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

A. G. Roeber

IN June of 1747, Johann Martin Boltzius, the Lutheran pastor at Ebenezer, Georgia, detailed for his 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 his way west to the indigenous peoples of the Mississippi River Valley. There he attempted to incite his hosts to war against the invading Europeans for violating the Indians' natural rights. For his trouble, Boltzius dryly observed, Prieber "was despised by even the Indians" for "his beliefs, 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	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 his fate, they might have concluded that the basic precepts of natural rights were not yet clear to the "savages" of the New World. Alternatively, they might have applauded the Cherokees' integrity for honoring diplomatic commitments to their British allies.2	2
For the Protestant pietist opponents of Thomasius at the Francke Foundations in Halle with whom Boltzius was associated, this secularized notion of "natural rights" held ominous implications. Did the Native Americans act out of a dim sense of conscience and duty, thus rightly despising the misguided secularist Prieber? Boltzius certainly seemed to hint at this in noting the proper contempt for Prieber's "beliefs" that the Cherokees exhibited. But if Indians acted out of conscience, how could their consciences have been so properly enlightened since they were pagans and knew nothing of the one true God and only dimly perceived the obligations of civic order, as well?	. . .