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The Letters of Johann Martin Boltzius, Lutheran Pastor in Ebenezer, Georgia: German Pietism in Colonial America, Book 1 and Book 2
The letters rovide commentary and insight on religious, economic, political and social matters that extended beyond Ebenezer to include the rest of Georgia, the religious life of other religious communities in the American South and Pennsylvania.
900 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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October 11, 2013
There are few dearer topics of study for me than the writings of pastor to so many of my ancestors. These nearly 800 pages across two books didn’t differ too markedly from his Detailed Reports volumes, even the expurgated ones published in Europe, making for consistency and directness of report, whether publicly or more confidentially. If he disapproved of someone’s conduct, he said so, while his approval of, and affection for, the majority of Salzburgers ran sincerely and deeply. His initial warmth (http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/90476... and http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/90476..., for two expressions) was undiminished in what he said was presumably his last letter and proved so: “Oh, how I will be cheered when I know by sight in the house of the Father my dearest Herr Court Chaplain and loving benefactors for 32 years and will be able to praise with a radiant voice the great God next to them and the entire believing and blessed band of the children of God prepared in Ebenezer for everything that so abundantly befell us through your service, intercession, and instructive and comforting letters.”
Hence, the main difference with the letters lay in a tendency for more minutiae. He was a very proper man and, true to his relation that disorder and ingratitude were the two sins he detested most, he often thanked those he wrote for their “fatherly” oversight and patience with him. He clearly believed in the work in which they were all engaged, without reservation, and it’s all the more remarkable that the Francke Foundation’s network of preaching extended to Prussia, American Georgia, and India with regular contacts and a more cosmopolitan outlook than is generally supposed.
An insular nature to the community against the frontier colonial manners persisted, though the compiler copied George Fenwick Jones’ observation that the retention of German language service up to 1824 went on too long, so that in a steady drift to other churches, “one Ebenezer pastor is purported to have boasted sadly that the Lutheran church at Ebenezer had produced many of the most outstanding Methodists and Baptists in Georgia.” Boltzius often wrote of his zeal to retain the fire of faith in the rising generation, who could little please him better than when, as young as 3 years old (as one ancestor did), they recited scriptural verses or sang hymns for his benefit. He struck a sad note in his final year, anticipating that “another [kind of] generation is beginning to grow up among us . . . . The old, upright Salzburgers are gradually going home in the heavenly fatherland, and God will also, because of advancing age and various noticeable (although so far completely bearable) infirmities, soon with grace take me to Himself in Heaven from this vale of tears!”
I’ll have to revise some of my considerations on the learnedness of one ancestor (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hans-Fl...) after finding Boltzius’ elaboration, “The enclosed letter was written to Your Reverence by a righteous Salzburger to whom the Lord also bestowed a blessing from your worthy letter to the community. He sincerely loves the work of the Lord in Halle and in East India, and since he is a diligent and faithful person of prayer, he diligently keeps them in mind before God’s throne of mercy. Please pardon his simple and poor manner of writing.” To his credit, this ancestor was also mentioned to Boltzius’ relief in 1755 as among the 4 newly appointed justices of the peace to impose communal order, and I don’t know how directly it may have applied to him later in a long succession of posts to schoolteacher when Boltzius indicated that most candidates would never have qualified back in the Fatherland.
I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to the level of literacy in Ebenezer. Whereas some Salzburgers are described as practically unlettered, elsewhere he places a great difference between understanding text and being able to write. Hymnals were distributed to every resident, as well as an enormous volume of religious tracts about which they conversed constantly, and even lent out to others as far away as South Carolina. It may be that Boltzius himself was at the pinnacle of education, freely conversant in Latin and Greek, and not knowing English at the time of voyaging from the continent to London to first settle in Ebenezer, but quite soon thereafter having picked up enough to become the continual representative with authorities in Savannah, to the extent that they asked him to write a few books in English. At one point, he mentioned a passing interest in learning Creek and Cherokee to help minister to the Indians. No common pastor was necessary for the solidarity of the Salzburger community, as the beliefs for which they’d been exiled were sustained in a climate of literary exchange (not least shown in the recent ancestral account found taken down by Boltzius in his Daily Reports, at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/90409...). Mack Walker describes their origins: “Books were almost a tribal totem of the mountain peasant culture, related to the family and Gut household as organic principles of the society: devotional books, designed for religious exercise where there was no priest, and thus mainly Protestant books. . . . Efforts to suppress the important of books had led to a lively smuggling trade. . . . The market was there, ‘because,’ according to a 1722 report from Austrian Carinthia next door, ‘just about every inhabitant here can read and many can write, but they never learned or allow [their children] to learn reading and writing in the towns and markets, for fear of the [Catholic] religious instruction and catechizing that would go with it there, but rather from a local schoolmaster or very often from a peasant, where in wintertime especially even the farmhands and maidservants come together for this, and take such instructions with no other purpose, than to read and to understand the old or newly arrived Lutheran book.’ . . . Literacy was widespread among women; a striking number—at a guess, perhaps a third—of the (male) peasants who were examined on account of book possession or literacy, these conditions becoming prima facie evidence of Protestant heresy, testified that they had learned to read from a female relative or housemistress. They hoarded books that might have been found in the library of a burgher family in the German north: Arndt’s Wahres Christentum and Paradiesgartlein, Habermann’s Gebetbuch . . . and Lutheran catechisms and hymnals. One family was found to own eighty-six devotional books in the spring of 1731, eighty of them Protestant and six Catholic (an exceptionally large collection, to be sure), about a quarter of them published before 1555, close to half before 1648, the rest since the Thirty Years’ War.” This comports with what I just read in Karl Friedrich Dobel’s Kurze Geschichte der Auswanderung der evangelischen Salzburger (20) : “Sie hatten theils die Bibel, theils Luthers Katechismus und einige andere evangelische Bücher von ihren Vorfahren geerbt, aus welchen sie von ihren Aeltern unterrichtet worden waren.”
While the rusticity in manners, speech, and dress of the Salzburgers had provoked some of the ridicule in Europe after expulsion, their simplicity was more by desire and design than fact. (They were expelled from the mountainous districts, not the city proper.) The same as with my mountainous Cevennes ancestors persecuted for Protestantism, these folks had ATTITUDE. I love recounting how, if they’d descended into town at the time of a Catholic festival, some would shout, “We’re Lutheran!” Also, that when one priest and a small troop of soldiers went to a tavern to apprehend citizens accused of Lutheranism, they were thrust out, the doors locked, and they overheard Lutheran hymns lustily bawled out the windows. In one letter, Boltzius lists individuals still in sundry German cities who were requested to join relatives, whom he deemed trustworthy, in Ebenezer; I found a heretofore unknown sister to one ancestor, and they share surname with a fellow whom Walker mentions had been brought in for questioning and informed it was for slandering a church official. He just said, “Well, then, [I] must have been drunk at the time.” Another compatriot is described with this beloved, closing passage from Walker:
Hans Reinpacher, of Gut Tauerlechen, same district, was confronted with a copy of Habermann’s Prayerbook, . . . which had been found on his premises.
What was it doing there?
Why, it had always been there, and Reinpacher didn’t know there was anything wrong with it.
If you didn’t know anything was wrong with it, then, why did you hide it under the stable floor?
Well, I didn’t hide it there, I just left it there.
Why didn’t you tell the inquisitors about it?
Well, I’m too simple. . . .
It was apparent, then and now, that the mountain folk knew how to talk like Catholics (or like simpletons) in examinations, but they did not act like Catholics: they did not regularly attend church or take communion, for example. Sulkiness, indifference, and erroneous notions persisted, examiners found, behind the calculated verbal screen of conformity. . . .
One new element that seems to have caused peculiar irritation was the introduction of the englischer Gruss, the “angelic salutation,” wherein every believer was to use the greeting gelobt sei Jesus Christus, “Jesus Christ be praised,” to which the proper response was in Ewigkeit, “in eternity,” Amen. Pope Benedict XIII had ordained this practice in 1728 and it carried a hundred days’ indulgence, thereby tripping signals that had marked the Lutheran revolt two hundred years before. Mountain men found it especially discomforting, tinged with sacrilege, to take Christ’s name in vain. . . . The angelic salutation went beyond a submission to official conformity, to conformity of conscience. Presumably it was meant to do so. [For contemporary likening, see the recent http://www.facebook.com/kristopher.sw..., and the highly timely http://www.facebook.com/SupportReligi....]
Hence, the main difference with the letters lay in a tendency for more minutiae. He was a very proper man and, true to his relation that disorder and ingratitude were the two sins he detested most, he often thanked those he wrote for their “fatherly” oversight and patience with him. He clearly believed in the work in which they were all engaged, without reservation, and it’s all the more remarkable that the Francke Foundation’s network of preaching extended to Prussia, American Georgia, and India with regular contacts and a more cosmopolitan outlook than is generally supposed.
An insular nature to the community against the frontier colonial manners persisted, though the compiler copied George Fenwick Jones’ observation that the retention of German language service up to 1824 went on too long, so that in a steady drift to other churches, “one Ebenezer pastor is purported to have boasted sadly that the Lutheran church at Ebenezer had produced many of the most outstanding Methodists and Baptists in Georgia.” Boltzius often wrote of his zeal to retain the fire of faith in the rising generation, who could little please him better than when, as young as 3 years old (as one ancestor did), they recited scriptural verses or sang hymns for his benefit. He struck a sad note in his final year, anticipating that “another [kind of] generation is beginning to grow up among us . . . . The old, upright Salzburgers are gradually going home in the heavenly fatherland, and God will also, because of advancing age and various noticeable (although so far completely bearable) infirmities, soon with grace take me to Himself in Heaven from this vale of tears!”
I’ll have to revise some of my considerations on the learnedness of one ancestor (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hans-Fl...) after finding Boltzius’ elaboration, “The enclosed letter was written to Your Reverence by a righteous Salzburger to whom the Lord also bestowed a blessing from your worthy letter to the community. He sincerely loves the work of the Lord in Halle and in East India, and since he is a diligent and faithful person of prayer, he diligently keeps them in mind before God’s throne of mercy. Please pardon his simple and poor manner of writing.” To his credit, this ancestor was also mentioned to Boltzius’ relief in 1755 as among the 4 newly appointed justices of the peace to impose communal order, and I don’t know how directly it may have applied to him later in a long succession of posts to schoolteacher when Boltzius indicated that most candidates would never have qualified back in the Fatherland.
I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to the level of literacy in Ebenezer. Whereas some Salzburgers are described as practically unlettered, elsewhere he places a great difference between understanding text and being able to write. Hymnals were distributed to every resident, as well as an enormous volume of religious tracts about which they conversed constantly, and even lent out to others as far away as South Carolina. It may be that Boltzius himself was at the pinnacle of education, freely conversant in Latin and Greek, and not knowing English at the time of voyaging from the continent to London to first settle in Ebenezer, but quite soon thereafter having picked up enough to become the continual representative with authorities in Savannah, to the extent that they asked him to write a few books in English. At one point, he mentioned a passing interest in learning Creek and Cherokee to help minister to the Indians. No common pastor was necessary for the solidarity of the Salzburger community, as the beliefs for which they’d been exiled were sustained in a climate of literary exchange (not least shown in the recent ancestral account found taken down by Boltzius in his Daily Reports, at http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/90409...). Mack Walker describes their origins: “Books were almost a tribal totem of the mountain peasant culture, related to the family and Gut household as organic principles of the society: devotional books, designed for religious exercise where there was no priest, and thus mainly Protestant books. . . . Efforts to suppress the important of books had led to a lively smuggling trade. . . . The market was there, ‘because,’ according to a 1722 report from Austrian Carinthia next door, ‘just about every inhabitant here can read and many can write, but they never learned or allow [their children] to learn reading and writing in the towns and markets, for fear of the [Catholic] religious instruction and catechizing that would go with it there, but rather from a local schoolmaster or very often from a peasant, where in wintertime especially even the farmhands and maidservants come together for this, and take such instructions with no other purpose, than to read and to understand the old or newly arrived Lutheran book.’ . . . Literacy was widespread among women; a striking number—at a guess, perhaps a third—of the (male) peasants who were examined on account of book possession or literacy, these conditions becoming prima facie evidence of Protestant heresy, testified that they had learned to read from a female relative or housemistress. They hoarded books that might have been found in the library of a burgher family in the German north: Arndt’s Wahres Christentum and Paradiesgartlein, Habermann’s Gebetbuch . . . and Lutheran catechisms and hymnals. One family was found to own eighty-six devotional books in the spring of 1731, eighty of them Protestant and six Catholic (an exceptionally large collection, to be sure), about a quarter of them published before 1555, close to half before 1648, the rest since the Thirty Years’ War.” This comports with what I just read in Karl Friedrich Dobel’s Kurze Geschichte der Auswanderung der evangelischen Salzburger (20) : “Sie hatten theils die Bibel, theils Luthers Katechismus und einige andere evangelische Bücher von ihren Vorfahren geerbt, aus welchen sie von ihren Aeltern unterrichtet worden waren.”
While the rusticity in manners, speech, and dress of the Salzburgers had provoked some of the ridicule in Europe after expulsion, their simplicity was more by desire and design than fact. (They were expelled from the mountainous districts, not the city proper.) The same as with my mountainous Cevennes ancestors persecuted for Protestantism, these folks had ATTITUDE. I love recounting how, if they’d descended into town at the time of a Catholic festival, some would shout, “We’re Lutheran!” Also, that when one priest and a small troop of soldiers went to a tavern to apprehend citizens accused of Lutheranism, they were thrust out, the doors locked, and they overheard Lutheran hymns lustily bawled out the windows. In one letter, Boltzius lists individuals still in sundry German cities who were requested to join relatives, whom he deemed trustworthy, in Ebenezer; I found a heretofore unknown sister to one ancestor, and they share surname with a fellow whom Walker mentions had been brought in for questioning and informed it was for slandering a church official. He just said, “Well, then, [I] must have been drunk at the time.” Another compatriot is described with this beloved, closing passage from Walker:
Hans Reinpacher, of Gut Tauerlechen, same district, was confronted with a copy of Habermann’s Prayerbook, . . . which had been found on his premises.
What was it doing there?
Why, it had always been there, and Reinpacher didn’t know there was anything wrong with it.
If you didn’t know anything was wrong with it, then, why did you hide it under the stable floor?
Well, I didn’t hide it there, I just left it there.
Why didn’t you tell the inquisitors about it?
Well, I’m too simple. . . .
It was apparent, then and now, that the mountain folk knew how to talk like Catholics (or like simpletons) in examinations, but they did not act like Catholics: they did not regularly attend church or take communion, for example. Sulkiness, indifference, and erroneous notions persisted, examiners found, behind the calculated verbal screen of conformity. . . .
One new element that seems to have caused peculiar irritation was the introduction of the englischer Gruss, the “angelic salutation,” wherein every believer was to use the greeting gelobt sei Jesus Christus, “Jesus Christ be praised,” to which the proper response was in Ewigkeit, “in eternity,” Amen. Pope Benedict XIII had ordained this practice in 1728 and it carried a hundred days’ indulgence, thereby tripping signals that had marked the Lutheran revolt two hundred years before. Mountain men found it especially discomforting, tinged with sacrilege, to take Christ’s name in vain. . . . The angelic salutation went beyond a submission to official conformity, to conformity of conscience. Presumably it was meant to do so. [For contemporary likening, see the recent http://www.facebook.com/kristopher.sw..., and the highly timely http://www.facebook.com/SupportReligi....]
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