These newcomers in America made their homes chiefly in New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Coming late upon
the scene, they found much of the land immediately upon the seaboard
already taken up. For this reason most of them became frontier people
settling the interior and upland regions. There they cleared the land,
laid out their small farms, and worked as "sturdy yeomen on the soil,"
hardy, industrious, and independent in spirit, sharing neither the
luxuries of the rich planters nor the easy life of the leisurely
merchants. To their agriculture they added woolen and linen
manufactures, which, flourishing in the supple fingers of their tireless
women, made heavy inroads upon the trade of the English merchants in
the colonies. Of their labors a poet has sung:

"O, willing hands to toil;
Strong natures tuned to the harvest-song and bound to the kindly soil;
Bold pioneers for the wilderness, defenders in the field."

=The Germans.=--Third among the colonists in order of numerical
importance were the Germans. From the very beginning, they appeared in
colonial records. A number of the artisans and carpenters in the first
Jamestown colony were of German descent. Peter Minuit, the famous
governor of New Motherland, was a German from Wesel on the Rhine, and
Jacob Leisler, leader of a popular uprising against the provincial
administration of New York, was a German from Frankfort-on-Main. The
wholesale migration of Germans began with the founding of Pennsylvania.
Penn was diligent in searching for thrifty farmers to cultivate his
lands and he made a special effort to attract peasants from the Rhine
country. A great association, known as the Frankfort Company, bought
more than twenty thousand acres from him and in 1684 established a
center at Germantown for the distribution of German immigrants. In old