The coming of the Germans may be divided into three quite distinct migrations:  the early, the middle, and the recent.  The first period includes all who came before the radical ferment which began to agitate Europe after the Napoleonic wars.  The Federal census of 1790 discloses 176,407 Germans living in America.  But German writers usually maintain that there were from 225,000 to 250,000 Germans in the colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence.  They had been driven from the fatherland by religious persecution and economic want.  Every German state contributed to their number, but the bulk of this migration came from the Palatinate, Wuerttemberg, Baden, and Alsace, and the German cantons of Switzerland.  The majority were of the peasant and artisan class who usually came over as redemptioners.  Yet there were not wanting among them many persons of means and of learning.

Pennsylvania was the favorite distributing point for these German hosts.  Thence they pushed southward through the beautiful Shenandoah Valley into Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and northward into New Jersey.  Large numbers entered at Charleston and thence went to the frontiers of South Carolina.  The Mohawk Valley in New York and the Berkshires of Massachusetts harbored many.  But not all of them moved inland.  They were to be found scattered on the coast from Maine to Georgia.  Boston, New York City, Baltimore, New Bern, Wilmington, Charleston, and Savannah, all counted Germans in their populations.  However strictly these German neighborhoods may have maintained the customs of their native land, the people thoroughly identified themselves with the patriot cause and supplied soldiers, leaders, money, and enthusiasm to the cause of the Revolutionary War.

Benjamin Rush, the distinguished Philadelphia physician and publicist, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in 1789 a description of the Germans of Pennsylvania which would apply generally to all German settlements at that time and to many of subsequent date.  The Pennsylvania German farmer, he says, was distinguished above everything else for his self-denying thrift, housing his horses and cattle in commodious, warm barns, while he and his family lived in a log hut until he was well able to afford a more comfortable house; selling his “most profitable grain, which is wheat” and “eating that which is less profitable but more nourishing, that is, rye or Indian corn”; breeding the best of livestock so that “a German horse is known in every part of the State” for his “extraordinary size or fat”; clearing his land thoroughly, not “as his English or Irish neighbors”; cultivating the most bountiful gardens and orchards; living frugally, working constantly, fearing God and debt, and rearing large families.  “A German farm may be distinguished,” concludes this writer, “from the farms of other citizens by the superior size of their barns, the plain but compact form of