By Paige Drummond, staff writer
On Wednesday, Professor Aaron Astor of the Civil War Era Studies Department spoke at the German Studies Colloquium on German migration to the United States in his presentation, “Die Lange Auswanderung: Understanding Two Centuries of German Migration to America, 1690-1890.”
The presentation was held in Joseph Theatre (Breidenbaugh 201) from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. for German Studies majors and minors, as well as the anyone interested in attending.
Professor Kerry Wallach, Chair of the German Studies Department, began the event by introducing Professor Aaron Astor.
Prior to coming to Gettysburg College, Astor was a professor at Maryville College in Tennessee and wrote multiple books and articles on different topics, including his publications “Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri, 1860-1872” (2012) and “The Civil War Along Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau (2015).” He is currently writing a book on the 1816 presidential election, which has included his research on German American communities in Cincinnati, Ohio.
He began his talk by discussing some statistics regarding German immigration to the United States, mentioning that “41 million Americans would claim that German is their primary ethnic background,” as well as the fact that in 1790, 33% of the state of Pennsylvania was German. Astor went on to discuss the push and pull factors surrounding immigration.
“The push factors, I think, are pretty large, I mean with religious upheaval, protest and reformation; you know they are going to be a huge part of it,” Astor stated, listing some of the push factors. Next, Astor then went into the history of Germans and German immigration.
“It’s kind of worth thinking about it this way, that essentially there are three sort of large groupings of Germans religiously in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. You have what used to be known as the Fancy Dutch and the Plain Dutch,” Astor explained. “The Fancy Dutch are the main line, it’s a Lutheran Reform; the Plain Dutch would be the Mennonites, Amish, and you have two thirds of Moravians, who are highly evangelical.”
“William Penn, famously, of course, established a Quaker colony in 1681 that was based around religious freedom around honorable dealings with Indigenous peoples and pacifism, and he very early on encouraged other quakers and people whose religious confessions seem to look like Quakers and to him, in which many Mennonites over on the European continent would be included in that,” Astor continued. “Some of the early settlers are going to settle in a place not surprisingly called Germantown.”
Astor presented a table, showing the number of ships that came into Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during the eighteenth century.
“If you have ancestors that came to Pennsylvania from the German States in the eighteenth century, there is a very good chance that they arrived on one of these boats that came over between 1727 and the revolution,” Astor stated.
He went on to explain the process of indentured servitude for German immigrants to the United States at the time, which was a process for immigrants to make money and eventually earn their freedom after migration.
“The way it would work there was that you actually traveled to America and then you worked out a labor contract when you arrived; you had a few days or a week to essentially work it out,” Astor explained. “Sometimes, family who was already here would essentially hire you and they’ve essentially agreed to pay for your shift voyage and then put you to work for a couple of years.”
Astor explained that many German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, the Midwest, and states just south of the Midwest, such as Kentucky and Tennessee.
“There became increasing numbers of German Catholics,” Astor said. “Baltimore and Philadelphia would actually have the first German Catholic parishes, with Baltimore having a history and tradition in Maryland, with it being a Catholic colony.”
“Germans who would come over are very much involved in the anti-slavery side of the conflict, including and most importantly those who lived in slave states, like Missouri,” Astor explained, going into the German American perspective of the Civil War.
“Pennsylvania, around here is, of course, the snack food capital,” Astor stated. “If you look at all these names on these containers of pretzel manufacturers: yeah, they’re mostly German.” To conclude his talk, Astor then opened the room for questions.
One audience member asked about the truth in German almost becoming an official language of Pennsylvania, to which Astor answered, “It became an unofficial language.”
“There are regions where lots of official documents are regularly published in German, particularly in Pennsylvania,” Astor explained. “German print culture newspapers continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
