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In sharp contrast to Mother England, the 13 American colonies were heterogeneous in character. By the mid-18th century, Welsh and Germans had settled in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, which also had a substantial population of Scotch-Irish. South Carolina and the major towns of New England were home to thousands of French Huguenots. There were Swedes and Finns in Delaware, Sephardic Jews from Holland and Portugal in Rhode Island and Dutch in New York. Visiting New Amsterdam in 1643, the French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues was amazed to discover that in this town of 8,000 people, 18 languages were spoken. In his famous Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur wrote in 1782, "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world."
But did these myriad groups really melt? A unique characteristic of the U.S. immigration experience, historian Daniel Boorstin has noted, is the way in which so many ethnic communities were able to preserve their separate identities. Instead of "E pluribus unum" (From many, one), Boorstin suggests, the American motto should have been "E pluribus plura." New York offers an early case history. The Dutch lost political control of the Hudson River within 40 years of New Amsterdam's founding in 1624, but their cultural influence proved longer lasting. As late as 1890, some inhabitants of villages near Albany still spoke a form of Dutch at home.
Early immigrants found their way to the New World for a variety of reasons. The Huguenots and German Mennonites were escaping religious persecution. The Irish had been deprived of their farmlands. As Crevecoeur observed, the primary motive for most newcomers was economic: "Ubi panis ibi patria ((Where there is bread there is country)) is a motto of all emigrants." A primitive form of advertising helped the cause. William Penn wrote pamphlets extolling the attractions of what was called "Quackerthal" in German, which were circulated widely in the Netherlands and the Rhineland. "Newlanders appeared in Old World villages as living specimens of New World prosperity, dressed in flashy clothes, wearing heavy watches, their pockets jingling with coins."
Brochures promoting the New World's glories understandably did not emphasize the difficulty of getting there. An 18th century journey from, say, Amsterdam to Philadelphia or Boston could last anywhere from five weeks to six months. The tiny ships, whose height between decks seldom exceeded 5 ft., braved pirates as well as North Atlantic storms. Conditions below decks were hardly better than on slave ships. As one passenger wrote, "Betwixt decks, there can hardlie a man fetch his breath by reason there ariseth such a funke in the night that it causeth putrifaction of the blood and breedeth disease much like the plague." Fatal outbreaks of scurvy, dysentery and smallpox were common. And yet the tide of emigration could not be halted. Between 1700 and 1776, . 450,000 Europeans crossed the ocean to find a new life.