Waves of Immigration—the Pre-Revolutionary Forces
Immigration flowed toward America in a series of continuous waves. Every new migration gathered force, built momentum, reached a crest and then merged imperceptibly into the great tide of people already on our shores.
The name “America” was given to this continent by a German mapmaker, Martin Waldseemüller, to honor an Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci. The three ships which discovered America sailed under a Spanish flag, were commanded by an Italian sea captain, and included in their crews an Englishman, an Irishman, a Jew and a Negro.
Long before the colonies were settled, the Spanish and French explorers left evidences of their visits on great expanses of the American wilderness: the Spanish in a wide arc across the southern part of the country, from Florida, where they founded St. Augustine, our oldest city, in 1565, through Texas and New Mexico, to California; the French, up and down the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. Spanish influence can be seen today in our architecture, in the old missions, in family names and place names such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento; the French influence is apparent in many towns and cities still bearing the names of the original settlements, such as Cadillac, Champlain and La Salle.
The first wave of settlement came with the colonists at Jamestown in 1607 and at Plymouth in 1620. It was predominantly English in origin. The urge for greater economic opportunity, together with the desire for religious freedom, impelled these people to leave their homes. Of all the groups that have come to America, these settlers had the most difficult physical environment to master, but the easiest social adjustment to make. They fought a rugged land, and that was hard. But they built a society in their own image, and never knew the hostility of the old toward the new that succeeding groups would meet.
The English, the numerical majority of the first settlers, gave America the basic foundation of its institutions: our form of government, our common law, our language, our tradition of freedom of religious worship. Some of these concepts have been modified as the nation has grown, but the basic elements remain. Those who came later built upon these foundations. But America was settled by immigrants from many countries, with diverse national ethnic and social backgrounds.
There were both indentured servants and profit-seeking aristocrats from England. There were farmers, both propertied and bankrupt, from Ireland. There were discharged soldiers, soldiers of fortune, scholars and intellectuals from Germany. The colonies welcomed all men, regardless of their origin or birth, so long as they could contribute to the building of the country. The Dutch settled Nieuw Amsterdam and explored the Hudson River. The Swedes came to Delaware. Polish, German and Italian craftsmen were eagerly solicited to join the struggling Virginia colonists in Jamestown. The Germans and Swiss opened up the back country in Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia and the Carolinas. French Huguenots took root in New England, New York, South Carolina and Georgia. The Scots and the Irish were in the vanguard that advanced the frontier beyond the Alleghenies. When Britain conquered Nieuw Amsterdam in 1664, it offered citizenship to immigrants of eighteen different nationalities.
At one time it seemed the continent might ultimately divide into three language sections: English, Spanish and French. But the English victories over the French and the purchase of territories held by the French and Spanish resulted in the creation of an indivisible country, with the same language, customs and government. Yet each ethnic strain left its own imprint on the new land.
Thus the very name of our country, “The United States of America,” was borrowed from “The United States of the Netherlands.” Many “typical American” activities are Dutch in origin. The immigrants from Holland brought to this country ice-skating, bowling, many forms of boating and golf (which they called kolf); they gave us waffles, cookies and that staple of the American menu, the doughnut (originally kruller). To our folklore they contributed the figure of Santa Claus and his reindeer, and the many tales of the Hudson Valley. Examples of their architecture can still be seen on the banks of the Hudson today.
French colonial immigration had two main sources. The Protestant Huguenots came here in considerable numbers after persecution resumed as the result of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Catholic “Acadians” came here after their exile from Nova Scotia in 1755 when that land fell under British rule.
The Huguenots settled in the larger trading towns of New England, later spreading down through Pennsylvania and Virginia, and in South Carolina. A Huguenot family presented Faneuil Hall, a shrine of American liberty, to the city of Boston. Many of the beautiful houses which make Charleston so picturesque today were built originally by Huguenots.
The Acadians, relatively few in numbers, scattered mostly along the Eastern seaboard. But a colony of them settled in Louisiana, along the bayous to the west and north of New Orleans. They were relatively isolated, and as they grew in number, they kept their language, their customs, their faith and folklore, even abiding by the Napoleonic Code rather than English law. Today, sometimes known as “Cajuns,” they provide one of the most distinctive ethnic elements on the American scene.
During and after the French Revolution of 1789, French musicians, dancing masters, tutors and wigmakers, once employed by the now deposed aristocrats, added a touch of grace to the homespun life of the new nation. They introduced the French art of cooking, as well as the cotillion, the waltz and the quadrille. French-Spanish émigrés from the West Indies made New Orleans into a great cultural and social center. The first opera to be given in America was produced in that city. The only major American city built according to a systematic plan, Washington, D.C., was designed by the French Army engineer Major Pierre Charles L‘Enfant.
The early Swedes, too, made their contribution to American culture—in particular, the knowledge of how to build houses from squared-off timbers. This structure was later to become the mark of the frontier, where it was known as the log cabin.
Over two thousand Jews came to this country in pre-Revolutionary days. Most were from Spain or Portugal. Some established themselves in the Dutch colony of Nieuw Amsterdam, after winning recognition of their right to trade, travel and live in the colony from Peter Stuyvesant. Others settled in Newport, Rhode Island, then a thriving center of the maritime trade. Many prospered as merchants in the West India trade, which included sugar, rum and molasses. The oldest synagogue in the United States, built in 1763, is located in Newport, Rhode Island.
Among the earliest settlers in Pennsylvania were Welsh farmers who came here for economic reasons and out of a desire to revive Welsh nationalism. In the years 1683—99, they were augmented by Welsh Quakers who came to escape religious persecution. Their presence is reflected by such place names as Bryn Mawr and Radnor, and in the sturdy farmhouses of the area, still standing after almost three hundred years.
The pre-Revolutionary Irish immigration is usually referred to as Scotch-Irish, since it consisted largely of Scots who had settled in Ireland during the seventeenth century.
These were the frontiersmen, ideally suited by their previous environment and experience to spearhead the drive against the colonial frontiers. They pushed out almost at once to the edge of the wilderness in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Maine, and down the Great Valley to the Carolina Piedmont. Through them, Presbyterianism became a powerful force on the frontier. The Scotch Presbyterians founded many institutions of higher learning, beginning with Princeton in 1746.
In 1683 thirteen German families arrived in Philadelphia. They were the forerunners of a substantial migration from Germany. With them there also came Swiss, Alsatians, Dutch and Bohemians. By the eve of the Revolution there were over 100,000 German immigrants and descendants of German immigrants living in the United States. They constituted the first numerical challenge to the hitherto predominantly English population.
Some were Pietists, Moravians and Mennonites, sects in some ways similar to the Quakers. They found in William Penn’s colony a sympathetic climate in which they could practice their beliefs without interference.
Those of their descendants who live today in and around Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, are known as the “Pennsylvania Dutch.” They have made of their land a model of conservationist farming. Nearly three hundred years after they first broke ground, their land is as fertile and productive as they found it. They built the first Conestoga wagon, a vehicle which was to prove immensely useful to the settlement of the West.
Other German immigrants were members of other religious groups, such as the Amish and the Dunkards, who like to be known as “the plain people.” They have changed little in their folkways and religious practices. They still wear their traditional clothing and follow traditional customs, providing, like the Cajuns, a picturesque addition to the American scene.
Although there was no large-scale Italian immigration before the Revolution, there were many Italians prominent in American life. As early as 1610, craftsmen were brought from Italy by the colony of Virginia to start a glass trade. Later, others came and planted vineyards. Georgia invited them to organize a silk industry.
In all the large cities there were Italian doctors, merchants, innkeepers and teachers. They wandered everywhere as traveling musicians, held concerts and established music schools. Our first sculptors and our first interior decorators were Italian.
Although predominantly Catholic, the Italians had their own counterpart of the Puritans, the Waldensians. They were an independent sect from the Piedmont, in the north of Italy, who were invited by the Dutch colonial government to form settlements here. Some 167 of them accepted, and in 1657 they were brought to the New World to settle a tract of land set aside for them by the Nieuw Amsterdam government.
Poles, too, were present in pre-Revolutionary America. Originally, they, too, came at the invitation of the Dutch. Most of them were farmers, but some settled in what is now New York City, where one of them, Dr. Alexander Kurcyusz (Curtius), a prominent physician, founded the first Latin school. Pre-Revolutionary America also included Greeks, Russians and other Slavs, immigrants from Southeastern and Eastern Europe.
During the Revolutionary War itself, men came from many other lands to help the new nation. Two Poles helped turn the tide toward victory. Thaddeus Kosciusko, a young engineer, offered his services early. He became an aide to General Washington and a major general in the engineers. His plans are credited with winning the Battle of Saratoga, a turning point in the war. Count Casimir Pulaski rose to the rank of general, fought heroically at Brandywine, Trenton and in other decisive engagements. He organized his own Polish Legion, ultimately giving his life to the new nation when he died as a result of a wound received at the Battle of Savannah. A German, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, did more than anyone else to shape the raw recruits into a disciplined army. A Frenchman, Marquis de Lafayette, has become something of an American folk hero for his part in the Revolution. He took a leading part in the campaign that led to the defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown. The service of another Frenchman, Count de Rochambeau, who recruited over four thousand French volunteers, was almost as great.
Between a third and a half of the fighting men of the Revolutionary Army were of Scottish or Scotch-Irish descent. Many of those at Valley Forge were German.
A Pole of Portuguese-Jewish origin, Haym Salomon, risked his life to gain vital intelligence for the American cause. A Scotch-Irish immigrant, Robert Morris, helped finance the war.
Four signers of the Declaration of Independence were immigrants of Irish birth: Matthew Thornton, James Smith, George Taylor and Edward Rutledge. The great doctrine “All men are created equal,” incorporated in the Declaration by Thomas Jefferson, was paraphrased from the writing of Philip Mazzei, an Italian-born patriot and pamphleteer, who was a close friend of Jefferson. Mazzei compiled the first accurate history of the colonies, which he wrote in French so that the European nations would be able to appreciate the political, social and economic conditions that characterized the new world.
A gravestone in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia reads: “Here lies the remains of John Lewis, who slew the Irish lord, settled in Augusta County, located the town of Staunton and furnished five sons to fight the battles of the American revolution.” Statements like this not only speak eloquently of the contribution of one Irish family, but represent the sacrifices of many immigrants to this country even before it had won its independence.