving, or knitting for profit commonly have not been classified as artisans by historians.”FOOTNOTE: Footnote Miller Lewis ascribes this to the fact that women did not receive the same training as male artisans, and if they did, it was within the home, invisible to the historical record of craftsmen’s books, journeymen’s passes, and guild records. Furthermore, many historians considered women’s artisanal skills as “merely” part of the housewife’s duties and therefore not an income-generating skill. However, recent studies of rural populations in, for example, Ireland during the Great Potato Famine, have shown that women’s skills were central to the survival of rural populations in times of crisis and famine (Irish famine and women lace makers, for example). Challenging the dominant notion of the “household economy” that has held sway over early modern economic history and its autarkic self-sufficiency, Miller Lewis argues for a more nuanced understanding of women’s participation in a backcountry economy where their skills in textile production and repair was also key to the survival of the family and also the community.FOOTNOTE: Footnote I would like to argue that what is presented as a paradigm for women’s work in the image of Anna Nitschmann spinning as she receives the eminent theologians, and in Maria’s institution of lovefeasts celebrating the work of women, provided many of the Married Sisters at Shamokin (and elsewhere) with precisely the model of work as Gottesdienst that women outside the Moravian church might have received within the household economy. The difference in the Moravian training was that women’s artisanal skills were taught not for the benefit of a more nuclear “household,” but rather for the larger “oikos” of the mission settlement; and, as such, these skills were both a form of women’s spiritual knowledge and income generating.
So, how crucial were the women’s contributions to this artisan economy? Did the sewing, the baking, the interpreting and negotiating help the mission in Shamokin?
Towards the end of the existence of the mission at Shamokin, the picture of the place has changed. The Moravians now have livestock, cows and calves, and are thinking about getting a bull. A new mission house has been built further from the river and closer to a spring. Letters between Shamokin and Bethlehem talk of the need for sugar and tea (for the Moravian Lovefeasts), of wine and bread for communion; new trousers and shirts; the skins received in payment (racoon and deer) are being transported back to Bethlehem through intermediaries, such as Michael Schäffer, a shoemaker who lives 5 miles down the Tulpehocken Path.
The Married Sisters have gone. The mission has become a plantation, it services the flints of the traders and white settlers and its original purpose has been lost. Spangenberg wonders if they shouldn’t just shut up shop, sell the house and its contents that are no longer needed to Conrad Weiser, slaughter the livestock and sell the meat.
The end of the Shamokin mission almost coincides with the arrival of Martha Spangenberg in America. In the little literature that exists on her, scholars such as Beverly Smaby and Hartmut Lehmann concur that she understood “women’s work” in a very different manner than her husband’s first wife. Where Eva Maria was seen as a leader, much after the model of Anna Nitschmann and Erdmuthe von Zinzendorf, Martha is described as quiet and staying in Spangenberg’s shadow.
Martha Elisabeth Spangenberg was born in 1708 in Berthelsdorf and came into the service of Benigna von Zinzendorf 1727. In 1730 she married Mattheus Miksch and they had two children. In 1733 Mattheus was sent to St. Croix as one of the first missionaries there but Martha was very reluctant to go and preferred to stay behind with their two children in the congregation in Herrnhut. When Mattheus died in St. Croix in 1734 Martha moves into the Widow’s House as their Laboress for sixteen years until in 1750 she is called to London in 1750 to work with the widows there. Then in 1752 it is suggested that she marry Spangenberg. Martha is initially reluctant because she is very happy living and working with the widows. However, she finally agrees and in 1754 proceeds to work with him in North America. As Craig Atwood has outlined in his article on Spangenberg in colonial America, Martha and Joseph worked here to stabilize and consolidate the community’s affairs through the difficulties of the French and Indian War and after the deaths of Zinzendorf and Anna, the dismantling of the General Economy. They return to Europe via Philadelphia in 1762.
As I have argued in the introduction to my recent translation of the Instructions to the Choir Helpers, it is clear that Martha worked with her husband in the composition of the Instructions for the Single, Married, and Widowed Sisters. In 1764, she is one of the Sisters who is given the task of discussing women’s issues in the synod when they come up. However, Martha’s work with her husband appears to have not always been so welcome to the sisters. For example, in 1771 after the Spangenbergs have returned to Herrnhut, the Single Sisters write a letter to the Unity Elders Conference complaining that Brother Spangenberg and Martha are conducting the monthly Speakings with them rather than their Choir Helpers. Although I need to examine the archival record still to unearth more of Martha’s work, it is already clear from the Instructions and then this letter, that it consisted in implementing the Choir Principles and Instructions that she and her husband were formulating. At the close of her wonderful article on Female Piety in Bethlehem, Beverly Smaby makes the point that the dismantling of women’s power and valued work as spiritual leaders was the work of Spangenberg, and that if it was a man, Zinzendorf, who gave women this power, it was also a man, Spangenberg, who took it away. I would refine this claim somewhat and argue that the positive and vital value ascribed to women’s spiritual and material work was modeled and encouraged by Erdmuthe von Zinzendorf and followed by a multitude of extraordinarily talented women and also integrated into the economic and spiritual economy of the congregations and missions. And it is also a woman who helps to redefine what women’s work should consist of after Anna Nitschmann’s and Erdmuthe’s deaths, and that seems to be Martha Spangenberg.
This 1752 document, however, described Froehlich’s visit to the enslaved Africans of New Jersey and New York, a subject that within Moravian studies has hardly been touched at all. Where there are studies of race and religion, they are of the South and rarely mention the populations of Africans living in the mid-Atlantic. Froehlich’s first stop on his journey is to the “Eisen Schmelze” or iron foundry near Bethlehem, the Durham furnace, owned by Mr Wiliam Allen. H
Moravian Studies and Digital Thinking and Praxis 