He was the founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania, now part of Philadelphia, the first permanent German-American settlement and the gateway for subsequent emigrants from Germany.

[4] Pastorius' biography reveals increasing dissatisfaction with the Lutheran church and state of his German youth in the Age of Absolutism.

As a young adult his Christian morality even strained the relationship with his father Melchior Adam Pastorius (1624–1702), a wealthy lawyer and burgomaster in Windsheim.

It was in this context that he left his home in 1679, joined the Lutheran Pietists in Frankfurt, and repeatedly urged adherence to Christ's Golden Rule.

[6] In 1683, a group of Mennonites, Pietists, and Quakers in Frankfurt, the so called Original 13, including Abraham op den Graeff a cousin of William Penn, approached Pastorius about acting as their agent to purchase land in Pennsylvania for a settlement.

In Philadelphia, he negotiated the purchase of 15,000 acres (61 km²) from William Penn, the proprietor of the colony, and laid out the settlement of Germantown, where he himself would live until his death.

[7][8] In 1691, Thomas Lloyd, Deputy General of Pennsylvania had granted a naturalisation to sixty-two of the first Germantown settlers as citizens of Pennsylvania (and therefore of England) with the status of a freeman including Pastorius and also other important members of the settlement, the brothers Derick, Herman and Abraham op den Graeff and William Rittenhouse.

The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier celebrated Pastorius' life – and particularly his anti-slavery advocacy – in The Pennsylvania Pilgrim.

[citation needed] In 1953 DeElla Victoria Toms wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the intellectual and literary background of Francis Daniel Pastorius.

[24] In 1985 John Weaver documented the cultural background of Pastorius' childhood and youth, and his reasons for emigrating to Pennsylvania in 1683.

[25] More recently Princeton University professor Anthony Grafton has written about Pastorius as a representative of European intellectual culture.

[29] In 2017 Margo Lambert published "Mediation, Assimilation, and German Foundations in North America: Francis Daniel Pastorius as Cultural Broker.