Germans

Sources

Earliest Settlers. German-speaking people were among the first people to settle the eastern coast of North America. Even among the first colonists to Virginia in 1607 there were a few Germans. Others settled in New Netherland and were among those speaking the “eighteen different languages” heard in New Amsterdam by the French Jesuit priest Father Jogues. By 1673 New York had as many as 2,400 Germans. Most came because of economic hardship in their homeland made even worse by various European wars, but some came for religious freedom. This earliest trickle of peoples was largely disorganized as families or individuals found their way to America. These included men such as Johannes Kelpius, one of the religious hermits who lived in caves on the banks of the Wissahickon Creek in Pennsylvania and practiced fortune-telling. Later migrations were more organized. Between 1683, when Francis Daniel Pastorius established Germantown outside Philadelphia, and 1783, some 125,000 German speakers came to British North America. Especially important was the immigration of German pietists in congregations, such as the Lutherans and Moravians. Some were driven out of Europe by overpopulation and land scarcity; known as hard workers and good farmers, they were actively recruited to come to America. Other nations also tried to recruit Germans. Between 1717 and 1721 the French Company of the Indies would send some 1,300 German speakers to the Gulf Coast. Most of these immigrants would die shortly thereafter of disease, and those who were left would abandon the lower Mississippi.

Palatines. From 1709 to 1714 approximately 3,000 Germans from the Palatinate, pushed out of their Rhineland homes by the aftermath of war and lured by promotional literature and the promise of free passage, sailed to New York and North Carolina. The 2,300 or so Palatines sent to New York were settled on the Hudson River to engage in manufacturing lumber and naval stores. Unfortunately, promised economic support did not materialize because of political changes in England that called for an end to this kind of expenditure. The New York Germans saw themselves as oppressed, and their attempts to settle on what seemed to be unoccupied lands on the Schoharie River failed. Disgusted at what they considered to be breaches of contract and frightened by potential religious persecution, they moved to Pennsylvania. The 600 or so Palatines who left for North Carolina eventually joined with some German-speaking Swiss, and together they founded the town of New Bern. This settlement made an inauspicious beginning as illness, French privateers, mismanagement, and an Indian war in 1711 all wreaked havoc on those who survived. Nonetheless, New Bern was rebuilt and incorporated in 1723.

Salzburgers. In 1729 the archbishop of Salzburg decided to convert the Lutherans in Salzburg to Roman Catholicism. Over the next three years some 30,000 Protestants left, most of them fleeing to England. There they seemed like good prospects for the new colony of Georgia, and with a grant from Parliament, and two German ministers, the first group of 42 families sailed for America in 1734. They created Ebenezer and New Ebenezer on the Savannah River, and by 1742 both towns had 250 settlers.

Moravians. The people called Moravians were German Protestants who lived on the lands of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf of Saxony. Religious persecution caused them to look elsewhere, and in 1735 and 1736 some 35 young men arrived in Savannah, Georgia. The outbreak of a war with Spain made these pacifists suspect, and between 1738 and 1740 they moved to Pennsylvania. Count Zinzendorf, one of the few European noblemen to come to America, traveled to Pennsylvania to set up a settlement even though he did not stay. In 1741 the Moravians bought land in Pennsylvania and founded the community of Bethlehem. In 1752 they also bought a tract of land in North Carolina that they called Wachovia, named for their lands in Europe. The first group of male brethren arrived in 1753 and celebrated their arrival by composing a song that began “We hold arrival lovefeast here / In Carolina land; / A company of Brethren true, / A little pilgrim band.” Married couples first arrived in 1755. The settlements survived, and Moravian influence can still be seen today.

Sources

Kenneth Coleman, Colonial Georgia: A History (Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1989);

Aaron Spencer Fogelman, Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996);

Adelaide L. Fries, The Road to Salem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972);

Gillian Lindt Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds: A Study of Changing Communities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967);

Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, The History of a Southern State: North Carolina, third edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973);

A. G. Roeber, “The Origin of Whatever Is Not English among Us’: The Dutch-speaking and the German-speaking Peoples of Colonial British America,” in Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, edited by Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 220–283;

Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).