Background
Johann Boltzius was born on December 15, 1703, in Forst, Brandenburg, Germany, the son of Eva Rosina Muller and Martin Boltzius.
Johann Boltzius was born on December 15, 1703, in Forst, Brandenburg, Germany, the son of Eva Rosina Muller and Martin Boltzius.
Johann Boltzius studied at the University of Halle, and was imbued with the Pietism that emanated from this institution.
Johann Boltzius was twenty-nine years old and held the post of inspector-vicar in the Latin School connected with the Lutheran Orphanage at Halle, Germany, when he was called as pastor of a company of about one hundred Salzburgers who had agreed to emigrate to the English colony of Georgia. He accepted the call, was ordained at Wernigerode November 11, 1733, and proceeded to Amsterdam, where his congregation was ready to embark. With him went Israel Christian Gronau, a teacher in the School, who was ordained at the same time. The emigrants landed at Savannah on March 12, 1734, and were welcomed with a salute of cannon and a gala dinner. Gen. Oglethorpe himself helped to select a site for their town of Ebenezer.
His charges were among the thousands of Protestants who had been driven from the archiepiscopal duchy of Salzburg because of their religion. They were simple folk, pious, industrious, uneducated, impoverished by confiscation and exile, and bewildered by their situation on the Georgia frontier. In spite of an excessively high death rate, the handicap of having to move their town in 1736 to a more wholesome locality, and the hardships incident to pioneer life, the Salzburgers ultimately attained a mild prosperity and were noted for their neatness, order, and industry. The religious life, after the manner of the Pietists, was cultivated assiduously, and perhaps to excess. There was no crime. Differences were settled by a committee of arbitration appointed by the chief pastor. As money was scarce tokens signed by Boltzius took the place of small coins and passed at their face value.
In 1737 John Wesley, on his visit to Georgia, became Boltzius' friend. Wesley, however, because of his High Church principles, refused to admit Boltzius to the Lord's Supper, and years later set down in his journal the appropriate comment on his own folly. Another visitor was George Whitefield, who took the Ebenezer orphanage as a model for his own, and was generous in his gifts of money, ironware, and church bells. In October 1742 Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, on his way to Pennsylvania, visited Boltzius, who accompanied him as far as Charleston, where, mindful of his frail wife and two sick daughters, he turned back. A son Boltzius sent home to Halle to be educated. To the Rev. Samuel Urlsperger of Augsburg, who collected the funds out of which the salaries of the ministers were paid, he wrote voluminous reports on all phases of the colony's life. In his last years he was ill a great deal, but he had able assistants in Hermann Heinrich Lemke and Christian Rabenhorst. After much suffering patiently borne he finally succumbed to dropsy.
Boltzius was a member of the Lutheran Church.