American Beer: Glimpses of Its History and Description of Its Manufacture — John Shaqi
American Beer: Glimpses of Its History and Description of Its ManufactureThomann, G. (Gallus)
History
American Beer: Glimpses of Its History and Description of Its Manufacture
Thomann, G. (Gallus)
Beer; Brewing industry -- United States
Neither the Moravians nor the Salzburgers of Georgia seem to have
received at the hands of modern historians their due measure of
appreciation. The somewhat indulgent contempt with which Jones in
his “Dead Towns of Georgia” occasionally refers to the Salzburgers
reveals a total lack of appreciation of these pious, upright and sturdy
people whom one is strongly tempted to style the German Huguenots.
Like their French co-religionists they were driven out of the land of
their birth by the intolerance of tyrannical rulers, and, sacrificing
all they possessed for the sake of their faith, they sought homes in
foreign lands. Both were welcomed and received with open arms by the
father of Frederick the Great, who colonized seventeen thousand of the
Salzburgers in his provinces and would gladly have sheltered them all;
but a part of the exodus was diverted to other lands and of that part
Oglethorpe secured a few communities with their pastors whom he settled
in Georgia.
Goethe immortalized the Salzburgers in his beautiful epic poem
“Hermann and Dorothea,”—“the German’s pride and poesy’s pearl”—and in
his history of Frederick the Great, Carlyle devotes one of his most
interesting chapters to them; but what ought to bring them nearer to
the American heart is the fact that Whitefield and Wesley called them
colonists of the best description, dwelling together in perfect peace
and harmony, without courts of law, referring all little differences
to their ministers whom they loved as their fathers. Wesley said of
the Georgia Moravians (all beer-drinking Germans) that they were “the
only genuine Christians he had ever met.” Whitefield said of the
Salzburgers’ spiritual leaders that he had “not often seen such pious
men.” No greater praise can be conceived than that which Bancroft,
America’s master historian, bestows upon the Salzburgers in the second
volume of his History of the United States. Jones’ veiled slur about
these people’s eagerness to get their beer shows a petty bias which
seems to crop up regularly whenever American historians lose sight of
the close relationship that exists between the Anglo-Saxon and their
Germanic cousins of other lands.
Unbiased minds will appreciate Oglethorpe’s profound regret at his
failure to carry out his plans, all the more so, if the present
condition of things in Georgia be considered.
In the “dead towns” of that State a tombstone may here or there testify
to the mundane existence of the Salzburgers; more rarely, perhaps, a
German patronymic, corrupted or Anglicized, may remind one of these
people; but that is practically all that is left of them. In Prussia,
however, their brethren flourished, forming a most useful, prosperous
and happy part of the population, who, as Carlyle puts it, had all
reason on their annual thanksgiving days “piously to admit that
Heaven’s blessing had been upon that King and upon them.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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