German Americans

Waves of German Immigration

The Germans who streamed into the British colonies since the late 17th century came from various principalities, stretching from the estuary of the Rhine in Holland up to the Alps in Switzerland, from Alsace in the west far into central Europe. Because of the existence of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, a pre- or supranational conglomerate of numerous territories rather than a national state, German immigrants often identified along regional (e.g., Bavarian, Prussian, Saxon) or religious (e.g., Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish) lines rather than as Germans. In addition, they spoke a large variety of, often mutually unintelligible, linguistic varieties.

The first German settlement in colonial America was established in 1683 by 13 Quaker and Mennonite families from Krefeld. Led by Francis Daniel Pastorius, they founded Germantown, Pennsylvania, forming the nucleus of a group that would soon be called the Pennsylvania Dutch. In 1709, 13,000 Germans mainly from the Palatinate region in southwestern Germany immigrated to America because of overpopulation, heavy taxation, wars, and a very harsh winter. Some of them settled in New York's Hudson River Valley, others moved up the Hudson and Mohawk, while another group settled in Pennsylvania. Letters home as well as the activities of the so-called Neuländers triggered a stream of German migration until the 1750s.

Pennsylvania became the center of German settlement in the colonial period, with 33 percent of its population being German. Maryland, New [Page 955]York, Virginia, and New Jersey also displayed sizable German communities. The majority of these early settlers were peasants who came from the Palatinate, Hesse, Baden, and Württemberg, traveled with family or village members, and belonged to the Lutheran or Reformed churches—although Mennonites and pietistic communities dissenting from mainstream Protestantism also figured prominently in the early period of German immigration.

Those migrants who lacked the money to pay for the transatlantic voyage became indentured servants, thus working off the fare paid for them by their employers over a fixed time period. The colonial period of German immigration was concluded by the settlement of about 5,000 Hessian soldiers, who had fought as mercenaries for the British in the Revolutionary War in the newly formed United States.

The second migration wave was inaugurated by the economic disruption caused by the Napoleonic Wars and the crop failures of 1816–17, which stimulated the migration of about 20,000 southwestern Germans to the United States. In the decades to come, the number of Germans entering the United States picked up steadily, peaking in the 1880s with 1,445,181 German arrivals, constituting 27.7 percent of the total immigration to the United States.

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