Immigrant and Entrepreneur Book

"[My] fatherland and the place where I was born is as follows: where the biggest forest in the world is and remains, in the Palatinate, two hours from Heidleberg in the mountains," wrote Caspar Wistar, at his upscale home in Philadelphia, sometime between 1743 and 1752. Recording his life's story for his six children, he laid out the journey he had made from the forests of Germany to Penn's Woods, and his rise to prominence and prosperity. In Immigrant and Entrepreneur Rosalind F. Beiler works outward from Wistar's record of his life, tracing the web of connections that united Old World skill and labor with New World land and government to sustain the Atlantic World. While the story of immigrant labor and colonial land is an old one, Beiler complicates it by placing Wistar's ascent to wealth the context of the skills and experiences he brought with him. Going back three generations into the Palatinate woodlands, Beiler chronicles the careers of Wistar's forester grandfather and father, whose careers were at the center of conflict between the local aristocracy, whose claims to the forest were tightening as state institutions gained strength, and the traditional claims of the peasantry to the forest's resources. In the mediating role the Wistars played between their employers and the people they lived among in conflicts over land use, Beiler finds the template of Caspar's main business: purchasing land from William Penn's dissolute heirs and selling it to new generations of German immigrants. It was this mediation, Beiler tells us, that "resulted in Pennsylvania German enclaves that stretched in an arc through Philadelphia's hinterland." Not only Caspar's father's religious conversion and strategic marriage to local elites seem to presage Caspar's own entrance into the ranks of the Quaker elite in this telling, but his continued ties to Germany and relationships among the immigrant community shift the emphasis of his entrepreneurialism from American opportunity to Atlantic networks. What Wistar brought with him he immigrated, what he found when he arrived, and what he left behind all contributed to his remaking of Pennsylvania settlement.

Beiler neglects to mention that the reshaping of settlement in Pennsylvania achieved by Wistar came at the expense of Native Americans. The cheery entrepreneurialism and ethnic patronage of her protagonist is, by stunning omission, the inescapable creeping doom of murderous conflicts over land which darkly haunts James Merrill's account of Indian/colonial relations in Into the American Woods. In eliding this element of the story Beiler faces resolutely eastwards, ignoring the fact that dispossession and violence were as essential to colonial success as skills, networks and patronage.