And State Papers 507 



tirely familiar, of course, with the German immi- 

 gration that went to the formation of Pennsylvania 

 from the beginning. That element was equally 

 strong in the Mohawk Valley in New York; it 

 was equally strong in Middle and Western Mary- 

 land. For instance, in the Revolutionary War, one 

 of the distinguished figures contributed by New 

 York to the cause of independence was that of the 

 German Herkimer, whose fight in the Mohawk Val- 

 ley represented one of the turning points in the 

 struggle for independence; and one of the New 

 York counties is now named after him. The other 

 day I went out to the battlefield of Antietam, here 

 in Maryland. There the Memorial Church is the 

 German Lutheran Church, which was founded in 

 1768, the settlement in the neighborhood of An- 

 tietam being originally exclusively a German set- 

 tlement. There is a list of its pastors, and curi- 

 ously enough a series of memorial windows of men 

 with German names men who belonged to the 

 Maryland regiment recruited largely from that re- 

 gion for the Civil War, which Maryland regiment 

 was mainly composed of men of German extraction. 

 In the Civil War it would be difficult to paint in too 

 strong colors what I may well-nigh call the all- 

 importance of the attitude of the American citizens 

 of German birth and extraction toward the cause 

 of Union and Liberty, especially in what were then 

 known as the border States. It would have been 

 out of the question to have kept Missouri loyal 

 had it not been for the German element therein. 



