Reply #46: German Contribution to the Early History of the USA

[Xipe Totec]

A large number of Americans have German ancestors. More than 25% of U.S. Americans are either completely or partly of German descent. There was even some talk after the War of Independence about whether English or German should be the national language! In the mid-1700s, Benjamin Franklin grumbled about Philadelphia's bilingual street signs and complained that the Pennsylvania parliament would soon need German-English interpreters. In the late-1700s the parliamentary records of Pennsylvania and new state laws were published in both English and German, and the parliament of Maryland decided to publish a German-language version of the Constitution. The fact that official bilingual publishing of parliamentary business slackened off in the 1800s had more to do with the fact that the German-language newspapers of the US were then reporting parliamentary news in detail. Much of the technical and cultural innovation that has come out of the USA would not have been possible without the contribution of German immigrants, whose influence on the USA began in the 1600s

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In the 1770s a third of the population of Philadelphia was German. A study by Albert Faust came to the conclusion that in 1775 10% of the population of the American colonies was German, though they were distributed unevenly amongst the 13 colonies. Dr Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), a Philadelphia doctor, signer of the Declaration of Independence, surgeon general of the Continental Army during the early part of the American Revolution (1776-1783) and member of Congress, was curious about the prosperity of Pennsylvania and decided that the German farmers there had much to do with it. He wrote a study listing what he thought were the reasons why the German farmers were better farmers than the non-German farmers in Pennsylvania. When the War of Independence began, Pennsylvania farms were producing enough food to feed the American Army and the allied French Army for the duration of the war. Most of the grain was provided by Pennsylvania-German farmers. Dr Rush wrote that the Pennsylvania farms produced millions of dollars, which after 1780 made possible the founding of the Bank of North America (chartered in 1781).

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On July 5, 1776, the "Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote" was America's first paper to announce that the Declaration of Independence had been adopted. The text reads as follows (there are some old-style German spellings in it):

Philadelphia, den 5 July.
Gestern hat der Achtbare Cong-

ress dieses Vesten Landes die

Vereinigten Colonien Freye

und Unabhaengige Staaten erklaeret.

Die Declaration in Englisch ist jetzt in der

Presse: sie ist datiert, den 4ten July, 1776, und

wird heut oder morgen im druck erscheinen.


http://www.mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au/la/lote/german/mckinnon/earlyger-usa.htm

Yet, somehow, we survived.