2025
52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 5
Prompt - Tariffs
No this is not a coincidence that the blog prompt is the same as the current news - I changed the prompt. This past week a gentleman (Arnold Neufeldt - Fast) posted on Facebook in The Mennonite Genealogy and History group a story on Tariffs and Taxes in the late 1700's in the Polish - Prussian area. An area that Mennonites were working on farms on land that was not theirs. I have blogged about this and the reasons why my German heritage both Mennonites and Lutheran Germans left for Russia. Arnold Neufeldt - Fast explains it so well that I have decided to post it here.
Tariffs and taxes: The Mennonite Experience, late 1700s
Everyone in the world is talking about tariffs these days—even of economic warfare to acquire other lands. This is hardly new. Tariffs and taxes in 17th and 18th century Polish-Prussia is something, I believe, Ingrid Peters-Fransen is doing some work on. But here are a few things I am recalling this week that may be of interest.
With the First Partitioning of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by Austria, Prussia and Russia in 1772, 2,638 Mennonite families in the Vistula River delta came under the rule of King Frederick II in Berlin—but not the Mennonites of Danzig. The Free City of Danzig was able to defend its independence.
In Prussia, Frederick kept an exceptionally strong military which was financed through a modern state bureaucracy. Mennonites in the Delta areas sought to negotiate some concessions on military conscription. At the ceremonial honouring of their new king at Marienburg near Heubuden in 1772, two Mennonite representatives came with a gift of two fat oxen, 400 pounds of butter, 50 ducks, 50 hens, and 20 cheeses (note 1). As is well known, Mennonites were eventually offered an exemption from military service in exchange for a large annual lump sum tax—enough to pay the majority capital portion and annual operating costs of a new military cadet school in Culm. Frederick's strategy: exert only enough pressure on Mennonites to successfully increase their military tax obligations and to curtail their rates of land ownership, but not so much as to lose them as productive citizens.
Unlike his successors, Frederick was convinced that these subjects served the state better as taxpayers and producers of goods than as soldiers. With Frederick William II, and especially Frederick William III, however, the view in Berlin had turned toxic towards the “slothful and useless” Mennonites, and the benefits of expulsion were seriously weighed (note 2).
Things were different in Danzig (not yet annexed by Prussia). In July 1786, Russian land agent Georg von Trappe arrived in Danzig and “spoke indiscriminately to all people he met on the streets, dispatched his staff everywhere, and drove into the villages surrounding Danzig [but belonging to Danzig] to persuade farmers to move to Russia” (note 3). On behalf of Catharine the Great, he could offer large parcels of settlement land, religious freedom and military exemption, as well as transportation and settlement support, and multi-year tax relief. While Danzig city officials tolerated the presence of Russian recruiting agents—assuming that good terms with Russia might check Prussian repression—they were furious that the Russian offer was promoted by Mennonite clergy.
To work around this, sixty Mennonite family heads signed a power-of-attorney document (Vollmacht) to send a scouting delegation—Jakob Höppner and Johann Bartsch—with Trappe to Russia to scout out land and to negotiate conditions for immigration (again, a well-known story).
Danzig officials were very anxious when they heard Trappe was returning with “significant financial resources” and Mennonite eyewitnesses, Höppner and Bartsch. The city stood to lose cheap labour and, if the wealthy Mennonites should emigrate, they could also lose considerable tax revenue (note 4).
This would be yet another blow to the city. Crippling Prussian tariffs on Danzig were already bringing it to its knees. Polish imports and exports had always travelled along the Vistula River through Danzig—a large shipping hub. Now exorbitant tariffs by Prussia on goods crossing in and out of the city were wearing down its trade and industry (note 5). Danzig’s population had dropped from a recent high of 60,000 inhabitants to 40,000 in 1787. In the same year, the city had 1,900 deaths compared to little more than 1,000 births, and the nearby city of Elbing—now under Prussian rule—had surpassed Danzig in shipping trade. That “even the industrious Mennonites” in Danzig and the surrounding region planned to accept the “very advantageous offers from St. Petersburg … if they choose to concentrate on agriculture” only confirmed Danzig’s rapid economic and political decline, according to one international press report, and was a “great embarrassment” for Danzig’s magistrate (note 6). For this reason, Danzig city councillors were furious at the Mennonite congregations.
In 1793 with the Second Partition of Poland, after some years of punishing and crippling tariffs, Prussia easily acquired and annexed the City of Danzig. From one perspective one might say, "tariffs work."
---Notes---
Note 1: Heinrich and Johann Donner, Orlofferfelde Chronik, transcribed by Werner Janzen and Merle Schlabough, 2022, pp. 23, 24. From MLA-B, Prussian-Polish sources (online).
https://mla.bethelks.edu/.../ok63/orlofferfeldechronik.html. English: Heinrich Donner Diary (Tagebuch), 1774–1803. Translated by Elfriede Rempel and Glenn Penner. Winnipeg, MB: Mennonite Heritage Archives, 2023.
https://www.mharchives.ca/.../Heinrich-Donner-Diary-12...
Note 2: Cited in Paul Karge, “Die Auswanderung ost- und westpreussischen Mennoniten nach Südrussland (nach Chortiza und der Molotschna), 1787–1820,” Elbinger Jahrbuch 3 (1923), 70.
http://dlibra.bibliotekaelblaska.pl/dlibra/doccontent...; https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/0v760.pdf.
Note 3: S. D. Bondar, Mennonite Sect in Russia [1916], transl. by Jacob Rempel, ed. by Peter Rempel and Glenn Penner (Winnipeg, MB: Mennonite Heritage Archives, 2021), 13. https://www.mharchives.ca/download/3344/. (Russian original: Sekta mennonitov Rossi, v sviazi s istoriei nemetskoi kolonizatsii na iuge Rossii. [The Mennonite Sect in Russia: In the Context of the History of German Colonization in South Russia]. Petrograd, 1916.
https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Buch/Bondar.pdf
Note 4: Grigorii G. Pisarevskii, Izbrannye proizvedenija po istorii inostrannoj kolonizacii v Rossii [Selected works on the history of foreign colonization in Russia], ed. by I.V. Cherkazyanova (Moscow: ICSU, 2011), 174.
https://bibliothek.rusdeutsch.ru/catalog/860. [English: https://www.mharchives.ca/download/3422/
Note 5: For a contemporary description of Danzig harbour custom houses and outside the city gates, see William Guthrie, A New System of Modern Geography: Or, A Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar; and Present State of the Several Nations of the World, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, 1795), 8.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433000988588...
Note 6: Augspurgische Ordinari Postzeitung, no. 47 (February 23, 1788), 2.
Wendy
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