Eben-Ezer’s Transnational Inspiration: The Transatlantic Pietist Communism of the Community of True Inspiration; 1829-1855

The Community of True Inspiration was a radical Pietist religion that began in 1714 in what is today Germany. Facing persecution in Europe, the group migrated to the United States beginning in 1842 and founded Eben-Ezer, a religious communist settlement on Seneca Indian land. The Ogden Company made the land available for sale due to what is sometimes called the Third Treaty of Buffalo Creek or the Compromise Treaty of 1842, which ceded Allegany and Cattaraugus Indian Reservations to the Seneca Nation, but compelled them to sell off the Buffalo Creek Reservation. Looking at information, goods, money and individuals moving from Hessen to the United States and back, this paper argues that Inspirationist history was affected by the transatlantic outside world in which they migrated, but they still retained their own distinct identity as separatists, outside the world of conventional authority. Their communal living and worker arrangements represented an unbroken transnational arc of communalism that started in Hessen and continued to ascend into Eben-Ezer before finally falling off in Amana, Iowa in 1842.