A popular explanation for the cause of German emigration was war. There is no doubt, especially using our hindsight, that this might have been a reason. The major war, in the century preceding the start of German immigration for America, in the eighteenth century, was the Thirty Years’ War. Some of the effects of that have been given here recently, in terms of the impact on Schwaigern. At the conclusion of the war, southwest Germany sometimes called the Rhineland was left prostrate.
Growth was good, and it was augmented by immigration; however, there was a series of wars in the second half of the seventeenth century, which was a setback to recovery, and which must have been discouraging to the citizens. Repeatedly, the Palatinate was the stomping ground of Louis XIV’s armies. The armies' philosophy was that they should be able to live from what they could obtain from the area they were in, and they should be able to send a profit back to the King.
Marshall Turenne devastated the Palatinate in 1674. The Palatinate at this time extended to the east bank of the Rhine, and included parts of the Kraichgau. Lingering resentments between the minor princes over the Thirty Years’ War led to internal conflicts. In 1688-1689, partly to vent his malice toward the Protestants, the Grand Monarch laid the Palatinate waste again. During the War of the Spanish Succession, Marshal Villars crossed the Rhine in 1707, and terrorized the Rhineland, including the Palatinate, Württemberg, Baden, and the Swabian Circle. The war was a political blunder for it helped to unite the German states against Louis.
For the people living in the war zones, these invasions wiped out the fruits of many of the advances made since the Thirty Years’ War.
One of the impacts of these wars is that the church records become very skimpy, or nonexistent. Repeatedly, we note there are years when there are no records. Or, we note that the records in a specific church start in 1690, picking a year for illustrative purposes. Were all of the church records to be compared, we could recreate the zones of war.
To us today, it is a mystery why the Germans did not leave sooner than they did. William Penn and his agents had been very active in the area recruiting people to settle in Pennsylvania. William Hoffman’s account tells of the unpleasantness caused by war and religious intolerance. Even though he lived to the north in the Siegen area, they were going through similar problems there. But our answer may lie in other of his comments. He believed that God had ordained that this was the life he was to live. This was God’s will. And who was he to challenge it?
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.