Francis Daniel Pastorius:
Colonial Pennsylvania German Statesman, Author and Educator
Nearly 130 years ago Oswald Seidenstickler, University of Pennsylvania Professor of
German Language and Literature published a book entitled The First German Immigration to
America and the Founding of Germantown in the Year 1683. Three or four decades after the
founding of Germantown, Pennsylvania, my ancestors followed their Germantown brethren
across the Atlantic Ocean, leaving the security of a small town in Alsace to settle in the
wilderness of Penn’s woods. I have often wondered what would entice these reasonably
prosperous burghers, millers according to the family history, to seek their fortune in the New
World. If they were literate, they might have stumbled upon a small tract by a Pennsylvania
German lawyer named Francis Daniel Pastorius originally from Franconia. It was a Detailed
Geographical Description of the Province of Pennsylvania published in Frankfurt and
Leipzig in 1704. The author was the founder of Germantown, and his goal was to persuade
fellow Germans to emigrate to this distant province in British North America.1 The title page
of the State Library’s copy lists the author’s titles as J.V. Lic. and Justice of the Peace
[Friedens-Richtern}
Francis Daniel Pastorius had been born in 1651, three years after the Thirty Years' War, in
Sommerhausen, Franconia, the son of Melchior Adam Pastorius, legal counselor to Count
Georg Friedrich von Limpurg and later burgomaster of Windsheim. Francis studied at the
universities of Strassburg, Basel, Jena, Regensburg before passing his Law examinations and
defending his thesis at the University of Altdorf in 1676. Afterward, the young Pastorius
briefly practiced law among the landed gentry of Windsheim, but was dissatisfied, since his
sympathies lay with the common people, whose concerns were seldom addressed. As a
result, in 1679 he moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he practiced and tutored Law students.
In Frankfurt Pastorius became part of the Pietist circle of the Lutheran theologian and
pastor Dr. Philipp Jacob Spener. A 1697 pamphlet, found in the Rare Collections Library,
1
Francis Daniel Pastorius, Umstandiges geographische beschreibung der zu allerletzt erfundundenen provintz
Pensylvaniae, in denen end-grantzen Americae in der west-welt gelegen, durch Franciscum Danielem Pastorium . . .
Worbey angehencket sind einige notable begebenheiten, und bericht-schreiben and dessen herzn vattern Melchior
Adamum Pastorium, und andere gute freunde. Franckfurt, Leipzig: Zufinden bey Andreas Otto, 1704.
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shows that he would later laud Spener and other north German Pietist theologians. 2 As a
committed Pietist, Pastroius prayed for the unity of believers, a goal that he probably expected
to see accomplished within his lifetime, since, like many pietists, he thought he was living in
the end times. For Pastorius and other disaffected or persecuted believers, the English
colonies appeared to offer a safe haven from the corruption of the Old World.
Prompted by Pietist and mystical religious sentiments, the young lawyer wished to move to
the New World, to Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. In the 17th century,
“Philadelphia” was actually a concept or a “program” before it was a physical place. It was
thought of as “a community of God in the Spirit”. After the Quaker Proprietor William Penn
established his “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania, a colony committed to religious liberty, his
“utopia became a distinct place”.3 The desire to find such a place guided the young Pastorius,
and directed his course toward Pennsylvania
Following a two-year “grand tour” of the Continent from 1680-1682, Pastorius became an
agent for the German Company, later reorganized in 1686 as the Frankfurt Company. This
company represented the interests of a group of German Quakers from Frankfurt, who wished
to buy land in Penn’s colony and emigrate there. Pastroius, who was given power of attorney
to administer the group’s lands, went on ahead, traveling to America via Rotterdam and
London. He arrived in Philadelphia on August 20, 1683. Although the initial negotiations with
Penn for 15,000 acres fell through, since the Frankfurters failed to emigrate, Pastorius soon
represented another group of German Quaker families from Krefeld in Westphalia. In 1684 he
laid out a 5,700-acre tract of land divided into two parts for the Krefelders and the German
Society. These were sub-divided into narrow lots. The lots, each with its own house, faced a
highway typical of towns in southwestern Germany. Pastorius wrote back to his father
Melchior and the investors of the Frankfurt Company, and several of these accounts made their
way into the Detailed Description of Pennsylvania published in 1704.
After implementing the original plan for Germantown, Pastorius settled down to build a new
life, but also to serve the new community. In 1688 he married Anna Klostermann with whom he
2
Pastorius, Francis Daniel. Ein Send-Brief offenhertziger liebsbezeugung an die sogenannte Pietisten in HochTeutschland. Amsterdam: Gedruckt vor Jacob Claus, 1697.
3
Rothermund, The Layman’s Progress, 1961. PP. 1-4.
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had two sons. Pastorius also put his legal, literary and educational talents at the service of the
Germantown community. Even before his naturalization as a citizen in 1709, Penn appointed
him Justice of the Peace for Philadelphia County in 1684. He was reappointed to this position
again in 1693 by the Royal Governor Benjamin Fletcher. In 1687 and 1691 Pastorius was also
elected the Philadelphia representative to Pennsylvania’s Colonial Assembly. In addition to
these civic responsibilities, Pastorius taught at the Penn Charter School from 1698-99, and in
1702 was appointed a teacher at the newly chartered Germantown School.
No stranger to controversies, Pastorius participated in several important early Commonwealth
debates within Pennsylvania’s Quaker community. Although a baptized Lutheran, his
sympathies were clearly with the most progressive Dutch and English Friends. In anticipation of
later 18th and 19th century abolitionist movements Pastorius joined three Germantown Quakers to
draft a 1688 Petition Against Slavery. Nine years later he participated in the Keithian
controversy that threatened to split the American Quaker community. The Rare Collections
Library holds a copy of his 1697 pamphlet entitled Four Boasting Disputers of This World
Briefly Rebuked. The Library’s heliographic copy of this religious tract represents Pastorius’s
contribution to the debate published in New York by William Bradford.
Pastorius, who died sometime in late December, 1719 and early January, 1720, was a
courageous activist, colonial statesman, prodigious thinker and a prolific writer. He read and
wrote in seven languages. His other published works include A New Primmer or Methodical
Directions to Attain the True Spelling, Reading & Writing of English (New York: William
Bradford, n.d.) and a Geographical-Statistical Description of the Province of Pennsylvania
[Geographische-statistische Beschreibung der Provinz Pensylvanien]. The State Library owns a
copy of the second pamphlet published posthumously at Memmingen in 1792. Ironically,
Pastorius’s most famous work is an unpublished common-place book known as the Beehive.
This massive encyclopedia is located in the Rare Books Collection at the Van Pelt Library of the
University of Pennsylvania.
A tribute to the Pennsylvania German statesman, educator and writer Francis Daniel Pastorius
in honor of German-American History Month.
The only image of Pastorius is a bas-relief portrait available at www.mceas.org/pastorius.
3
For further reading
Learned. Marion Dexter. The Life of Francis Daniel Pastorius, The Founder of Germantown.
Philadelphia: William J. Campbell, 1908.
Excellent brief biographies also appear in the Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 7 (1934)
and the American National Biography, vol. 17 (1999).
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