Sauer, Christoph b. (?) early 1695; Ladenburg on the Neckar, Palatinate d. September 25, 1758; Germantown, Pennsylvania
Founder of the most influential German American printing house of the eighteenth century. As editor of the first commercially successful German-language newspaper in
North America and publisher of numerous pamphlets and broadsides, Christoph Sauer (also spelled Saur or Sower) became an opinion leader among German settlers in Pennsylvania and neighboring colonies.
Not only the elder Christoph Sauer, but his son and four of his grandsons worked as printers and publishers.The data on Sauer’s early life are fragmentary. Some time after the death of his father, a Reformed pastor, in 1701, the family removed from Feudenheim in the Palatinate to the Westphalian county of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. Due to the tolerationist policies of the ruling prince, the small territory of Wittgenstein was then regarded as a haven for religious separatists and radical pietists. Sauer initially worked as a tailor in Schwarzenau and was living in Laasphe when his only son, Christoph, was born in 1721. Three years later the family migrated to Pennsylvania and settled in Germantown. In letters to friends in Germany, Sauer described the conditions of the voyage and his circumstances in his new home. The positive tenor of his letters seems to have animated a number of people to follow him to America. In 1730 the family was disrupted when Sauer’s wife joined the monastic Ephrata community of the radical pietist and mystic Conrad Beissel; she returned to her husband only in 1744.
Sauer practiced a variety of trades and worked a farm in Lancaster County for several years before he succeeded in obtaining Fraktur type from Frankfurt am Main for a printing press that he had evidently constructed himself. The numerous works coming from his press beginning in 1738 included a yearly almanac (Der Hoch- Deutsch Americanische Calender [The High- German American Calender ]) and a newspaper (Der Hoch-Deutsch Pensylvanische Geschicht-Schreiber [The High-German Pennsylvanian Chronicler], later renamed Pensylvanische Berichte [Pennsylvanian Reports]).
First issued in 1739, the paper appeared monthly beginning in 1741 and bimonthly after 1756. Sauer repeatedly called upon his fellow Germans to become naturalized and exercise their political rights in provincial elections. In Pennsylvania politics he supported the pacifist position of the Quaker party during the colonial wars with France and advocated legislation to improve the conditions on immigrant vessels. When leading representatives of the colony set up so-called charity schools in the 1750s to further the linguistic and cultural assimilation of German immigrant children, Sauer’s consistent opposition was largely responsible for the failure of this ambitious and well-organized project. Worried by Sauer’s influence, Benjamin Franklin sponsored several rival newspaper publications, but all of them were short lived.A religious separatist, Sauer often criticized the Lutheran and Reformed clergy and attacked the ecumenical endeavors of Nikolaus von Zinzendorf and his Moravian brethren in a series of articles and pamphlets. His most ambitious project was the printing of the German Bible in 1743—the first Bible edition in a European language printed in North America (in the seventeenth century John Eliot had published the Bible in an Algonquian dialect). Lutheran and Reformed clergymen rejected the work because Sauer had included three apocryphal books from the radical pietist Berleburg Bible.
The second Christoph Sauer (1721— 1784) continued the printing business after his father’s death, renaming the newspaper Germantowner Zeitung (Germantown Paper) and reprinting the Germantown Bible in 1763 and 1776. By 1778 the Sauer enterprise comprised four printing presses, a paper mill, and a type foundry. The younger Sauer, who also officiated as a Dunker bishop, was sympathetic to American resistance against London’s taxation policies but rejected independence from Great Britain. During the British occupation of Philadelphia in the winter of 1777—1778 his sons Christoph III and Peter worked for the British.
For these reasons the second and third Christoph Sauer were indicted for high treason in 1778 and their substantial property confiscated. In 1784 Christoph III successfully petitioned Parliament for recognition as a Loyalist and compensation for damages. He later returned to North America and died in Baltimore, where his brother Samuel was operating a printing press, in 1799.Mark Haberlein
See also Ephrata; Germantown, Pennsylvania; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Pennsylvania; Pietism; Printing and Publishing
References and Further Reading
Durnbaugh, Donald F. “Christopher Sauer,
Pennsylvania German Printer: His Youth in Germany and Later Relations with Europe.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 82 (1958): 316—340.
------. “The Sauer Family: An American Printing Dynasty.” Yearbook of German- American Studies 23 (1988): 31—40.
Longenecker, Stephen L. The Christopher Sauers: Courageous Printers Who Defended Religious Freedom in Early America. Elgin, IL: Brethren, 1981.
Roeber, A. G. Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1993.
Steckel, William Reed. “Pietist in Colonial Pennsylvania: Christopher Sauer, Printer, 1738—1758.” PhD diss. Stanford University, 1949.