America's earliest recorded text in accounting: Sarjeant's 1789 book

              The Accounting Historians Journal Vol. 12, No. 2 Fall 1985
Terry K. Sheldahl
SAVANNAH, GEORGIA
AMERICA'S EARLIEST RECORDED TEXT IN ACCOUNTING: SARJEANT'S 1789 BOOK
Abstract: In 1789, seven years before the text developed by "pioneer Ameri-can [accounting] author" William Mitchell appeared, Thomas Sarjeant of Phila-delphia published An Introduction to the Counting House. It was a concise and able expression of a long mercantile bookkeeping tradition destined to result in later American texts. A mathematics teacher in England and a Philadelphia "academy," Sarjeant also contributed works on commercial arithmetic.
There is significant bibliographical evidence that An Introduction to the Count-ing House, which is readily available within a remarkable historical microform series, was the first text on accounting to be produced by an American writer.
An important advance in the evolution of accounting education in the United States was the advent of accounting books published originally in this country by resident authors. A text by William Mitchell appearing in 1796 is widely known; it has also been noted that a Philadelphia mathematics professor, Benjamin Workman, had written a book bearing an accounting title seven years earlier. Workman's text did not, however, cover accounting subjects. Authoritative research on early printing reveals no earlier American texts on accounting, nor, except for a 1788 collection of writings by English author Charles Hutton, even local editions of (or com-pilations from) overseas works addressed more than incidentally to the field.
Yet a book by another Philadelphia mathematics teacher that also appeared in 1789 was primarily a text on mercantile book-keeping. The purpose of this paper is to call attention to An Intro-duction to the Counting House as the earliest recorded American accounting text, issued precisely at the beginning of the constitu-tional republic, and to Thomas Sarjeant as thus apparently the charter American author. Sarjeant, a transplanted Englishman who taught commercial subjects at an American academy, gave an exposition of mercantile accounting. Claiming no originality for his concise treatment of single- and double-entry procedures and re-