In 1802 Francis Bailey printed an edition of the landmark book that is the first American militia training manual.
This book had initally been published in Philadelphia by Melchior Steiner and Carl Cist, in 1779, on order of Congress. The great demand for this book by the state militias convinced Bailey to print his own edition.
This book was written by Baron von Steuben, the great Prussian officer who helped George Washington and the American troops win the Revolutionary War.
Bailey bound this Von Steuben manual with An Act for the Regulation of the Militia of the Commonwealth, which he also printed in 1802.
Five years later the Lancaster printer John R. Mathews printed this same two-part publication. Bailey's and Mathews' editions both include eight engraved illustration plates, as I show here.
P.S. Steiner and Cist are also remembered for printing the first broadside, German-language edition of the Declaration of Independence, in July 1776.
