Still, it seems hard to imagine that Priestley maintained that kind of calm in the face of such brutality. His “Letter to the Inhabitants of Birmingham, Following the Riots of 14 July 1791” took a more aggressive tone. Addressing his “late townsmen and neighbors,” he began with a protestation of innocence that was perhaps a bit too strong, given the militant rhetoric he had indulged in during the preceding decade. “After living with you 11 years,” he wrote “in which you had uniform experience of my peaceful behaviour, in my attention to the quiet studies of my profession, and those of philosophy, I was far from expecting the injuries which I and my friends have lately received from you.” A natural philosopher to the end, Priestley then moved quickly to the core injustice—not the threat to his life, his family, his home, but the loss of his gear:
You have destroyed the most truly valuable and useful apparatus of philosophical instruments that perhaps any individual, in this country or any other, was ever possessed of, in my use of which I annually spent large sums of money with no pecuniary view whatever but only in the advancement of science, for the benefit of my country and of mankind.
By the end of the letter he returned to the central insight that had launched his decade at Fair Hill and had sent him down the path to the Birmingham Riots—the corruptions of original Christian values: “We are better instructed in the mild and forbearing spirit of Christianity than ever to think of recourse to violence—and can you think that such conduct as yours [offers] any recommendation of your religious principles in preference to ours?”
Between the tranquillity of Mary Russell’s account, and the firebrand rebuttal of Priestley’s letter, the most revealing look at Priestley’s inner state—and the emotional weight of his loss—comes in a letter he wrote to a friend some time after the riots: “I shall be obliged to you,” he wrote, “if you will mention my situation to any of your friends whose laboratories are furnished, and who may have anything to spare to set up a broken philosopher.”
THE RIOTS SENT a shock wave through British society, though the establishment generally adopted a blasé attitude that suggested Priestley and his ilk had it coming to them. The king’s order to send the Dragoons had included this withering remark: “I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled, and that the people see them in their true light.” The Times even ran an entirely scurrilous report of the dinner, which falsely placed Priestley at the event, and quoted him raising his glass with a toast to “The King’s head on a platter.”
Other voices were more sympathetic. The Lunar Society, of course, rallied to Priestley’s side—Darwin called the riots a “disgrace to Mankind”—though they did gently warn him to moderate some of his public views, to protect himself and their circle of friends. Dissenting churches around the country expressed support for their spiritual and political guiding light. Vice President John Adams sent his letter of support from America, comparing Priestley’s persecution to that of Socrates. Perhaps the most touching note of solidarity came from across the Channel, in a statement issued by the French Academy of Sciences, and likely penned by Lavoisier himself. “As a citizen, you belong to England, and it is to her to atone for your losses: as a Scholar and as a Philosopher you belong to the entire world,” they wrote. And in a fitting gesture, they offered to help reconstruct Priestley’s ruined laboratory: “We . . . vow to restore to you the instruments which you have employed so usefully in our instruction. . . . What more important service can we render to science than to place in your hands the instruments necessary for its cultivation?”
Aided by his allies in the Lunar Society, Priestley waged a long campaign to be compensated by the state for his losses. He settled in Hackney, taking up ministerial duties at Richard Price’s old congregation. (Price had died in April of 1791, leaving Priestley alone as England’s public enemy number one.) Though Priestley found that most members of the Royal Society shunned him “on account of [his] religious and political views,” over time, some semblance of normalcy would return to his life, with Joseph publishing again and preaching his Sunday sermons. But the Priestleys would never feel fully at home in England again. In August of 1792, the French legislative assembly endowed Priestley with an honorary citizenship, which triggered a whole new round of cartoons and angry pamphlets deriding Priestley for his traitorous ways. In October 1793, Joseph Jr. emigrated to Pennsylvania and sent back word of a promising land settlement between the two branches of the Susquehanna, a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Philadelphia. By the spring of 1794, Joseph and Mary Priestley had set sail on the Samson for America.
On the news of Priestley’s departure, a twenty-one-year-old Samuel Taylor Coleridge penned these lines:
Lo! Priestley there, Patriot, and Saint and Sage!
Him, full of years, from his lov’d native land,
Statesmen blood-stain’d, and Priests idolatrous,
By dark lies maddening the blind multitude,
Drove with vain hate. Calm, pitying, he retired,
And mused expectant on these promised years.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Comet in the System
February 1804
Northumberland, Pennsylvania
THE SAMSON HIT HEAVY RAINS AND IMPENETRABLE fog as she neared the northeast coast of America but eventually found her way to Sandy Hook on June 1, where she anchored for a few days, waiting for a pilot to steer her through the channels of New York Harbor. On June 4, Joseph Jr. hired a boat to greet his parents and bring them back discreetly to the Battery. Despite his efforts, word soon spread of Priestley’s arrival, and by the next morning an august procession of luminaries arrived to pay their respects, starting with Governor Clinton. Vice President Adams had left New York the day before Priestley’s arrival, but he had left behind a note encouraging Priestley to settle in Boston, and promising that he would be very well received there. This began a bit of an internal fight among the American founders over where Priestley should settle, and reading the letters now, one senses that the debate was ultimately a proxy for a larger dispute over where the intellectual center of the new country lay.
The New York papers printed solemn declarations of support and welcome from scientific and religious societies around the city. The American Daily Advertiser pronounced: “The name of Joseph Priestley will be long remembered among all enlightened people. . . . His persecutions in England have presented to him the American Republic as a safe and honourable retreat in his declining years: and his arrival in this City calls upon us to testify our respect and esteem for a man whose whole life has been devoted to the sacred duty of diffusing knowledge and happiness among nations.”
Priestley wrote back to Lindsey to say that the reception had been “too flattering.” The accolades would continue several weeks later, when the Priestleys moved on to Philadelphia, where they were met with “the most flattering attentions from all persons of note,” according to Priestley’s account. He enjoyed tea several times with President Washington, and cemented a friendship with Benjamin Rush, the physician and political theorist, whose writing career came closest to matching Priestley’s in the diversity of its subject matter. (With Franklin gone, Rush would become the American whom Priestley found the most “congenial.”) Priestley’s appearance in Philadelphia precipitated a formal address from the astronomer David Rittenhouse, one of Jefferson’s intellectual mentors and president of the American Philosophical Society, of which Priestley had been a long-distance member since 1785. When word of Priestley’s arrival trickled down to Jefferson, who was at Monticello, enjoying his first hiatus from political life, he wrote Rittenhouse enviously: “If I had but Fortunatus’s wishing-cap, to seat myself sometimes by your fireside, and to pay a visit to Dr. Priestley, I would be contented; his writings evince that he must be a fund of instruction in conversation, and his character an object of attachment and veneration.”
The sense of gravitas that attended Priestley’s emigration seems
somehow fitting to us now, not just because of his individual accomplishments, but also because Priestley was inaugurating what would become one of the most honorable traditions of the American experience. He was the first great scientist-exile to seek safe harbor in America after being persecuted for his religious and political beliefs at home. Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, Xiao Qiang—they would all follow in Priestley’s footsteps.
Priestley initially embraced asylum in America with his typical enthusiasm: he was, at long last, in his own element, surrounded by intellectual peers who also happened to be, amazingly enough, the political establishment. “Whether it be the effect of general liberty, or some other cause,” he wrote to Lindsey in June, “I find many more clever men, men capable of conversing with propriety and fluency on all subjects relating to government, than I have met with any where in England. I have seen many of the members of Congress on their return from it, and, without exception, they seem to be men of first-rate ability.”
The story up to this point, one month into his emigration, seems to provide an almost irresistible narrative arc: persecuted scientist and priest leaves behind the repressive fossils of the Old World to thrive among the statesmen-scholars of the new republic—a country whose creation he himself had supported from afar. Alas, the story is not quite so neat, though it is far more interesting, largely for what it reveals about the birthing pains of the new nation. Priestley may have imagined that he was escaping England to retreat back to the private pursuits of natural philosophy, but once again he would find himself on the main stage of history, this time in his adopted homeland.
THE FIRST TURN OF EVENTS that sent the Priestleys off course was a disappointment in the real estate market. The land that Joseph Jr. had scouted as a site for a large settlement of like-minded émigrés turned out to be less desirable than originally thought, and by the fall of 1794 the entire scheme had collapsed, upsetting Priestley greatly. The University of Pennsylvania offered him the position of chair of the chemistry department, and for a time the Priestleys debated staying in the city. But Philadelphia at that point was pestilent and overcrowded, ravaged by yellow-fever epidemics, and almost entirely lacking green space. Mary Priestley had always preferred rural to urban life, and in recent years she had begun to suffer from ominous episodes that involved spitting up blood for several days. So the couple decided to stick with their original plan to settle in central Pennsylvania—in Northumberland—this time on a less ambitious scale—accompanied by their children and a few friends who settled nearby, including Thomas Cooper, the chemist and political agitator who had also emigrated from England in 1794. For the first time, the couple planned a house together, to be built on eleven acres outside the small town, and Priestley once again reconstructed his laboratory, his fragile instruments damaged by “injudicious packing” on the trip from Philadelphia. Mary was overjoyed with their new life: “I am happy and thankful to meet with so sweet a situation and so peaceful a retreat as this place I now write from,” she wrote back to England.
Joseph grumbled about the effect the sluggishness of the postal system was having on his work. In London, Birmingham, and Leeds, information had traveled on the scale of hours or days. Communicating with the Honest Whigs or the Lunar Society via mail back home had been a conversational experience: you could make plans, or banter, jot off quick observations, swap half-formed ideas, at that accelerated rhythm. But the lag time just between Northumberland and Philadelphia was often a matter of weeks, and sending a message all the way to London took an entire season at least. This meant a detachment from world news as much as it did from personal connection. “I could now give a great deal for a complete set of the Morning Chronicle,” Priestley wrote to Lindsey, “or any tolerable English newspaper tho ever so old. I hope Mr. Belsham will send me the Cambridge Papers. They would amuse me much. We have only poor extracts in the Philadelphia papers.” Priestley had experienced once before what it was like to be separated from his tools, but in the move to Northumberland he felt for the first time the pain of separation from his information network, or at least of seeing its transfer rates decline by an order of magnitude or two. He wrote several appeals to Adams, imploring him to help establish a regular stagecoach to Northumberland: “Could we have a Coach . . . to carry parcells, and passengers, as well as letters, it would be a great convenience and benefit to the country, and in time would pay for any reasonable expence attending it,” Priestley wrote. “We sometimes talk of petitioning the legislature on the subject. Could you give us any assistance in the business, you would confer a great obligation on one who was so much interested in the conveyance of letters and small parcells.”
If Priestley’s natural philosophy suffered from his being unplugged from his usual network, an even greater blow was dealt by the vicissitudes of health and disease. The first strike came in December of 1795, when their son Harry died somewhat suddenly, after battling a wave of fevers. Both Mary and Joseph were devastated, but then Mary’s health took a turn for the worse, and they spent most of the winter recovering, emotionally and physically, from the loss of Harry. In late February, Priestley returned to Philadelphia for several months, trying to re-create the annual migrations to the metropolis that had so energized him in England. (He stayed with William and Mary Russell, his short-lived protectors during the Birmingham Riots, who had themselves emigrated, in a tortuous, prolonged voyage the year before.) Priestley quickly returned to the pulpit, delivering sermons at the Universalist Church on Lombard Street.
Priestley’s first addresses were well attended: a flock of luminaries from the Revolutionary War came out to hear the legendary Gunpowder Joe talk. Vice President Adams attended, and reported backed to Abigail Adams that the sermons—titled “Discourses on the Evidences of Divine Revelation”—were “learned, ingenious, and useful.” But even Adams was more cautious in endorsing such a controversial figure. “The [Discourses] will be printed, and He says dedicated to me,” he wrote to Abigail. “Dont tell this secret though, for no other being knows it. It will get me the Character of an Heretick I fear. I presume however, that dedicating a Book to a Man, will not imply that he approves every Thing in it.”
Over time the novelty of the famous radical’s sermons appears to have worn off and the number of people showing up on Lombard Street began to dwindle. Adams in particular grew disenchanted with Priestley. Some scholars have attributed the growing distance between the two men as a case of political pragmatism: Priestley was probably the most controversial religious figure of the age, and Adams was running for president. It was one thing to be a follower of a great champion of the American cause, but it was quite another to throw your lot in with a minister who considered half of modern Christianity to be a bunch of Pagan hocus-pocus. Here again Priestley lies at the origin point of another venerable—if not altogether meritorious—American tradition: aspiring politicians distancing themselves from their controversial religious advisers during the campaign season.
But Adams may have soured on Priestley for another reason: Priestley’s increasingly millenarian tendencies. At one of their last meetings, Priestley and Adams had breakfast alone together, and Adams began inquiring about his friend’s thoughts on the Reign of Terror in France. Priestley was typically sanguine. The Revolution was “opening a new era in the world and presenting a near view of the millennium.” Adams thought Priestley seemed a notch too blithe about such a volatile and uncharted situation, and pressed him to explain how he could be so sure of France’s democratic prospects. The answer startled the vice president. “My opinion is founded altogether upon revelation and the prophecies,” Priestley explained. “I take it that the ten horns of the great Beast in revelations, mean the ten crowned heads of Europe: and that the execution of the king of France is the falling off of the first of those horns; and that the nine monarchies of Europe will fall one after another in the same way.”
Priestley published almost none of his millennial speculations; reading the Book of Revelation for p
olitical prophecies seems to have been something of a private hobby for the old man, one that his friends often chided him about. The epic explosions of the French Revolution and Priestley’s exile into the wilderness of Pennsylvania intensified these thoughts, and so the great believer in rational Christianity would spend some not insignificant portion of his last years mulling over the horns of the Great Beast. Adams was baffled at the seeming contradiction: a man dedicated to excising every last hint of mysticism from the New Testament, but who nonetheless happily based his interpretation of contemporary political events on hallucinatory visions from Revelation. Priestley’s erratic behavior over breakfast might have cost him some regard in the eyes of John Adams, but in several years’ time, his apocalyptic musings would indirectly come to his aid and help protect him from a potential threat to his freedom nearly as severe as that of the Birmingham Riots.
Before Priestley returned to the center stage of political controversy, he had his own private tragedy to endure. Upon his return from Philadelphia in the middle of 1796 he found Mary’s condition much worsened. By September, she was dead. The intellectual isolation from the Lunar Men that Priestley felt would be nothing compared to this loss. “The death of Harry affected her much, and it has hardly ever been out of my mind, tho it is near 9 months since he died; but this is a much heavier stroke,” he wrote in a letter. “It has been a happy union to me for more than thirty years, in which I have had no care about anything in the world, so that, without any anxiety I have been able to give all my time to my own pursuits. I always said I was only a lodger in her house.” Part of what made Mary’s death so painful to Priestley was the fact that she, more than any of the Northumberland settlers, had genuinely embraced life on the frontier. “She had taken much pleasure in planning our new house,” he wrote mournfully, “and now that it is advancing apace, and promises to be every thing that she wished it to be, she goes to occupy another.” A few months after Mary’s death, he wrote to her brother, John Wilkinson: “Having always been very domestic, reading and writing with my wife sitting near me, and often reading to her, I miss her every where.”
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