half. On 1 July 1793, Caspar Voght transferred all activities to Sieveking, apart from the trade with America, and dedicated himself to other pursuits. Instead of concentrating on a specific sector of trade, Voght und Sieveking traded a wide range of goods, on the basis of a broad spectrum of clients. The focus of their import business was initially on the ports of the French Atlantic coast and of England, but already with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, ships of the firm from the ports of the American East Coast laden with tobacco, rice and indigo arrived in the Hanseatic city. Voght stated of himself: "Ich war der erste Hamburger Kaufmann, der aus Mocca Kaffee, aus Baltimore Toback, aus Surinam Kaffee, aus Afrika Gummi holte" ("I was the first Hamburg businessman to bring coffee from Mocha, tobacco from Baltimore, coffee from Suriname, rubber from Africa"). It was Georg Heinrich Sieveking, however, who was the real driving force behind the business, which was run jointly until 1793. Whilst Voght crossed all of Europe on his extensive travels, his partner Sieveking took care of running the business in Hamburg mostly on his own. Voght himself underlined this fact, when he wrote in a letter to all business partners in July 1793 that his friend had been the sole decision-maker of the firm for some years ("le seul gérant de notre commerce"). Sieveking and the French Revolution Friends and Freemasonry From an early age, Sieveking had shown a great interest in literature. Alongside his childhood friends Johann Michael Hudtwalcker (born 1747) and Caspar Voght (born 1752) he composed poetry and prose, and performed plays with Hudtwalcker's sisters. Sieveking's wife Johanna Magdalena Sieveking (née Reimarus) maintained a literary salon in Hamburg, which represented similar ideas. Some of the greatest role models of this circle around Sieveking were Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, whom they gushingly admired as the composer of the Messias. Sieveking further developed his Enlightenment ideas as a Freemason in the Hamburg Lodge "St. Georg zur grünenden Fichte" ("St George of the verdant spruce"), and became its Worshipful Master in 1789. In a speech at the Lodge on freedom he already in 1777 advanced a moderated concept of freedom: "Lawlessness is precisely what freedom is not: Even the noble Architect of the great Universe, the most free of all Beings, is governed in all His actions by the