From Reich to Realm: German Immigrants in a New Land

Abstract

Historians of early America have long been fascinated with the transatlantic migrations that brought hundreds of thousands of settlers onto colonial soil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The peopling of British North America, to use Bernard Bailyn's term, has largely been viewed as the voluntary transfer of migrants from the British Isles to New England, the Chesapeake, and Pennsylvania. To some scholars, the connection between English migration and the meaning of America has even assumed heroic overtones. Indeed, to write of English, or at least Puritan, emigration to, and acculturation in, early America was to venture into the near-mythical realm of American origins. When Perry Miller drew a phrase from the Reverend Samuel Danforth to coin the title of his famous essay Errand Into the Wilderness, he sketched a paradigm of enduring rhetorical power. From Miller's vantage point 300 years later, the Great Migration of 1630 brought to America a nucleus of visionaries whose self-appointed destiny was nothing less than the regeneration of the Christian covenant in what they took to be the wilderness of America. Books published in the last few years, such as Bailyn's Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986), David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), and Virginia DeJohn Anderson's New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (1991) have shown that the religious and economic seekers who left the British Isles for America hold continued appeal for laborers in the newly invigorated field of transatlantic history But across the oceans came other migrants to British North America: Dutch, Swedes, English convicts, and the most unwilling of emigrants, half a million enslaved Africans during the colonial period. Now, in this superb book, A. G. Roeber documents the migration of the second largest group of European settlers to the British colonies, the Germans. Between 1683 and