Pastorius, Francis Daniel b. September 26, 1651; Sommerhausen, Franconia d. Exact date unknown; sometime between December 26, 1719, and January 13 1720; Germantown, Pennsylvania
Founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania, and leader of the first organized German immigration to North America in 1683. Although the group of settlers who established Germantown (the so-called Krefelders) came from a Dutch background, Pastorius helped to set the course of the fledgling community as a focal point for future waves of German immigration.
Pastorius’s cosmopolitan education, legal training, and multilingual abilities allowed him to function as a cultural mediator between the German, Dutch, and English immigrant groups of early Pennsylvania. Assuming multiple public offices, Pastorius alleviated the confrontation with cultural and linguistic differences among fellow German immigrants; in turn, he raised awareness among prominent English in- habitants—especially leading Pennsylvania Quakers such as William Penn, James Logan, and Isaac Norris—of the intellectual and spiritual bonds they shared with their German neighbors. Pastorius circulated his multilingual manuscript writings as tokens of a communal experiment valuing moral integrity over ethnic or linguistic heritage. Ultimately, his importance in the realm of Anglo-German relations in North America lies in his careful negotiation of the difficult terrain between assimilation and isolation faced by most non-English immigrant groups.Following his father’s lead, Francis Daniel Pastorius received a classical humanistic education (including proficiency in Latin and Greek) as well as a degree in law from Altdorf University in 1676. Before his graduation, Pastorius had also studied law and modern languages at several other European universities, including Straβburg, Basel, Jena, and Regensburg. From 1680 to 1682, he completed his intellectual and worldly education by accompanying a German nobleman on a Grand Tour through Europe. His travels, his training for high government office, as well as a brief period as an attorney in Wind- sheim and Frankfurt am Main, however, instilled in Pastorius the belief that European society was steering toward a moral and spiritual collapse.
In Frankfurt, Pastorius found kindred spirits among the so-called Saalhof Pietists, a group of intellectuals and merchants pursuing a mystical, millenarian, and separatist course away from the orthodox Lutheran religion. When Pastorius learned about the group’s purchase of 15,000 acres of land in Pennsylvania and of their plans to emigrate, he immediately resolved “to continue in their Society, and with them to lead a quiet, godly & honest life in a howling wilderness” (Bee-Hive quoted in Weaver 1985, 403). The Saalhof Pietists formed the German Society and conferred power of attorney on Pastorius for all its transactions in America. After leaving Frankfurt in April 1683, Pastorius visited a group of Krefeld Mennonites, who had already purchased 18,000 acres from William Penn and asked Pastorius to act in their behalf. In Rotterdam, Pastorius embarked on the ship America and arrived in Philadelphia on August 20, 1683. In a letter to German friends published in 1684 as Sichere Nachricht (Certain News), Pastorius described the religious and linguistic diversity on the ship as an emblem for the communal multiplicity he found in his new home.
After his arrival in Pennsylvania, Pasto- rius used his classical education to forge friendships with William Penn and other prominent members of the Quaker elite. He was thus able to negotiate profitable terms for the German settlers in spite of the failure of his Frankfurt friends to join him and cultivate the tract purchased from Penn. Rather than releasing Pastorius from his obligations, the Pietists retained him as the agent for their reorganized Frankfurt Company until 1700. Pastorius’s successors apparently mismanaged the company, which fell prey to the fraudulent dealings of the German real estate speculator Johann Heinrich Sprogel and his English lawyer David Lloyd. Pastorius and other Germantown residents escaped eviction only through the assistance of prominent friends in Philadelphia.
In spite of much disillusionment about the possibilities of spiritual and social reform in the New World, Pastorius embraced his roles as political and cultural leader of the Germantown community, and he gained much respect and intellectual prominence in the province at large.
Except for a brief period at the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia, Pas- torius held multiple public offices ranging from court scribe to bailiff to justice of the peace and member of the provincial assembly. Teaching at the Germantown school from 1702 until shortly before his death, Pastorius designed several schoolbooks, including an English primer, and thus helped German immigrants to cope with an unfamiliar linguistic and cultural setting.Pastorius joined the Society of Friends soon after his arrival in the New World. As members of the Abington Monthly Meeting, Pastorius and three other Germantown Quakers composed the first known public protest against slavery in North America. Pastorius did not participate in any other abolitionist activities, yet his manuscript writings contain many indictments of slavery in the New World, especially of its inconsistency with Christian principles.
After his official release from his duties for the Frankfurt Company, Pastorius dedicated much of his time to his studies, his
extensive manuscript compositions, and his friendships with other learned Pennsylvanians, such as Penn’s secretary James Logan. Pastorius’s writings constitute several commonplace books in manuscript, of which the Bee-Hive is the most voluminous and compendious. In this volume, Pasto- rius gathered a vast array of philosophical, religious, moral, social, and linguistic knowledge into one of the most singular examples of early American learning. Adding his own commentary and poetic compositions, Pastorius conceived the BeeHive and other manuscript books as the means to position European culture and intellectual traditions within the changing epistemological framework of the New World. In particular, Pastorius understood his multilingual writings as reflections of the diverse languages and cultures gathering in Pennsylvania under Penn’s policy of religious freedom. Much of Pastorius’s writings are moreover concerned with practical matters, including popular medicine, gardening, agriculture, and law.
With most of his complex and expansive literary work remaining unpublished, Pastorius is known almost exclusively as an emblem of German immigration to North America in the late seventeenth century.Patrick M. Erben
See also Germantown, Pennsylvania; Pietism References and Further Reading
Brophy, Alfred L. “The Intellectual World of a Seventeenth-Century Jurist: Francis Daniel Pastorius and the Reconstruction of Pietist Thought.” German? American? Literature?: New Directions in German-American Studies. Eds. Winfried Fluck and Werner Sollors. New York: Peter Lang, 2002, pp. 43-63.
Erben, Patrick M. “‘Honey-Combs’ and ‘Paper-Hives’: Positioning Francis Daniel Pastorius’s Manuscript Writings in Early Pennsylvania.” Early American Literature 37, 2 (2002): 157-194.
Learned, Marion Dexter. The Life of Francis Daniel Pastorius. Philadelphia: Campbell, 1908.
Weaver, John David. “Franz Daniel Pastorius (1651-c.1720): Early Life in Germany with Glimpses of his Removal to Pennsylvania.” Diss. U of California, Davis, 1985.
Wokeck, Marianne S. “Francis Daniel Pastorius.” Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary; Volume One, 1682-1709. Eds. Craig Horle et al. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1991, pp. 586-590.