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The events of a brutal century drove the Palatine Germans to America. When their emigration began in 1709, the region in which they lived, the Palatinate, was an area of Germany west of the Rhine and north of the French border. Its recent history was woeful. Half a century earlier, it had been devastated by the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants which became a war between nations to dominate Europe. As subjects of one of Europe's most powerful Protestant rulers, the Palatine Germans paid dearly during the crisis, with most of the population being killed and the country in ruins. New persecutions of Protestants at the start of the eighteenth century led the Palatines to flee, usually penniless and starving.

Leaving hardship in the old world, the Palatines encountered different hardships before they even reached the new one. This legal document, a pleading written nearly...