[Illustration:  SETTLEMENTS OF GERMAN AND SCOTCH-IRISH IMMIGRANTS]

These newcomers in America made their homes chiefly in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas.  Coming late upon the scene, they found much of the land immediately upon the seaboard already taken up.  For this reason most of them became frontier people settling the interior and upland regions.  There they cleared the land, laid out their small farms, and worked as “sturdy yeomen on the soil,” hardy, industrious, and independent in spirit, sharing neither the luxuries of the rich planters nor the easy life of the leisurely merchants.  To their agriculture they added woolen and linen manufactures, which, flourishing in the supple fingers of their tireless women, made heavy inroads upon the trade of the English merchants in the colonies.  Of their labors a poet has sung: 

        “O, willing hands to toil;
    Strong natures tuned to the harvest-song and bound to the kindly soil;
    Bold pioneers for the wilderness, defenders in the field.”

=The Germans.=—­Third among the colonists in order of numerical importance were the Germans.  From the very beginning, they appeared in colonial records.  A number of the artisans and carpenters in the first Jamestown colony were of German descent.  Peter Minuit, the famous governor of New Motherland, was a German from Wesel on the Rhine, and Jacob Leisler, leader of a popular uprising against the provincial administration of New York, was a German from Frankfort-on-Main.  The wholesale migration of Germans began with the founding of Pennsylvania.  Penn was diligent in searching for thrifty farmers to cultivate his lands and he made a special effort to attract peasants from the Rhine country.  A great association, known as the Frankfort Company, bought more than twenty thousand acres from him and in 1684 established a center at Germantown for the distribution of German immigrants.  In old New York, Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson became a similar center for distribution.  All the way from Maine to Georgia inducements were offered to the German farmers and in nearly every colony were to be found, in time, German settlements.  In fact the migration became so large that German princes were frightened at the loss of so many subjects and England was alarmed by the influx of foreigners into her overseas dominions.  Yet nothing could stop the movement.  By the end of the colonial period, the number of Germans had risen to more than two hundred thousand.

The majority of them were Protestants from the Rhine region, and South Germany.  Wars, religious controversies, oppression, and poverty drove them forth to America.  Though most of them were farmers, there were also among them skilled artisans who contributed to the rapid growth of industries in Pennsylvania.  Their iron, glass, paper, and woolen mills, dotted here and there among the thickly settled regions, added to the wealth and independence of the province.