54 EMIGRATION OF STEPPIAN1STS. [CHAP. XXIII. 



and worldly in their nature, ought to be despised ; 

 that no one could enjoy freedom of conscience in 

 Germany ; and that the only path to salvation was 

 to follow him, and emigrate to North America. He 

 himself was to be their temporal and spiritual chief, 

 and to him they were to deliver up all their property. 

 In November, 1838, 700 victims of this impostor 

 embarked from Bremen, including six pastors and 

 four schoolmasters. One of the transports, the 

 Amelia, carrying about sixty emigrants, including 

 children, a crazy old ship, was never heard of again, 

 and doubtless foundered on the Atlantic. The other 

 carried Stephan and the rest of his followers to New 

 Orleans, from whence they ascended the Mississippi, 

 and founded a settlement, called Wittenberg, on a 

 rich, aguish flat, bordering the Missouri, above St. 

 Louis. Here one fourth of their number were swept 

 off by fever, and Stephan, who had deserted a wife 

 and nine children in Germany, was detected carrying 

 on a licentious intercourse with some of the women of 

 the new community. Before, however, this scandal 

 became notorious, he contrived to make off with all 

 the money which had been entrusted to him to buy 

 land for the new colony. Hanne Rottgen, the young 

 woman who related this story, went, as soon as she 

 recovered from the ague, to St. Louis, her eyes 

 having at length been opened, like those of many 

 other Stephanists, to the fraud of which they had been 

 the dupes. She was immediately employed to attend a 

 hospital filled with numbers of her poor country people 

 of both sexes, who had been scalded by the bursting of 

 the boiler of a large steam-boat. After witnessing 



