Come early and enjoy dinner at MaGerks before our meeting!!

Live Meeting at MaGerks Fort Washington – 582 S. Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington, PA 19034

We recommend that you get here before 6:30pm to order your food and drinks before the lecture.  Bring $1 or $5 cash for our used book raffle and you could win a Revolutionary War book!!  Program begins around 7:15pm, Lecture around 7:30pm.

Christopher Ludwick left the Old World to settle in Philadelphia and, during the imperial crisis, became a fierce supporter of the Whig position. The broad objectives that motivated Ludwick to commit his personal blood and treasure to American resistance and, ultimately revolution, lie less in his embrace of colonial identity and more in his opposition to general oppression and hierarchical privilege. Ludwick remained grateful that Pennsylvania had welcomed him, foreigner though he was, and provided space where his personal industriousness and amicability made social mobility possible. In return, he dedicated his life to helping strangers realize their potential while jealously guarding against what he considered political despotism and economic predestination.

Shortly after Christopher Ludwick died in 1801, his friend, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, wrote the baker’s first biography. Rush opened his short treatise lamenting how history had once been limited to studying “men who occupied the first ranks of society.” But now, and “Happily for the world,” he continued, scholars had expanded their investigative scope to include “successful talents and virtue . . . [in] those classes of people who constitute the majority of mankind.” Rush designed his biographical sketch partly to unveil the positive impact religious instruction had on moral character, a microstudy using Christopher Ludwick to tell a wider story. Rush also aimed to inform contemporary middling men that personal work ethic, frugality and honesty could result in private wealth, independence and happiness. Yet the physician had at least one other motive for writing his account. He hoped “to rescue from the rapid oblivion of the grave, the name of a venerable and excellent citizen. Benjamin Rush’s work remains the foundation to any modern exploration into Christopher Ludwick.

Photo: Christopher Ludwig’s grave site at Saint Michael’s Lutheran Churchyard, Germantown, Pennsylvania. (Author’s Collection)

About Shawn David McGhee

Shawn is a historian of eighteenth-century America and professional educator in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. He earned his PhD from Temple University and lives in New Jersey with his wife and family.