What the Law Requires Is Written on Their Hearts: Noachic and Natural Law among German-Speakers in Early Modern North America

Abstract

IN June of 1747, Johann Martin Boltzius, the Lutheran pastor at Ebenezer, Georgia, detailed for superiors in Europe the fate of a German-speaker who had attempted to draw the Cherokees away from their alliance with the British by an appeal to natural law. During Joseph Watson's expeditions among the Cherokees in 1741, the Englishman had encountered a Saxon, Christian Gottlieb Prieber. After law studies at Leipzig, Prieber had emigrated to North America and found way west to the indigenous peoples of the Mississippi River Valley. There he attempted to incite hosts to war against the invading Europeans for violating the Indains' natural rights. For trouble, Boltzius dryly observed, Prieber despised by even the Indians for his conduct, ethics, and dress. Kidnapped by the Creek Nation, Prieber was sold into British captivity. James Oglethorpe imprisoned the German-speaker on the island of Frederica, where he died.1 Precisely why Prieber's beliefs, conduct, ethics, and dress upset those he was trying to enlighten, Boltzius did not explain. The ambivalence with which the story must have been read by Europeans mirrored a profound crisis in European thinking about whether all peoples were bound by certain empirically valid concepts of civic order rooted in a natural law. The emerging secular jurisprudence Prieber had studied, pioneered by the Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius and adumbrated by the German scholars Samuel Pufendorf and, more recently, Christian Thomasius, insisted that international civic order could be constructed without reference to Christian scripture or revelation. If Prieber's former Leipzig classmates read of fate, they might have concluded that the basic precepts of natural rights were not yet