Coming To America Chapter 4 Other Europeans in Colonial America

I am continually impressed by the diversity of colonial America and the influence these migrating ethnicities had on what would become the United States. The non-English European groups of German, Scotch-Irish, Scot, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, French, Spanish, Swedish, and Jewish immigrants made invaluable contributions to our collective history and it is a rich legacy that they give to all the generations that follow. I know I have never before studied American history from the perspective of this collective ethnic history. It has given me a different perspective and contexts in which to look at my own personal ethnic history and for the first time, my national ethnic history.

German immigrants were not unlike many English immigrants with major push factors of politics and economics rather than religion bringing them here. Settling heavily in Pennsylvania, many Germans had to indenture themselves for passage, although by deliberate choice. Called free willers or redemptioners, they had to execute 2 contracts – with the European captain for fare here and with the American purchaser who held the terms of their indenture. Like so many indentured immigrants before them, they were willing to risk extreme hardship because the conditions in Europe were not tolerable. They “preferred being slaves in America to being free townsmen in Germany.” Their indentured life was not considered to be harsh as that of the English and Irish indentured servants, however.

Comparatively, they ended up having more upward social mobility.  It was interesting to learn that redemption ended because it was no longer consonant with the ideology of an American life, although it took more than fifty years after the Declaration of Independence for it to happen.

The emigration from Ulster of the Scotch Irish was much the same in its push forces, although they also had the Anglican Church as a motivating force as well. Many came as a mix of voluntary and coerced indenture. The settlement of the interior of the southern colonies proceeded from Pennsylvania and it was mostly Scotch Irish. The route to

Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and across North Carolina into South Carolina was along the Great Philadelphia Road. It was the major internal migration route of the Colonial Era. With a cultural problem of the absence of an educated clergy, which was important to the Scotch Irish Presbyterians, they helped found (with the Scots) the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) in 1776 and Dickinson College in Pennsylvania in 1781.

So many push and pull factors bringing these migrants here and so many factors influencing the acculturation to American life experienced by each group. Language, family, religious custom, and economic successes were all important contributing factors to their survival and acculturation to American life. And yet, neither size nor geographic concentration was necessary for ethnic survival.

Questions:

1. What was the redemption system of indenture for Germans? Compare it to the indentured servitude of other groups. Why didn’t the system continue?

2. What was the Great Philadelphia Road and what was its significance to the settlement of America?

3. What was the Dutch Golden Age?