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

Benjamin Franklin was, as his biographer Carl van Doren once famously put 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 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 [End Page 90...