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Entry: Confederates and Catholics, Unite! Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/down_in_dixie#2546 Post contents: Many of the German settlers in the Piedmont were "Palatine Germans," i.e., from the Rheinpfalz, whose elector Frederick V and his wife, Elizabeth Stuart (daughter of James I) started the Thirty Years' War by accepting the elective crown of Bohemia. The Palatinate was politically and economically unsettled for decades afterwards as a consequence, and many of its people eventually found their way to the American South, among them some of my ancestors. I believe they were of a Reformed persuasion of some sort, but here they quickly lost their German-ness and became either Episcopalians or Methodists. The "Moravians" of N.C. were probably not of Czech origin but ethnically German, followers of Zinzendorf, who had adhered to the old Utraquist sect of Czechoslovakia as an alliance of convenience, similarly to the way Döllinger's followers in the 1870s adhered to the schismatic Jansenists of Utrecht who had left the Roman fold in the 1730s to form the present Old Catholic Church. Some of Zinzendorf's sectaries settled in Great Britain and a small Moravian congregation persisted for many years in London, attracting English converts (among them the family of the poet William Blake). The Moravian Brethren were great hymnodists and many of the melodies in the Episcopal Hymnal of 1940, with which I grew up, are credited to them. Sent at: 2008 10 07