The Leipzig World Fair of 1784 and the Mississippi Valley: How a map may have affected the settling of Southeast Missouri

A map of eastern North America with the boundaries of the United States in its first year of independence, from "1700s in America: Historical Genealogical Calendar or Yearbook of the Most Noteworthy Recent Worldwide Events for the 1784 Fair at Leipzig." This map was distributed at the 1784 World's Fair in Leipzig, Germany, and may have influenced people to immigrate to this region in America.

Courtesy of Southeast Missouri State University Press

On a wintry day in the early 1980s, Bob Keathley of Bernie, Mo., attended an estate sale near Lebanon, Tenn. The items being sold had been collected by a retired medical doctor who had traveled widely and accumulated a sizable collection of old and historical books. Robert Keathley, who had for years been interested in antiques, was attracted to a row of old books that were to be put up for sale at an upcoming auction.

One small and fragile item caught his attention, a book that measured approximately three by five inches and was printed in German. The book was entitled “General Historical Pocketbook or Summary of the Most Noteworthy Recent Worldwide Events Containing for 1784 the History of the North American Revolution,” generally shortened to the “1784 Calendar and Yearbook,” or in German, the “1784 Calendar oder Jahrbuch.”

The manuscript was written by M. Christian Sprengel, a professor of history at the University of Halle, and produced for the 1784 World Fair at Leipzig, which has evolved into one of the oldest trade fairs in the world. Sprengel’s motivation for writing this publication was the 1783 Treaty of Paris that concluded the American Revolution and announced to the world the independence of the United States of America. Writing for a broad German population, Sprengel said the American Revolution was “the most noteworthy event of our days.” Here, he wrote, “at the farthest end of a little-known, or at least hardly populated part of this world, in North America, a new powerful free state developed unexpectedly and quickly.”

Sprengel asserted everyone interested in human history must be interested in the story of people from different backgrounds and cultures “who leave [their] ploughs and start fighting for something nobler than the reasons which princes fight, not for glory, not for gain, but for the most holy rights of humanity, for freedom and security of one’s property.” Germans were interested in what was occurring in America, according to Sprengel, “despite the remoteness of the place of performance.” The idea of American diversity and democracy had motivated Sprengel, and the age and fragility of the manuscript motivated Keathley. He was uncertain of the historical value of the small book, but he never forgot it.

A few years later, he traveled to California on a business trip and decided to take “the Sprengel” with him to see if he could find a book dealer who might provide information about it. In Los Angeles, he located just such a person, fluent in German and knowledgeable about German publishing. This gentleman impressed upon Keathley that the book was both scarce and important.

Upon his return to Missouri, Keathley contacted Library of Congress personnel who identified six microfiche copies of the book in the United States, all in the original German with no known translations.

At the time of Keathley’s acquisition of the manuscript, he owned the IXL Handle Company in Bernie, Mo. A long-time employee there told Keathley his in-laws, Heinz and Karin Dutt of St. Louis, were professional translators, and soon the entire manuscript was translated into English. In 2004, Southeast Missouri State University Press made the translated manuscript available with the title “1700s in America: Historical Genealogical Calendar or Yearbook of the Most Noteworthy Recent Worldwide Events for the 1784 Fair at Leipzig.”

One of the most interesting features of the book is a map of eastern North America with the boundaries of the United States in its first year of independence. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence, Newfoundland and the Bay of Fundy, west through the Great Lakes to the middle of the Mississippi River, and south to East and West Florida, Sprengel does his best to provide a geographical and cultural definition of the United States of America when it was a 1-year-old nation.

Sprengel’s description of this new nation is fascinating, as it reveals much about what German and European scholars did and did not know about this new nation. Clearly, Sprengel illustrates this new nation was large with a very promising future. He illustrates there was much available land, abundant lakes, rivers and water, a livable climate, neighbors who were democratic and known, and a vast Spanish frontier to the west full of mines and buffalo, forests, meadows and rivers. Sprengel did not put trading posts on the maps; thus, there is no Cape Girardeau or St. Louis or Chicago on the map, and thus, no worrisome concentrations of population.

The Sprengel map clearly identified the names and locations of the numerous Native American tribes. German scholars were knowledgeable about Native Americans in the 18th Century and viewed them in a different perspective than did American frontiersmen. There were no great concerns on that point; there seemed to be sufficient land and resources for all. The German scholars did not yet know the Osages.

Thus, the map was reassuring on all issues. Sprengel indicated the American Revolution “will have the strongest impact on Europe, and results that we hardly see yet today will be experienced most certainly by our descendants.”

That impact was fast and significant. International interest in the Mississippi Valley increased dramatically after 1784. It is impossible to measure the extent to which the distribution of the “Leipzig Yearbook” contributed to that interest. But, within the next two decades, there were dramatic changes in the Mississippi Valley and western North America. The Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1800 transferred the Spanish lands west of the Mississippi to the French, and the Louisiana Purchase Treaty of 1803 transferred Louisiana to the United States for approximately three cents per acre, doubling the size of the new nation in a single stroke. This new republic was suddenly one of the largest nations in the world.

Europeans with a copy of the “1784 Yearbook” must have been inclined to take a new look at the Mississippi Valley map and think about this new land and new nation. As conditions worsened in the German states in the early 19th Century, migration to America was more attractive, and the Germans came. They would change the history of the Mississippi Valley and all of North America. “The Leipzig World Fair Yearbook of 1784” and Bob Keathley of Bernie, Mo., are parts of that story.