War, the persecutions of Louis XIV,
and Elector John Wilhelm, who was a tool of the Jesuits, had brought
upon them, hosts of Palatinates came to America in quest of liberty and
happiness. The cruelties and barbarities which the French king, the
French officers, and the French soldiers perpetrated against innocent
men, women, and children are described by Macaulay as follows: "The
French commander announced to near half a million of human beings that
he granted them three days of grace. Soon the roads and fields, which
then lay deep in snow, were blackened by innumerable multitudes of men,
women, and children flying from their homes. Many died of cold and
hunger; but enough survived to fill the streets of all the cities of
Europe with lean and squalid beggars, who had once been thriving farmers
and shopkeepers. Meanwhile the work of destruction began. The flames
went up from every marketplace, every hamlet, every parish church, every
country seat, within the devoted provinces. The fields where the corn
had been sown were plowed up. The orchards were hewn down. No promise of
a harvest was left on the fertile plains where had once been
Frankenthal. Not a vine, not an almond tree, was to be seen on the
slopes of the sunny hills round what had once been Heidelberg." (Wolf,
_Lutherans in America_, 175.) Great numbers of emigrants from Hesse,
Baden, and Wuerttemberg whose fate had been similar to that of the
Palatinates, joined them. Permission to settle in the New World was
sought from the authorities in London, where in 1709, according to
various authorities, from ten to twenty thousand Palatines, as they were
all designated, were assembled, waiting for an opportunity to emigrate.
Joshua Kocherthal, Lutheran pastor at Landau in Bavaria, was the leader
of the emigrants from the Palatinate. In 1704 he went to London to make
the necessary arrangements. Two years later he published a booklet on
the proposed emigration. In 1708 he sailed for the New World with the
first fifty-three souls, landing in New York at the close of December,
1708, or the beginning of January, 1709, after a long and stormy voyage
lasting about four months. It was the first German Lutheran congregation
in the State of New York. After spending the winter in the city, they
settled on the right bank of the Hudson, near the mouth of the Quassaic,
where Newburgh is now located. Every person received a grant of fifty
acres and the congregation five hundred acres