This week marks the 250th anniversary of American independence. To mark that, I’ll have a series of 250th-themed columns this week.
The vote came sometime on the afternoon of July 4, 1776: Thomas Jefferson’s words were now the official position of the Continental Congress — and a new nation. A quarter of them had been scratched out with various objections, but no matter. The Declaration of Independence had been approved.
That is where many stories end, but where this one begins. The Continental Congress now faced many tasks. Securing that independence when the most powerful military on the planet was on North American shores was, of course, the main one. There was, though, another: communicating to the new nation, and the world, what had just been done.
Today, this would have been as simple as a tweet, but the only ones tweeting in 1776 were the birds.
Instead, John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, sent the historic words to the body’s official printer, John Dunlap.
Dunlap ran a well-known printing shop in Philadelphia. Apparently he was something of an entrepreneur because he’d managed to secure the printing contract from the Continental Congress, that rogue body of Colonial delegates that now envisioned itself as the government of a new nation. Printing in those days required both tedium (setting the letters for the typesetter) and brute force (pressing that typesetter against first ink and then paper).
Dunlap worked all through the night to produce 200 copies of the Declaration of Independence — “broadsides” in the language of the time. He sent these to Assembly Hall on the morning of July 5, where Hancock set about distributing them to Colonial legislatures and troop commanders and anybody else deemed important. The goal was to quickly disseminate these broadsides throughout the Colonies so they could be read to crowds — about half the white population, at best, was literate in those days — and republished in newspapers.
The “Dunlap Broadside,” as historians call it today, was the first printing of the Declaration. They were, in effect, official documents, the equivalent of the government today running a photocopier all night to distribute some pronouncement. The Declaration was the news; but who was the first to report this news?
Philadelphia in 1776 had a robust media ecosystem of at least six newspapers that published regularly — none of them dailies, though.
The two main ones were the Pennsylvania Evening Post and the Pennsylvania Gazette (the latter of which had once been owned by Benjamin Franklin). These two newspapers competed to tell the news of the story, which in the early summer of 1776 was dominated by the proceedings of the Continental Congress. The Evening Post scored the first scoop: It was the first to report that the Congress on July 2 had voted to approve independence by passing the “Lee Resolution” from Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee. The Evening Post was so speedy that it was able to squeeze this news into its afternoon edition of July 2. The Pennsylvania Gazette had to wait until it came out the next day, July 3.
There were many residents of Philadelphia, though, who could not read those newspapers — not because they were illiterate, but because they specifically could not read English.
They were German immigrants.
The vast German immigration into North America is one of the lesser-told stories of American independence. Driven by war, weather and religious persecution, Germans began moving en masse to the British Colonies in the early 1700s. They generally entered through the port of Philadelphia, then moved on — some down the Great Valley of Virginia, others westward. There were other, non-English speaking, immigrants, too — the Finns and the Swedes also moved into the Mid-Atlantic — but the Germans were the main ones.
Immigration then produced some of the same tensions it does now. As early as 1717, Pennsylvania Gov. William Keith warned the legislature about “the inconveniences which may possibly arise by the unlimited Number of Foreigners that … have been transported hither of late.” In 1718, a prominent Philadelphia minister declared that “we are resolved to receive no more of them.” Yet still they came. In 1727, the Pennsylvania Assembly warned that “the great Importation of Foreigners into this Province … who are subjects of a foreign Prince, and who keep up amongst themselves a different Language, may, in Time, prove of dangerous Consequence to the Peace.” Yet still they came. Some towns in the Pennsylvania countryside were almost entirely German. Farther south, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, the Germans and the Scots-Irish were the main ethnic groups. Overall, about 10% of the population of the 13 original Colonies was German, according to the historian Lester Cappon.
The result of all this immigration was that Philadelphia in 1776 was a cosmopolitan city where no ethnic group held a majority, according to the Philadelphia Encyclopedia. There were no formal censuses to go on, but historians today believe that perhaps 30% to 40% of Philadelphia’s population spoke a language other than English. Those who didn’t speak English overwhelmingly spoke German.
For more reading:
German immigrants in Virginia formed “German regiments” that fought in the American Revolution, by Randy Walker
Our entire Cardinal 250 series (so far) is here.
And that brings us to one of Philadelphia’s other newspapers of 1776: Heinrich Miller’s Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote.
Heinrich Miller had been an itinerant printer in Europe, spending time plying his trade in Leipzig, Hamburg, London, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Geneva. This was not uncommon, according to the website Immigrant Entrepreneurship: “Strict regulations by trade guilds … made it difficult for journeymen to establish their own businesses and thus forced many of them to live in a permanent state of traveling in search for employment.” In time, Miller moved to Zurich to live with his aging parents. However, after his mother died, his father — then 80 — decided to remarry. Miller disapproved and decided to ask the Lord whether this was a good time to move to America. He did this through a game of chance — possibly involving throwing bones or stones. Whatever his method, the answer came back: Go.
It took a while, but in 1741 Miller sailed into Philadelphia and quickly found work with one of the city’s most prominent publishers: Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had long sought to establish readership — and influence — with the city’s German speakers but had always been outmaneuvered by German printers. Franklin apparently saw Miller as the key to this market. Franklin helped set up Miller in business to print his own German-language newspaper. Franklin’s goal wasn’t so much financial as it was political. He wanted to spread his political views to the German population — and “inculcate in them British civic and cultural sensibilities,” according to Immigrant Entrepreneurship.
Newspapers in those days often went through many iterations, but the relevant point for us today is that come 1776, Miller was publisher of a German-language newspaper that bore his name — and whose political views were decidedly in line with the growing anti-British sentiment in the land.
Miller must have been both excited and frustrated that first week of July 1776. The Continental Congress was moving toward independence, which he supported. But his newspaper only came out once a week so he couldn’t report it yet.
Congress had approved the Lee Resolution on Tuesday, in time to be published in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and the Pennsylvania Gazette. But then Congress did something else: It adopted a formal document describing the reasons for this radical act. It adopted the Declaration of Independence. Congress did this on a Thursday afternoon.
There was only one newspaper in Philadelphia that published on a Friday: Heinrich Miller’s Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote.
Miller had to literally squeeze in the news. He couldn’t even get it on the front page because that had already been put together. There was, though, a small place on his second page where he could fit in the type: It was just a scant two sentences, but it was the first news report about the Declaration of Independence — and it was in German.
“Gestern hat der Achtbare Congreß dieses Westen Landes die Vereinigten Colonien Freye und unabhängig Staaten erkläret. Die Declaration in Englisch ist jetzt in der Presse; sie ist datirt, den 4ten July, 1776, und wird heut oder morgen im druck erscheinen.”
For those of you who can’t read 18th century German, the account read: “Yesterday, the honorable Congress of these Western Lands, declared the United Colonies free and independent states. The Declaration is in English and is now at the Press; it is dated July 4th, 1776, and will be published either today or tomorrow.”
Not until the next day, July 6, did the Pennsylvania Evening Post break the news to its English-language readers — although the Evening Post did have the advantage of being able to print the entire Declaration, something Miller couldn’t do until the following week.
Still, the point remains: The first news report about the Declaration of Independence came in German.
The American story has always been a little more complicated than we are sometimes led to believe.
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