Name/Title
Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of PennsylvaniaDescription
First American printing of this tract by Rush.
Butterfield 368(1):
This public communication is assigned to BR solely on the basis of internal evidence, but one cannot read two paragraphs together without encountering repeated and unmistakable indications of BR's style and thought.
This is the first of a number of public statements made by him in the interest of his fellow citizens of German birth and extraction. Since he was eager to win support for the Republican party in the state, his motives may be considered as partly political. Yet his private utterances about the Pennsylvania Germans have almost invariably the same friendly and admiring tone.
It is not too much to say that BR was the first wholehearted friend the Germans gained among the front-rank leaders of non-German stock in the state. He had studied their language, he had observed with admiration their agricultural economy and their simple, pious manners, and he now came forward, though engaged in founding a college that he had hoped would attract German youth, with a plea for an independent German had hoped would attract German youth, with a plea for an independent German college. Probably in his conversations with German friends in Philadelphia, they had put him up to composing the appeal, and he had agreed to do so provided his name could be withheld.
(The Penna. Gazette states that the article had first appeared in a German language paper.)
proposal materialized in Franklin College at Lancaster. BR was to serve as a charter trustee of this institution and to write a delightful account of its opening ceremonies (letter to Mrs. Stockton,19 June 1787) The culmination of all this was his "Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania," which was for its time uniquely sympathetic and which still makes illuminating reading. The "Account" originally appeared in the Columbian Magazine, III, 22-30 (Jan. 1789), was included in BR's Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical (see 1798.RUSH.B1 this collection)
(1798), and because of its importance in the cultural history of the Pennsylvania Germans has been reissued several times in both English and German; see Emil Meynen, Bibliographie des Deutschtums der Kolonialzeitlichen Ein-wanderung in Nordamerika, Leipzig,
1937, Nos. 375-8.Other Names and Numbers
Other Numbers
Number Type
ReferencesOther Number
Butterfield 368 (1), Fox 1789 (5)