The first year of their correspondence, however, lacked the passion and engagement and argument that would ultimately make it so fascinating. There is a sense of careful decorum and fragility to these first exchanges, as if the two men were tiptoeing through a minefield of their past hostilities. Much of the prose remains focused on the personal domain: they pass on inventories of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren; complain about their failing health; tally up the number of Declaration signatories still alive. There is some talk about contemporary politics, and a few fond references to their collaborations in the 1770s, but almost no allusions to the turbulence and rancor that would follow.
All that would change, though, with the publication of a book in London in 1812: the posthumous memoirs of the Reverend Theophilus Lindsey, including a generous appendix of “Letters of eminent Persons, his Friends and Correspondents.” In that collection were Jefferson’s postinaugural letters to Priestley, which Priestley had forwarded to Lindsey in confidence a decade before. Somehow a copy found its way to Adams in Quincy in May of 1813. Adams read through the letters, and all the old anger and resentment from that period boiled over in him again. He wrote a quick note to Jefferson, asking if he was familiar with the volume, and promising that he would have more to say. Ten days later, he was back, this time quoting Jefferson’s letter in detail: “We were to look backwards, not forwards, for improvement; the President himself declaring in one of his answers to addresses, that We were never to expect to go beyond them in real Science.” Adams vehemently denied ever uttering such a statement: “The sentiment you have attributed to me in your letter to Dr. Priestley I totally disclaim and demand in the French sense of the word demand of you the proof. It is totally incongruous to every principle of my mind and every Sentiment of my heart for Three-score Years at least.”
Four days later, on June 14, he fired off another screed, this time quoting Jefferson’s reference to the Alien and Sedition Acts as a “Libel on legislation.”
As your name is subscribed to that law as Vice President, and mine as President, I know not why you are not as responsible for it as I am. Neither of us was concerned in the formation of it. We were then at war with France. French spies then swarmed in our cities and our country; some of them were intolerably impudent, turbulent, and seditious. To check these was the design of this law. Was there ever a government which had not authority to defend itself against spies in its own bosom, spies of an enemy at war. This law was never executed by me, in any Instance.
The next day, Jefferson wrote his first reply, a long and gracious letter, attempting to soothe his combustible friend: “[The letter] recalls to our recollection the gloomy transactions of the times, the doctrines they witness, and the sensibilities they excited. It was a confidential communication of reflections of these from one friend to another, deposited in his bosom, and never meant to trouble the public mind.” Yet Jefferson would not concede everything. “Whether the character of the times is justly portrayed, posterity will decide. But on one feature of them they can never decide, the sensations excited in free yet firm minds, by the terrorism of the day. None can conceive who did not witness them, and they were felt by one party only.”
With those lines, the exchange between Adams and Jefferson became a genuine, two-way debate. “It was,” the historian Joseph Ellis writes, “the defining moment in the correspondence,” the point at which it “became an argument between competing versions of the revolutionary legacy.” It would rage in its most heated form for the next four months, driven by a constant barrage of more than twenty agitated letters from Quincy, interrupted by five longer and more contemplative replies from Monticello. They discuss the inevitability of political parties, and the “terrorism” of the Alien and Sedition period. Adams burrows through his own personal archive to track down the speech where he had denounced the innovations of science, arguing that Jefferson had misunderstood the original context. Adams offers a quote from his own “Defense of the Constitutions” (published in 1787) that lauds the “Invention of Mechanic Arts” and the “discoveries in Natural Philosophy.” The two men ponder why systems of government have not progressed at the same speed as natural philosophy. And they delve deeply into Priestley’s unorthodox vision of Christianity and its influence on Jefferson. This is no ordinary conversation, not just because it involves the two great living patriarchs of the American Revolution, but also because it transpires through an extremely unusual, almost postmodern, literary device: nearly all of Adams’s letters pivot off of specific quotes from Jefferson’s original exchange with Priestley. At the heart of this great American conversation, then, we find a strange sort of deconstruction taking place, with Adams meticulously unpacking, sentence by sentence, the turns of phrase that Jefferson had written more than a decade earlier. The whole context seems, to the modern reader, like something from a Borges short story or a Calvino novel, or one of the layered epistolary novels of the eighteenth century: a letter is written, then forwarded, then published, then discovered by one of the people vilified in the original text, then forwarded again back to its original author, with extensive annotations. That palimpsest of commentary upon commentary is what ignited the most epic conversation in American history. And there, at the center of that textual web, almost ten years after his death, lay Joseph Priestley.
THE FACT THAT PRIESTLEY should play such a transformative role in the Jefferson-Adams letters, coupled with the fact that he is mentioned in that archive far more frequently than Washington, Franklin, or Madison, gives us some sense of the magnitude of Priestley’s presence in the minds of Jefferson and Adams. Priestley was a kind of Zelig of early American history, appearing at key turning points like some kind of errant founding father: Franklin’s kite; the Privy Council; Alien and Sedition; the Jefferson-Adams correspondence. One of the final letters Adams wrote, at the age of eighty-eight, recounted in exacting detail the breakfast he had with Priestley almost thirty years before, where Priestley had waxed apocalyptic in his interpretation of the French Revolution. Decades after his death, Adams and Jefferson were still debating the ideas that their old friend had unleashed on the world. “This great, excellent, and extraordinary Man, whom I sincerely loved, esteemed, and respected, was really a Phenomenon: a Comet in the System, like Voltaire,” Adams wrote. Priestley’s ideas lived on so vividly in the Jefferson-Adams correspondence because they were, in multiple ways, central to the American experiment itself.
What, then, does Priestley’s life tell us about the great paradigm shift of the American Revolution? We have been debating what the founders stood for practically since the ink dried on Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration. But something different happens when you look at the birth of America through the outsider view of Priestley’s career—when you take Jefferson at his word that Priestley’s life was “one of the few precious to mankind,” when you think of Franklin’s longing to return to his happiest days, trading ideas at the London Coffee House. If Priestley was so central a figure to the three towering intellects central to the birth of the United States, how does that shape our perception of the founders—and the values they pass on to us today?
Clearly one lesson is that Priestley—and his kindred spirits in London, Birmingham, Quincy, and Monticello—refused to compartmentalize science, faith, and politics. They saw those three systems not as separate intellectual fiefdoms, but rather as a continuum, or a connected web. The new explanations of natural philosophy could help shape new political systems and redefine faith for an Enlightened age. Adopting a know-nothing attitude toward scientific understanding—to hide behind the cloak of piety or political dogma—would have been the gravest offense to Priestley and his disciples. It is no accident that, despite the long litany of injuries Adams felt had been dealt him in Jefferson’s letters to Priestley, he chose to begin his counterassault by denying, as a point of honor, that he had ever publicly taken a position as president that was resistant to the innovations of science. Remember that Jeffers
on had also insinuated that Adams had betrayed the Constitution with his “libel on legislation.” But Adams lashed out first at the accusation that he was anti-science. That alone tells us something about the gap that separates the current political climate from that of the founders.
In the popular folklore of American history, there is a sense in which the founders’ various achievements in natural philosophy—Franklin’s electrical experiments, Jefferson’s botany—serve as a kind of sanctified extracurricular activity. They were statesmen and political visionaries who just happened to be hobbyists in science, albeit amazingly successful ones. Their great passions were liberty and freedom and democracy; the experiments were a side project. But the Priestley view suggests that the story has it backward. Yes, they were hobbyists and amateurs at natural philosophy, but so were all the great minds of Enlightenment-era science. What they shared was a fundamental belief that the world could change—that it could improve—if the light of reason was allowed to shine upon it. And that belief emanated from the great ascent of science over the past century, the upward trajectory that Priestley had so powerfully conveyed in his History and Present State of Electricity. The political possibilities for change were modeled after the change they had all experienced through the advancements in natural philosophy. With Priestley, they grasped the political power of the air pump and the electrical machine.
We like to talk about the American sensibility in terms of its inveterate optimism, but when one reads Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, what one finds in each man is a slightly different streak of darkness: Franklin was a borderline misanthrope; Jefferson was horrified by the emerging power of cities and industrialization; Adams had his furies and his nagging sense that the world was not respecting his achievements. The temperament that we expect to find at the birth of America—bountiful optimism, an untroubled sense that the world must inevitably see the light of reason—arrives aboard the Samson in 1794. Priestley seems to have had a remarkable capacity to bring out the most positive feelings in his friends, as in Jefferson’s postinaugural letter (“this whole chapter in the history of man is new”). He was a true progressive, in the literal meaning of the term, in that he thought the world was headed naturally toward an increase in liberty and understanding, what he called the “sublime” view in the introduction to The History:
For an object in which we see a perpetual progress and improvement is, as it were, continually rising in its magnitude; and moreover, when we see an actual increase, in a long period of time past, we cannot help forming an idea of an unlimited increase in futurity; which is a prospect really boundless, and sublime.
That faith in progress was challenged by riots, exile, and the threat of prosecution, but it survived to his last days, under the “excellent administration” of Thomas Jefferson.
The faith in science and progress necessitated one other core value that Priestley shared with Jefferson and Franklin, and that is the radical’s belief that progress inevitably undermines the institutions and belief systems of the past. (Whether Adams truly shared this perspective is a more complicated question, one that was central to the initial flare-up in the correspondence with Jefferson.) To embrace the sublime vista of reason was, inevitably, to shake off a thousand old conventions and pieties. It forced you to rewrite the Bible, and contest the divinity of Jesus Christ; it forced you to throw out all the august, Latinate traditions of the educational establishment; it forced you to invent whole new modes of government; it forced you to think of the air we breathe as part of a natural system that could be disturbed by human intervention; it forced you to dream up entirely new structures for the transmission and cultivation of ideas. You could no longer put stock in “the education of our ancestors,” as Jefferson derisively called it. Embracing change meant embracing the possibility that everything would have to be re-invented.
All of these values exist separately today on various points of the political spectrum. But to find them strung together as a single, unified worldview is astonishingly rare. We have always had a steady supply of politicians who speak euphorically about the great possibilities that lie ahead, and just as many who connect that sense of hope to their religious values. But, ironically, the vision of “morning in America” usually involves a return to simpler times, the old conventions, the education of our ancestors. Those who still argue for the possibility of radical change—in government, in faith, in our economic systems—increasingly center their arguments on the bedrock of scientific understanding, largely the ecosystem science that Priestley helped invent. But the radical’s default temperament today is precisely the opposite of Priestley’s: bleak and dystopian, filled with gloomy predictions of imminent catastrophe. To be a progressive today is to believe that the great engine of progress has stalled, and that we are no longer climbing the mountain, but descending into a valley of self-destruction.
It is possible that the circumstances of our age do, in fact, warrant these views. Perhaps the Priestley worldview is obsolete for a reason. Perhaps the era of radical change has passed us by, or the steady march of progress has reversed itself. Yet one thing is clear: to see the world in this way—to disconnect the timeless insights of science and faith from the transitory world of politics; to give up the sublime view of progress; to rely on the old institutions and not conjure up new ones—is to betray the core and connected values that Priestley shared with the American founders. Thanks to the accelerating march of human understanding, we now see the web of relationships far more clearly than Priestley or Franklin or Jefferson could: we can link a single molecule of oxygen; the biochemical engine of photosynthesis; the atmospheric explosion of breathable air; the immense energy deposits of the Carboniferous era; the rise of industrialization; the political turmoil of Priestley’s day; and the environmental crisis of our own. All those elements now exist for us as a connected system, understood with a level of precision and subtlety that would have delighted Priestley, though not surprised him, given his expectations. How can such a dramatically expanded vista not make us think that the world is still ripe for radical change, for new ways of sharing ideas or organizing human life? And how could it not also be cause for hope?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m grateful to several institutions for their willingness to let me work through the major themes of this book in public. First, NYU’s School of Journalism, for letting me teach a graduate seminar on Cultural Ecosystems, and my students there who contributed so many helpful ideas (and who, I’m thankful to report, shot down more than a few of my less helpful ones). My friends at the Long Now Foundation—Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, and Alexander Rose—were kind enough to invite me to discuss the “long zoom” approach to cultural history at one of their seminars in long-term thinking in 2007. I was also lucky enough to be invited to discuss these issues onstage with Brian at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. I’m also indebted to Larry Lessig for the Jefferson quote at the beginning of this book, an early link that led me to one of the book’s major themes. But the most important intellectual debt I owe for this book is to my cousin Jay Haynes, with whom I have been discussing new political models, environmentalism, and other heresies for almost thirty years now. So thanks to all these folks: you are truly my heroes, my own merry band of Honest Whigs. Go on and prosper.
Speaking of the Honest Whigs, I can’t fail to mention the coffee-houses that made this book possible: first the late lamented Tea Lounge in the South Slope, then Brooklyn’s unparalleled Gorilla Coffee. (Even better than the coffee, though, were the many walks to and fro with Mark Bailey.) My colleagues and investors at outside.in were incredibly supportive of my admittedly unorthodox desire to write a book while running an Internet startup; I’m particularly indebted to Mark Josephson, Rob Deeming, John Geraci, Cory Forsyth, Andy Karsch, Fred Wilson, Ed Goodman, George Crowley, Richard Smith, and John Borthwick for their support.
My research assistant, Jared Ranere, responded with aplomb to the most biza
rre of my requests—“Giant dragonflies!”—and was an invaluable sounding board from start to finish. I’m grateful for the institutions that supported the research for this book: the University of Chicago Library; the New York Public Library; the NYU Library; the Jefferson Library at Monticello; the Papers of Benjamin Franklin, maintained by the American Philosophical Society and Yale; the Avalon Project at Yale Law Library; the Royal Society; the British Library; the Priestley collection at the University of Pennsylvania. I also greatly benefited from the many public-domain works by Priestley and his peers that are now available as full-text documents from Google Books.
Thanks to the many people who read this manuscript in draft: Oliver Morton, Garry Wills, Kurt Andersen, Walter Isaacson, David Smith, Malcolm Dick, and Alexa Robinson. Any errors that remain are, of course, entirely of my own making. Special thanks to the good people at Riverhead, led by my longtime editor, Sean McDonald, who handled the sudden emergence of this book idea with grace and keen understanding, and who supported me through the chaotic final weeks of putting it together. Thanks, too, to Geoff Kloske, Matthew Venzon, Hal Fessenden, Meredith Phebus, Marie Finamore, and Emily Bell. Once again, my agent, Lydia Wills, helped steer the ship of my career with her amazing sense of direction, despite a few unusual detours this time around.
The Invention of Air Page 18
