“Foreword to the Revised Edition” in “Henry Newman’s Salzburger Letterbooks”
Foreword to the Reissue
Henry Newman, a Massachusetts-born convert to Anglicanism, spent most of his professional life in England. Born in 1670 and orphaned at a young age, he moved to England in the early 1700s, where from 1708 until 1743 he was the secretary for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK).1
Newman’s employer, the SPCK, was founded in 1698 with the intent to provide ecclesiastical libraries to poor Anglican priests in America and England. The group’s mission expanded in the early decades of the eighteenth century to run charity schools in England and to promote the “Protestant Interest” worldwide. To meet that second goal, the SPCK developed an ecumenical network of like-minded Protestants in the Atlantic world, including corresponding members in German-speaking Protestant Europe. It was through this continental network that the SPCK became involved in supporting the Salzburger exiles in the early 1730s.
In October 1731 the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, Leopold Anton von Firmian, expelled all Protestants from his kingdom, giving landowners three months to leave, while the landless had only eight days.2 The expulsions came in waves as Jesuits in Salzburg identified Protestant individuals and families over the next few years; in total about twenty thousand people poured out of the alpine territory into Swabia and Bavaria, in modern southern Germany.3
Thousands of Salzburgers arrived at Augsburg, where Samuel Urlsperger served as the senior pastor of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Ministry, and he was the connection between the SPCK, Henry Newman, and the Salzburgers. Urlsperger had served as a minister to the German Lutheran congregation in London for two years (1709–11) and became one of the SPCK’S corresponding members on returning to the continent. The earliest letter that Newman included in his Salzburger files is from Urlsperger, dated April 1732, acknowledging an SPCK donation. Several of the newly formed Georgia Trustees were also members of the SPCK, and through this connection they began to recruit Salzburgers for the new colony. This project of caring for and settling Salzburgers in America forms the bulk of the correspondence that Henry Newman copied into his SPCK Salzburger letterbooks.
George Fenwick Jones, the original editor of this volume, maintained Henry Newman’s organization of sorting letters into either “outward” or “inward” groups, covering the years 1732–39 and 1732–35 respectively. While this had the advantage of preserving the record as it was produced, the structure made it difficult to follow a conversation and to track issues through the correspondence. Additionally, the printed volume’s index did not always capture subjects of modern interest, such as women, family, and the environment. The new online digital version, with full search capabilities, should help readers and scholars overcome the book’s structure and mine this rich archive.
At the heart of Henry Newman’s letters is a network and exchange between continental Germans, British philanthropists, and people in America. Cultures, religion, trade goods, and people moved in complex dealings spanning the English Channel and the Atlantic. As such, the workings of the SPCK in its aid to the Salzburgers intersect a number of historical themes, including colonization, empire, migration, Protestant philanthropy, religion, women, families, Native Americans, and transatlantic economy and culture.
The Georgia Salzburgers project left a rich archive yet remains relatively understudied. In addition to Newman’s letterbooks, George Fenwick Jones transcribed and edited the eighteen-volume diaries of the Salzburgers’ Lutheran pastors, known as the Detailed Reports, which has also been digitized as part of the Georgia Open History Library. Jones’s intimate knowledge of these sources contributed to his 1984 narrative history The Salzburger Saga: Religious Exiles and Other Germans along the Savannah. In 2015 James Van Horn Melton published a study of these American Salzburgers, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier, which traced their migration experience and their role in the controversy in Trustee Georgia over the ban on slavery.4
As an organization with a zeal for the “Protestant Interest” broadly defined, the SPCK was known for its philanthropic role supporting non-Anglican Protestants. While not specifically about the Salzburgers, Sugiko Nishikawa’s article “The SPCK in Defense of Protestant Minorities in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe” explored the SPCK’S ecumenical partnerships and activities with continental Protestants, such as the Augsburg Lutheran pastor, Samuel Urlsperger.5 Similarly, Daniel L. Brunner’s Halle Pietists in England: Anthony William Boehm and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge studied how the SPCK partnered with German Lutherans to promote Protestantism around the globe, beginning before the Salzburger expulsion.6 In a similar vein, Alexander Pyrges published on religious networks, especially those of German Pietists and Anglicans in the Atlantic world.7 These partnerships resulted in the SPCK supporting Protestant missions, including a German Lutheran mission in the Danish colony of Tranquebar, in modern India.8 The SPCK was able to respond relatively quickly to the Salzburgers’ plight in large part because it had previously formed these Protestant networks.
This web of the SPCK and Lutheran Germans not only promoted global Protestantism but also helped expand the British Empire. The role of religion in building empire has been a subject of study for decades, yet there remains relatively little work on the ecumenical partnerships that reached beyond Anglicanism.9 The digitization of Henry Newman’s Salzburger Letterbooks should encourage more work in this field, as the correspondence recorded the way the SPCK exerted power in the Atlantic world. For example, we can see how the network influenced the Georgia Trustees to change colonial policy in support of the Salzburgers’s desires. The letters also detailed how continental Germans supported the British colonies, as when the Augsburg banker Christian von Münch and the Pietist Francke Foundations in Halle worked with the SPCK to move capital and goods to America. Renate Wilson’s Pious Traders in Medicine traced the flow of Francke’s medicines from Halle, through London, to the colonies, but very little has been produced about von Münch and the flow of capital.10
The role of women and the significance of families in the Atlantic world is also a growing field for research.11 One such instance, Ben Marsh’s study of women in colonial Georgia, focused mostly on the experience of Anglo-Americans.12 Much room is left for work on German women. While it is true that women are difficult to find in the Letterbooks, they are present as charitable donors and as Salzburger migrants. The correspondence also documents families who settled in Georgia, as well as the important role familial connections played in the Salzburger project.
While the time period of coverage is relatively brief, Henry Newman’s Salzburger Letterbooks is an important source for understanding early Georgia and the SPCK. With its documentation on the relationships and projects conducted within a far-reaching network of philanthropists and colonizers, the online digitized version promises opportunities for greater insights in the eighteenth-century Anglo-German Atlantic world.
KAREN AUMAN
Notes
1. Leonard W. Cowie, Henry Newman, An American in London, 1708–1743 (London: SPCK, 1956).
2. The decree was later modified to give landowners until April 1732 to leave.
3. Mack Walker, The Salzburger Transaction: Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
4. James Van Horn Melton, Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
5. Sugiko Nishikawa, “The SPCK in Defense of Protestant Minorities in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 56, no. 4 (October 2005): 730–48.
6. Daniel L. Brunner, Halle Pietists in England: Anthony William Boehm and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993).
7. Alexander Pyrges, “Religion in the Atlantic World: The Ebenezer Communication Network, 1732–1828,” in Pietism in Germany and North America, 1680–1820: Transmissions of Dissent, ed. Hartmut Lehmann, James V. H. Melton, and Jonathan Strom, (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 51–70. See also Alexander Pyrges, “German Immigrants at the Ebenezer Settlement in Colonial Georgia, 1734–1850: Integration and Separatism,” (PhD Dissertation, Kansas State University, 2000).
8. Edward E. Andrews, “Tranquebar: Charting the Protestant International in the British Atlantic and Beyond,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 74, no. 1 (January 2017), 3–34.
9. Two foundational texts are Rowan Strong’s Anglicanism and the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Carla Pestana’s Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Both argue for the central importance of Protestant religious identity, as a key factor in English global expansion.
10. Renate Wilson, Pious Traders in Medicine: A German Pharmaceutical Network in Eighteenth-Century North America (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
11. Julie Hardwick, Sarah M. S. Pearsall, and Karin Wulf, “Introduction: Centering Families in Atlantic Histories,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 70, no. 2 (April 2013).
12. Ben Marsh, Georgia’s Frontier Women: Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.