“The only house in the neighbourhood unprovided with an electrical apparatus”

I’ve been writing about the death of Lt. Albert Rémy de Meaux, artillerist in the French army, after he was struck by lightning in Philadelphia in March 1782.

That news reached the commanders of the French forces in Williamsburg, Virginia, the next month. They were sad at the loss, though grateful that the man De Meaux had been staying with, the chevalier de la Luzerne, had escaped the same death by coming to visit them.

Those commanders were well aware of the value of lightning rods, invented by Benjamin Franklin back in 1752. The military engineer d’Aucteville wrote about Williamsburg:

Upon nearly all the houses there are lightning rods [conducteurs]. The chimneys are all of brick, often outside the houses, and rising far above the roofs. Almost all of them are capped with cut stone placed carefully and symmetrically; also upon all the roofs are to be seen fire escapes—des échelles contre le danger des incendies.

Gen. Rochambeau himself wrote to his minister of war:

M. de Meaux, lieutenant of artillery, who was convalescing at M. de Luzerne’s residence, was killed. This fatality is a strong argument in favor of the conducteurs. The owner of the house in which M. de Luzerne lodged had always opposed the system of M. Franklin and had refused permission to have it installed.

There’s an echo of that remark in the memoir of one of Rochambeau’s aides de camp, the Baron von Closen:

M. de La Luzerne arrived in Williamsburg on the 17th… On the 26th he received the sad news of the thunderbolt which had struck his house during his absence; the circumstances…are very odd and prove how much one owes to Franklin for his invention of lightning conductors, which are much used in America.

The owner of M. de la Luzerne’s house, who was an enemy and rival of Dr. Franklin’s, had been skeptical until then of the value of conductors; but after that he had them erected on all his houses.

(Von Closen wrote his manuscript about 1823, based on his wartime records; the William and Mary Quarterly published it as his “Journal” in 1953.)

It’s notable that none of those French officers named that landlord, nor did the Philadelphia newspaper articles that went into great detail about the damage the lightning had done. However, a letter published in “The Norris-Fisher Correspondence: A Circle of Friends, 1779-1782” (Delaware History, March 1955) clearly placed the blame on one prominent man:

There has within this few Days a very Meloncholy accident happen’d at the house of Johny Dickinson, ocupied by the french Minister, it was occasion’d by a dreadful flash of Lightning and thunder. the [h]ouse in every part is more or less shatter’d, the furniture mostly distroy’d, and [e]very thing almost inside the house carries the appearance of Devastation—all this is trifling compared with the horrid situacion it has thrown a poor Man in—he lays now in the Most extreem agony, if he survives he is an entire Cripple, what an affecting Circumstance

George Grieve also named John Dickinson in his 1796 translation of the Marquis de Chastellux’s Travels in North-America, in a footnote that closed, “It may be proper to add, that this was the only house in the neighbourhood unprovided with an electrical apparatus.”

In March 1782, Dickinson was the president of the state of Delaware. By the end of the year he was also president of the state of Pennsylvania. He owned a great deal of real estate in and around Philadelphia in addition to that lightning-struck house. The French commanders no doubt knew he was an influential man and chose not to name him.

I don’t know whether it’s accurate to say Dickinson was “an enemy and rival of Dr. Franklin’s” or simply conservative about that new-fangled lightning rod. If indeed he had them added to his properties after De Meaux’s death, we can credit Dickinson with being able to learn and change his mind, just as he did on American independence after July 1776. But that was too late for Lt. De Meaux. All told, this seems like an incident that Dickinson would prefer no one mention.

As I wrote in the first post of this series, I started looking into this story because of a chance remark by William Hogeland on Twitter. But what spurred me to finish was the title of one of the papers planned for the Dickinson Symposium later this week: David Forte’s “‘Like Lightening thro the Land’: John Dickinson and the Freedom of the Press.” I’m sure that’s a period metaphor, but, given De Meaux’s fate, it feels like an awkward one.

(My thanks once again to Dr. Robert A. Selig for help finding sources on this event.)