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The Business Activities of Eric Bollmann: An International Business Promoter, 1797-1821: Part I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Fritz Redlich
Fritz Redlich
Affiliation:
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Extract

Eric Bollmann, a Hanoverian by birth who lived in this country from 1796 to 1814, is all but forgotten today. But about 150 years ago he was widely known on two continents. To be sure, this was not owing to his extensive business activities but to some daring coups during the years of the French Revolution. In 1792, when the Jacobins came into power in Paris, Bollmann spirited the Minister of War, Narbonne, out of France and shortly afterwards tried to liberate Lafayette, then held as a prisoner by the Austrians in the fortress of Olmutz. After this attempt had failed, Bollmann came to the United States and established himself as a business man in Philadelphia.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 17 , Issue 5 , November 1943 , pp. 81 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1943

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References

1 Dated Jan. 30, 1798, 31 pages. Reprinted in Kapp, Friedrich, Justus Erich Bollmann, Ein Lebensbild aus zwei Welttheilen (Berlin, 1880), pp. 286CrossRefGoogle Scholar ff. This book is a collection of letters and documents relating to Bollmann and is to be considered as a primary source. (The German of the circular is excellent but of course old-fashioned; modern English terms are used here.) An earlier circular letter of the Bollmanns of 1797 seems to be among the Varnhagen papers in the State Library in Berlin. It would be desirable for an American library specializing in this field, such as the Baker Library, to have a photostat made and bring it to America, when that is again possible.

2 Bollmann uses the words ueberlisten, uebervorteilen, and anfuehren.

3 How justified these warnings were is indicated by a story told by one of Bollmann's contemporaries, Buck, Charles N., in his Memoirs (Philadelphia, 1941), p. 60.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., pp. 54, 55, and 58.

5 Kapp. op. cit., pp. 3.17 ff.

6 Dec, 1803 (Kapp., op. cit., p 326). Bollmann at that time also corresponded with a firm in Konstanz: Beutter, Rahn & Vanotti. He seems to have imported plate glass for mirrors, John Jacob Astor financing the transaction. (Astor's interest in the import of glass and glassware from Germany is known. See Porter, Kenneth Wiggins, Astor, John Jacob, Business Man, Cambridge, 1931, vol. i, pp. 119 and 121.)Google Scholar