Part 10
On the 8th day of April 1794, my father set sail from London, and arrived at New-York on the 4th of June, where he staid about a fortnight. Many persons went to meet him upon his landing, and while he staid at New-York he received addresses from various Societies, and great attention from many of the most respectable persons in the place. From thence he proceeded to Philadelphia, where he received an address from the American Philosophical Society. Independent of the above marks of respect, he was chosen by an unanimous vote of the Trustees of the University of Philadelphia, professor of Chemistry. He was likewise invited to return and stay at New-York, and open an Unitarian place of worship, which was to have been provided for him, and also to give Lectures on Experimental Philosophy to one hundred subscribers at ten dollars each. These invitations indeed he did not receive until he had been settled some little time at Northumberland. These are sufficient proofs that the citizens of this country were not insensible to his merit as a Philosopher, and that they esteemed him for the part he took in the politics of Europe. That he was not invited immediately on his arrival to preach either at New-York or Philadelphia, was not from any want of respect for his character, but because Unitarianism was in a manner unknown, and by many ignorantly supposed to have some connection with infidelity. The proper evidences of christianity, the corruptions it has suffered, the monstrous additions that have been engrafted on its primitive simplicity, and the real state of the opinions of christians in the first ages of the church, were subjects that had hardly ever been discussed in this country. The controversies that had been carried on in England had not awakened attention here, and therefore though my father was known as having suffered in consequence of his opposition to the established religion of his country, yet his particular opinions were little understood. As his religious tenets became more known, these prejudices wore away, and independent of the proposal to open a place of Unitarian worship at New-York, mentioned above, I shall have occasion to state the great reason he had to be satisfied with the testimonies of respect paid to him, by the most eminent persons in the country, not merely in his character as a Philosopher, but as a preacher of the Gospel.
About the middle of July 1794 my father left Philadelphia for Northumberland, a town situated at the confluence of the North-East and West branches of the Susquehanna, and about 130 miles North-West of Philadelphia. I, and some other English gentlemen, had projected a settlement of 300,000 acres of land, about fifty miles distant from Northumberland. The subscription was filled chiefly by persons in England. Northumberland being at that time the nearest town to the proposed settlement, my father wished to see the place, and ascertain what conveniencies it would afford should he incline either to fix there permanently, or only until the settlement should be sufficiently advanced for his accommodation; he was induced likewise to retreat, at least for the summer months, into the country, fearing the effects of the hot weather in such a city as Philadelphia. He had not, as has been erroneously reported, the least concern in the projected settlement. He was not consulted in the formation of the plan of it, nor had he come to any determination to join it had it been carried into effect.
The scheme of settlement was not confined to any particular class or character of men, religious, or political. It was set on foot to be as it were a rallying point for the English, who were at that time emigrating to America in great numbers, and who it was thought, would be more happy in society of the kind they had been accustomed to, than they would be, dispersed, as they now are, through the whole of the United States. It was farther thought, that by the union of industry and capital, the wilderness would soon become cultivated and equal to any other part of the country in every thing necessary to the enjoyment of life. To promote this as much as possible, the original projectors of that scheme reserved only a few shares for themselves, for which they paid the same as those who had no trouble or expence either in forming the plan, or carrying it into execution. This they did, with a view to take away all source of jealousy, and to increase the facility of settlement, by increasing the proportion of settlers to the quantity of land to be settled. Fortunately for the original proposers, the scheme was abandoned. It might and would have answered in a pecuniary point of view, as the land now sells at double and treble the price then asked for it, without the advantages which that settlement would have given rise to; but the generality of Englishmen come to this country with such erroneous ideas, and, unless previously accustomed to a life of labour, are so ill qualified to commence cultivation in a wilderness, that the projectors would most probably have been subject to still more unfounded abuse than they have been, for their well meant endeavours to promote the interests of their countrymen.
The scheme of settlement thus failing, for reasons which it is not necessary now to state, my father, struck with the beauty of the situation of Northumberland, which is universally allowed to be equal if not superior to any in the state; believing that, from the nature of its situation, it was likely to become a great thoroughfare, and having reason to consider it as healthy as it was pleasant, the intermittents to which it has latterly been subject being then unknown, determined to settle there. Before he came to this resolution however, he had the offer of the Professorship of Chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania, before mentioned, which would probably have yielded him 3000 dollars per annum, there being generally about 200 students in Medicine of whom about 150 attend the Chemical Lectures; as likewise the offer of a situation as Unitarian Preacher and Lecturer in Natural Philosophy as I have likewise mentioned before. At that time he had no inducement to settle at Northumberland contrary to his inclination, as his books and apparatus were still at Philadelphia, his sons had not fixed upon any place of settlement for themselves, and neither he, nor they, had purchased a single foot of land in the town or the neighbourhood of it.
The following reasons among others induced him to prefer a country to a city life. He thought that if he undertook the duties of a professor, he should not be so much at liberty to follow his favourite pursuits as he could wish, and that the expence of living at Philadelphia or New-York would counterbalance the advantages resulting from his salary; and indeed, at that time he had no occasion to attend to any pecuniary considerations, as he believed his income, calculating upon his property in the French funds (which however from circumstances not necessary to be stated in this place, never produced him any thing,) to be more than equal to his wants; but what had greater weight with him than any thing else was that my mother, who had been harrassed in her mind ever since the riots at Birmingham, thought that by living in the country, at a distance from the cities, she should be more likely to obtain that quiet of which she stood so much in need.
Soon after his settlement at Northumberland, many persons, with a view that his qualifications as an instructor of youth should not be wholly lost to the country, concurred in a plan for the establishment of a college at Northumberland. To this scheme several subscribed from this motive alone. Many of the principal landholders, partly from the above and partly from motives of interest, contributed largely both in money and land, and there was a fair prospect, from the liberal principles upon which it was founded, that it would have been of very great advantage to the country. My father was requested to draw up a plan of the course of study he would recommend, as well as the rules for the internal management of the institution, and he was appointed President. He however declined receiving any emolument, and proposed giving such lectures as he was best qualified for, _gratis_; in the same manner as he had done at Hackney, and he meant to have given to the institution the use of his library and apparatus, until the students could have been furnished with them by means of the funds of the college. In consequence of the unexpected failure of some of the principal contributors, the scheme fell through at that time, and little more was done during my father’s life time than to raise the shell of a convenient building.
I shall in this place state, though I shall anticipate, in so doing, that in the year 1803 a vacancy occurred in the University of Pennsylvania, by the death of Dr. Euen, Principal of that institution. It was intimated to my father by many of the Trustees, that in case he would accept of the appointment, there was little doubt of his obtaining it; Mr. M’Kean, the present governor of the State of Pennsylvania, being among others particularly anxious that he should accept of it. In addition to the reasons that had induced him to decline the offer of the Professorship of Chemistry were to be added the weak state of his health, which would have made the idea of his having any serious engagement to fulfil, very irksome to him; he accordingly declined it.
He had frequent intimations of other proposals of a similar nature that would have been made to him, had it not become generally known, that he could not accede to them from their being inconsistent with the plan of life he had laid down for himself.
I have been thus particular in the account of his reasons for settling at Northumberland, and of the different inducements offered to him to fix elsewhere, to do away the erroneous reports respecting the former, and likewise to counteract the idea that has been so industriously circulated in England, that his abilities were undervalued, that the bigotry and prejudice he had to encounter in this country, were greater than were opposed to him in England; that his life was in consequence rendered uncomfortable, and that if he could, he would have been glad to have returned to his native country, but was restrained by a sense of shame. Some colour was given to these reports by many of his countrymen who, from motives best known to themselves, perhaps thinking thereby to excuse the inconsistency of their own conduct, corroborated the accounts, though many of them had never seen my father in this country, and had no authority whatever for assertions which were entirely calumnies. Some currency was also given to the statement, by the false and injurious accounts published by the Duke de Liancourt, whose book if I may judge of it by that part which treats of Pennsylvania, and of this neighbourhood in particular, is not entitled to the least credit, being false in almost every particular. This my father himself has stated in a letter addressed to him.
The writer, understanding the language of the country but very imperfectly, must necessarily have been liable to many mistakes; nor is it to be wondered at that a man who details all the tittle tattle of every table to which he is invited, and who can basely convert the hospitable reception he meets with in a strange country, into the means of turning into ridicule those who shewed him attention and meant to serve him, should be even capable of fabricating and circulating gross and injurious falsehoods respecting individuals. I should disgrace myself, in my opinion, and still more should I disgrace the high situation which my father held in the esteem of the public, were I in this work to enter into any further consideration of his attack on my father’s character, satisfied that it is beyond the reach of his falsehoods and unprovoked malevolence.
My father would, no doubt, have been glad to have returned to England, and have enjoyed the society of his old and much valued friends; he would have rejoiced to have been nearer the centre of the Arts and Sciences; to have been joined again to his congregation and resumed his duties as a Christian Preacher; he would have been glad at the close of life, as he expresses himself, “to have found a grave in the land that gave him birth;” but this was impossible: and no person can read the preface to his Fast Sermon, quoted above, but must be convinced of it. Though he raised the credit of his native country by the brilliancy, the extent and the usefulness of his discoveries in different branches of science; though during his whole life he inculcated principles of virtue and religion, which the government pretended at least to believe were necessary to the well being of the state; though in no one single act of his life had he violated any law of his country or encouraged others to do so, what was the treatment he met with in that land of boasted civilization, and at the close of the 18th Century? It is sufficiently known, and will, as it ought to do, affect the character of the nation at large. Therefore, though he could have forgotten and forgiven all that was past, though the above mentioned motives would have had great weight in inducing him to return, yet there was no reason to expect that he should meet hereafter with better treatment than he had already experienced; and in consequence of this fixed persuasion he never entertained the idea of returning to live in England. He frequently talked indeed of returning to visit his friends; but when peace took place and he could have gone with safety, so comfortably was he settled in this country, and such was his opinion of the state of things in England, that he abandoned even the idea of a temporary journey thither, altogether.
But supposing the above obstacles had not existed to his return to his native country, he had no reason to be, nor was he, dissatisfied with his reception here. Independent of the attentions paid to him upon his first arrival in this country, he continued to receive marks of respect from bodies of men, and from individuals of various opinions in religion and politics, to whom he had been all his life before an utter stranger. Little reason therefore have his countrymen to represent his reception in America as unequal to his merits, or to calumniate the general character of the people here. His discoveries did not add to the credit of America as they had done to that of England, yet he was not obliged to withdraw his name from its Philosophical Society, disgusted with its illiberal treatment of himself and his friends. The Americans, comparatively speaking, had little opportunity of judging of his zeal for the real interests of religion, yet he was suffered to live in peace; and this country has not been disgraced by the destruction of a library and apparatus uniformly dedicated to the promotion of Science, and the good of mankind. It will be said that there were not such interests to oppose in America as in England. It is true, and it proves that the Americans have done well not to create such interests, and that the placing all the religious sects upon the same footing with respect to the government of the country, has effectually secured the peace of the community, at the same time that it has essentially promoted the interests of truth and virtue.
Being now settled at Northumberland with his mind at peace, and at ease in his circumstances, he seriously applied himself to those studies which he had long been compelled to desist from, and which he had but imperfectly attended to while he resided at Hackney. It is true that he spent his time there very agreeably, in a society of highly valued friends; but he did little compared to what he effected while he was at Birmingham, or what he has done during his residence here, owing to his time being very much broken in upon at Hackney by company. To prove how much he did in this country it is only necessary to refer to the list of the publications which he presented to the world in various branches of science, in theology and general literature. Here as in England, though more at leisure than formerly, he continued to apportion his time to the various occupations in which he was engaged, and strictly adhered to a regular plan of alternate study and relaxation, from which he never materially deviated.
It was while my father was at the academy that he commenced a practice which he continued until within three or four days of his death, of keeping a diary, in which he put down the occurrences of the day; what he was employed about, where he had been, and particularly an exact account of what he had been reading, mentioning the names of the authors, and the number of pages he read, which was generally a fixed number, previously determined upon in his own mind. He likewise noted down any hints suggested by what he read in the course of the day. It was his custom at the beginning of each year to arrange the plan of study that he meant to pursue that year, and to review the general situation of his affairs, and at the end of the year he took an account of the progress he had made, how far he had executed the plan he had laid down, and whether his situation exceeded or fell short of the expectations he had formed.
This practice was a source of great satisfaction to him through life. It was at first adopted as a mode of regulating his studies, and afterwards continued from the pleasure it gave him. The greater part of his diaries were destroyed at the riots at Birmingham, but there are still extant those for the year 1754, 1755 and several of the subsequent years.
As it will serve to shew the regularity with which he pursued his studies, and may possibly be instructive as well as amusing to the reader, I shall give a specimen of the manner in which he spent a year while he was at the academy, at Daventry, and for that purpose shall select his diary for the year 1755 when he was in his 22d year. The diary contains a particular account of what he read and wrote each day, and at different periods of the year he sums up in the following manner, the progress he had made in improvement, which I give as entered at the end of the diary.
* * * * *
Business done in January, February and March.
_Practical._
Howe’s blessedness of the righteous; Bennet’s pastoral care; Norris’s letters and some sermons.
_Controversial._
Taylor on Atonement; Hampton’s Answer; Sherlock’s discourses Vol. 1; Christianity not founded in Argument; Doddridge’s Answer; Warburton’s divine legation; Benson on the first planting of Christianity; King’s Constitution of the Primitive Church.
_Classics._
Josephus, Vol. 1, from page 390 to 770; Ovid’s Metamorphoses to page 139; Tacitus’s History, Life of Agricola, and Manners of the Germans.
_Scriptures._
John the Evangelist, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, 1st and 2d Corinthians, in Greek; Isaiah to the 8th chapter, in Hebrew.
_Mathematics._
Maclaurin’s Algebra to part 2d.
_Entertaining._
Irene; Prince Arthur; Ecclesiastical characters; Dryden’s fables; Peruvian tales; Voyage round the world; Oriental tales; Massey’s travels; Life of Hai Ebn Yokdam; History of Abdallah.
_Composition._
A Sermon on the Wisdom of God; An Oration on the means of Virtue; 1st Vol. of the Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion.
Business done from April 1st to June 23d.
_Practical._
Watts’s Catechism, and discourses on Catechizing; Fenelon’s spiritual works Vol. 1st and half of Vol. 2d; Saurin’s Sermons a few; Thomas a Kempis Book 1st to ch. 21; Cotton Mather’s life; Jenning’s on preaching Christianity.
_Controversial._
Towgood, Gill and Breckell on Baptism; Le Clerc on Inspiration; Whiston’s Historical preface; Emlyn’s narrative and humble enquiry; Apostolical Constitutions; Newton on the prophecies; Winder’s History of knowledge; Hoadly on the Sacrament; Lowman on the Revelation; Moral Philosopher; Hume’s Political discourses; Middleton’s fathers of the four first centuries; Middleton and Waterland’s controversy. ---- on the Demoniacs; Goodrich’s display of Human Nature.
_Classics._
Cicero’s 1st. Phillippic.
_Historical._
Universal History Vol. 15 and 16 and to page 488 of the 17th.
_Composition._
Second Vol. of the Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion; wrote an article on Edwards’s translation of the Psalms for the review.
From June 23d to September 1.
_Practical Writers._
Thomas a Kempis from Ch. 21 of Book 1st; Hartley on Man vol. 2d. May’s Prayers. Holland’s Sermons.
_Scriptures._
From the 1st Epistle of Timothy to the Revelations, and the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in the Greek Testament; The books of Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, in the Hebrew Bible.
_Classics._
Ovid from Book 9th; Demosthenes 1st Phillippic and 3 Olynthiacs; Herodotus Book 1st; Homer’s Iliad, Book 1, 2, 3; Sallust.
_History._
Universal History from Vol. 17 p. 488 to the end of Vol. 18. Neal’s History of the Puritans 4 Volumes.
_Philosophy._
The Anatomical Articles in the Universal Dictionary, several principal Algebraic ones, and all the letter A.
_Composition._
12 Sermons.
Business done in September.
_Practical._
Holland’s Sermons, Vol. 2d; Doddridge’s family Expositor Vol. 1.
_Scriptures._
John the Evangelist, in Greek.
Numbers, and to the 16th Chapter in Deuteronomy in Hebrew.
_Classics._
Homer’s Iliad, 12 books.
_Mathematical._
Euclid, Lib. 1, 2, 3.
_History._
Universal History, Vol. 19th.
_Miscellaneous._
Mason’s Student; One of Shakespeare’s plays.
_Composition._
4 Sermons.
Business done in October.
_Practical._
Doddridge’s Expositor Vol. 2d; Common Prayer Book; Fordyce’s Sermons on public Institutions.
_Scriptures._
Deuteronomy from Ch. 16 to the end; Ecclesiastes and Solomon’s Song in Hebrew and Greek.
_Classics._
Homer’s Iliad, Book P to the end.
_Mathematical._
Euclid, Lib, 4, 5, 6.
_Historical._
Universal History, Vol. 20th.
_Miscellaneous._
5 Shakespeare’s Plays.
_Composition._
3 Sermons.
Business done in November.
_Practical._
Abernethy’s Practical Sermons.
_Scriptures._
Job, in Hebrew and the Septuagint.
_Philosophy, Mathematics and Chemistry._
Euclid Lib. 11 and 12 slightly; Boerhave’s Theory of Chemistry a good part of Vol. 1st; Rowning’s Philosophy half of Vol. 1st.
_Classics._
Francis’s Horace, Odes 4 books.
_History._
Universal History part of Vol. 3d; Jewish Antiquities. History of the Council of Trent to page 133. Anson’s voyage by Walter.
_Plays._
4 of Shakespeare’s plays.
_Composition._
2 Sermons.
Business done in December.
_Practical._
Abernethy’s Posthumous sermons Vol. 2d; Clarke’s sermons Vol. 1st. Patric on Ecclesiastes.
_Scriptures._
Psalms, in the Hebrew and Septuagint.
_Philosophy._
Rowning’s Philosophy part 2d and 3d.
_Classics._
Francis’s Horace Vol. 2 and 3.
_Miscellaneous and Entertaining._
Malcolm on Music, half; 4 Shakespeare’s plays.
Half of the 1st Vol. of the Rambler.
Popes Ethic Epistles, a few.
_History._
Paul’s Council of Trent, to page 476; Life of the Duke of Marlborough.
_Composition._
4 Sermons.