The Tale of A Villainess

ULYSSES S. KOONS

Published December, 1904

From the Press of the

American Baptist Publication Society

TO THE MEMORY OF

My Mother

THIS STORY OF THE LITTLE BAND

OF BROTHERS AND SISTERS

OF THE KLOSTER

IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED

* * *

INTRODUCTION

A great New England historian has said that "The colony of Pennsylvania was not only more heterogeneous in population than any of the others, but it actually was the principal center of distribution of the non-English population from the seaboard to the Allegheny Mountains. All of the population of the Carolinas, as well as in Virginia and Maryland, entered the country by way of Pennsylvania, and this migration was so great, both in its physical dimensions and in the political and social effects which it wrought, that Pennsylvania acquires a special interest as the temporary tarrying place and distributing center for so much that we now call characteristically American."[1]

It is undoubtedly true that into none of the other colonies did there flow such a tide of German immigration, bringing with it many a hardy Swiss and French Huguenot refugee from the Palatinate, along the lower Rhine.

Up to the Revolution there were more Germans in Pennsylvania than in all the other colonies together. Benjamin Franklin, it is well known, feared that the State might become a German province. Among the causes of this resistless tide of immigration were: Religious zeal, fostered by the teachings of William Penn and George Fox and their followers, and Penn's far-sighted pledge of tolerance as to liberty of worship, sectarian ambition, escape from religious persecution, and bad government.

Especially were the first-comers inspired by religious zeal, and it was to this that such old settlements as Bethlehem and Germantown and Ephrata owe their founding. Later, when the tide rose to a thousand German immigrants a month, a great majority came with the simple desire to earn a livelihood in peace and safety-a desire played upon by the glib-tongued, unscrupulous land agents of that day so successfully, that shipload after shipload of poverty-stricken German peasantry, enduring uncomplainingly the sufferings and hardships of hunger, thirst, and f?tid air of the crowded hold and consequent ship-fever, poured into the port of Philadelphia and immediately took the oath of allegiance.

Quaint and curious names they had, as is evidenced by many an ancient shipmaster's list-patronymics indicative of trade, occupation, profession, personal characteristics, nicknames, names that by a slow but sure process of anglization have lost much of their humor and flavor, and are now so changed in spelling and sound as hardly to be recognized in their original form.

But with all the fears of pauperism and disease and racial deterioration and establishment of inimical foreign institutions, this mass of crude, uncouth peasantry, with their unpronounceable names, besides bearing the brunt of Indian depredation and massacre during the French and Indian wars, became the ancestry of perhaps not less than one-third of the population of Pennsylvania to-day.