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Book Reviews
| Souls for Sale: Two German Redemptioners Come to Revolutionary America: The Life Stories of John Frederick Whitehead and Johann Carl Büttner. Edited by Susan E. Klepp, Farley Grubb, and Anne Pfaelzer de Ortiz. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. xvi, 272 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $75; paper, $25.)
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Souls for Sale is a companion book to The Infortunate: The Voyage and Adventures of William Moraley, an Indentured Servant (ed. Klepp and Billy G. Smith, 2nd ed., 2005), the latter the tale of fortunes and misfortunes of a young Englishman indentured as a servant in the Delaware Valley in the eighteenth century, the former the stories of two German speakers whose lives happen to intersect when each took passage as a redemptioner on the ship Sally, which arrived in Philadelphia in 1773. John Frederick Whitehead paid his fare debts by contracting as a servant in Pennsylvania, where he met his wife, had children, and worked as a weaver until his death in 1815. Johann Carl Büttner, too, redeemed the debts he incurred for the voyage from Rotterdam to Philadelphia as an indentured servant. He served in New Jersey and, after many adventures during the American Revolution, returned to Europe and settled in Senftenberg in the Lausitz in Saxony. Whitehead's and Büttner's stories broaden by two examples the small circle of autobiographies of ordinary men at a time when writing about oneself was mostly limited to men, and only a few women, of elite status. |
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Whitehead and Büttner came from different geographical and social backgrounds and were very different kinds of men, even though both of them came to Philadelphia as teenage redemptioners, originally recruited, but ultimately not chosen, as servants of the United Netherlands Chartered East India Company (VOC) and served as indentured servants during the American Revolution. Well after their respective experiences in the very early American republic each man recorded his recollection—Whitehead in middle age and Büttner after a full life as a surgeon. The one (Whitehead's) was produced privately in English, the other (Büttner's) in German as a print publication in 1824 that saw a second, expanded edition in 1828. Souls for Sale presents Whitehead's life story for the first time in print and pairs it with a reprint of the abbreviated 1915 English translation, Narrative of Johann Carl Büttner in the American Revolution. |
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The title, Souls for Sale, focuses attention on the coercive aspect of contract labor that lured many a young, single, adventurous, or down-on-his-luck German-speaking man to service in foreign countries, even though Whitehead and Büttner signed up with the VOC agents willingly, even eagerly, and even though the redemptioners' respective times as indentured servants do not feature most prominently in their life stories. The title does not so much reflect the richness of Whitehead's and Büttner's reminiscences but more the interests of the editors, as is evident from the general introduction about German immigration to early America, which relies heavily on the largely quantitative work of Farley Grubb and includes a short discussion of the literary genre of (auto)biographies and relatively little about the political, economic, and cultural situation of the Delaware Valley in the revolutionary period (pp. 1–24). Some of the general background of the region finds its place in the more specific introductions to the two narratives, providing necessary context for modern, primarily English-speaking readers. The editors also provide some samples of primary-source materials that illustrate the biographers' lives through records they produced or that were similar in nature to the ones that would have existed in regard to their voyage to Philadelphia and their contracted service in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It is unfortunate, however, that the editors chose an example of a contract for the transatlantic crossing from 1803 (pp. 12–13) rather than one of those that have survived from the period closer to the 1760s and 1770s, when the Sally sailed; and that the reproduced indenture (pp. 15–16) is that of a dependent young woman rather than an extant one for a single young man. The three different introductions, notes, and bibliography indicate the primary audience for this book: mostly college and university students. |
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