Around the turn of the 17th century, settlers in Pennsylvania had been primarily English (mostly Quakers, some Anglicans). Some Swedes, Finns and Dutch had been settled before the English arrived but were quickly outnumbered. The only other immigrant group of any size consisted of Welsh immigrants, who were soon joined by the Scotch-Irish and, hot on their heels, the Germans.
Germans who immigrated to the American colonies in the early 1700's were almost always referred to as "Palatines". This was actually a misnomer as not all German immigrants were from the Rhine Valley, but were, as a whole, a very mobile population and as most immigrants traveled down the Rhine at one time or another, gradually came to all be lumped together and called "Palatines".
Despite the fact that William Penn did market settlement in Pennsylvania to the Germans in his tract Some Account of the Province of Pennsilvania (1608), German immigration was primarily prompted by events that originated in Europe. The end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 saw a population that was nearly destitute and subject to raids and destruction at the whim of the French King, not to mention ever-rising taxes levied by the local nobility. In May and September of 1707, the French plundered the Palatine and an unusually harsh winter of 1708-1709 prompted many Germans to pack up their families and take up the offer of British Government to leave their homelands for security in England. However, once the Germans arrived, the British Government was at a loss of what to do with them. Living in a shantytown outside of London was hardly a solution, so many of the families were sent to New York. They were ordered to pay off their transport by making Naval Stores. Several of these families eventually settled in the Tulpehocken region of Pennsylvania (Berks County) around 1723.
Once the tide of immigrants began to leave Germany, immigrant agents, called Newlanders, worked for the transport companies to persuade Germans to leave their homeland for the colonies. Often the means of persuasion were fraudulent and the wealth they supposedly acquired in the New World was only an act. By 1750, literature was circulating in Germany that both praised life in the colonies and condemned it. Gottlieb Mittelberger published a tract in 1756 called Journey to Pennsylvania, in which he blamed the Newlanders as being the emphasis behind the German immigration to Pennsylvania, a journey which could only end in misery. However, other tracts praised the goodness found in Pennsylvania, such as a tract by Christopher Sauer, which exalted the economic opportunity found in the
