Moravian Soundscapes. Sarah Justina Eyerly
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and pathways. The well was frozen solid. But in early March, more than one hundred Delaware and Mohican Moravians returned to the mission after their forced removal in the fall of 1781 by British and Wyandot soldiers.2 Throughout the winter, the Native Moravian congregation had lingered in captivity along the Sandusky River in the Wyandot-controlled Captives’ Town. The German missionaries and three Native elders who served their community were imprisoned by the British at Fort Detroit, suspected of sending military intelligence to the Americans at Fort Pitt. Caught on the western boundary of the American Revolution, a global conflict that stretched from Ohio to India, the Moravians were left to eke out a meager existence far from their agricultural plantations on the Tuscarawas. After several months of near starvation, the desperate refugees risked a return to Gnadenhütten in early March to harvest what little remained of their corn.
As the Moravians worked in the cornfields near Gnadenhütten on the morning of March 7, there was little conversation. Ice crystals filled the air, refracting and amplifying the sounds of the wind. Overhead, red-tailed hawks, mourning doves, and black-capped chickadees spun and called, eager for corn kernels or insects frightened in the passage of the harvesters. The river ran rough despite the ice blocks that littered its surface, and the splashes of otters and muskrats mixed with the dampened biophony of water striders, sauger, bass, and walleye. Flathead catfish and crawfish dredged the riverbed. The reeds rustled in the damp marshes on the river’s bank. The harvesters did not hear the militia coming. Despite the size of the company, 160 men from Washington County, Pennsylvania, emerged unheard from the forest. Their muster had been sounded to raze Gnadenhütten and its sister missions of Schönbrunn and Salem to the ground in retaliation for Delaware and Wyandot attacks and the killing of Scots-Irish settlers along the Pennsylvania–Ohio border. No longer would the Moravians be allowed to trade secrets with the Delaware chief, Netawatwees, at Gekelmukpechunk (Newcomerstown). Although the militiamen likely knew that the Delaware and Mohican Moravians were not responsible for the recent raids on Scots-Irish homesteads, their desire for retribution was strong. For them, the stakes were high—the very safety and security of the homes and farmsteads of Washington County and other settler communities in western Pennsylvania.
By the evening of March 7, the little mission settlement of Gnadenhütten resounded with a cacophony of voices in English, German, Delaware, and Mohican. This clamor of tongues was recorded in diary records, letters, and conversations for decades to come: the songs, speeches, and prayers of the Moravians as they begged for mercy from their captors; and the arguments of their captors as they debated whether to take the Moravians as hostages to Fort Pitt, or to kill them and burn their villages. In the end, the most vocal militiamen persuaded all but eighteen of their number to herd the Moravians into “killing houses.” The following morning, twenty-eight men, twenty-nine women, and thirty-nine children were bludgeoned, tomahawked, scalped, and burned. No one cared to write down or remember the terrible thud of a cooper’s mallet on bone, or the dripping of blood through floorboards; the murmurs and cries of the dying, crushed together in piles in the mission buildings; or the heavy breathing of the Pennsylvanians as they methodically killed ninety-six unarmed people. But some sounds were remembered: the weeping of Nathan Rollins as he tomahawked nineteen people and still felt no relief from having lost his father and brother to Wyandot raiders. The sounds of the dying Moravians subsumed into the crackling fires of burning buildings and the drunken yells of the militia, as remembered by two boys, Jacob and Thomas, who escaped. Militiaman Obadiah Holmes would later write of the quiet remorse of the eighteen abstaining Pennsylvanians who sat huddled on the riverbank, as far away from the atrocities as they dared to creep.3 And Jacob and Thomas would later recount to the missionary David Zeisberger at Sandusky the jubilant shouts of those who spent the night singing and telling stories about the destruction of the mission and the justice they had exacted from the Moravians.4
For those who escaped, perpetrated, or heard tales of the massacre in the days, months, and years following “Gnadenhütten,” it was the sounds of that day that were especially remembered. As the years passed, and the horrors of the massacre dimmed, smaller and perhaps lesser sounds were forgotten. But the singing of the Moravian Christians as they prepared for death lingered persistently in legends of the massacre. When the first reports of the event were sent to the North American headquarters of the Moravian Church at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, they all related a sonic story of the martyrdom of the Delaware and Mohican Moravians, who had “die ganze Nacht Hymns u. Psalms gesungen [sung hymns and psalms for the whole night].”5 It was through their songs that the Native martyrs had achieved, in the Moravian cosmology, a good death. Their sung prayers had allowed them passage from the mortal world and their own physical suffering into the spiritual realms beyond all pain. The fact that the Native martyrs spent their final hours singing Christian hymns, as was customary in German Moravian communities at the point of death, was proof of their sincere adherence to Christianity, in the opinion of church elders. Zeisberger was certain that the Native Moravians had died as true Christians, since they “began to sing hymns and spoke words of encouragement to another until they were all slain.”6 Even in 1792, ten years after the massacre, when the missionary Johann Heckewelder lodged for the evening in Washington County, he found that the Scots-Irish communities where many of the perpetrators still lived remembered the hymns of the Moravians: “I . . . was invited to supper by Mr. van Sweringen, Esq. The good man spoke about the massacre of our Indians, threw his hands together over his head & said: ‘I have heard from the lips of the murderers themselves that they killed them while they were praying, singing, and kissing,’ & he was not surprised that . . . great blood-guilt lay upon the land and must be atoned for.’”7
For the lawyer, Mr. van Sweringen, and others in his community, it was not just the murders that had brought “great blood guilt” upon their communities. Gnadenhütten was not the first or the only massacre to occur during the American Revolution. However, it was set apart from similar atrocities for one reason: the perpetrators had refused to recognize the distinction between Christian and non-Christian Native Americans.8 Their urgent desire to extact retribution for their own murdered family members and friends had impelled them to heedlessly kill innocent men, women, and children even as they “began to sing hymns and spoke words of encouragement and consolation to each other.”9 Despite the European-style houses and spatial design of the Ohio missions, and the prospect of Native Christians dressed in very much the same manner as the members of the militia, the Pennsylvanians were not interested in believing these were “peaceful Indians.” In the years following the massacre, both the fledgling United States government and nativist movements among Native communities in Ohio and Indiana would agree that the blood guilt of the murders at Gnadenhütten rested squarely on the fact that Christians had killed Christians. Two decades later, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh would remind future president William Henry Harrison: “You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?”10 The truth was that the Christian songs and prayers of the Moravians had not saved them from death or tremendous suffering.
Song and Sound in the Moravian Missions
The massacre at Gnadenhütten raises a number of difficult, but important, issues. The ninety-six people who perished there died partly as a result of their tenuous existence at the boundaries between cultures, ethnicities, nations, and religions. What had begun in the 1740s as an attempt by German missionaries to create new multicultural Christian utopias in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania had ended tragically in the death of many of these same Delaware and Mohican Moravians along the Ohio frontier. Although singing had for a brief time in the early history of the Moravian missions created a space for exchange of spiritual and cultural ideas between Delaware and Mohican communities and Moravian missionaries, ironically it was those very hymns that would linger most powerfully in memories of the massacre.
Working forward in time from the founding of the first Moravian settler community at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1741, to the massacre at Gnadenhütten, Ohio, in 1782, this book positions song and sound at the center of interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in eastern North America. It is no coincidence that the singing of the Native Moravian congregation at Gnadenhütten persisted