The Salzburger Saga: Religious Exiles and Other Germans Along the Savannah

by George Fenwick Jones

256pp. dustjacket. New 4,426 entry Subject & Every Name Index by Picton Press. 1997 (1983) #1779 $24.50 In 1734 several hundred Lutherans who had been expelled from Salzburg (now Austria) arrived in colonial Georgia. Here they became some of Georgia's earliest, most extraordinary, and most industrious settlers. Dr. Jones' book details the daily lives of the settlers, masterfully mixing lively accounting of individual settlers with much dryer appendices which name all of the settlers and the ships in which they came. This classic source for early southern research has been out of print for some time, and is brought back into print here by Picton Press with a new exhaustive index.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1984

Reviews

[Kristopher Swinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naturally, I enjoyed reading about my ancestors, particularly as some earned specific mention (27, 49, 89, 94, 96, and so on). I suppose its high rating is largely a product of my own, er, genetic (and otherwise)interest in the tale. Walker's separately published treatment of the Prussian branch was thus terrifically irrelevant to me.

This voluminous research (utilizing things not known, available, or understood until recent decades) paints a bold picture of Salzburger history. I had little difficulty in my mind's eye reviewing their more or less continuous suppression, punctuated by violence, culminating in their expulsion that was even illegal by the Treaty of Westphalia's broad grant of secular control over subjects. Typical of such religious persecution, those given leave to sell their property had no time to sell profitably on the bloated market, and the poorest suffered and even died in a snowstorm (7). Upon reminder that October 31 was the day of Emigrationspatent (Edict of Expulsion), I believe that from now on I'll commemorate their exodus instead of ALL the usual pagan rubbish. ;-)

These sober and industrious people, a character attested to by a multiplicity of contemporaries, like the Huguenots a generation or so before, looked to England as their benefactor. In fact, they obtained natural citizenship far more easily (13). Also like the Huguenots, even as an actively persecuted minority, they had seen to their children's education:

[They:] had been able to learn the articles of their faith only from their parents, visiting merchants, and journeymen, and smuggled Lutheran theological and inspirational texts; yet rigorous examinations of the exiles usually proved them amazingly well acquainted with the tenets of the Augsburg Confession (5; see 37, 53)

This reminds me of another quotation, about the Huguenots, as already suggested:

Parents efficiently corrected at home any Catholic "error" that their children had learned at school. Elie Marion, one of the leaders of the early eighteenth-century Huguenot rebellion of the Cevennes, wrote about "the secret teaching that [he:] received from [his:] father and mother" that fueled his "aversion for idolatry and the errors of popery." (Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina [Columbia, South: The University of South Carolina Press, 2006], 53-54)

Jones is eminently readable and brought professionalism to the field,
which has greatly improved this generation's approach to Salzburger
history. For a shining example, I appreciate his careful distinction among the many groups that blended into one, i.e.:

Many of the Savannah Germans asked Boltzius to have them moved to Ebenezer, and sometimes this could be done, with the result that the Palatines at Ebenezer eventually outnumbered the Salzburgers. Nevertheless, by that time they had so intermarried with the older settlers and had so well adopted their pious ways that they were indistinguishable from them and were included in the term Salzburger. Today, most of the descendants of these Ebenezer Palatines are also descended on one or more lines from the actual Salzburgers, and no distinction is made, even if a family's patrilineal surname derives from the Palatinate. (44-45)

Genau! Exactly! My grandfather went to his grave convinced that the Waldhours, his mother's family, were Salzburgers from Salzburg. We are descended from a more than adequate number of actual Salzburger lines, but the Waldhauers/Walthauers themselves were Palatines just as described above.

One may admire Jones' balanced look at Strobel's initial efforts, with his supercession of Mauelshagen's generous bridging of the European/Georgian gap that nonetheless partook of the overly romanticized view. The manner in which he identifies dialectical issues and tackles Voigt's deficiencies with family names (I'd already disproven a fatal misread on one of my forebears) shows just what a
contributory genius he was for the Salzburgers' descendants.

Much as he did for genealogical efforts, one might wish he had done more than compile a better version of the usual "inhabitants of benezer" list. His passing mention that Johann Flerl married Anna Maria Hopflinger while passing through Frankfurt has left me wondering for nearly ten years just which source documents it better. Would that he had been unafraid to allow such things to be "documented with footnotes, . . . resulting . . . [in:] a dissertation" (xi). For instance, he also left me hanging with, "Of all these new arrivals [Swabians from the vicinity of Ulm:], Boltzius commented most favorably about the Heinles" (97), so I looked up these ancestors in Volume 15 of the Detailed Reports (62, 125-126):

In Heinle and his wife we have right loyal servants at the mill, of which we would like to have many. They love God's word and are glad to be at our place. She told me that her oldest son . . . told her that he liked being in Ebenezer. He likes the solitude and the good opportunity to hear the word of God, which other young people might sometimes consider a yoke. . . .

Johann Heinle, a married and industrious [indentured:] servant of the
former transport from the territory of Ulm, has died after a long and
hard sickness.

At any rate, I greatly appreciated his treatment of all the intervening history through the American Revolution--including their enlistment, in spite of what Jones described as little reason to rebel (126)--and slightly beyond. The now-extinct community is brought to life through their creation of an economic independence envied by all around them, in the midst of the wilderness. Theirs is the admirable battle to hold off the introduction of slavery to the colony, with Boltzius adducing moral reasons in addition to economic. Their orphanage, church, gristmill, productivity in silk culture, etc. were among the foremost achievements of early Georgia. They even displayed a remarkable ability to commit someone's past misdeeds to oblivion in reintegration (65). But Jones is true to his purpose in not only painting a rosy picture. With the Triebner/Rabenhorst factions, we see the seeds of communal destruction. (I still can't understand how my ancestors on different sides of that equation married their children to each other.)

[William Nilsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great source of information for genealogical or religious minded history buffs.