Excursus: "What Did You Do During the Civil War, Grandpa?"—The Shoofly Pie side

Shoofly Pie

I'm not quite sure exactly when our Hertzler ancestors moved from Bern Township (near Hamburg), in Berks County, PA, to Caernarvon Township, in the northeastern corner of Lancaster County, PA. Certainly one of the reasons they moved was because of the Hochstetler Indian massacre in which the mother and two Hochstetler children were killed and the father, Jacob, and two sons were kidnapped by the Delaware Indians. The Amish (Northkill) community dispersed over time, with our ancestors moving south, while other Hertzlers headed west to Mifflin County.



Regardless of where they lived, whether in Europe or Pennsylvania, they adhered to their belief and practice of refusing to take up the sword, whether on behalf of themselves or their state or country.

So long as the armies of the new United States were supplied with volunteers, there was only social pressure upon the Amish and Mennonites to serve in those armies. At the same time, their social separation from mainstream America—they spoke German rather than English amongst themselves, and they typically did not intermarry with non-Amish/non-Mennonites—meant that their refusal to serve in the armies gained some acceptance over time as a boundary marker between Amish/Mennonite and mainstream cultures.

Another boundary marker between Amish and Mennonites and much of mainstream American society was their refusal to own slaves. While the Amish and Mennonites generally refused to openly advocate for abolition, they also would not accept slave-owning in their midst. Indeed, their refusal to own slaves was pointed to by the Quakers as exemplary during the Quaker conversation about owning slaves.

Lehman and Nolt note in Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War that the sizable Amish and Mennonite population in Lancaster County attracted some critical attention in the Lancaster newspaper because they not only refused to serve, but opposed the war on principle. The newspaper found their opposition particularly galling in light of the fact that they were quite prosperous. Word eventually got out that these prosperous Amish and Mennonite farmers were nevertheless providing financial and other support to the families of Union soldiers and the critics were for a time mollified. (p. 47-49)

But as the war dragged on and the casualties mounted, the U.S. Congress passed a national conscription act (the Enrollment Act of 1863) which established manpower quotas for every congressional district. Men who were of age were required to either serve, to pay a fine in lieu of serving, or to pay for a substitute to serve. The register of conscientious objectors in Pennsylvania shows a Hertzler from Lancaster County and another from Berks County. There are more Hertzlers registered for the various militias, but their names appear on no other lists, so it appears that they did not serve.

The practice of either paying a fine/tax in lieu of serving or of paying a substitute to serve in one's stead seem to have been both widely known and widely accepted by our Amish Mennonite ancestors. The most interesting anecdote regarding reliance on a substitute comes from Paton Yoder's biography of Amish Bishop "Tennessee" John Stoltzfus, whose home farm adjoined the property where I grew up in Millwood, near Gap, PA. "Tennessee" John had paid for a substitute to fight in his place, and when that substitute was killed in action, "Tennessee" John somehow acquired the man's coat and kept it in his closet and cared for it, carefully and reverently polishing the buttons.


Sources: James O. Lehman and Steven M. Nolt, Mennonites, Amish, and the American Civil War (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2007) This is the best study I'm aware of. It's particularly good on explicating the differences in regional responses to the Civil War.

Paton Yoder, Eine Wurzel: Tennessee John Stoltzfus (Sutter House: 1979)