David Zeisberger
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David Zeisberger (11 April 1721 – 17 November 1808) was a Moravian clergyman and missionary among the Native Americans in the Thirteen Colonies. He established communities of Munsee (Lenape) converts in the valley of the Muskingum River in Ohio; and for a time, near modern-day Amherstburg, Ontario.
Zeisberger was born in Zauchtenthal, Moravia (today part of the Czech Republic) and moved with his family to the German principality of Saxony in 1727. However, when his family migrated to the newly established English colony in Georgia, Zeisberger remained in Europe to complete his education. With the assistance of governor James Edward Oglethorpe, he later rejoined his family in the Moravian community of Savanna, Georgia.
In 1739, Zeisberger was influential in the development of a Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Six years later, at the invitation of their leader King Hendrick, he came to live among the Mohawk. He became fluent in the Onondaga Iroquoian dialect and assisted Conrad Weiser in negotiating an alliance between the English and the Iroquois in Onondaga (near present-day Syracuse, New York). He also produced dictionaries and religious works in Iroquoian and Algonquian.
Zeisberger began his career as a missionary to Native American peoples following his ordination as a Moravian minister in 1749. He worked among the Lenape (Delaware) of Pennsylvania, coming into conflict with British authorities over his advocacy of Natives' rights and his ongoing efforts to establish white and native Moravian communities in southern Ohio. His relations with British authorities worsened during the American Revolutionary War and in 1781 he was arrested and held at Fort Detroit. While imprisoned, around hundred of his native converts in Ohio were murdered by Pennsylvanian militiamen during the Gnadenhütten massacre.
After Zeisberger was released, violent conflicts with other Native tribes and the expansion of white settlement forced many Moravian Christian settlements to relocate to present-day Michigan and Ontario. A large group of Munsee moved there in 1782, but Zeisberger later returned to live the rest of his life among the Native converts remaining near Goshen, Ohio.
