“The air is superphlogisticated”

On 20 Nov 1783, Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy ran an “Extract of a letter from Sailon in Provence, July 11.” It reported:

For twenty days, a singular fog, such as the oldest man here has before not seen, has reigned in most part of Provence; the atmosphere is filled with it, and the sun, although extremely hot, for at noon the barometer rises forty five degrees, is not sufficiently so to dissipate it; it continues day and night, though not equally thick; for sometimes it clouds the neighbouring mountains.

The horizon, which is usually of a beautiful azure in this country, appears of a whitish grey, the sun, which during the day is very pale, is at setting and rising quite read, and so absorbed are his rays by the fog, that one may at any time look steadily at him without being in the least incommoded.

It is an observation made by many, that the fog at some times emits a strong odour, the nature of which is not easily determined; it is so dry as not to tarnish a looking-glass, and instead of liquifying salts it drys them; the hidrometer does not ascend, and evaporation is abundant; the eyes are affected with a slight heat, and such as have weak lungs, are disagreeably affected.

The article went on to report an unusual “storm of thunder and hail” on the solstice and the air being “greatly electrified.”

However, this correspondent concluded: “The constant drought which has prevented the usual exhalations from the earth, seems to be the sole cause of this mist, the late rains having diluted the matter of which these exhalations are formed, they now ascend with their vehicle the water.”

The London printer that Thomas copied this article from then stated:

It may not be unentertaining to our readers to be informed that Dr. [Joseph] Priestly has long ago discovered that the changes in the atmosphere depend very much on the quantity of phlogiston contained in it. The excessive burning and sultry weather we have had of late shews that the air is superphlogisticated. Letters from all parts of Europe describe exactly the same season that we have had.

The real reason for Europe’s strange atmospheric conditions in the summer of 1783 wouldn’t be discovered for more than another century.

TOMORROW: It wasn’t drought or phlogiston.

[The picture above shows Priestley before he took refuge in the U.S. of A.]

When Did Benjamin Franklin Fly His Kite?

Today, 15 June, is the anniversary of the date in 1752 when Benjamin Franklin conducted his famously picturesque experiment with a kite, a key, and a lightning storm.

At least, this is the anniversary according to The New American Cyclopædia, edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana and published in 1860. Many other reference books of the nineteenth century echoed that statement.

That date might come as a surprise for people who remember that just five days ago, on 10 June, many institutions sent out tweets saying that was the anniversary of Franklin’s kite experiment. The 10 June date appears as early as 1935 and dominates recent books and the web.

However, still other authorities differ. In an article for the American Antiquarian Society’s Proceedings titled “The Date of Franklin’s Kite Experiment” (P.D.F. download), Alexander McAdie wrote: “Most biographers say that experiments were made by Franklin on June 6, 1752.” (He cited no examples, and I haven’t found any. In any event, McAdie was skeptical.)

Yet another strain of information gives the auspicious date of 4 July 1752, as in Richard Anderson’s Lightning Conductors (1885).

In fact, there’s no real information about what date Franklin flew that kite. He wrote about how scientists might trap lightning as a form of electricity in 1750 and explained how to do so with a kite in a letter dated 19 Oct 1752.

In 1767 Joseph Priestley wrote about Franklin’s experiment in his History and Present Status of Electricity, probably based on conversations with the experimenter himself. Priestley stated the doctor and his son William flew their kite in June 1752, but gave no specific date.

In that month, a letter was coming to Franklin from Europe describing a similar experiment, so to maintain his originality Franklin might have been keen to state that he had flown his kite before seeing that letter. A small number of authors doubt Franklin did the experiment at all, given that he wasn’t electrocuted. But most accept the kite story without a specific date.

We might therefore ask how 15 June, or 10 June, or any day of the month became attached to the event. Yet it might be more fruitful to ask why.

Some articles about Franklin’s kite experiment, such as these from the Constitution Center and History.com, acknowledge the lack of a definite date. But many more sources of information, especially single sentences in timelines or tweets, state a particular day in June with no doubt attached.

I see similar pressure to assign definite dates to when Olaudah Equiano or Phillis Wheatley were born, when Wheatley became free, and when a Massachusetts court ruled in the Quock Walker cases.

Our culture likes to have a date as an anchor for historical discussions. I ran across lots of material for teachers in the early twentieth century pointing to the 15 or 10 June dates as a prompt for classroom lessons. I’m sure the now-prevalent 10 June appears on a lot of timelines for people in the media looking for “on this date” hooks. And with information coming at us faster than ever, those hooks have to be sharp.

“‘Illuminati Morse’ as he is now called”

New England Federalists were happy to link Jeffersonians with the democratic, anti-religious, and French Illuminati (no matter that the order was actually Bavarian). At the end of his article on the birth of the Illuminati myth, Mike Jay writes:

In an overheated political milieu where accusations of treason were hurled from both sides, [John Robison’s] Proofs of a Conspiracy was seized on eagerly by the Federalists as evidence of the hidden agenda that lurked behind fine-sounding slogans such as democracy, the abolition of slavery and the rights of man. Robison’s words were repeated endlessly in New England pulpits and pamphlets through 1798 and 1799, and [Thomas] Jefferson was publicly accused of being a member of [Adam] Weishaupt’s Order.

One of the loudest voices promoting this idea was the Rev. Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826, shown above) of Charlestown, who was also a leading textbook author. A strong Federalist and Congregationalist, he seized on Robison’s book as proof of a worldwide conspiracy against traditional politics and religion.

On the national fast day of 9 May 1798, Morse preached a sermon based on Robison’s book. He returned to that topic for Thanksgiving on 29 November and for the next national fast on 29 Apr 1799, publishing all three sermons for wider consumption. (It’s notable that Morse didn’t deliver these messages during his regular church services. It’s also notable that in between those dates, on 25 June 1798, he spoke to the Massachusetts Grand Lodge of Freemasons, not mentioning the Illuminati, at least overtly.)

Other speakers pushed back against Morse’s charges, particularly men already in the Jeffersonian camp, such as the Rev. William Bentley of Salem. But the most effective response to Morse came from John Cosens Ogden (1751-1800), an itinerant Episcopal priest with the zeal of a convert (from Presbyterianism).

In 1799 Ogden published a pamphlet titled A View of the New-England Illuminati; Who are Indefatigably Engaged in Destroying the Religion and Government of the United States, under a feigned regard for their safety, and under an impious abuse of true religion. It wasn’t the Jeffersonians who were secretly Illuminati, Ogden wrote—it was the New England Federalists who were pointing fingers at other people.

On 31 Jan 1800, Vice President Jefferson wrote to James Madison—not his political ally but the Episcopal bishop of Virginia with the same name—about the conspiracy theories:

I have lately by accident got a sight of a single volume, (the 3d.) of the Abbé [Augustin] Barruel’s ‘Antisocial conspiracy,’ which gives me the first idea I have ever had of what is meant by the Illuminatism, against which ‘illuminati Morse’ as he is now called, and his ecclesiastical & monarchical associates have been making such a hue & cry.

Barruel’s own parts of the book are perfectly the ravings of a Bedlamite. but he quotes largely from Wishaupt whom he considers as the founder of what he calls the order. . . . Wishaupt seems to be an enthusiastic Philanthropist. he is among those (as you know the excellent [Richard] Price and [Joseph] Priestly also are) who believe in the indefinite perfectibility of man. he thinks he may in time be rendered so perfect that he will be able to govern himself in every circumstance so as to injure none, to do all the good he can, to leave government no occasion to exercise their powers over him, & of course to render political government useless. this, you know is Godwin’s doctrine, and this is what Robinson, Barruel & Morse have called a conspiracy against all government

With both sides of the political divide using the term “Illuminati” to tar the other, it became part of the American political lexicon. It survives in many conspiracy theories, still reading like the ravings of Bedlamites.

Illuminating the Illuminati Myth

I quite enjoyed Mike Jay’s recent article at Public Domain Review on the birth of our understanding of the Illuminati. The crucial text was the subtly titled Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, published in 1797 by Prof. John Robison of Edinburgh (shown here).

Jay, also author of A Visionary Madness: The Case of James Tilly Matthews and the Influencing Machine, writes:

Robison’s vast conspiracy needed an imposing figurehead, a role for which Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, seemed on the surface to be an unpromising candidate. Obsessive and domineering, Weishaupt had from the beginning found difficulty in attracting members to his secret society, where they were expected to adopt mystical pseudonyms chosen by him, jump through the hoops of his strict initiatic grades – Novice and Minerval, Illuminatus Minor and Major, Dirigens and Magus – and take up subservient roles in his grandiose but unfocused crusade for world domination. After 1784, when the Order had been exposed and banned by the Elector of Bavaria, Weishaupt had exiled himself to Gotha in central Germany, since when he appeared to have done little beyond producing a series of morose and self-justifying memoirs of his adventures.

As for Robison himself:

In 1785 he had begun to suffer from a mysterious medical condition, a severe and painful spasm of the groin: it seemed to emanate from beneath his testicles, but its precise origin baffled the most distinguished doctors of Edinburgh and London. Racked with pain and frequently bed-ridden, by the late 1790s he had become a withdrawn and isolated figure; he was using opium frequently, a regime which according to some of his acquaintances made him vulnerable to melancholy, confusion and paranoia. As the successive crises of the French Revolution shook Britain, the panic was particularly intense in Scotland, where ministers and judges whipped up constant rumours of fifth columnists and secret Jacobin cells. . . .

The physical sciences were in the grip of another French revolution, led by Antoine Lavoisier. During the 1780s Lavoisier had overthrown the chemistry of the previous century with his discovery of oxygen, from which he had been able to establish new theories of combustion and to begin the process of reducing all material substances to a basic table of elements. Lavoisier’s revolution had split British chemistry: some recognised that his technically brilliant experiments had transformed the science of matter, but for others his new and foreign terminology was, like the French metric system and the revolutionary Year Zero, an arrogant attempt to wipe away the accumulated wisdom of the ages and to eliminate the role of God. The old system of chemistry, with its mysterious forms of energy and its languages of essences and principles, had readily contained the idea of a life-force and the mysterious breath of the divine; but in Lavoisier’s cold new world, matter was reduced to inert building-blocks manipulated by the measurable forces of pressure and temperature.

Robison had never accepted the French theories, and by 1797 had worked the new chemistry deep into his Illuminatist plot. For him, Lavoisier – along with Britain’s most famous experimental chemist, the dissenting minister Joseph Priestley – was a master Illuminist, working in concert with infiltrated Masonic lodges to spread the doctrine of materialism that would underlie the new atheist world order. Madame Lavoisier’s famous salons, at which the leading Continental philosophes met, were now revealed by Robison to have been the venues for sacreligious rites where the hostess, dressed in the ceremonial robes of an occult priestess, ritually burned the texts of the old chemistry.

I can’t resist noting that after Lavoisier’s death during the Terror, his widow went on to marry Woburn’s own Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. (That marriage couldn’t be saved.)

TOMORROW: Warnings about the Illuminati come to America.

Franklin’s Library for Franklin

The Boston Globe just reported on “an old-fashioned turf war” between the city of Franklin’s public library and the private non-profit group that sells used books to benefit that library. I suspect the roots of that dispute might be related to last year’s report of the city cutting its library budget so much that it was decertified by the state.

Franklin claims to have the “oldest public lending library in the country,” dating back to 1792, but that, too, was a matter of dispute. The Darby Free Library in Pennsylvania also claims to be the nation’s oldest, dating from 1743. And Boston says it has “The nation's oldest public library system, established in 1848.”

What’s the basis for Franklin’s claim? As the town website explains, in 1778 the Massachusetts General Court approved the formation of new town that had grown out of Wrentham. Originally it was to be named Exeter, but that name changed to Franklin to honor the eminent statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin. And then the inhabitants hit up the man for money.

Working through Franklin’s great-nephew Jonathan Williams (1751-1815), Franklin the town asked Franklin the man for a donation toward a bell for the town’s church. Benjamin Franklin, as so often, thought he had a better idea. On 18 Mar 1785, he wrote from Passy, France, to his friend Richard Price (1723-1791, shown above), a British dissenting clergyman with connections to political radicals and supporters of America:

My Nephew, Mr. Williams, will have the honour of delivering you this Line. It is to request from you a List of a few good Books to the Value of about Twenty-five Pounds, such as are most proper to inculcate Principles of sound Religion and just Government. A new Town in the State of Massachusetts, having done me the honour of naming itself after me, and proposing to build a Steeple to their Meeting House if I would give them a Bell, I have advis’d the sparing themselves the Expence of a Steeple at present, and that they would accept of Books instead of a Bell, Sense being preferable to Sound. These are therefore intended as the Commencement of a little Parochial Library, for the Use of a Society of intelligent respectable Farmers, such as our Country People generally consist of. Besides your own Works I would only mention, on the Recommendation of my Sister, [Samuel] Stennet’s Discourses on personal Religion, which may be one Book of the Number, if you know it and approve of it.

(Franklin’s sister, Jane Mecom, is the subject of a new biography by Jill Lepore.)

Price wrote back on 3 June 1785 saying that Williams had visited him:

I have, according to your desire, furnished him with a list of such books on religion and government as I think some of the best, and added a present to the parish that is to bear your name, of such of my own publications as I think, may not be unsuitable. Should this be the commencement of parochial libraries in the States, it will do great good.

This is said to be a list of the titles Franklin’s money went to—plus several of Price’s own works:

Clark’s Works; Hoadley’s Works; Barrow’s Works; Ridgeley’s Works; Locke’s Works; Sydney’s Works; Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws; Blackstone’s Commentaries; Watson’s Tracts; Newton on the Prophecies; Law on Religion; Priestley’s Institutes; Priestley’s Corruptions; Price and Priestly; Lyndsey’s Apology; Lyndsey’s Sequel; Abernethy’s Sermons; Duchal’s Sermons; Price’s Morals; Price on Providence; Price on Liberty; Price’s Sermons; Price on the Christian Scheme; Needham’s Free State; West & Lyttleton on the Resurrection; Stennet’s Sermons; Addison’s Evidences; Gordon’s Tacitus; Backus’s History; Lardner on the Logos; Watts’s Orthodoxy and Charity; Doddridge’s Life; Fordyce’s Sermons; Life of Cromwell; Fulfilling of the Scriptures; Watts on the Passions; Watts’s Logic; Christian History; Prideaux’s Connections; Cooper on Predestination; Cambridge Platform; Burkett on Personal Reformation; Barnard’s Sermons; History of the Rebellion; Janeway’s Life; American Preacher; Thomas’s Laws of Massachusetts; American Constitutions; Young’s Night Thoughts; Pilgrim’s Progress; Life of Baron Trench; Erskine’s Sermons; The Spectator, etc.

For Britain, that might have been a pretty radical set of theologies. But for New England, it was well in line with Calvinist thinking.

In 1786, the young town’s minister, the Rev. Nathaniel Emmons (1745-1840), preached about the newly arrived books. His sermon was published as “The dignity of man: A discourse addressed to the congregation in Franklin, upon the occasion of their receiving from Dr. Franklin, the mark of his respect in a rich donation of books, appropriated to the use of a parish-library.” Read it here; Emmons gets onto the value of reading and study about halfway through.

TOMORROW: But was that a public library?

Benjamin Vaughan, Franklin Fanboy

The Englishman who edited Benjamin Franklin’s essays for the press in 1779 was his admirer Benjamin Vaughan (1751-1835). Like Franklin, he had family in Boston.

Born in Jamaica, Vaughan was a grandson of the Massachusetts merchant captain Benjamin Hallowell, Sr. (The captain’s namesake son became one of the most hated of the royal Customs Commissioners in Boston.)

Vaughan’s immediate family were Unitarians, not fitting in with either New England Congregationalists or the established church in Britain. He attended dissenting grammar schools in Britain, and his faith limited the possibilities of a university degree.

Vaughan studied science under the Quaker scholar Joseph Priestley, then law, and finally medicine when he was trying to impress his future wife’s father that he could earn a steady living. But what really excited him was politics. He became a radical, which in Britain meant a republican. Vaughan stood somewhere between activists like John Horne and more establishment figures like the Earl of Shelburne. All that was going on while he collected Franklin’s older books and circulating manuscripts and prepared them for the press in 1779.

When Shelburne became prime minister in 1782, he asked Vaughan to go to Paris and use his relationship to Franklin to create a sort of back-door channel for news and reassurances. He wasn’t officially part of the British diplomatic delegation but seems to have contributed to the peace of 1783.

Vaughan served in Parliament from 1792 to 1794. Despite coming from the left, he opposed the idea of ending slavery in the British West Indies (his own family’s fortune was of course based on slave labor). When the old rivalry between Britain and France heated up again, this time with France as a militant republic, Vaughan came under suspicion of being a French sympathizer and fled the country.

Unfortunately, he arrived in France just as the “Terror” gave way to the “Thermidor” reaction, consuming one set of leaders after another. Vaughan was locked up on suspicion of being a British spy—I can’t tell exactly when and how his treatment fit with the swift changes in the French government at the time. But after a brief stretch in prison Vaughan made it out to Switzerland, then sailed for Boston in 1795.

Vaughan soon settled for life in Hallowell, Maine, where he had inherited land through his mother. His personal library was said to contain 10,000 books, one of the largest in the country. In American politics Vaughan became a firm Federalist, thus on the right. He finally started practicing medicine and promoted the use of Francis Jenner’s smallpox vaccine. He also built up his area of Maine with mills, wharfs, and stores.

There are papers related to Vaughan and his family at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, the Clements Library, and elsewhere, given his correspondence with many early American statesmen. Vaughan’s house in Maine is now a historic site, though it’s not open to tours this summer. 

How Not to Make Saltpetre

Prof. David Hsiung’s “Making Saltpetre” seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society last night was quite interesting, and I probably missed the most interesting part because I was in a committee meeting upstairs for the first half.

David’s paper collected eight sets of instructions for extracting saltpetre from soil promulgated in newspapers, pamphlets, and letters in 1775-76. Everyone at the seminar also got a copy of a ninth method published in Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine in August 1774, with the above engraving by Paul Revere as illustration (courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society).

Unfortunately, the Americans of 1775-76 weren’t simply wrestling with a shortage of saltpetre, and thus of gunpowder. They were also dealing with a very incomplete knowledge of chemistry. Joseph Priestley had just isolated oxygen, but Antoine Lavoisier and Humphrey Davy hadn’t isolated and named nitrogen and postassium yet. People did recognize nitre as the precursor to saltpetre, and that soil rich in nitre could produce saltpetre, so that was at least a start.

Unfortunately, none of the nine methods of finding nitre and turning it into saltpetre agreed with another. In fact, the instructions differed on fundamental questions like whether one should start with soil that’s been exposed to a lot of urine or not. The Royal American Magazine told its readers:

it has been often found by experiments made in England, that the mortar of old walls, moistened with urine, and exposed to the northeast wind, in a covered shed, will, in a few weeks, afford a considerable quantity of nitre.

But a report recommended by the Continental Congress and printed by Benjamin Edes in Watertown in 1775 recommended against starting with soil from “stables, and all other places, where the earths were impregnated with ruinous and excrementicious salts.”

Hsiung presented modern chemistry to show that bringing water close to a boil strongly increases the solubility of saltpetre without affecting the solubility of other mineral salts so much—so the hotter the water, the more saltpetre it will yield relative to undesired compounds. Yet some methods from 1775-76 say nothing about heating water, meaning they’re inefficient at best.

Early American saltpetre production was hampered by successful longtime makers’ reluctance to share their secrets, ignorance of which variables in different conditions really mattered, and the tendency of confident men (like Dr. Benjamin Rush) to drown out others whether or not they were correct.

Eventually the Continental authorities realized it was much more efficient just to smuggle in finished gunpowder from French, Dutch, and other territories, and the saltpetre instructions stopped appearing in print. But in 1775-76 making lots of people were working hard at making saltpetre—without a whole lot to show for that effort.

TOMORROW: Saltpetre and the Adams family.

Anna Barbauld and “A Pensive Prisoner’s Prayer”

On Sunday, the Guardian newspaper ran a story by Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder, about “The Royal Society’s lost women scientists.” It highlighted several pre-twentieth-century British women who, Holmes said, contributed to scientific inquiry.

The first example is Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, who attended Royal Society meetings in the late 1600s. Back in college, I actually wrote a paper about one such session. As I recall now, Robert Hooke was supposed to do something awful to a dog to demonstrate its breathing, but so many members escorted the duchess out to her carriage halfway through the meeting that there wasn’t time. I don’t recall the duchess making a significant contribution to science, and Holmes doesn’t really describe one, as opposed to her contributions to philosophy and letters. Then again, I don’t recall such gentlemen at that meeting as John Evelyn doing much for science, either.

An example closer to 1775 and perhaps to the scientific process is Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), an important literary figure. Holmes writes:

Anna Barbauld, the brilliant young assistant to Joseph Priestley FRS, the great 18th-century chemist, noticed the distress of his laboratory animals as they were steadily deprived of air in glass vacuum jars, during the experiments in which he first discovered oxygen (1774). Accordingly, she wrote a poem in the voice of one of Priestley’s laboratory mice and stuck it in the bars of the mouse’s cage for Priestley to find the next morning.

Barbauld actually published the poem in 1772. It’s in the voice of a wild mouse that Priestley has just trapped, not one he already had caged in his lab. As for stating that Barbauld was a laboratory assistant, her 2008 biographer, William McCarthy, wrote merely:

[Priestley] allowed his sons to use the block on which he kept his wig as a target for air-gun marksmanship. Like these boys, Anna Letitia was amused by the medley of books, papers, apparatus, and odds and ends that littered Priestley’s study; probably she also got to take a hand in his experiments.

That seems like a slender basis for saying Barbauld was Priestley’s scientific colleague, as opposed to a smart and lively protégée in poetry, politics, chess, and other fields. There’s a big difference between being a magician’s assistant and being a volunteer from the audience assisting with a trick.

In any event, here’s the complete murine poem that Barbauld left for Priestley:

The Mouse’s Petition
Found in the Trap, where he had been confined all Night

Parcere subjectis, & debellare superbos. [To spare the lowly, and to overthrow the proud.] VIRGIL.

Oh! hear a pensive prisoner’s prayer,
For liberty that sighs;
And never let thine heart be shut
Against the prisoner’s cries!

For here forlorn and sad I sit,
Within the wiry grate;
And tremble at th’ approaching morn,
Which brings impending fate.

If e’er thy breast with freedom glowed,
And spurned a tyrant’s chain,
Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain.

Oh! do not stain with guiltless blood
Thy hospitable hearth!
Nor triumph that thy wiles betrayed
A prize so little worth.

The scattered gleanings of a feast
My scanty meals supply;
But if thine unrelenting heart
That slender boon deny,

The cheerful light, the vital air,
Are blessings widely given;
Let Nature's commoners enjoy
The common gifts of Heaven.

The well-taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives;
Casts round the world an equal eye,
And feels for all that lives.

If mind, as ancient sages taught,
A never dying flame,
Still shifts through matter's varying forms,
In every form the same,

Beware, lest in the worm you crush,
A brother’s soul you find;
And tremble lest thy luckless hand
Dislodge a kindred mind.

Or, if this transient gleam of day
Be all of life we share,
Let pity plead within thy breast
That little all to spare.

So may thy hospitable board
With health and peace be crowned;
And every charm of heartfelt ease
Beneath thy roof be found.

So when destruction lurks unseen,
Which men, like mice, may share,
May some kind angel clear thy path,
And break the hidden snare.

When she republished the lines in the fifth edition of her Poems, Barbauld added this footnote:

The Author is concerned to find, that what was Intended as the petition of mercy against justice, has been construed as the plea of humanity against cruelty. She is certain that cruelty could never be apprehended from the Gentleman to whom this is addressed; and the poor animal would have suffered more as the victim of domestic œconomy, than of philosophical curiosity.

By then it had become known that the mouse had been trapped “by Dr. Priestley for the sake of making experiments with different kinds of air.” Though Barbauld had written the mouse’s plea, she felt a stronger urge to defend Priestley.

The Challenges of Pinning John Adams Down on Religion

As I mentioned yesterday, despite the Federalist Party’s portrayal of John Adams as a better Christian than Thomas Jefferson, the two men’s faiths were rather similar. Neither believed in the divinity of Jesus, but both admired Jesus’s teachings. Both men heartily distrusted religious hierarchies.

Pinning down Adams’s beliefs further can be difficult because he was a difficult man. On 28 Aug 1811 he wrote to Dr. Benjamin Rush:

I agree with you in Sentiment that Religion and Virtue are the only Foundations, not only of Republicanism and of all free Government, but of social felicity under all Governments and in all the Combinations of human Society.

Yet the following year, in the same letter I quoted on Thursday, Adams told Rush:

I agree with you, there is a Germ of Religion in human Nature so strong, that whenever an order of Men can persuade the People by flattery or Terror, that they have Salvation at their disposal, there can be no end to fraud, Violence or Usurpation.

Adams’s statements on religion also tended to be personal. Not in the sense that, as Jefferson wrote in his letter to the Danbury Baptists, “religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God.” Rather, personal in the sense that Adams often thought he was being personally and unfairly attacked—he even took that as a sign of his virtue. He therefore spent a lot of ink refuting what he thought others might say about him.

Here, for example, is more context for the quotation above about how he saw “Religion and Virtue” as fundamental:

I agree with you in Sentiment that Religion and Virtue are the only Foundations, not only of Republicanism and of all free Government, but of social felicity under all Governments and in all the Combinations of human Society. But if I should inculcate this doctrine in my Will, I should be charged with Hypocrisy and a desire to conciliate the good will of the Clergy towards my Family as I was charged by Dr. [Joseph] Priestley and his Friend [Thomas] Cooper and by Quakers, Baptists and I know not how many other sects, for instituting a National Fast, for even common Civility to the Clergy, and for being a Church going animal. . . .

If I should inculcate those “National, Social, domestic and religious virtues” you recommend, I should be suspected and charged with an hypocritical, Machiavilian, Jesuitical, Pharisaical attempt to promote a national establishment of Presbyterianism in America, whereas I would as soon establish the Episcopal Church, and almost as soon the Catholic Church. . . .

If I should recommend the Sanctification of the Sabbath like a divine, or even only a regular attendance on publick Worship as a means of moral Instruction and Social Improvement like a Phylosopher or Statesman, I should be charged with vain ostentation again, and a selfish desire to revive the Remembrance of my own Punctuality in this Respect, for it is notorious enough that I have been a Church going animal for seventy six years i.e. from the Cradle; and this has been alledged as one Proof of my Hypocrisy.

As you can see, this letter was almost all about how the many enemies of John Adams would distort whatever he said, so he was best off saying nothing. We have to dig beneath his self-pitying declarations to find out how he viewed religion, as opposed to how he suspected or hoped people viewed him.

One detail I find notable is Adams’s distinction between two ways of recommending going to church: “the Sanctification of the Sabbath,” as ministers would have it, and “regular attendance on publick Worship as a means of moral Instruction and Social Improvement like a Phylosopher or Statesman.” Which was the basis for his own behavior? Which did he recommend for other people?

Discovering the Discoverer of Oxygen

Last weekend in the New York Times, Barry Gewen reviewed Steven Johnson’s book The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. It follows the career of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the British-American scientist and political reformer. Here’s a sample of the review:

Arriving in London from the provinces in 1765, he quickly joined a group of freethinking intellectuals known as the Honest Whigs, which included James Boswell and Benjamin Franklin. (Priestley’s history of electricity established the popular image of Franklin flying a kite during an electrical storm.) When he relocated to Birmingham some years later he joined another remarkable circle, the Lunar Society, with members like James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather; they called themselves the Lunaticks.

During his Birmingham period Priestley devoted most of his energies to religion and politics. His unorthodox beliefs, along with his enthusiastic support for the French Revolution, turned him into a very public target for nationalist zealots. Conservatives like Samuel Johnson called him “an evil man,” and despite his many accomplishments he was refused an audience with King George III.

Priestley, Steven Johnson says, had made himself “the most hated man in all of Britain.” In 1791 a mob burned down his house and, more tragically, his laboratory. Soon he and his family were off to that new, more open-minded country, the United States.

In America as in England, Priestley seems to have become acquainted with everyone who was anyone. He had tea on several occasions with George Washington. John Adams urged him to settle in Boston. He was especially close to [Thomas] Jefferson. Mr. Johnson calls him “a kind of Zelig of early American history.” Yet, as in England, his religious and political views got him into trouble. During the repressive time of the Alien and Sedition Acts, it was only the personal intervention of President Adams that kept him out of prison.

Here’s a webpage from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission about Priestley’s home. And here’s a digital version of his Essay on the First Principles of Government, a very far-seeing and thus entirely uninfluential book.