Biography
Francis Daniel Pastorius, Franz Daniel Pastorius in German, was born on 26 September 1651 at Sommerhausen, in Franconia, into a well-off Lutheran family. His father, Melchior Adam Pastorius, a lawyer, became burgomaster of Windsheim, where the family settled in the late 1650s and where the boy attended the gymnasium. He studied law at Altdorf, Strasbourg and Jena; the Britannica places the completion of his studies at Altdorf in 1676.
He first practised at Windsheim, but the routine of the profession and tensions with his father, whom the son's moral rigour worried, led him to move to Frankfurt am Main in 1679. There he joined the Pietist circle of Johann Jakob Schütz and frequented Philipp Jakob Spener. From 1680 to 1682 he travelled through Germany, England, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands as tutor to a young nobleman. In 1683 the Frankfurt Land Company, which had grown out of Schütz's circle, commissioned him to buy land in Pennsylvania.
He crossed the Atlantic that year and, according to Wikipedia, reached Philadelphia on 20 August 1683; the Britannica says only summer. He bought some 15,000 acres from William Penn and founded Germantown that autumn. First burgomaster of the town, then clerk, he sat in the provincial assembly in 1687 and 1691. His book, Umständige geographische Beschreibung der zu allerletzt erfundenen Provintz Pensylvaniae, appeared in 1700: the imprint reads Frankfurt and Leipzig, but the printing may have taken place at Nuremberg. In it he brought together the description of the province and his letters from America, published by his father.
On 18 February 1688, he drew up, with Gerrit Henderich and the Op den Graeff brothers, a protest against slavery, often presented as the first in the colonies. He married Ennecke Klostermanns on 6 November 1688; the couple had two sons. A Pietist Lutheran in his youth, he later drew closer to the Quakers, and his confession remains debated between German and American historians. He taught at the Friends' school in Philadelphia from 1698 to 1700, then ran his own school at Germantown. He wrote in German, English and Latin: an English primer, the New Primmer (1698), poems on the garden and the bees, and a great manuscript compendium, the Bee Hive.
He died at Germantown. The date is uncertain: the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Britannica give about 1 January 1720, within a range from 26 December 1719 to 13 January 1720, while English Wikipedia gives 17 February 1719. His papers, including the autobiography Res propriae, are held at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Bee Hive at the University of Pennsylvania. Modern works include the biography by Marion Dexter Learned (1908), the edition of the poems by Christoph Schweitzer (1982) and Patrick Erben's The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader (2019).
