The Right to Migrate … Then What?
The downstream effects of realizing the American Dream, 1736 to 2024
Hans Georg Gerster’s American Dream started promisingly. He left his home in Basel, Switzerland, made his way down the Rhine, and sailed for England in 1736 at the age of 25 or 26. In London, he and his wife and mother boarded a ship for Philadelphia. They got lucky; their passage took only eight weeks. They and most of the passengers on their ship survived the journey.
They settled in Germantown, which Gerster described as two hours from Philadelphia. (It’s about ten miles from the Germantown neighborhood of Philly today to the Delaware River downtown.) At first, things looked promising: In 1737, Gerster reported with pleasure that he worked as a day laborer and received daily pay, plus food and drink. They got along well with their Indian neighbors (probably Lenape people), who stopped by frequently and enjoyed learning German. (Gerster noted with surprise that Indian children were as fair-skinned as Swiss and German children; adults tanned using bear fat as suntan oil.) Gerster celebrated the freedom of physical and spiritual expression they enjoyed (though many, he noted, abused the privilege). Perhaps most of all, he appreciated that the King of England did not demand taxes or tithes. Each man contributed to road-building and the cost of the common lands, but nothing else. Cereal crops grew well, and they found grape vines in the trees, but he missed the fruit trees from back home. If you’re poor and want to work, he advised, you can easily get a new start here.
By 1740, however, the new land had won many battles, if not the war, against the aspiring young immigrant. Gerster warned his friends back home of the extreme dangers of emigrating: Some crossings took as much as twenty weeks (often with rations for only eight to ten). He counted the death toll: Weißer Martin’s wife died at sea; so did Mathiß Mohler, two daughters of Jacob Buser, two of the eight children of Heinrich Rickenbacher, and the carpenter N. von Oberdorff. Cousin Zuß Jocki and all of his family except the youngest child died when they got to Gerster’s house. Jacob Buser died in England, and his wife died in Philadelphia eight days after their arrival. Rickenbacher’s wife died there too. Sixty people in one group starved to death after a harsh storm wiped out their provisions and cooking equipment.
Though he had managed to work long enough to pay off the debt he arrived with, Gerster’s own health and that of his wife had declined considerably. He had developed an illness that prevented him from working as a laborer; he learned linen weaving and made his living that way. His wife, alarmed at his condition, suffered extreme pain or paralysis in her limbs, and developed scurvy in her mouth that affected her ability to swallow. They had both improved, and they thanked God. If these personal travails weren’t enough, the European powers threatened each other on the seas, and colonists feared attacks by the Spanish or French (possibly anticipating the Seven Years’ War).
Although he would not tell any of his friend they should not come, Gerster recounted these horrors to make plain the dangers of the journey. Often we seek relief from hardship only to find that an even greater hardship awaits us, he told them. At thirty, Gerster had grown old – and wise.
Closing the Doors to America, Six Generations Later
Because I want to know why Americans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries voted to restrict immigration – ending the American Dreams of millions of people for decades – I need to go back to the beginning and understand their American Dream. My biographical subject, Wilbur J. Carr, descended from German immigrants, the first of whom arrived in 1737 as part of a moderate wave of German-speaking immigrants to Philadelphia between 1727 and 1748 (and peaking dramatically during the six years thereafter).
I’m still looking for someone who arrived on the very same ship as Carr’s third great-grandfather, but Gerster was on one of three ships that arrived a year earlier, and he settled in the same area. They undoubtedly would have known each other.
I came across Gerster’s letters in a book called Alles ist ganz anders hier (Everything is different over here), edited by Leo Schelbert and Hedwig Rappolt. (I don’t know German, so I had to resort to manually transcribing the letters and plugging them into online translation software – in my free trials, DeepL Translate worked the best.)
Did these natives of the Rhineland flee “persecution,” as defined by the Immigration and Nationality Act today? They faced severe hardships, to be sure: communities repeatedly decimated for a century by French and Habsburg warfare; severe local restrictions on religious practice (though usually not on belief); and feudal limitations, both financial and personal, on their freedom. I haven’t tried to analyze their claims under modern law, but they strike me as falling somewhere along that line of material hardship and discrimination that characterizes many decisions to migrate today.
Gerster survived those first hard winters and lived to become an American: He died on Christmas Eve 1797 at the age of 87. His gravestone at Frankford Presbyterian Church bears his Americanized name, “George Castor,” and the verse: “Remember Man as you pass by/ As you are now so once was I/ As I am now so must you be/ Prepare for Death and follow me.”
The Right to Migrate … Then What?
Gerster survived, but, as he reminded us, many of his fellow travelers did not. Then, in his old age, came a revolution, which he survived too.
People of the Rhineland endured ghastly wars in the early modern era and lingering poverty and subjugation thereafter; I find it hard to blame them for seeking a better life elsewhere, just as I find it hard to blame migrants fleeing similar conditions today. The life the Rhinelanders struggled and managed to carve out on this continent cost others dearly – the year after Gerster arrived, for example, Thomas Penn reinterpreted the Quakers’ agreement with the Lenape in a way that deprived the tribe of vast landholdings. But as I sit here at my word processor, earning a living with my head instead of my hands, I know I walk in all of their footsteps.
By re-living these journeys of the past, we don’t find simple answers. Instead, we find unwavering, unforgiving complexity: cycle after overlapping cycle of hardship, persecution, migration, change, conflict, conflagration, uneasy new order, repeat. Having survived migration and resettlement at long odds, what might Gerster and his descendants justifiably seek to protect out of the new order they created? If we think migration is a human right, does the migrant have any rights to self-preservation in the new world? And if so, does that complicate our understanding of today’s immigration debate, wherever we may stand on it?