new world germanic foundations

In 1603, following the death of Elizabeth I, her nephew, James VI of Scotland, became James I of England and an uneasy union took place between the two nations; and in 1613 the Houses of Stuart and Lorraine were united with the marriage of Fredrick of the German Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I, but this union sparked the Thirty Years' War 1613-1645 (otherwise known as the Catholic Reformation) which ravaged Germany, causing the death of hundreds of thousands of young men in battle, widespread starvation of peasants and massive migrations of Germans to the new American colonies.

The founding by the English of the first American colony of Jamestown in 1607 along non-sectarian lines provided a safety valve for the insanity of the old world, and over time more German than English new settlers arrived because following the Thirty Years' War Germany went through further turmoil leaving the plight of the impoverished and war-weary Germans so terrible that Catherine the Great of Russia and many of the Austro-Hungarian kings sent envoys into the German countryside offering the starving farmers who were unable to emigrate to the new world a new home in their lands.

Finally, William Penn came to the rescue with a vision of harmony in the new world. He was granted the Charter of Pennsylvania in 1681 and founded Philadelphia in 1682 with migrants he had previously attracted during his travels through Europe actively promoting religious freedom in the new land. Germans -- both Catholics and Protestants -- constituted the largest group of emigrants to Pennsylvania and they founded Germantown in the same year, 1683, that the Moslem Ottoman Turks had advanced through southern Austria and were besieging its capital, Vienna.

Read the full story The Stuart Lorraine Marriage