A Rediscovered Unique Revolutionary War Broadside

 

The long display case in the center of the Lititz Moravian Church Museum’s front room contains rare items: a letter from Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf, the ledger from Lititz’s community store in the 1760s and 1770s, architectural drawings of the community’s earliest buildings. But an equally rare treasure hid there in plain sight: a yellowed broadside (a single- sheet announcement, typically printed on one side) circulated by Lancaster County’s Committee of Correspondence and Observation on July 11, 1775. Over 235 years old, the broadside’s age lends it distinction enough. But the real importance of this document has only just been discovered: no other copy of this 1775 broadside exists in any other collection in the world. It is unique, the only copy to have survived.

Lancaster County’s Committee of Correspondence and Observation, the ad-hoc group of local leaders who gathered in 1774 by request of the first Continental Congress, was responsible for many matters. The Committee needed to convince or compel men to join in militia companies; it also needed to figure out how to deal with those who would not bear arms. Part of this effort, the Lititz broadside asks those whose “religious Scruples” prevent them from joining the militia to “contribute” funds toward the “unavoidable Expenses of the Public.” The broadside reminds those individuals who refuse to bear arms that, if they “keep their Money in their Pockets,” they in effect “throw those Burthens upon a Part of the Community, which, in a Cause that affects all, should be borne by all.”

This 1775 plea did not solve the difficult problem of dealing with individuals who would not bear arms. This issue continued to trouble Pennsylvania and led to the 1777 Test and Militia Acts, which punished severely those who refused to swear loyalty to the state of Pennsylvania or to associate with a militia company. Many Lititz brethren refused both demands and, in October 1777, nine single brothers and four married brothers “were carried off” by “six militia men, fully armed.” Others, however, conformed, and the deep division made it impossible to offer communion in the Lititz Moravian community from June to November.

Lancaster’s revolutionary committee issued many broadsides in 1775 and 1776 to inform and cajole the local population. Nine others have been identified: the Lititz broadside makes ten. Some were printed simultaneously in English-language and German-language versions (200 copies of each). A fragment of the German-language printing of the July 11, 1775, broadside exists in the Library of Congress. But no trace of the English-language version survived. Neither Evans’ massive American Bibliography, nor the National Index of American Imprints Through 1800 (its successor), nor their recent digital versions, mention it. The standard reference tools that aim to record every item published in America before 1800, that is, have overlooked this broadside entirely. When recently alerted to its existence, archivists at the Library of Congress and the American Antiquarian Society (the foremost authority on pre-1800 imprints) described it as “amazing” and as “a treasure” of “extreme rarity.”

With the help of librarians at the American Antiquarian Society, there is now a North American Imprints Program (NAIP) record for the July 11, 1775, broadside. The NAIP catalog contains over 40,000 records of 17th- and 18th-century imprints and identifies the locations of over 120,000 extant copies of these publications. This record ensures that historians around the world will learn of the Lititz broadside and will know that it resides in the Lititz Moravian Congregation’s Museum. The 1775 broadside can now rejoin conversations about the earliest days of the Revolutionary War and its debates, still vital today, about liberty of conscience—and remind people that these battles were fought in places such as Lititz.

by Scott Paul Gordon, Lehigh University, CSJ, Fall 2011