Citizens in a Strange Land: A Study of German-American Broadsides and Their Meaning for Germans in North America, 1730–1830

By Hermann Wellenreuther

In Citizens in a Strange Land, Hermann Wellenreuther examines the broadsides—printed single sheets—produced by the Pennsylvania German community. These broadsides covered topics ranging from local controversies and politics to devotional poems and hymns. Each one is a product of and reaction to a particular historical setting. To understand them fully, Wellenreuther systematically reconstructs Pennsylvania’s print culture, the material conditions of life, the problems German settlers faced, the demands their communities made on the individual settlers, the complications to be overcome, and the needs to be satisfied. He shows how these broadsides provided advice, projections, and comment on phases of life from cradle to grave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PSUPress
• Release date: Aug 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9780271069616

Hermann Wellenreuther

Hermann Wellenreuther is Professor of Modern History at the Georg-August University in Göttingen.

Book preview

CITIZENS

IN A

STRANGE LAND

MAX KADE GERMAN-AMERICAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE SERIES

Edited by A. Gregg Roeber and Daniel Purdy

This series provides an outlet for books that reflect the mission of the Penn State Max Kade Institute: to integrate the history and culture of German speakers in the Americas with the major themes of early modern scholarship from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century.

The Max Kade

German-American Research Institute,

located on Penn State’s campus

(http://www.maxkade.psu.edu/),

was founded in 1993 thanks to a grant from the

Max Kade Foundation, New York.

The directors of the Penn State Max Kade

German-American Research Institute are

Daniel Purdy and A. Gregg Roeber.

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA

This book has been published through the support of

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft grants WE 586/10-1 and WE 586/17-1.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wellenreuther, Hermann.

Citizens in a strange land : a study of German-American

broadsides and their meaning for Germans in North America,

1730–1830 / Hermann Wellenreuther.

p. cm.—(Max Kade German-American Research Institute series)

Summary: "Examines German broadsides published in America

from 1730 to 1830. Through them, explores aspects of the

German-American world, including printing, religious practices,

social life, politics, education, farming, economics,

and medicine"—Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-271-05937-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Germans—North America—Social life and customs—18th century—Sources.

2. Germans—North America—Social life and customs—19th century—Sources.

3. German Americans—Social life and customs—18th century—Sources.

4. German Americans—Social life and customs—19th century—Sources.

5. Broadsides—North America—History—18th century.

6. Broadsides—North America—History—19th century.

7. Printing—North America—History—18th century.

8. Printing—North America—History—19th century.

I. Title.

II. Series: Max Kade German-American Research Institute series.

E49.2.G3W45 2013

973'.0431—dc23

2012051290

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,

University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the

Association of American University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use

acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the

minimum requirements of American National Standard for

Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for

Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48-1992.

This book is printed on paper that contains

30% post-consumer waste.

For Claudia

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

One

The German-American Printing World

Two

The German-American Secular World

Three

Praying and Reading: House Devotions of German Settlers

Four

Pennsylvania Politics and German Political Broadsides, 1730–1830

Conclusion

Appendix A: Georg Hohmann’s Broadsides

Appendix B: Statistical Tables

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOR PLATES

  1    Lieben und geliebt zu werden Ist das gröste Glück auf Erden

  2    Geistlicher Haus-Segen

  3    Christlicher Haus-Seegen, Nebst der Zwölf Stunden Gedächtniß

  4    Himmels-Brief, welcher mit goldenen Buchstaben geschrieben

  5    Das Leben und Alter der Menschen. Die Stufenjahre des Menschlichen Lebens von der Wiege bis zum Grabe … alphabetischen Gedichte

  6    Die Historie von Joseph und seinen Brüdern, Worinn wir die wundervolle Leitung Gottes erblicken, in allen Leiden,Widerwärtigkeiten, im Glück und Unglück, etc.

  7    Detail of Adam und Eva, im Paradies (C. A. Bruckman, [ca. 1815–23])

  8    Detail of Adam und Eva im Paradies (H. W. Villee, [1825–32])

  9    Detail of Adam und Eva im Paradies (Heinrich B. Sage, n.d.)

 10   Detail of Adam und Eva im Paradies (Meyers und Christian, [after 1829])

 11   Detail of [Adam und Eva.] ALS GOTT die Welt erschaffen (Samuel Baumann, [1810–20]).

 12   Die Wege zum Ewigen Leben oder zum Ewigen Verderben

 13   Ein sehr geistreicher Spiegel, als worinnen das rechte Bild des einsamen Lebens erscheinet, und was eigentlich desselben Beschaffenheit seye, wann es seine rechtmässige Sache darstellet und ans Licht gibt

 14   Der Him[m]el ist mein Stuhl und die Erde meiner Füse Schemel

 15   Ich sahe ein Lamm stehen oben auf dem Berge Zion

 16   Das neue Jerusalem

FIGURES

  1    Liebes-Erklärung

  2    Eine wahre Geschichte, oder eine probirte Kunst, in Feuers-Gefahr wie auch in Pestelenz Zeiten zu gebrauchen

  3    Tinctura Assafoeditae Composita. Zusammengesetzte Asandtinktur … Dr. Salomon Henkel

  4    Infant in the cradle. Detail of Das Leben und Alter der Menschen (plate 5)

  5    Young man. Detail of Das Leben und Alter der Menschen (plate 5)

  6    Betrachtung über das ABC

  7    Schöne geistliche auserlesene und Sinnreiche Rätzel-Stücklein

  8    Anfangsgründe der ganzen Universal-Historie, von Anfang der Welt bis auf diese Zeit

  9    Gebet-Lied der Confirmanden

 10   Die Historie von Joseph und seinen Brüdern (plate 6)

 11   Das Leben und Alter der Menschen (plate 5)

 12   Ein neues Trauer-Lied, Enthaltend die Geschichte der Susanna Cox, die in Reading wegen den Mord ihres Kindes hingerichtet wurde

 13   Der Bauren-Stand

 14   Das vortreffliche Schaff-Pferd Stumps- towner Bald

 15   Johannes Rose, Mineralisches Pferd-Pulver

 16   Erklärung dieser Tafel

 17   Jahrmarkt … Auf Befehl des Managers

 18   Tobias Hirte, Sclaven-Handel. Die Menschlichkeit beleidiget

 19   Das Todesurtheil von Elisabeth Moore und John Charles, und das Letzte Bekenntniß von Elisabeth Moore … 1809, zu York in Pennsylvanien, hingerichtet wurden …

 20   Eine wahre Geschichte

 21   Konfirmazionslied (Fühl das heiligste Entzücken)

 22   Trost Lied, für ein Nachfolger JESU

 23   Ein Schön JEsus-Lied

 24   Die Richtschnur und Regel eines Streiters Jesu Christi, welcher in die ewige Schätze der Weißheit verlibet ist

 25   1. Corinth. 1 v. 81 [sic]. Das Wort vom Creutz ist zwar eine Thorheit denen die verlohren werden

 26   Gedanken über den Zustand der Kirche, (sonderlich in Europa,) in der nahen Stunde der Versuchung, die uber den ganzen Weltkreis kommen wird … Yalc. Avilas

 27   Seht doch am Creutzes-Holtz nur euren JESUM an, Er hat ja eure Schuld bezahlt und abgethan

 28   Joseph’s Second Dream

 29   Detail of Die Historie von Joseph und seinen Brüdern

 30   Detail of Der Him[m]el ist mein Stuhl (plate 14)

 31   Eine Vorstellung von Begebenheiten, welche sich auf die Kirche GOttes und die Welt beziehet, durch emblematische Figuren …

 32   Auf Befehl von dem König der Könige … das Weltgericht oder der Jüngste Tag

 33   Ein Wohl-gemeindter und Ernstlicher Rath an unsere Lands-Leute, die Teutschen

 34   [Christoph Saur I], Eine zu dieser Zeit höchstnöthige Warnung und Erinnerung an die freye Einwohner der Provintz Pensylvanien von Einem, dem die Wohlfahrt des Landes angelegen und darauf bedacht ist

 35   Eine lustige Aria, über die letztgeschehene Unruhen in Philadelphia

 36   Nun will ich Valediciren Nun So Will ich

 37   An die hochgeehrten Glieder der Assembly, des Pennsylvanischen Staats. Das Memorial verschiedener Einwohner der Graffschaft Lancaster giebt mit aller gebührenden Hochachtung zu erkennen

TABLES

 1     Changing book trading patterns

 2     German printing presses in North America, 1730–1830

 3     German almanacs printed and distributed by Daniel Billmeyer

 4     Publications of Johannes Albrecht, 1788–1806

 5     Publications of Christian Jacob Hütter, 1800–1830

 6     Hütter’s economic activities in Lancaster, 1798–1804

 7     Geographical distribution of customers

 8     Geographical range of orders

 9     Books Yost ordered from Hütter

10    Medical broadsides: Producers and location

11    Places of publication of medical broadsides

12    Broadsides by printers, physicians, and pharmacists according to illness

13    German congregations in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia in 1793

14    Hymnals printed in German in North America, 1730–1800

15    Main themes of hymns

16    Five thematic groups

17    Frequency of broadsides within the five periods

18    Analysis of broadsides in the colonial period

19    Distribution of broadsides during political crises

20    Ticket changes according to the broadside Höret ihr deutsche Bürger

B.1   Categories of broadsides classified according to origin

B.2   Towns with printers who produced German-American broadsides, 1728–1830, sorted by state

B.3   Clients of Michael Billmeyer: Pastors and printers

B.4   Peddler’s licenses in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 1732–1830

B.5   Peddler’s petitions in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1722–1830

B.6   Prices of single sheets, handbills, directions, and information charged by John Ritter & Comp., 1804–1814

B.7   Broadsides advertising real estate, 1760–1830

B.8   Death of owners as motive for sale

B.9   Nature of propery advertised in broadsides

B.10 Broadsides on courtship, love, disappointments, and parodies

B.11 Haussegen broadsides, 1760–1830

B.12 Heavenly letters and other protection broadsides in figures

B.13 Broadsides on wool-carding machines

B.14 Hand carding and machine carding in selected counties in Pennsylvania and Virginia, 1810

B.15 Contours of the settlers’ private religiosity

B.16 Broadsides on the story of Joseph in Egypt

B.17 Acculturated political terminology, 1741–1764

B.18 German political broadsides

GRAPHS

 1    Broadsides advertising real estate sales, 1760–1830

 2    Broadsides advertising real estate sales, with place of publication and language, 1760–1830

 3    Broadsides on real estate, with motives for selling and language, by decade

 4    Broadsides on movable properties, by decade

 5    Broadsides on immovable properties, by decade

MAP

  1    Map of Pennsylvania (1819) with locations of German-language printers

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The history of Pennsylvania is usually written as that of its English-speaking inhabitants; other ethnic and linguistic groups, like Native Americans, Swedes, French Huguenots, Finns, and Germans, live their separate and somewhat isolated historiographical lives. This means that while they exist, as far as the cultural, political, economic, and religious development of Pennsylvania is concerned, they are perceived to be by and large irrelevant. In a sense this is natural: after all, English-speaking inhabitants formed and form the large majority of Pennsylvanians. This was not always so, however. Until 1700 European immigrants were still outnumbered by Native Americans; at the beginning of the French and Indian War German settlers probably constituted about 50 percent of the colony’s European population; and by the time of the Declaration of Independence they may still have represented about a third of Pennsylvania’s population.¹

One reason for the emphasis on the English majority in Pennsylvania’s history has to do with language. Almost all governmental records of Pennsylvania are in English; except for Saur’s almanacs and his newspaper, there is no single group of sources in the German language, with the exception of the German-American broadsides analyzed in this study, which have been ably described by Corinne P. and Russell Earnest and by Don Yoder.² Their work is described in detail in the introduction. This study has profited greatly from their achievements. How it opens up new research perspectives is discussed in the introduction. Materially, this study is based on the work of a research group the author chaired between 2000 and 2007 at the Georg-August University at Göttingen, which systematically searched, sorted, and described the large number of German-American broadsides published between 1730 and 1830 that we had found in American repositories and in private collections. Parallel to this study, the Pennsylvania State University Press will publish a bibliography of German-American broadsides, and the university’s library will host an Internet database containing images of the broadsides. The bibliography and database will contain full bibliographic information on the broadsides discussed in this study, as well as on the remainder of those we found.

No scholarly book can be written without the help of others, and this one is no exception. The classification system according to which the broadsides were arranged was largely developed by Dr. Carola Wessel, the first bibliographer of the Göttingen research group; without her groundbreaking work this study could not have been written. When she passed away in early 2003 we thought that the project would have to be aborted, so heavy did we feel her loss to be. When I toured archives and libraries in Pennsylvania I stumbled at almost every place over her tracks; archivists and librarians shared with me their memories of her. In late 2004 we found in Dr. Anne von Kamp another librarian and bibliographer who ably and energetically continued where Carola Wessel had left off. Reimer Eck, the second member of the research group and then head of the library’s North America department, and I resumed work, and by 2007 we had finished the project and submitted our final reports to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council), which had so generously funded the project (grant WE 586/10–1). The council likewise helped publish this study with another generous grant (grant WE 586/17–1); for both these grants the council deserves our gratitude.

In the bibliography volume we list and thank all the institutions that have liberally shared with us their treasures. Here I can only repeat what we say there: that without their cooperation this project and thus this study would not have been begun, continued, and completed. For this study two librarians have been particularly helpful: James N. Greene of the Library Company, Philadelphia, who had always time for me and helped me to sort out difficult issues of the German publishing world in North America; and Sandra Stelts, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Paterno Library, Pennsylvania State University, whose generosity and kindness eased my worries when I got stuck with endless numbers of hymnals and other soul-saving publications. We are likewise deeply grateful to the staff of the Paterno Library, who under the energetic guidance of Mike Furlough, Assistant Dean for Scholarly Communications and Co-Director, Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing, have taken over the digital publication of our broadside bibliography and have procured permission to reproduce those broadsides whose images were not in our possession. In the many meetings and the two workshops in which we participated, we profited greatly from their technical expertise in modernizing databases and improving digital images. My friend A. Gregg Roeber kindly invited me to publish this study in the Max Kade German-American Research Institute Series. As always, his kindness extended to endless hours we spent together in arguing over interpretations of particularly challenging religious broadsides, and again I was the learner in these conversations. Thanks to his good offices the Max Kade Foundation has supported the project and provided funds for the workshops and other cost-intensive parts of the project; we are grateful to the Foundation. Finally, Penn State Press manuscript editor John P. Morris has not only saved me from many unhappy phrases and linguistic traps, but has proved that his mathematical abilities by far surpassed mine; in general, he has displayed uncalled-for patience with an author who not always was willing to see the light. Last but not least, the Göttingen research group had a large share in the writing of the book. Both Reimer Eck and Dr. von Kamp were always willing to spend time with me in sorting out difficult bibliographical problems. Dr. Thomas Fischer of the Göttingen University Library was likewise ever ready to sort out our problems with the Allegro database we used.

Three close good friends have a large share in this study: Hartmut Lehmann, former Director of the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., and Director of the Max-Planck Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen, my friend of forty years; Timothy H. Breen, whom I first met during my year as a fellow of the Commonwealth Fund of New York at Yale, and with whom I spent many hours during our joint times in Evanston and at the Huntington Library arguing about broadsides and the misery of the world; and finally, Mark Häberlein, Chair of Early Modern History at the University of Bamberg, who has devoted much time to carefully weeding out errors and guiding me to the latest research in the field.

I have lived with broadsides in general for over ten years; it took me four years to conceptualize and write this study. One person in particular has supported me, spent time with the project, read each chapter of the manuscript, fought with me over eternity envisioned in broadsides and printed images, listened for endless hours to my reading to her sections of the book—and after all she has suffered, she still wants to share the good and bad with me: my wife, Claudia Schnurmann. To her I dedicate this book.

Hermann Wellenreuther

Göttingen, early December 2012

INTRODUCTION

The Setting

In a broadside published in September 1741, Conrad Weiser reminded his fellow German settlers of what they had hoped to achieve in immigrating to Pennsylvania: to attain peace and security, and to more easily secure our daily bread than in Germany. All of which we have abundantly achieved [in this country].¹ In the midst of social, political, and military crises, thousands of middling and poor people in southern Germany had packed up and decided to leave. Most of them opted for eastern Europe, but by the time of the American Revolution some one hundred thousand men, women, and children from Baden and Württemberg had emigrated to Pennsylvania, their new Canaan.² To Badenians and Swabians Pennsylvania was known as the land of unlimited freedom of conscience, the land of liberty, rights, and the possibility of acquiring property by sheer dedication, work, and discipline—virtues southern Germans seemed to possess in abundance. Faced with feudal dues and indebtedness, these Germans were tired of being discriminated against as the dregs of society, tired of war miseries, and tired of shabby treatment by their local landlords and squires. To them, Pennsylvania seemed the land of hope and glory, the perfect refuge where they would be able to achieve a peaceful life on earth and eternal bliss in heaven.

With the beginning of the War of Austrian Succession in December 1740, the harmony that had reigned in Pennsylvania collapsed—not because Thomas Penn, eldest son of William Penn, had become the monster some of his political opponents thought, but simply because macro-political conditions in Europe and in the Atlantic world had changed.³ As shadows began to darken the bright new American world, Conrad Weiser’s broadsides appealed to the rapidly growing number of German immigrants to vote for candidates who, under the mounting danger of war, favored defensive measures. They mark the beginning of one of the most turbulent phases in the history of Pennsylvania.

Germans had fled war and misery. Now, according to Weiser, war had again caught up with them. Yet that was not the only problem Germans faced. They could not understand Pennsylvania’s large English-speaking majority; they had to accept indentures for up to five years with a farmer, albeit often a German one; in the first two years increased mortality threatened their lives;⁴ and they had to cope generally with cultural, political, and social dislocation. These difficult experiences, together with their European memories, became deeply engrained in their minds.

The English, Welsh, and Irish in Pennsylvania experienced this influx of foreigners differently. For them in 1739 Pennsylvania was still a peaceful haven, stable and quiet except for the little catastrophes here and there. Two years later that peace was gone. Political controversy reigned as the colony became politically deeply divided between the dominant Quaker Party and the small but influential Proprietary Party, which drew its strength from its closeness to the proprietors of the colony. In this context the German settlers voted the way most English settlers did: for the Quaker Party. As long as the number of naturalized German settlers was small, their vote was insignificant. The rapidly growing influx of Germans from the 1730s onwards, however, increasingly irritated the English, who perceived these newcomers as a danger to English culture and politics.⁵

The process for acquiring full citizen status and thus the right to vote was eased in 1741 by the arrival of the new general naturalization act of the British Parliament and in February 1743 by the passage of laws in Pennsylvania that allowed German Mennonites and other peace churches to substitute affirmations for the required oaths of allegiance.⁶ Along with the substantial immigration not only from Germany but from Scotland and Ireland, this meant that Pennsylvania was gradually becoming a multiethnic society. This picture was complicated even more by a continuous substantial immigration from Ireland and Scotland. As future developments would show, the English considered both a problem. As it turned out, Germans would come to adopt English prejudices toward the Irish. Another consequence was that pacifism, which had been seen as a distinctive mark of Quakerism, came to be associated with a number of German peace churches, including Moravians, Mennonites, and Dunkers.⁷ The consequences of this development would continue to surface in Pennsylvania politics until the early nineteenth century.

Most German immigrants, like most of Pennsylvania’s population in general, became farmers. The greater part of them finally settled in the colony’s southeastern counties—Berks, Lancaster, and Northampton—which became German strongholds after the middle of the eighteenth century.⁸ This is the region with which this book is primarily concerned.

German-American Broadsides

Conrad Weiser’s reminder of German immigrants’ initial hopes is contained in one of the first German-American broadsides;⁹ the first German sheet, entitled Notice calling for the payment of consideration money, dated November 1738, was printed by Benjamin Franklin. Its existence is known from Franklin’s account book.¹⁰ In the same year a second German printing appeared, the first for which information on date, place of publication, and printer has survived: Eine Ernstliche Ermahnung, An Junge und Alte. Its colophon states, "Germanton [sic] Gedruckt und zu finden bey Christoph Saur. 1738.¹¹ Christoph Saur I (1693–1758) would dominate German print culture in the Middle Atlantic colonies. This first printing fits the definition of broadside" we employ in this study as well as in the larger project on which it is based: a broadside is a sheet that is printed on a single sheet on either one or both sides irrespective of its contents. We exclude three categories from this definition: forms, formulas, and handwritten texts.

Who are we? The answer is simple: we are the members of a research team whose genesis reaches back to the 1980s, when Dr. Werner Tannhoff, a librarian, returned from a two-year research stay in the United States. Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Dr. Tannhoff had collected data on German-language publications published in North America between 1730 and 1830. The fruits of his labor were published in 1989 in a two-volume bibliography.¹² In the course of his studies, Dr. Tannhoff had also collected bibliographical data on about five hundred broadsides whose existence had hitherto been unknown. Faced with this rich harvest, the editors of the bibliography decided that the even scarcer broadsides had to be left out to be described in a later, supplementary volume.¹³ Some time later Reimer Eck, then chief librarian for the North American holdings in the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbiblio-thek Göttingen, asked me whether I would be willing to sponsor a new application to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for funds to continue work on these precious leftovers. I agreed in principle. By early 2000 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft granted sufficient funds to continue and complete work on the German-American broadsides.

The research team consisted then of Reimer Eck, Dr. Carola Wessel as research bibliographer, and myself as project director. At the outset we agreed, first, on the above-mentioned definition of broadside; second, on developing a subject-focused project index; third, on listing all the bibliographical data in a database according to the project index; and fourth, on linking the data to their digitized images. Finally we decided that another search for German broadsides in American libraries, archives, and private collections was necessary. Based on a thorough analysis of the broadsides Dr. Tannhoff had catalogued, Dr. Wessel developed a project index that, with slight variations, still forms the backbone of our project. The index has been invaluable in ordering the over seventeen hundred broadsides. This simplified version of the project index provides a rough idea of the classification system of the index:¹⁴

Most broadsides were described by Dr. Wessel according to general bibliographic rules¹⁵ and to the categories of the project index. She filtered the data into the database. In late 2002 Dr. Wessel went to the United States to hunt for more broadsides. Sadly, after about six months of successful work she fell seriously ill and had to return to Germany. Her death on February 14, 2004, was a great personal loss to all who knew her and to the project. In 2005 Dr. Anne von Kamp, another fine historian and bibliographer, joined the team, and work resumed.

The index suggests a panorama of subjects reflecting contemporary concerns and interests of printers and customers. These suggestions form the basis for this study. This is how we will proceed: first, broadsides of particular index positions will be placed in their historical context and, if possible, linked to the historical reality of the times. Second, the texts will be carefully interpreted as potential projections of contemporary visions, concerns, and perceptions. We will ask the following questions: To which visions and perceptions do they respond? What were the functions or purposes of the broadsides? Why were they produced and how did they reach their potential customers? Were they addressed to particular groups or persons? What kind of cultural images did they evoke? To which needs, if any, did they react? Answers to these questions, reported in chapters 2 to 4, are suggested by the links and relationships between broadsides, printers, and customers or users.

Each broadside is the product of and reaction to a particular historical setting. The study will therefore be based on a careful reconstruction of the colony’s and state’s print culture (chapter 1), the material conditions of life, the problems German settlers faced, the demands their communities made on individual settlers, the complications to be overcome, and the needs to be satisfied (chapter 2). Since the project index showed large clusters of broadsides with religious subjects, special care will be taken to carefully delineate the religious world of German settlers (chapter 3). Other clusters, for example on local and state political affairs, discussed in chapter 4, seemed to arrange themselves by the problems and needs settlers encountered in the course of their lives. In a very real sense they provide advice, projections, and comment on phases of life from the cradle to the grave.

Although the number of German printers proliferated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there is ample evidence that aside from those printed in Philadelphia, most German broadsides were printed in Lancaster/Ephrata, Reading, York, and Lebanon. This regional concentration reflects the tendency of German settlers to settle in specific counties. The Reverend Johann Christoph Kunze, one of the leading Lutheran pastors and son-in-law of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, discussed this process in focusing on the language problem:

I consider it unlikely that the German language will ever die out in Pennsylvania. Yet the situation is different between the east coast and the inner parts of the state. In the latter parts children would find it difficult to wean themselves from the German language and be ashamed of using it. In some rural regions Germans live so closely together that one finds large villages where no English at all live and where no schools for English children exist. In these villages life is as genuinely German as in Swabia or in the Palatinate—and it will remain so for a long time to come… . The real German farmer prefers to live among other Germans and only rarely or never moves into a region where English farmers settle, whom they call Eirisch.¹⁶

Kunze went on to point out that the controversies over the use of German or English in German Lutheran churches were unlikely to plague these rural regions. By implication he suggested, as it turned out correctly, that these language controversies were the product of linguistically mixed neighborhoods. Indeed, the fiercest battle over the use of German or English was fought out in the Lutheran congregation in Philadelphia, where between 1803 and 1825 the congregation was badly split between advocates and opponents of the use of English in Lutheran services. In the end the advocates of English split off and started their own congregation.¹⁷

Without explicit proofs, the analysis of the relationship between German settlers and the broadsides rests on the assumption that for the most part these broadsides were not only produced but read and consumed in the rural regions where most Pennsylvania Germans lived and where they had created their own cultural, religious, political, and linguistic communities.

Research on Broadsides and Definitions

Broadsides are part of the communicative system of the Atlantic world, and our lack of knowledge about that system’s contours and contents is a direct result of the historiography of broadsides.¹⁸ For example, the subject entries for Einblattdrucke in the Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel list sixty-nine titles, sixty-seven of which refer to broadsides issued in late medieval times and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁹ The list of the sixty-six titles on broadsides owned by the second contributing library to the Fachdatenbank Buchwissenschaft (Database for Library Science), the St. Gallen Klosterbibliothek in Switzerland, is similarly skewed,²⁰ as is that of the Fachdatenbank Buchwissenschaft of the University Library Erlangen, which contains twenty-eight titles on broadsides printed prior to 1680.²¹ Aside from these libraries, probably the largest collection of broadsides is housed in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The library has made impressive efforts in making its holdings in modern scholarship on broadsides, single leaves, and broadsheets available. Most of them have been digitized. The bibliography Auswahlbibliographie zur Geschichte des Einblattdrucks in der frühen Neuzeit, published in 2003 by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, offers the best survey of international scholarship on broadsides and is easily downloaded.²² It confirms the impression gained from the holdings of the other three libraries: scholarship on broadsides focuses heavily on broadsides prior to 1700. Because the distribution, function, and movement of broadsides within a European or an Atlantic context have thus far escaped the attention of scholarship, our Göttingen project, of which this study is a part, has ventured into hitherto largely unplowed fields.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term broadside seems to have come into use in the second half of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, however, the term was not widespread in England or in the Middle Atlantic British colonies. The printers in Pennsylvania seem to have preferred terms like sheet or handbill.²³ In Germany the Swabian poet Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (1739–1791) is credited with introducing the terms Flugblatt (flying leaf) and Flugschrift into the history of the printed word. Neither Johann Heinrich Zedler (1706–1751), whose encyclopedia was published between 1731 and 1754, nor Johann Christoph Adelung, whose Grammatisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart appeared in five volumes between 1774 and 1786, included the terms.²⁴ Schubart coined Flugblatt in 1786/87 as a creative translation of the French term feuille volante to replace the older generic terms Libell, Tractat, and Pasquill.²⁵ German scholarship is agreed that a Flugblatt consists of one sheet printed on one or both sides that addresses newsworthy and controversial subjects of a particular time.²⁶ There are disagreements about the exact differences between Flugschrift and Flugblatt, but they do not concern us here.

Until the last two decades most German scholars viewed these flying leaves as curiosities of interest only to the folklorist. Specialists on the Protestant Reformation period and on early print culture did realize early on their exceptional value in the swift dissemination of new religious insights; scholars also noted the important role they played during the Thirty Years’ War and in the fierce public debates in Germany between 1847 and 1849.²⁷ But outside these critical periods broadsides remained an ignored species. Probably the most important reason for this crisis-centered attention to broadsides has to do with the German definition of a broadside: its function and definition are dependent on sensations, catastrophes, crises, and wars.²⁸ This rather limited perception is squarely contradicted by a large number of broadsides discussed in this study.

American historiography on broadsides does not differ significantly from its German counterpart. The index to Lawrence C. Wroth’s magisterial The Colonial Printer does not mention the term; Michael Warner in The Letters of the Republic includes broadside ballads in his description of counterpublic literature and credits them with a role in the public debate on politics,²⁹ but that exhausts his treatment. David P. Shields describes the New England broadsides—mostly elegies on the famous dead, usually composed by Harvard men—as part of the parochialism of the collegiate cult of memory; they were often collected and displayed in [rural] households.³⁰ To our knowledge only one monographic study examines the role and contribution of broadsides to the public debate during the American Revolution.³¹

The impressive exception to this meager harvest is the scholarship on German broadsides as part of Pennsylvania Dutch culture. For a long time scholarly discussion of these broadsides was confined to little articles in journals or magazines like Der Reg-geboge that specialized in the Pennsylvania Dutch.³² But within a few months in 2005 the first two comprehensive studies were published: Corinne and Russell Earnest’s Flying Leaves and One-Sheets: Pennsylvania German Broadsides, Fraktur, and Their Printers and Don Yoder’s The Pennsylvania German Broadside.³³ Both studies were based on the authors’ own large collections of German-American broadsides. The Earnests’ collection is housed at the Schoeneck Library in East Berlin, Pennsylvania; Yoder’s Roughwood Collection is now deposited at the Library Company at Philadelphia.

In the preface to Flying Leaves and One-Sheets, Edward L. Rosenberry rightly describes the Earnests’ work as a landscape view of a largely unexplored region among American broadsides and characterizes it overly modestly as an introductory and more correctly as a pioneering work.³⁴ The study is divided into six chapters: the first five chapters sketch the nature of broadsides, their production, shape, paper, coloring and illustrations, texts, and producers. The sixth chapter, the largest, describes in thematic order the whole range of German-American broadsides. Each broadside is accompanied by excellent reproductions that rival in quality Klaus Stopp’s reproductions of birth and baptismal certificates,³⁵ by bibliographical data, and by a brief description of its context and contents. The Earnests include in their definition freehand copies of printed examples³⁶ and forms like birth certificates and certificates of marriage, but exclude broadsides with official, administrative, or military content.

Don Yoder, professor emeritus of folklife studies and American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania, calls his somewhat different, yet equally impressive work a history and guide. Yoder’s purpose is to illustrate how broadsides, including prints, can be used to illuminate the culture of the Pennsylvania Germans. For him broadsides provide a cultural index as a basis for a cultural description of the everyday world of the Pennsylvania Germans. They are indeed, says Yoder, a ‘window’ into the culture. Culture is here meant in a comprehensive sense, for broadsides, Yoder notes, illustrate rites of passage, customs of the year, the engagement of the people with religion, politics, and war, and their enjoyment of humor, poetry, and song.³⁷ As a true scholar, Yoder begins with an overview of the broadside in Old Europe, Great Britain, and America before he zeroes in on Pennsylvania German culture. In ten chapters he analyzes in detail ten thematic groups of broadsides, ranging from songs and ballads, military, political, and medical broadsides to those that advertise goods, offer religious nourishment, and depict the linguistic and imagined world of the Pennsylvania Dutch. In each chapter the individual broadsides are embedded in rich context and well-researched data both on the genesis of the texts and on the printers who produced them. This contextualization supplements the Earnests’ work; both books indeed provide scholars with a rock-solid basis on which they can stand and from whose substance they can and must profit. Yoder’s twenty-page bibliographical essay attests to his erudition.

We, the Göttingen team, are not the only ones who have immensely profited from these two books. Indeed, we are most grateful to Yoder and the Earnests for sharing their knowledge with us and allowing us unlimited access to their treasures. Yet this does not mean that our study will repeat what these two have so superbly done. Indeed, it differs in scope, methodology, emphasis, and range of sources from both.

Scope: As mentioned above, we have excluded from our definition of broadside all forms, or broadsides that have a set form character. Our decision is based on the principle that forms or broadsides of a schedule character are by nature endless. The blanks for birth and death certificates are always valid—one just had to fill in the name of the person and the person’s date of birth or death.³⁸ The same is true for administrative forms like blanks for bonds—they could be used as long as the law did not change.³⁹ We accept criticism of our decision and indeed agree that Fraktur certificates deserve serious scholarly attention—which they have received in Klaus Stopp’s splendid volumes and the Earnests’ and Don Yoder’s exemplary discussions. Finally, we exclude from consideration manuscripts, English broadsides, and other printed sources like treatises and pamphlets. If this had been intended as a comprehensive history of Middle Atlantic print culture, they would of course form one of the bases of this study. But such an enlarged scope would have not only precluded the careful textual analysis of the Pennsylvania German broadsides, but also exceeded the abilities of this author.

Methodology: Fundamental to the approach of this study is the assumption that Pennsylvania German broadsides are embedded in a special relationship between the producer and the consumer, in most cases the printer and the customer. In this context these broadsides are the result of specific needs—of local politicians to publicize their perceptions, of pharmacists and doctors to propagate their products, of ill people, of heirs to sell the estates of their loved ones, of the religiously driven to share their insights with the rest of the world. Alternatively, broadsides respond to specific religious concerns of German settlers and provide help to the lover who wants to please his beloved. Methodologically, the concrete and often very detailed analysis of the texts, decorations, and images as an integral whole provides the clues to the nature of these needs, which are at the core of the special and dynamic relationship between the producer and the consumer. Our methodological approach thus does not assume a one-to-one relationship between Pennsylvania German broadsides and social life in the Middle Atlantic region. Rather, it assumes a one-to-one relationship between the perceptions and imaginations of both the producer/printer and the consumer/purchaser of Pennsylvania German broadsides. Included in the term producer/printer are those who ordered a printer to print a broadside and paid the printer for his services. Put differently, this is not intended to be a history of print culture or of Pennsylvania social life. It is a study of the imaginations, perceptions, and visions of Pennsylvania Germans embodied in German-language broadsides.

In general we assume that German settlers’ cultural perceptions were formed by their own experiences back in Germany or within their communities in the Middle Atlantic region. This implies that in interpreting broadsides we will ignore possible contemporary English perceptions of similar problems because we cannot assume that these perceptions were known to German settlers. This assumption raises a larger problem. In a broad sense it is evident that cultural perceptions are not nationally confined. Europeans shared perceptions, for example, about the mystical nature of earth, and scholars have described these perceptions in some detail.⁴⁰ Drawing on these European concepts would imply, however, that German settlers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were aware of them as European perceptions or that, more generally, they knew what today’s scholars know. There is no evidence that would support such an assumption. We will therefore not evoke European perceptions of ideas, concepts, and notions in interpreting German settlers’ visions as expressed in German broadsides. Similarly, we do not intend to compare findings about the distribution of print media or the business practices of German printers in North America with findings about English printers. German printers most often learned their jobs in Germany or were, as in the case of Christoph Saur I, self-taught; they worked in a German business environment and streamlined their business practices to the needs of their German customers. There are of course exceptions like Christian Jacob Hütter, and these will be discussed. Similarly, German printers who owned bookshops offered not only German but also English books and therefore served English as well as German customers, as will be shown in the analysis of the business ledger of one German printer, Christian Jacob Hütter.

Emphasis and structure: At the center of this study are the printers as the producers of broadsides and the people who acquired, bought, or received them. The broadsides represent links between the two; their messages tell us of the motives for their production and their acquisition. This, and only this, is the reason why the interpretation of their texts is of vital importance.

Methodology and emphasis determine the structure of the book. The first chapter is devoted to German printers and how they brought their products to their customers. We have intentionally limited ourselves to them and excluded any discussion of English printers, who made no contribution to Pennsylvania German broadsides and who have already received lavish scholarly attention.⁴¹ Chapters 2, 3, and 4 describe and analyze how, with their broadsides, printers or authors expressed or served their and their customers’ needs.

The focus on customers’ needs results in emphases that distinctly differ from those of the Earnests and of Yoder. Almost half of all broadsides convey religious messages that speak to the interests and concerns of German settlers. Three in particular will be discussed in the second and third chapters: the need for protection through house blessings and heavenly letters, the need for solace and comfort, and, most importantly, the quest for the attainment of eternal happiness. The analysis of these texts forms the core of our hypothesis that Pennsylvania German society was not only intensely religious but, as part of an Atlantic Christian community, Pietistic and driven by the hope of the coming of Christ.

A final aspect has to be mentioned: broadsides are not only literary artifacts but sheets in which texts, illustrations, decorations, and artistic embellishments merge and thus produce messages that transcend purely textual meanings. Unraveling the meanings of these broadsides often required detailed inquiries, which in some cases led us into fairly specific biblical discussions and often forced us to draw on the insights of art historians. Fortunately, scholarship has identified the meanings of symbols popular within the Ephrata circle.⁴² In many other cases our interpretations probably do not do justice to the complexity of the messages conveyed in the broadsides. If in the end the idea of a lively German community in Pennsylvania with its own religious, social, material, and political concerns, hopes, and visions emerges, then this is most of all due to the messages and comments the broadsides carried.

The reader of these lines will occasionally miss modern scholarly discussions of the subjects examined in this book. The author shares this feeling. It is unfortunate that many important aspects of the life of German settlers in the Middle Atlantic region have thus far received very little scholarly attention. While we know, for example, much about the art of medicine within the American majority society, and about emotions, love, and death, no work exists on these subjects regarding German settlers in the Middle Atlantic region. It would of course not be appropriate to transpose scholarly findings based on sources produced by English colonists onto German settlers—one of the important findings of this study, after all, is that precious few connections existed between the majority of Germans and their surrounding American neighbors. At least as far as their cultural and religious interests were concerned, the two societies lived side by side, but without significant contact.

One

THE GERMAN-AMERICAN PRINTING WORLD

Heady words and phrases like print culture and public sphere shape our thoughts about books.¹ Authors worry whether a print culture and a public sphere existed at all in the colonial, Revolutionary, or early national period—and occasionally become depressed by indications that the Revolution may have happened without the existence of a national print culture.² These thoughts, however, are exclusively focused on English-language books, publishing, and culture. Given the dominating influence of English printing in shaping American thinking in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this is natural. Non-English books of any kind do not play a role in this debate: scholars conceive the emergence of the American nation as an English-language event. That raises the question of the role of non-English minorities like the German settlers within the larger cultural and political setting of North America. Did the German inhabitants who represented about one-third of the American population read only English books, if at all? Of course not. According to Arndt and Eck, between 1728 and 1830 some 3,151 German books, treatises, magazines, almanacs, and pamphlets were printed in North America.³ To these one must now add the 1,682 German-language broadsides published in the same period that are the subject of this study. At least for the Middle Atlantic region, these production figures are far from negligible.⁴ But these German publications have thus far received little scholarly attention.⁵ We know little about who produced them, who bought them, what made them so attractive that German settlers were willing to spend money on them, and finally, what their role and meaning were in the life and culture of German settlers. We hope to answer some of these questions in the following pages.

How did these German publications reach customers in early America? Where could a hypothetical German farming couple buy broadsides, hymnals, or Bibles? Today we assume that the bookstore is still the most important distribution center for books, newspapers, and other printed items, probably because visiting a bookstore means more than just buying something: it means walking leisurely between the shelves, sipping a coffee while leafing through a book that has caught our eye. At the same time we know that this is only part of the story, for today Internet stores like Amazon represent a sharply rising part of book sales, at least in the Western world. The figures on the sales of the biggest American players for 2008 suggest changes in book trading patterns (see table 1).⁶ Data for Germany indicate that the large majority of books in Germany are still sold through bookstores. According to a report in Das Börsenblatt, only 8–9 percent of all sales were negotiated via the Internet.⁷

Discussing the importance of Internet business is not the purpose of this first chapter. It is rather designed to introduce the reader to German print culture and its economic underpinnings in North America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We will set out with a short discussion of where the printers acquired the texts for the broadsides they produced. In the next section we will offer a description of the numbers and locations of German printers and the links between them. We will argue that apprentices as well as membership in the same church linked German printers until the early nineteenth century, when they slowly joined the mainstream of American print culture. The next section will seek answers to the simple question of how customers acquired print products. The analysis discounts the importance of peddlers and to a lesser extent of markets and fairs. Instead, the evidence from merchant accounts in the following section, Price of Printing and the Distribution of Books, suggests a complex network that linked merchants in the rural economy on the one hand to the metropolis and on the other to potential customers. In the penultimate section of the chapter, German Settlers, Printers, and Broadsides, we focus on the question of what determined the survival rate of broadsides. In the concluding section we sketch the complex relationships between printers, customers, and motives for production and acquisition of broadsides that form the basis for the analyses in the following chapters.

Who Authored the Texts?

Where did printers get the texts for the 1,682 broadsides? The composition of the text as well as the costs were the responsibility of those who wanted them to appear in broadside form, namely the sellers of medicine, those advertising the sale of an estate, books, or other goods, those promoting an election campaign, as well as those putting forth an official public announcement. Some claimed that they had authored the texts: Johann Georg Hohmann alleged that he had written some of the songs he printed, or at least improved them.⁸ Others, such as Hohmann again, Christian Brüstle, Martin Gaby, and the Reverend Friedrich Geissenhainer, just added their names to the broadside so that future owners would know who had initiated the text.⁹ Possibly many more unknown pastors authored hymns and had them printed at their own expense. The authors of some of the ballads that describe the miserable fate of murderers are known: Johannes Koppelberger¹⁰ claimed to have written the ballad Ein Lied, von der Mordge-schichte des Joseph Miller, which went through sixteen editions.¹¹ Johann Valentin Schuller (1759–1833)¹² signed his name as author of the ballad Lied von einem Mörder, Namens Johannes Schild . . . der seinen Vater und Mutter mit einer Axt auf das grausamste hingerichtet hat, which never saw a second edition.¹³ And a large number of the authors of political broadsides, including Christoph Saur I and II, Conrad Weiser, Andreas Emmerich, and the editors of newspapers in Reading, York, Lancaster, and Lebanon, can be named.¹⁴ But these publications amount to probably less than a third of all German-American broadsides (see table B.1). For another group of broadsides it is less clear who the authors were: no one claimed authorship of the many secular poems or love poems, or the ballads about outrageous incidents or heinous crimes. We can only suspect that at least a respectable number of these were written by the printers themselves; certainly Peter Montelius wrote some of the broadsides he produced on education and for schools.¹⁵

The origin of the largest number of religious broadsides, however, is unknown. For a very few hymns, such as Wo ist Jesus mein Verlangen, we have found the European roots. The same is true for heavenly letters (Himmelsbriefe), and probably for some of the many house blessings (Haussegen). Yet despite thorough searches, very few European predecessors of the rest of these broadsides have been located.¹⁶ Occasionally a broadside offers excerpts from the writings of a popular religious poet like Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769) or Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen (1670–1739)¹⁷—but again, very few broadsides fit this category. In the absence of further research, we assume that most of the hymns published in broadsides were composed in North America; certainly some brothers and sisters at Ephrata copied the example of Conrad Beissel, who wrote literally hundreds of hymns.¹⁸ They may have brought their offerings to the monastery’s printshop, had them printed, and then decorated them. In other cases a hymn was probably printed at the suggestion of a pastor. But in the absence of hard evidence, the most likely guess is that for most religious broadsides the printers themselves either wrote the text or got it from a book that was printed either locally—Tersteegen’s books come to mind¹⁹—or elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

If our speculations come near the truth, then they would explain why so many of the German printers in North America played such prominent roles in particular denominations: that is certainly true for Christoph Saur I and II, Henrich Miller, Peter Leibert, Michael Billmeyer, the members of the Baumann family, and Conrad Zentler.²⁰ Belonging to a particular denomination was one of the most important ways to characterize a Pennsylvania German printer before 1830. The close links between the nature of the broadsides, the themes that