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Individual Record
Name
Surname:
Ernst
Given Name:
John Frederick
Soundex Code:
E652
Birth, Christening and Other Information
Gender:
Male
Date of Birth or Christening:
about 1748
Nation:
[Germany]
Occupation(s):
Minister, Schoolmaster, Tailor
Religion(s):
Lutheran
Orphan:
Unknown
Position in Parent's Family:
Unknown
Landowner:
Unknown
Literate:
Unknown
Convict:
Unknown
Length of Indenture
Year of Indenture:
1765
Residence
Town/City:
Philadelphia,
County:
Philadelphia
Colony:
Pennsylvania
Residence
Town/City:
New Hanover Township,
Colony:
Pennsylvania
Residence
Town/City:
Cooperstown,
County:
Otsego
Colony:
New York
Residence
Town/City:
Manheim,
County:
Lancaster
Colony:
Pennsylvania
Death Information
Locality:
Manheim
County:
Lancaster
Colony:
Pennsylvania
Date of Death:
1805
Testate:
Unknown
Research Notes
Comments:
"In September 1797 the executors had named Rev. John Frederick Ernst to launch their seminary, preferably on the Hartwick Patent as Reverend Hartwick had intended. Ernst and Hartwick were old friends who had lodged together in 1780 in New Hanover, Pennsylvania, where Ernst had been the schoolmaster. In July 1796 Ernst was the Lutheran minister in Lunenburgh and Claverack when Hartwick fell fatally ill at nearby Clermont Manor. Ernst tended to Hartwick during his last days and pronounced his funeral sermon. Ernst had risen from humble circumstances as an indentured servant who emigrated from Germany to America in 1765. He plied his trade as a tailor in Philadelphia in the early 1770s until a patron, Rev. John C. Kunze, discovered his piety and intelligence. Tutored in Latin, English, and Lutheran theology by Kunze, Ernst became a schoolmaster in 1775 and a pastor in 1780. Overcompensating for his humble origins, Ernst developed a stubborn, arrogant, and confrontational personality much like Hartwick's. Although the Reverend Henry M. Muhlenberg admired Ernst's talents (as he had admired Hartwick's), he sadly concluded, 'Mr. Ernst was too proud.' Like Hartwick, Ernst had difficulty keeping a parish. Between 1780 and 1791 he took on and rapidly lost posts at New Hanover, Easton, Dryland, Greenwich, Moore, and Maxatawny townships, all in Pennsylvania. In 1791 he moved to New York State, taking charge of the parishes at Claverack and Lunenburgh in the Hudson valley. But the parishioners there quickly began to abandon his preaching and their paying upon discovering his new and fervent engagement with Freemasonry. In December 1796 the dedication ceremonies for the new Freemasonic hall in the town of Hudson featured prayers and anthems specially written for the occasion by Brother Ernst. His Freemasonry alienated his German parishioners, who imagined 'that Masons stand immediately connected with the Devil, who discovers all Secrets to them.' Freemasonry was his school to replace the wearisome Germanness of his boorish parishioners with the polished manners and pleaseing information of Anglo-American gentility: 'I joined the Society from a Desire of Knowledge & removing Ignorance.... I've broken in my Boat the Ice of Prejudice, as no other German Minister in this Country is initiated to my knowledge.' He wrote and published a pamphlet extolling Freemasonry as 'truly Christian,' but he exhorted a bookseller, 'Don't let it come to the hands of unlearned or prejudiced Germans & others who would deal with it as Swines with Pearls. Neither let any peruse it before they have bought it.' His audience dwindling and his income exhausted, Ernst was available in 1797 for the invitation from Hartwick's executors to establish a seminary in Otsego County. He benefited from the patronage of Reverend Kunze, who had joined the board of executors and had formal direction of the seminary but no intention of leaving his comfortable parish in New York City. Like so many other clergymen down on their luck or on the run from trouble, Ernst sought a fresh start in a frontier village. In November he headed west to visit Otsego and assess his opportunities. Ernst found an eager reception in both the Hartwick Patent and adjoining Cooperstown from rival groups keen to retain his services that they might capture the Hartwick estate's funds. It did not seem to matter to either Ernst or the rival groups that none of the settlers, in either the Hartwick Patent or Cooperstown, were Lutheran. All the parties discovered in their financial desires a convenient new ecumenicalism. Indeed, the villagers kept straight faces as they assured Ernst that they cherished as 'entirely neutral' Lutheran minister as uniquely able to cope with their bitter religious divisions. The Hartwick Patent settlers invited Ernst to become their 'minister, teacher, overseer, and Curate of Souls' and to build his seminary in their midst. But William Cooper proposed merging that seminary with his new academy, welcoming Ernst to Cooperstown as both the schoolmaster and the village's settled minister. In that dual role Ernst could top off his $250 salary from the Hartwick estate with the $302 annually subscribed by the United Ecclesiastical Society for preaching in the village (led by Cooper's $50). According to the judge, everyone (except the Hartwick Patent settlers) would benefit: the Hartwick estate would be spared the cost of constructing a building; the academy would gain a desperately needed endowment and master; the village would, at last, obtain a settled minister; and Ernst would enjoy a substantial income. Cooperstown's boosters also saw to it that Ernst especially enjoyed his November visit. Gathered at Joseph Griffin's Red Lion Inn, they resolved to pay Ernst's tavern bill. Cooper recalled, 'I instantly gave two dollars. Others gave to the amount of nine or ten dollars -- of this Mr. Earnst was Ignorant untill he found his bill Paid.' Ernst enthusiastically embraced the Cooperstown offer because, in contrast to the rustic Hartwick Patent, the village offered much better pay and a more genteel society, including a Freemasonic lodge. As a sop to the disappointed settlers on the Hartwick Patent, he proposed establishing there a 1,500-acre-farm-school 'for teaching the Indians the blesing of a civil life.' Resettling a group of Indians within the Hartwick Patent was hardly an attractive prospect for the settlers, much less any consolation for losing the seminary. Moreover, there was no parcel of 1,500 acres left unsold within the patent-which was just as well because there were no prospective Indian students for Ernst's disingenuous proposal. Humiliated by Cooperstown's victory, the Hartwick settlers angrily complained that the villagers had begun 'to mock us, and well they may, when we have and must forever hereafter be Shaking the Tree and them gathering the Fruits.' In the late 1780s Cooper had repelled Hartwick's desire to become the local minister, a decade later, lusting after money for his new academy, the judge welcomed as Cooperstown's pastor the demanding legatee of the difficult Hartwick. In June of 1798 Ernst and Jeremiah Van Rensselaer visited Cooperstown to finalize the merger. 'Judge Cooper, whom we met on our Road thither going to Albany, was kind enough to return -- lodged us in his house and shewed us considerable civility.' Ernst reported. He planned to move to Cooperstown with his family and furniture at the first of the new year. However, during his June visit Ernst detected a new opposition spreading within the village, encouraged by John McDonald, a defrocked Presbyterian minister held as a debtor in the county jail. ... McDonald encouraged the locals to believe that he would linger on as their minister when released from jail. Hoping to retain the most talented minister in upstate New York, growing numbers of settlers in Cooperstown and the rest of Otsego Township decided that they no longer wanted the services of Ernst, a Lutheran with a thick German accent. Raised in the Calvinist religious culture of New England, almost all of the devout settlers preferred McDonald's Presbyterianism to Ernst's more alien Lutheranism. In Hudson preparing for his move to Cooperstown, Ernst was enraged by reports that his support in Otsego was flowing into McDonald's camp. He both envied and detested the persuasive power of McDonald's fluent tongue: 'By smooth speech, flattery, &c. [he] had insinuated or ingratiated himself with the wicked, the ignorant & the weak, and particularly the WOMEN, with whom he endeavours to excite their compassion & to make them believe, not that he seduced Miss Yates, but that she, as a wicked, designing woman, seduced him.' According to Ernst, such was McDonald's spell that his blind addicts swore 'that they would prefer him, should he even be the father of an hundred Bastards, and have committed fornication between his prayer & his Sermon.' McDonald's opposition was especially offensive to Ernst because the two men were Freemasonic brethren, belonging to the same lodge in Hudson, New York. Like their Christian calling, shared Freemasonry was supposed to induce trust and harmony between brethren, but instead they engaged in a bitter, divine competition for religious authority in Cooperstown. Defying the growing opposition, Ernst removed with his wife and children from Hudson to Cooperstown, arriving in January 1799. No sooner had Ernst reached Cooperstown than the villagers began to wish him away. ... Embarrased and offended by the unseemly spectacle in Cooperstown, the Hartwick executors voted on June 11, 1799, to give up the merger and to terminate Ernst's salary as soon as he could depart the village. After prolonged and acrimonious negotiations, Ernst reached a compromise with the Otsego subscribers, who in December 1803 agreed to pay him $250 to drop his claims. In the meantime (1802), Ernst reached a compromise with the Otsego subscribers, who in December 1803 agreed to pay him $250 to drop his claims. In the meantime (1802), Ernst had left Cooperstown to take a new post as the Lutheran minister in Manheim, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Back among his fellow Germans, he had to promise to forsake his beloved Freemasonry. On October 24, 1805, he died in Manheim at the age of fifty-seven." (1)
Source Citations:
(1) Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 214-217, 222-227; (2) Records of the Executors of the Will of John Christopher Hartwick, Sept. 20, 1797, Lutheran Archives Center, Mount Airy, Pa.; (3) Jeremiah Van Rensselaer to John Cox, July 22, 1796, JCHP, HCA; (4) Otsego Herald, Aug 11, 1796; (5) Charles H. Glatfelter, Pastors and People: German Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Pennsylvania Field, 1717-1793, 2 vols. (Breingsville, Pa., 1980), vol. 1, 36-37; (6) Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, The Journal of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1942-1958), vol. 3, 291 (Jan 24, 1780), 355 (July 31, 1780); (7) Edith Von Zemensky, ed., "A Letter from Pastor Johann Friedrich Ernst," Pennsylvania Folklife, 26 (Summer 1977), 33-45; (8) John Frederick Ernst, "Account of His Removal from Pennsylvania to New York, in November of 1791," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 42 (1918): 172-173; (9) John Frederick Ernst, An Account of the Performances at the Dedication of Mason-Hall, Hudson, on the Festival of St. John the Evangelist (Hudson, N.Y., 1797, Evans no. 32287), 6; (10) Ernst to John Arndt, Aug 24, 1797, Lutheran Archives Center, Mount Airy, Pa. (all quotations); (11) Documentary History of the Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania: Proceedings of the Annual Conventions from 1748 to 1821 (Philadelphia, 1898), 292; (12) Ernst v. Bartle et al, in William Johnson, ed., Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court of Judicature of the State of New-York; From January Term 1799 to January Term 1803, 3 vols. (New York, 1808-1812, Shaw-Shoemaker no. 15759), vol. 1, 319-26; (13) Thomas Loomis et al to John Frederick Ernst, Nov 20, 1797, JCHP, HCA; (14) [at least 20 other source citations regarding this former servant are listed in Taylor's endnotes].