their houses, the height of their enclosures, the extent of their orchards, the fertility of their fields, the luxuriance of their meadows, and a general appearance of plenty and neatness in everything that belongs to them."[26] Rush’s praise of the German mechanics is not less stinted.  They were found in that day mainly as “weavers, taylors, tanners, shoe-makers, comb-makers, smiths of all kinds, butchers, paper makers, watchmakers, and sugar bakers.”  Their first desire was “to become freeholders,” and they almost invariably succeeded.  German merchants and bankers also prospered in Philadelphia, Germantown, Lancaster, and other Pennsylvania towns.  One-third of the population of Pennsylvania, Rush says, was of German origin, and for their convenience a German edition of the laws of the State was printed.

After the Revolution, a number of the Hessian hirelings who had been brought over by the British settled in America.  They usually became farmers, although some of the officers taught school.  They joined the German settlements, avoiding the English-speaking communities in the United States because of the resentment shown towards them.  Their number is unknown.  Frederick Kapp, a German writer, estimates that, of the 29,875 sent over, 12,562 never returned—­but he fails to tell us how many of these remained because of Yankee bullets or bayonets.

The second period of German migration began about 1820 and lasted through the Civil War.  Before 1830 the number of immigrants fluctuated between 200 and 2000 a year; in 1832 it exceeded 10,000; in 1834 it was over 17,000; three years later it reached nearly 24,000; between 1845 and 1860 there arrived 1,250,000, and 200,000 came during the Civil War.

There were several causes, working in close conjunction, that impelled these thousands to leave Germany.  Economic disturbances doubtless turned the thoughts of the hungry and harassed to the land of plenty across the sea.  But a potent cause of the great migration of the thirties and forties was the universal social and political discontent which followed in the wake of the Napoleonic wars.  The German people were still divided into numberless small feudalities whose petty dukes and princes clung tenaciously to their medieval prerogatives and tyrannies.  The contest against Napoleon had been waged by German patriots not only to overcome a foreign foe but to break the tyrant at home.  The hope for constitutional government, for a representative system and a liberal legislation in the German States rose mightily after Waterloo.  But the promises of princes made in days of stress were soon forgotten, and the Congress of Vienna had established the semblance of a German federation upon a unity of reactionary rulers, not upon a constitutional, representative basis.