There were two general types of these communities, the sectarian and
the economic. Frequently they combined a peculiar religious belief
with the economic practice of having everything in common. The
sectarians professed to be neither proselyters nor propagandists but
religious devotees, accepting communism as a physical advantage as
well as a spiritual balm, and seeking in seclusion and quiet merely to
save their own souls.

The majority of the religious communists came from Germany--the home,
also, of Marxian socialism in later years--where persecution was the
lot of innumerable little sects which budded after the Reformation.
They came usually as whole colonies, bringing both leaders and
membership with them.[15] Probably the earliest to arrive in America
were the Labadists, who denied the doctrine of original sin, discarded
the Sabbath, and held strict views of marriage. In 1684, under the
leadership of Peter Sluyter or Schluter (an assumed name, his original
name being Vorstmann), some of these Labadists settled on the Bohemia
River in Delaware. They were sent out from the mother colony in West
Friesland to select a site for the entire body, but it does not appear
that any others migrated, for within fifteen years the American
colony was reduced to eight men. Sluyter evidently had considerable
business capacity, for he became a wealthy tobacco planter and slave
trader.

In 1693 Johann Jacob Zimmermann, a distinguished mathematician and
astronomer and the founder of an order of mystics called Pietists,
started for America, to await the coming of the millennium, which his
calculations placed in the autumn of 1694. But the fate of common
mortals overtook the unfortunate leader and he died just as he was