History of the United States | Page 7

harvest-song and
bound to the kindly soil; Bold pioneers for the wilderness, defenders in
the field."
=The Germans.=--Third among the colonists in order of numerical
importance were the Germans. From the very beginning, they appeared
in colonial records. A number of the artisans and carpenters in the first
Jamestown colony were of German descent. Peter Minuit, the famous
governor of New Motherland, was a German from Wesel on the Rhine,
and Jacob Leisler, leader of a popular uprising against the provincial
administration of New York, was a German from Frankfort-on-Main.
The wholesale migration of Germans began with the founding of
Pennsylvania. Penn was diligent in searching for thrifty farmers to
cultivate his lands and he made a special effort to attract peasants from
the Rhine country. A great association, known as the Frankfort
Company, bought more than twenty thousand acres from him and in
1684 established a center at Germantown for the distribution of

German immigrants. In old New York, Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson
became a similar center for distribution. All the way from Maine to
Georgia inducements were offered to the German farmers and in nearly
every colony were to be found, in time, German settlements. In fact the
migration became so large that German princes were frightened at the
loss of so many subjects and England was alarmed by the influx of
foreigners into her overseas dominions. Yet nothing could stop the
movement. By the end of the colonial period, the number of Germans
had risen to more than two hundred thousand.
The majority of them were Protestants from the Rhine region, and
South Germany. Wars, religious controversies, oppression, and poverty
drove them forth to America. Though most of them were farmers, there
were also among them skilled artisans who contributed to the rapid
growth of industries in Pennsylvania. Their iron, glass, paper, and
woolen mills, dotted here and there among the thickly settled regions,
added to the wealth and independence of the province.
[Illustration: From an old print
A GLIMPSE OF OLD GERMANTOWN]
Unlike the Scotch-Irish, the Germans did not speak the language of the
original colonists or mingle freely with them. They kept to themselves,
built their own schools, founded their own newspapers, and published
their own books. Their clannish habits often irritated their neighbors
and led to occasional agitations against "foreigners." However, no
serious collisions seem to have occurred; and in the days of the
Revolution, German soldiers from Pennsylvania fought in the patriot
armies side by side with soldiers from the English and Scotch-Irish
sections.
=Other Nationalities.=--Though the English, the Scotch-Irish, and the
Germans made up the bulk of the colonial population, there were other
racial strains as well, varying in numerical importance but contributing
their share to colonial life.
From France came the Huguenots fleeing from the decree of the king

which inflicted terrible penalties upon Protestants.
From "Old Ireland" came thousands of native Irish, Celtic in race and
Catholic in religion. Like their Scotch-Irish neighbors to the north, they
revered neither the government nor the church of England imposed
upon them by the sword. How many came we do not know, but
shipping records of the colonial period show that boatload after
boatload left the southern and eastern shores of Ireland for the New
World. Undoubtedly thousands of their passengers were Irish of the
native stock. This surmise is well sustained by the constant appearance
of Celtic names in the records of various colonies.
[Illustration:From an old print
OLD DUTCH FORT AND ENGLISH CHURCH NEAR ALBANY]
The Jews, then as ever engaged in their age-long battle for religious and
economic toleration, found in the American colonies, not complete
liberty, but certainly more freedom than they enjoyed in England,
France, Spain, or Portugal. The English law did not actually recognize
their right to live in any of the dominions, but owing to the easy-going
habits of the Americans they were allowed to filter into the seaboard
towns. The treatment they received there varied. On one occasion the
mayor and council of New York forbade them to sell by retail and on
another prohibited the exercise of their religious worship. Newport,
Philadelphia, and Charleston were more hospitable, and there large
Jewish colonies, consisting principally of merchants and their families,
flourished in spite of nominal prohibitions of the law.
Though the small Swedish colony in Delaware was quickly submerged
beneath the tide of English migration, the Dutch in New York
continued to hold their own for more than a hundred years after the
English conquest in 1664. At the end of the colonial period over
one-half of the 170,000 inhabitants of the province were descendants of
the original Dutch--still distinct enough to give a decided cast to the life
and manners of New York. Many of them clung as tenaciously to their
mother tongue as they did to their capacious