[I return to Fogleman's "Hopeful Journeys."] [See previous references to his book on Page 67, Note 1665 , and on Page 68, Note 1677 .)
I have been attempting to establish that there were many migratory movements of people in Europe. Concentrating on southwest Germany, we have seen there were movements in and out of the area. Before 1800, even for centuries, the eastern lands were the destinations for most of the people who left southwest Germany. The eastern lands offered the overcrowded, wanderlust-stricken peasants enough land, resources, religious freedom, and protection from enemies (such as the Turks), to begin building flourishing German communities wherever they ended up. The destination government often assisted the people, in groups of forty or fifty families, in establishing their own semi-autonomous villages, set apart from the native people in the region.
The British government did not try to the extent that other governments did. They did encourage the circulation of pamphlets and books extolling North America regions. In 1709 they were so successful, since perhaps 12,000 people descended on London, that this soured the British on German emigrants.
A disadvantage of the choice of North America over eastern Europe was the "Indian" threat. The Turkish threat in Europe receded throughout the Eighteenth Century, but the dangers from Indians to European settlers on the American frontier seemed to remain constant. Pennsylvania seemed to be pacificist in its outlook toward protecting the frontier people. British recruiters attempted to counteract this by portraying the Indians as docile and exotic neighbors.
The lack of special privileges, the difficult and expensive journey, and the Indian threat may explain why so few emigrants, perhaps less than 15 percent, chose to go to British North America. Four regions in Germany have official statistics on the destinations of where their emigrants were going.
In Northern Baden-Durlach in the Eighteenth Century, 26 percent of the head of families chose North America. A similar number applied to the Lower Neckar (around Heidelberg). From the Western Palatinate and the Saarland, the percent choosing North America fell to 11 percent, though the number leaving the region was much higher. From Ulm and its territories, only 16 percent chose North America.
[You could have been a Rumanian or a Hungarian or a Russian!]
Traveling to the west, across the ocean, was not the favorite choice of the immigrants. One historian estimates that perhaps 900,000 people left Germany in the Eighteenth Century, and that only 15% of these went to the Thirteen Colonies, or to the United States. Why did that 15 percent choose to go west rather than east?
(04 Jun 03)
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.