Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple's Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World

Two Troubled Souls

Two Troubled Souls

An Eighteenth-Century Couple’s Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World

Aaron Spencer Fogleman

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS    Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Endowment Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2013 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved.

Set in Quadraat by codeMantra. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fogleman, Aaron Spencer.

Two troubled souls : an eighteenth-century couple’s spiritual journey in the Atlantic world / Aaron Spencer Fogleman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-0879-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-2642-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Christian biography. 2. Reynier, Jean-François. 3. Reynier, Jean-François—Travel. 4. Knoll, Maria Barbara. 5. Knoll, Maria Barbara—Travel. 6. Missions—Atlantic Ocean Region. 7. Atlantic Ocean Region—Civilization—18th century. I. Title.

BR1700.3.F64 2013

280’.40922—dc23

[B]

2013021087

TO SALOME. This one is for you, Kälbchen.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Calendars and Currency Exchange Rates

Introduction Marriage, Mission, and Migrants in the Atlantic World

PART I     A Young Man’s Path into the Atlantic World

1. Alpine Origins

2. Pennsylvania: A Troubled Pietist in an Individualist Paradise

3. Georgia: Joining a Colony of Rebels

4. Giving Europe Another Chance

PART II     Union in Europe

5. A Woman’s Path into the Atlantic World

6. The Wedding

PART III     To the Caribbean They Went

7. A Long Journey Together

8. Trouble in Suriname

9. Salvation and Success on St. Thomas

PART IV     Life in North America

10. Crisis and Controversy in Pennsylvania

11. Onto the Transatlantic Stage

12. Separation, Empowerment, and Flight from Pennsylvania

13. A Separate Peace in Georgia

Conclusion Seekers at Rest in a World They Could Not Change

Appendix Genealogy of Jean-François Reynier of Vevey, 1712–1775

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures, Maps, and Tables

FIGURES

I.1 The Marriage of Twelve Moravian Couples in the Saal of Schloß Marienborn in 1743 3

1.1 View of Vevey on Lake Geneva and its Alpine surroundings 19

1.2 View of the town of Vevey, from the south 20

2.1 The Old Main Harbor of Rotterdam 33

2.2 The Needles in the English Channel 36

2.3 Waterspout on the Atlantic Ocean 39

2.4 The South East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia 40

3.1 Savannah in 1734 57

3.2 Von Reck’s depiction of a Yuchi village 59

3.3 Von Reck’s painting of a Yuchi official and his wife 61

4.1 Schloß Marienborn in Wetteravia 75

4.2 View from the northwest of Herrnhaag 77

6.1 A Moravian woman wearing the unique dress of the group 94

7.1 Paramaribo, Suriname, in 1770 109

7.2 Suriname and its plantations in 1737 111

8.1 Sugar plantation operations in eighteenth-century Suriname 135

8.2 Slaves on a sugar plantation in Suriname 136

9.1 Posaunenberg, the Moravian plantation on St. Thomas, in 1757 154

9.2 Baptism of slaves in the Moravian mission on St. Thomas 156

9.3 A prayer day at the Moravian slave mission on St. Croix 166

10.1 View of the Moravian community of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, from the south 179

11.1 Title page of Jean-François Reynier’s published autobiography 203

12.1 Panoramic view of the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania 221

12.2 Saron, the sisters’ house of the Ephrata Cloister 222

12.3 Ephrata sisters wearing habits at the Ephrata Cloister 223

12.4 Kammer, or cell, in Saron 227

13.1 Plan of Ebenezer, Georgia 244

13.2 Jerusalem Lutheran Church in Ebenezer, Georgia 245

13.3 Jerusalem Lutheran Church Graveyard 256

MAPS

1. The Atlantic World in the eighteenth century 5

2. Lake Geneva in the early eighteenth century 18

3. Jean-François Reynier’s emigration route through Europe in 1728 31

4. Jean-François Reynier’s travels in British North America, 1728–39 52

5. The Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry in the eighteenth century 56

6. Suriname in the eighteenth century 110

7. The Reyniers’ journey through the Caribbean in 1743 148

8. The mid-Atlantic colonies of British North America 178

TABLES

1. Material Goods in the Estate Inventory of Jean-François Reynier, 1775 251

2. Material Goods in the Estate Inventory of Maria Barbara Reynier, 1777 252

Acknowledgments

There are many people and institutions to recognize for their generous assistance in the completion of this project. Let me begin with the numerous archives and libraries whose staffs helped me. Many of the manuscripts used in this project came from the Unity Archives in Herrnhut, Germany, and Olaf Nippe was especially helpful in making these materials available. Many thanks also to the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, especially to Paul Peucker and Lanie Graf. Marjolaine Guisan went well beyond the call of duty to provide invaluable materials from the Archives Communales in Vevey, Switzerland, and for this I am very grateful. Thomas Schmid of the Bürgerbibliothek in Bern, Switzerland, also helped me greatly in acquiring manuscripts. At the Library Company of Philadelphia, James Green helped me again—just as he has been doing for the past twenty-five years. There is none better than he. The few days I spent at the Georgia Archives in Morrow, Georgia, were among the most productive, revealing, and interesting for this project—what a wonderful facility, filled with mountains of invaluable historical material and hardworking, knowledgeable, and kind staff like Steven Engerrand and Anna Appleman. Yet the state government has recently seen fit to drastically limit operations of its own historical archives, the most important depository of history in the entire state of Georgia. It is an awful shame, and I hope that the lawmakers in Atlanta will come to their senses soon and correct this terrible error. Others that I would like to thank for their help are Lynette J. Stoudt of the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah, Kerry Mohn of the Ephrata Cloister in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, Kevin Shue of the Lancaster County Historical Society in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Wayne Weber of the Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections in Wheaton, Illinois, and L. Allen Viehmeyer of the Schwenkfelder Library in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania.

For funding of this project I would like to thank a number of institutions and agencies. The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia has supported my work for many years, and for this I am grateful. The Fulbright Program provided me with the opportunity to teach for a year at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, as the Distinguished Chair in American Studies, and during this time I was also able to complete the European side of research for this project. Reiner Rohr of the Fulbright office in Berlin was especially helpful. Northern Illinois University, my professional home, provided significant support in the form of a sabbatical leave and Research and Artistry funds.

There are many professional colleagues and friends whom I would like to thank for their invaluable assistance to this project. Most I have known for years; others I met during the course of research for this book. First, let me thank Michael Zuckerman and Wim Klooster. The University of North Carolina Press could not have chosen two more qualified and helpful evaluators. Both challenged me to improve the manuscript and make it as good as it possibly could be. Kenneth Lockridge did the same in an unofficial capacity, as he has done with my work for the past twenty-five years. Ken commented thoroughly on the entire manuscript and urged me to press on, yet in ways that might improve the final outcome. Natalie Zemon Davis was generous with her time and commented extensively on the Suriname material in this manuscript. Clint Cargile proved to be an excellent proofreader of the entire manuscript. Susan Branson, Ben Marsh, Jeff Bach, Gert Oostindie, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Holly Snyder, and Hans-Jürgen Schrader were also helpful. Staff members of Founders Library at Northern Illinois University were extremely helpful, especially James Millhorn. Susanne Opfermann and Christa Buschendorf were supportive hosts during my one-year stay at the American Studies Department of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

A special note of thanks goes to the Atlantic World Discussion Group at Northern Illinois University. This motley crew of faculty and graduate students from our History Department has been patiently listening to me talk about this project for years. In addition to commenting extensively on an early book proposal and later on a well-developed chapter, they have responded with thoughtfulness and interest to my many queries about specific details in their respective areas of expertise. Ismael Montana, Brian Sandberg, and John Alcalde have been especially helpful on specific matters. Most important, however, have been our general explorations in Atlantic history in weekly discussions for the past nine years. Sean Farrell, James Schmidt, and many other faculty and graduate students have contributed significantly to keeping this project afloat during this period. Through our many meetings and readings, I have learned a great deal about the Atlantic World that is the subject of this book.

Most important, I would like to thank my family. Vera has helped me and this family greatly, and she also commented extensively on the entire manuscript. Salome keeps growing up, and I have enjoyed watching her while writing this book. Noah and Lukey came along in the middle of this project and keep making life more interesting and wonderful. I am so glad that I have you all.

Note on Calendars and Currency Exchange Rates

CALENDARS

With the exception of Britain and its American colonies, all of the places mentioned in this book had adopted the Gregorian (new style) calendar during the period of this study. The British Empire continued to use the Julian (old style) calendar, which was eleven days behind the Gregorian, until after 2 September 1752. Thus correspondence, reports, and other documents about America written to or by individuals from the European continent might be dated according to one or the other calendar. When it is not obvious, I will indicate which calendar was used with NS or OS, if known.

APPROXIMATE CURRENCY EXCHANGE RATES AND VALUES

£1 sterling = 20 shillings (12 pence = 1 shilling) = £1.1 Georgia = £1.6 Pennsylvania = £5.5 New England = 7.4 Danish West Indies Rigsdaler = £7.5 South Carolina = 10.0 fl Rhineland Palatinate guilders (1 fl = 60 Kreutzer [x]) = 11.11 fl Dutch = 12.5 Basel/Swiss Pfund (pounds) = 12.6 fl Suriname = 16.2 French livres

Sources

John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775: A Handbook (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 141, 291–98, 309–10, 316–17; Georg Fertig, Lokales Leben, atlantische Welt: Die Entscheidung zur Auswanderung vom Rhein nach Nordamerika im 18. Jahrhundert (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 2000), 422.

INTRODUCTION

Marriage, Mission, and Migrants in the Atlantic World

This book is about a marriage, specifically, the marriage of a woman named Maria Barbara Knoll and a doctor named Jean-François Reynier, two very different people from very different corners of Europe who were drawn into the historic events that shaped the Atlantic World in the eighteenth century. Throughout their obscure but storied lives, Knoll and Reynier resided on three continents, endured four colonial wars, and participated in conquest, slavery, religious missions, and revivals. They interacted with colonists, Indians, rebellious slaves, and imperial troops. They were religious seekers who frequently found themselves at odds with the communities in which they lived. They were also frequently at odds with each other, and marital tension and scandal threatened to tear them apart. Their travels and adventures led them through so many different places and episodes of the Atlantic World that their lives provide an invaluable insight and perspective into how that world functioned in the eighteenth century and the different ways that women and men experienced it.

The story of this marriage begins on 25 March 1740, when the young, anxious, strong-spirited Maria Barbara Knoll awaited her wedding ceremony in the Schloß (palace) Marienborn in Wetteravia, near the free imperial city of Frankfurt am Main in the German territories. There was good reason for her anxiety. By evening’s end, she would be bound in holy matrimony to Jean-Francois Reynier, and as of yet, she had never properly met the man.

Maria Barbara Knoll had journeyed to Marienborn to join a budding religious movement committed to a communal spiritual lifestyle and an elevated role for women. Upon arrival, she did not know that the group’s leaders would ask her to marry a member of their group whom she had never met. When they did ask—she was not forced—she reluctantly agreed. As if marrying a stranger was not enough, soon after the wedding the newlyweds were scheduled to cross the Atlantic Ocean together, but not for a honeymoon. Because of Reynier’s religious zeal and medical skills, church leaders had selected him to serve in a mission in the Dutch colony of Suriname in the tropics of South America. They had selected Knoll to go not so much because of her individual skills and abilities, but because she was his wife and they needed couples working in their mission fields.

Suriname lay in the heart of the broad plantation belt in the colonies that stretched from the Chesapeake Bay in North America to southeastern Brazil. The newlyweds were supposed to work in a mission intended to convert Carib, Arawak, and African inhabitants to Christianity. Almost all of the missionaries who had been sent to this post since it opened five years earlier had either perished from disease, or some other misfortune, or returned prematurely while still extremely ill. Knoll had received all of this news during the previous three weeks and may have been in some shock as the wedding ceremony proceeded and the new plan for her life began to unfold.

The bride hoped that she would perform everything properly during the upcoming ceremony. It was, after all, a complicated, ritualistic affair. And Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, the leader of the renewed Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Church, was in attendance. Members of the small community crowded into Schloß Marienborn’s great Saal—a spacious ballroom-like interior where liturgical gatherings took place. The men wore their finest wigs, coats, vests, breeches, and knee stockings and stood to one side of the Saal. The women stood opposite, wearing the distinct female clothing that was the religious group’s trademark: long dresses, tight-fitting white hoods, and colored ribbons under the chin. Maria Barbara Knoll wore the same.

Everyone sang hymns (Count Zinzendorf sang loudly from the heart), accompanied by string and brass instruments and perhaps an organ. They also held Communion and a love feast, a communal celebration with tea and rolls. The long ceremony carried on late into the candlelit evening. While the bride and groom stood together in front of the community members, the preacher solemnly explained the spiritual meaning of marriage and then completed the service. Thereafter, further ritual meetings and counseling continued well into the night, followed by ritualistic consummation of the marriage.¹

Maria Barbara Knoll came from one of the German territories and was probably Lutheran. Other than that, we know nothing about her before her marriage in Marienborn, but we know a lot about her thereafter. When Knoll joined the Moravian Church in 1739 or 1740, she would have experienced a liberating new lifestyle. This group allowed women to preach, hold community office, and work as missionaries among Atlantic peoples. They also promoted the education of women and encouraged them to write letters, reports, diaries, and poetry, which gave Knoll ample opportunity to improve herself. In contrast, the orthodox Lutheran Church of the period stressed patriarchy, male-only leadership, and the silence of women in church. Lutheran women on both sides of the Atlantic played important public roles as pastors’ wives and in enforcing community values, but they held no church offices and were not sent on missions. Yet, with the possible exception of the Quakers, no Protestant group offered women religious and social opportunities for leadership, travel, and experience like the Moravians.

Figure I.1. The Marriage of Twelve Moravian Couples in the Saal of Schloß Marienborn in 1743. Maria Barbara Knoll and Jean-François Reynier were married here three years earlier. Pen drawing, artist unknown. TS Mp.372.15, Unity Archives, Herrnhut, Germany.

Knoll’s letters reveal that she was a pious woman, and her handwriting and grammar suggest that she was not well educated. Her willingness to marry Reynier and go with him to the Moravian mission in Suriname, however, testifies to her bravery. What others wrote about her—and they wrote a lot—indicates that she was a strong, determined woman who could bear tremendous hardship, challenge her husband and other men, and act on her strong sexual impulses. She lived a life filled with troubles—some caused by her husband, some self-induced—but she was able to overcome most of them.

Jean-François Reynier was a French-speaking Protestant, or Huguenot, who came from Vevey on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. He was the son of refugees who had fled Louis XIV’s France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which had provided protection for Protestants in that kingdom. His father had been an apothecary, and Reynier took his medical bag with him when he emigrated alone to Pennsylvania at age sixteen. Reynier began life in America as a poor indentured servant. A self-styled jack-of-all-trades, he became an adept craftsman, making and selling pewter spoons, shoes, and other items. He never attended medical school, but he learned the art of healing informally, and people started referring to him as Dr. Reynier. Moreover, he became a writer, as proven by his many letters and the autobiography he published later in life, and he composed hymns as well.² Reynier was also a religious seeker with a utopian streak. He became a missionary and sought perfection within himself and in the communities around him. He used his medical, artisanal, and spiritual skills among slaves and Indians in Georgia, South Carolina, Suriname, and St. Thomas to heal bodies and souls and keep mission stations afloat in times of crisis.

Reynier’s tenacity, endurance, and resistance to authority, together with his unquenchable desire for knowledge and experience, his bold, adventurous nature, and his remarkable talents, all combined to make him the quintessential American individualist. Yet he remained a difficult, troubled soul. He did not always get along with others, including his wife. He could be self-righteous and egoistic, which led to constant rejection and alienation. And he even showed signs of obsessive-compulsion and susceptibility to madness.

After the marriage ceremony, the Reyniers began a tumultuous journey through what, today, we call the Atlantic World. Historians have become increasingly interested in the Atlantic World in which the Reyniers lived, but they do not always agree on its significance or even what it was. In my view, the Atlantic World was the world made by encounters among Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans, wherever they occurred on all four continents and at sea. The Atlantic World, which has received so much attention from historians in recent years, began with Columbus, who initiated permanent contact among Atlantic peoples. Before Columbus, contacts across the Atlantic had been fleeting and infrequent. Historians still debate the significance of probable and possible pre-Columbian encounters of Norse peoples, Irish monks, ancient Phoenicians, and others with America and its native inhabitants, but few deny the importance of the tremendous developments that quickly and dramatically changed Atlantic relationships—for better and worse—beginning in 1492.³

Map 1. The Atlantic World in the eighteenth century

From 1492 on, Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans alternatively fought or cooperated with each other in a world of conquest, slavery, and resistance in the midst of massive economic exchange, social and cultural interactions, and struggles for freedom, opportunity, and autonomy, which did not occur elsewhere on the globe, yet had permanent consequences recognizable even today. During this long era of the Atlantic World, Cherokees, Arawaks, Igbo, Angolans, Akan, Germans, Irish, English, and others hardly considered themselves part of a world spanning four continents. Yet they traded, fought, moved (or were forced to move), worshiped, and sometimes married in ways that ignored the imperial boundaries of traditional colonial history. Such seemingly incongruous actions are better understood in an Atlantic context.

In the extensive historical literature that has emerged on the Atlantic World in the past twenty-five years, we have learned a lot about the nature of encounters among Atlantic peoples. People moving among the continents—mariners, traders, missionaries, diplomats, soldiers, workers, slaves, and settlers—had a tremendous impact on the developing Atlantic World. People leaving their homelands voluntarily or involuntarily to live and work in the Americas for a long period of time (perhaps the rest of their lives) were by far the largest of these groups. The vast majority of migrants who crossed the Atlantic before the early nineteenth century did so in some form of unfreedom, mostly as slaves.

Enslaved migrants were prevalent throughout the Americas. For a long time, historians excluded African slaves from the ranks of immigrants, but a generation of work has now overturned this view. Immigrants were people who came from somewhere else and stayed, as opposed to having been born in America. In British North America, three-fourths of all immigrants before 1776 were slaves, convicts, or indentured servants,⁴ and a large majority of all transatlantic immigrants in the Americas were African slaves. By 1800, over 8.6 million Africans had experienced the infamous Middle Passage to the Americas, and about 1.3 million of these did not survive it, with many more dying in captivity in Africa while awaiting transport or shortly after arrival in America.⁵

In contrast, only about 1.7 million European migrants crossed the Atlantic before 1800. Of these, 100,000 were Portuguese who settled in Brazil by 1700. Some 437,000 Spaniards migrated to the Americas by 1650, and about 250,000 arrived between 1650 and 1819. They settled primarily in Peru and New Spain, although nearly a third of them scattered across New Granada, Central America, Cuba, and Chile. About 722,000 immigrated from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland to settle in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean. Over 130,000 left the German territories and German-speaking areas of Switzerland and France to settle primarily in British North America, but also in French Louisiana and Guiana and elsewhere. Additionally, about 51,000 emigrants from France settled in Canada and the Caribbean, and over 2,000 French-speaking Protestants (Huguenots) settled in British North America. Also, a few thousand Dutch immigrants settled in New Netherland (later New York) and surrounding areas, in the Caribbean and Suriname, and in South Africa. Many of the Europeans, especially in the British, French, and Dutch colonies, were indentured servants, or in some cases convicts. In the eighteenth century (until 1776), the largest European immigrant ethnic group in the British North American colonies was the Germans, followed by northern and southern Irish (primarily Protestant and Catholic, respectively), Scots, and English. Philadelphia was the largest entrepôt for European immigrants in this region, not to be replaced by New York until the nineteenth century. Whereas English indentured servants had dominated the immigration before 1700, especially in the Chesapeake colonies, the number of English arrivals declined in the eighteenth century, and most who did come were convicts, as the English government began a program of clearing out its overcrowded prisons, transporting tens of thousands of convicted criminals in chains to North America in the eighteenth century. Additionally, about 10 percent of the more than 100,000 Irish immigrants were convicts during this period. The majority of these and other convicts were taken to work on the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake colonies.⁶

By the eighteenth century, a plantation system functioned at the heart of most of the colonial economies, and it laid the foundation of the Atlantic system that attracted so many immigrants to the New World. As Europeans conquered many areas of the Americas, they began using first native and European labor and then slave labor from Africa to raise staple crops for the Atlantic trade. From Maryland to southeastern Brazil, sugar, tobacco, cocoa, and other staple products raised with slave labor were traded across the Atlantic for European manufactured and luxury goods, which Africans also imported in exchange for the slaves they sent to the Americas.

In the early modern era, western Europeans underwent a consumer revolution. The growing middle classes developed a voracious appetite for colonial luxury products like cane sugar, pipe tobacco, and cocoa, yet they remained oblivious to (or were satisfied with) the brutal exploitation of Africans and the conquest of Indian lands that made obtaining these luxuries possible. By the eighteenth century, profits from this trade superseded those of the old precious metals trade. People and capital flowed into the Americas at record levels, and with them the conflicts among imperial, political, and military interests quickly increased, especially in North America and the Caribbean.⁷

This was the world into which the newlyweds plunged. During their journeys, Knoll and Reynier became involved in a number of high-profile transatlantic religious developments and controversies. Although central and western Europe became increasingly connected to the rest of the Atlantic World in the eighteenth century, when people like Knoll and Reynier made the journey to America they left behind a world much different than the one they would encounter. Aristocratic privilege and serfdom remained important in much of their old world, even as new enlightened rulers tried and often succeeded in building modern states. In many areas, sustained demographic growth following generations of devastating warfare led to economic crises for villagers, who faced the prospect of making a living on less than an acre of land. Large numbers of religious refugees and new radical religious movements sprang up throughout western Europe. Huguenots began leaving France before 1685, but in the twenty-five years thereafter about 200,000 Huguenots fled the kingdom, most going to the Dutch Republic and German territories, as well as to Switzerland and England (and often from there to English North America). Authorities expelled nearly 20,000 Lutherans from the Archbishopric of Salzburg in 1731, with most going to other German territories, although a handful settled in the British North American colony of Georgia. Small radical groups could be found in places like Wetteravia (including Marienborn) and Schwarzenau and on Lake Geneva. Unlike in America (especially Pennsylvania), religious diversity developed in Europe not because of formal programs of freedom and tolerance or because of the lack of strong state churches, but because strong state churches periodically forced out some religious groups, while other states or rulers agreed, at least temporarily, to accept them.

When Knoll and Reynier arrived in British North America in the eighteenth century, they, along with many of the more than 250,000 other Europeans, found it a liberating experience where everything was completely different, as immigrants often wrote in their letters home. Here there was land—a lot of land—as well as religious freedom and a much less obtrusive state (meaning low taxes). In addition to German- and French-speakers like the Reyniers, Irish, Scots, English, and others brought a plethora of religious beliefs and practices with them. As happened in many cases in America, one could also pursue religion less rigorously or not at all, joining the ranks of the large unchurched population.

But the freedom and opportunity immigrants and others enjoyed were in some ways connected to forms of unfreedom and warfare that they had sought to escape. The Reyniers found slavery nearly everywhere in America, but especially in South Carolina, Georgia, Suriname, and on St. Thomas. Further, Reynier had to sell himself as an indentured servant to even make his first trip to America—a status that he and other Europeans often referred to as slavery, although no African would have agreed. And the land (and with this, opportunity) came from Native Americans, who resisted this conquest and kept immigrants and colonists at or close to war for much of their lives.

Coming to America also meant that the Reyniers and others had the opportunity to participate in experiments and religious missions among Atlantic peoples that fascinated and inspired some Europeans, who wanted to know more about this place and the people in it. In 1699, a naturalist and painter originally from Frankfurt named Maria Sibylla Merian, who had recently been a member of a pietist community called the Labadists in the Dutch province of Friesland, traveled from Amsterdam to Suriname to investigate its exotic plant and insect life, which she portrayed six years later in a brilliantly illustrated volume that sold widely in Europe. In 1748, a student of the famous Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus journeyed to the Delaware Valley to collect information on New World plant life for his mentor to classify. In addition to returning with notes on at least ninety species, Peter Kalm became involved in controversies and missions involving Swedes and the countless German religious groups in the region. Later he wrote a description of his travels and findings that was published in Swedish, German, and English.⁸

European scientists and missionaries found America fascinating. Although there was much tension between science and religion during the era of Enlightenment and revival, members of both movements had much in common. Both sought truth and explored new territories wherever they could be found or disseminated. America offered new plants and animals to examine, as well as new bodies and souls—European, African, and Native American—to study, heal, and save. The vast, nearly stateless expanses and the multitudes of different peoples and ideas offered the chance to experiment religiously. Colonial Pennsylvania became both famous and notorious—depending on one’s point of view—as a haven for such experimenters. In 1694, a man from Transylvania named Johannes Kelpius, who believed that Judgment Day was rapidly approaching, led a group of refugees to the colony and built a tabernacle in the wilderness where they might worship in peace. On top of the tabernacle, they placed a telescope to study the heavens and to watch the burning stars fall on wicked Europe. They also believed they would witness the Second Coming of Christ.⁹

A generation after Kelpius, scattered remnants of this group reassembled under a newly arrived leader named Georg Conrad Beissel, a journeyman baker from Württemberg who had spent time in Marienborn himself before immigrating to Pennsylvania in 1720. Here he founded a celibate, hermetic cloister deep in the backcountry at a place he and his followers called Ephrata. In deep isolation from Europeans, but still among several groups of Native Americans known collectively as Delawares, Beissel and others contemplated an alternative form of God and Christ. They worshiped alone in the wilderness (or tried to).¹⁰ Jean-François Reynier lived there shortly after his time as an indentured servant. He returned thirty years later with his wife, and together they found that the brothers and sisters of Ephrata were not as devout or celibate as many believed.

A generation or more of historians have enlightened us on encounters of the Atlantic peoples and the Atlantic system of operation at its height in the eighteenth century, but the role of individual women and men in these developments has been studied much less. A few microhistories of slaves and women have helped us understand how Atlantic developments affected the otherwise unknown individual lives of those who crossed territorial, imperial, and cultural boundaries. But little if anything has appeared that addresses how a husband and a wife experienced Atlantic events differently.¹¹

The purpose of this book is to enhance our understanding of the Atlantic World by investigating the experiences of a married couple who engaged with so many of its structures. It employs a microhistorical approach to investigate what the Reyniers’ lives tell us about something as big as the Atlantic World in the eighteenth century and to understand the lives of a woman and a man that were shaped by many of that world’s central features. This unavoidably involves a significant amount of interpretation of what their motivations, thoughts, and feelings might have been, especially in Knoll’s case, since there is less documentation on her. But these interpretations are based on the documentation that does exist and on what we know about other women and men in similar situations at the time.

In some ways, this book addresses only issues relevant to Protestant lands in the Atlantic World. Reynier and Knoll lived and traveled in Switzerland, some unknown German Lutheran territory where Knoll was born, Wetteravia, the Netherlands, London, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, St. Thomas and St. Jan, and Suriname—all Protestant places from the European religious perspective. Moreover, the themes of religious seeking, revival, and controversies in the slave and Native American missions that this book addresses could only have happened in Protestant lands.

Yet in a number of ways the lives of Knoll and Reynier and the themes this book addresses were relevant not just to the Protestant but to all of the Atlantic World, at least from the European perspective. First, many of the decisions, difficulties of travel, dangers, and diversions that Reynier experienced as a single, male transatlantic migrant were hardly Protestant in nature and were familiar to Catholic European migrants, who were overwhelmingly male. Knoll’s experiences as a migrant were in some ways rare to both Protestants and Catholics, yet women in both groups would have recognized the vulnerability, dangers, culture shock and displacement, and longings for the homeland that she experienced, as well as the notion that men determined much about women’s destinations and activities and even their decisions to leave home in the first place. Knoll’s experiences were not Protestant in these respects.

Second, the Reyniers’ experiences in Suriname and on St. Thomas were more similar than different to those of people in slave colonies held by Catholic Europeans. What mattered most to the Africans and Native Americans they encountered was not that the Reyniers were Protestant but rather that they were European, Christian, a man and a woman, and part of a mission not directly connected to an imperial power. Although Catholics and Protestants had different methods with different political implications, their missionaries still shared the experience of bringing a Christian message to dramatically different peoples in dangerous physical and political environments. Further, the tensions between communalism and individualism and between husband and wife that ran throughout their marriage and individual lives, as well as the psychology of dealing with tremendous change when migrating from Europe to America, the deadly disease environments, and patriarchy, along with the issues of survival, work, and the threat and impact of horrible rumors in their communities, were not Protestant. European men and women of all faiths faced this.

Third, this story illuminates a number of important gender issues that were not Protestant. Although there were far fewer married immigrant couples in Catholic than in Protestant colonies, most of those who were in the former lived and dealt with many of the same kinds of issues as the Reyniers did. There was nothing particularly Protestant about Knoll’s nursing and other work in Suriname in the midst of a deadly disease environment, with tense, violent black-white relations and the threat of rape, rebellion, and war. Nor were the most important issues of the Reyniers’ tense marital relationship particularly Protestant, such as arguing over where and how they would live or dealing with difficult, eccentric personalities and conflicting interests or desires within the marriage. And there was nothing Protestant about Knoll’s desire to have a close spiritual and working relationship or friendship with other women in a community that protected and empowered women. Reynier’s needs or desires to become a jack-of-all-trades for survival purposes, to dominate and correct those around him, or to face down male rivals for power were not Protestant either.

Last, the themes of resistance and hidden corners in the Atlantic that this book addresses were relevant to both Catholic and Protestant lands. True, many of the troubles Reynier and Knoll encountered would not have happened in Catholic lands (for example, elaborate schemes to critique, resist, or replace state church authority and struggles over the meaning and limits of religious freedom), but cross-cultural spiritual and medical exchanges among Atlantic peoples occurred everywhere, whether those attempting to control the system wanted this or not, and so did individual resistance, or wives challenging husbands, and more.

Throughout their spiritual journey in the Atlantic World, Reynier and Knoll sought truth and opportunity. Whenever individuals or groups seek truth with relatively little restraint, it implies that there is a lack of religious unity where they live. A unified religious body cannot tolerate people seeking the truth because they might find it in a way that disrupts or undermines church authority. This problem is something that both Protestants and Catholics discovered during the Reformation and throughout the early modern era, when the growth of tolerance and measures of religious freedom occurred in some places of the Atlantic World (even as harsh religious repression occurred in other places). Knoll and Reynier discovered this as they pursued what seemed to be the most fulfilling spiritual course—as members contributing to a larger group effort, as a couple, and for themselves individually. They exploited tolerance in places where it was possible, by joining numerous religious groups in the Atlantic World; but sometimes they caused such problems within otherwise tolerant groups where they could not be accepted. Similarly, within those groups, the Reyniers often felt compelled to give up their individual search for truth in order to reduce tension within the community. And, within their marriage, one or the other (usually Knoll, but sometimes Reynier) had to give in to the other’s desires for a specific spiritual course in order to preserve the marriage. This is something that married couples of different religious beliefs and commitments regularly have experienced throughout history. The Reyniers’ travels and pursuit of truth at all of these levels accounted for much of the tension in their lives and marriage.

The opportunity that the Reyniers sought was both economic and spiritual, and the two were related. Almost all voluntary European emigrants sought economic opportunity one way or another, but there was a male bias to this aspect of migration. Most emigrated because things were going poorly in an economic sense at home. They believed or hoped that they could do better in America, and the risk seemed worth it. Yet most of these migrants were male, and wives and other women might have had a different attitude toward migration. Wives often left home not to seek opportunity but because their husbands did. This is not to say that they had no input in the decision to migrate, but like