Leonard von Morzé
On 8 March 1800, an immigrant living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, advertised a most unusual German-language pamphlet. In translation, the title reads Washington’s Arrival in Elysium: A Sketch in Dialogue Form by an Admirer of the Pallid Hero. The reader would have opened the book to discover a thirty-page dialogue, concluding with a few pages of patriotic songs—all of this “dedicated,” as the extended subtitle indicated, “to all uncorrupted American republicans.”1 Ostensibly a memorial to Washington, the dialogue would, when finally printed and distributed sometime around September 1800, contextualize the American Revolution within a global history from Rome to revolutionary France and trace the young republic’s recent fall into corruption under the Adams administration.2 As though these topics were not ponderous enough for such a short text, the author cast them into a classical genre well known to eighteenth-century readers: a dialogue among the dead. The text, discussed at greater length below, begins with Washington’s waking up in the pagan underworld and follows him as he engages in political discussions with revolutionaries from ancient Rome to Napoleonic France. These discussions offer a rousing history of American liberties, from the first European colonization of the continent to the American Revolution and beyond.
A gesture at the end of the dialogue, however, offers its most significant hint about how the author wished readers in the new century to understand Washington’s revolution. In the closing scene, Hebe, goddess of youth, offers Washington a cup from the waters of the Lethe, which would allow Washington to forget his earthly sorrows. To Hebe’s surprise, Washington makes an unprecedented refusal, as he prefers to “keep the memory of my life!” (28). As a ceremonial gesture, Washington’s act of declining the proffered cup suggests a rejection of the Christian rite of communion. This was an appropriate way to end an uncompromisingly pagan dialogue whose author was interested in the cultural capital signified by classical learning, by knowledge about the Greek cup itself rather than in its potential to be turned into a Christian allegory. Equally significant for the purposes of this essay, the act marks a commitment to remembering the Revolution at a time when many Americans—so the dialogue implied—seemed determined to forget it. By implication, Washington’s revolutionary legacy does not need Hebe’s help to remain eternal. His refusal of the cup of happy forgetfulness suggests to the reader that the specific history of founding a separate American republic could be remembered without negating the possibility of subsequent revolutions.
The printer (and, in the absence of other candidates, the presumed author) of the dialogue was a young man who had not been around for the American Revolution. He had arrived in the country in 1789 and was, at the time of publication, twenty-nine years old.3 Born in Saxe-Gotha in 1771, Christian Jacob Hütter had been taken at a very early age to Zeist in the Netherlands, and then to Pennsylvania at the age of eighteen as part of the Moravian mission. What this background does not explain is how Hütter came to view the American Revolution through the mirror of Rome’s pagan mythology and the history of its republic, and to adopt a republican historical perspective on virtue and corruption. It seems unlikely that he had any schooling in the Anglo-American tradition reconstructed by the historians associated with the “republican synthesis,” in which Roman history played such a central role.4 The context for Hütter’s views on revolutionary political culture was, instead, a shifting set of influences that evolved in response to the unfolding of the French Revolution. In the Washington dialogue, Hütter was evidently moved by the secularization of France, which impressed him and encouraged him to see, retrospectively, the American Revolution as having satisfied the dreams of the pagan republic of ancient Rome, a progression that made the death of the founder of the “fatherland” more tolerable as it offered hope that the principles of the American Revolution had already spread abroad.
Fifteen years later, however, Hütter’s admiration for the French Revolution had considerably diminished, partly thanks to his distrust of Napoleon. At this point in his career, Hütter published a remarkable novel called The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel that reworked the familial theme of Washington, once again comparing the American republic to a fatherless orphan. Yet the later work is a realist novel with an allegorical dimension rather than a dialogue conducted in a space outside history. In Moses Nathan Israel, the American Revolution embodies the historical spirit of the age, whose global dimensions await discovery (in this case, through a reckoning with the laws and customs of Hanseatic Germany) by the hero and the reader. In the earlier Washington, by contrast, the American Revolution is understood as the expression of natural right rather than the establishment of a positive law. Hütter understood the history of English and German transatlantic migration as the settlers’ affirmation of the right of mobility, and defended the ever-present possibility of continued emigration. The trappings of pagan mythology and the dialogue of the dead provided an imaginative structure for the work, whose political significance was to situate the mobility that led to the American Revolution in a setting outside place and time, in the domain of natural right.
As the leading dealer of German-language books in the early republic, Hütter was certainly acquainted with the latest writings from Europe. He seems to have read not just the rancorous party-sponsored newspapers which he also published himself but also German newspapers in the genre of the political review that came to the German states near the end of the eighteenth century.5 But while this genre reflected an evolving relationship between editors in the German-language states and their reading publics, Hütter could not count on a politically engaged German American audience and instead appealed to his readers as consumers interested in purchasing books and periodicals that were valuable as commodities from overseas. At least in the Washington dialogue, his classical framework accordingly reads more as a draft of a marketable educational program than as a coherent ideology for the interpretation of political history. Roman mythology might have, in other words, conferred distinction on readers interested in buying texts other than a family Bible.
Hopeful of reaching these consumers, Hütter had unbounded ambitions for his bookstore and the associated circulating library. Advertising a stock of six thousand titles for sale and claiming that his circulating library boasted one thousand titles, with “many magnificent works missing from the largest libraries in Germany,”6 he is probably responsible for circulating more non-English material between 1798 and 1815 than anyone else on the continent. His confidence, surprising though it may seem today, in the commercial centrality of Lancaster also led to triumphant assertions about its political centrality: “The conditions in Lancaster occupy every politician from the northernmost to the southernmost extremes of the United States,” he claimed in November 1800.7 His subsequent success, despite bankruptcy and repeated relocations, bore this out: until his death in 1849, he would enjoy an extraordinarily varied career as a printer and controversialist in the Delaware Valley. Even more than for other German-language newspapermen (who printed one-third of the titles produced in Pennsylvania in the 1790s), his career remains woefully understudied. This may be because he pursued his business interests by writing and distributing work whose abiding subject was, at least in the early period, political, rather than religious or ethnically particularized, or even limited to the German language, as he began to transition to English-language printing around 1810.
Of the works printed by his own press, the Washington dialogue (1800) and Moses Nathan Israel (1815) are the first and last statements we have from him during the period of the French Revolution. No definitive claim can be made about Hütter’s precise share in writing either text; he seems the most likely candidate for the author of the unsigned Washington dialogue, and he contributed, at the very least, significant edits to Moses Nathan Israel, posthumously published on behalf of the obscure Gotthilf Nicolas Lutyens, who was born in Hamburg and died in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in the year of the novel’s publication. Hütter’s intentions as an author are of less relevance to this essay than his responsibility for importing or printing and then selling works that encouraged readers to interpret the American Revolution in light of ongoing events. The circulation he sought was both economic and political: he wished to attract readers and book purchasers to his Lancaster bookselling operation while at the same time attempting to disseminate a Jeffersonian interpretation of the Revolution. In the ferment around the election of 1800, Hütter saw an opportunity to align his politics with his business interests, as his political identification with the Jeffersonian side supported his proposals to sell thousands of German-language Enlightenment books to American readers. For him, the American Revolution was an unfinished project whose legacy he thought Jefferson and the revolutionaries in France well prepared to continue.
The project of this essay is modest in the sense that I draw attention to an overlooked figure whose business was “global” insofar as it paralleled the Enlightenment book trade itself. Yet Hütter’s biography may also bridge the gap between scholarship on German American literary culture and studies of German literature on the Continent. To date, the transatlantic connections between German and American literary culture circa 1800 have remained as insubstantial as the shades that Hütter’s Washington spotted along the Styx. On the one hand, comparatists have proposed important connections between German and American writers. On the other hand, bibliographers and folklorists have attended to German-language writing of the mid-Atlantic. It is fair enough to say that “belles lettres,” as one representative historian concludes, “hardly existed in the pietistic German-American world.”8 The list of dozens of eighteenth-century works compiled by Robert Elmer Ward qualifies this claim somewhat, but Ward nonetheless also equated the belletristic with the “creative.”9 This equation left political productions such as Hütter’s entirely out of Ward’s bibliography. What ethnic historians ignore, moreover, is the circulation of imported books, consumer items that conferred cultural capital and political identification. Research in the transatlantic history of the book shows that even pietistic German Americans were interested in owning creative if not belletristic works. Transatlantic book distribution gives us a more varied picture than studies of cultural particularity would suggest and offers us new directions for understanding how Germans on both sides of the Atlantic might have commemorated the Revolution.
The majority of the books that German Americans read, then, came not from Pennsylvania printers but from German presses in Europe and consisted of a mix of German- and English-language materials. At various times, Hütter controlled and lost the capital needed to acquire and distribute these varied texts, from books to pamphlets to newspapers. Hütter might thus be regarded as the “missing link” who connected the book-buying public of the German states with their American counterparts. A transatlantic conversation between entirely separate schools of political historiography can elucidate the political significance of Americans’ purchase of imported books. On the one hand, German American politics has been ably treated through a synthesis of community-based social and ethnic history with political history, which produced a set of studies that are empirically grounded.10 On the other hand, approaches to the reception of the American Revolution on the Continent continued the theme of the “image of America”11 studies associated with Durand Echeverria, culminating in Horst Dippel’s definitive 1977 study of the German states’ reception of the American Revolution. Dippel’s strikingly coherent, often brilliant interpretation, grounded in Marxism, argued that the responses to the American Revolution coming from a culturally and politically backward central Europe expressed social class interests. Dippel’s critique of bourgeois ideology as “false consciousness” assumed that the American Revolution’s causes could be clearly understood; from that starting point, he found ample evidence that the German bourgeoisie misunderstood them. But his interpretation, which preceded the development of the history of the book as a discipline, treated books simply as representations or reflections of economic life rather than being themselves objects of trade.12 Attending to the materiality of book distribution does not make questions of false consciousness irrelevant, but it does complicate them. If books are not simply texts (that is, representations) but are commodities, then the books do not simply comment on the Revolution in ways reflective of class interests; they also circulate as a kind of currency of affiliation, indicating the political alignments of their buyers. In his works, as I will suggest, Hütter saw free circulation itself as a revolutionary ideal, mobility of persons and commodities being the most foundational of negative liberties.13
Thus a study of practices of the circulation of books (which is not necessarily a study of reading) would effectively bridge the Atlantic world in ways that an exclusive focus on representational norms does not, important though the latter remains for the present essay. Studies in the history of the book join cultural spheres that have been considered in isolation from one another. This essay cannot provide that synthesis but instead suggests how developments in Europe may have influenced the way the American Revolution was remembered by German American readers. A steady stream of German books arriving from Europe might have become objects for debate in the German-language American public sphere, though regrettably little evidence of reading practices appears to have survived.
Through newspapers and catalogues, Hütter drew together a group of book purchasers in ways that he hoped would connect his political and business interests. The evidence suggests that Hütter printed Washington in an attempt to capitalize on the political turmoil that led to the election of 1800, which for German Americans involved a debate over the American relationship to France. The importance of this relationship for Germans lay in the fact that French armies had made successful incursions against the states of central Europe. The desirability of Napoleon remained an open question, as many German Americans had little reason to be nostalgic about the feudal Kleinstaaten they had left behind.
Hütter seems to have made an assessment of the way Napoleon’s conquests of the German-speaking states divided German American readers along partisan lines. He produced Washington as a reflection on the American Revolution, as his homegrown contribution to a book business that consisted almost entirely of imports. With its dialogue and its patriotic songs, Washington was to serve as a low-price provocation, perhaps even a sort of “loss leader,” that would induce readers to purchase his imported books. Hütter’s surviving ledger shows that, according to plan, thirteen fellow book-loving Republicans (perhaps not as many as Hütter hoped) voted with their wallets, sponsoring the book by subscription, reselling it on commission, or purchasing the copies outright. While there is no record of a buyer purchasing only a single copy, Hütter distributed 267 copies, which suggests that the thirteen buyers may have intended to resell the pieces out of their bookstores.14 It seems that to circulate Hütter’s books was to take a political side, to identify with the Republican opposition to Adams.
Hütter was not the only German American to see both a political and a marketing opportunity in the circulation of representations of the Founding Fathers. Among the distributors of Washington was a German entrepreneur in Philadelphia named George Helmbold who would, in September 1800, begin a nationwide campaign advertising the sale of David Edwin’s engraving of a full-length image of Thomas Jefferson. Since he was retailing an image rather than a text, Helmbold was not confined to a German-language audience; he was apparently following in the footsteps of Gilbert Stuart, who had attempted a smaller-scale campaign distributing copies of his portrait of Washington. Helmbold and Hütter wanted their images of the Founding Fathers to appeal to partisan interests while reaching the widest possible audience. Around the time of the 1800 election, the appearance of visual images of the presidential candidate in public places inevitably incited partisan commentary, and Helmbold carefully reworded his advertisements in response to the latest election returns from each state assembly.15
In his introduction to Washington, Hütter wrote that his dramatized vision of Washington was analogous to a visual representation, concluding with a wish for its verisimilitude to be recognized (“How pleased will I be if my readers recognize the portrait [Portrait] of Washington as accurate!”). Yet this appeal can also be read less as a claim of historical objectivity than as the expression of a wish to find sympathetic readers and book buyers; Hütter wishes readers to find their likeness in Hütter rather than to see Washington perfectly represented there. Given the figures for the print run, this appeal seems to have been partly successful. Yet despite the number of copies in circulation, I have not been able to find evidence of anyone actually reading Washington.16 Jacob Dietrick, who purchased fourteen copies in January 1801, did not list it in a catalogue of the 150-odd German books available from his circulating library in Hagerstown, Maryland, that same year, though it is possible his catalogue was already in press when he received Hütter’s books.17 Indeed the only acknowledgment of its publication that I have yet found is indirect, in the ridicule directed at him by Johann Albrecht, the printer of the local Federalist newspaper, who editorialized in November 1800, “So here’s a question for you: when were you molded [geknetet] into a printer of books?”18 This was a fair question: not having been apprenticed, like nearly every other printer of the era, Hütter was an upstart, and Hütter’s first print production was a bold one.19 Then, in the next column, Albrecht ridiculed his rival’s primitive print operations, asking whether Hütter had made his typefaces from Lebkuchen or from stinky cheese, and momentarily switched from Gothic to roman type in order to recommend that Hütter give up German printing and recommence in French, satirically hailing his new rival: “Au Correspondent de Lancastre. Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! Vivre libre, ou mourir!”20
A review of Hütter’s marketing campaign points to the way Washington seemed to bring together different projects: on the one hand, Hütter’s advertisements for the little book represent an ambitious commercial project establishing a German-language communication network, while on the other hand, the text of the dialogue reflects a fascinating interpretation of the Revolution that may perhaps owe, at least in part, to frustration at the failure of that very marketing campaign. In his initial advertisement, Hütter asked subscribers for a half dollar (or the price of six months of his newspaper, Der Lancaster Correspondent), “a large octavo volume on nice paper of about sixty pages” that would be printed as soon as he has collected $250.21 Surely worried about the declining relevance of his work as the event of Washington’s death (on 14 December 1799) grew more distant, Hütter announced three months later, on 23 August, that the work was being printed and would be distributed two weeks later.22 However, the changes to the length and price of the book indicate his reduced expectations for the volume. Instead of the promised sixty, the book is just thirty-six pages (excluding the title pages, it is a twenty-seven-page dialogue plus seven pages of patriotic songs). In the December announcement, he halves the price, asking a quarter dollar per copy, or three dollars for fourteen (despite his original advertisement’s promise that the price would be raised after the completion of subscriptions). It is not until 27 June 1801 that Hütter ceases to advertise his small book.
It is tempting to interpret Hütter’s weird text, then, as a cri de coeur expressing an upstart printer’s frustration at public indifference. But to focus on what makes the text an anomaly—a rare German-language political pamphlet—obscures its representative quality, its presentation of a characteristically Jeffersonian interpretation of the Revolution, and its corresponding celebration of freedom of circulation, whether of goods or people. That Jeffersonian interpretation viewed British political control over the colonies as a temporary contract, sealed not through colonial charters but through a later decision to accept protection against both Native American and European enemies. In an interpretation consistent with Jefferson’s Summary View, Hütter views the decision to leave for America as an escape into a state of nature; the king had no more claim to these emigrants’ America than a German elector had over the England to which the Saxons had fled.23 In keeping also with the Declaration of Independence, the Revolution is seen as an inevitable response to the failure of the king to protect his subjects.
But in the text, Christopher Columbus, whose legend German fabulists (especially Joachim Heinrich Campe) had a large part in making, stands in for Jefferson, whose voice could not yet be heard among the Elysian shades. Glimpsing Washington’s shade approaching the Elysian banks, Brutus asks Columbus about the identity of the celebrated newcomer. Columbus answers:
About two centuries ago, the northern part of America began to be a sanctuary for unfortunates of every kind. Anyone who could not bear the oppression of tyrants, anyone who was driven from his home by malicious priests for his contrary beliefs, anyone who was struck low by the envy of his fellow man, anyone who loved peace and quiet and could not find them in his fatherland [in seinem Vaterlande]—all these fled to America. Britons were the first to settle here, and many of Germania’s sons followed them.
Agriculture and animal husbandry were their only trades. Peace-loving and good, like the very first human beings, they abhorred conflict. The incursions of the savage natives and the avarice and rapacity of the whites beyond the British boundaries persuaded them to recognize the King of Britain as the guardian of their rights. But the guardian soon became a subjugator who ruled the country with an iron scepter. Columbia long endured in silence the crimes of the distant despot; the yoke finally became too oppressive; the love of liberty prevailed over the love of peace; the people rose up, expelled the mercenaries who kept them in subjection, and declared their independence. But Britannia still hoped to bring a free people back into subjection; she paid foreign princes for soldiers, sending them along with thousands of her own men to America. (13–14)
This potted history from Columbus to the American Revolution is revealing in several respects. Columbus calls the British and Germans the first settlers of America. He narrates a history of the European settlement of the continent in which the authority of the British king was freely granted only in order to protect the settlers from Indian violence.
But it is Columbus’s closing mention of the Hessian soldiers, in an echo of the Declaration, that would probably have struck German readers with particular force. It would have reminded them of German princes’ notorious practice of selling soldiers to larger countries in need of a temporary fighting force, a practice that sent these soldiers around the globe. For a group of consumers whose education was as much musical as verbal, a similar reminder of this history would have been made through the suggested musical accompaniment to the first tune appearing at the end of the pamphlet, authored by one Christian F. D. Schubart (1739–1791), the passionately pro-American editor of the Teutsche Chronik. The occasion for the “Kaplied” (Cape Song) whose tune Hütter borrows from Schubart was the selling of two thousand Württemberg men in 1786 to fight in South Africa for the Dutch East India Company. This infamous transaction cost many of the soldiers their lives. Republican sympathies led printers like Schubart and Hütter to see the freedom of mobility promised by both American emigration and the American Revolution as reverberating across the world.24
In Washington Hütter elevates into a literary register the partisan interpretation of the Revolution that took shape around the election of 1800. For the Jeffersonians, the American Revolution was not a completed event: its relationship to German struggles in the 1780s, or the French Revolution, remained an open question rather than a study in contrast. Here Hütter has Washington grandiloquently attribute partisan conflict to a systematic British attempt to roll back the Revolution. When Penn asks him about why John Adams’s America has returned to its prerevolutionary English alliance, Washington explains:
Britannia can never forget that she once ruled America. With arms she sought to maintain her arrogated right . . . that did not succeed. Thus she turns to guile now. She gives salaries to shameful scoundrels, the scum of the earth, to set the once harmonious people against each other. Magazines and pamphlets [fliegende Blätter] are the means whereby they spew their venom. Oh, this has already worked too well! English people who live among us but remain dependent on their native land; miserable Americans who played an important role under English subordination, whom necessity had made republicans and who now come forward openly as aristocrats; émigrés who left their fatherland when France restored the abrogated rights of men, and who would rather be slaves to tyrants than free citizens—these are the people who stoke the smoldering embers of conflict, and have thus led already a large part of the American nation astray. (20; ellipsis in original)
Thus Hütter contrasts Britain’s long and bitter memory of the Revolution with the forgetfulness of the Americans, who are consumed by the fliegende Blätter, literally “flying leaves,” of partisan controversy. Hütter was himself an avid participant in this paper war, but he suggests here that Albrecht and others enjoyed a British subvention for subverting American democracy. Washington continues:
At the instigation of England, everything was done to involve us in a war with France, our sister republic whom they hated, whereas the patriots were wholeheartedly delighted when she achieved the ineffably great blessing of liberty. The consequences would have been terrible for America if this plan had been successful, which would once again have eradicated the liberty that is heaven’s sweetest blessing, and reestablished a throne for whose destruction much blood had been spilled. Those Americans who remained true deeply felt the disgrace that had been inflicted on them, and they united to bring about a change in their condition. The most recent election for Pennsylvania governor provided them with an opportunity to wrest the government from these unworthy hands. (23)
But this plan did not succeed, and at least in Pennsylvania the Republicans returned to power. The freedom achieved by the “Revolution of 1800,” which Hütter thought would be realized even in the absence of definitive electoral results, is repeatedly imagined as a restoration of lost liberties:
Imagine the emotions of the friends of a prisoner who, having languished in a dark dungeon for years, has suddenly been freed and given back to his family. Those emotions would be but weak in comparison to those now felt by the friends of liberty. Public festivities were held, shouts of jubilation resounded on all sides, . . . heartfelt joy replaced the dejection that had spread across their brows. The traitors to the country were consumed by their wrath and swore terrible vengeance. But their desires were ignored; the new rulers had set limits on the mischief they could do, and Pennsylvania seems to want to restore its lost happiness, and the other states are preparing to follow its lofty example. (24; ellipsis in original)
The Washington dialogue constituted a claim to the memory of the Revolution whose spirit Hütter believed had been forgotten. This “spirit of 1776” referred, for Hütter as for so many of his contemporaries, more to the achievement of social unity in the face of obvious political fissures than to political independence. This emphasis on social unity acknowledges no legitimate basis for disagreement. Like his contemporaries, Hütter attributed the disunity to the other side: “My fellow German citizens of America, I appeal to your conscience whether I am wrong in claiming that the Federalists are not animated by that spirit which animated all of us in Anno 1776”?25 He explained that “many thousands of Americans did not have the opportunity to feel the British yoke before our independence” and therefore took their liberties for granted.26
The claim to the revolutionary legacy remained in dispute, and it was left to each side to blame the other for initiating the conflict. Hütter’s Federalist antagonist Albrecht knew how to use the history of the American Revolution to make his own case against the Jeffersonian Republicans. Albrecht printed the false allegation that Hütter had been born in Hesse, thus associating him with the soldiers hired by George III.27 Like Hütter, Albrecht attributed the origins of political dissension in the republic to his opponents. Demonstrating a level of sophisticated play with the German language of which Hütter was incapable, Albrecht put a wittier version of Washington into dialogue with living heroes such as John Adams. In one newspaper pasquinade, printed around the same time as Hütter’s pamphlet, between Washington and the sitting president, Washington and Adams indict the demonic French “degenerate rabble [Lumpengesindel]” for “contaminating [verunreinigen] the country as they stepped into it.” The verb verunreinigen means to contaminate but also sounds a lot like an invented word, ver-un-einigen or “dis-unifying” the Vereinigten Staaten, the “United States.”28 While Albrecht punningly called Hütter a lying deceiver, a stooge-like “Hüter,” or defender, of the Jacobins, Hütter all the while insisted, in a Jeffersonian vein, on the virtue of the plebeian class. The novel he printed in 1815 would develop a fuller portrait of the revolutionary plebeian, but now it linked American virtues to German rather than French roots. The move from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century also corresponded to a shift in historical consciousness for Hütter, as he began printing novels instead of dialogues, contributing to the genre that would dominate the new century’s literature.
The first years of the nineteenth century saw an important shift in Hütter’s business, as he moved from importing books en masse to printing them. At the same time, he experimented with printing narrative works.29 Perhaps he was transferring the high hopes he had entertained for the genre of the dialogue to the genre of the novel. Hütter’s experimentation with novels culminated in the publication of the English-language work The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel (1815). Hütter edited the novel and probably rewrote some sections, as well as printing and promoting it; as with Washington, he began seeking subscribers for Israel well before publication—in the latter case, advertisements began appearing at least six years earlier.30
Instead of the historical personages represented in Washington with its dialogue among the dead, Israel features wholly fictionalized characters. Yet important thematic links connect Washington and Israel. The contested history of the American Revolution is central to both works, as is the guiding metaphor of the nation as a male orphan entering a political order without a patriarchal source of authority. The Washington dialogue describes a subtle transition, as identification with the father of the nation is replaced by allegiance to the fatherland.31 Yet, inasmuch as he accepts that the monarchical spirit is dead in the United States, Hütter both mourns Washington’s death and acknowledges that alternative bases for social unity were always necessary in a nation without kings. America is an orphan, declares Franklin in the Washington dialogue: “Land of my birth! you are orphaned, who will be a father to you?” (18) Though Washington dismisses Franklin’s concern, the question of Washington’s replacement remains unanswered in this 1800 text.
Beyond a commitment to remembering the Revolution (or a certain version of it), the Washington dialogue fails to offer an alternative basis for social unity. Clearly, the ever-changing France of the Revolution could not offer a stable point of identification for the American republic. Even Hütter disclaimed the label “Jacobin.” After Napoleon’s reimposition of dynastic law, Hütter could not continue to maintain that the French leader was simply globalizing the principles of the American Revolution. The identification of the father of the nation with the father of its next leaders represented an obvious regression to monarchical principles.32
Turning to the German states rather than to France, The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel works out something like an alternative genealogy for American federalism, with the protagonist’s travels in Europe reversing the emigration story in Washington. The smaller Hanseatic cities, viewed through a post-Napoleonic retrospective, offer a granular rather than monolithic picture of state sovereignty, characterized as these cities are by distinctive, mutually contradictory laws. Playing on the ambiguity of the German term Vaterland, which can refer either to a country of origin or an adopted country, the nation/orphan in this novel makes a series of involuntary discoveries that locates American political identity between Germany and the American backcountry. The plot can be briefly summarized. One night in April 1775, a pregnant woman shows up at an inn on the road between New York and Boston. During the birth throes of the American Revolution, Moses comes into the world to a mother who does not identify herself to her hosts before she dies. The only clue to the orphan’s identity is a document which is apparently a Taufschein, a baptismal certificate traditionally used by Germans, left in his mother’s Bible. The Connecticut-born boy is educated by a series of Anglo-American Presbyterians who can trace their revolutionary principles to their ancestors with clarity, in one case to “the Puritan Moses” Cromwell himself, while the best guess they can offer poor Moses Nathan about his baptismal certificate is that it is written in Persian or Turkish. Adding to the joke about Moses’s Middle Eastern origins is a running gag in the novel in which Moses Nathan Israel is repeatedly mistaken for a Jew, his name getting him into trouble over and over again. Figurally speaking, Israel’s story is modeled on the traditional legend of the Wandering Jew.33 But this is a secularized retelling of the Wandering Jew, which implicitly connects the hero’s lack of a nationality with Jewish statelessness, a condition that is not remedied by Moses’s wandering through a Germany consisting of many principalities with mutually exclusive laws and customs. Moses’s political maturity will be achieved only by returning to the United States. But his passage through Germany is critical to Moses’s discovery of his adult identity. While Moses’s mother actually turns out to be French, it is the father’s origins in a tiny Bavarian village that will determine the course of the plot.
Born during the American Revolution, Moses is a national allegory,34 a mold into which few heroes of early U.S. novels fit: the American Revolution and its aftermath generally register in these novels as a site of unhealed trauma. This trauma pervades the works of Charles Brockden Brown, whose father’s wartime imprisonment is reflected in such novels as Edgar Huntly (1799), set outside the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Whereas Brown produces a vision of a violent backcountry, however, Lutyens scarcely gives us any sense of the American frontier at all; the alien landscapes with which the reader will become acquainted are all set in Germany and Italy. Moreover, Lutyens gives a stronger version of orphaning than one finds in Huntly—the former hero does not know the identity of his parents at all, and feels no sense of loss over what happened during the American Revolution. In both novels, the hero loses his parents to frontier violence around the period of the Revolution, but in the German American work the father is, through a series of coincidences, triumphantly restored to his son. If orphaning in Edgar Huntly refers to the trauma of revolution and in Washington to the problem of proper patriotic remembrance, orphaning in Moses Nathan Israel refers to that which was never known at all but awaits discovery—the identity of the parent. Far from reawakening a trauma, family history in Lutyens’s novel provides a source of national renewal. In Moses Nathan Israel, then, the American Revolution is responsible for separating the hero from his parents, but this scarcely registers as a trauma.
Reversing an incipient national tradition of America-as-orphan narratives, which seem designed to facilitate cultural independence from Europe, or at least to allay the anxiety of European cultural influence,35 Moses Nathan Israel moves toward identification and reunification with the lost father. In terms of the realist (picaresque) novel, Moses is a typical artisan with no estate but a restless inclination that leads him to wander through the German and Italian states. Soon, having acquainted himself with German culture and the language, he is able to read the birth certificate, discovering therein the name of his father, Landman, which has the same semantic duality as the English word “countryman”: a farmer who is also a fellow American. While traveling through the German states, Moses Nathan falls in love, pledging himself to a Bavarian woman. His fiancée, Henrietta, as it turns out, is actually his cousin, and his father, for whom he works after meeting him in a tavern on the road to Washington, is a German American patriot who had been separated from his French wife during the Revolution. Comically, Moses nearly marries his sister, a woman named Betsey whom he has met on his father’s plantation in Virginia, but the revelation of his father’s identity occurs just in time, and Moses instead ends the novel marrying his cousin and marrying off his newfound sister to that wife’s brother. Thus the novel closes with two weddings of the two pairs of cousins in this reunited family.
In this summary, I have deliberately neglected to mention the material that would seem to make the novel interesting to historians: published in 1815, the year that spelled the end of the age of revolutions, the novel devotes at least half its space to a meticulous survey of Germany and Italy as presented to the narrator’s open-eyed innocence, as he “discovers” major German and Italian cities, from Hamburg to Venice, as though for the first time. Written around the time of Madame de Staël’s famous De l’Allemagne (1810), Lutyens’s narrator provides the same impression that German culture is an object of discovery, offering a deep history that can provide a counterweight to French Enlightenment. If Staël makes Germany, rather than Italy, the object of a “Grand Tour”–style survey, then Lutyens takes this mode even further by seeing the world through the eyes of a poor artisan rather than a moneyed gentleman. On the surface, the family plot, which concerns the displacements caused by the American and French Revolutions, is less interesting than the topographical information about Europe. As so often with this type of book, the plot seems secondary, and the task of criticism is to figure out why it is there at all: why did Lutyens not write another nonfictional tract, and why did Hütter not publish another political drama along the lines of Washington? Such works could well have been updated with a political vision reflective of the dismay at the course the French Revolution had taken.
In addition to the increased currency of the genre, the choice of the novel form accommodates Lutyens’s desire to develop a family plot in which the hero travels abroad. As his travels coincide with the American Revolution and as he reunites with family members, Moses’s travels resemble a homecoming, for he also discovers the secret of his family. While endogamous marriage, in this case between cousins, was probably not exceptional in any historical or sociological sense, what surprises is the novel’s peculiar use of this family melodrama: here, the hero’s discovery while in America that the woman with whom he happens to have fallen in love back in Germany is actually a family member reduces the scale of the action in a way that cuts through the unsettling changes experienced on both sides of the Atlantic.
As with so many English narratives about orphans, from Moll Flanders (1722) to The Power of Sympathy (1789), the uncertainty of the orphan’s paternity poses the continual danger of brother-sister incest. But Lutyens manages quite differently the orphan/incest nexus that tends in other early American novels to result in catastrophe. In early national narratives of brother-sister incest, such as The Power of Sympathy, the discovery of the identity of the orphan’s father ends in madness and suicide. In the early republic such narratives reflect a “deep anxiety about ease of social movement,” a sense that the class system remains too unclearly defined.36 Yet the older colonial example of Moll Flanders is more relevant to Moses Nathan Israel, in that both novels are more concerned with physical rather than class mobility. Incest in Defoe’s novel can be taken as a figure of the magnetism by which the limitless American landscape gets reduced to the tiny scale of the family; in far-flung Virginia, Moll cannot avoid being pulled into her brother’s arms. The prohibition against incest (which is actually broken in Defoe) both reduces the immensity of colonial space and forces Moll back into motion. Yet in Lutyens the hero’s discovery that his prospective bride is his sister causes nothing but a slight disappointment. He also finds, while in the United States, that the woman he met in Germany is actually his cousin, whom he may marry legitimately. Lutyens depicts the transatlantic connection between Moses and his bride Henrietta as complementing his bond with his newfound Virginian sister Betsey. As it turns out in the end, the hero’s travels throughout Europe have healed the social disruption of the American Revolution, bringing the fragmented family back together again.
The family melodrama, in other words, manages both to celebrate the foundational freedom of mobility Hütter associated with the American Revolution and to satisfy a desire for history by producing a localized sense of “roots.” The hero’s free circulation is counterbalanced by a comfortable reduction of scale, as though by going abroad he had been heading home all along. This reduction also acts to counterbalance the long survey chapters that provide nondiegetic information about the wide world and that could potentially have been interminable. Through the family plot, the hero abandons the project of transmitting authoritative information about a dizzying succession of European and American cities; Lutyens, in fact, telescopes these diverse spaces into two German and French Canadian villages from which Moses’s parents stem. For all of the unrealism of the reunions, Lutyens offers enough of a nod to the traditional realist novel that the obscure town names convey something like a “reality-effect”: the village of Aurach could not possibly be important enough to be included in the novel’s survey of great cities from Hamburg to Venice, but its insignificance makes more plausible the novel’s family melodrama. The pages and pages of information about the civic traditions of Leipzig or Rome, in fact, seem irrelevant as the novel centers on the lives of and interactions among people from a tiny Bavarian village.
In another sense these two aspects of the novel—the sweeping worldly scale of the survey of Germany and Italy, and the local scale of the family story originating with the American Revolution—are mutually reinforcing: the narrator’s discovery of his family parallels the post-Napoleonic discovery of German political culture, particularly its claims to civic republicanism. The conclusion and the additions by the printer Hütter reconstruct something like a republican tradition in the Hanseatic world, in which German artisans’ self-government and free trade might offer lessons for the American republic, perhaps in contrast to the British liberal tradition. Likewise, the German city-states are seen to operate differently from the Napoleonic empire; if, as the 1815 postscript to the novel suggests, those cities are likely to be restored to their pre-Napoleonic condition, then Americans are urged to pay attention to a political tradition that once seemed to them (as recently as in the Washington dialogue itself) to have little value. While urban regulations are implemented by the heavy hand of the state, which sometimes lands Moses in jail, these laws are the product of a local rather than an imperial (Napoleonic) sovereignty and therefore by implication less threatening. Perhaps the civic tradition of the city-states might offer an alternative to the varieties of expansionist discourse, whether Napoleonic or Jeffersonian.
The context for this political conclusion is comparative revolutionary history, which apparently interested the two men who produced the novel. Lutyens having died in the year of the novel’s appearance, Hütter seems to have made strategic edits to the volume. Hütter’s concluding “Memorandum” precisely identifies the global politics at stake in the text:
It is superfluous to take notice of the wonderful changes and revolutions, which since Moses Nathan Israel travelled through the continent of Europe, have happened to nearly all those places which he visited and described in this present work. Particularly as the occurrences which took place in the first part of the current year, 1814, are of such a nature as to make it probable that the old order of things, such as described by Israel, will be as much as possible restored. It is generally known that the finest pieces of art in sculpture, castings and paintings, described in this work were transported by the order of Bonaparte to Paris, wether [sic] they will be suffered to remain there, time only will develop. (215/167)
It is as if the novel depicts the early nineteenth century as organizing the disparate traditions of various nations and providing a shared global history. However, the novel expresses anxiety as to whether this history will remain accessible: “time only will develop.” If the novel exhibits anxiety about cultural history, it suggests that the origins of democracy, trade, and labor regulation, which he finds in Hamburg and Leipzig and the Hanseatic cities, provide a firmer political foundation. Lutyens’s emphasis tends to be on the enlightened features of the Hanseatic city governments in particular (Lutyens was himself from Hamburg), whose political and economic liberalism are shown to precede the arrival of the Napoleonic code. While the novel does not offer an entirely rosy picture of the German states, it does allow Hütter in his afterword to treat the restoration of pre-Napoleonic central Europe as a positive development.
In interpreting Hütter’s Washington dialogue, I have suggested that Hütter saw a community of like-minded readers/consumers as the potential foundation for a utopian period of political consensus that would reemerge after the Revolution of 1800. By printing a pamphlet about Washington and asking his buyers to sell it for him, Hütter was building a public sphere that would celebrate the ideal of free circulation represented by American emigration and the Revolution. Fifteen years later, Hütter was living in the Republican-controlled nation that he had desired, but his political vision became more nuanced as he came to understand the liabilities of free circulation. While Moses Nathan Israel also celebrates the value of mobility, it tends toward a reduction of geographical space to the scale of the family and situates the right to free circulation within history rather than viewing it from a timelessly classical vantage point.
As he moved from printing a dialogue to printing novels, Hütter was placing the American Revolution within a history of the present that might record and preserve “the old order of things” as revolution and counterrevolutions disrupted local culture. In his “Memorandum” concluding the novel, Hütter draws attention to the artwork described in the text not to highlight the circulation of art through ekphrasis, but to catalogue German and Italian art that had been displaced to France. Hütter saw cultural artifacts as tokens of memory and political capital, as signified by Hebe’s cup or Washington’s portrait, or for that matter by the text of Moses Nathan Israel itself, part of which (as he explains) “had been lost on the route for upwards of one year,” probably due to the War of 1812 (257/167). Hütter recognized that histories that had been lost or thought to be of little value (such as those of the German city-states) might now be circulated to an appreciative audience. At a moment when the French Revolution had lost its luster and when American Anglophobia was at a high point, Hütter thought that the local cultures of central Europe might be valuable tokens in the currency of political affiliation. But he also saw that the value of the American Revolution remained constant. During a period of turmoil in the United States and still more in Europe, Hütter invited retellings of American independence amid the shifts in political alignment following the French Revolution.
I gratefully acknowledge the excellent feedback from the editors of this volume and from my colleague Betsy Klimasmith, as well as the support of a Reese Fellowship to study Hütter from the American Antiquarian Society. All translations from the German are mine; the original language will not be quoted unless it is relevant to the argument.
1. Washingtons Ankunft in Elisium: Eine dialogisirte Skizze von einem Bewunderer des erblaßten Helden; Nebst einingen Gedichten den Zeitläuften gemäs. Allen unverfälschten republicanischen Americanern gewidmet (Lancaster, PA: printed by Christian Jacob Hütter, 1800) 3. Hereafter my translation is cited parenthetically. For a complete translation, see my “Christian Jacob Hütter’s Washington: An Introduction, Commentary, and Translation of the Work,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 60, nos. 2–3 (2015): 293–331.
2. The date of distribution is surmised from Hütter’s announcements in his newspaper, Der Lancaster Correspondent (hereafter LC) 66 (23 August 1800): 1.
3. The authoritative source of information on Hütter’s life is Hermann Wellenreuther’s “Printer of a New Generation.” I am grateful to Professor Wellenreuther for sharing his unpublished draft with me.
4. Robert Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 29, no. 1 (January 1972): 49–80.
5. Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution: A Sociohistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-Century Political Thinking, trans. B. A. Uhlendorf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 25.
6. LC 40 (22 February 1800): 1.
7. Ibid. 78 (15 November 1800): 1.
8. Christopher Dolmetsch, German Press of the Shenandoah Valley (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1984), 58.
9. Ward’s bibliography represents a signal accomplishment in a century-long tradition of scholarship (dating to the ethnic historians of the 1890s) committed to constructing an admittedly slight tradition of native German American writing by “weed[ing] out” writings of European origin from writings produced in the United States (see Robert Elmer Ward, A Bio-Bibliography of German-American Writers, 1670–1970 [White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1985], xii).
Such studies preceded the development of Atlanticist approaches and in fact are profoundly opposed to transatlantic textual analysis insofar as they assume that only indigenously produced works merit Americanists’ attention. Folklorists meanwhile have assumed, along related lines, that German American writing (rather than book buying) becomes worthy of attention only insofar as “Pennsylvania Deutsch” became an indigenous folk tradition with a literature, if not a language, of its own.
10. See especially Liam Riordan’s excellent synthesis Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
11. Deutschlands Literarisches Amerikabild, ed. Alexander Ritter (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1977).
12. Note that Jürgen Habermas’s more dialectical model assumes that the marketplace, with its “interested,” for-profit system for distributing information, also gave rise to the “disinterested” public sphere (see Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989], 21).
13. In defending a liberal ideal of revolution, Hannah Arendt observes that an insistence on the right of mobility is the most foundational negative liberty (Arendt, On Revolution [New York: Penguin, 1964], 32).
14. In the introduction and translation of Washington in Amerikastudien/American Studies, as cited above, I erroneously underreported the number of buyers and copies sold, based on my imperfect reading of Hütter’s sales ledger. In the meantime I have benefited from the German manuscript reading skills of Alexander Lambrow, who expertly and patiently transcribed the entire ledger for me. The ledger is in the Northampton County [Pennsylvania] Genealogical and Historical Society Archives, call number 658.87M554. Its contents are briefly discussed in Hermann Wellenreuther, Citizens in a Strange Land: A Study of German-American Broadsides (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 25–30. Wellenreuther and James Green identified the ledger as Hütter’s.
15. Carl Robert Keyes, “History Prints, Newspaper Advertisements, and Cultivating Citizen Consumers: Patriotism and Partisanship in Marketing Campaigns in the Era of the Revolution,” American Periodicals 24, no. 2 (2014): 145–85.
16. Some of this may be attributable to the remarkably poor state of German-language newspaper preservation. The Clarence Brigham correspondence at the American Antiquarian Society from the 1920s suggests that some of these newspapers had been destroyed during the First World War. At the present time, a small part of the remaining German-language serials have been digitized, with lone surviving issues scattered over many libraries. I draw mostly on the issues held in the American Antiquarian Society and the Lancaster Historical Society.
17. Jacob Dietrick, A Catalog of Jacob D. Dietrick’s Circulating Library Consisting of History, Voyages, Novels, &c. now kept in Hagers-Town adjoining his Book-, Paint-, & Hardware-Store (Hagerstown, MD: printed by John Gruber, 1801). My thanks to Jill Craig of the Western Maryland Public Library for digitizing the only surviving copy of the catalogue for me.
18. Amerikanische Staatsbothe 151 (19 November 1800): 3. Another issue at stake in this dispute was the procurement of lucrative state printing contracts. Hütter fired back with an equally puerile retort: “Where did you learn the noble printing trade? Didn’t you learn your alphabet from a 1527 Catholic book attacking heretics and Indians?” (LC 79 [22 November 1800]: 3).
19. Wellenreuther, “Printer of a New Generation,” 3–4.
20. Der Amerikanische Staatsbothe 151 (19 November 1800): 3.
21. LC 42 (8 March 1800): 1.
22. Ibid. 66 (23 August 1800): 1. That fall, Hütter also began printing Helmbold’s advertisements for his copperplate engravings.
23. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 83–84.
24. On Schubart’s republicanism, see Jeffrey L. High, “Introduction: Why Is This Schiller [Still] in the United States?,” in Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance, ed. Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2011), 2–4. According to his ledger, Hütter sold two volumes of the Teutsche Chronik to Mathew Carey in January 1800. It must be noted that Schubart’s “Kaplied” did not overtly protest the sale; on the contrary, it prepared the soldiers to fight. Schubart apparently wrote the song in a compromise gesture after a lengthy prison sentence.
25. LC 66 (23 August 1800): 1. See Wesley Craven’s contention that “among a people who even today can recall only with difficulty the exact date on which their constitution was officially adopted, ‘the spirit of ’76’ was destined to remain a slogan calling first of all for unity. . . . The answer given to that question was shaped in part by the very incompleteness of the union achieved in 1776” (Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers [New York: New York University Press, 1956], 74).
26. LC 57 (21 June 1800): 1.
27. Hütter retorted by declaring that he had been born in Saxe-Gotha, and that he became an American “not by chance but by choice” (LC 123 [26 September 1801]: 2).
28. Der Amerikanische Staatsbothe 131 (2 July 1800): 1. This narrative is numbered into mock-biblical verses. The chronicle begins when Parisian fishwives guillotine King Ludwig and replace him with a five-headed Demon (after the famous print made for the XYZ Affair). An epistolary correspondence between Adams and Washington follows, as the sitting president summons the latter from his “peaceful abode” (friedlichen Auffenthalt; it is unclear here whether this Washington is alive or dead, the resting place in question Mount Vernon or the grave).
29. For example, Eliza; or, The Pattern of Women: A Moral Romance (Lancaster, PA: Hütter, 1802) and Weibliche Standhaftigkeit (Easton, PA: Hütter, 1809), the latter a translation of a now-lost English novel, Female Constancy; or The History of Miss Arabella Waldegrave (1769).
30. Oliver Scheiding has recently produced an outstanding electronic edition of the novel (http://etext.obama-institute.de/wp-content/uploads/Lutyens_Life_and_Adventures_1815_Final_20_04_2016.pdf). All quotations are taken from this edition. I will indicate two sets of page numbers: first, the 1815 edition; second, Scheiding’s edition (e.g., 26/15). The only other book that appeared under Lutyens’s name is a German-language 1796 Hamburg text addressed to potential German emigrants to Pennsylvania. While a promotional work, Lutyens’s portrait of America is not entirely sanguine; for example, he warns his readers of the dangers of dealing with land agents and states that in no country is land ownership more disputed or more difficult than in the United States, such that even a firsthand survey of the land cannot protect buyers (see Etwas über den gegenwärtigen Zustand der Auswanderungen und Ansiedlungen im Staate von Pennsylvanien in Nord-Amerika, besonders in Ansehung der Deutschen [Hamburg: Carl Ernst Bohn, 1796], 22–23).
31. The word Vaterland appears eight times in Hütter’s text. The patria is usually male, rather than female, in the German language. A useful set of essays exploring the implications of these and other terms during a period in which no unified German “nation” existed in any political sense is Volk—Nation—Vaterland: Studien zum 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Ulrich Herrmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996).
32. When Hütter reprinted the letter from Bonneville de Ayral calling for Napoleon’s consulate to be passed on to his heirs, he appended the simple headline: “Traurig” (Sad), LC 168 (7 August 1802): 2.
33. Hütter is thought to have reprinted a popular 1602 text about Ahasuerus, entitled Wahre Geschichte oder Lebensbeschreibung des immer in der Welt herum wandernden Juden (Hellertown, 1810).
34. Scheiding, The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel, ix.
35. On American self-orphaning narratives, see Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 6.
36. Anne Dalke, “Original Vice: The Political Implications of Incest in the Early American Novel,” Early American Literature 23, no. 2 (1988): 188.