Besides its wealth, the sheer beauty of Missouri—the water, the rolling land, and the trees—declared a certain wonder of nature. Many in the East United States were attracted to this natural splendor, and so were people in Europe.
Emigrants who landed in Missouri in 1839 faced an unknown wilderness as well as an unknown society. But so did the original pioneers and pilgrims of America, who also had come mostly from Europe. In his history of Missouri, Paul Nagel writes about the changing peoples in America. He says that by 1840 the values of the original American society were shifting, and the peace within the country was unstable.5
Americans had come through an exciting time. The explorers of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase had returned in 1806 with documented tales and drawings of an enormous land beyond the Mississippi to the West coast. It was inhabited by many native peoples and new species of plants and animals. The wealth and beauty of this unspoiled and rugged territory was unimaginable until Lewis and Clark had returned to St. Louis. Their stories of encounters with the native tribes were of great interest to Americans and to European immigrants. So a certain romantic lore was associated with these new territories west of the Mississippi. Not only was America the land of the free, but there were new lands and places to live. No one knew the actual risks of settling this new territory. The real cost of getting a fresh start in a fresh land would prove to be quite high in many ways.
Besides adjusting to the land itself, the newcomers to America would need to learn, understand, and adjust to American culture. The people of America were flying high on an air of hope and excitement about their new land. The 1820s and 1830s were a time of enormous expansion in the United States. However, under President Andrew Jackson, restrictive federal banking polices were overturned leading to an economic depression during the term of his successor, Martin Van Buren, in 1836. So, when the Emigration Society landed in Missouri they realized a gain in the exchange of their Thaler for the dollar. For a time, their buying power with foreign money increased, but in the long run they were unable to overcome dollar exchange rates and lower wages.
Among cultural changes in America affecting the Saxon immigrants were reform movements such as temperance, controls on the sale of alcohol, and the rise of the tax-supported public schools and university. New institutions were formed at this time to care for the mentally ill. Hospitals and medical facilities provided health care for the ill. The institution of slavery was being attacked openly by abolitionists in the North. This frontal assault would eventually end in civil war.
The tide of rationalism that had flooded both Europe and America evolved into a more humanitarian and optimistic view of life. The new optimism showed up in the utopian communities formed at this time. The Perry County Saxon Lutherans were not unlike participants in the commune movements such as the Shaker and Amana colonies of Pennsylvania and Iowa, and Robert Owens’s New Harmony, Indiana. The changing mood from fierce individualism to cooperative community was spurred on by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorn. In his work The Scarlet Letter, he makes the point that a life lived in isolation from society is condemned. Hawthorn’s idea seemed to support the spiritual ideal that Stephan had proposed and nurtured within the colony.
The Dresden and Saxon immigrants moved onto the American scene at a time of great ferment and humanistic optimism. No doubt this was food for both soul and body for these folks who had come from oppression for their “style” of faith. They arrived with great promise, and they also faced enormous challenges.
The community had hardly arrived in St. Louis when they were greeted by the locals with a flurry of warm welcomes and harsh criticisms. But they had other things to do than defend themselves. Once they were settled and had found places to live, they organized themselves for the tasks of teaching the children, purchasing food and supplies, and finally setting out to find and settle the land where they would develop their new home.
The Saxon Society spent much of its time finding part-time work, resting, regrouping their energies, and preparing to find land. A group was selected to purchase the necessary groceries and other needs for living. Forster points out that, for the first time in the history of the emerging church, a woman was appointed as the chairperson of the “committee” to purchase supplies and to select materials for the clergy and Episcopal vestments for the bishop. A woman would not be considered for this role again until the middle of the next century. The person appointed by the bishop and the planning committee was Louise Guenther. Her group managed to purchase the supplies needed for this colony, and she organized another group of seamstresses to sew the robes for the clergy and vestments for the bishop.
However, while the Society members were settling in, they continued to be haunted by concerns and squabbles about money. Contrary to their pledges aboard the Selma, some Society members, prodded by Vehse, continued their complaints about how much money Stephan was spending for his Episcopal robes and the needs for his Episcopal office. By this time Vehse was the chief critic of Stephan’s expenses. After he left the community, he later charged in his memoirs that Stephan was conducting all kinds of soirees for his inner circle of close friends.
Vehse’s complaint as the former treasurer about the missing funds and Stephan’s spending on parties and Episcopal trappings was joined by Marbach’s sniping about the bishop’s office having too much power. This thinly veiled retaliation was payment for their earlier defeat in the attempt to take over the treasury. Their animosity would emerge again and again.
NOTES
1 Paul C. Nagel, Missouri, A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton, 1977), 49.
2 Nagel, Missouri, A Bicentennial History, 50.
3 Walter O. Forster, Zion on the Mississippi (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 228.
4 Forster, Zion on the Mississippi, 228–29.
5 Nagel, Missouri, A Bicentennial History, 45.
21
The Press Rears Its Head
In addition to their own complaints, the unexpected criticism of Bishop Stephan and the Society by the local press topped off the Society’s distress. The German Newspaper Anzeiger des Westens, a leftist-leaning paper owned and edited by William Weber, began to publish editorials attacking the theology of the “Old Lutherans.” The editor particularly questioned the idea of forming a rather separatist Christian colony.
Weber, who had fled Germany with the Gressener Emigration Party in 1834 to escape the Polish Revolution of 1830, had purchased the paper from its founder Christian Bimpage in 1835. Weber’s business connection with Christian Bimpage, who became the real estate agent for the Society, and his association with the disaffected former intimate follower Ludwig Lutkemueller, provided a lot of inside information to Weber about Pastor Stephan and his followers. “Weber,” Koepchen bluntly stated, “was unprincipled enough to make use of everything that would bring discredit upon these Saxon Emigrants.”1 Newspaper articles such as the following take up twenty pages of Koepchen’s account; they attacked the Society with brutal sarcasm and anticlerical opinions. It must have seemed to the Society that the German press had followed the emigrants across the Atlantic to continue their assault. One of the news articles on January 26, 1839, characterized the Saxon arrivals to St. Louis this way:
We have to announce to our readers the arrival of the first two sections of the Stephanists-altogether about 300 souls. Very aged people, who were living in prosperous circumstances in their home country, are among them. Only the delusion wrought on them by their Pfaffen, (priesthood or priestly rule) that if they were to die in Europe they could not be saved, could induce them to take the unusual step of emigrating in their advanced age, and the still more perilous one of investing their entire fortune in the airy project of a communistic settlement. As matters are at present, the spiritual and the secular affairs of the congregation are, almost without control on their part, in the hands of their ministers, who enjoy unconditional authority and obedience among their sect.2
Pastor Loeber wrot
e to his relatives in Saxony on January 30, 1839, and remarked that this slurring announcement by the Anzeiger des Westens made him note “that the hatred shown them in Saxony had preceded them to St. Louis and had already found expression in local papers.” Some Germans living in St. Louis resented the tone of the paper toward their fellow Germans. An anonymous person wrote to the paper objecting to the editor’s tone in his articles on the Saxon group. The letter was printed on February 9, 1839:
Mr. Editor:
In the last issue of the Anzeiger, the Society of Stephan has been mentioned in a manner which offends against the esteem and toleration which we owe these unfortunate and persecuted people. Surely such a reception they could not have expected from Germans and in a country the first settlers of which were fugitives for religion’s sake. The greatest principle of our Constitution is universal liberty of religion and conscience. Due respect for this principle alone should have you to accord such an unfriendly greeting to fellow citizens from the old country. We are not in harmony with our arrived guests as regard their religious opinions and sentiments; we hold, however, that these must be respected in the same degree as we demand to have our own religious sentiment respected.3
Editor Weber replied in the same issue stating that he meant no harm to these Stephanists and welcomed them to America. There was no intention to attack their religion or their freedom to live it. Then, the editor continued to justify his position:
The only thing of which we disapproved in our remarks is the manner in which this emigration, in part at least, was started and conducted, their abject dependence upon the “Pfaffen” [English: priests, parsons] and the dangerous and boundless influence which these latter exercise over them. Against these elements, indeed, we fight wherever we meet them and only those who do not know how to distinguish between “Tfaffen”—worship and religion can charge us with having assailed in an unbecoming manner the liberty of conscience of our fellow-citizens. Our sole object was, if possible to warn such members of the Society as have not yet had their energy completely undermined by the influence or smothered by the superiority of their Pfaffen, not to permit their spiritual and personal liberty etc.4
This statement sounded incongruent coming from a former German who had fled his country because of restrictive polices ruling church polity, a country ruled by dukes and kings who declared wars in its name and conscripted its young men to fight their battles. William Koepchen understood well the relationships Weber had with the real estate agent Bimpage and candidate Paul Lutkemueller, and the probable “leaking” of some of the complaints within the Saxon colony. No doubt the press then loved a good juicy story to sell papers much as it does today. It is clear that Weber had an inside connection on the gossip within the Saxon group. He knew how the Society was governed. He concluded that the group was controlled by an authoritarian autocracy. In the land of the free this was “good press.”
In spite of the Society’s calm letters of protest, these editorials continued regularly, especially against the clergy and their control over the church. The participation of the laity in the decisions affecting them was a major issue for Eduard Vehse. When he decided to leave the Society and return to Germany in June, he also viciously attacked the power of the clergy. Vehse and Editor Weber were on the same anticlerical page and not by accident. Such remarks were of the spirit of the times. Imperialistic leadership would not sell in America. Independence and individual freedom were some the highest prized values of the day. Some news articles reported conversations within the Society and described how the conversation moved into the area of rationalism. Society members purportedly called reason in religion an “act of the Devil.” The editor’s response noted how ignorant of this particular Society member to believe that you could have religion without using reason.
Finally, members of the Society replied to the editor about their reception in the country and St. Louis, both friendly and unfriendly, and proceeded to explain what they, as a group, were about. One member wrote a letter about his desire for the freedom to believe and worship the way he felt to be true to the Lutheran faith and that he could no longer do that in Germany. The Society members’ motto was quoted in the article: “God’s Word and Luther’s doctrine pure shall to eternity endure.” They reassured the public they were not communistic, nor did they coerce their people in matters of faith, nor did they practice domination over the consciences of the congregation. They closed their letter by repeating the familiar patriotic formula that even today identifies the speaker as a loyal patriot: “God Bless America.” In doing so, the writers assumed the marks of a trustworthy and valuable citizen of America, hoping to blunt any accusation of being undemocratic.
Other commentaries and articles in German newspapers from around the United States repeated the same theme, namely, that a group of fanatic religious folks from Germany were forming a colony in America, and they were sectarian and enthusiastic like the Moravian Brethren. A Baltimore German paper even compared the newly arrived German Lutherans to the Mormons.
While the colony tried to get settled, Weber continued his editorial assault on the Saxon Emigration Society. In late April 1839, when Stephan traveled by steamboat to Perry County with carpenters to build cabins, some of the pastors who remained behind in St. Louis wrote a letter to Weber. They asserted that Weber was simply repeating some of the false rumors about them and Bishop Stephan that circulated in Germany, and they refused to defend against these lies. At their refusal to play his game, Weber unleashed a barrage of editorial paragraphs each beginning with the sentence “Your simple declaration is not sufficient.” Weber took up the cause of reason and told them that he would not accept their word as they wished because he and the public needed empirical proof that this Stephan fellow and his followers were not some kind of weird cult or sect.
After that attack, the pastors of the colony decided to write a letter that has become known as “Protestation.” The pastors defended Stephan and the whole Society. This letter is printed in full here rather than in the appendix because of its controversial nature and extraordinary retraction a month later. The letter from the Society’s pastors was written April 29, the very day Bishop Stephan and others arrived in Perry County at the steamboat landing now called Wittenberg—named after the University town where Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses calling for reform of the church. The letter was printed in the Anzeiger des Westens on May 4, 1839:
For some time evil rumors have been spread among our new fellow-countrymen about the “Old Lutheran Congregation,” which immigrated to this country from Germany. In a previous article, this congregation and its Bishop have declared, that they would not commit themselves to refuting these rumors. In accordance with this declaration our pastors have restricted themselves to a simple denial of these lies, which have recently been printed against our Bishop, and, in spite of all provocation from the Anzeiger Des Westens, they will continue to remain silent, as these lies are taken from German newspapers, which are, as is well known, under the influence of the state and its restrictions of the press. By republishing them in free America a person makes himself an understrapper of this oppression of the German State.
It has repeatedly been stated, that there exists, among us a government by ecclesiastics, and the Anzeiger Des Westens even printed the threat that we would not be considered free and independent men until this hierarchy was done away with among us ...
There exists no hierarchy among us. With absolute free will and with full agreement of our hearts, without any urging or compulsion on the part of our pastor, this congregation was organized. Voluntarily its members stayed together on their trip from Europe to America. Voluntarily its members are still standing together. Whoever wishes to separate himself from us is at all times free to do so ...
The bond which unites us is this mutual faith and the confidence we have in our clergy. We have not followed them blindly and our confidence in them and especially in the oldest and first among them, which is n
ow our lawful bishop, is fully justified. These clergymen had taken an oath of fealty on the entire confessional writings of the Lutheran Church. They have kept this oath truly and firmly ...
Since we left our fatherland our confidence in them has grown, especially after we have observed how they unshackled from the European fetters, have endeavored to prove their love, sincerity and diligence in the care of our souls.
Our confidence in them is founded on their loyalty in holding fast our common faith and confession and upon their love, which we have experienced. But, above all, our confidence is founded on God’s Holy Word to which we submit unconditionally, submit in such a manner that we wish nothing added and nothing taken from it ...
This suffices us and we are highly elated that we are slandered for such behavior.
In conclusion we declare most emphatically that in spirit of the denial of our enemies we claim to be free men. As such we have proved ourselves by not tolerating the oppression of faith and conscience in our fatherland, but rather emigrating thence, as such we propose to prove ourselves in this free America and in no wise permit ourselves to be led astray in our clean and good cause. St Louis, April 29, 1839.5
In Pursuit of Religious Freedom: Bishop Martin Stephan's Journey Page 22
