The “Black Dutch” of Appalachia

Scene along Rhine River during the 1600s, Herman Saftleven

The German word for “German” is “Deutsch“, and in America, “Deutsch” got misconstrued as “Dutch”. The so-called “Pennsylvania Dutch” or Amish and Mennonite communities are not Dutch – they are German.

In the late 1600s and early 1700s – during the Nine Years War [1688-1697] and the Wars of the Spanish Succession [1701-1715] – tens of thousands of German peasants became refugees, displaced by war and famine.

Many travelled up the Rhine as far as the major port city of Rotterdam in order to flee via boat to the UK or America.

German Sinti (German Romani, or “Gypsies”) were being viciously persecuted in the contested lands of Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland-Palatinate between Eastern France and Western Germany at this time.

A medal struck just after the wars in the Rhineland, showing Heidelberg Castle

Between 1700 and 1722, for example, begging and “vagabondage” were outlawed in the German-speaking sections of eastern France, even though much of this begging and wandering had been caused by the economic devastation brought on by war. Field armies varying in size from 60,000 to over 100,000 men (not including their camp followers) stripped the land of food and supplies like vast plagues of locusts.

Accused Roma could be branded, placed in iron collars, mutilated, summarily hanged, or banished.

By 1714, in places like Mainz, Roma could be executed without trial for simply being Roma.

In other parts of the Holy Roman Empire like Mecklenburg-Strelitz or Moravia, children under 10 were removed from their families and placed into non-Romani households or “hospitals for education”.

The parents of stolen children who were banished (rather than imprisoned or killed) could end up being sent to the galleys, work camps, or transported to various overseas colonies.

By 1734, the Landgraf of Hesse even offered six Reichstaler (“taler” being the source of the word “dollar”) for every “Gypsy” captured alive, and half that amount for every dead one presented.

Financial incentives of this kind led to the infamous “Gypsy hunts” – when Roma were hunted like game by local inhabitants.

It is worth bearing all of this in mind when we consider which “Hessians” ended-up being conscripted and sold into military service to the British for their war against rebellious American colonials…

*****

Many other Gypsies fled along with the starving and impoverished Palatine German war refugees to Rotterdam, where they spread outwards to other coastal towns and ports of the Baltic and North Seas, seeking and negotiating terms for a passage overseas – in the first instance to London, with many continuing on to British North America.

Some signed formal indentureship agreements before sailing, but more were simply transported abroad to be auctioned as servants upon arrival, after which they were expected to complete a five to seven year term of work – in often harsh conditions – all to “pay” for their passage.

Whether Palatine or Sinti, these were the people known as “Redemptioners” in colonial American history.

Back in Europe, the most desperate and impoverished had often been plied with alcohol in the taverns of port towns before being kidnapped by ruthless merchants working in tandem with unscrupulous ship’s captains.

Needless to say, those who had been kidnapped and sold into servitude were not always compliant and cooperative once they arrived in their new surroundings.

Columns of colonial-era American newspapers were full of ads placed by masters looking for runaway servants.

By 1763 there were enough Sinti living just outside Philadelphia that they were able to form themselves into a small community, living outdoors among the white oaks lining Conestoga and Mill Creek.

Sinti in 1930s Germany before Nazi murder of the Romani people began

There can be no doubt that many of these people followed the same path south into the Shenandoah Valley as other Germans (and German Jews) who were migrating alongside the many settler/colonizers of English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, and Swedish background.

This southward migration also included countless displaced indigenous peoples from the east/northeast such as the Lenape, although school textbooks in the USA never mention it.

There can also be little doubt that many of the aforementioned runaways and Hessian deserters – the poorest members of the underclasses – took indigenous or mixed-ethnic partners as they moved along and beyond the frontier of European settlement.

While the German-speaking populations of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany have always had a small percentage of relatively dark-complected people (just like most European populations), the sheer number of such people among 18th century German speakers in rural America strongly suggests the likelihood of non-European – Jewish, Sinti, indigenous American, or African-American – admixture explaining their “dark” or “exotic” appearance.

This writer lived in what was still called West Germany for most of the 1980s, and I speak from personal experience when I say that the blonde-haired and blue-eyed image of the “ideal Aryan” portrayed by Nazis was not representative of the average German I met there. But nor was the average German “dark or swarthy”.

So what can explain these charming, white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and outright xenophobic quotes from none other than founding father of the USA, Benjamin Franklin?

Here we can witness the ancient seeds of “Great Replacement” fears:

“Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation…and as few of the English understand the German Language, and so cannot address them either from the Press or Pulpit, ’tis almost impossible to remove any prejudices they once entertain…Not being used to Liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it…I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our Elections, but now they come in droves, and carry all before them, except in one or two Counties…In short unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so out number us, that all the advantages we have will not in My Opinion be able to preserve our language, and even our Government will become precarious…”

“…Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion…”

“Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind…”

Benjamin Franklin was well-travelled for his time. His description of Germans, Russians and Swedes (Swedes?) as being of “swarthy complexion” in comparison to the English is almost ridiculous.

This writer will venture a guess that Franklin was basing his assessment on a very specific population or data set.

The Swedes of New England who Franklin encountered were quite possibly descended from the New Sweden colony of the mid-1600s which had encompassed parts of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Such early colonies became almost invariably “creolized” – or to put it differently, the earliest settler-colonizers in the Americas were the people most likely to intermarry with local tribespeople and “go native” to some extent.

Franklin was quite likely describing a mixed-ethnic community when he spoke of “Swedes”.

And the same goes for his “swarthy” Germans. Benjamin Franklin, for all his cleverness in other departments, was probably unaware that France and Germany were making themselves rid of “undesirables”, quite intentionally.

These German “undesirables” are part of the people often called “Black Dutch” among Southern Appalachians, and their surnames – Kiser, Rhinehart (Reinhardt), Justice, Renner, Deal (Diehl), Koontz (Kuntz), Conatser (Knetzer, Knörtzer) et al – endure to this day, closely alongside the multi-ethnic people of Appalachia known as “Melungeons“.

Foust family of Anderson County, TN – Christopher, mother Mary Elizabeth, sister Mary Ann

[original article published 2023, updated Apr 2025]