Part 8

About 1709, these Palatines began frantic efforts to escape from their misfortunes, and within a few years some 30,000 had gone over into Holland and even into England, where they were not welcome. The British Government was only too glad to subsidize their further emigration, and several thousand of them were transported to the Hudson River valley. They soon became discontented there and were finally colonized on the Schoharie River in New York. Here, in turn, they were ousted by what they considered political jobbery and many of them moved on to the Mohawk River, a tributary of the Hudson, while others continued down the Susquehanna River to Pennsylvania. On the whole, therefore, the Palatines are to be considered merely temporary inhabitants of New York State. Although a good many of them remained, the reports they sent out as to their treatment were so unsatisfactory that thenceforth the Palatine immigration mostly avoided New York and landed in Pennsylvania, where it will be encountered later.

The next influx, particularly after 1719, was of Ulster Scots, similar to that already mentioned as invading New England. Much of Orange County on the west of the Hudson River was settled by these Ulstermen, beginning as early as 1729, and for the next half-century the infiltration of this Nordic element was continuous, although more of it came through New England than directly into New York harbor. By the time of the Revolution the Ulster Scots had spread over much of the eastern part of northern New York, having enough representatives in Albany in 1760 to establish a Presbyterian church there.

At about the same time Sir William Johnson, who had received a grant of 100,000 acres of land north of the Mohawk River for his valor in defending the colonies against the French at Crown Point and Lake George in 1755, began to look about for suitable tenants and hit upon the idea of importing Scotch Highlanders of Roman Catholic faith. Some hundreds of these arrived just before the Revolution, and like Sir John Johnson, son of Sir William, espoused the cause of the Loyalists. After the Revolution, they moved northward to Ontario where the town of Glengarry recalls their earlier home in Inverness. There, such families as the MacDonnells, McDougalls, Camerons, McIntyres, and Fergusons became an important element of strength to Canada.

As noted, New York State at the time of the Revolution was still distinctly an unimportant colony, and its greatness dates from the invasion of New Englanders immediately after the war. Connecticut, by virtue of its proximity, was the principal source of these settlers, although almost every part of New England contributed. The crossing over of the Ulster Scots has already been mentioned, but it must not be inferred that that was the principal element in the settlement of the State. The main immigration was of the old Puritan English stock which still dominates all of upper New York, except where subsequent colonies of recent immigrants in some of the larger industrial cities have altered the local scene.

The western shores of Lake Champlain and some of the older towns of the Hudson River valley could scarcely be recognized, after a few years, by those who had known them previously. A mere Dutch farm in 1784 had been changed in four years to the thriving city of Hudson, a typical New England commercial town with warehouses, wharves, Yankee shipping, and stores filled with Yankee notions.

A visitor to Whitesborough on the Mohawk River, in 1788, reported that "settlers are continually pouring in from the Connecticut hive." Binghamton was settled jointly by Connecticut and Massachusetts. The same spirit caused a mixing up of the population within the limits of New England so that, to take a single illustration, the men of Middlefield, a small hill town in western Massachusetts, were found on inquiry to come from nearly sixty different towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

After the Revolution the more enterprising young men of Massachusetts and Connecticut began to leave their home towns. Of those who departed, a half went to other places in New England, a quarter to western New York, and a quarter to Ohio and other points in the then "Far West."

The extreme western part of New York State had not begun to develop as early as the period of which we are speaking. Canandaigua was the largest town in 1790, and it had but a hundred inhabitants. Pioneers came from New Jersey and Pennsylvania by way of the Susquehanna and Tioga Rivers, went to Seneca Lake, and thence to Cayuga; others from Connecticut had entered the valley of the Mohawk by way of Albany and Fort Schuyler. Small settlements sprang up at Bath, Naples, Geneva, Aurora, Seneca Falls, Palmyra, Richmond, Fort Stanwix, and Marcellus. The Erie Canal was as yet undreamt of.

The population picture of New York State in 1790 is then a double one. The great bulk of the State, so far as area is concerned, was a colony of Anglo-Saxon origin almost identical with the New England States. The Hudson valley formed a less important appendage to this, with New York City at its mouth--a miscellaneous settlement of people of all sorts whose interests were largely commercial.

New York was one of the States that lost most heavily by the Loyalist migration at the end of the Revolution. This superior Nordic element left in two great streams; one by sea to Nova Scotia, and the other overland to Canada. Long Island was a particularly heavy loser, 3000 people going in one fleet in 1783. The influx of Loyalists into Nova Scotia, amounting to some 35,000, was a severe burden on that little colony. Those who went into Canada overland from New York were more easily assimilated, and many of the important settlements along the northern shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, such as Kingston, date from that time. To these Ontario settlers was given, by Order in Council in 1789, the honorary name of "United Empire Loyalists," and they formed the backbone of Upper Canada, as the Province of Ontario was then called, and were a main element in defeating the plans of American strategists in 1812 to capture Canada and annex it to the Union.

Although New York is generally credited with having more Loyalists during the Revolution than any other colony, she also furnished more troops for the patriot army than did any other State except Massachusetts.

New Jersey, in contrast to its neighbors on either side, was one of the most thoroughly English of all the colonies. The settlements of the Dutch in the north, and the squabbles of a few hundred Dutch, Swedes, and Finlanders in the south, left little trace on the population when colonization once started in earnest. The real history of the colony begins in 1664 when the English proprietors, to whom it had been granted, began to colonize it seriously.

Northern New Jersey was a chaos of rugged hills and forests which offered little to the settler and is still largely waste land. The southern part of the State is also largely waste land, consisting chiefly of pine barrens so that early settlement was virtually limited to two areas. On the North River, as the Hudson was called, the lands along the meadows opposite Manhattan Island were inviting, and on the South River, as the Delaware was originally designated, there was a broad strip of fertile farm land which attracted the early settlers. Among other centers New Haven had established a colony there about 1640, but had been driven off by the Dutch. There was also some extremely fertile land around Freehold and other towns on the line between New York and Philadelphia.

Since these two areas were so inaccessible to each other by direct communication, the State grew up in two distinct settlements; that along the western side of New York harbor, then known as East Jersey, and that on the Delaware, known as West Jersey. While these two were consolidated administratively in 1702, they have never been wholly consolidated in actual character, and the two ends of the State are, even today, diverse enough to show their somewhat divergent origin.

The land along the Delaware was colonized, for the most part, directly from England by the Quakers who had secured an interest in it, and who established the only two towns of importance in West Jersey during the Colonial period--Burlington in 1667 and Salem in 1675. Those who established Burlington were mostly from Yorkshire with a large group also from London, and they took opposite sides of the town, the Yorkshire people spreading north and the London people spreading south. Geographical difficulties checked the southward spread so that Cape May was settled separately by people from Connecticut and from Long Island. Later, some of the French Huguenots went down into West Jersey, but it always remained essentially an English colony, largely of Quaker complexion and influenced by the close proximity of co-religionists in Pennsylvania.

East Jersey, like western New York, represents more directly a New England outpost. Elizabethtown had been established in 1665 by emigrants sent direct from Great Britain, but Newark had at almost the same time been colonized by people from Connecticut, who at first gave to it the name of their old home, Milford. The Elizabethtown Association somewhat later sold part of its territory to people from New Hampshire and Massachusetts who established the two hamlets of Woodbridge and Piscataqua, now New Brunswick.

In 1666, Connecticut Puritans also established on the Passaic River first Guilford, and later Branford, both of which with Milford merged in the town of Newark. The New England overflow continued until the shores of Newark Bay had become another New England colony. Such communities as the Oranges were chiefly transplanted Puritan towns.

The proprietorship of East Jersey shortly passed into the hands of Scotsmen and a steady immigration of these began about 1684. The capital of East Jersey, Perth Amboy, was named for one of the proprietors, James Drummond, the Earl of Perth. The colony soon became, and has ever since remained, one of the strongholds of Scotch Presbyterianism in America, which found its intellectual center in the establishment of Princeton University.

For a long time the two sections of New Jersey were of about equal size and importance. As the country between them gradually filled up, the State grew slowly until at the time of the Revolution its population was estimated at about 120,000. Another fifteen years saw a healthy growth, the first census, in 1790, showing 184,139 inhabitants. The somewhat complicated details of its development should not obscure the fact that New Jersey was one of the most purely white, Protestant, Nordic settlements in the colonies.

Although prior to the arrival of William Penn there were several thousand settlers on the Delaware River, in the territory now covered by Pennsylvania and Delaware, the real settlement of that region is generally dated from the beginning of his operations in 1681, when Upland, now Chester, was settled as his headquarters. A year later Philadelphia was founded, and in spite of this late start grew so rapidly that William Penn, the Quaker, at his death, had the satisfaction of knowing that the City of Brotherly Love was the largest in North America.

While the foundation stock was made up of English Quakers, Penn had ambitious ideas of establishing a headquarters for other like-minded persons, and with this idealism was apparently mixed a solid commercial ambition which led him and his agents to advertise the merits of the colony widely. The land system, unlike that of Virginia or New Netherlands, favored the settler with small means. English and Welsh farmers rapidly appropriated to themselves the country along the west side of the Delaware River from Trenton to Wilmington.

Penn maintained friendly relations with the Protestant leaders in southern Germany, and he and his agents seem to have had an extraordinary flair for finding obscure and peculiar sects and getting them to emigrate to the new colony. A mere list of the odd religious denominations that soon flourished in Pennsylvania is bewildering, and an attempt to define the characteristics, which to them seemed more than matters of life and death, is quite beyond the capacity of the present-day student not steeped in the knowledge of seventeenth-century theology.

Germantown was established in October, 1673, the first outpost of the Alpine race in the present territory of the United States. Its founders were Mennonites; but they were later joined by Dunkards or Tunkers, that is, Dippers, who held to the efficacy of baptism by immersion.

Generally speaking, the Germans who came to Pennsylvania during the first quarter-century of its settlement belong to these distinctive sects, while after that time the immigration was made up of a somewhat more uniform mass of adherents of either the Lutheran or the Reformed Church. This difference soon became a recognized one for an easy division of "the Pennsylvania Dutch," as this mixed group of Alpines came to be called, not very correctly, from an assimilation of _Pennsylvanische Deutsche_. One would ask, on hearing such a person mentioned, "Does he belong to the sects or to the church people?"

A few of these such as the Labadists from Friesland who settled in New Castle County, Delaware, were either from Holland or parts of Germany bordering Holland, but the great bulk of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" came from the Rhine Provinces, particularly from Alsace and the Palatinate, with a liberal sprinkling of northern French Protestants who had been forced over the border, while others came from Austria and Prussia and even from northern Italy. As a matter of fact, down to the time of the World War, Americans called, colloquially, all Germans "Dutchmen."

While the Palatinate furnished only a part of the immigration its name was soon given to all similar newcomers, so that the term Palatine became a general description for a German-speaking immigrant; and one even finds in the old records such anomalies as an allusion to "a Palatine from Hamburg." An important centre of their dispersion was the town of Crefeld near the border of Holland.

The colonies in general, being overwhelmingly and typically British, looked with suspicion on any alien groups, and New England, in particular, probably would not have encouraged these Alpines to enter at all. Virginia with its Church of England establishment and its self-conscious English attitude was likewise not disposed to be hospitable to such a large group of foreigners.

Governor Oglethorpe attracted some of them to Georgia, but not very successfully, as will be mentioned later. One important group of his settlers, in particular, the Moravians, left Georgia about 1739 because they were required to take up arms against the neighboring Spanish in Florida. They moved to Pennsylvania where they founded, in 1741, the town of Bethlehem, which has been their headquarters ever since.

While New York originally welcomed the Palatines, it soon treated them so badly that thereafter almost all the vessels bearing German immigrants came directly from Dutch ports to the Delaware, and if by chance an occasional ship was forced to make a landing in New York, its passengers quickly made their way across the Jerseys into more hospitable territory.

Even in Pennsylvania the invasion of the Germans eventually began to cause alarm among the English-speaking and dominant part of the population. In Virginia this attitude of exclusion of supposedly alien races had been maintained ever since the first permanent settlement. Inspired by visions of building up a great industry, the proprietors of that colony had sent out with their "second supply" a little group of eight artisans from Germany and Poland who were skilled glassmakers. The English colonists charged them with treasonable dealings with the Indians and the Chronicler of the settlement refers to them disgustedly as those "damned Dutchmen."

Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1753, expressed his opinion of some of his fellow citizens in a letter to Peter Collinson, was merely reflecting an attitude which the English stock had more or less generally taken when he declared:

"Those who come hither are generally the most stupid of their own nation, and, as ignorance is often attended with credulity when knavery would mislead it, and with suspicion when honesty would set it right; and as few of the English understand the German language, and so cannot address them either from the press or the pulpit, it is almost impossible to remove any prejudices they may entertain. Their clergy have very little influence on the people, who seem to take a pleasure in abusing and discharging the minister on every trivial occasion. Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it. And as Holben says of the young Hottentots, that they are not esteemed men until they have shown their manhood by beating their mothers, so these seem not to think themselves free, till they can feel their liberty in abusing and insulting their teachers. Thus they are under no restraint from ecclesiastical government; they behave, however, submissively enough at present to the civil government, which I wish they may continue to do, for I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but now they come in droves and carry all before them, except in one or two counties.[7]

"Few of their children in the country know English. They import many books from Germany; and of the six printing-houses in the province, two are entirely German, two half German, half English, and but two entirely English. They have one German newspaper, and one half-German. Advertisements, intended to be general, are now printed in Dutch and English. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal instruments in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continued need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one-half our legislators what the other half say.

"In short, unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so outnumber us that we will, in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious. The French, who watch all advantages, are now themselves making a German settlement, back of us, in the Illinois country, and by means of these Germans they may in time come to an understanding with ours; and, indeed, in the last war,[8] our Germans showed a general disposition, that seemed to bode us no good. For, when the English, who were not Quakers, alarmed by the danger arising from the defenseless state of our country, entered unanimously into an association, and within this government, and the Lower Counties raised, armed, and disciplined near ten thousand men, the Germans, except a very few in proportion to their number, refused to engage in it, giving out, one amongst another, and even in print, that, if they were quiet, the French, should they take the country, would not molest them; at the time abusing the Philadelphians for fitting out privateers against the enemy, and representing the trouble, hazard, and expense of defending the province, as a greater inconvenience than any that might be expected from a change of government. Yet I am not for refusing to admit them entirely into our colonies. All that seems to me necessary is, to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English schools, where they are not too thickly settled, and take some care to prevent the practice, lately fallen into by some of the shipowners, of sweeping the German gaols to make up the number of their passengers. I say I am not against the admission of Germans in general, for they have their virtues. Their industry and frugality are exemplary. They are excellent husbandmen, and contribute greatly to the improvement of a country."

By 1727, the English in Pennsylvania had become sufficiently alarmed over the proportions of the Palatine invasion to demand a careful record of the numbers arriving each year so that from then on there is full official record of all foreigners entered at the port of Philadelphia. By that time there were probably fifteen or twenty thousand Germans already in the province, and the record mentioned indicates that between 1727 and 1745 approximately 22,000 arrived by ships. To this number should, of course, be added the high natural increase of those already settled.

Since the English had pre-empted much of the desirable land along the Delaware and around Philadelphia, the Germans, with whom the acquisition of farming land was a dominant passion, mostly went westward of the English settlement and formed a belt where their language was and, in scattered groups to this day, is spoken. They filled the Lehigh and Schuylkill valleys and occupied a band of fertile soil beginning in eastern Pennsylvania on the Delaware, passing westward toward the Susquehanna through the towns of Allentown, Reading, Lebanon, Lancaster, and thence down to the Cumberland valley on the Maryland border where they had a natural outlet to western Virginia and to the south. The tier of counties north of this belt and along the borders of New York was comparatively neglected by them, and was filled largely by settlers from Connecticut. The influx of English and German sectaries was so rapid that within three years from its founding, Penn's province had made a growth as great as that of New Netherlands in its first half-century.

The early Quakers who belonged to the privileged group grew prosperous, and many of them finding the strict ordinances of their sect somewhat oppressive became Anglicans. Thus the Church of England gained an important position in Philadelphia which it retained up to the Revolution. In general, it represented the Loyalist element and therefore partly disintegrated when they left at the end of the war. The Revolution was largely Calvinistic, and the Established Church was in most of the northern colonies regarded with disfavor as "loyalist."

The invasion of Ulster Scots into Pennsylvania began shortly after the German immigration was well under way. Within a few years the great majority of the Ulster immigrants to America were making directly for the Delaware shores. Presbyterian congregations existed in the important towns of the colony about 1700, and within the next decade the Scotch had made numerous settlements in New Castle County, Delaware, and on both sides of the Pennsylvania-Maryland boundary at its intersection with the Delaware line.

When the great tide of emigration from Ulster set in about 1720, the Scotch found the best and most accessible soil in Pennsylvania occupied by the English and the next belt held firmly by the Germans. In general, therefore, they were obliged to pass over these two territories and settle still farther west, particularly in the Cumberland valley of which Gettysburg, York, and Carlisle are now important centers. In this district geographical isolation led later to the establishment farther south of a distinct church, the Cumberland Presbyterian, somewhat different in its tenets from the Presbyterianism of the Philadelphia region and Delaware.