German Americans

The Colonial Period

The period prior to and around the American Revolution, labeled by historians of German America as “before the Great Flood,” saw a number of religious dissenters following William Penn's attractive offer of religious freedom and free land for resettlement. The group of “Krefelders,” with their leader Franz Daniel Pastorius, arrived in October 1683 to found what came to be known as Germantown. This group nicely provided historians with the material for a foundational myth of German America.

In addition to these religiously motivated settlers, a number of Germans made use of the redemptioner or indentured servant system to have their passage paid for, to work it off over the subsequent couple of years, and then to seek opportunities for settlement. Protective legislation in favor of the redemptioners in [Page 541]some states, and (more so) the entrenchment of African American servitude in America, put an end to this immigration strategy during the 1830s. Regarding the number of people of German-speaking origin (this would include Swiss immigrants) who lived in the colonies around the time of the American Revolution, new research and more refined calculating methods estimate that in 1776 the United States was home to 228.600 people of Swiss and German origin, approximately 11.5% of the White population.

German emigrants. This engraving in Harper's Weekly from November 7, 1874, shows German emigrants embarking on a Hamburg steamer headed for New York. Upon arrival in the United States, these immigrants likely moved to where land was available—first in Pennsylvania and New York and then west into Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and Kansas, and southwest to Texas and California.

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-2054.

During the American Revolution, young German men were pressed into military service to support the British troops so their ruler could pay off some debt to the British king. Some deserted to join the revolutionaries, some stayed and settled, and some returned home. All of them, however, helped to spread the word about land and opportunities in the New World. It is through these troops that information about the New World disseminated, it has been argued in German historiography.

The Quest for Land

From the 1830s onward, when Germans began to leave Europe in greater numbers, the pull of information about the United States was compounded by the push of deteriorating economic and social conditions, at first in southern and southwestern Germany. During the 1840s and 1850s, the migration fever had reached the middle regions of the country, including the eastern provinces of Mecklenburg. By the 1890s, people living in the northeastern agrarian lands voted with their feet against oppressive political conditions and for an opportunity to carve out a better life for their families.

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