Sacrificing to Prosper: Cultural Exchange at Port of Philadelphia
The interaction between Pennsylvania “Deitschers” (Dutch people) and English farmers around Philadelphia was important to both their well-being, because of the Dutchman’s language barrier attempting to negotiate commerce in Penn’s port city. Several Pennsylvania Dutch farmers in the PA Dutch Country purposely hired their young children out to English farmers who lived in New Jersey just to learn the English language. By forcing their children to live in this exclusive New Jersey English environment, it was hoped that when they returned home to the PA Dutch Country, they would have acquired the ability to understand and speak English. Subsequently, when these Rhineland farmers sent their goods to the Philadelphia market, their bilingual children were then able to get the best prices.
The steadfast Deitsch work ethic of these diligent working Pennsylvania Dutch people can be traced to their frontier experience as immigrants who fell in love with the American free private enterprise system. When they lived in the Old World, they were part of a primitive Guild system that denied many of them the ability to develop skills and talents. Lucky were a number of PA Dutch immigrants that were farmer redemptioners who were sold into iron ore and iron furnace industry, whose plight was perhaps just as bad in the Old World, but these industrious souls had a better chance of skillfully paying their indentures and becoming enterprising skilled capitalists and buying their own farms. These true-grit Germanic immigrants did not take long in paying off their indentures and become free private businessmen who owned their own American farms or gristmills, as the young American Republic ratified the United States Constitution, and our agrarian Republic prospered in the American Industrial Revolution.
No longer hindered by the antiquated European Guild System, skilled PA Dutchman invented Conestoga wagons and other agrarian achievements to become America’s largest breadbasket, where their hard working productivity had no equal. It is difficult for modern American immigrants to realize the challenges facing those Colonial redemptioners, having signed contracts to work off their ocean passage to Pennsylvania, and help timber these vast virgin forests to create a civilized nation. Furthermore, they avoided death defying Indian massacres and survived the French and Indian Wars (1754-1763) during North American Colonialism.
These PA Deitsch immigrants who had gone through so much in their mortal lives were determined to join William Penn’s Holy experiment in creating a civilized American society and vowed to themselves to become his most productive citizens. They were working “True-Grit” individuals who turned the PA Dutch Country into an agrarian cradle of Liberty following the ideas of Adam Smith, our founder of the “Free market private enterprise system.” Few Americans were as dedicated to the ideals of the United States Democracy as these Colonial Deitsch people sold as indentured servants just to reach the shores of Pennsylvania. Dedicated to God and Country to this very day, they were a humanitarian class of hard-working, agrarian citizens.