some of them were inclined to
monastic and hermit life and their devotees often lived in caves or
solitary huts in the woods.

It would hardly be accurate to call all the German sects Quakers, since
a great deal of their mysticism would have been anything but congenial
to the followers of Fox and Penn. Resemblances to Quaker doctrine can,
however, be found among many of them; and there was one large sect,
the Mennonites, who were often spoken of as German Quakers. The two
divisions fraternized and preached in each other's meetings. The
Mennonites were well educated as a class and Pastorius, their leader,
was a ponderously learned German. Most of the German sects left the
Quakers in undisturbed possession of Philadelphia, and spread out into
the surrounding region, which was then a wilderness. They and all the
other Germans who afterwards followed them settled in a half circle
beginning at Easton on the Delaware, passing up the Lehigh Valley into
Lancaster County, thence across the Susquehanna and down the Cumberland
Valley to the Maryland border, which many of them crossed, and in time
scattered far to the south in Virginia and even North Carolina, where
their descendants are still found.

These German sects which came over under the influence of Penn and the
Quakers, between the years 1682 and 1702, formed a class by themselves.
Though they may be regarded as peculiar in their ideas and often in
their manner of life, it cannot be denied that as a class they were a
well-educated, thrifty, and excellent people and far superior to the
rough German peasants who followed them in later years. This latter
class was often spoken of in Pennsylvania as "the church people," to
distinguish them from "the sects," as those of the earlier migration
were called.

The church people, or peasantry of the later migration, belonged usually
to one of the two dominant churches of Germany, the Lutheran or
the Reformed. Those of the Reformed Church were often spoken of as
Calvinists. This migration of the church people was not due to the
example of the Quakers but was the result of a new policy which was
adopted by the British Government when Queen Anne ascended the throne
in 1702, and which aimed at keeping the English people at home and at
filling the English colonies in America with foreign Protestants hostile
to France and Spain.

Large numbers of these immigrants were "redemptioners," as they were
called; that is to say, they were p