The Thirty Years' War was the background
for the departure of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, to settle
at Plymouth in 1620, and for the Dutch to purchase the island
of Manhattan—named New Amsterdam, later New York. These
settlements in North America opened the continent to the migration
of Europeans to the New World. With this migration came the political
institutions and values that were eventually to lead to the colonial
constitutions and the federal organization of the United States.