Palatine German Emigration to Pennsylvania
Some 13,000 Germans left the Rhineland for England in 1709 and most of them had nowhere to go. The Palatinate had been devastated repeatedly for two generations — by French armies in 1674 and again in 1689, when the countryside was burned deliberately, and by the campaigns of the Spanish Succession war that was still running. The winter of 1708 and 1709 was the coldest in five hundred years. The Rhine froze solid, vines and fruit trees died, birds fell out of the air, and the harvest failed across western Europe. Into that arrived pamphlets circulating in the Rhine valley promising free land in the American colonies and describing Queen Anne as a protector of Protestants; one was bound in a red cover, which is why the emigrants were later called the Golden Book people. They came down the Rhine to Rotterdam and were shipped to London, where the government had not planned for them and put them in tents and warehouses at Blackheath and Camberwell. Public opinion turned against them within months. The disposal was improvised. About 3,000 Catholics were sent home, some 3,000 were shipped to Ireland, and around 3,000 went to New York under a scheme to produce naval stores from pine tar that failed completely, leaving them to settle the Schoharie and Mohawk valleys. Others reached Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. It is the first mass migration of continental Europeans to British America, and the precedent for the far larger German emigration of the following century.
- Year: 1709 CE
- Category: Social
