German immigration to the New World began very slowly in comparison to many other nationalities, only to become so forceful that German authorities and English colonists began to worry about it's impact. In Bernard Bailyn's book, The Peopling of British North America, the questions of why the Germans came to settle in the colonies of America, and of what hardships they faced on their journey are asked, but never really answered.
Bailyn begins to examine the German population of immigrants early on by stating that "An estimated ten percent of the pre-Revolutionary population was German Speaking about 500,000 people emigrated from southwestern Germany and Switzerland in the eighteenth century." 1 Bailyn then goes on to ask the question: why? He wants to know what it was that compelled almost 500,000 people to pack up everything they owned and move halfway across the world to a new land in which they knew no one and had no guarantee of work, food, or even a place to live. I have to admit that this immediately caught my interest and I read forward anticipating when he would address the answers. Disappointingly, Bailyn never really gives a sufficient answer. He makes a quick mention of it later in the book, blaming "special problems created by persecution, wars, and famine in the Palatine at the end of the wars, and famine in the Palatine at the end of the seventeenth century."2 There is not much else relating to the actual reasons for the majority of the German immigration. .
It did pique my interest enough though, to look for the answers myself, and they were not hard to find. One article on the internet says specifically that German immigration was prompted because of many different events in Europe. One being the end of the Thirty Years War, where the people of Germany were basically indigent. The French were constantly raiding, ravaging, and destroying their towns.
