Reviewed by Patrick M. Erben | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1

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Reviewed by Patrick M. Erben | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Patrick M. Erben, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York. By Philip Otterness. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. 256 pages. $39.95 (cloth).
The long trek of the 1709 Palatine migrants from the Rhineland to the Hudson and Mohawk valleys is one of the great stories in the history of immigration to colonial America, and one that Philip Otterness tells with alacrity and depth. Indeed, the history of the Palatines includes many stock elements of immigration myths: a group of destitute refugees tossed about Western Europe and the British Atlantic by false promises, haughty German princes, insensitive British officials, and the elusive dream of a better life in the New World. One can see how easily a retelling of this story could slide into cliché, yet Otterness generally succeeds in breaking down tenacious stereotypes that were coined by the Palatines' contemporaries and sometimes manipulated by the immigrants themselves. Most notably, the immigrants originated not only in the Palatinate proper but also in a diverse array of principalities in the German southwest; further, they did not flee popish persecution as British Protestants believed. In fact many of the immigrants were Catholics and interdenominational marriages were common. Unfortunately, Otterness rejoins the myth makers at the end of his story. By following the paradigm of resistance and assimilation that is so common in studies of minority groups in America, he perpetuates the myth of a vanishing German immigrant culture. Otterness fails to assess the Palatines' influence on the development of colonial North America; thus, his study gravitates toward the elegiac conclusion that "the 1710 immigrants largely faded from American memory" (165).	1
Becoming German is an event-driven book whose basic story deserves considerable attention. At the end of the seventeenth century, peasants and artisans in the German southwest had been predisposed toward emigration by repeated warfare, the persistence of feudal obligations, and "long-term economic instability" (23). When recent emigrant Joshua Kocherthal reported in a widely circulated book that Queen Anne granted German immigrants free passage and land in the Carolinas, he triggered a mass exodus of almost fifteen thousand men, women, and children. After traveling to Rotterdam in the spring and summer of 1709, Palatine migrants petitioned English officials for passage to London. In England the Whig government favored a liberal immigration policy and welcomed thousands of Germans whom they had neither encouraged nor expected. The English government placed the Palatines in camps outside London but soon became bogged down in a debate over the proper mode and place of settling the immigrants. Initially, the English population championed the so-called poor Palatines as hard-working Protestant refugees fleeing French persecution. Londoners even traveled to witness the spectacle of the German camps outside their city. Eventually, the recognition that the Palatines were seeking fortunes rather than freedom of conscience turned the immigrants into nuisances in the minds of their English benefactors.	2
The story turns ugly at this point. Violent threats against the migrants urged a quick solution to the German problem. Thousands of Catholics refusing to convert were shipped back to Rotterdam. The commission in charge of settling the remaining Protestant Palatines sent about a quarter to Ireland and several hundred to New Bern, North Carolina. Over half the Carolina settlers perished during the voyage and many others died in conflicts with Tuscarora Indians. Finally, the Board of Trade in conjunction with New York governor Robert Hunter hatched a plan for employing the remaining three thousand Palatines to produce tar and pitch in the Hudson valley, giving only vague assurances of free land in the province. In late 1710 Hunter and the Germans entered a tug and pull war of intimidation and resistance. Feeling betrayed by British authorities, the Germans only agreed to work on the naval stores project after several demonstrations of force by Hunter.	. . .

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