Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York

We are becoming increasingly aware that the transplantation of peoples from the Old World to the New was a complex business. Any real understanding of migration must include investigations of the conditions and identities in the emigrants’ places of origin, of the factors that facilitated or hindered migration, of the physical migration itself, of the conditions and evolving identities in the immigrants’ new settlement areas, and maybe some follow-up on what happened to those who left their homelands. By these criteria, Becoming German is a successful exploration of one relatively small piece of the settling of Anglo-America, the so-called Palatine migration of 1709. As a case study of the pushes and pulls of immigration, of the intricacies of ethnicity and perception, of the limits the eighteenth-century state faced in the management of large groups of newcomers, and of the impossibility of forcing free people in America to follow any sort of ‘imperial’ script, Becoming German adds to our understanding of these important processes.

Philip Otterness tells his story well. It is a revisionist tale. An older and simpler narrative had it that Protestant Palatines, faced with the hardships of war and a new Roman Catholic Prince intent on converting them, fled their homelands seeking peace and religious freedom. The reality is more complicated and more compelling. In the latter part of the sixteenth and early part of the seventeenth centuries, various Southwest German states were experiencing economic hardship. War, but also disease, poor harvests, and taxation had undermined the quality of life for rural agriculturalists and artisans. Partible inheritance had made farmsteads too small to absorb the claims of future heirs. Thus, rather than becoming immigrants because of religion or war, the Palatines were opportunity migrants.

While the group in question was labeled Palatines after the group of lands known as the Palatinate, in fact the majority of peoples did not originate there. Instead, migrants came from many of the small states in the Southwest of what would only later become a unified Germany. They not only had diverse nationalities, but also practiced their religion in diverse denominations: Those leaving were Catholics, Reformed (Calvinist), and Lutheran. Until pressed from the outside to reject Catholics or Catholicism, they had been tolerant of one another, intermarrying in the process. Unlike many of those ending up on American shores, the ‘Palatines’ migrated as families headed by men and women in their thirties. As others have shown, Germans tended to come over together—unlike Irish, Scots-Irish, and many English, who emigrated as young, single, males. Such patterns should have made it easier for them to retain their Germanness, but they also made it harder for them to provide for their needs.

The actual emigration of some 13,000 people in the space of about a year shows both the power of the marketplace and its limitations. Based on what they called the “golden book,” apparently a German-language piece of promotional literature touting the wonders of Carolina, men and women believed that Queen Anne would pay their passage to America and give them land if only they could get themselves to London. Selling all and buying their freedom from their princely overlords, they flocked to Rotterdam. As luck would have it, troop ships bearing British soldiers to fight the war of the Spanish Succession had room for England-bound emigrants. Without realizing the extant of the migration, British officials agreed to ferry people to England. Once there, they were put up first in warehouses and then in tent cities outside of London. Their numbers soon overwhelmed the charities which initially oversaw their welfare.

It was in England that the migrants became German, Palatine, and Protestant. The original narrative stressed their religious hardship and nobody cared about the dirty details of ethnicity and religious diversity. Initially, they were perceived as the deserving poor, but this favorable vision deteriorated in the face of their growing numbers and their unwillingness to be placed as poor workers in either England or Ireland. They wanted America, and America they would get—but not until at least some had died, the Catholics had been weeded out and sent back to the Continent, and some 3,000 had been packed off to Ireland (although 1,000 returned).

By 1710 English officials understood they had a large problem. Packing off the Catholics had stopped the flow of people from the German states, as they had carried back their tale of what they considered broken promises and harsh usage, but the problem of those left remained. Robert Hunter, newly appointed governor of New York, stepped into the breach by proposing a scheme to send these families into the New York woods to make pitch and tar, thus freeing England of its dependence on the Baltic for these naval stores. Some 2,800 left London for New York, and after a hard passage some 2,400 landed there. Again local officials were unprepared, and initial sympathy for the migrants turned to hostility.

Grand schemes tend to fail in eighteenth-century Anglo-America, and Robert Hunter’s was no different. The ‘Germans’ were placed in seven villages near the lands of Robert Livingston, one of New York’s most resourceful entrepreneurs, and he agreed to supply them. They, in turn, wanted farm land and had little taste for the difficult and unrewarding task of making pitch and tar. In the end, this scheme failed, leaving Hunter with an enormous personal debt. Most of the settlers left the villages to squat on more fertile lands next to the Mohawks. Realizing the need for good relations with these neighbors, they treated them well and even sent one of their young men to live in a Mohawk village and learn the language.

Larger events undermined this idyllic picture. Land speculators claimed the land and many of the Germans went further west and then south. Pressures on the Indians eventually forced them to choose between alliance with the French or the English. The Seven Years’ War saw many choosing the French and turning on the Germans. By then the Germans also were becoming more like the English—less open, for instance, to religious equality for Africans, and indeed more likely to own slaves. Like the English, they also became more creolized religiously and less willing to accept European-trained ministers. When the Revolution came, the Germans of the Mohawk Valley choose the patriot side.

When various poor farmers and artisans in the principalities of what would become Southwest Germany left their homes to pursue the dream of their own farms, they unwittingly became part of a larger history. Lured by false tales of free passage and land, they not only gave up their old homes but also their old identities. Catholics among them were expelled, so the group became entirely Protestant. Since those upon whom they relied cared little for the complexity of their identity, they were labeled both Palatine and German, although most were neither the former nor identified themselves as the latter. The British government, which neither wanted them in the first place nor had the resources to deal with them once they arrived, finally was convinced they could play a role in the great power struggle for empire by settling on the New York frontier and producing naval stores. They disagreed and mostly went their own way, although not without high cost in terms of lives and initial prosperity. Some sixty-five years later, their descendants would chose to identify with the Americans, although many still spoke German and married other Germans. Certainly this is part of the puzzle of what it means not only to become German but also to become American.