IN SEARCH OF PETER BELL: THE SCOT HYPOTHESIS

IN SEARCH OF PETER BELL: THE SCOT HYPOTHESIS

A comment was recently posted on the piece Obama and the Bells:

Mark said...

I've noticed that you're a descendant of captain Peter Bell and was wondering if you could give me your take on what I've heard. I heard a few years ago that the brothers Peter and Anthony Bell were actually from Scotland and were only residing in Germany just before coming to Maryland. I haven't been able to verify this but it could be plausible if they were part of the thousands that left Scotland after "the '45". This was the last of the Jacobite rebellions and the one in which the movement was utterly crushed at the battle of Culloden, resulting in the exodus of tens of thousands out of Scotland and northern England. Most ended up in Europe and a lot ended up in Germany. A huge portion of these people had military experience and that could explain why Peter Bell became a captain in the revolution so quickly. I always thought it unusual that two not-so-young unmarried brothers would just pick up and leave Germany for America. Also the Bells have a very long history in Scotland. I hope to find some evidence of the history of these two brothers some day but am becoming very discouraged.

June 20, 2009 1:13 PM

As far as I have been able to tell, the first statement of what I call the “Scot hypothesis” was advanced by Colonel Fielder M.M. Beall in Colonial Families of the United States Descended from the Immigrants: Bell, Beal, Bale, Beale, Beall (1927). The putative genealogical basis for this claim involved, among other things, the undocumented assumptions that: (1) the father of Anthony and Peter Bell was also named Anthony; (2) they also had brothers Daniel and Joseph; (3) belonged to a family that had settled in Old Sommerset before 1700. Fielder Beall’s work in this and many other areas has been severely criticized by professional genealogists for the obvious reasons.

Setting aside the faulty work of Fielder Beall, I think that the Scot hypothesis suffers from several major difficulties:

Religion: Peter and Anthony Bell are associated in every aspect of their documented history with the Evangelical Lutheran Church. They took communion as a condition of naturalization in that church. Peter Bell married the daughter of Johann Friederich Vogeler, one of the constitutional founders of St. John’s Evangelical Church in Hagerstown, under which Peter Bell was buried. (The signature of a Johann Friederich Vogeler also appears earlier in 1747 as a founder of the Monocacy Evangelical Lutheran Church near Frederick, Maryland. Anthony Bell and Peter’s oldest son Frederick were prominent contributors and officials within the Evangelical Lutheran Church founded in part from their contributions in Leitersburg. Frederick Bell also contributed to the establishment and maintenance of other Evangelical Lutheran Churches and even other dissident protestant sects, such as the Mennonites. It seems unlikely (though not impossible) to me that soldiers formerly fighting for a Catholic king would be so deeply immersed in the establishment of an evangelical protestant sect.

Language: The language of church, school and partly the business community of the Bell brothers and their descendants continued to be German until the mid-1800’s. The signatures of Anthony Bell, Johann Friederich Vogeler and Frederick Bell all follow German orthography. I have not yet found an exemplar for the signature of Peter Bell. We know that Frederick Bell had, for the time, a rather extensive library and subscribed to a German language bible.

Marriages: Anthony took to wife Maria Schneeberger (Snowhill), the German speaking Swiss daughter of Hans Schneeberger, described in Swiss records as a religious fanatic. As noted above, Peter was married to a Vogeler daughter, the other two Vogeler daughters being wed to Leiters, whose father had converted from the Mennonite sect to Evangelical Lutheran. In the next several generations, the offspring, male and female, made marriages within the German speaking community whose ancestors trace back to the Rhineland Palatinate and to the German speaking regions of Switzerland. As far as I have been able to research the other lines, very few marriages occur among the Scot, Irish or English population in the second, third and fourth generations. I would expect a different distribution if the Bell line originated in Scotland, Ireland or England.

Military Experience: Keeping in mind that captains of militia were elected and the ability to outfit and recruit followers often trumped military training, we should not feel compelled to find such a background in either of the Bell brothers. However, if such training existed, it might have come from a closer and more relevant conflict, the French and Indian War which ended almost exactly when the Bell Brothers first appear in colonial records. We know that the Swiss born British mercenary, Colonel Henry Bouquet, recruited his countrymen both at home and after arrival, and then trained and marched the assembled army through the western parts of Maryland before engaging for the decisive battles in Pennsylvania. Another notable colonel, George Washington, was also involved in this action and came to have a fairly high estimation of the German speaking soldiers in the command, which carried over to the Revolutionary War. Another tantalizing possibility stems from the existence of a Bell family line descending from the 1709 Palatine migration to the Mohawk Valley. Part of that group was also involved in the Canadian expedition. Some of the 1709 families eventually ended up among the Monocacy congregation near Frederick, Maryland, and were among the signers on the constitution of that church. Incidentally, several of those Mohawk Valley families will also involved in the Pennsylvania-Maryland border skirmishes that preceded the establishment of the Mason-Dixon line, also on the northern boundary of the Bell brothers original homesteads.

Family History: None of the documents contemporary to the Bell brothers hint at any non-Germanic origin or strong association with Scotland or Ireland. The muster rolls for Peter Bell’s and Anthony Bell’s companies are almost devoid of any names that are not clearly traceable to the Palatinate. Subsequent family history prior to 1900 by descendants points to Alsace, as does the best overall (though sometimes mistaken) account by Herbert Bell in The History of the Leitersburg District.

Bell Pottery and Housing: Shenandoah red ware, a variation of which at least three of the Bells in the second generation significantly advanced, had its origin in the Palatinate. It seems doubtful to me, but not impossible, that Scot soldiers of fortune or exiles might have picked up the knack and become sufficiently skillful to advance and pass on the technology to the succeeding generations. More likely, given the similarity to pottery glazing techniques associated with the Strasbourg area, the craft was learned there at some level, and came with the Bell brothers to Maryland. As to the original home of Peter Bell, which still stands on Bell’s Choice just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, it embodies the classical German stone construction found in the Rhineland and throughout Maryland German settlements. The house was, according to Herbert Bell, begun by Peter and completed by oldest son Frederick.

The Schottie Emigration to Prussia:  One possible connection to Scotland may exist, but no direct evidence, to the best of my knowledge, has been found.  In the late 1600's, several Scot families of landless peddler-merchants arrived in Prussia from Scotland.  Immanuel Kant may have been descended from one of these families.  Peter Bell and perhaps his brother Anton may have been itinerant merchants prior to their arrival in western Maryland.  Both had accumulated enough capital by some unknown means to make outright purchases of significant tracts of good farmland.  Peter Bell established a trading house at the central market square in Hagerstown.  Peter Bell's ability to work with the Revolutionary War Committee of Observation and to be elected a captain in the militia suggest that he had little difificulty in working and communicating with the English and Scots who controlled most of the public affairs in western Maryland.