Printing and Bible Publishing in Early America

by John Perry
(© 2000 Broadman & Holman Publishers—Nashville, Tennessee)

Strictly speaking, the Bible published in Germantown, seven miles north Philadelphia, in 1743 was not the first Bible of any kind produced in the Western Hemisphere. That distinction went to Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Upbiblum God, a translation into the Nantucket Indian language published eighty years earlier in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by John Eliot. A dedicated missionary, Eliot saw value in the printed word (as Gutenberg and Luther had seen it) for imparting the Scriptures – even to a race considered unschooled and savage.

The first Bible in a Western language was printed by Christoph Saur, who set up his Germantown shop in 1738 and began work on the Bible in 1740. Completing the thousand-copy first edition of Die Heilige Schrift, the Holy Bible in Luther’s translation, took three years, hand-setting every letter with type imported from Germany and printing four pages at a time. Saur died in 1758; five years later his son and namesake, who anglicized the name to Christopher Sower, had the text reset and produced a second edition of 2,000.

The Gun-Wad Bible

In the momentous year of 1776, a third edition of the Sower Bible was printed, this time in a run of 3,000 copies. But most of them became casualties of the war that by then was raging throughout the country. Trouble had been brewing in America for years as colonists chafed under the oppressive and unreasonable rule of King George III. The convening of the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September 1774 heightened the tension between America and England; then, with the battles of Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, the American Revolution began. On July 4, 1776, the colonies unilaterally declared themselves to be independent of British rule. By late summer of the next year, British soldiers had occupied Philadelphia: as a prosperous trade center with a population approaching 25,000, it was an important strategic target.

On the morning of October 4, 1777, General George Washington led a force of 11,000 in an attack on 9,000 British soldiers stationed at Germantown to hold Philadelphia against the colonists. In preparation for the battle they knew was inevitable, British forces commandeered the pages of Sower’s Bible for use as gun wadding. Of the 3,000 Bibles from the third edition, only a handful survived, to be known thereafter as The Gun-Wad Bible.

Disoriented by heavy fog, Washington’s troops fired on their own men. The Americans withdrew, leaving Germantown and Philadelphia to the British. However, the Loyalist support that English officers expected from the citizens never materialized, and the two cities eventually proved to be of no strategic value.

The Bible in English

In 1782, the year after the British surrender at Yorktown, the first American Bible in English was published by another Philadelphia printer, Robert Aitken. The Pennsylvania Assembly advanced Aitken £150 for the project, and on September 10, 1782, Congress recommended this edition of the Bible to residents of the United States “as subservient to the interest of religion and progress of arts in this country.”

There had been serious discussions about whether the official language of the new United States should be English or German. Many settlers, including thousands of Philadelphia residents, were of German ancestry and spoke German. Even King George III himself was German. His grandfather, George II, and great-grandfather, George I were both born in Germany and were native German speakers; though George I ruled as king for thirteen years, he never learned to speak English. But English in America prevailed, and in 1801, Christopher Sower published his own Bible in English.

Printing in Philadelphia

Long before the Revolutionary War, Philadelphia had established itself as the commercial and political center of America. As early as 1723 it attracted a seventeen-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin who was eager to escape from his oppressive brother in Boston. Franklin was already an experienced printer and writer, having run his brother James’s printing shop while James was in jail for writing satirical pieces about prominent Bostonians. Young Ben had also already published incisive satire of his own under the penname Silence Dogwood.

After serving an apprenticeship for two years in England, Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1726 and founded a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. Biographer Ralph Ketcham summarizes Franklin’s remarkable printing career from that point: In 1732 Poor Richard’s Almanack began, by which time Franklin “did most of the public printing of the province. He also became clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly and postmaster of Philadelphia, operated a bookshop, and established partnerships with printers from Nova Scotia to Antigua. By 1748, at the age of 42, Franklin was able to retire and live comfortably for 20 years off the income from his printing business, managed by a partner.”

Common Sense

Revolutionary patriots were quick to see the power of the printed word in swaying public opinion. One noteworthy example among many was a modest 50-page pamphlet published in January, 1776. It was written by an Englishman named Thomas Paine who
sailed to America in middle age in hopes of improving his fortune. He had worked as a
stay-maker, and arrived in Philadelphia in the autumn of 1774 with a few shillings and a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. Eventually he got a job working for printer Robert Aitken (whose English Bible would be out a few years later), and edited The Pennsylvania Magazine, a modest periodical that soon became a clarion in the cause of independence.

According to historical novelist Howard Fast, Paine was “partisan, decisive, and, above all, articulate; he was a voice that might have gone unheeded in another time, but that was welcomed and listened to in Philadelphia of 1775 and 1776. Poems, articles, exhortations poured from his pen. The idea of independence was in the air. Others debated it, considered it judiciously and carefully; Paine embraced it...”

Paine had the ability to sense the feelings and frustrations of the colonists and express them clearly, articulately, and compellingly. His little pamphlet, called “Common Sense,” created a sensation, disseminating ideas on a scale that without the speed and economy of printing would have been impossible. It was what the people wanted to hear: a clear, impassioned expression of their own hopes and desires. Estimates vary, but “Common Sense” probably sold somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 copies – and this in a total population of three million, a large number of whom were illiterate.

Paine repeated his success a few years after returning home to England, where he wrote the Rights of Man, a defense of the original democratic ideals, similar to those in America, that sparked the French Revolution. With the high price of three shillings, British authorities expected the first volume to give them little trouble, yet more than 50,000 copies were sold within weeks. Sales of the second volume were even more successful; Paine had to flee England to avoid arrest.

The Federalist

There was yet another two-volume work crucial to the development of the United States during the difficult years between independence and the ratification of the Constitution. In that time between the surrender at Yorktown and the inauguration of President Washington, America struggled to determine exactly what kind of country it was. One of the chief arguments was over how much power the federal government should have relative to the power of the individual states.

A constitutional convention was called to draft a permanent replacement for the Articles of Confederation under which the government had been operating since 1781. The Articles had established a basic federal structure but had no provision for a chief executive, a judiciary, national tax collection, or other essential basic components.

The convention began in May, 1787, but by the end of the year, only three states – Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey – had ratified the new Constitution. The biggest bone of contention was over how much control the central government should be granted.

To make the case for the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, writing anonymously, produced a series of articles entitled The Federalist, running in New York papers between October 1787 and April 1788. The complete set was then collected and published in two volumes. The minutely detailed, closely reasoned, carefully considered text made a compelling argument for the federal government as outlined in the working draft of the Constitution The Federalist was a vital element in marshaling public opinion in favor of the proposed federal system, which led to the replacement of the Articles of Confederation by the Constitution on March 4, 1789. The following month, George Washington was sworn in as President.

Books In America

From Poor Richard’s Almanack to “Common Sense” and The Federalist, books were tightly woven into the fabric of America from its earliest formative years. To a considerable extent, religious and political freedom were as much products of the printing press as they were of patriots and legislatures. The press tied the sparsely settled communities of the country together behind one great idea or movement in ways nothing else could have done. Newspapers were the conduits through which encouragement, enlightenment, and the fire of liberty spread through the colonies. Franklin, Paine, Hamilton and many others recognized the power of the press and used it masterfully. Sower, Aitken, and other printers and publishers saw that power (and the business potential) as well, and responded to it with more papers, more presses, and more innovations.

For the next 40 years, Philadelphia remained the cultural and political center of the United States. It was the national capital for ten years, until Washington City (as it was then called) was built up enough from the Potomac swampland for President John Adams and the Congress to move there. Philadelphia was where the first Catholic Bible in America was printed (1790), and the first Hebrew Bible, the Biblia Hebraica (1814).

A New Colossus

The printing press Christopher Sower and his contemporaries used was not much different from the press Gutenberg had developed three centuries before. But by the first years of the nineteenth century, changes began that would make books cheaper and more plentiful than ever, and begin the transformation of the humble printer’s shop into an industrial colossus.

Since ancient times, paper had been made laboriously by hand, one sheet at a time. In 1803 a machine was invented that manufactured paper in a continuous roll. In 1822 the world’s first powered press, turned by drive belts running off a steam engine, was operated in Philadelphia by Daniel Treadwell. His design was a commercial failure, but another by competitor Isaac Adams met with success a few years later.

Meanwhile, in England, Friedrich König developed a revolutionary design that printed the page on both sides at once, using a pair of giant rollers to press paper onto the type. This design enabled printers to produce finished sheets eight times as fast as older machines.

Back in Philadelphia, the first rotary press – allowing sheets to be fed and printed continuously – was installed by the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1846. That design was dramatically improved in 1865 by William Bullock, who combined several earlier developments in a rotary press that printed both sides at once on a continuous roll of paper. This became the prototype for the rotary presses found in newspaper pressrooms throughout the world today.

The Torch is Passed

As the printing industry began its metamorphosis, the printing shop of Christopher Sower was changing as well. Around 1801, the year Sower’s first English Bible was published, Solomon W. Conrad established a printing and bookselling firm in Philadelphia. About four years later, he formed a partnership with Emmor Kimber at 93 Market Street. A few blocks down the street, at number 237, Thomas Kimber and John Richardson began their publishing company in 1813.

By 1815, Kimber & Conrad and Kimber & Richardson had become Kimber & Sharpless: Thomas Kimber and Blakely Sharpless bought the two existing publishers and merged them into their own.

Also by that time, Christopher Sower’s business had been merged into Kimber & Sharpless as well. After three generations, the historic Sower company no longer had a separate identity. However, its rich legacy and commitment to excellence would fuel the passion for God’s Word of publishers for the centuries to come.