Book Review: Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg

David Valuska and Christian B. Keller, Damn Dutch: Pennsylvania Germans at Gettysburg. Stackpole Books, 2004. photographs, endnotes, index, 236 pages, hardcover $26.95.

"The Damned Dutchmen are running again!!!" That shout went up on the afternoon of the 1st of July 1863 at Gettysburg when units of the Federal XI corps were driven from their positions north of town by elements of the II corps of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. This book examines just who those "Dutchmen" were, their background and their performance at Gettysburg to shed a bit more light on them and their culture.

The work begins with an overview of the two largest identifiable German immigrant groups in the Federal Army and helps to show how they were indeed two separate groups with differing attitudes even though they had similar culture backgrounds. The first group the authors identify are the "Pennsylvania Dutch" who, unfortunately, any number of folks today identify as being our Old Order Mennonite and Amish neighbors here in Cumberland County.

This is not the case however, since the name was applied originally to the German speaking immigrants who had arrived largely in the years covering the late 17th Century through the very early 19th century and who had settled in communities in a broad arc formed largely by Franklin, Cumberland, Perry, Juniata and Snyder counties on the west and Lancaster, Berks, Lehigh and Northampton on the east. These German speaking immigrants (The term is used since there was no "Germany" as such until the unification in the 1870s under Bismarck) tended to settle in rural communities and through the years evolved a sort of amalgam of English and German in daily speech, yet used High German in their churches which were mostly Lutheran and German Reformed. A recent article in the local paper covered how a new church was formed when members of the congregation of the Evangelical German Church of Carlisle broke away and formed the new Second German Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1854 in order to continue services in the High German that the original congregation had abandoned for English, illustrating the forces acting on those communities.

These were the original "Pennsylvania Dutch" so called due to their reference to themselves as "Pennsylvanisch Deitch" who had been here in the United States for some time when the newcomers arrived after the abortive revolution in the late 1840s. The "Forty-eighters", as they called in some instances, were of a more urban background and largely settled in the cities forming German speaking sections where they gathered. These people had brought with them some of their societies from their homeland and the authors allude to one such, the "Turnverein", but unfortunately do not tell us that this was a patriotic society of gymnastic origin formed during the Napoleanic era when the German states were under French influence. These "Turnverein" were disbanded after Napoleon's empire was crushed when authorities felt that bodies of disciplined men posed a threat to state governments. The fact that this society had transplanted to the U.S. and influenced the influx of late German speaking immigrants into the Union Army could have been more completely covered instead of a single reference to the existence of the groups.

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