The Moravians, settling first in Georgia, had founded Bethlehem in Pennsylvania in 1741, and soon extended the field of their labors into New York;[557] and in no way did the characteristics of this people impress the life of the colonies so much as in the intermediary nature of their missions among the Indians. David Zeisberger was a leading spirit in this work, and left a manuscript account (written in 1778 in German) of the missions, which was discovered by Schweinitz in the archives of the Moravian church at Bethlehem. (Schweinitz’s Zeisberger, p. 29.) It proved to be the source upon which Loskiel had depended for the first part of his History of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Indians in North America, in three parts, by Geo. H. Loskiel, translated from the German by Christian Ignatius Latrobe (London, 1794);[558] and Schweinitz found it of invaluable use to him in the studies for his Life of David Zeisberger (Philad., 1870). The other principal authority on the work of the Moravians among the Indians is Rev. John Heckewelder, whose Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren (Philad., 1820) has been elsewhere referred to,[559] and who also published An account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania and the neighboring States (Philad., 1818).[560] Schweinitz also refers to another manuscript upon the Indians, preserved in the library of the American Philosophical Society, by Christopher Pyrlaeus, likewise a Moravian missionary.[561] We have again from Spangenberg an Account of the manner in which the Protestant Church of the Unitas Fratrum preach the Gospel and carry on their missions among the heathen (English transl., London, 1788); and his notes of travel to Onondaga, in 1745, which are referred to in the original MS. by Schweinitz (Zeisberger, p. 132), have since been printed in the Penna. Mag. of History (vol. iii.).[562]
Perhaps the most distinguished of the English missionaries was David Brainerd, a native of Connecticut, of whose methods and their results, as he went among the Indians of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, we have the record in his life and diaries.[563]
The question of the population of the middle colonies during the eighteenth century is complicated somewhat by the heterogeneous compounding of nationalities, particularly in Pennsylvania. In New Jersey the people were more purely English than in New York. We find brought together the statistics of the population of New York, 1647-1774, in the Doc. Hist. of N. Y. (i. 687), and Lodge (English Colonies, p. 312) collates some of the evidence. The German element in New York is exemplified in F. Kapp’s Die Deutschen im Staate New York während des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts. (New York, 1884.)
In Pennsylvania the Swedes were beginning to lose in number when the century opened, and the Dutch were also succumbing to the English preponderance; but there were new-comers in the Welsh and Germans in sufficient numbers to keep the characteristics of the people very various.[564] Religion had brought the earliest Germans,—Dunkers[565] and Mennonists,[566] all industrious, but ignorant. By 1719 the Irish began to come, in part a desirable stock, the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians; but in large numbers they were as unpromising as the dregs of a race could make them. The rise of Presbyterianism in Pennsylvania is traced in C. A. Briggs’s Amer. Presbyterianism (New York, 1885).[567]
The influx of other than English into Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century had an extent best measured by A collection of upwards of 30,000 names of German, Swiss, Dutch, French, and other immigrants in Pennsylvania, 1727-1776, with notes and an appendix containing lists of more than one thousand German and French in New York prior to 1712, by Professor I. Daniel Rupp (2d enlarged ed., Philad., 1876).
Respecting the Welsh immigrants, compare the Pennsylvania Mag. of Hist., i. 330; Howard M. Jenkins’s Historical collections relating to Gwynedd, a township of Montgomery County, Penn., settled, 1698, by Welsh immigrants, with some data referring to the adjoining township of Montgomery, also a Welsh settlement (Phila., 1884), and J. Davis’s History of the Welsh Baptists (Pittsburgh, 1835).
The Huguenot emigration to the middle colonies, particularly to New York, is well studied in C. W. Baird’s Huguenot Emigration to America (1885). Cf. references ante, p. 98; and for special monographs, W. W. Waldron’s Huguenots of Westchester and Parish of Fordham, with an introduction by S. H. Tyng (New York, 1864), and G. P. Disosway on the Huguenots of Staten Island, in the Continental Monthly, i. 683, and his app. on “The Huguenots in America” to Samuel Smiles’s Huguenots (N. Y., 1868).
The best summary of the manners and social and intellectual life of the middle colonies will be found in Lodge’s Short History of the English Colonies (New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania), and he fortifies his varied statements with convenient references. For New York specially the best known picture of life is Mrs. Anne Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady,[568] but its recollections, recorded in late life, of experiences of childhood, have nearly taken it out of the region of historical truth. For Pennsylvania there is a rich store of illustration in Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia, and much help will be derived from the Penn and Logan Letters, printed by the Penna. Hist. Soc.;[569] from the journal of William Black, a Virginian, who recorded his observations in 1744, printed in the Penna. Mag. of Hist. (vols. i. and ii.).[570]
The exigencies of the Indian wars, while they colored the life and embroiled the politics of the time, induced the search for relief from pecuniary burdens, here as in New England, in the issue of paper money, which in turn in its depreciation grew to be a factor of itself in determining some social conditions.[571]
The educational aspects of the middle colonies have been summarily touched by Lodge in his English Colonies. Each of them had founded a college. An institution begun at Elizabethtown in 1741, was transferred to Princeton in 1757, and still flourishes.[572] In 1750 the Academy of Philadelphia made the beginning of the present University of Pennsylvania. In 1754 King’s College in New York city began its mission,—the present Columbia College.[573]