With Mary’s death, a long-standing dream of Priestley’s finally expired as well: there would be no great settlement in Northumberland, no Lunar Society on the Susquehannah—in fact, there would be very little companionship at all. He was too frail to move again, and with Mary gone, he was dependent on the care of Joseph Jr., who had begun to make a sensible life for himself as a farmer. He had held out hope that his old student Benjamin Vaughan or the Russells would settle in Northumberland, but Vaughan ended up in Maine, and the Russells were appalled by the rustic lifestyle Priestley had adopted. (His house, Thomas Russell wrote, was “a mere hut in comparison with the one they lived in formerly.”) Lonely in the woods, isolated from civilization and the news of the world, Priestley went so far as to initiate a few halfhearted plans to emigrate again, this time to France, but it never amounted to anything.
Yet just as the exhilaration of Priestley’s arrival in America would prove ephemeral, so would the gloom of 1797 ultimately pass, in part because of the one undeniably positive development during this otherwise stormy period in Priestley’s life. He became close friends with Thomas Jefferson.
JEFFERSON HAD RETURNED to Philadelphia on March 2, 1798, after a four-year retirement from politics at Monticello. He had a busy week on his return. The day after his arrival he was installed as president of the American Philosophical Society, succeeding David Rittenhouse, who had died several months before. And on March 4, Jefferson was sworn in as vice president of the United States, serving under the new president John Adams. Priestley was in Philadelphia that spring, and, his relations with Adams being generally strained, he began spending a great deal of time with the new vice president.
This small, seemingly private shift in the personal connections between these three men—one friendship fading, to be replaced by another—ended up having significant political consequences for the early years of the Republic. The complex dynamic between Jefferson, Adams, and Priestley would continue to play out for more than twenty years, outliving Priestley by more than a decade.
To choose between Jefferson and Adams in 1798 was, in effect, to choose between the two emerging political parties to which each man had become attached: the largely agrarian Republicans, led by Jefferson and Madison, opponents of centralized political and economic power; or the urban, centralized Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton and, somewhat fitfully, by Adams. Given the geopolitics of the day, it was also a choice between France and England, with Jefferson and his group still enthralled by the French Revolution and Hamilton aligned with London’s economic power.
Choosing sides had an even more profound implication as well, one that no longer applies in our modern political world. To align yourself with either party in 1798 was to endorse the whole concept of different political parties, which was then a new and fiercely contested development on the American political scene, following the ostensibly unified front of the first two Washington administrations. Adams had long resisted the idea that opposing parties were an inevitable development. (They were to be “dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution,” he wrote.) Priestley himself had warned against the emergence of political factions in his private correspondence, shortly after his arrival in America. But by 1798, perhaps feeling spurned by his falling-out with Adams, Priestley had firmly thrown his lot in with the Republicans. A few weeks before Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia, Priestley wrote his first openly political tract since the Birmingham Letters, published in the pro-Jefferson Philadelphia newspaper, the Aurora. The main thrust of the argument was a protest against building up a national army and navy prepared for war with France, when America would be much better served by retreating from costly overseas entanglements at this fragile stage in its development. True to form, Priestley thought the war trust would be better spent on libraries and laboratories, “of which all the universities and colleges of this country are most disgracefully destitute.” England and France would have much to fear from an American air pump, if the current administration would only see fit to endow its schools with the technology.
Priestley’s “Maxims on Political Arithmetic” were published anonymously, but word soon leaked that Gunpowder Joe had begun laying grains under the Federalist party, just as he had done to the Church of England back home. Priestley’s Northumberland neighbor Thomas Cooper began publishing even more strident attacks on the Federalists in the Northumberland Gazette, which Cooper edited, building something of a Republican stronghold in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Priestley engaged in a long correspondence with a Unitarian minister and congressman named George Thatcher, in which he stridently criticized Adams, calling the new president “unstatesmanlike” in his war-mongering with France. Before long, Priestley had become a popular target for the cartoonists and pamphleteers of the day, led by another British expatriate, one William Cobbett, who had been publishing screeds—under the pen name Peter Porcupine—against Priestley since the first days of his arrival in 1794. Priestley, Cobbett wrote, had entered America with the express aim of “disunit[ing] the people from their government, and . . . introduc[ing] the blessing of French anarchy.”
With tensions rising across the country, Adams signed into law the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts in the summer of 1798, authorizing the state to deport any noncitizen “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,” and to arrest anyone who published “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government. It was the fledgling nation’s first constitutional crisis. Jefferson, the sitting vice president, announced that signing of the acts into law meant that the government had “become more arbitrary, and ha[d] swallowed more of the public liberty than even that of England.” To the opponents of the acts, the whole American experiment in democractic rule seemed at risk. Would the constitutional framework—still in its infancy—survive this challenge to its core values? Was Alien and Sedition the first step of an inevitable progression that would transform the young republic into a dictatorship, the same dismal trajectory that France was currently following across the Atlantic?
Concerned about his own situation under these new laws, Priestley wrote to Thatcher, urging him to keep their correspondence private, but word soon got back to Priestley that his criticisms of Adams were now well known in Philadelphia, including some details that seemed to have come from his exchange with the Maine congressman. He wrote back to Thatcher:
I have not written to any person in Philadelphia besides yourself, and I am sure you would not intentionally expose me to danger. However, I will take care to send no more, lest a worse thing come unto me. I find I am at the mercy of one man, who, if he pleases, may, even without giving me a hearing, or a minute’s warning, either confine me, or send me out of the country. This is not a pleasant situation.
The situation was about to get much worse. Unbeknownst to Priestley, a few weeks before the Alien and Sedition Acts passed, a packet of letters headed for Priestley was captured on board a Danish frigate and leaked to the British press. The letters had been penned by John Hurford Stone, a British radical whom Priestley had met in Price’s congregation in Hackney. The correspondence addressed Priestley as a committed supporter of the French, and spoke rhapsodically of France’s plans to invade England and complete its project of bringing the glories of liberty to all of Europe. Stone alluded to Priestley’s plans to emigrate to France, and made dismissive comments about John Adams’s leadership. It was an entirely one-sided conversation, but the undeniable impression on reading the letters was that Stone believed he was writing to a friend whose primary allegiances were to the Directoire Exécutif in Paris above all else.
On August 20, William Cobbett published the letters in their entirety, accompanied by scathing editorial commentary and a banner headline: “PRIESTLEY COMPLETELY DETECTED.” The copy included a direct challenge to Adams: “If this discovery passes unnoticed by the government, it will operate as the greatest encouragement that its enemies have ever received; they will say, and justly too, that though th
e President is armed with power, he is afraid to make use of it, and that the Alien-Law is a mere bug-bear.”
Priestley was devastated by the uproar that followed. “I am considered as a citizen of France,” he wrote back to an English friend, “and the rage against every thing relating to France and French principles as they say, is not to be described. It is even more violent than with you. This is a change that I was far from expecting when I came hither.” For several months, he went silent, hoping that a retreat from the public sphere would calm the passions against him. (Here he may have learned a lesson from his immediate and confrontational public statement after the Birmingham Riots, which only served to fan the flames higher.) But by the new year he was back writing to Thatcher, more incensed than ever at the administration’s violation of civil liberties: “It is clear to me,” Priestley wrote, “that you have violated your constitution in several essential articles, and act upon maxims by which you may defeat the whole object of it.” That congenital openness that had helped him so much in spreading the enlightenment of natural philosophy might end up getting him imprisoned or deported, but he was too old to change his ways:
I may be doing wrong in writing so freely, and I have been desired to be cautious with respect to what I write to you. But I am not used to secrecy or caution, and I cannot adopt a new system of conduct now. There is no person in this country to whom I write on the subject of Politics besides yourself, nor do I recollect what I have written; but I do not care who sees what I write or knows what I think on any subject. You may, if you please, show all my letters to Mr. Adams himself.
Thomas Cooper also began fighting the administration more openly, publishing a series of fierce editorials in the Northumberland Gazette, starting in early 1799. (No doubt most of them emerged out of conversations with Priestley, given their isolated situation.) They ended with an address published in June that systematically laid out the case against the abuses of the Adams presidency: “I cannot help thinking that of late years, measures have been adopted and opinions sanctioned in this country, which have an evident tendency to stretch to the utmost the constitutional authority of our Executive, and to introduce the political evils of those European governments whose principles we have rejected.” Adams’s policies, in short, were exactly those “that a leader inclined to despotism might wish.”
Cooper’s address was reprinted in the Philadelphia Aurora, and circulated widely via handbills. (Allegedly, Priestley had assisted in their distribution.) For Secretary of State Thomas Pickering, it was the final straw. Pickering advised Adams that Priestley and Cooper were in clear violation of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Of Priestley, Pickering wrote, “What is of most consequence, and demonstrates the Doctor’s want of decency, being an alien, his discontented and turbulent spirit that will never be quiet under the freest government on Earth, is his industry in getting Mr Cooper’s address printed in handbills and distributed.” He noted ruefully that Cooper had naturalized himself as an American citizen: “I am sorry for it, for those who are desirous of maintaining our internal tranquillity must wish them both removed from the United States.” Adams agreed with Pickering’s take on Cooper’s address: “A meaner, a more artful, or a more malicious libel has not appeared. As far as it alludes to me, I despise it; but I have no doubt it is a libel against the whole government, and as such ought to be prosecuted.” Later that year, Cooper was in fact arrested, and became one of the ten men successfully prosecuted under the Sedition Act.
But the question of Priestley was far more complicated. Four years before, after the senseless extremity of the Birmingham Riots, Adams had sent Priestley a letter comparing him to Socrates, a man of great wisdom persecuted by an unthinking establishment. Two years before, Adams had sat, attentive, in the first pews for Priestley’s initial sermons in America. They had known each other personally for more than ten years. And yet now Priestley, a guest in this country, was disparaging Adams in private letters to members of his own party, and supporting radicals like Cooper, who called Adams a despot, no better than the monarchs of Europe. The purloined Stone letters had strongly implied that Priestley was plotting with America’s enemies. Priestley had publicly allied himself with Jefferson and the Republican opposition, despite all his talk about the dangers of political factions. And now Pickering wanted to deport him, or at least put the heat on. The decision lay at a crossroads of great personal and historic magnitude: a man choosing whether to apply the full force of law against his former friend; a young nation wrestling with the question of how it would handle its intellectual dissidents. Would they be tolerated, even protected? Or would they be silenced? The French had already made it clear where their revolution had taken them: Lavoisier had been executed five years before, during the Reign of Terror. Would the United States embark on the same path with Priestley?
Adams had a reputation for being thin-skinned, but in this one extraordinary instance—faced with undeniable personal betrayal and at least the accusation of public treason—he took another approach. He blinked.
ADAMS WROTE the specific lines that spared Priestley on August 16, in a letter sent back to Pickering: “I do not think it wise to execute the alien law against poor Priestley at present. He is as weak as water, as unstable as Reuben, or the wind. His influence is not an atom in the world.” The words were simple enough, but, to borrow a phrase from Whitman, they contained multitudes. Their meaning is so unstable to us now, because they tease us with the answer to two key questions about Adams: his true feelings about Priestley, which indirectly leads us to the more momentous question of his true feelings about the Alien and Sedition Acts. A considerable part of the historical status of the Adams presidency hinges on his relationship to the Acts. Certainly the decision to sign the Acts was crucial to Jefferson’s assessment of Adams. Nearly everyone now agrees, with Jefferson, that that decision was a mistake; the debate centers on whether it was a mistake that Adams willingly made, or whether it was one that he was forced, against his will, into making—forced by the heightened tensions of political partisanship and the threat of war.
The literal meaning of the lines to Pickering is clear enough: Priestley is an old, confused man, obsessed with the ten horns of the Beast, and geographically isolated from the centers of power, in both America and Europe. He poses no threat to the Union in such a doddering state. But did Adams truly believe this of his old friend? Clearly Priestley’s bizarre proclamations over breakfast had made a deep impression on Adams; he would still be writing about Priestley’s apocalyptic musings twenty years later. That experience could well have left Adams with the impression that Priestley was unstable, but it still doesn’t justify the claim about his limited influence. He was clearly supporting Cooper, who had direct access to the megaphone of the Aurora. And Priestley was one of the most distinguished intellectuals in the United States. With Rittenhouse dead, there was no real rival to Priestley in terms of scientific achievement, and as a theologian—at least as measured by the international reach of his work—he had no peers in the new country. Most of all, he had the ear of the vice president. Place all those factors on the scale of influence, and there is no reasonable scenario where they weigh in at “not an atom in this world.”
So why would Adams make Priestley sound weaker than he actually was? One potential answer, which Adams would himself suggest in his later correspondence with Jefferson, was that he had signed the Alien and Sedition Acts as a gesture of political conciliation, but had no intention of enforcing them to the full extent of the law. His plan was to sign and then (selectively) undermine. He was after genuine spies, and not the loyal opposition. Joseph Priestley Jr. later reported hat Adams had sent a message privately to Priestley after the August 16th note to Pickering, saying that “he wished [Priestley] would abstain from saying anything on politics, lest he should get into difficulty.” The president made it clear that Priestley was “one of the persons contemplated when the law was passed,” which struck Adams as a sign that the aggressive fa
ctions within his party did not understand Priestley’s “real character and disposition.”
The other possibility is that Adams felt pangs of guilt that centered exclusively on Priestley himself, because of their existing relationship, but was otherwise entirely happy to throw his weight behind the new laws. The disparity between Cooper’s treatment and Priestley’s makes this the slightly more plausible scenario. Cooper was a polemicist, and far more of a hothead than Priestley, but he was quite clearly not a spy. And yet Adams was entirely willing to send him to jail for six months. If the famous radical theologian in Northumberland didn’t pose enough of a threat to justify prosecuting him, why bother incarcerating his deputy?
Whatever his true motivation, Adams spared Priestley the torment of becoming a political prisoner in his adopted homeland. Inspired in part by Adams’s suggestion that Priestley’s enemies did not understand his “real character,” Priestley set out to write a thorough response to his American critics. The final result of that effort, Letters to the Inhabitants of Northumberland and Its Neighborhood, would be the last great work of his enormously prolific life. Published at the end of 1799, the Letters were divided into two main sections: a long inventory of all the charges against Priestley (his religious unorthodoxies, his support for France, the purloined letters, the Cooper handbills), and then a series of short essays on the political and constitutional questions of the day. The most impassioned section of the Letters conveyed Priestley’s long-standing support for the colonies’ struggle against England, and alluded to his rich friendship and collaboration with Franklin. It was, in a way, a summing up of the past thirty years of his political journey, tracing a line back to the London Coffee House and the Honest Whigs, and their collective dream of a new form of enlightened liberty across the Atlantic. In framing the story of his life this way, Priestley turned the nativist rhetoric of his critics on its head: rather than being traitors or spies, émigrés like Priestley and Cooper, who had come to America voluntarily seeking the promised freedom of the new land, had the most investment in seeing the new nation live up to its founding principles:
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