Penn maintained friendly relations with the Protestant leaders in southern Germany, and he and his agents seem to have had an extraordinary flair for finding obscure and peculiar sects and getting them to emigrate to the new colony. A mere list of the odd religious denominations that soon flourished in Pennsylvania is bewildering, and an attempt to define the characteristics, which to them seemed more than matters of life and death, is quite beyond the capacity of the present-day student not steeped in the knowledge of seventeenth-century theology.
Germantown was established in October, 1673, the first outpost of the Alpine race in the present territory of the United States. Its founders were Mennonites; but they were later joined by Dunkards or Tunkers, that is, Dippers, who held to the efficacy of baptism by immersion.
Generally speaking, the Germans who came to Pennsylvania during the first quarter-century of its settlement belong to these distinctive sects, while after that time the immigration was made up of a somewhat more uniform mass of adherents of either the Lutheran or the Reformed Church. This difference soon became a recognized one for an easy division of "the Pennsylvania Dutch," as this mixed group of Alpines came to be called, not very correctly, from an assimilation of Pennsylvanische Deutsche. One would ask, on hearing such a person mentioned, "Does he belong to the sects or to the church people?"
A few of these such as the Labadists from Friesland who settled in New Castle County, Delaware, were either from Holland or parts of Germany bordering Holland, but the great bulk of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" came from the Rhine Provinces, particularly from Alsace and the Palatinate, with a liberal sprinkling of northern French Protestants who had been forced over the border, while others came from Austria and Prussia and even from northern Italy. As a matter of fact, down to the time of the World War, Americans called, colloquially, all Germans "Dutchmen."
While the Palatinate furnished only a part of the immigration its name was soon given to all similar newcomers, so that the term Palatine became a general description for a German-speaking immigrant; and one even finds in the old records such anomalies as an allusion to "a Palatine from Hamburg." An important centre of their dispersion was the town of Crefeld near the border of Holland.
The colonies in general, being overwhelmingly and typically British, looked with suspicion on any alien groups, and New England, in particular, probably would not have encouraged these Alpines to enter at all. Virginia with its Church of England establishment and its self-conscious English attitude was likewise not disposed to be hospitable to such a large group of foreigners.
Governor Oglethorpe attracted some of them to Georgia, but not very successfully, as will be mentioned later. One important group of his settlers, in particular, the Moravians, left Georgia about 1739 because they were required to take up arms against the neighboring Spanish in Florida. They moved to Pennsylvania where they founded, in 1741, the town of Bethlehem, which has been their headquarters ever since.
While New York originally welcomed the Palatines, it soon treated them so badly that thereafter almost all the vessels bearing German immigrants came directly from Dutch ports to the Delaware, and if by chance an occasional ship was forced to make a landing in New York, its passengers quickly made their way across the Jerseys into more hospitable territory.
Even in Pennsylvania the invasion of the Germans eventually began to cause alarm among the English-speaking and dominant part of the population. In Virginia this attitude of exclusion of supposedly alien races had been maintained ever since the first permanent settlement. Inspired by visions of building up a great industry, the proprietors of that colony had sent out with their "second supply" a little group of eight artisans from Germany and Poland who were skilled glassmakers. The English colonists charged them with treasonable dealings with the Indians and the Chronicler of the settlement refers to them disgustedly as those "damned Dutchmen."