A footnote to the “Protestation” letter, also signed by twenty-four delegates of the “Old Lutheran Church,”6 affirmed that they would never defend their letter and it was up to this young upstart paper and its editor to do what he willed with its content. They would not submit the three-hundred-year-old Lutheran Church to the tribunal of a newspaper. The signers of this letter to the editor were the lay leaders of the Society who had done much of the planning for the voyage and had purchased the Perry County land.
The task of finding the right land and purchasing it was not easy. The Emigration Society’s land commission had already been elected in Germany; now they met in St. Louis to select a site for purchase. Members of this land commission were the Pastor O. H. Walther, attorney Adolf Marbach, and three farmers: Johann Georg Gube, Johann Gottlieb Palisch, and Christian Gottfried Schimpert. The commission selected Christian Bimpage as their real estate agent (Forster calls him Heinrich). Bimpage came to America with the Giessener Emigration Society with Weber and was managing an intelligence and commission office in St. Louis. Bimpage had founded the Anzeiger des Westens and maintained ties to its new owner and editor, Weber.
Some of the community suggested they buy the land offered for sale near the Meramec River, but Pastor Stephan and others had reservations about this property because it was considered too flood-prone and too costly. Another offer was made to the community by the Gratiot estate fifteen miles from St. Louis. In Zion on the Mississippi Forster said that property was rich and wooded and near St. Louis, which partly qualified it for purchase according to the planning commission’s selection criteria. (This property is now part of south St. Louis.)
Realty agent Bimpage became an influential person in the Society although not a member. He favored a site in Perry County. When he took the land commission without the bishop to view the property before the purchase, he concentrated on the farmers. The property was rugged, heavily forested, possessing few trails, and supported only a rustic cabin or two.
The commission reported this as their choice: a tract of land in Perry County, Missouri, near Cape Girardeau, on the Brazeau River where it joins the Mississippi, near the town of Perryville 110 miles south of St. Louis. On April 8,1839, the commission accepted the recommendation of Bimpage and purchased 4,472.66 acres for US$9,234.25. The price included $1,000 for a steamboat landing site on the Mississippi.7
The final selection of these 4,472.66 acres in southeastern Missouri was influenced by an already existing steamboat landing adjacent to the property. This particular steamboat landing, one of the few on the Mississippi River, was a priceless asset in a state like Missouri which had yet developed few highways or railroads. The Mississippi was the main “highway” between St. Louis and New Orleans. The Mississippi also connected the colony with the East via the Ohio River, and with the new territories opening to the West via the Missouri River.8
Forster quotes Eduard Vehse as saying “that Stephan’s mind was set on the wilderness.”9 However, this decision was not Stephan’s alone. The commission and the entire Society voted on the site once it was described to them in detail and had been viewed first hand by the land commission. Stephan had not even seen the property.
Two days after the contract for the land was signed, Agent Bimpage with a surveyor by the name of Thierry, four log cabin builders, a few carpenters, and other laborers arrived at the steamboat landing. On the following morning of April 11th they surveyed the land and the existing log cabins as temporary housing for the colony. These carpenters received $1 a day, and the laborers were paid 50 cents a day, plus food and lodging. Johanna Heiner, wife of carpenter Carl Heiner, was engaged by the Land Commission to do the cooking for these workmen. During the seventy days she served as the chief cook she received 40 cents a day. The cabins were built at a site later named Dresden, a short distance to the south of the steamboat landing. A one-room log cabin on the “Martin’s farm” property, coincidentally named after its former owner, had been furnished to serve as the temporary home of Bishop Stephan and presumably his son.
Now, the community had land in Perry County on which to build their homes and virgin forests to clear to make room for their towns. It would not be long now that the entire community could travel to Perry County and find homes for their families and begin a new life. These folks had lived in the culture-rich metropolis of Dresden and surrounding communities, came from towns that had enjoyed centuries of cultural development in the arts, opera, symphony, spas, breweries and their gardens, and restaurants. But they were in America, the land of promise and the land of religious freedom.
Their new life would consist of building homes, finding jobs, organizing their villages and churches, and finding a way to feed their families. This was a huge task for many people, but they did not scare easily. They were committed to carving out a new life in a new land where one of the freedoms guaranteed was that of practicing the kind of faith they chose without harassment.
NOTES
1 Paul C. Nagel, Missouri, A Bicentennial History (New York: Norton,1977), 118.
2 Nagel, Missouri, A Bicentennial History, 119.
3 Nagel, Missouri, A Bicentennial History, 120.
4 Nagel, Missouri, A Bicentennial History, 120.
5 Nagel, Missouri, A Bicentennial History, 148–51.
6 These are probably the same delegates who participated in the election of Pastor Stephan as bishop. Why there were only twenty-four instead of forty-eight delegates (twelve delegates from each of the four ships) is unknown.
7 William Koepchen, “Martin Stephan and the Saxon Emigration of 1838” (unpublished ms., Stephan Family Archives and Concordia Historical Institute, 1935), 142.
8 Koepchen, “Martin Stephan and the Saxon Emigration of 1838,” 142.
9 Carl Eduard Vehse, The Stephanite Emigration to America: With Documentation, trans. Rudolph Fiehler (1840; Tuscon: M. R. Winkler, 1975), 39.
VI
DEPOSING A BISHOP
22
Rogate Sunday Sermon and Its Aftermath
Soon after completing the survey of the Society’s new land in Perry County and the first crews began building cabins, newly elected bishop Martin Stephan went by steamboat to the land where he, his son, and the Society would settle and live their lives in America. A second work crew left with the bishop on April 26 and landed April 29 at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Brazeau Rivers, one hundred and twenty miles south of St. Louis. Little did the bishop anticipate the solid footing he once knew with this community would turn to mud in the swampy waters of conflict and challenge to his leadership. He had known difficulties with the Society’s finances before. This time, however, the lay leaders challenged him directly about the money he was spending.
The carriage Martin had purchased in Bremen was far too heavy for use in Perry County. He subsequently purchased a new one-horse carriage, paid for by the Credit Fund. Vehse considered the purchase extravagant, and another conflict developed within the Society especially among those who invested money expecting good interest.1 Although such expenses were specified in the Credit Fund agreements, some members did not count on covering the costs for a bishop’s office including clerical vestments. Still others were put off by Stephan’s parties and the wine bought for his personal use. Shortly after the bishop landed in Perry County, a bombshell dropped into the midst of the community back in St. Louis.
On Rogate Sunday, March 5, 1839, Pastor G. H. Loeber preached to the Society during their worship in the basement of the Episcopal cathedral. It was a rather penetrating sermon on the Ten Commandments. Apparently the speech affected the sensitive consciences of many who heard it. After the service was over in the afternoon of that same Sunday, a woman in the congregation came to pastor Loeber’s living quarters and asked him to hear her confession. (Vehse says that the woman’s confession occurred immediately after the early service and was followed by a second woman’s confession.) At this time the sacrament of absolution was still used in Germany and pract
iced by the Saxon Society. She told him that she was seeking comfort for her troubled conscience as a result of that morning’s sermon. She confessed that Bishop Stephan had made improper advances toward her and that she had violated the sixth commandment with him.
The woman was Louise Guenther, Stephan’s personal assistant. She was in charge of purchasing all the supplies for the Society, and she lived in the same rooming house as Stephan, just one floor above him, under the watchful eye of housemother Schneider. Louise Guenther had also been questioned extensively about her relationship with Stephan at the Dresden trials.
Shortly after Guenther’s confession, a second woman came forward with a similar confession that she, too, was guilty of illicit relations with the bishop. Forster cites Gotthold Guenther, the brother of Louise Guenther and author of a book on the Saxon Emigration, as his source for naming other women. However, G. Guenther fails to mention his own sister’s verbal confession.2 In light of missing documents and G. Guenther’s omission of his sister’s involvement, the stories of other women accusing Stephan rely heavily on hearsay, conjecture, and gossip; they excite the imagination but contribute little to the facts of the matter and sound suspiciously similar to the dismissed charges against Stephan back in Dresden.
This confession would initiate the most severe crisis that Stephan had encountered in Dresden or on the voyage. As the story unfolds it becomes evident that his leadership, his dream of a Lutheran community in America, his own reputation, and his ministry were in double jeopardy. Louise Guenther’s confession would determine much of his future ministry.
The events that followed have been told in many different accounts, especially those written for anniversaries of the emigration in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Many of Stephan’s contemporaries spelled out the story of his deposition as bishop in their books on the Saxon Emigration: Vehse, Loeber, Guenther, Schieferdecker, and Ludwig Fischer. A hundred years later Walter O. Forster reiterated the tales, and all these accounts vary little from one another.
Now fifty years after Forster’s work, new information provides a fresh light on these sad events. The story is so familiar that it is told often without considering new evidence that might place a different slant on Stephan’s expulsion from the community. In the 1930s, William Koepchen detailed the events that followed Louise Guenther’s confession to Pastor Loeber. He begins his account by indicating the sources that are and are not available for a complete picture of what happened to the bishop:
There is to the writer’s knowledge no complete record of what transpired during those hectic days of May 1839 among the more than hysterical leaders of these Saxon Emigrant in St. Louis and Perry County, Missouri. The “Protocol” of these unethical actions written by their land agent H. C. Bimpage, seem to have vanished, and the July letter of Pastor G. Loeber, in which he informs his brother and sister in Altenburg, Saxony, about these happenings is not found among the collection of Pastor Loeber’s letters as preserved in volume 7 of “Mittelheilungen des Vereins fuer Geschichte und Altertumskunde zu Kahla and Roda.” ... There are, however, a number of statements by Vehse, Buerger, Schieferdecker, Guenther, and other Saxons, by Stephan’s attorney, Gustav Koerner, and above all by Pastor Stephan himself, so that there is really no difficulty in getting a correct account of what really happened.
On Rogate Sunday May 5,1839, Pastor G. H. Loeber, who had the preaching assignment on that day, had delivered a very solemn sermon. During the afternoon of that Sunday, a young woman confessed to Pastor Loeber, that Bishop Stephan had made improper proposals to her. Not many hours later another woman made a similar statement.
Pastor Loeber had serious misgiving about these confessions. He feared that they might have been prompted by jealousy or that some sinister plot lay at the bottom of this sudden attack upon Bishop Stephan’s character for some time. Loeber confided these confessions to Pastor C. F. W. Walther the only other remaining pastor of the Saxon group left in St. Louis ... On May 13, Eduard Vehse and Gustav Jaeckel were called into consultation by Pastors Loeber and Walther. As the Saxon congregation had not yet been incorporated, it was resolved to send Pastor C. F. W. Walther to Perry County to get the Land commission’s promise not to have the purchased land deeded to their bishop [who had rightfully purchased 80 acres of his own land and was given an additional 40 acres of land by the Society]. They were to do nothing more until Pastor Stephan could be deposed from his office as Bishop.3
Without saying a word to Bishop Stephan about these charges against him or affording him any opportunity to defend himself, the pastors quickly sent a letter to the newspaper that had printed their earlier defense of Stephan against the Anzeiger des Westens editorials. In it they retracted their defense, described themselves as having given false witness, and announced their intention to depose and remove Stephan. The pastors in St. Louis tried to distance themselves from the bishop as far and as fast as possible, desperate to salvage their own reputations.
The retraction written by the Pastors reads,
A few weeks ago, the undersigned felt it to be their duty to publicly contradict, in this paper, many evil rumors from Germany which were circulated in this town against Bishop Stephan. Our own observation, as well as the fact that even the strictest investigations of the charges against this man had all remained unproven, prompted us to rely chiefly upon his firm Lutheran Confession, and, therefore, not only unhesitatingly emigrated with him to America, but also publicly declared our conviction of his innocence on the pages of the paper.
During the past week, however, events have occurred, which proved us to be the victims of a disgraceful deception by this man, as well as filled hearts with abhorrence and disgust. Stephan has really made himself guilty of sensuality, unfaithfulness and hypocrisy and we had to be the one, to whom these unsolicited revelations were made, which unmask him and which we have at once communicated to others.
As we have, heretofore, defended him in ignorance and loyal affection, we, know that God in His gracious providence has opened our eyes in regard to him; publicly renounce all connection with him, who has sunken so low.
We hope and pray that God, who has hitherto so signally blest us and the congregation which emigrated with us, will keep us and others from the evil consequences of this great offence. St. Louis, May 27, 1839.
Signed: Gotthold Heinrich Loeber, Pastor
Ernst Gerhard Wilhelm Keyl, Pastor
Ernst Moritz Buerger, Pastor
Karl Ferd. Wilhelm Walther, Pastor
In a post script the pastors added,
In regard to the Protestation, which we inserted in the paper April 29 of this year, we, the undersigned, also declare that regarding Stephan’s person, we have, in total ignorance of his crime, given false witness, which we formally recant. Stephan will be deposed at once and removed from our settlement in Perry County. St. Louis May 27, 1839.4
Each of these events occurred between May 5 and May 27. They were carefully orchestrated in St. Louis by Pastors Loeber, C. F. W. Walther, and Keyl with the help of attorneys Vehse and Marbach, without any communication with the bishop about their concerns and charges. No evidence suggests that the bishop heard any of the rumors and accusations circulating throughout the community, not even from Louise Guenther who usually had her ears tuned to gossip and reported it to Stephan. It seems that Martin Stephan had little or no inkling of the major tension and discomfort among Society members in St. Louis, or even among the people who were now living with him in the cabins at the Perry County site. C. F. W. Walther’s admonition to the people at Perry County was to keep the planned deposition secret. However, Forster thought that maybe Stephan was suspicious, because he was to preach at the Wittenberg site on Pentecost Sunday, May 19. However, Walther held an alternative service at Altenburg that same day and urged everyone to come to his service. In Forster’s account of these events, Stephan spoke of a conspiracy against him and told Pastor Ernst Buenger “beware of Ferd. Walther, that fellow is a fox.”5
&
nbsp; Before the community was informed or Pastor Stephan was confronted by the Saxon Society leaders, the pastors already decided that Martin Stephan was guilty of all the charges made by the two women. Without a hearing they decided to depose him as bishop and to oust him from the community. It had been decided in St. Louis. Bishop Stephan had to go, guilty or not. Martin Stephan’s leadership and episcopacy would come to a swift and merciless end.
Anzeiger des Westens newspaper jumped at the chance to prove their editor’s point and wrote a searing postscript to their earlier editorials. Editor Weber denounced Stephan as well as all the pastors of the “Old Lutherans.” He made serious insinuations about the whole colony. Koepchen summarized the editor’s demands:
That Bishop Stephan be delivered to the civil authorities with the various statements and testimonies of his revolting excesses and unlawful abridgement of the Common Treasury so that he, and incidentally, all the other pastors, might be punished according to justice and the law. He [Weber] added that the above printed condemnation of their former bishop and their hypocritical anathemas against him will not exculpate these clergymen, if they should not succeed in convincing the civil magistrate, the world at large, and their ill-treated congregation that it was neither criminal stupidity nor willful participation in a crime that caused them to bind their future with that of Stephan.
In Pursuit of Religious Freedom: Bishop Martin Stephan's Journey Page 23
