Once word of the discovery of the New World spread throughout the Old World - the kingdoms
and empires of Europe - many people began to plan journeys of their own across the Atlantic
Ocean.
Starting around 1620, tens of thousands of British, German and Dutch - but mostly British
Puritans - came to North America to escape religious persecution, or to search for better
opportunity, or simply for an adventure.
The Puritans spread throughout New England in the northeast, the Dutch settled along
the Hudson River in New York and established rich, successful trading posts and cities
like New Amsterdam (which we now call New York City).
English Quakers established the Pennsylvania colony and its commercial center, Philadelphia.
More than 90% of these early colonists became farmers.
And, because they were living in small, widespread villages, disease didn’t spread as easily
as it could back in Europe, which kept the death rate among settlers in America low.
All these farmers needed large families to help them farm, which caused the population
to boom, especially in the New England colonies.
As land became harder to come by along the coasts, the roughly 350,000 Scottish and Northern
Irish who arrived throughout the 1700’s settled inland in western Pennsylvania and
along the Appalachians deep into the south.
The British sent 60,000 prisoners across the ocean to Georgia, although the only thing
many of these men were guilty of was being poor and out of work.
Tobacco was a highly profitable cash crop in the southern colonies, so many British
settled there and began to take advantage of the thriving slave trade.
“Those of us who study immigration history think in terms of why people leave their homelands
and why they come here.
And those are generally encapsulated in two words: push and pull.
Something pushes them out of their homeland and something pulls them to the United States.
Now obviously in the earliest cases of slavery they were not necessarily pushed from their
homeland, but they were taken from their homeland.
But the reason why they were taken was because there was labor to be done here in the United
States.
It was a global force, the slave trade was fairly global - at least in the Atlantic - and
later Asia would become involved in it as well.
So here you have a forced migration.”
Hundreds of thousands of Africans were mercilessly captured and taken prisoner in their own lands,
then put on ships bound for America, where they were sold into a life of hard labor for
no pay, and no chance at freedom.
[Graph] This is the population breakdown of the country around 1790, shortly after the
colonies’ hard-won war of independence with the British and the adoption of the American
constitution, which made the country of the United States official.
The Native American population was so decimated by disease, war, and migration to the west,
that only about 100,000 were left inside the territorial United States.
Out west, many Spaniards moved north from Mexico across the Rio Grande to settle in
California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
Not all of these settlers were of European descent.
They all could speak spanish, but ethnically, they were a melting pot of whites, Indians
and mestizos, or people of mixed race.
French settlers established footholds mainly along the Saint Lawrence River and the Great
Lakes, along the Mississippi River, and along the Gulf Coast, establishing the city of New
Orleans.
Their descendants are known as Cajuns.
These French and Spanish populations would be incorporated into the United States in
the coming decades through the Louisiana Purchase and the granting of statehood to the western
territories.
I hope you enjoyed part two of our six-part series on America’s History of Immigration.
Click on the screen to watch part one or the next part, part three, or our latest video,
or our video on the most ambitious megaprojects currently under development around the world.