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.