Correspondence Between Benjamin Franklin and Johann Karl Philipp Spener on the American Revolution

Correspondence between Benjamin Franklin and Johann Karl Philipp Spener on the American Revolution Jürgen Overhoff Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 48, 2019, pp. 89-101 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.2019.0007 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/749552 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Correspondence between Benjamin Franklin and Johann Karl Philipp Spener on the American Revolution JÜRGEN OVERHOFF enjamin Franklin was, as his biographer Carl van Doren once famously Bput it, “a harmonious human multitude:” he was a public-minded citizen, a self-taught scientist, inventor of the lightning rod, a gifted educator, and prominent founder of the University of Pennsylvania.1 Yet, until the end of his long life, Franklin was particularly proud to call himself a printer.2 The printing business was his profession since he was a twelve-year old boy. Printing usually meant publishing news and exciting innovative ideas as quickly as possible. Sometimes, however, Franklin decided to take his time before setting something into print. He then circulated his ideas—spelled out in letters and manuscripts—among trustworthy readers, soliciting the thoughts of friends or colleagues for many weeks or even months. Sometimes it was highly advisable to refrain from immediate publication and to collect, assemble, and weigh the relevant material—to obtain the best, the most mature result. Obviously, in the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters, Franklin was not the only printer who had grown used to circulating certain ideas—or even illustrations, engravings, and copper plates—among friends and acquaintances. The best and most prominent printers of North America and Europe regularly tested their thoughts by sharing their ideas. As Carla 89 90 / O V E R H O F F Correspondence between Franklin and Spener / 91 Mulford has pointed out in her magisterial study of Franklin’s political thought and his understanding of the ends of empire, circulating handwritten materials to reliable friends and colleagues offered an opportunity for information-sharing, critique, and mutual improvement. Circulating one’s thoughts by way of manuscript was a method—a form of coterie publication —that Franklin and other printers used when they were still thinking about their data and positions on various topics.3 One of the leading European printers with whom Franklin shared his views on the history of the American Revolution was the renowned German publisher and bookseller Johann Karl Philipp Spener. Both men’s interests strongly coincided in the spring and early summer of 1783, when the American War of Independence had come to an end and the United States emerged on the scene as a new political body of federated free states. Spener wanted to gather reliable and accurate information about the inspiring new American nation and the American people’s republican constitution to feed his German readership with the most up-to-date information.4 Franklin wanted to propagate the gospel of liberty and republicanism in Europe, hoping to pass on the torch of freedom to as many countries as possible. Spener was one of Germany’s leading publishers of his day. He was also the great-grandson of the Lutheran theologian Philipp Jacob Spener—the author of the famous 1675 tract “Pia desideria”—who was later dubbed the Father of Pietism.5 Born in 1749 and based in his hometown and birthplace Berlin, the striving capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, Johann Karl Philipp Spener was by privilege of the Prussian King Frederick the Great director of the Berlin publishing firm Haude & Spener, a firm he had inherited from his father Johann Karl Spener and his uncle Ambrosius Haude in 1772. His father and uncle started their business partnership as early as 1740, when they published the first issue of the politically influential and commercially successful newspaper Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen. Their publishing house was then formally and officially founded in 1748. When Johann Karl Philipp became his late father’s successor as the publishing house’s sole director, he quickly made extensive use of his excellent contacts with the leading philosophers of the enlightenment in London and Paris. Between 1769 and 1772, Spener had travelled widely in Germany, Italy, France, England, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, and had become one of the closest friends of the botanist Sir Joseph Banks and of the famous naturalists Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster, who accompanied James Cook on his second voyage around the world.6 During that formative and inspiring period of his youth, he also established firm relationships with some of the most important European publishers and printers. Despite Correspondence between Franklin and Spener / 91 Spener’s huge impact on the development of Germany’s enlightenment culture—an impact that cannot be overestimated—it is a perplexing fact that no comprehensive, critical, modern biography of the man and his astonishing achievements exists to this day.7 Spener continued publishing the Berlinische Nachrichten, and he began editing a geographical weekly Wöchentliche Nachrichten von neuen Landcharten; yet, his most popular and highly influential publication was a monthly magazine called Berlinische Monatsschrift.8 It appeared for the first time in January 1783 and soon became the preferred journal of the German philosophers of the enlightenment and of the Königsberg university professor Immanuel Kant, mainly due to the magazine’s numerous contributions to the heated debate on the true concept of enlightenment. Kant’s own article “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” with its world-famous definition “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” was published in the fourth volume of Spener’s Berlinische Monatsschrift as a reply to a similar question posed in the first volume of the Berlin monthly. When Spener prepared the very first volume of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, he intended to dedicate it to Benjamin Franklin. The Berlin publisher wanted to pay homage to the United States of America, and, accordingly, he wanted to portray both the new democratic Federation and the man whom he described as the personification of theAmerican Revolution. Moreover, Spener also intended to publish an American Almanac depicting the most important events of the American Revolution and of the War of Independence. Since Spener knew that his friend Georg Forster had regularly met and lunched with Franklin in Paris in 1777, he expected him to provide the relevant information, but Forster had to confess that his knowledge about Franklin’s biography and the political reality of the United States was too meagre. Nevertheless, Forster explicitly encouraged Spener to collect and publish new and reliable information about Franklin and America. The cosmopolitan Forster agreed that Germans needed to know more about the U.S., the model state of the age of enlightenment.9 Therefore, in the spring of 1783, Spener turned to French acquaintances whom he rightly considered to be friends of Franklin, the historian and lawyer Michel-René Hilliard d’Auberteuil and the printer Jean-Georges Treuttel of Strasbourg, asking them to get in touch with the American ambassador to France and tell him about the interesting Berlin publishing project. And this is precisely what they did. In a letter from 12 April 1783, Hilliard d’Auberteuil pointed out to Franklin that “Charles Spener, Libraire du Roi de prusse” intended to publish an important “commemoration de la revolution glorieuse” in Germany, a commemoration of the sensational American Revolution that 92 / O V E R H O F F Correspondence between Franklin and Spener / 93 had come to an extremely satisfactory end in late 1782 and early 1783.10 By way of this letter, he paved the ground for Spener, who now felt encouraged to approach Franklin himself with a letter of his own. In a letter to Franklin from 26 May 1783, Spener greeted the American kindly and explained to him his exciting plan of publishing “un Almanac américain en allemande.”11 Spener stressed that the material included in this Almanac ought not to stem from the close reading of printed books. Instead, he sought to acquire written and firsthand information from Benjamin Franklin because he was an eyewitness and a famous protagonist of the American Revolution. And Spener signaled that he was prepared, if necessary, to postpone his publication project for a while because it was of the utmost importance for him to discuss the early history of the United States in his correspondence with Franklin in some detail. Certainly, his personal curiosity determined his exchange of letters with Franklin to a considerable extent—or at least as much as did the promises and expectations of the German book market.12 Spener first wanted to find out whether Franklin agreed with the “plan de cet Almanac,” which he accordingly described in some detail.13 Then, the Berlin printer and publisher wished to obtain accurate information not only about his correspondent Franklin but also about John Adams, another important political leader of the Americans and staunch defender of the principle of republicanism whom Spener held in equal esteem. Could Franklin provide him with a “Portrait de John Adams,” possibly an engraving depicting the remarkable lawyer, orator, and political philosopher from Massachusetts?14 Furthermore,

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