The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden: Empire, Science, and Intellectual Culture in British New York 9781501703515

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Dates
Introduction
Part I. Beginnings
1. Enlightened Age
2. Pursuit of Gentility
3. Intellectuals
Part II. Active Matters
4. Knowledge of Empires
5. Otium
6. Philosophical Actions
Part III. Politics
7. Against Partisanship
8. Colden’s Ordeal
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliographic Note
Index

Citation preview

The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden

The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden Empire, Science, and Intellectual Culture in British New York

John M. Dixon

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2016 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2016 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dixon, John M., 1970– author. Title: The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden : empire, science, and intellectual culture in British New York / John M. Dixon. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015036031 | ISBN 9780801448034 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Colden, Cadwallader, 1688–1776—Political activity. | Colden, Cadwallader, 1688–1776—Philosophy. | New York (State)— Politics and government—To 1775. | New York (State)—Intellectual life—18th century. Classification: LCC F122 .C6825 2016 | DDC 974.7/02092— dc23 LC record available at http:// lccn.loc.gov/ 2015036031 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my parents

It is no consequence to the truth whether a discovery of it be made by a Greek or a Barbarian, by a Courtier or a Clown; or whether it be made in the Gardens of Epicurus, or in the Forests of America. The evidence of its truth only is properly the object of Philosophical enquiry. Cadwallader Colden, 1753

Contents

Acknowledgments A Note on Dates Introduction

ix xiii 1

PART I. BEGINNINGS 1. Enlightened Age

11

2. Pursuit of Gentility

25

3. Intellectuals

43

PART II. ACTIVE MATTERS 4. Knowledge of Empires

61

5. Otium

84

v iii

Contents

6. Philosophical Actions

103

PART III. POLITICS 7. Against Partisanship

129

8. Colden’s Ordeal

149

Abbreviations

169

Notes

173

Bibliographic Note

235

Index

237

Acknowledgments

My most sincere thanks go to Ruth Bloch. I have benefited from her invaluable advice, kind encouragement, and astute insights for many years. Without her generous and expert mentorship, this book would not have been possible. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Mary Terrall, who helped me understand Colden’s theories of aether and a lot more besides. For numerous enlightening seminars and conversations at the University of California, Los Angeles, I want to thank Perry Anderson, Joyce Appleby, Jenna Gibbs, Robert Hill, Margaret Jacob, Kevin Lambert, Naomi Lamoreaux, Inger Leemans, Christopher Looby, Muriel McClendon, Wijnand Mijnhardt, Anthony Pagden, Janice Reiff, Peter Reill, Arthur Rolston, Teofilo Ruiz, Geoffrey Symcox, and Craig Yirush. Laura McEnaney and Marie Francois provided important guidance as I further developed my ideas while teaching at Whittier College and California State University, Channel Islands, respectively. From 2009, I have relied on the good cheer and wise counsel of colleagues at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. I particularly want to recognize Zara Anishanslin and Jonathan Sassi,

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Acknowledgments

two specialists in early American history who generously shared their time and knowledge as I worked on this book. Bryan Averbuch, Melissa Borja, Marcela Echeverri (now at Yale University), Sandra Gambetti, Eric Ivison, Catherine Lavender, Mark Lewis, Ben Mercer (now at Australian National University), Susan Smith-Peter, and John Wing also provided fruitful leads and suggestions. Numerous other scholars and friends have contributed in various ways. Both Roger Emerson and Ned Landsman read the entire manuscript. The importance of their thoughtful criticism and honest assessments cannot be overstated. Anonymous reviewers for Cornell University Press and the City University of New York supplied a wealth of additional comments and information. I am grateful to Patricia Bonomi and Joyce Goodfriend for providing considerable encouragement, help, and advice over several years. I similarly thank Joyce Chaplin for her friendly and constructive recommendations. And I am indebted to the participants at conferences in Houston, London, Montreal, New York, and Philadelphia who pushed me to think more heavily about my research. Mordechai Feingold, Anthony Grafton, James Green, Sara Gronim, and Richard Sher merit special mention. For assistance during my research, I thank staff at the American Antiquarian Society; Bibliothèque de Genève; the British Library, London; City University of New York; Colby College Museum of Art; Columbia University; the University of Edinburgh; Göttingen State and University Library; Harvard University; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Museum of the City of New York; the National Archives, London; the National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh; the New Jersey Historical Society; the New York Academy of Medicine; the New-York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the New York State Archives, Albany; the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia; the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh; the Royal Society of London; the Stevens Institute of Technology; Tacoma Museum; the University of California, Los Angeles; and Yale University. Karl Kusserow, Henk Looijesteijn, and Peter Titcomb graciously and swiftly responded to specific queries. Grants from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Professional Staff Congress– City University of New York Fund aided my scholarship. It has been a pleasure to work with Michael McGandy, my editor at Cornell University Press, who saw potential in an early draft and then oversaw

Acknowledgments

xi

its revision with extreme patience and expertise. His insightful comments have improved this book no end. I thank all of the family members who have lived with this book for more years than I dare count. Individual recognition must go to William Sater, my father-in-law, who read multiple unpolished chapters, and John Dixon, my uncle and namesake, who provided ample room and board while I completed research at Edinburgh. My greatest appreciation goes to my wife, Rachel, who gave endless support and encouragement. For better or worse, I conscripted our sons, Milo and Ewan, into the historical profession as I worked on this book. They provided help and distraction in equal measure. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once said that he wrote The Age of Jackson with a young child sitting on his knee, and I can now testify to the true benefits (and fine balance) of that methodology. I reserve my final thanks for my parents, Joe and Barbara Dixon. They taught me the most of what I know, and I dedicate this book to their memory.

A Note on Dates

The Julian (Old Style or O.S.) calendar was used in Britain and the British colonies until 1752. It operated several days behind the Gregorian (New Style or N.S.) calendar that was followed elsewhere in Europe after 1582. To complicate matters further, Scotland adopted 1 January as the start of a new year from 1600, while England continued to use 25 March until 1752. This book takes 1 January as the start of a new year, but otherwise repeats Old Style dates where they appear in the original documents. For example, Colden’s birth date (known at the time as 7  February 1687  in England, 7 February 1688 in Scotland, and 17 February 1688 in other parts of Europe) is presented here as 7 February 1688.

The Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden

Introduction

“Nothing more prevents the advancement of any Art or Science than that of making it cheap & mean.” So wrote a much-traveled New York politician in 1743 after he observed low legal fees, excessive litigation, and uninformed religious talk while passing through Connecticut. His comment expressed more than his views about New England. It reflected his overall opinion of mid-eighteenth-century British America. This provincial statesman had previously complained of the contemporary overproduction of inexpensive and inaccurate books, and he had even gone so far as to invent a printing technology to enable the commercial output of complex and authoritative works. Now he groaned that Connecticut’s “litigeous humour” and “perpetual caballing” hampered colonial business and undermined social unity. Furthermore, New Englanders who pretended to possess great “skill in Theology” showed no actual mastery of “the Principles of Religeon.” In short, there was too much uncultured noise and not enough enlightenment in the American colonies.1

2

Introduction

Cadwallader Colden was not only a well-traveled New York politician but also an intellectual. In 1743 he was on the verge of making his own philosophical breakthrough. Thirty-three years earlier he had arrived in America as a learned Scottish immigrant short in stature and dour in nature, grayeyed with an oval, reddish face and a prominent nose that curled outward like an upturned cup handle. At that time he possessed little more than a university education and a rich knowledge of the natural sciences. Yet, his impressive understanding of medicine, physiology, astronomy, mathematics, and physics eventually won patrons and established his gentility. He gained an appointment as New York’s surveyor general and a seat on the province’s council in the early 1720s. Subsequently, he became a powerful local figure and a valuable imperial agent with an expert knowledge of the history and geography of New York and neighboring Iroquoia. However, the colonial statesman temporarily withdrew from public affairs after he developed a reactionary dislike for interest politics and popular mobilization during the 1730s. By 1743 he wanted nothing more than a secluded and contemplative retirement. He imagined himself as an eighteenth-century gentleman-scholar possessing all the leisure, erudition, and polish required to shape international thought and improve the condition of mankind. That winter, he immersed himself in books and developed an intriguing theory of active matter that appeared to reveal the cause of gravitation. This colonial pursuit of “Art” and “Science” that was the very opposite of “cheap & mean” exposes some of the ideological, social, and political parameters of intellectual culture in British America and beyond. Colden and other imperial agents in New York played a constitutive role in the so-called Moderate Enlightenment during the first half of the eighteenth century. The Moderate Enlightenment was a mainstream and state-sponsored fusion of tradition, tolerant and reasonable religion, and new science and philosophy. It was typically reformist not revolutionary, and had its origins in the religious and political turmoil of the seventeenth century. The Moderate Enlightenment had an especially strong presence in Britain. Recoiling from the political volatility of the 1640s and 1650s, English and Scottish governing classes sought to establish an extended period of calm, order, industry, and innovation after the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). In the early eighteenth century, Newtonian natural philosophy, particularly as it was espoused by latitudinarian clergymen, gave ideological support to this effort. It seemed that a new era of stable politics and useful knowledge was indeed possible.

Introduction

3

An elite intellectual culture that formed in New York around that time helped to imperialize this outlook by tying it to Protestantism, British expansionism, commerce, and social harmony in North America. Yet, aspirations for a High Moderate Enlightenment in New York ran up against several tall hurdles. The colony’s furious partisanship, the wider politics and patronage of the First British Empire, the commercial needs of European and American publishers, the rise of a literate and refined colonial middling sort, and the ambivalence of non-elites toward metropolitan scientific knowledge each posed sizable challenges. As a result, enlightened culture in eighteenth-century British New York became at once highly significant and worryingly fragile. The Moderate Enlightenment was one wing of a larger movement that lasted approximately from the late seventeenth century until the early nineteenth century. The Enlightenment as a whole was an age of intellectual vitality, cultural experimentation, societal transformation, and political upheaval. Formerly considered the creation of a few Parisian philosophes, it is now more often thought of as a global and polycentric early modern phenomenon fanned by an unprecedented interaction of peoples, ideas, plants, animals, and technologies. Smart conversation in salons and coffeehouses, secretive rituals in masonic halls, the publication of polite periodicals, kite-flying during electrical storms, and declarations and revolutions of one sort or another are well-known and important features. All the same, the Enlightenment remains best defined by its ideological core, and most especially by its fundamental insistence on the capacity of human reason to deliver individual and societal improvement. Equally, it expressed an optimistic vision of the eighteenth century as a historic tipping point, a moment when centuries of stagnation, ignorance, and intolerance could finally give way to progress, knowledge, and cosmopolitanism. British America’s particular relationship with the Enlightenment began long before the American Revolution and was shaped by imperial and elitist concerns, as well as by the unique interplay of European, African, native, scholarly, and artisanal knowledge that occurred in the colonies. Within this context, New York elites served a critical role as intermediaries between local knowledge producers and distant scientific institutions and patrons. They imported books and built large libraries, exported information and specimens to European aristocrats and royal societies, published scholarly tracts,

4

Introduction

and organized correspondence networks. These achievements quickened the production and circulation of knowledge, enabling American and transatlantic intellectual culture to thrive. In addition, they created valuable political connections and demarcated the gentility and social status of the colony’s ruling class.2 Intellectual activity proceeded in New York against a backdrop of European imperialism. Before the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, colonials were more concerned with defeating Catholic absolutism than with securing independence from British Protestant rule. Attachment to Britain was particularly strong in a colony that abutted French Canada, served as an administrative and military hub of the First British Empire, and provided an accessible gateway to the continental interior. Centrally positioned within the mainland British American colonies and blessed with a deep harbor and penetrative inland water routes, New York pivoted between land and ocean, profiting from both eastward trade with Europe and the Caribbean, and westward commerce with Native Americans. Imperialism, intellectualism, and elitism combined to produce what was initially a socially and ideologically narrow form of enlightened culture in New York. Despite its contemporary reputation as a haven for crude, heavy drinkers, the colony contained numerous learned officials. A clique of wellinformed deep thinkers gathered around Governors Robert Hunter and William Burnet, two Fellows of the Royal Society and two of the most capable minds in British America. Being a refined New York intellectual took on added social and political importance as the court parties of Hunter and Burnet engaged in intelligent conversation and practices, while also sneering at the crudeness of their rivals. For example, Hunter’s 1714 play, Androboros, the first theater piece authored and published in British America, compared opposition legislators to inmates of London’s notorious insane asylum, Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam. Later, a Latin poem by an associate of Burnet ridiculed New Yorkers on the basis of their chess skills and strategies. Wit and intelligence thus became markers of local social and political distinctions.3 It is no surprise that this environment attracted ambitious and smart men such as Colden. Like Hunter and Burnet, and several other New York imperial agents, he possessed a Scottish background. He was born in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, and so lived through the traumatic religious conflict, depression, and famine that engulfed Scotland in the 1690s. The son

Introduction

5

of a Presbyterian minister, he entered the University of Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century with the expectation that he would go on to become a churchman. It was therefore shocking and disappointing to his pious parents that he graduated in 1705 with a deep interest in the natural sciences, some exposure to Scottish Newtonianism, and a determination to become a London physician rather than a Roxburghshire clergyman. Limited by his family’s modest wealth, he failed as a medical professional in the British capital and sailed for Philadelphia in 1710. Colden soon joined an Atlantic trading community and spent a sizable chunk of the next five years touring the Caribbean as a merchant. Although he developed warm and useful friendships with other educated Scots involved in commerce, his business faltered. In 1715 he sailed back to the British Isles, where he wedded a Scottish fiancée he had not seen for five years. While on that trip, he established his scientific credentials in London by circulating a manuscript on animal secretion. Returning to Philadelphia in 1716, Colden fashioned himself as a clever and cultured doctor. He swiftly became the town’s leading physician, but was nevertheless unable to secure a steady public position. Deciding there were more opportunities in New York, he moved to Manhattan in 1718 and joined the intellectual and political circle of Governor Hunter. This relocation north brought handsome reward in April 1720 when Colden learned that he was appointed New York’s surveyor general. Soon thereafter, he gained a seat on the colony’s council, and thus became one of the most powerful figures in a large and important colony. In defense of the expansionist imperial policies of Governor Burnet and against the protestations of a rival political faction, he produced maps and reports that circulated in Whitehall, and influenced imperial policy. He wrote his most enduring work, The History of the Five Indian Nations, for similar reasons. Initially printed in New York in 1727, this account of the Iroquois later appeared in an extended and revised form as a commercial work printed in London. It reached a large European and American readership and was widely recognized from the 1750s as a standard scholarly resource. All the same, its author reaped few direct benefits. In the meantime, the colony of New York endured political turmoil in the 1730s and a horrific sequence of theft, fires, conspiracy trials, and executions shocked Manhattan in 1741. These events initiated Colden’s turn toward despair and conservatism. He responded at first by withdrawing from public affairs and recast himself as a noble philosopher removed from the

6

Introduction

disruptions of commerce and politics. As he fashioned himself as a gentleman at leisure, he engaged in scientific practices that depended on the labor of slaves, servants, and family members, including his daughter Jane, who became a pioneering woman botanist. Colden was a pragmatist who understood the mechanics of eighteenth-century intellectual culture. He thought long and hard about how to use script and print to distribute knowledge. He also skillfully utilized a burgeoning scientific correspondence network partly of his own making. In particular, he relied on London merchant and plant collector Peter Collinson, a well-connected figure in the British capital who helped to arrange the European publication and distribution of his writings. It was against this backdrop that Colden made his major philosophical breakthrough in the winter of 1743–1744. He spent the next two years cautiously preparing the international launch of his new physics of active matter. Finally, in the fall of 1745, he felt ready to share his thoughts with select scholars. He informed several correspondents of his plan to disseminate a printed account of his ideas to the Royal Society and other “proper Judges.”4 An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation appeared in New York a few months later. One of the most ambitious publications in the history of American scientific literature, this twochapter treatise claimed to solve mysteries of the universe that had perplexed all of the great ancient and modern thinkers. Its author distributed copies to the up-and-coming Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and to another leading colonial philosopher, the Reverend Samuel Johnson, in Stratford, Connecticut. When a political emergency called him back to Manhattan in June 1746, Colden placed a bundle on a London-bound ship. These pamphlets evaded French privateers, successfully reached Collinson that August, and circulated among Britain’s literati. They sparked enough interest to prompt an English printer to run off an unauthorized copy before the year ended. Translated versions later appeared in Hamburg and Paris.5 Unfortunately, scholarly interest in Colden’s theory of active matter did not last. Although a celebrated London publisher issued the colonial philosopher’s grand follow-up, The Principles of Action in Matter, in 1751, that sizable and costly book was a commercial and critical flop. Colden, who remained utterly convinced of the intellectual value of his work, cursed his age’s preference for cheap, ephemeral print and condemned European prejudices against American intellectualism. Both grievances had some merit. But, in truth, Colden’s theory of active matter was too speculative and

Introduction

7

convoluted to realize the advancements in practical knowledge that it promised. To make matters worse, the New Yorker’s self-confidence smacked of hubris, while his remoteness meant that he could not respond quickly to negative European reviews. Colden’s intellectual authority declined in America as well as Europe. A group of young and largely Yale-educated professionals usurped his cultural authority in New York in the 1750s by announcing themselves as the colony’s new intelligentsia. These upstart thinkers clashed repeatedly with Colden, who became New York’s lieutenant governor in 1761. Worn down by decades of intellectual and political struggles, as well as by a succession of personal losses, the aging statesman endured a torrid spell as an inflexible and ineffective Crown loyalist faced with a series of prerevolutionary crises. He lost confidence that the eighteenth century could usher in a new enlightened age, lamented the destructive spread of self-interest, delusion, and discord in New York, and castigated his elite opponents for manipulating the people and stirring disorder. The defining moment of his late political life occurred during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 when a riotous mob burnt his effigy and property. Colden saw nothing enlightened about his country’s descent into civil war and died dispirited in September 1776 not long after another enlightened figure, Thomas Jefferson, had declared America’s independence from the British Empire. Imperialism, elitism, and conservatism are not the usual stuff of the American Enlightenment. But then most of our traditional narratives concentrate heavily on libertarianism and the American Revolution. The timing of Colden’s death invites us to revisit colonial thought and culture on its own terms, rather than as a precursor to a 1776 Declaration or a 1787 Constitution. In retracing Colden’s life, we find much scientific and philosophical activity that engaged with but also extended beyond the now well-documented liberal and republican ideologies, growing refinement of the colonial middling sort, and peculiar political battles of British New York. The general picture that emerges is not one of American detachment from Europe, but one of extensive and dynamic transatlantic exchange. Peoples, ideas, information, natural objects, and human inventions passed both ways across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century. By participating in the circulation of useful knowledge, New York elites with Crown appointments and metropolitan connections laid claim to gentility, asserted their social and intellectual

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Introduction

superiority, and established a moral basis for their government. They found opportunities in print and public debate, but also feared any popular mobilization would breed discord, dissent, conspiracy, and anarchy. Enlightenment, in the opinion of Colden and many other leading colonials, had to be managed carefully from the top down. This history of one of New York’s earliest intellectuals and his context offers a perspective on the Enlightenment that is at once local, colonial, and transatlantic. Colden arrived in Manhattan with a good Scottish education, solid links to leading Newtonian mathematicians and astronomers in London, and a track record of medical success in Philadelphia. He gained rewarding and influential posts as a provincial councilor and surveyor general, and developed close friendships with talented and informed thinkers such as Governors Hunter and Burnet. He became a central figure in the partisan broils of a famously factious colony, as well as in the development of local intellectual culture. Simultaneously, he looked beyond New York. By the 1740s, he was in regular correspondence with Franklin, John Bartram, Rev. Johnson, and other colonial men of science. Moreover, through his London agent, Peter Collinson, he struck up relationships with the celebrated European naturalists Carl Linnaeus and Johan Frederik Gronovius, as well as powerful British politicians, including George Montagu-Dunk, Earl of Halifax and president of the Board of Trade. Colden’s writings on active matter appeared in print in America and throughout Europe, challenging preconceptions on both sides of the Atlantic about the role of colonial thought and scientific practices in an enlightened age. Such extensive participation in early modern intellectual culture deserves greater recognition and understanding. Colden, like many of his contemporaries, believed that humankind had a historic opportunity in the eighteenth century to achieve societal progress. Even while living in a remote part of New York, he sought to help realize that goal. As an eighteenth-century imperialist, elitist, and royalist, he may not fit comfortably into our standard historical narratives about early America and the Enlightenment. But that is all the more reason to consider his importance. It is as much to say that America’s Enlightenment was not just that of Thomas Jefferson and other patriots and revolutionaries. It was also the Enlightenment of Cadwallader Colden.

PART I

Beginnings

Chapter 1

Enlightened Age

With a series of concussive booms, pyrotechnics created at a laboratory in Greenwich, London, not far from a recently built observatory, exploded above the River Thames in July 1688 in celebration of the birth of a new royal.1 As the only legitimate son of the King of England, Ireland, and Scotland, the infant Prince of Wales was heir to three crowns and an empire of Caribbean islands and North American colonies. His family—the Stuarts— had returned to power in 1660, after eleven years of republicanism, and overseen an age of cultural splendor that encompassed the poetry and plays of John Dryden, the music of Henry Purcell, and the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren. The Restoration had also brought an unprecedented institutionalization and legitimization of English and Scottish science. The Royal Society of London, chartered in 1662, had added visibility and prestige to English natural history and natural philosophy. Meanwhile, in Scotland’s capital, the botanist, royal physician, and royal geographer, Sir Robert Sibbald, had founded Edinburgh’s first physic garden, co-organized the

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Chapter 1

Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and gathered a “virtuoso” circle of scientifically minded gentlemen.2 These developments helped to nurture an exciting age of international intellectual innovation, cultural experiment, and political transformation that started in the second half of the seventeenth century and lasted well into the nineteenth century. This is by no means to say that the Enlightenment— as it is now known—began solely in England and Scotland, or for that matter in Europe. Rather, it was a global and polycentric phenomenon that owed much to the remarkable exchange of peoples, ideas, information, natural objects, and human inventions that happened during the early modern era, albeit often under the aegis of European imperialism and commercialism. The Enlightenment covered a great deal of ideological as well as geographical ground, combining diverse conservative, moderate, and radical opinions— some secular, some religious. Its intellectual coherence came from its general advocacy of reason, pursuit of self-improvement and societal progress, and assertion that the eighteenth century was a pivotal moment in a centurieslong battle against dogma and ignorance.3 Enlightenment Scotland and America enjoyed a particularly close intellectual relationship.4 Historians have paid a great deal of attention to the transatlantic reach of the mid and late eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith. By comparison, the sizable impact in America of learned Scots born around 1688 remains underappreciated. This generation came of age during a difficult period of religious tumult, famine, and exodus, but simultaneously benefited from modernizing academic reforms, the support of an aristocracy interested in scientific improvement, and the thrill of living at what seemed like a crucial point in intellectual history—a moment of sweeping philosophical change and scientific breakthroughs. Cadwallader Colden was arguably the most important of the several educated Scots who immigrated to America in the early eighteenth century. After a period in Philadelphia, he moved to New York in 1718 and spent much of his remaining life constructing and justifying a transatlantic intellectual culture. Around 1760, he told his American grandchildren a historical narrative that he may well have learned more than fifty years earlier as a student at the University of Edinburgh.5 It was a stock eighteenth-century tale that recalled how Popish priests and Aristotelian scholars had imposed a cultural hegemony of useless knowledge on the world, and how two great

Enlightened Age

13

thinkers, René Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton, had cleared away much of that intellectual fog in the seventeenth century. Colden acknowledged that more needed to be done, but also asserted that the world stood on the verge of an “enlightened” age. He then impressed upon his grandchildren that his own intellectual work was an integral part of that historic moment. In this way, he used a story of enlightenment to reflect on his life’s meaning and purpose.6 Colden was correct to view the decline of Aristotelian scholastic tradition and development of new understandings of the natural world as important precursors to eighteenth-century intellectual culture. The Aristotelian universe was very different from our own. Whereas we now accept that our planet rotates around the Sun, Aristotelians generally put the Earth at the center of the cosmos. They also usually agreed that the orbit of the Moon separated a celestial realm where stars and planets moved in perfect circles from a set of corrupt sublunary spheres composed of four elements— earth, water, air, and fire. Each of these elements had characteristic qualities and innate tendencies. Aristotelians claimed that cold, dry, and heavy earth constantly tried to reach the center of the world. So did cold, wet, and heavy water. By contrast, hot, wet, and light air and hot, dry, and light fire sought to rise upward. In this scheme, bodies fell downward not because of some external gravitational force, but because of the inner strivings of earth and water to reach their natural place at the Earth’s core.7 Aristotelian tradition additionally viewed terrestrial bodies as interactions of prime matter and substantial form. We are now used to thinking of matter as an actual material substance, but Aristotelians considered prime matter to be something else—an inert potential to become substance. Substantial form was the active principle that realized that latent transformation. It imbued prime matter with essential, as well as nonessential, qualities.8 The recovery of ancient pre-Socratic, Platonic, Hermetic, Epicurean, and Stoic writings during the Renaissance encouraged a significant number of early modern natural philosophers to read beyond the Aristotelian corpus. Even though some of these scholars subsequently adopted alchemical or magical explanations that were fiercely anti-Aristotelian in many respects, European natural philosophy continued to view matter as animate. The cosmos, in other words, remained in the view of most educated Europeans something like a living organism.9

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Chapter 1

The rise of an alternative mechanistic physics was a prolonged, contingent, and contested event, and not the automatic progression of scientific knowledge it has sometimes been described as. Aristotelianism, which was varied and flexible enough to adapt to new discoveries, could not be swiftly or easily dislodged in Europe, where political authorities limited and monitored the assimilation of novel systems of knowledge.10 Nevertheless, new philosophy, new astronomy, and new forms of scientific experimentation gained traction over time, and matter eventually came to be widely seen as a nonliving or inert substance in the seventeenth century. The growing prevalence in Europe of machines such as windmills and clocks perhaps contributed to this shift.11 It is also easy to imagine that Europe’s religious authorities and possessing classes thought that the notion of a predictable, law-bound universe might encourage social, political, and religious calm during a tempestuous age.12 A number of seventeenth-century European scholars, fueled by the ancient writings of Epicurus and Lucretius, created systems that emphasized the order and regularity of the universe. One French philosopher, Pierre Gassendi, drew heavily on ancient Epicureanism to conceive of the natural world as a multitude of indivisible and interlocked atoms moving in a void. Another Frenchman, Descartes, abandoned all ancient knowledge and began with the simple proposition, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I  am), from which he extrapolated a complicated account of the cosmos. Descartes’s substantial and compelling alternative to Aristotelian physics claimed matter was omnipresent and infinitely divisible. It also described the universe as a combination of large material bodies and swirling vortices of extremely fine matter, or aether.13 As advocates of Cartesianism overcame resistance from clerical and civic powers to achieve significant influence in parts of Continental Europe, especially the Netherlands and France, a confusing mess of philosophical systems persisted in mid-seventeenth-century England and Scotland. Walter Charleton issued an English-language version of Gassendi’s Animadversiones in the 1650s. Robert Boyle developed a natural philosophy that combined elements of both Descartes and Gassendi. Thomas Hobbes created a shockingly materialistic account of nature that became synonymous with atheism. Henry More, the leader of a group of seventeenth-century English theologians and philosophers known as the Cambridge Platonists, complained that Cartesianism reduced the role of God to the point where he

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did no more than get the universe up and running. And Baconian empiricism, which gained important institutional support at the Royal Society of London, prioritized the scientific pursuit of useful facts and so provided a more general ideological bulwark in Britain against Descartes’s rationalism. That was the intellectual context in which Newton, the son of a wellto-do Lincolnshire farmer, set out to understand the universe while a student at Cambridge University in the 1660s. During the remainder of his life, he became fascinated by many religious and natural problems, including, of course, the cause of gravitation. Newton initially considered gravity to be the mechanical result of fine aether particles hitting material bodies. He reassessed that explanation in the 1680s, when he discovered through mathematics and experiment that the motion of celestial bodies was not slowed by resistance as it should have been if these bodies were actually moving through a purely material aether. By the time that his greatest work, the Principia, was published in 1687, Newton was prepared only to identify gravitation as a centripetal force without venturing any real explanation of its workings. Later, he became convinced that this force derived from the will of God. The second English edition of the Opticks, Newton’s other major work, published in 1718, speculated that a subtle fluid filled space and communicated gravity through its inherent elasticity. In private, Newton had begun to think of this aether as a critical linkage between the natural and the supernatural. It served, as one historian has aptly noted, “as a cosmic mediator between God and matter.”14 Not all Newtonians agreed with Newton that God intervened in this way in the regular operation of the universe. Like Aristotelianism and Cartesianism, Newtonianism was a complex and evolving set of beliefs rather than a static doctrinal monolith. It gathered momentum as Newtonian ideas of one sort or another gained acceptance in Scottish and English universities in the last decades of the seventeenth century, earlier than in most other parts of Europe. At Edinburgh, Newton’s theories of light and color, as well as his physics, entered the curriculum in the 1670s and 1680s.15 Simultaneously, two reputedly hard-drinking friends, the physician Archibald Pitcairne and the mathematician David Gregory, later a professor at Oxford, hosted a clique of Scottish Newtonians in the taverns of Scotland’s capital.16 Newtonianism gained even more currency when leading proponents such as Samuel Clarke, an Anglican clergyman, and Jean Le Clerc, a liberal minister and publisher of the Bibliothèque universelle et historique, a French-language

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journal printed in Holland and read throughout Europe, asserted that matter was inert and God was the ultimate source of cosmic movement.17 A Whig regime put in place by the recent Glorious Revolution appreciated the political and religious tameness of these claims, which in turn helped to give eighteenth-century British thought a distinctly moderate flavor. Intellectual and political change were never far apart in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England and Scotland. The London fireworks of July 1688 provided a striking display of this relationship by at once illuminating the enhanced capabilities of Restoration science and demonstrating the extravagance and pomposity of the Crown. What is more, the impressive pyrotechnics effectively declared the start of a Catholic dynasty in two countries that were 98 percent Protestant. Everyone expected in 1688 that the newborn Prince of Wales would be raised in his father’s faith, even though his two older half-sisters had been brought up as Protestants. Alarmed at that prospect, Scottish and English exiles in Holland convinced a Dutch Stadhouder to invade the British Isles. Prince William of Orange, a staunch Protestant married to one of King James’s daughters, landed on the south coast of England in November 1688 with a force of fifteen thousand professional fighters. James tried to rally his troops for a battle, but his courtiers and soldiers deserted in large numbers. Confronted by this desperate military and political predicament, the Catholic king fled to France with his infant son.18 Once remembered as a bloodless rejection of tyranny, as well as a very English return to business as usual, the Glorious Revolution was in actuality a violent and transformative event, especially in Scotland. After news of James’s departure traveled north of the border, angry gangs rampaged in the streets against the Stuart monarchy and the Restoration Settlement. They targeted Catholics at first, and then turned on the Episcopalian clergy, tormenting and expelling between two hundred and three hundred ministers, mostly in the south and the west of the country.19 A new political order took shape amid this turmoil. Elections held in the winter of 1688–1689 determined the form of the Convention of the Estates, a quasi-parliament called by the as-yet-uncrowned William. Hard-campaigning Presbyterians won a majority of seats, dominated the convention when it met in March 1689, and swiftly realigned the religion and politics of Scotland. By the end of April, the new political body had terminated the reign of James VII, curbed the

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legal powers of the monarchy, and presented the Scottish throne to William and his English wife, Mary. The convention duly evolved into an actual Scottish Parliament, and Presbyterian government was restored to the Church of Scotland.20 The Revolution Settlement so clearly favored one religious and political group that it left Scotland deeply unsettled for decades. Sectarian conflict continued into the 1690s as militant Presbyterians seized control of the General Assembly of the Church and proceeded to dismantle Scottish Episcopalianism. Visitation committees sought out “insufficient, negligent, scandalous and erroneous ministers.”21 Six or seven hundred churchmen eventually lost their posts either through the actions of these committees or at the hands of rabbling mobs. Even though Scottish Episcopalians retained considerable religious and political clout, especially north of the Tay and among the nobility, they suffered a severe blow as Presbyterians regained Scottish pulpits that had been under Episcopalian control for decades.22 Academics were removed from their lecterns after 1689, just as clergymen were forced from their pulpits. Several expulsions took place at the University of Edinburgh, initiated by the Town Council, which was formally responsible for most local faculty appointments, though it often bowed to pressure from Scotland’s influential political managers. Edinburgh’s councilors tended to be narrow-minded administrators uninterested in academic innovation or institutional reform.23 After an election held in 1689, they were also mostly Presbyterians determined to rid the University of Edinburgh of all Jacobite influence. The Council dispatched a visitation committee to the university in 1689. The following year, the Scottish Parliament sent out a similar task force. These committees investigated, intimidated, and removed a number of Episcopalian scholars from the University of Edinburgh.24 In addition, they examined student lecture notes for religiously or politically suspect content. When it was discovered that some students believed “the material world has existed from eternity,” and that “our reason or philosophy is the father of Scripture,” the Scottish Parliament promptly instructed Edinburgh professors to stifle all irreligious thought.25 The nonconformist scholars forced into exile after 1690 included a group of leading Scottish Newtonians. Ironically, the expulsion of these Scottish men of science only added to their influence and international standing. Archibald Pitcairne joined the faculty at the University of Leiden and visited Newton in Cambridge while on his way to Holland in 1692. David Gregory

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went south to Oxford, where he became the Savilian Professor of Astronomy in 1691 after Newton recommended him as the “greatest Mathematician in Scotland.”26 John Keill, one of Gregory’s Edinburgh students, also relocated to Oxford, where he taught Newtonian natural philosophy. In 1709 Keill received an appointment as treasurer of the Palatines, Germanspeaking Protestant refugees from the Holy Roman Empire. He traveled with many of these Palatines to New York and spent the best part of a year living in Manhattan. The colony’s governor later reported that Keill “shewed himself an intolerable Debauchee, whimsical, irregular in all his Conduct.” Apparently, the Scottish visitor “had nothing to recommend him besides his knowledge of . . . sciences.”27 John Craige, the first mathematician to import Newton’s ideas into Scotland, had a further impact on intellectual life in early eighteenth-century New York, although he did not cross the Atlantic to do so. Having moved to Salisbury, England, with the backing of another Scot, Bishop Gilbert Burnet, he tutored his patron’s eldest son, William, who became governor of New York and New Jersey in the 1720s (see figure 1).28 Despite the expulsion of some of its faculty and the repressive oversight of the Edinburgh Council and Scottish Parliament, the University of Edinburgh managed to implement a series of important reforms following the Glorious Revolution. Before the last decade of the seventeenth century, the university mainly trained churchmen. After 1690, enlightened clerics, aristocrats, and civic notables modernized Scottish education with the aim of producing more qualified professionals, especially lawyers and doctors.29 Reform-minded patrons and principals, as well as politicians looking to secure support for the 1707 parliamentary union of Scotland and England, established new chairs in humanity (1690), oriental languages (1692), botany (1695), ecclesiastical history (1702), public law (1707), Greek (1708), logic (1708), moral philosophy (1708), natural philosophy (1708), civil law (1709), chemistry (1713), and history (1719).30 In 1708, in a major improvement borrowed from the Dutch university system, Edinburgh replaced its generalist regents with specialized professors hired to teach just parts of the curriculum. By the mid-1720s, when it gained a medical school, the University of Edinburgh was significantly restructured.31 With the approval of the Scottish Whig establishment, it had become a fulcrum of enlightened learning. Around one hundred candidates for the Master of Arts degree gathered at the University of Edinburgh in April 1705 and marched in procession through

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Figure 1. John Watson, Portrait of Governor William Burnet (1688–1729), ca. 1726. Oil on canvas, 49½ in. x 40 in. Courtesy of the Colby College Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. Ledyard Cogswell Jr., 1966.003.

the college library, passing wire-fronted cabinets filled with books, manuscripts, and a peculiar emblem of Scotland’s rich intellectual heritage: the remarkably translucent skull of George Buchanan, the great sixteenthcentury humanist.32 The graduating students climbed stairs at the back of the library to reach a large second-floor room crowded with academics, city

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officials, local gentlemen, friends, and relatives.33 In this grand hall, the educated young men publicly displayed their erudition and ideological conformism by defending a series of theses drawn up by their tutor, William Law. Edinburgh’s class of 1705 stressed the limits of human knowledge about nature, refuted Epicurean materialism, and warned against speculative abstraction in philosophy. These students also recommended Newton’s theories of comets, light, and color. Finally, before collecting their ceremonial velvet caps, they asserted the immateriality of the soul and insisted that true happiness lies in the contemplation of God.34 Seventeen-year-old Cadwallader Colden was among the Edinburgh graduates who espoused this form of Moderate Enlightenment thought in 1705.35 His generation of Scots had been raised during the traumatic political and religious battles of the late seventeenth century. Indeed, Colden’s birth on 7 February 1688 more or less coincided with the onset of the Glorious Revolution, just as his death eighty-eight years later would occur at the start of the American Revolution. Unfortunately, although its date is well documented, the site of Colden’s birthplace remains unknown. One close associate located it “near Cheviotdale” in Scotland, but this statement was probably incorrect. It seems most likely that Colden was born at Enniscorthy, a market town in southeastern Ireland, where his father, a Presbyterian divine, ministered from 1683 until around 1690.36 In any event, it is clear that young Cadwallader spent no more than his first few weeks in Ireland and lived almost all—if not all—of his childhood in the Scottish border counties before enrolling at the University of Edinburgh in February 1703. Colden’s father was a well-connected and highly respected champion of Scottish Presbyterianism and Whiggism.37 During his time in Ireland, the Reverend Alexander Colden aided the flight of a rebellious Scottish noble, the ninth Earl of Argyll.38 By force or desire, he returned from Ireland to his homeland around March 1689, just in time to witness, and perhaps help bring about, the formation of a new political order.39 In 1690 Colden’s father took over the pulpit at Bunkle, the Berwickshire parish where his own father had served as a clergyman until 1664. Rev. Colden was able to do so because a mob had violently ejected his Episcopalian predecessor.40 After three years in Bunkle, he relocated to nearby Duns. In 1700, he switched to Oxnam, a narrow, pointed parish extending nine miles or so from the English border into the Scottish county of Roxburghshire. Rev. Colden remained

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there until his death in 1738.41 By all accounts, he was an intensely serious and dedicated churchman. His Oxnam tombstone states that “for true piety, learning, wisdom, diligence and success in gaining souls, he had few equals.”42 In an elegy published in Edinburgh in 1739, he was honored as a “Godly, Pious and Painful [or painstaking] Minister.”43 Comparatively little is known about Cadwallader Colden’s mother. She was born Janet Hughes, or some close variant of that name. A passing contemporary remark that “the Lord hath been kinde to her befor[e] her mariage” suggests she came from a respectable family.44 Otherwise, she appears in the historical record only as Janet Colden, a parson’s wife and a mother to at least four, perhaps five, children.45 There is some evidence that she was deeply involved in her husband’s affairs and unafraid to speak her mind. For instance, the memoirs of Rev. Colden’s protégé, Thomas Boston, show Janet Colden offering a career suggestion that Boston took up. On another occasion, she accused Boston of “double-dealing.”46 Elsewhere, however, she can be found promoting the subservience of women. Writing to her daughterin-law in America in early 1717, she preached obedience to her husband, the family patriarch.47 A prominent, respected clergyman and his spouse, Colden’s parents had enough connections to provide their eldest son with a solid start in an aristocratic society where patronage mattered a great deal. They had the ear of several local nobles. None carried more political weight at the start of the eighteenth century than John Ker, the Earl (and later Duke) of Roxburghe. A major figure in British public life, Roxburghe served as secretary of state for Scotland in 1704–1705, aided the 1707 parliamentary union of Scotland and England, and assumed leadership in 1715 of the Squadrone Volante (or flying squadron), the faction that dominated Scottish politics from roughly 1716 until 1723.48 Roxburghe indirectly sponsored Colden’s education at the University of Edinburgh by gifting funds to his clergyman father.49 Yet, for an undocumented reason, the earl’s support of Colden seemingly ended there. It is reasonable to suppose he would have found an open pulpit had Colden decided to enter the Church after 1705; after all, he did just that for another 1705 Edinburgh graduate, James Chrystie, also from Roxburghshire.50 That said, Roxburghe was equally well positioned to back Colden’s post1705 pursuit of a medical career as he socialized with Archibald Pitcairne and George Cheyne, two leading Scottish Newtonian physicians, and helped

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Pitcairne’s friends and fellow Newtonians gain university appointments.51 One can only presume, then, that the earl did not similarly aid Colden because he thought the young man belonged to a family of churchmen and churchmen only. Other Scottish sources of patronage became available to Colden when the Squadrone’s political influence declined and a rival faction came to the fore during the 1720s. John Campbell, the second Duke of Argyll, and his younger brother, Archibald, the third Duke of Argyll, led the group that became known as the Argathelians. These two siblings controlled many of the highest levels of Scottish politics and culture during the mid-eighteenth century. Colden could boast a personal connection to them both because his father had assisted their grandfather escape imprisonment by the Stuarts in the 1680s. Remembering that event, the Campbell brothers’ father (the first Duke of Argyll) visited Rev. Colden’s home on occasion. Alas, the third Duke of Argyll was unmoved when reminded of this family bond in the late 1740s.52 Roxburghshire nobles related to the Campbells proved to be more accessible, if less powerful, patrons. The Colden family maintained particularly close relations with William Kerr, the fifth Lord Jedburgh and second Marquess of Lothian, who was the grandson through his mother of the eighth Earl and first Marquess of Argyll, the son-in-law of the ninth Earl of Argyll, and a political ally of the second Duke of Argyll.53 In addition, the Coldens had ties to Jean Kerr, Lady Cranstoun, the daughter of Lothian who reportedly had “a good deal to Say . . . with the [second] Duke of Argyle” before his death in 1743. Colden’s brother, James, informed Colden in 1742 that, “I can fully depend on her using her interest . . . on your account if ever it be needful.”54 Years earlier, her husband, William Cranstoun, fifth Lord Cranstoun of Crailing, had offered to appoint Colden’s father as minister of the parish of Crailing, Roxburghshire.55 With such connections to Roxburghshire nobles, Colden would almost certainly have secured an appointment in the Scottish Church had he decided to become a minister. His father fully expected him to follow that route, and Rev. Colden stretched his finances to provide his eldest son with an education befitting a man of the cloth. It turned out to be a poor investment as the university set Cadwallader on another path. By the start of the eighteenth century, Newtonian ideas had entered the Scottish academy, and

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Scottish Newtonians possessed power and university positions. Colden’s tutor, William Law, was one of the earliest Edinburgh professors to adopt Newtonian ideas. The son of an Edinburgh minister, he had joined the faculty of the University of Edinburgh in 1690, after the parliamentary visitation committee ejected another professor for his alleged Stuart sympathies. Law would be appointed as the first chair of moral philosophy, then the university’s highest-paying academic position, in 1708.56 Student notebooks preserved in the archives of the University of Edinburgh reveal that he incorporated Newton’s ideas in his lectures from at least 1701. Colden’s finalyear lecture notes exist, and they confirm that the class of 1705 was introduced to Newtonian ideas via lessons on the physics of Le Clerc.57 With his curiosity about the natural world ignited in this fashion, Colden graduated from Edinburgh determined to become something other than a clergyman. This resolve should not be confused with atheism. The minister’s son retained a strong appreciation for established religion, which he considered to be an essential component of a stable society. Accordingly, he abandoned his Presbyterianism and joined the Anglican fold in America, a common move for transplanted Scots involved in the imperial administration. He confirmed his social and religious status by purchasing half a pew in New York’s newly expanded Trinity Church in 1724, surely spending many subsequent Sundays sitting there among the colonial elite. Later, in the 1740s, he gleefully speculated that his grandson, Peter DeLancey, then just eight years old and from a wealthy family, might eventually become an Anglican minister in America. Colden thought such a role was ideal for a colonial gentleman and lamented that too few elites were entering the clergy.58 Colden’s earlier decision not to become a churchman himself resulted from his social ambition, as well as from his scientific interests. The Edinburgh graduate wanted greater material reward than his father had obtained as a Presbyterian divine. Colden generally fretted more about his position in society than about his standing with God. Constrained by the limited wealth of his parents and correctly expecting to inherit little, he wrote of his father’s impoverishment with some bitterness. In the early 1720s, he complained to his younger brother, James, that a man who undertakes a church career leaves his children without “something certain to live on.”59 James, who had by then become a Presbyterian minister in the family tradition, advised his elder sibling to study the Bible and “find more true quiet and peace in your

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own mind and more true Joy and Satisfaction than in gaining the whole world or aspiring to the utmost pinicle of honour.”60 That sentiment fell on deaf ears, though. Cadwallader did not subsequently curb his pursuit of gain and glory. Moreover, when he did find a quiet moment to read, he usually turned not to the Bible, but to the sort of science and philosophy that had captured his attention at Edinburgh. From the moment he left university, his life combined an indefatigable quest for wealth and honor with a sincere commitment to advancing human knowledge.

Chapter 2

Pursuit of Gentility

Change was afoot in early eighteenth century Scotland. This rugged and mostly rural country contained a population of just over one million people (approximately half of the Netherlands, or one-fifth of England, or onetwentieth of France at that time). Edinburgh, the capital, was a sizable city with around fifty thousand inhabitants. Glasgow, with a population of about twenty thousand, was considerably smaller but growing fast.1 Scotland as a whole was culturally rich. It possessed a long intellectual tradition, and contained scholars at the forefront of European science and philosophy.2 Agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial improvements were also under way. Having traditionally looked eastward to continental Europe, Scottish merchants now turned westward toward America and the Caribbean. Glaswegians, in particular, had struck up a profitable tobacco trade with Virginia and Maryland. Across Scotland, an emergent literate, affluent middle class had begun to challenge the political hegemony of the aristocracy and Kirk. The country, then, was more socially, politically, and culturally dynamic in 1700 than many historians have been willing to acknowledge.

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Undeniably, multiple crop failures, trade disruption caused by AngloFrench war, severe population loss from starvation and out-migration, and the collapse of the Scottish Africa Company’s colony at Darien, Panama, had produced a national crisis in the 1690s. But the worst was over by the time of the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. Old (and usually English) assumptions that an independent Scotland was unviable should therefore no longer be taken for granted.3 Educated Scots who reached adulthood around 1700 benefited from their country’s development. They generally had a good range of professional options, especially if they were willing to take risks and travel abroad. Aspiring lawyers and doctors often studied in Holland, as did some future churchmen. Likewise, there were multiple business opportunities for Scots in Europe and America. It was thus fairly typical that James Chrystie, Colden’s closest university friend, became a minister, while two of his brothers entered business and settled in Norway, enjoying enough prosperity as exporters of lumber to build large estates, including an impressive summer home that still stands today.4 Another Chrystie brother joined the Atlantic slave trade, but died from sickness the very day he arrived in Virginia after sailing from Guinea in 1718.5 Colden similarly left Scotland to raise his social status. He tried to become a physician in London, but was stymied by his lack of wealth and patronage. A subsequent move to Philadelphia in 1710 initially failed to improve his standing. It was only after a brief return to London in 1715–1716 that the ambitious Edinburgh graduate established himself as a colonial gentleman. The friendship and patronage of other learned Scots, metropolitan connections, and a good understanding of current Newtonian medicine provided the basis for that eventual success. University-trained physicians were the cream of London’s medical profession at the start of the eighteenth century. They possessed high levels of education, catered to elite clients, and earned greater income than the surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, dentists, and folk healers who also then offered health care in the British capital. The Royal College of Physicians, an organization chartered by the Crown in 1518 to regulate all medical practices in London, fiercely protected the prestige, privileges, and power of its membership, which it limited almost entirely to persons holding Oxbridge medical degrees. Not surprisingly, the College was unpopular. Demands for more

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accessible and affordable medical treatment increased as London’s population burgeoned. After the House of Lords responded by enabling apothecaries to dispense drugs and medical advice independent of physician oversight, the College made a concession by bringing into its ranks persons holding medical degrees from foreign as well as English universities. Simultaneously, it stuck with its tried-and-tested strategy of vociferously denouncing London’s unlicensed practitioners as unskilled charlatans who put lives at risk.6 Hugh Graham, a London-based Scottish doctor, neatly encapsulated the situation in a letter he sent to Colden in 1719. “The Colledge of Physicians here have determin’d to put the laws in Execution against all Physicians that will not come in to their Colledge,” he wrote, “and afterwards [the physicians] are resolv’d effectually to suppress all Quacks.”7 Graham had a particular interest in this development as he possessed a doctor of medicine degree from the University of Leiden. This was not unusual. It was common for early eighteenth-century Scots to study medicine in Continental Europe, with Leiden being a particularly popular choice. Before 1726, Scotland lacked its own medical school. Domestic medical education consisted mostly of apprenticeships to local physicians and surgeons, although a guild known as the Surgeons’ Company did offer some anatomy, chemistry, and medicine lectures in Edinburgh from the 1690s. As the universities at Oxford and Cambridge in England required religious tests and offered a relatively expensive and ineffective medical training, many Scots found better options in Holland, France, Italy, or elsewhere on the Continent.8 The career of one of Colden’s Edinburgh classmates typifies the mobility of Scottish medical practitioners. William Douglass was the son of a “portioner” (or small landowner) from Gifford, a town around forty miles north of Oxnam. After graduating from Edinburgh in 1705, he studied at universities in Paris, Leiden, and Utrecht, earning his degree from the latter in 1712. Even with this impressive international education, the man from Gifford struggled. For a time, he lived and worked in Paris and Bristol. Things cannot have gone too well as he decided around 1716 to move to Boston. Douglass erroneously believed that a friend, Colonel Elizeus Burges, had been appointed governor of Massachusetts Bay. When Burges failed to follow him across the Atlantic, the physician embarked once again on his travels. Leaving Massachusetts and heading south, he visited Colden, who was

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then in Philadelphia, before touring the Caribbean and returning to Boston in 1718.9 Finally, Douglass settled down for good and he prospered as Boston’s most qualified physician, as well as a real estate investor. One of the ironies of Douglass’s circuitous journey is that it ended where his medical degree mattered little. There was no College of Physicians or equivalent institution in eighteenth-century British America and hardly any government regulation of physicians until a licensing law passed in New York in 1760. As much as the more educated colonial doctors wanted such oversight so that they could differentiate themselves from lesser-trained practitioners and charge higher fees, there was widespread popular resistance in the colonies to the awarding of monopolistic privileges. It was a deadlock that produced considerable animosity. Douglass, a haughty snob proud of his own academic training as a physician and dismissive of his lesser-educated rivals, clashed repeatedly with New England neighbors who challenged his medical authority. Regarded by at least one associate as the “most compleat snarler” in the region, he was at his most belligerent in 1721 when he opposed the use of inoculation to combat a smallpox epidemic that infected over half of Boston’s population and eventually killed more than eight hundred people.10 Cotton Mather, a powerful Puritan minister, scholar, and Fellow of the Royal Society of London, had learned of African inoculation from a slave, and also read about similar Turkish procedures in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. He called on Boston’s doctors to assess the benefits and risks of inoculation. However, Douglass flatly refused to consider the deliberate infection of people with a deadly and contagious disease. All but one of Boston’s doctors initially took the same stance. The single exception, Zabdiel Boylston, lacked Douglass’s academic training but still managed to conduct an extensive and successful inoculation trial, starting with his own son, one of his slaves, and this slave’s young child. Boylston ended up inoculating over two hundred patients, only six of whom died.11 Boylston’s impressive achievement posed a public challenge to Douglass’s professional credibility. The university-trained Douglass reacted by deriding the scientific credentials of both Mather and Boylston, pointing out the former’s role in the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials and the latter’s lack of qualifications. Douglass also warned (perhaps correctly) that Boylston’s inoculation would ultimately spread smallpox and so do more harm than good.12 He received support for this anti-inoculation position from much of the Boston

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elite as well as from Colden, who sent his Boston friend a list of reasons why inoculation should be opposed.13 Given the paucity of knowledge about inoculation at the time, it was a reasonable position. It should also be acknowledged that both Colden and Douglass adapted their views as inoculation gained popular and institutional approval. Douglass conceded as early as mid-1722 that “Inoculation grows more and more in vogue in England.”14 Four years later, this trend was confirmed when the Royal Society of London acknowledged Boylston’s contribution to science by electing him a Fellow (much to Douglass’s chagrin, one imagines).15 Although some early eighteenth-century Scots like Douglass gained medical degrees, others who did not have the finances or connections to do the same obtained effective but more limited professional medical training through private courses. It was in this fashion that Colden amassed a useful, if piecemeal, postgraduate education. He likely began with mathematics, a topic directly relevant to medicine during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when mathematical and mechanical understandings of the human body were imported into Britain from Italy and Holland.16 Around 1706, Colden filled two notebooks with introductory lessons in Latin and intricate diagrams on the subjects of mathematics, astronomy, and geometry. Although the identity of his instructor is unknown, the notebooks contain the lessons of David Gregory, the one-time chair of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh and the Newtonian friend of Archibald Pitcairne. Gregory had moved to Oxford by 1706, and so could not have trained Colden in person. But there was a brisk trade in lecture notes among eighteenth-century Scottish students, and so Colden may have simply copied down an acquaintance’s purchase.17 He would have considered this laborious task worthwhile as he took his mathematical journals to America and eventually passed them down to his sons.18 Botany, like mathematics, was closely aligned with medicine in the early eighteenth century. Colden studied the subject under Charles Preston, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who has recently been acknowledged as “one of the best educated and well-connected scientific virtuosi of his time in Scotland.”19 In 1705, the year of Colden’s graduation, the Surgeons’ Company allowed Preston—and only Preston—to teach the medical apprentices of Edinburgh. He later gained an appointment as professor of botany at the town’s university. A correspondent of leading European men of science, and an academic in possession of two medical degrees (one from Rheims and one

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from Aberdeen), he was deeply involved with the virtuoso circle that formed around his friend Robert Sibbald.20 Additional courses in chemistry and anatomy rounded off Colden’s medical education. These were taken in London, probably in 1706 or 1707. In one of two brief autobiographies that he later wrote for European correspondents, Colden named “Mr. Wilson” and “Dr Ariskine” as his instructors.21 The former was almost certainly George Wilson, the author of A Compleat Course of Chymistry (1691) and a lecturer who advertised his courses in the London press around the time Colden was in the English capital.22 Unfortunately, the anatomy teacher cannot be so firmly identified, though his name suggests he was a Scotsman. Robert Erskine, a well-known Scottish doctor and Fellow of the Royal Society who gave lectures on anatomy in London at the start of the eighteenth century, is one intriguing possibility. But as this Erskine left for Russia in 1704, while Colden was a student in Scotland, it seems more probable that the mysterious “Dr Ariskine” was the same Erskine (first name unknown) who unsuccessfully lobbied for an appointment as professor of anatomy and physic at the University of Edinburgh in 1708.23 Although private courses in mathematics, botany, chemistry, and anatomy could provide the sort of practical and progressive professional training that many early eighteenth-century Scots wanted, they could not by themselves turn a clergyman’s son into a London physician. Around the time of the 1707 union of England and Scotland, Colden realized that his family’s modest wealth was “not sufficient” to launch his medical career in the British capital.24 “The Sallaries of the Ministers in the Church of Scotland are very small,” he explained later, “& the expence of my Education had so far exhausted my fathers pocket that I found it was not in my power to make that figure which it is necessary for a young Physician to do in Gr.Brittain on his first appearing in the World.”25 It was therefore a fortunate coincidence that the political creation of Great Britain in 1707 opened up new imperial and commercial possibilities for educated Scots just as Colden’s medical career stumbled. The failing Edinburgh graduate sought to benefit from the new political arrangement. Within a year of the union, he announced his intention to sail to British America.26 Elizabeth Hill, the sister of Colden’s mother, already resided in Lewes, Delaware, having perhaps first arrived in the South Bay (Delaware Bay) in July 1663 with a party of Dutch radicals led by Pieter Cornelisz Plockhoy.27

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Sometime in the 1680s, she wed Captain John Hill, an up-and-coming English immigrant and neighbor of Plockhoy’s son. According to one contemporary account, her husband was “a variable, good-natured man . . . easily wrought upon where he thought he could gain the most honour to himself.”28 This description fits what else we know about the English captain, which is that he became a prominent Sussex County landowner, lawyer, ranger, customs officer, militia commander, and politician by the time of his death in 1708.29 He left behind a wealthy and prominent but childless and isolated widow. Elizabeth Hill’s closest relations were on the other side of the Atlantic. Her nephew, Richard Hill, the son of her husband’s brother, lived in London, and her only sister in Scotland. Separated by three thousand miles of ocean and most probably at a young age, Elizabeth Hill and Janet Colden would have had limited contact. For this reason, it seems likely that Hill abruptly sought out her Scottish relations shortly before or after her husband’s death, with a view to bringing them over to America to ease her widowhood. Such an occurrence would help to explain why in 1708 the American Presbytery asked Colden’s father to assume the pulpit at Hill’s hometown of Lewes. Organized Presbyterianism was very much in its infancy in America at that moment. Just a handful of churches existed along the mid-Atlantic coast, and the American presbytery was itself no more than two years’ old. The securing of a pastor for Lewes, where Presbyterians had lived since the 1690s, was one of its earliest orders of business. In March 1708, the presbytery instructed one of its members, the Reverend Francis Makemie, to invite “Mr. Alexander Coldin [Colden], minister of Oxnam” to take on this role. Two months later Makemie reported back that he had completed this task.30 Nothing more was said of the matter in the presbytery’s minutes, but it can be assumed that Rev. Colden received the invitation and turned it down. Did Makemie’s approach to Rev. Colden inspire the minister’s eldest son to journey to America? This sequence of events cannot be confirmed but seems highly probable given that around the time when the Lewes offer would have arrived in Scotland, Edinburgh botanist Charles Preston informed James Petiver, a prominent London naturalist, that Cadwallader Colden would soon cross the Atlantic and become a New World “Correspondent for us.” In 1708 and 1709, Petiver exchanged letters directly with Preston’s former student, who acknowledged his intention to reach America and agreed to send back plants, insects, shells, and fossils to London.31

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Colden’s plan was adventurous and bold. An eighteenth-century transatlantic passage was a risk-filled and unpleasant venture that involved two or three miserable months at sea—a grueling endurance of hunger, thirst, illness, and overcrowding. Colden did not exaggerate the problem of seaborne disease when he later informed a European correspondent that most immigrants landed in America in ships “run with the Scurvy.”32 For an unlucky 3 or 4 percent of those Europeans who journeyed to colonial Philadelphia, the voyage meant death.33 Even a hardy young Benjamin Franklin barely survived a voyage from London to Philadelphia in 1726; he arrived weak and months later contracted a life-threatening case of pleurisy. Nearly a half century later, Thomas Paine similarly came close to death as a result of an Atlantic crossing. The toils of eighteenth-century transoceanic travel thus almost eradicated two canonical figures of the American Enlightenment before they gained fame and influence. As it happened, Colden did not actually leave Scotland until 1710. The charming sister of his college friend, James Chrystie, may have been the reason why he delayed his departure. Alice Chrystie, his junior by two years, was smart, lively, and accomplished. As part of a Kelso set of ladies who enjoyed conversations over tea, she was also apparently quite sociable.34 A son later recalled her as “well educated” and “as capable as most women, giving the brightest example of virtue and economy.”35 Colden perhaps saw in her all of the features that one of Alice’s brothers found in his own fiancée; “handsome, beautifull, Religious, well tempered, well educated, wise and vertous,” that lady was deemed “a woman compleat.”36 Even so, the failed physician was not ready for marriage. Colden lacked financial stability and agreed only to a pre-engagement before bidding his lover farewell.37 On arriving in America, Colden probably went first to Delaware; a later passing remark that he “lived six months within two miles of an Indian settlement” suggests that he might have spent a half year with his aunt and close to the Lenape who resided near Lewes.38 For the most part, however, he lived in Philadelphia, from where he traveled to other parts of North America and the Caribbean. This period was a busy and exciting time in his life, one that he vividly remembered decades later. The traveling Scotsman rarely paused to write back to friends and family. When James Chrystie reassured his former classmate and future brother-in-law in April 1715 of the “Same Steddy and Unchanged friendship that you ever knew in me,”

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he did so because he had barely heard from Colden in three years.39 Chrystie’s sister was apparently even more neglected. The historical record suggests Alice did not receive a single letter from her fiancé between 1710 and their eventual marriage in 1715. Showing similar disregard, Colden defaulted on his promise to send botanical samples to Petiver. Although he would later explain that “the American plants . . . were then so little known & I had so little assistance from my books that I was soon discouraged in that study [of botany],” he was in truth distracted by business affairs and a set of new contacts.40 It says something about the sociability of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world that a man who characterized himself as “alwase a Grave fellow” and who is mostly remembered today as a gruff, unlikable figure, made more friends than money during his first spell in the colonies.41 Other learned Scottish merchants featured among Colden’s first American network. Alexander Arbuthnot, a graduate of the University of Aberdeen, was particularly important. He had arrived in Pennsylvania in 1703 and gone on to establish himself as a trader with an impressive knowledge of the Atlantic marketplace. Arbuthnot and Colden struck up both a friendship and a business partnership, and the former looked after his new acquaintance’s affairs in Philadelphia when Colden left for the Caribbean in the autumn of 1711.42 This arrangement lasted longer than anticipated when Colden was stranded by bad weather in Charles Town, South Carolina. The delayed entrepreneur considered, and possibly embarked on, a winter tour of the coast of Spanish America, before eventually finding passage back to Philadelphia by the spring of 1712.43 He discovered that, while Arbuthnot had served him well, an unfortunate combination of piracy, oversupplied shopkeepers, and competition from England had left the Quaker port in economic distress. “Trade was never so uncertain in [this] place as now,” Colden remarked about Philadelphia in May 1712.44 Short on cash, and with goods unsold and going bad, he offloaded his excess stock at country fairs.45 New business opportunities followed in 1713. With a view to importing wine from the Portuguese Madeira Islands into the West Indies, Colden sailed again to the Caribbean and forged a new partnership with Jacob Franco Nunes and Jacob Valverde, two Jewish merchants in Barbados. On his return to Philadelphia, he served as a local agent for these Caribbean contacts. In exchange for collecting their debts, selling their iron and rum, and dispatching flour and other commodities back to Barbados, he earned a

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commission, which must have been a welcome source of income at a time when his Madeira imports more than once arrived spoiled.46 Overall, Colden’s first spell in America brought more intellectual than financial gain. His interest in natural history did not entirely vanish, and the sight of Caribbean waterspouts left such a strong impression that the venturesome Scotsman could recall them in detail to Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s.47 In Arbuthnot, Colden found a trusted associate who shared his Scottish background and university education. Hugh Graham, the Dutcheducated Scottish MD who was then a Caribbean merchant with connections to Arbuthnot, Franco Nunes, and Valverde, provided another source of intellectual conversation. Given that he was on the verge of returning to London to become a physician at that time, Graham presumably played a large part in reviving Colden’s medical ambitions.48 Either way, Colden crossed the Atlantic in 1715 with a plan to marry Alice in Scotland and then return with her to North America. He perhaps also at that time envisioned himself becoming a colonial physician with metropolitan connections and an impressive knowledge of mechanistic physiology. If so, he would have appreciated the fact that, unlike in London, there was no professional body in British America to monitor his medical qualifications—or lack thereof.49 European medical thought was divided at the start of the eighteenth century. Traditional Galenism had gone largely unchallenged until the midsixteenth century, when Paracelsus, a Swiss physician, mystic, and alchemist, called for a radical overhaul of medical theory, practices, and institutions. Paracelsus inspired a new chemical philosophy that incrementally gained recognition and acceptance, and that strongly influenced the medical thought of such notable seventeenth-century scientific figures as Jean Baptiste van Helmont and Robert Boyle.50 During the seventeenth century, mechanistic medicine emerged as a rival to Galenism and chemistry. Impressed by how mechanical natural philosophy redescribed the universe as the interactions of bodies of matter, several physiologists—notably Lorenzo Bellini, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, Marcello Malpighi, and Nicholas Steno— developed analogous mechanical explanations of animal body functions. Concurrently, William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in the 1620s led several English scientists to evaluate the “animal oeconomy” as a machine.51

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The chemists and mechanists—two groups intent on replacing the Galenists as the leading school of medicine—battled fiercely against each other in the second half of the seventeenth century. In London, unlicensed chemists denounced the College of Physicians as a haven for outmoded traditionalists. The physicians responded by embracing mechanical philosophy in the 1680s and 1690s as a way to assert their modernity.52 The Newtonian discourses and networks that emerged in Britain in the 1680s gave the mechanists added momentum, and the Scottish physician, Archibald Pitcairne, pioneered a related form of mathematized medicine during the 1690s.53 Just a few years after Newton’s Principia had triumphantly demonstrated that principles or laws constructed from mathematical analogies of the natural world could greatly improve knowledge about celestial and terrestrial phenomena, Pitcairne insisted that mathematics offered a degree of exactness and certainty beyond empiricism and that “reasoning in Medicine ought to be founded upon the same Principles with those which are made use of by Astronomers.”54 When Newtonians took control of the Royal Society of London in the early eighteenth century, such calls multiplied and Pitcairne’s mathematical approach came to dominate British medical thought.55 An old Scottish contact kept Colden abreast of these developments while he was in America between 1710 and 1715.56 Alexander Tomson, who had attended Marischal College, Aberdeen, before earning a doctor of medicine degree at Utrecht in 1698, was a doctor in the coastal town of Montrose. In 1714, after an evening spent with mutual friends, he sent Colden a summary of the complete works of Pitcairne, recently collected and published in Latin as a single volume.57 Tomson detailed the author’s remedies for epilepsies, palsies, and arthritis (an affliction Colden personally knew), before adding that this new edition of Pitcairne’s writings included an interesting letter from an Aberdeen professor of mathematics, Thomas Bower. This piece refuted the claim of a French chemist, Jean Astruc, that digestion was a process involving liquid “menstrua” or ferments. In his correspondence with Pitcairne, Bower insisted that digestion was not chemical in nature, but a mechanical activity reliant on the motion of muscles.58 By this point, Pitcairne had himself moved away from a strict mechanical understanding of the human body and instead incorporated Newtonian attractive forces into his physiology. In a discussion of animal secretion, a bodily process concerned with the removal of particles of matter from fluids, the Edinburgh physician identified blood as a combination of particles

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so small as to be fluid and bound together by such forces. This approach avoided the standard mechanistic account of secretion, which imagined glands as a series of tubes and pores filled with differently sized sieves that trapped particles according to their size and shape. Equally, it dismissed the notion of chemical ferments. It instead asserted innovatively that secretion resulted from the ability of a beating heart to overpower the attractive forces that otherwise held blood particles together.59 Other medical theorists, many of whom were Scots, and several of whom trained under Pitcairne, soon followed suit by identifying short-range forces within animal and human bodies. Of these, James Keill made the boldest claims. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, he had followed his brother, John, to Oxford, before setting up a medical practice in Northampton. In a 1708 treatise on animal secretion, he argued that the “whole Animal Oeconomy” depends on an “Attractive Power” comparable to gravity.60 This discourse typified the state of medical debate in England in 1715 and 1716, when Colden spent time in the British capital identifying reputable contacts who could supply the materials and resources he would need as a dispensing physician in Philadelphia. The Scotsman stayed in Cheapside, an area traditionally associated with London’s druggists. He caught up with his old friend, Hugh Graham, as well as Elizabeth Hill’s nephew, Richard Hill, from whom he would later request scientific equipment, including “a good Barometer & Thermometer.”61 This networking evidently went well as Colden would on his return to Philadelphia import medicines from a London apothecary and receive books—mostly standard medical works, but also new editions of the complete works of George Buchanan and Newton’s Opticks—from William Innys, a London bookseller, Newton’s publisher, and the printer for the Royal Society of London.62 A political and military crisis cast a shadow over Colden’s return to Britain. The death of Queen Anne in 1714 and the subsequent arrival of the Protestant George I from Hanover had provoked outrage among those who wanted the now-adult James Francis Edward Stuart, son of James II/VII, installed on the throne. In 1715 an army of rebellious Jacobites gathered in the Scottish highlands and began to head south. Britain’s ruling Whig regime now faced a serious threat. Colden traveled north from London in the company of the Roxburghshire noble, Lord Jedburgh, a colonel in the Scottish Foot Guards, and probably arrived in Scotland around October 1715. He promptly gathered together seventy volunteers to help defend Kelso

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against the Jacobites, and could well have gone to battle had not Jedburgh advised him to withdraw before superior Jacobite forces seized the town on 22 October.63 From Kelso, the Jacobites marched into England and toward eventual defeat. As the rebels moved away and the immediate military danger subsided, Colden was able to turn to more personal matters. He and Alice Chrystie tied the knot in the bride’s hometown of Kelso on 14 November 1715, coincidentally the day that the Jacobite army surrendered at Preston.64 The newlyweds left soon thereafter for London, where they awaited passage to America. Colden achieved far more in the British capital in 1715 and 1716 than he had a decade before. Most significantly, he met and interacted with several leading scientific figures, including the celebrated astronomer Edmund Halley, the mathematician William Jones, and a future secretary of the Royal Society, John Machin. He likely also encountered Charles Hayes, the author of A Treatise of Fluxions (1704) and a close associate and fellow University of Aberdeen alumnus of Alexander Arbuthnot. Although Hayes may have introduced Colden to Halley and Jones, it is more feasible that Hugh Graham facilitated these meetings as Colden later requested from America that Graham pass on his “most humble respects to [Halley] Mr. Jones Mr. Hay & Mr Mach[in].”65 In any case, Arbuthnot and Graham, two Scottish contacts from America, provided Colden with access to London’s scientific establishment in ways that his Scottish education and Roxburghshire patrons previously had not. The social and intellectual entrenchment of Pitcairnian physiology was another factor in Colden’s success. The returning Scotsman wrote an essay on animal secretion either shortly before or after he landed in London in 1715. Through this work, he identified himself as a fashionable mechanist, even if he had yet to embrace the recent notion that short-range attractive forces linked particles within the human body. Halley had Colden’s account of animal secretion read before a meeting of the Royal Society.66 While no copy now exists, we can assume it was similar to a chapter on the same subject that Colden included in an unpublished manuscript on the “animal oeconomy” that he appears to have completed in the early 1720s. This chapter, which leant heavily on Pitcairne, described blood as a mix of “particles of Different Bulks, figures, & Specific Gravities.” With no reference to forces, it offered a mechanical argument that the distance at which secretions separate from blood is proportional to the specific gravities (or density ratios) and

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surface sizes of their particles, as well as the viscidity of the liquid that contains them. For instance, Colden observed that spit and snot (which he identified as a collection of light, rugged particles trapped in a sticky, glutinous liquid) are excreted near to the heart, through the mouth, wind pipe, gullet, and nose. By contrast, particles with greater specific gravity and more spherical surfaces travel further along tubes and pipes and are secreted in more watery liquid as urine, sweat, tears, or bile. In other words, secretion was an entirely mechanical process.67 This argument proved current and clever enough to gain the attention of Halley and other metropolitan figures. Accordingly, it enabled Colden to build a prestigious intellectual network. Colden was a recently married man in his late twenties when he arrived back in Philadelphia in early 1716. He was also a soon-to-be father (his first son, Alexander, was born that August, suggesting Alice sailed while pregnant). Not any wealthier than when he had first landed in America six years earlier, he could at least anticipate providing for his new family as a colonial doctor and gentleman. He brought with him from London a periwig, an expensive investment in the traditional costume of a physician. Once in Philadelphia he ordered another peruke from the same maker—a sign perhaps of his growing confidence that he would succeed, or maybe of his determination to appear respectable when entering a profession notorious for quacks, charlatans, saltimbancos, and mountebanks.68 Ties to metropolitan intellectuals enhanced Colden’s appearance as a legitimate medical practitioner. The ambitious Scotsman began to cultivate his scientific correspondence network in the late spring of 1716, not long after landing in Philadelphia. In a journal entitled, “Copy Book of Letters on Subjects of Philosophy, Medecine, Friendship,” he recorded a letter to Hugh Graham. Over the next few years, he added to this copybook four more communications to Graham, as well as one received in return, a September 1717 letter to the London mathematician William Jones, and other exchanges with several other contacts on both sides of the Atlantic.69 Colden’s early letters were mostly those of a hesitant, polite, and selfeffacing man looking to establish credibility and build trust. They contained apologies for seeming “troublsome or Ridicolous,” and for sending just “trifling observations.”70 Elsewhere, the budding physician regretted that he had been unable to identify a subject worthy of communication to his London contacts “ev’n in a place soe far distant.”71 In a letter to William

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Douglass, Colden adopted a slightly more assertive voice. After receiving a paper from the Boston doctor on blood circulation, as well as some general ideas on animal secretion, he mildly suggested that some of his friend’s ideas were vague.72 Douglass did not immediately reply, leaving Colden concerned that his remarks had been too strong. He feared communications with his old university classmate were now “nipt in the Bud.”73 For all the attention Colden gave to his appearance and connections, colonials tended to judge their medical men more by their effectiveness and skill as healers than by their dress and acquaintances. When several passengers fell ill with fever while sailing from England to America in April 1716, Colden gained an opportunity to prove himself in Philadelphia as a capable medical practitioner. He adopted an innovative approach that blended medical empiricism and philosophy. He first observed that the infirm were generally cold, shivering, sweating, and fainting. They had pains in their head, back, and bones. Their pulses were weak. They passed “high colour’d” urine without sediment and often with “a white cloud otherwise entirely pellucid.” Some were even at their “last extremity.” Then Colden noticed a peculiar trait: the sufferers who sweated at the earliest stage of the illness experienced “more Stubborn” fevers. He therefore decided, against standard practice but drawing on the theory of animal secretion he had earlier shown to Halley, to cool and hydrate his patients in an effort to reduce the thickness and quantity of their blood. He delayed the common treatments of bleeding and sweating until sediment appeared in a patient’s urine, signaling that the blood had been adequately thinned. Significantly, this method involved few medicines and instead relied on the precise and knowledgeable intervention of the doctor. As Colden pointed out to Graham, the “chief Art lyes in the Management & in Catching the Critical Moment & knowing by what Secretion the Crisis is to be made.”74 This dramatic performance of shrewd medical judgment made Colden a physician in demand. By the time a smallpox epidemic struck Philadelphia in the summer of 1716, the town’s newest medical practitioner was also its busiest doctor, particularly among the gentry. It was not just his survival rate that impressed, but also the fact that his treatments required skill and had a clear theoretical underpinning. As before, he recommended his smallpox patients follow a “cool regimen” based on his theories of animal secretion. These “Rules about Fevers answear like Oracles,” Colden bragged to Graham in October 1716, before explaining that the illness lasted longest when fever

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stirred the blood and prevented a necessary separation of blood particles from taking place. The cooling regime, he said, encouraged that separation. Colden had so much success that other Philadelphia doctors replicated his technique.75 Things did not go so well for Graham in London. He had a medical degree and good social and intellectual contacts, but crucially failed in his care of a nineteen-year-old gentleman with smallpox. This well-to-do client took a turn for the worse under Graham’s watch, and his friends sought out a second opinion. Richard Mead, a celebrated physician trained by Pitcairne, promptly arrived and recommended a purging, advice that Graham refused to follow. The matter was decided by the “authority” of another well-known Newtonian physician, and Mead’s close acquaintance, John Freind, who confirmed the need for a purging. The sick gentleman recovered, exacerbating Graham’s professional embarrassment. It is perhaps no coincidence that the next client Graham mentioned in his letters to Philadelphia was not an ailing gentleman, but an alcoholic woman on whom he performed an autopsy.76 As his friend’s reputation sank in London, Colden considered raising his own profile in the metropole by sending a collection of his medical “thoughts” across the Atlantic.77 In the end, however, he decided to focus on improving his colonial standing. Earlier in 1717 he had passed three related pieces on animal secretion and fevers to Philadelphia’s outstanding early eighteenthcentury savant, James Logan, who also happened to be a relation of his wife. The son of a Scottish Quaker, Logan was born in Ireland and raised for a time in Scotland. He had arrived in Pennsylvania as William Penn’s private secretary in 1699 and become over time a successful merchant, landowner, and politician. His home on Second Street, Philadelphia, contained an observatory and one of the finest libraries in British America. Largely selftaught, he was, like many autodidacts, widely read. He possessed a deep knowledge of the classics, a good understanding of botany and astronomy, and enough mathematics to make sense of Newton’s complicated Principia— which was no small achievement.78 Medicine, however, was one subject that Logan had not mastered. So he sent carefully copied versions of Colden’s work to his brother, William, a physician in Bristol, England. Logan’s cover letter stated that the enclosed ideas, “like Descartes’s Philosophy,” drew a “regular system” from “first Principles,” and that the account of animal secretion was “taken out of a kind of Institutions” that Colden had “drawn up

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for his own use.” Logan additionally revealed that some of his acquaintances (presumably in Philadelphia) preferred Colden’s physiological theories to those of James Keill, an observation that suggests colonial medicine was generally no more ready in 1717 than Colden to apply Newtonian attractive forces to physiology. Finally, Logan offered a brief sketch of Colden as “a North Briton yet very modest furnished with a good stock both of sense and learning.” He added that the Scottish doctor “has a systematical head & is regular in his Inquiries, but admits ye Ancients, above most other practical writers.”79 Unfortunately, what Logan’s brother made of this letter or indeed of Colden’s medical writings is no longer recorded. The arrival of another learned Scottish politician in Philadelphia in May 1717 greatly augmented Colden’s local social and intellectual connections. William Keith, who came from a Tory family in Aberdeenshire, had studied under Thomas Bower at Marischal College, before spending a year in Virginia as an important customs official. He lost that post when the Tory Party fell from power following the death of Queen Anne in 1714 and remained out of favor until he gained an appointment as lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania three years later. He brought to Philadelphia a deep interest in intellectual matters. Given that he had been tutored by Bower, as well as that one of his friends was the Latin translator of Bower’s published letter to Pitcairne, it seems highly likely that Keith shared a conversation or two with Colden about mechanistic physiology, perhaps over a game of whist in one of Philadelphia’s taverns. Be that as it may, the two Scots certainly forged a friendship based on their mutual scientific interests.80 Astronomy, like medicine, provided colonial elites with a way to connect with each other, as well as with scientific Europeans. Colden and Keith combined to measure a solar eclipse in September 1717. Two days later, the physician wrote of this experience to the mathematician William Jones, in London. A one-time tutor to Philip Yorke, a future Lord Chancellor and the first Earl of Hardwicke, and George Parker, who later became the second Earl of Macclesfield and president of the Royal Society of London, Jones was an influential figure who had established his name by publishing a mathematics textbook in 1706.81 Following his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1712, he had served on a committee (along with Edmond Halley, John Machin, and future New York governor William Burnet) commissioned to adjudicate whether Isaac Newton or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had discovered infinitesimal calculus. Jones was thus at the forefront of

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Newtonian mathematics when Colden met him in London in 1715–1716. In a bid to continue that relationship from America, the Scotsman sent his acquaintance news from Philadelphia of the “Great American Eclipse,” along with the admission that an “unlucky accident” had prevented him from taking measurements “with any exactness.”82 Not surprisingly, this confession of scientific failure did not ignite a lasting correspondence between Colden and Jones. The less circumspect Keith managed to do much better by parlaying the same experience into a publication in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.83 For all of his proximity to influential men such as Logan and Keith, Colden was not yet a secure and established colonial gentleman in late 1717. He held no public office, possessed no land, and relied on an unsteady income. Nevertheless, his growing reputation as a colonial intellectual gave reason for optimism. By 1717 this reputation had reached New York. In a letter to Governor Hunter, another learned Scotsman, who had met Colden earlier that year, Logan recommended that the talented physician continue “those studies for wch he has doubtless a most happy turn” and by which he might overcome his humble means and rise from obscurity. Logan then added that Colden was on the search for “a surer prospect” in Philadelphia and even thinking seriously about relocating to New York.84 Other documents reveal that Colden’s restlessness stemmed most immediately from the fact that he had failed to gain a local appointment as a public physician to the poor. Colden had become disillusioned and bitter after the Pennsylvania General Assembly had rejected his bid to secure that role. He blamed his setback on Logan, whom he accused of a treacherous lack of support. Logan responded that he had only ever been “ye Doctrs very good friend.”85 Regardless of who was right, and the exact details of this conflict are unrecorded, two of the most intelligent men in Philadelphia were at odds by 1718. Colden decided at this moment to pack his periwig and head to Manhattan, where he found even more scientific company and new possibilities for social elevation. It was a move that had great implications for early American and transatlantic intellectual history.

Chapter 3

Intellectuals

Early eighteenth-century New York City was a busy town handsomely set on a high edge overlooking the mouth of the Hudson River. Then, as now, Manhattan drew the eye skyward; one visitor described it as an amphitheater sprouting from the water.1 Fort George, a squat, square garrison mounted with fifty guns, anchored the island’s southern tip. From there, warehouses, markets, and wharves ran east along a stone quay. A line of step gables and sloping roofs—an architectural legacy of Dutch rule—skirted above. The town’s skyline rose at its center, where the tall steeple of the Anglican Trinity Church, flanked on either side by the Reformed Dutch Church and the French Protestant Eglise du St.  Esprit, scraped at the heavens. Looking down rather than up, New Yorkers saw water, and plenty of it. Manhattan pivoted between river and sea. Positioned at the gateway to the Hudson, it guarded the most reliable and accessible route from the northern Atlantic into the American continental interior. Almost two hundred ships entered and cleared its port in 1718, over half shuttling to and from the

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Caribbean, exchanging provisions, horses, and timber for rum, molasses, and sugar, while furs and fur traders floated down from Albany.2 Robert Hunter, governor of New York and New Jersey, could see this commerce from his Fort George base. He was a shrewd colonial executive and astute scholar. The son of an Edinburgh lawyer, he had been raised in a middle-class Scottish family and had made his name in the military, especially as an aide-de-camp to the Duke of Marlborough during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1714). He had arrived in America in 1710 and two years later received a promotion to brigadier general.3 He held strong intellectual credentials, having become a close friend in London of such literati as Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Jonathan Swift, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1714, he engaged in a correspondence with James Logan, with whom he exchanged letters, books, and news on a wide range of topics. Logan had himself spent several months in London in 1710 and 1711, and he shared Hunter’s nostalgia for the literary and scientific culture of the British capital.4 In 1715 he informed the governor that he had just received the second edition of Newton’s Principia, published in 1713; he already owned a copy of the original 1687 edition.5 Subsequently, in 1717, after forwarding a book on musical theory, Logan sent to New York part of Colden’s animal secretion paper.6 An accompanying note that read “Dr Colden also sends what he promised” indicates that Hunter expected this piece.7 In another statement dispatched a week later, Logan praised the essay as a superior account of secretion than that of James Keill.8 The Logan-Hunter correspondence usefully places Colden in Manhattan by late 1717. A letter from Philadelphia dated 9 November lamented that the physician had become obsessed with New York “since his Return” from that town, and that he had asked Logan to approach Hunter on his behalf, presumably with a view to facilitating a move to Manhattan. “I told [Colden] today that it was too like a mans desiring his wife to speak in his behalf to another woman,” Logan joked.9 We can learn more about Colden’s first trip to New York from an autobiographical statement written in 1751. It describes Colden arriving in Manhattan and going quickly to Fort George, where he waited on the governor. Although “I had no manner of acquaintance with him,” Colden recalled, Hunter “receiv’d me more kindly than I expected & tho I staid but three days in the place I was twice invited by him to particular conversations.”10 The previous year, the governor had treated an itinerant Huguenot to dinner and a personal tour of the fort.11 Whether or not

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the visiting physician received a same reception is unknown. In any event, he left with a good impression. Colden weighed the possibility of relocating north during the winter of 1717–1718. During those cold months, his wife almost died from complications related to pregnancy. Alice survived, but her second son, David, was dead within a year.12 Amid this personal crisis and with his plan to become a public physician in Philadelphia blocked by the Pennsylvania Assembly, Colden bet his future on New York. It was another bold decision by a man determined to advance his social position. For all of New York’s potential as a commercial and imperial hub and notwithstanding his struggles in Philadelphia, the ambitious Scotsman could not be sure that another move would bring success. It is worth considering on this point that a young Benjamin Franklin ended up penniless in London six years later after erroneously believing that he had the backing of Colden’s friend William Keith. A printer’s assistant, runaway apprentice, and bachelor, Franklin had little to lose in 1724. Colden, a relatively well-placed physician with family in tow, risked a great deal more by moving to Manhattan. As it turned out, the gamble paid double. Colden was rewarded in New York both by political office and by the enjoyment of joining what was perhaps the most vibrant intellectual circle in early eighteenth-century British America. Initially gathered around Hunter, this group gained additional energy and direction during the 1720s from Hunter’s gubernatorial successor, William Burnet. A protégé of Isaac Newton and an internationally recognized mathematical authority, Burnet brought to New York a huge library and a substantial collection of scientific equipment. He was an energetic and sociable figure who expanded the elite scholarly environment created by his predecessor. It was through Burnet’s patronage that Colden gained the important offices of provincial surveyor general and councilor. Simultaneously, as part of Burnet’s intellectual coterie, he took his first steps away from mechanistic physiology and physics, and toward his mature philosophy of active matter. Governor Hunter was in a political bind in 1717. Dispatched by Queen Anne in 1710 with instructions to establish a permanent revenue for the support of New York’s government, he had encountered a local Assembly determined to keep a tight grip on the colonial purse. After several years without public funding, he formed an alliance with a wealthy landowner, Lewis Morris Sr.,

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which enabled him to seize control of the Assembly and to secure a five-year support bill for his administration in 1715. Nevertheless, his political opponents did not go away, and two years later many of New York’s leading merchants rallied against the governor’s issuing of bills of credit financed by new excise taxes.13 When a smart Philadelphia physician attended his court in mid-1717, Hunter saw an opportunity to gain another useful ally, as well as a source of intellectual conversation. He tempted the visitor to move north with the promise of an “office of Profit.”14 Following his relocation in 1718, Colden swiftly gained positions in the customs office and the chancery court.15 The new addition to Hunter’s inner circle also became a local landowner when he joined two other Scottish members of the governor’s faction, James Alexander and Archibald Kennedy, in obtaining a warrant for six thousand acres of land on the southern side of the Wallkill, a north-flowing tributary of the Hudson River, in Ulster County. Colden received a two thousand acre portion of that land in 1719.16 His transition could hardly have started better. He complained in a letter to Scotland that his customs post as weighmaster was “precarious,” but his disgruntlement probably stemmed more from an impatience for success than from any concern that his New York project was failing.17 In October 1718, the death of the provincial surveyor general opened up one of the most coveted positions in New York, one that Colden desperately wanted. Appointed by King George I, rewarded in the form of surveying fees, and usually held for life, the office of surveyor general carried significant prestige and power. For an unknown reason, Hunter departed America for England in mid-1719 without filling the post. The final decision lay with imperial authorities in London, so it is possible that the governor always expected to nominate Colden once he reached the British capital. But New York was a factious place, and the surveyor general’s office was too valuable for colonials to leave empty. After the governor left New York, the power of nomination passed to the acting governor, Peter Schuyler, one of Hunter’s political opponents. Schuyler seized his opportunity to reward friends and named an associate as surveyor general. Thus, in New York in 1719, as in Philadelphia a year or so before, Colden’s social rise came to a sudden and unforeseen halt. Not all hope was lost, however. There remained a good chance that the Board of Trade, the London-based administrative body created in 1696 to

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manage the English colonies, would reject Schuyler’s appointee. Colden anxiously waited for news from Hunter, his now distant patron. No word was expected from the British capital that winter so the apprehensive Scotsman may have filled his time during the cold months of late 1719 and early 1720 with experiments in natural philosophy. The birth of a third child, a daughter named Elizabeth after her great-aunt, must have provided another welcome distraction. As a warm spell melted the ice on the Hudson River at the start of 1720 and as colonials started to anticipate the arrival of more British ships, impatience got the better of Colden.18 He reached out to the governor by dispatching to London some thoughts on the elasticity of air, a phenomenon that had occupied a central place in English natural philosophy since the publication in 1660 of Robert Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, Touching the Spring of the Air.19 Colden then sent another letter on 26 January 1720 that announced he had begun a different, more ambitious project: the application of Newtonian theories of light and colors to the study of heat with a view to improving medicine. This correspondence is the first indication we have of Colden’s intellectual engagement in America with Newton’s Opticks, a book that the Scotsman had requested in August 1718 from his London book supplier, William Innys, along with several medical works, including anything by the Dutch botanist and anatomist, Frederik Ruysch.20 Colden specifically asked for the second English edition of the Opticks that Innys, together with his brother, John, had published earlier that year. He presumably received that volume sometime in 1719 and so became acquainted with Newton’s speculation that light created heat by vibrating the parts of bodies.21 Colden’s January 1720 letter to Hunter also contained a historical and social justification for an overhaul of the medical profession along the lines of astronomy. Echoing Pitcairne, it proclaimed that astronomy had made tremendous progress in recent times through the combined use of exact observation and the tools of geometry. In contrast, medicine had stalled even though it had no intrinsic weakness or flaw, and even though it was the most useful of sciences and deserving of attention. Clearly, then, “something Foreign” must have clogged its natural evolution. Colden gave a social and political explanation. He attributed the obstruction to the ignorance of most medical men. He noted that astronomy attracted either “Gentlemen of Good Estates” with leisure, money, and genius to spare, or publicly supported

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“Skillfull Laborious men.” Finally, he declared that the medical profession could only be reformed through the “Assistance of our Rulers & Governours who dispense Rewards & Punishments.”22 This carefully crafted performance designed to secure Hunter’s patronage crossed the Atlantic in early 1720. Worryingly, no reply came as winter turned into spring. Colden wrote in March 1720 to his contracts in Philadelphia to ask if they had received any news from London. He tried William Keith, who responded on 8 March 1720 that he had barely heard “one word of the Brigadeer [Hunter].”23 Days later, Colden sent an anxious letter to Logan, perhaps his first since their falling out. Logan, who had for some time been writing to his cousin, Colden’s wife, wanted to let bygones be bygones. Desperate to hear about Hunter in London, Colden swallowed his pride and accepted Logan’s offer of détente. “My having once fallen under your displeasure,” he began, was “one of the great misfortunes of my Life.” He then quickly turned to his most pressing matter. “Lett mee know any news you have heard of our most worthy Governor [Hunter]. We know nothing butt that he was arrived in England.”24 Like his earlier letter to Hunter, Colden’s correspondence to Logan revealed the impact of Newton’s Opticks on his thought. Colden proposed— perhaps as he had previously done to Hunter—that air pressure did not result from spiral-shaped air particles, as Robert Boyle had argued in the seventeenth century. Rather, it was the effect of a centrifugal power emanating from within each air particle. Following Newton, Colden claimed that this force pushes air particles apart, while an opposite gravitational power pulls them together.25 He also proposed the existence of an “Aether or a fluid w ch freely passes through all bodys.”26 Then, in order to convince Logan of this model, he offered the following thought experiment. Imagine dipping a porous bag containing an ounce of dust into a container of moving water. We would expect the water to separate the dust particles and push them up against the sides of the bag causing the “net work” to swell in proportion to the number of dust particles held within. By analogy, we should expect air pressure to result from a combination of the resistance of the Earth (a force that compresses the air particles as the net contains the dust) and the dilating force of aether, the fluid that surrounds all matter.27 Logan rightly considered this explanation to be baffling and showy. “I can Say nothing to thy hypothesis, not fully understanding it as yet,” he replied, adding that he did not see much value in such speculative “Inquiries” about unobservable natu-

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ral phenomena.28 It would not be the last time that Colden was criticized for being overly conjectural in his natural philosophy. These intellectual objections did not preclude Logan from patching up his relationship with Colden. Coincidentally, as these two men of science reconciled, a letter from Hunter arrived in Manhattan in mid-April 1720. It declared that Colden was appointed surveyor general of New York. And so, four years after returning to America as a married man, the son of a Scottish clergyman obtained a prestigious and relatively secure public position.29 He was now well positioned to accrue substantial wealth and status for himself and his family. Yet, one large problem remained. The income of the surveyor general depended on the willingness of the governor to issue the land grants for which the surveyor would be paid to measure.30 When Hunter decided in 1720 that he did not intend to return to New York, Colden once again faced financial uncertainty. He could only hope that the next provincial executive would be just as supportive of him as Hunter had been. In a letter probably hand-delivered by the incoming Governor William Burnet, the outgoing Governor Hunter reassured Colden that “you’ll have at least as good a friend in the Gentleman who brings you this as it was in my power to be to you and I doubt not but you’ll deserve it from him.”31 As if to confirm this sentiment, Governor William Burnet, soon after landing in New York in September 1720, informed the Board of Trade in London that he was “adhering firmly to every one of Brigadeer Hunters friends and not giving way to a party that has gathered strength by his absence.”32 The opposition party that Burnet identified included many of New York’s leading merchants. They had coalesced not only against taxes on trade in 1717, but also against Hunter’s 1718 ban on New York ships sailing to the French Caribbean. When a brief 1719 war between Spain and Britain closed off the Spanish West Indies to New York ships, compounding the loss of trade with the French West Indies and producing a recession, these New York’s merchants mobilized their English contacts into political action in London. That transatlantic alliance remained in place in 1720.33 At the same time as they sought influence in the British capital, New York’s merchant interest prepared to fight Burnet at home for control of the Assembly. They were left frustrated when the new governor, heeding the legal advice of Chief Justice Morris, declined to call a general election

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following his arrival. The merchants turned to the provincial Council, a prestigious though somewhat feeble body of crown-appointees tasked with advising the governor on important matters, as well as with forming a legislature with the Assembly. The Council generally lacked political independence. Morris mockingly referred to it as a “chamber of the leap sticks,” by which he meant a body filled with men who leapt to obey the governor like a group of trained spaniels.34 Colden had a similar opinion of the Council, and at one point he proposed that it be replaced by a colonial House of Lords. That plan was unfeasible in a factious colony that had no established aristocracy. New York’s ruling elite could claim only the barest of bloodlines. It was filled with men of middling origin—a class of not-quite-nobles who claimed superior intelligence and refinement and who amassed grand manors, estates, townhomes, and libraries. Although Colden considered using tax-free land grants to create a hereditary colonial “senate,” such a scheme was impossible to achieve in a colony ridden with competing political interests.35 Aspiring colonial Lords like Colden simply had to make do with a Council comprised of “Men of Estates & Families” whose power was “far from being hereditary.”36 The inherent political weakness of the Council became evident in 1720 when Burnet’s opponents sought to use their control over half of that body to pressure for a new Assembly election. The governor simply responded by asking the Board of Trade to remove the Council’s two main troublemakers, Schuyler, the former acting governor, and Adolph Philipse, the political schemer who reputedly pulled Schuyler’s strings. Burnet simultaneously nominated two court party allies as Schuyler’s and Philipse’s replacements. The Board approved this change, and warrants appointing Colden and James Alexander to the Council were issued in February 1721. The two friends and fellow Scotsmen were sworn in as councilors that August.37 Burnet’s packing of the Council continued when the death of another member opened up an extra seat. On Burnet’s recommendation, the king filled it with Lewis Morris Jr., the son of the chief justice, in October 1721.38 When a further councilor died in 1724, Burnet secured the appointment of Philip Livingston, son of Robert Livingston, the speaker of the Assembly.39 The following year, he successfully requested Archibald Kennedy, New York’s collector of customs and receiver-general, be added to the Council.40 In this way, the governor consolidated enough political power to push through a program of substantial reform.

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Only a few elites in eighteenth-century British New York held both a Council seat and another important government office. This cohort included almost all of the colony’s most powerful men. As a core member of the Hunter-Burnet party, Colden reached this status less than three years after moving to Manhattan. Wary that the political winds could change suddenly, he immediately and enthusiastically took up his official duties. He routinely attended the Council meetings held at Fort George from the beginning of a new session in May 1722 through to 1727. He served on several Council committees. He accompanied the governor to Albany conferences with the Five Indian Nations in 1721 and 1722. He led a commission to settle the New York– Connecticut boundary that met in New Rochelle, New York, in spring 1724 and then at Greenwich, Connecticut, the following year. In addition, as surveyor general, he personally laid out over 30,000 acres in 1720 and measured thousands more by chain over the next five or six years. It was a heavy workload that took him around Orange, Ulster, and Westchester Counties, as well as from the Mohawk River north of Albany to the docks and wharves along Manhattan’s southeastern waterfront.41 Colden would later record the problems he encountered as he tried to make careful and accurate surveys with inaccurate equipment “in thick woods,” across uneven ground, and through “underbrush & thick swamps.”42 While the surveyor general trekked to new corners of New York, Burnet busily turned Fort George into a hub of intellectual activity. No other colonial governor could match his credentials and reputation as a man of science. Born at The Hague in March 1688, he was the first son of the famous Scottish historian, Gilbert Burnet. He was also the godson and namesake of William of Orange. After falling out with the Stuarts, Burnet’s father had taken up exile in Holland and sided with the future King William III. In 1688, he returned to Britain as the chaplain and chief propagandist of the invading Dutch troops. Later rewarded with the Bishopric of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet offered positions within his diocese to a number of talented scholars who helped to spread Newtonian mathematics around England and Scotland. His son William grew up among these men.43 John Craige, the mathematician who initially brought Newton’s ideas to Scotland, was a particular favorite of the Bishop of Salisbury. Appointed as a Salisbury vicar in the 1690s, Craige published his most important work, Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology) in 1699.44 A few years later, Craige tutored William

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Burnet, inspiring the young man’s interest in science and, quite possibly, in scriptural prophecies. Although it cannot have been an easy role given that his student had just wasted two years at the University of Cambridge, Craige reportedly carried his charge “a great way into Mathematicks and Philosophy.”45 He may have also introduced William Burnet to Isaac Newton, who moved from Cambridge to London in 1696 to take up a position at the Mint. Newton assumed the presidency of the Royal Society of London in 1703. Shortly thereafter, he took young Burnet under his wing, proposing his election to the society in February 1706. Not quite eighteen years old and still unsure of his future, Burnet found himself at the epicenter of British scientific life. Burnet went on to play an important role in the dissemination of Newtonian mathematics around Continental Europe. In late 1708, at his father’s request, he joined his brothers and stepmother on an extended tour of Europe. He stayed for three weeks in Basel, Switzerland, with the mathematician Johann Bernoulli. From there, he traveled to Italy, the southern European edge of modern mathematics. By that time, only a handful of Italian mathematicians—including the brothers Gabriele and Eustachio Manfredi at the University of Bologna, Abbé Antonio Conti at Venice, and the monk Celestino Galiani at Rome—had shown any interest in the new analytical methods of Leibniz and Newton. Leibniz, though, had visited Italy years before, and he gave the Italian study of infinitesimal calculus a boost in 1707 by sealing the appointment of one of Bernoulli’s students, Jacob Hermann, as chair of mathematics at the University of Padua. Arriving at this opportune moment, Burnet received a warm welcome as a visiting expert on calculus. He held separate discussions with Galiani, the Manfredis, and Hermann, all of whom admired his mathematical skill and knowledge. He also conversed with such Italian scholars as Giuseppe Valletta in Naples, Giovanni Poleni in Padua, and Bernardino Zendrini in Venice. When Burnet told the latter of an experiment at the Royal Society of London, Zendrini became convinced “that gravity is made through a collision of the fluid matter [aether] that spins around the world.”46 Having helped to spur on the Italian Enlightenment, Burnet returned to England, probably in mid-1710. Now in his early twenties and grappling for direction, he studied law. There is no evidence that he ever practiced as a lawyer, but his legal training had uses all the same as it entailed dining with future leaders and so provided good preparation for a political career. Fur-

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thermore, attending law school allowed ongoing involvement with the Royal Society. In 1710 the Philosophical Transactions published a paper from Craige to his former student. Two years later, Burnet joined the Royal Society committee commissioned to decide whether Newton or Leibniz had first discovered calculus. This committee was stacked to favor the president of the Royal Society, and presumably Burnet was appointed because he was deemed a trustworthy Newtonian (despite the fact that he had earlier aided the diffusion of Leibnizian methods to Italy by befriending Hermann at Padua). A confident, sociable, dashing figure as well as a mathematician of repute, Burnet married the pretty daughter of Dean Stanhope in 1712. Mary Stanhope Burnet, who appears in Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella as “Moll Stanhope,” had been recognized before her marriage for her “Ingenuity and Love of Learning.”47 She died suddenly in 1715, leaving Burnet a widow and father of a young child, Gilbert. Despite his having recently been appointed comptroller of customs in London, Burnet fell into financial difficulty around this time. Bereaved and beholden, he agreed in 1720 to swap offices with Hunter and crossed the Atlantic. Burnet disembarked at New York with his young son at his side. He also brought ashore a substantial library of books and a collection of scientific instruments. Quick-witted, chatty, and learned, he swiftly made a good impression on the colonial elite, especially those with intellectual pretensions. Contemporaries said that his character matched his “cloth coat lined with velvet.”48 He was considered to be “a man of sense and polite breeding, a well read scholar, sprightly, and of a social disposition.”49 It was also noted that he had a “free and easy manner of communicating his sentiments,” which “made him the delight of men of sense and learning.”50 Used to the interactions of the Royal Society, Burnet turned Fort George into a center of sociable scientific activity. Colden, James Alexander, Archibald Kennedy, Chief Justice Lewis Morris Sr. and his son Lewis Morris Jr.  were at the core of the governor’s clique. Scientific and political lives intertwined in early eighteenth-century New York as never before and perhaps as never since. On one occasion, Colden and Alexander joined Burnet in observing an eclipse of Jupiter’s moons. Their findings appeared in the Philosophical Transactions in 1724–1725. In another illustrative incident, Colden and Burnet were called on as “two of the best mathematicians . . . in these parts” to judge the outcome of a handsome wager struck between a Westchester County Quaker, Josiah Quinby, and a

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group of four “city gentlemen” that included two of Burnet’s closest allies— Morris Jr. and Alexander. After Quinby claimed he could make a perpetualmotion machine, the Manhattanites bet he could not. Colden and Burnet were tasked with adjudicating this contest. They determined that Quinby could in fact “perform what is by him proposed to be done in the proposal,” even though they did not believe either that the Westchester inventor had “discovered the perpetual motion,” or that “his discovery will be of great Benefit to Mankind.” Quinby, in other words, did enough to win his bet on a technicality and walked away with a large sum of money.51 Colonial elites greatly enjoyed Burnet’s conversation until he started on the subject of religion—which happened too often for their liking. The governor arrived in America convinced that a mathematical analysis of Scripture confirmed that a biblically predicted 1260-year-long period of corrupt papal dominance had recently ended, and that a new era was dawning. Colden was aware that Newton shared the governor’s deep interest in Scripture prophecy. He perhaps also noticed the parallels between Burnet’s religious outlook and his own optimism for the emergence of a new enlightened age. All the same, he regarded the topic of scripture prophecy as antithetical to proper scientific investigation. Other colonials apparently agreed. Burnet, though, was a man who loved the sound of his own voice, and he pushed his theories on his New York acquaintances. Colden later reminisced that the governor did not make a single convert even though “upon all occasions he introduced [his ideas] into discourse even so far that his conversation became disagreeable to his best friends.”52 A more recent assessment suggests that Burnet was so taken with Scripture prophecy that he diverted his attention from public matters and weakened his political position in the mid-1720s.53 Even if this was so, Burnet’s intellectual efforts deserve to be remembered as something more than an intellectually worthless and politically detrimental distraction. Most notably, they resulted in a treatise on Scripture prophecy that Burnet published in New York in 1724. This colonial work provoked an important rebuttal from the Genevan scholar, Firmin Abauzit, which in turn influenced Voltaire, that great figure of the French Enlightenment.54 Although Burnet had little intellectual interest in medicine, Colden initially continued to be active in that area in the 1720s. He maintained a correspondence on smallpox and other health issues with his friend William Douglass

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in Boston.55 He offered medical advice to friends and political allies (including Burnet) in New York and Pennsylvania.56 He advised the captain of a British warship, whose crew had contracted scurvy.57 And he spent one winter evening stuffing and manipulating a bladder in order to demonstrate that digestion was a mechanical rather than a chemical process. For this experiment, Colden hammered a day’s worth of corned beef and other solid food to a pulp, added a similar amount of liquid, and squeezed the resultant mixture into a bladder, which he closed and tied up. To recreate the mechanical action of the stomach, he instructed one of his slaves to massage the bag gingerly for thirty minutes, after which time Colden peered inside to find the sort of “half digested slimy food which a Dog frequently vomits when he has [ate] too much.” The slave pressed the bladder for a further two and a half hours, before the experiment finally came to an end. When Colden reopened the bladder, and strained its contents through a cloth, he found a mechanically produced “pint of good chyle,” the nutritive part of food. He declared his experiment a complete success.58 A description of this investigation appears in a seven-chapter treatise on the “animal oeconomy” that Colden sent to Hunter, along with a treatise on  infinitesimals. This fascinating work—which unfortunately remains unpublished today—has been misidentified as a product of the 1730s. It was almost certainly started much earlier and revised over time. After all, it is unlikely that Colden would have dedicated his treatise to Hunter had it been written any later than the mid-1720s; the former governor’s last extant letter to Colden is dated 5 February 1722, and there is no record of any contact after Colden sent plants via Hunter to the first Earl of Ilay (later the third Duke of Argyll) in 1725.59 It is also notable that the treatise cites books— especially Newton’s Opticks and Ruysch’s Thesaurus anatomicus nonus— which Colden likely received from Innys in 1719. The Histoire de l’academie royale des sciences avec les memoires de mathematique et de physique, a periodical held in the extensive library of Governor Burnet, is also mentioned.60 This combined evidence strongly suggests that Colden wrote the first draft of his treatise in the early 1720s and perhaps during the winter of 1720–1721.61 The treatise attempts to show that animal and human bodies operate “Mechanically According to the Laws of Matter in Motion.” The opening chapter accordingly presents a mechanical explanation of generation, one that contained an unusual reference to the mathematics of infinitesimals.

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How does plant, human, and animal life begin? Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanists, including the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, had answered that question by invoking preformationism, or the idea that beings preexist as minute organisms stored in either the ovaries or sperm of their ancestors.62 Drawing heavily on Ruysch, Colden presented a similar view, although he insisted too that the Aristotelian concept of substantial form remained useful, especially when combined with the concept of infinity. Substantial form is all that is left when something becomes infinitely small, Colden explained, perhaps utilizing ideas contained in his accompanying— but now missing—piece on infinitesimals. Put another way, substantial form allows us to conceive the beginning point of individual existence and identity. Turning next to the problem of generation, the New York author claimed that individual animals and humans are not created anew but exist “compleat” before birth in the tail of the male sperm. The “Male contains many thousands [of little] animals in his testicles,” Colden wrote, “& these animalcules contain as many proportionally less Animalcules in their testicles & soe on.” Eventually, they become so small that they are reduced to substantial form. While this spermist argument was certainly compatible with mechanistic natural philosophy, it also looked forward to Colden’s mature philosophy, which similarly claimed that things could vanish away and yet remain knowable, just like an infinite series of decreasing numbers.63 The treatise’s last chapter on innate heat revealed the extent to which Newton’s Opticks had begun by the early 1720s to shape a new research agenda. Citing both the Latin edition published in 1706 and the second English edition published in 1718 of Newton’s work, Colden declared that there is “some part of Matter” that is “self active” or there is some “active principle . . . which is always in motion if not hindered.” He directed his readers to Newton’s last query (query 31 in the second English edition of the Opticks), which proposed that, because the cosmos routinely loses motion, “there is a necessity of conserving and recruiting it by active Principles, such as are the cause of Gravity. . . . And if it were not for these Principles the Bodies of the Earth, Planets, Comets, Sun, and all things in them would grow cold and freeze, and become inactive Masses; and all Putrefaction, Generation, Vegetation and Life would cease, and the Planets and Comets would not remain in their Orbs.”64 Colden agreed with Newton that motion was not entirely preserved, but rather lost and created. New motion, he

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argued, was produced by particles of light or fire that were perhaps capable of infinite degrees of expansion and contraction. Here, once again, he followed Newton. Influenced at least in part by his interest in alchemy, as well as his study of ancient Stoicism, Newton (in query 30 of the 1718 edition of Opticks) had asked, “may not Bodies receive much of their activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?”65 This claim raised a series of unanswered theological and philosophical problems. How did light move matter? Did light represent—literally or metaphorically—the power of God to activate the world? Was this “active principle” material and mechanical, or spiritual?66 In his treatise on the “animal oeconomy,” Colden confessed that fire and light—in particular the fire and light produced by an explosion of gunpowder— could not result from the mechanical action of springs, “for the motion generated exceeds immensely the force of the first Impeller.” Nonetheless, he offered no alternative explanation, except to insist that light was natural, not mystical or divine. “[H]eathen Philosophers[,] the Chaldeans[,] Egyptians[,] Persians[,] Chinese & Indians” had all recognized the power of light and understandably equated it with God, he noted, but Christians should know better. Light followed the laws of nature even when it expanded everywhere, or when it diminished infinitely without disappearing, just like an infinite series of smaller and smaller animalcules inside of sperm.67 Colden’s treatise on the “animal oeconomy” was an accomplished, informed, and provocative dissertation. Starting with a preformationist theory of generation and ending with a strong statement on the power of light, it grappled—albeit within the framework of mechanical philosophy—with issues of infinitesimals and material actions that would become central to Colden’s later thought. The manuscript not only looked forward, but also reflected Colden’s life and New York intellectual culture as they stood in the 1720s. It was the work of a gentleman-scholar who had, after a difficult journey that originated in Scotland, now joined the colonial elite. It engaged with current European debate, but simultaneously owed much to the specific intellectual context of early eighteenth-century Manhattan. It was rooted in the fact that, after Hunter had sought to replicate metropolitan learned culture in America, Burnet’s arrival in 1720 had brought a huge library and further stimulated cultural excitement and scholarly energy in the colony. From that point on, empire and enlightenment entwined more thoroughly in New York than anywhere else in British America.

PART II

Active Matters

Chapter 4

Knowledge of Empires

New York City was a valuable British entrepôt in the early eighteenth century. Although France and its Native American allies continued to threaten from without and even though a 1712 slave revolt showed that social tensions simmered within, the commercial boom that immediately followed the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, and the provincial Assembly’s support of Governor Robert Hunter’s administration in 1715 provided the town’s merchants and politicians with good reason for optimism.1 An English draughtsman captured New York’s buoyant postwar spirit around 1717.2 William Burgis’s panorama (figure 2) depicted a busy port in celebratory mood. Such urban prospects were popular in the eighteenth century, an era when British provincial towns grew, streets straightened, facades flattened, bricks replaced cobbles and clay, and thatch gave way to slate.3 New York followed that general trend, but simultaneously stood out among British urban sites— even in America—because of its history as a conquered Dutch outpost and its richly diverse population. It was therefore appropriate

Figure 2. A section (the third of four sheets) of John Harris’s engraving of William Burgis’s A South Prospect of ye Flourishing City of New York in the Province of New York in America, published ca. 1719. This skyline of New York was relatively new. The towering steeple of Trinity Church had been completed in 1711, and the dome roof of the City Hall had been built between 1699 and 1703. The French Huguenot Eglise du St. Esprit, the prominent building in the center of this image, dates from 1704. Courtesy of the Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.

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that Burgis not only foregrounded oversized flags to emphasize New York’s Britishness, but also included step gables and a windmill that signaled a persistent Dutch influence in Manhattan. Historians calculate that men of Dutch origin or ancestry still composed over half of the town’s white male adult population in 1700.4 While that proportion declined as a large number of British men and women arrived from Europe, the Caribbean, and other parts of North America during the first decades of the eighteenth century, the total number of Britons remained below half of the town’s white population in 1730.5 Ethnic, racial, and religious diversity was a distinctive feature of eighteenth-century British Manhattan, as it was for the whole colony of New York. A sizable wave of lowland Scots joined this mix in the early eighteenth century. After the 1707 Act of Union ended restrictions on Scottish settlement in the colonies and facilitated Scottish-American commerce, these immigrants arrived as merchants, artisans, farmers, servants, soldiers, sailors, ministers, missionaries, doctors, and lawyers. Some remained in the port town. Others headed to the backcountry.6 Several became high-profile colonial officeholders, benefiting from the fact that three men with Scottish backgrounds— Governors Robert Hunter, William Burnet, and John Montgomerie— consecutively administered New York between 1710 and 1731. It also helped that New York’s imperial importance increased following the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict that rewarded Britain with extra territory and commercial rights. New York, with its accessible inland waterways and mid-Atlantic location, stood to benefit from a postwar British expansion into the continental interior. However, politics on both sides of the Atlantic hindered efforts to redirect New York’s commerce away from Canada and toward Indians in the Far West. The increased possibility of British extension into inland North America heightened the importance of credible geographic and historical knowledge of the continent. As a result, Colden found a new intellectual niche. Following his 1720 appointment as New York’s surveyor general, the ambitious Scotsman set aside his medicine, botany, and natural philosophy to concentrate on becoming one of Britain’s foremost experts on the economy, geography, and history of North America. His efforts culminated in the publication of his best-known work, The History of the Five Indian Nations, which initially appeared in New York in 1727 as part of a contest over imperial policy. An enlarged version published in London two decades later was primarily

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a commercial rather than a political venture. This second edition gained international recognition, but the complicated nature of transatlantic politics and print culture meant that its colonial author acquired few direct benefits. The death of a childless Spanish monarch in 1700 sparked a bloody international conflict that had profound American consequences. Carlos II had bequeathed the entire Spanish realm to the Duke of Anjou, a grandson of the French king, Louis XIV. This arrangement raised the prospect of an immense Bourbon empire and perhaps encouraged France to consider settling the North American interior in order to protect Spanish colonies from English invasion.7 Not surprisingly, England, along with the Dutch Republic and Austria, opposed this extension of Louis XIV’s influence. After nominating a Habsburg alternative for the Spanish throne, the so-called Grand Alliance declared war on Spain and France in 1702. The War of the Spanish Succession (which was known as Queen Anne’s War in British America) lasted, often with extreme violence, until 1714. The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which helped to conclude the war, rewarded Britain with the French colonies of Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, Acadia (Nova Scotia), and Saint-Christophe (St. Kitts). Britain also gained the asiento, or the right to sell African slaves to Spanish America, as well as permission to trade with Native Americans in the North American interior. The treaty further recognized (albeit ambiguously and without Native American consent) British suzerainty over the Iroquois.8 France moved quickly to prevent Britain from capitalizing on its new North American privileges. Boosted by a postwar increase in beaver prices, it constructed new trading posts in the Great Lakes region.9 Moreover, in 1717, the French government awarded monopoly rights for Louisiana to the attention-grabbing, high-growth, joint-stock Compagnie d’Occident. That enterprise did not last long. It boomed for a while, before collapsing spectacularly in 1720, just before the English South Sea Bubble similarly burst. Despite that rapid decline, the company’s widely advertised plans to establish French towns up and down the Mississippi caused considerable anxiety in British America. At a time when the imperial government in London remained uncommitted to territorial expansion in North America, British colonials directly involved in brokering commercial and diplomatic Indian relations were

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among the first persons to sound the alarm about French plans to seize North America.10 Citing Baron de Lahontan’s New Voyages to NorthAmerica, published in 1703, which documented a French proposal to build forts along the Great Lakes, they warned of a Bourbon plot to grab the whole continent. It mattered little that Versailles had decided against that scheme. Lahontan’s testimony was considered evidence enough that the French wanted to settle the continental interior at Britain’s expense.11 In 1717 an agent for South Carolina informed the Board of Trade that “ye French had a design to dispossess us of all our Plantations in the Continent of North America.” He pointed to “La Hontan’s project either to draw over ye Iroquese Indians etc., to their interest and to engross all ye commerce of those Nations . . . [or] by building forts.”12 The stakes could hardly have been higher. Robert Livingston—a Roxburghshire Scot who had made a fortune in fur trading and become the Albany-based secretary of Indian Affairs— declared in 1720 that New Yorkers faced “a Crisis” and “must do or dye.”13 In the same year, a self-proclaimed “American,” probably the South Carolina judge, James Smith, called for the British imperial government to centralize along Bourbon lines— only without the tyranny. He argued that colonies “canton’d into so many petty independent States or Common Wealths” simply could not survive. London must strengthen its imperial administration or the “Mississippi will drown our Settlements on the Main of America.”14 The publication of new French maps of North America exacerbated these colonial concerns. Cartography played a major role in the contest over North America during the three decades of Anglo-French peace that followed the War of the Spanish Succession. For competing reasons, the location of rivers and lakes, as well as the boundaries of Iroquoia, were crucial factors determining the limits of French and British territory. By insisting that the “right of discovery” extended to the entire length of a waterway, French officials asserted their control over a large area around the Mississippi and Great Lakes, including much of Iroquoia.15 By contrast, the British justified their claims to trans-Appalachian lands on the basis that this region had been conquered by a group of British dependents, namely the Iroquois.16 By the standards of our time, eighteenth-century French maps are strikingly inaccurate, but to contemporaries they were impressive and authoritative. The French state, unlike its British counterpart, had strongly supported cartography since the 1660s, especially through the Académie Royale des Sciences, which was organized in 1666. French mapmakers and geographers

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were renowned as the best in Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century.17 None were more highly rated than Guillaume Delisle, the premier geographe du roi (or royal geographer), who pioneered an extensive and critical interrogation of sources, achieving new standards of cartographical correctness.18 British imperialists simultaneously admired French mapmakers and denounced their work as the propaganda of the Bourbon state. Delisle’s 1718 image of North America proved particularly controversial because it puffed up Louisiana, extending French borders eastward into the backcountry of British America and southward from Canada over the Great Lakes.19 As Governor Burnet explained to the Board of Trade, Delisle awarded more North American territory to France in 1718 than he had in an earlier depiction of the same region.20 Commissioned by the Compagnie d’Occident as part of its promotional drive, Delisle’s latest effort provided panicked British colonials with strong additional evidence of French intentions to destroy British America.21 The Board of Trade was alert to the problem of French expansionism in North America, having realized during the negotiations over the Treaty of Utrecht that French diplomats knew considerably more about the New World than their British counterparts. The Board subsequently surveyed colonial officials for information. In a significant reply, the Pennsylvanian statesmen William Keith and James Logan confirmed the French claimed “all the lands to the northward and westward of the British Colonies from Canada along the Lakes to the mouth of the River [Mississippi].” Keith and Logan recommended the construction of new British forts on Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, the Potomac, and the Susquehanna. Furthermore, they called for the coordination of an intercolonial Indian policy, noting that the French, unlike the British, make “their correspondence with the Indians a national concern.”22 With such recommendations in hand, the Board of Trade delivered a comprehensive 135-page policy statement to King George I in September 1721. It detailed the commercial importance of the American interior, as well as the threat that New France posed to British American interests.23 The Board of Trade’s document also identified New York as the natural linchpin of the continent because of the colony’s proximity to French Canada and the Indian tribes residing around the Great Lakes. Rumors soon circulated in America that a viceroy was on his way to Manhattan. It looked as if that island was about to become the capital of British America,

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as well as an eventual launching site for British expansion into the continental interior.24 As New York became a pivotal part of the First British Empire, emboldened imperial agents threatened local interests and inflamed existing internal tensions. The colony’s newly appointed surveyor general fueled the fire in 1720 by launching a crusade against corruption. Colden had discovered that previous governors had given away huge tracts to their family and friends, and that landowners had fraudulently pushed out their boundaries to claim many more acres. After determining that local greed restricted the British government’s income, prevented settlement, and exposed the province’s frontiers to invasion, he resolved to discontinue practices that went against the national interest. Consequently, he ignored some good advice to tread carefully and denied land in Ulster County to two prominent figures on the grounds that to do otherwise would contradict certain Crown instructions.25 He then shot down accusations that he was assuming “too great a power” by stating that the king gave the governor, collector general, secretary, and the surveyor general “the sole power” of setting out land grants. Likewise, he asserted that the principal responsibility for safeguarding the Crown’s income from land grants and taxes fell on the surveyor general, who he declared was the official “suppos’d to have the best knowledge of the lands.”26 A related dispute that occurred in 1721 revealed the lack of local support for Colden’s land reforms. The surveyor general complained that a bill passed by the New York Assembly that allowed for the subdivision of large land grants held by multiple owners was a corrupt scheme designed to imbue fraudulent land claims with legal sanction. Because he was busy laying out lands away from the city when the bill came before the provincial Council at the start of July, Colden sent a written protest to the relevant committee that proposed requiring all land grants be resurveyed before being partitioned. It is an indication of how little support the surveyor general had even among his colonial peers that the Council paid little notice to this suggestion and passed the Assembly’s Partition Act with only minor changes. The bill then landed on the governor’s desk. Fortunately, Burnet had read Colden’s report with interest and separately discovered that the king had repealed similar legislation just two years before. As a result, he refused to sign the act and referred the whole matter to London.27

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This gubernatorial veto gave Colden his first opportunity to write directly to the Board of Trade and raise his profile in Whitehall. Around November 1721, he penned a representation against the Partition Act that explained how corrupt officials, poor or nonexistent surveys, and vaguely worded warrants both facilitated a gross abuse of land grants at the expense of the Crown and Native Americans and prevented a proper “setling & Improveing” of New York. The surveyor general called for a new and complete survey of the province’s property lines. Accurate land records, he argued, would increase quit rents, providing “sufficient Revenue to support the Government without doeing injustice to any body but a great deal of justice to the King.”28 This memorial reached London and helped to secure Crown support for the governor’s veto of the Partition Act, although the suggested survey was not approved.29 Despite this reversal of its legislation, the provincial Assembly retained considerable power in the 1720s. It had gained control of government expenditure through a backroom deal made with Governor Hunter in 1715 and so effectively managed any local public payments made to the colony’s imperial officials.30 Colden complained that these elected politicians were no more likely to fund an agent of the Crown than brewers were to “reward the Excise men & Gaudgers when they doe their Duty.”31 New York customs surveyor Caleb Heathcote had earlier proposed solving this problem through a new commercial tax capable of providing colonial officials with “their Bread, & support, from the Hands of the King, without a slavish dependence for it, on the uncertain Humours of assemblys.”32 In the mid-1720s, Colden made a comparable suggestion that recommended the use of quit rents not commercial levies. Land taxation, he reasoned, had the double benefit of both raising revenue and discouraging speculators from hording vast unimproved tracts.33 Ironically, corruption in London—not in New York—intervened to prevent colonial officials from receiving salaries. In 1722, the New York government actually approved such payments for the surveyor general, admiralty court judge Francis Harison, and attorney general James Alexander, but a dispute involving the British auditor-general, Horace Walpole, brother of the prime minister, thwarted this arrangement.34 Walpole demanded substantial arrears from New York’s Assembly for fees related to his auditing of the revenue of New York. When the Assembly protested that it could ill afford both the salaries of Crown officials and Walpole’s remunerations, the

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auditor-general insisted to be paid first.35 In this way, Colden lost part of his income and remained financially tied to the whims of the provincial Assembly.36 Still, there was at least one benefit. Colden learned from this disappointment that he needed more influence in the British capital. He subsequently used his outstanding knowledge of New York to make powerful metropolitan connections. The imperial significance of New York rested largely on its proximity to the Iroquois, a complex, dynamic, knowledgeable, and often internally divided league of five (later six) Indian nations: the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas (with the Tuscaroras joining around 1723).37 William Burnet arrived in America in 1720 aware of the importance of the Iroquois as mediators between New York and the Far West.38 Soon after landing in Manhattan, the incoming governor presented New York’s Assembly with a three-pronged set of commercial and military objectives: to improve British trade relations with the Far Indians (the French-allied Algonquian-speaking peoples residing west of the British-aligned Iroquois nations), to invest in frontier defenses to protect that trade, and to cut relations between New York and Canada that enabled French-Indian business activity.39 The provincial assemblymen backed the governor (unsurprisingly given that Burnet had kept them in power by refusing to call an election on his arrival). Two relevant bills passed into law in November 1720. The first levied—for a period of six years—a 2 percent tariff on European imports in order to raise funds for a costly program of defense spending and Indian diplomacy.40 The second, entitled An Act for the Encouragement of the Indian Trade, prohibited New Yorkers for a term of three years from selling or delivering to French subjects, even via a third person, the clothes, blankets, firearms, and other items collectively known as “Indian Goods.”41 The governor and his allies calculated that French traders forced to import their Indian goods along the St. Lawrence River would eventually suffer greater costs and losses than British merchants using the Hudson. Albany would then come to monopolize the Indian trade.42 It was a solid assessment, except that the prospect of distant and theoretical gains failed to appease the New York wholesalers and London exporters who already profited handsomely by selling goods in bulk to Canada, from where French traders sold them on to Indians. In the face of growing opposition, the imperial scheme gathered pace in the early 1720s. A crucial moment came when Burnet and a diplomatic party

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that included Colden traveled to Albany for a conference with Iroquois leaders in the autumn of 1721. Located around 150 miles north of New York City, a distance that took the best part of a week to travel, early eighteenthcentury Albany was a stockaded last stop before the American wilderness.43 The governor arrived a few days before the delegates of the Five Nations and used his spare time to travel to the village of Schenectady, the site of a brutal Indian massacre, as well as the magnificent Cohoes Falls. Colden meanwhile took in the Iroquois lodge on the outskirts of Albany and watched with fascination as Indians arrived in town and performed nighttime war dances. Quite possibly, the Iroquois stared back at the displaced Scotsman with a similar sense of wonder.44 The conference’s opening statements were made on 4  September, probably in Albany’s Stadt Huys, or City Hall.45 New York councilors and the commissioners for Indian Affairs sat either side of the governor, while additional Albany gentlemen stood behind. On the opposite side of the room, Iroquois sachems gathered round their leader, Decanisora (known by the French as Teganissorens). So arranged, the two sides confronted each other at a critical moment in Iroquois political affairs. Decanisora, an Onondaga sachem, was a famous and skillful Indian statesman largely responsible for an Iroquois policy of neutrality and diplomacy that had culminated in dual 1701 treaties with England and France. These treaties had achieved a period of peace and international recognition of Iroquois claims to hunting territories above Lake Ontario. They had also allowed the Five Nations to stretch their influence westward and establish themselves as middlemen between Albany and the fur-trading Far Indians.46 Decanisora was by all accounts an impressive orator and skilled politician who, according to Colden, bore a physical resemblance to the Roman statesman Cicero.47 Even so, his leadership was on the wane by 1721. A generation of younger sachems who were less tied to the policy of neutrality had come to the fore. These Anglophile leaders consented to Burnet’s request that Decanisora (whom the New York governor labeled “a [F]rench Spy”) be replaced as the Iroquois speaker. And they heeded Burnet’s warnings that the French had encroached upon Iroquois territory, threatening their liberty.48 By the time the conference got fully under way on 7 September, Decanisora had been demoted to the conference sidelines and the Anglophiles were firmly in charge. Following an established ritual, the Iroquois and New York delegations met opposite each other on boards laid out on Albany’s main

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street. Burnet opened proceedings by describing the English and Iroquois similarly as “free people” who “hated slavery.” The French, he said, were “rul’d by a king who was a great Tyrant,” and intent on bringing “all their Neighbors into the same slavery.” He then asked for a renewal of the traditional Anglo-Iroquois alliance, known as the Covenant Chain. The New York governor additionally requested that the Iroquois protest to the French about the development of a blockhouse on the Niagara River (at present-day Lewiston), a location that allowed the French to intercept Algonquian fur traders and redirect them around Iroquoia.49 After two days of private meetings and discussions, the Iroquois sachems agreed to these requests, as well as to maintain “an open path” for western Indian tribes to reach Albany. Burnet then showered the Iroquois with gifts and brought the conference to an end. He had every reason to be satisfied. The Iroquois policy of neutrality was effectively over and a new era of British-Iroquois relations was under way.50 Colden undertook his first serious writing on the Iroquois after he returned to Manhattan excited by what he had seen at Albany. He sent a lengthy letter to William Douglass that included a detailed account of the conference and Indian culture.51 It pulled in two competing intellectual directions. On the one hand, Colden wrote as a committed empiricist who sought to provide his friend with accurate and detailed information. On the other hand, he embraced a European tradition of conjectural history that viewed Native American society as an undeveloped and preliminary type of human organization. Colden argued in this correspondence that a primitive respect for wisdom and courage underpinned all political power and authority, an assertion he later repeated in The History of the Five Indian Nations, from which it was picked up by the Scottish political theorist, Adam Ferguson.52 In this sense, Colden refused to imagine a prepolitical state of nature in the manner of Thomas Hobbes and other early modern political theorists. He assumed that humans always possessed some form of government, and viewed the Iroquois as a living example of the earliest and most basic—but not necessarily the least favorable—form of human society. By his account, the Five Nations were a republic of noble but revengeful barbarians who could either be civilized by enlightened European imperialists or corrupted by selfinterested colonizers.53 He reported to Douglass in 1721 that Iroquois society was neatly structured around a moral hierarchy. The sachems were

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“large well shaped” men with “goodly countenances” who led not because of their wealth but because of their reputations for “wisdome & experience.” The Iroquois captains were likewise respected for their “strength & bravery” in war. The rest of the Iroquois were deemed less honorable warriors who operated by “sackling and surprising their enemy” rather than in pitched battles of the European sort. They were also irreligious barbarians who “burnt alive” prisoners of war “with the greatest cruelty.”54 Colden’s description of the three-fold division of Iroquois society carried an imperial purpose. It explained how the Native Americans could be in the eyes of Europeans both trusted military partners and inferior savages.55 Moreover, it provided intellectual support for the concept of a sustainable Anglo-Iroquois peace by presenting the Iroquois leaders as something other than unthinking wagers of war. For while he acknowledged that fighting was the “delight” of the Iroquois in general, Colden also noted that Decanisora repeatedly sought a peaceful path of neutrality.56 It thus seemed that war was at least in some instances a carefully weighed choice for the Iroquois, not a simple, reflex action. After the Albany meeting of 1721 secured the safe passage of western Algonquians through Iroquoia, a similar conference held the next year further promoted commerce between New York and the Far West. It marked the start of a new era of intercolonial Indian affairs. Two other colonial governors—William Keith of Pennsylvania and Alexander Spotswood of Virginia—joined Burnet at Albany. They were primarily concerned with backcountry conflicts between colonial settlers and Iroquois warriors. The New York governor shared these worries, but concentrated on larger imperial issues. At Burnet’s request, the Iroquois consented to resist French military aggression and to help promote trade between Albany and the Far Indians.57 Their pledge paved the way for lucrative British-Algonquian commerce. A party of twenty Far Indian traders duly arrived in Albany in the spring of 1723. When an additional group of eighty western Indians came to Albany months later, the New York governor boasted to the Board of Trade that “the most difficult part is over.” He predicted that New York traders would no longer be interested in selling to Canada.58 The governor was right to think that the French fur trade was in decline, but wrong to estimate that the Albany-Canada trade would end any time soon.59 New York and London merchants were unwilling to forgo the profits they made by selling Indian goods to the French. A transatlantic coali-

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tion rallied in opposition to Burnet’s attempts to extend the 1720 Act for the Encouragement of the Indian Trade beyond its expiration date of 1723. After Burnet turned to Colden as he battled to defend these laws, the surveyor general produced an account of New York’s trade, which traveled across the Atlantic in June 1723.60 A few months later, a related manuscript map drawn by Colden reached the secretary of state in London.61 Colden’s report and map circulated in the British capital as the dispute over Burnet’s restrictions on commerce with Canada heated up. When the New York legislature voted to continue until 1725 both the 1720 Act for the Encouragement of the Indian Trade and a companion 1722 bill designed to prevent the smuggling of Indian goods, a group of twenty London merchants petitioned the Board of Trade to reopen the trade with Canada. They argued that Burnet’s policies were “very Pernicious to the British Trade in general, and to the Interest of New-York in particular.” They claimed too that the acts did not facilitate Indian commerce, but rather drove the French to prevent “English Indians” from reaching New York. To force home this point, they asserted that French-allied natives lived between New York and the Iroquois, hindering westward trade.62 This claim, as Colden was quick to spot, was factually incorrect. The Board of Trade investigated the complaints of the London merchants against Burnet’s policies in spring 1724, before summarizing the disagreement for the king. The issue rested on two competing images of New York’s economy and Indian relations. The governor insisted that his actions improved Anglo-Iroquois relations and steered Far Indian traders to Albany and away from Montreal. The London merchants protested that fur imports from New York into Britain, as well as exports of goods from Britain to New York, had fallen under Burnet’s administration. They also warned that France might soon trade with the Iroquois, threatening the Anglo-Iroquois alliance. The Board did not take a side, but it did express some doubt about the accuracy of the merchants’ information, creating an opening for a knowledgeable counteroffensive.63 Copies of the merchants’ petition and the Board of Trade’s representation to the King reached New York in mid-1724. Colden coordinated the Burnet administration’s response and probably co-wrote a Council report, which the governor sent to the Board of Trade in November 1724, along with a printed copy of Colden’s map of the Five Nations, which had just been published in New York (figure 3).64

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Figure 3. Cadwallader Colden, “A Map of the Countrey of the Five Nations belonging to the Province of New York and of the Lakes Near Which the Nations of Far Indians Live with Part of Canada Taken from the Map of the Louisiane Done by Mr. DeLisle in 1718.” Printed in New York by William Bradford, this map was first published as part of Papers relating to an Act of the Assembly of the Province of New-York, for Encouragement of the Indian Trade, &c. and for Prohibiting the Selling of Indian Goods to the French, viz. of Canada (New York, 1724). Bradford reissued the map separately in 1727, the same year that he published the first edition of Colden’s The History of the Five Indian Nations. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The Council statement rejected several of the merchants’ key claims, including their assertion that French-allied Indians lived between New York and the Iroquois. The map reinforced this point. As Burnet proclaimed in his covering letter, it clearly showed that “our Indians [the Iroquois] are there visibly adjoining close to us in a continued Chain.”65 A memorial on the fur trade that followed the Council Report and map to London confirmed Colden’s status as an expert on North American history and geography. Writing in the first person and invoking evidence “from the writings of the French and from others who have travel’d in Canada or among the Indians,” the surveyor general warned that the French could potentially make the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes “a scene of inland Navigation as cannot be parallelled in any other part of the world.” Colden stated the French had been “indefatigable in making discoveries and carrying on their Commerce with Nations whom the English

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know nothing [about] but what they see in the French Maps and Books.” Nonetheless, Britain could catch up because the Hudson provided a much more reliable and safe shipping route than the St. Lawrence. In other words, New York traders could transport their Indian goods to the Far West more quickly and cheaply than their French rivals.66 With the geographical case made and his geographical expertise displayed, Colden turned to a historical problem: Why have the traders of New York neglected “so considerable & beneficial a Trade for so long a time”? His answer emphasized a set of historical incidents and conditions that were either over or on the wane. It began in the 1660s and 1670s, when the Iroquois and French were enemies. Colden described how Anglo-French warfare restricted English travel west of Iroquoia, as well as how the Five Nations blocked the Far Indians from reaching Albany. After a brief account of how the French had encouraged Iroquois suspicions of the English and built a fort at the mouth of the Cataraqui River, the fur trade memorial went on to praise Thomas Dongan, a Stuart-appointed, Restoration-era Catholic governor of New York, for his efforts to improve English trade relations with the Far Indians. Colden then noted that, as the seventeenth century came to a close, French military strength forced the Iroquois to accept “a kind of Neutrality.” He added that two failed expeditions against Canada in the early eighteenth century further undermined England’s position, as did trade in Indian goods between Albany and Montreal. The memorial concluded by stating that the arrival of Burnet had ushered in a new period of British strength. We “now enjoy the most favorable time that at any time can be hoped for in order to extend the British commerce in North America,” Colden cheered before predicting that “if the clandestine Trade with Albany be entirely stopped, the French Traders will be ruined.”67 This memorial—a precursor to The History of the Five Indian Nations— had the dual aim of supporting Burnet’s policies and of demonstrating Colden’s knowledge of North America. The governor sent the piece to the Board of Trade in November 1724 with a request that the king compel the lying merchants to “either confess their fault or name their authors.”68 Burnet also attempted to ratchet up the pressure on the merchants in New York by allowing a local printing of the most important documents related to the Indian trade controversy. The colony’s sole printer, William Bradford, issued a single volume in 1724 that included the petition of the London merchants, extracted minutes from the Board of Trade’s interview of the merchants’

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attorney, the July 1724 Board of Trade representation to King George I, the New York Council’s committee report coauthored by Colden, an engraved copy of the surveyor’s map of the Five Nations, and his memorial on the fur trade.69 Burnet justified the printing of this material to the Board of Trade by explaining that he and his Council wanted “to make the publick here judges, since truth and reason are so evidently on our side and against the Petitioners.”70 He later added that the “many unjustifiable Assertions of the Merchants” could not survive public scrutiny in a place where “the facts are well known.”71 This explanation suggests the governor and other New York elites considered the colonial public capable of rational political engagement in the mid-1720s. All the same, it upset the Board of Trade, which reprimanded the New York governor in 1725 for printing material intended only for private consumption.72 This official scolding was an early signal of the complex politics of print culture in eighteenth-century British New York. Ultimately, Colden’s map and writings stirred debate, but failed to win over the Board of Trade. Discussion of the Albany-Canada trade continued in London in May 1725. The Board once again grilled the solicitor representing the English merchants, as well as the colony’s London agent. It also studied the acts and its own correspondence with Burnet, and even brought in former Governor Robert Hunter, who testified that the New York laws “were of Great use” and predicted that Montreal “would be intirely deserted” within a few years. Hunter’s speech, however, failed to sway the Board, which eventually ruled that the acts were too severe.73 Burnet refused to abandon his imperial scheme and instead secured passage of a more moderate law in 1726, just as the French rebuilt Fort Niagara and threatened once again to channel trade with the western Algonquians around Iroquoia.74 The governor later returned to the problem of the Far West when he met with Iroquois sachems at Albany in 1726 and presented them with a copy of Claude Charles Le Roy Bacqueville de la Potherie’s Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale, a recently published French history of North America that, according to Burnet at least, showed “what accounts the French give of their own Proceedings and Designs with relation to [the Iroquois].” Burnet reported his meeting back to the Board of Trade and enclosed a marked-up copy of Colden’s map.75 He also ordered the fortification of a trading post at Oswego on Lake Ontario.76 This order turned out to be one of his last major political acts in New York. In April 1728, in an imperial shake-up initiated by the death of King George I, this godson of

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William of Orange and protégé of Isaac Newton moved from New York to Boston to become governor of Massachusetts. In 1729 King George II repealed all New York prohibitions on the selling of Indian goods to the French. Coincidentally, Burnet died that year along with his imperial scheme. With the publication in 1727 of The History of the Five Indian Nations, Colden’s standing as Britain’s leading authority on the history and geography of New York reached new heights. Bradford issued the book along with a new edition of the author’s map of the Five Nations. Both works sought to impose a British interpretation on information drawn heavily from French sources. By copying an extract from Delisle’s 1718 map and relabeling it “the Countrey of the Five Nations, Belonging to the Province of New York,” Colden claimed for Britain all land conquered by the Iroquois. Likewise, in the full title of his book, The History of the Five Indian Nations Depending on the Province of New-York in America, he asserted British dominance over a territory containing few British traders or settlers.77 Despite this imperial agenda, Colden had to rely on French histories for the early part of his narrative. He especially used de la Potherie’s Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale (presumably the same copy that Burnet had shown to Iroquois sachems at Albany in 1726) and Baron de Lahontan’s New Voyages to North-America. In later sections, he supplemented these French accounts with the official minutes of the Albany Commissioners of Indian Affairs.78 Nevertheless, the overall balance of these sources undermined the History’s ambition to offer a new British alternative to existing French narratives. Colden addressed this problem by exaggerating his use of British material. Further, he claimed that his work benefited from a peculiar British preference for veracity over style. “Histories wrote with all the Delicacy of a fine Romance, are like French Dishes, more agreeable to the Pallat than the Stomach, and less wholsom than more common and courser Dyet,” the New York author joked in his preface. By contrast, dry British translations of Indian speeches are more “genuine, and truly related” than the fancy French alternatives.79 Although The History of the Five Indian Nations was primarily a political tract, it also provided a rich account of Native American society and government. Along with Joseph-François Lafitau’s Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains, Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps (1724) and Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s Histoire et Description Générale de la Nouvelle France (1744),

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it offered detailed evidence about the Iroquois that helped to support numerous Enlightenment accounts of the origins and progress of human society. Significantly, this impact occurred even though Colden’s book, when read closely, challenged common eighteenth-century assumptions about the linear progression of civilization. Those assumptions gained particular currency in Scotland, where a number of intellectuals analyzed social development through various stages (usually three or four in number) from rude savagery to polished refinement.80 Colden, in contrast, believed in cycles of rising and falling civilizations not the straight upward trend of human society. He was also ambivalent about the benefits of commerce and modernity. Moreover, he appreciated many of the qualities and customs of the Iroquois, whom he described as an exact and observable example of “the most Ancient and Original Condition of almost every Nation.” In an opening dedication to Burnet where he argued that self-interested European colonizers had corrupted the noble virtues of the Iroquois, Colden called on enlightened governors to civilize “a poor Barbarous People, under the darkest Ignorance,” yet possessive of “a bright and noble Genius.”81 In his view, then, unenlightened imperialism was worse than no imperialism at all. The Iroquois were deemed in Colden’s book to be a politically organized people who valued intelligence and valor. An opening chapter entitled “A Short View of the Form of Government of the Five Nations” introduced the Iroquois as a coalition of simple, free, republican, warring nations led by sachems commonly respected for their “Wisdom and Integrity” and by captains highly regarded for their “Courage and Conduct.”82 As we have seen, Colden had made exactly the same points years earlier to Douglass. Now, in the early chapters of his 1727 History, he paired his account of the rise of the Iroquois with a discussion of the fall of the Algonquins (also called the Adirondacks), the longstanding enemy of the Iroquois. Drawing on de la Potherie, he recounted an Indian oral history of how the Algonquins, once the “most War-like and Polite Nation of all the Indians,” regarded themselves as nobler than their neighbors, the Iroquois.83 Originally farmers of corn, the Iroquois became better hunters and warriors over time and gained control over the Great Lakes region. Even with French firearms and support, the ill-disciplined Algonquins were unable to defeat the more organized and strategic Iroquois. Thus, for Colden, the decline of the Algonquins provided an important lesson to all nations about the need to maintain strength and virtue.

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While Colden found much to admire about the Iroquois, the French appeared in The History of the Five Indian Nations as both untrustworthy imperial aggressors and untrustworthy historians. Colden explained that the Iroquois accepted a treaty with France in 1667, around the same time the Five Nations struck up a lasting alliance with the English conquerors of New Netherland. Unlike the English, though, the French did not sustain peace but rather launched an unsuccessful attack on the Iroquois in the 1680s. They unleashed a cruel and unjust war against the Seneca in an effort to stop English trade extending westward. New York’s Governor Dongan “earnestly pursued the Interest of his Country” only to find himself removed from office by a Stuart monarchy keen on peace with France. Significantly, the first part of the History concluded at the time of the Glorious Revolution and with French Canada on the point of “entire Destruction.” It was, in Colden’s telling, a moment of great hope and potential for England and New York.84 Around 500 copies of the American edition of The History of the Five Indian Nations were printed in New York in 1727 and entirely sold by the early 1740s.85 Even though Colden advertised his work as the “First Part” of a longer study, he did not rush to extend it.86 One main reason was surely that Burnet’s relocation to Boston in 1728 and death in 1729 left the New York historian with little direct encouragement to produce a second part. Things changed in the early 1740s when he began to correspond with the man who became his London agent. Peter Collinson was a Quaker, merchant, plant collector, and natural historian with a haberdashery and drapery business that gave him numerous contacts in British America, including Colden and James Alexander.87 Sometime in 1740 or early 1741, Colden tried to impress Collinson, a new correspondent, by sending him both a design for a portable, accurate quadrant and a copy of The History of the Five Indian Nations.88 The London Quaker passed this quadrant plan to a famous British instrument maker, George Graham, who judged it ill conceived.89 By contrast, Graham and Collinson agreed that Colden should produce a second edition of his History. “Tretises of this kind where they may be rely’d on are much in Request & Demand Here,” Collinson wrote encouragingly to his New York correspondent in March 1741.90 Whereas the first volume of his The History of the Five Indian Nations aimed to support the imperial politics of Burnet, the second volume shot for commercial success. Heartened by the prospect that his writing might attract

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a wide readership in London, Colden revised the first section and produced a second part over the winter of 1741–1742. He may have also at this time written a third part, which went unpublished in the eighteenth century.91 These additional passages brought the historical narrative from the Glorious Revolution through to the arrival of Governor Burnet in New York in 1720. They also added rich descriptions of the Iroquois. Most especially, an enlarged introductory chapter, now retitled “A Short View of the Form of Government of the Five Nations, and of their Laws, Customs, &c.,” included a detailed account of Iroquois customs and beliefs that drew on new sources, including a long letter from Henry Barclay, an Albany-born, Yale-educated Anglican missionary to the Mohawk.92 Even though the revamped The History of the Five Indian Nations moved away from the first edition’s concern with Burnet’s imperial policy, it did not abandon public matters entirely. The second part contained a strong condemnation of New York’s political partisanship and poor governorship. Colden explained that English colonial executives usually arrived in America to make their own fortune rather than to serve the public good. Their greed encouraged factionalism and prevented Christian Britons from improving the noble but revengeful and irreligious Iroquois.93 As it was completed largely during the winter of 1741–1742, the manuscript took shape just months after thirteen black New Yorkers were burned at the stake in Lower Manhattan. It is therefore quite remarkable that Colden managed to criticize a similar French execution in his History without considering the recent horrific events in New York. With complete moral blindness, he reported that the governor of New France, anguished by the success of Iroquois attacks on French soldiers and forts, ordered “a Piece of monstrous Cruelty,” the burning alive of two captured Iroquois “after the Indian Manner.” One of these Iroquois committed suicide while in prison, but the other bravely and defiantly sang as he was tortured with extreme violence and killed. In Colden’s view, this instance of French cruelty showed “how far a false Policy, under a corrupt Religion, can debase even great Minds.”94 The London publication of The History of the Five Indian Nations was a drawn-out and frustrating experience that illustrates how little control colonial intellectuals had over the printing and dissemination of their work. Colden sent the first section of his revised manuscript to London in April 1742, along with a cover letter asking Collinson to decide whether this new

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edition deserved publication. The New Yorker added that he only wanted his book published if it would bring him some profit.95 The following month, he sent the remainder of his manuscript to London, along with an autobiographical letter designed to deepen and solidify his bond with Collinson.96 After waiting several months for a response, Colden anxiously sent off another letter asking for Collinson’s assistance in securing a decent book contract.97 When Collinson reported back in March 1743 that the manuscript was with “an honest ingenious printer,” Colden began to expect its release and to think about how his book might be marketed.98 At the end of the year, he advised his London agent to add to the title page some promotional blurb that stressed his book’s political relevance “at a time when a Treaty of Peace & Commerce may be expected between Great Britain & France.” Fortunately, that line was not added as the War of the Austrian Succession lasted from 1740 until 1748 and was soon followed by the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756.99 As it happened, the second edition of The History of the Five Indian Nations remained unpublished until a bookseller, Thomas Osborne, issued copies in the summer of 1747. Osborne passed at least ten (possibly twelve) copies to Collinson, who kept one for himself, forwarded six or seven on to Colden, and sent others to the Leiden botanist, Johan Frederik Gronovius, and the Scottish physician and naturalist, John Mitchell, who had studied at the University of Edinburgh before settling in Urbanna, Virginia, in 1735. Mitchell had returned to Britain in the 1740s and helped design the title page of The History of the Five Indian Nations while in London in 1747.100 Regrettably, almost all of the copies addressed to Colden were lost at sea. Thus the first editions of Colden’s 1747 History to reach America arrived not in New York but in Philadelphia.101 Franklin received one book from a London contact in September 1747 and grew angry when Osborne sent fifty volumes to a rival Philadelphia printer, James Read. “I should sell them more readily than [Read] can,” Franklin grumbled.102 On hearing that Colden had yet to see his work in print, Franklin kindly dispatched his book to New York at the start of October, along with a complaint that the editor had padded the book with charters relating to Pennsylvania.103 This copy was the only one Colden saw for a while. Two books from Collinson finally arrived in New York in March 1748, but their receiver, James Alexander, concluded they were too big to send upriver to Colden’s estate in Ulster County.104 As for the fifty copies dispatched to Read, they remained hidden away in boxes

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for months, with their Philadelphia distributor deciding they warranted neither shelf space nor the cost of advertising in local newspapers.105 Things went little better in Europe. Osborne reported to Colden that the publication was first “received in the World with the greatest Reputation,” but sales had since declined to the extent that the London printer had not yet sold three hundred copies. Another two hundred had been shipped “abroad to different places,” but there was no news of their reception. As a result, Osborne had close to five hundred unsold books on his hands. In a bid to move this stock, he finally permitted Franklin to distribute Colden’s History in Philadelphia.106 Franklin’s partner, David Hall, took charge of Read’s fifty copies and almost immediately complained they were priced “so extravagantly high” that he could not sell them at a profit to himself “without hurting the Character of his Shop.”107 As a money-making exercise, then, the second edition of The History of the Five Indian Nations initially flopped. No one profited—not Colden, not Osborne, not Read, not Franklin, not Hall. In 1750 the London printer finally gave up and sold off his remaining copies at “Twelve Pence a Book,” a substantial discount from his initial price of five or six shillings. He griped that the whole venture had cost him at least thirty pounds.108 In truth, Osborne was largely responsible for this loss as the poor sales had much to do with his marketing and distribution. When the same octavo copies reappeared in the marketplace with a new title page listing John Whiston, Lockyer Davis, and John Ward as its printers, they sold well at a price of five shillings.109 Davis and Ward even decided to join with another partner to issue an entirely new edition, in two duodecimo volumes, in 1755.110 Although The History of the Five Indian Nations did not make its author money, it did help to open some new political doors. After John Mitchell passed his copy to the third Duke of Argyll in 1749, Colden rushed another piece on Indian affairs to his distant friend hoping that it might also be shown to the Scottish noble.111 Mitchell received this “ingenious & particular account” while touring Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Inveraray with Argyll in 1751. All the same, he could not convince the duke to take an interest in it and ended up forwarding Colden’s paper to a member of the Board of Trade.112 A further copy of The History of the Five Indian Nations reached the secretary of state, Robert D’Arcy, fourth Earl of Holdernesse. It was sent by Collinson with a note recommending the New York author be appointed lieutenant governor of New York. Nothing came of that suggestion in

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1752.113 In fact, the following year George Montagu-Dunk, Earl of Halifax, president of the Board of Trade, directly informed Colden that the present lieutenant governor, James DeLancey, would remain in place indefinitely.114 While Collinson continued to lobby Halifax on behalf of his New York correspondent, Colden would not get his desired office before DeLancey’s unexpected death in 1760.115 Meanwhile, The History of the Five Indian Nations continued to be read in Europe, where it became an internationally recognized reference work. A brief entry on the Iroquois in the L’Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert recommended the book as a history “equally curious and clever.”116 William Robertson, the Scottish author of History of America, published in 1777, sought “specimens” of Native American speech from gentlemen with firsthand knowledge of America and pointed to the speeches in Colden’s History as an example of what he was looking for.117 Adam Ferguson cited the same work in his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society, a book translated into a number of European languages.118 References to Colden’s scholarship also appeared in Cornelius de Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (1770), James Adair’s History of the American Indians (1775), Hugh Blair’s Essays on Rhetoric (1784), and Johann Gottfried Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1800).119 The impressive international impact of The History of the Five Indian Nations is all the more surprising when we consider that Colden’s book challenged common eighteenth-century theories of progress. Unlike most of the Scottish social theorists, with the notable exception of Adam Ferguson, Colden did not praise modern, commercial society as an automatic improvement on its precursors, but rather emphasized the strong virtues of the Iroquois and warned against European corruption. He praised the Iroquois’ “genius” and ability to maintain lasting political agreements. Moreover, in a remarkable statement, Colden concluded his work by noting that French and British colonials imprisoned by Indians often preferred to remain in Indian society following their release. Overall, then, The History of the Five Indian Nations offered something other than a comforting image of inevitable betterment. It expressed considerable ambiguity about eighteenthcentury European and Euro-American society, even as it called for an expansion of enlightened and British imperial government.

Chapter 5

Otium

Not long after he moved to New York in 1718, Colden bought a tract of land in the Wallkill Valley sixty miles north of Manhattan. For a time, he continued to live in town and left the management of his rural property to a “very good laborious carefull Slave.” By 1724 the farm contained a stock of horses, cows, and pigs, as well as the beginnings of a dairy. Its owner reflected that life in the country could not “be half so uneasy as the Uncertainty & servile dependance in publick employments.”1 Three years later, he relocated his family to the estate he now called Coldengham. The extra space that this country residence afforded proved helpful when another daughter, Sarah, joined the brood of Alexander, Elizabeth, Cadwallader Jr., Jane, and Alice. One child (David) had previously died in infancy, and Sarah would also die at a very young age. Three more children—John, Catherine, and a second David—arrived over the next six years. The farm supplied ample food for this growing family. Rye, wheat, grass, and clover grew in the fields. Pears, peaches, nectarines, cherries, and a variety of apples—including spitzenburgs, pippins, and pomroys— appeared in the orchards. Onions,

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kale, and cabbage nestled near mustard, melons, and tobacco in a garden fenced with chestnut rails. Cows with names like Blassy, Whity, and Old Starry produced a steady supply of milk, cheese, and butter.2 As we tend now to associate the Enlightenment with urban locations such as learned societies, royal academies, bookshops, salons, and coffeehouses, Coldengham seems an unlikely site for eighteenth-century intellectual activity. And yet, it did not appear so unusual in its own day. This removed farm fitted neatly with a popular neo-Stoic notion that intellectual activity required seclusion, calm, and quiet. Colden played up that association by repeatedly describing his country life as a comfortable retirement and by comparing his rural ease to the factious politics and competing self-interests of New York City. “I hope I am now settled for some months free from the troublesome broils which mens passions occasion in all publick affairs,” he wrote at one point to William Douglass, before adding, “A man that has for some time been tossed upon the Dunghill of mens Passions gratifies all his sense greedily with the quiet & innocent pleasures that Nature freally offers.”3 Elsewhere, he aligned himself with Cicero, the Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher who recommended a lifestyle of otium cum dignitate (leisure with dignity). Colden understood that Cicero’s phrase did not equate to “doing nothing,” but rather meant pursuing philosophy for the public good. An active and virtuous existence removed from the grind and hostilities of politics and commerce, it was a lifestyle that bright, thinking eighteenth-century aristocrats longed for.4 Colden’s Scottish contacts likewise appreciated the benefits of a philosophical seclusion. Douglass envied Colden’s ability to sing “Deus nobis haec otia fecit” (God has given us this leisure), a line he took from the Roman poet Virgil. He later wished his friend well in his “Country retirement.”5 James Chrystie hoped his New York brother-in-law would always prefer the country over “Court-amusements.”6 Colden’s own brother expressed his desire to “retire” in America, far from the “very Great” disturbances of his own country.7 Writing from Albany a decade later, John Rutherfurd, a Scottish military officer, imagined himself in a “perfectly agreeable” and “compleat” state of philosophic retirement, where his time was spent “equally for Mathematicks, Philosphy, Politicks, &c without being interrupted in any Shape by Family cares o[r] publick affairs.”8 In these ways, the fashionable talk of otium cum dignitate bound together learned Scotsmen in America and legitimized the remote situation of colonial

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intellectuals. However, it simultaneously excised the social and political realities of rural British America. Otium cum dignitate was an attractive but unattainable fantasy. In reality, Colden’s eighteenth-century intellectual pursuits required substantial labor and a transatlantic body of researchers, assistants, amanuenses, agents, printers, booksellers, reviewers, readers, and patrons. Coldengham became a productive intellectual center not through its relaxed isolation, but through the strenuous efforts of an entire colonial family and several unknown enslaved and free assistants. Furthermore, it was connected to far-reaching correspondence and print networks and formed part of a larger project of land investment and development. Classical philosophy promoted two ostensibly incompatible lifestyles: one oriented toward sociability and active public service (vita activa) and another that celebrated seclusion and quiet reflection (vita contemplativa). Two rival schools that developed in third-century BCE Athens recommended the latter on the basis of peculiar understandings of the universe. The Epicureans, who believed that everything, including the human soul, resulted from the random movement of atoms through space, insisted that there was no existence after death and as a result no reason to worry about the afterlife. Accordingly, they urged people to focus on the here and now, most especially by minimizing their worldly pain. The avoidance of onerous public affairs was identified as a way to achieve this aim. For the Stoics, who maintained an alternative physics that would later influence Newton among others, this Epicurean strategy was a form of cowardly self-indulgence based on a faulty atomism. Stoicism insisted that an omnipresent deity or rational spirit permeated the cosmos in the form of pneuma, an intelligent primary substance that combined air and fire. Pneuma created an active, coherent, ordered universe. But here came the rub: it also ensured impermanence. Stoics accepted that everything would eventually dissolve. Collapse would always follow creation in an eternal cycle of making and unmaking. Under these circumstances, the pursuit of transitory material gain appeared quite pointless. The Stoics opted instead to live their lives in sympathy with the underlying spirit of reason. In other words, they chose quiet reflection as a means to enlightenment, not as an escape from pain.9 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European scholars revived and rusticated Stoicism. In its ancient form, Stoicism had been a civic phenomenon that derived its name from the marketplace doorways known

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in Athens as stoa. This urban connection changed when early modern neoStoics such as the Dutch humanist, Justus Lipsius, and his French correspondent, Michel de Montaigne, overturned traditional suspicions that remote thinkers were solipsistic hermits and identified the countryside as a perfect site for philosophy.10 By promoting the benefits of safe and rural otium (or leisurely retirement) over violent and urban negotium (or public business), early modern neoStoicism provided comfort in a continent torn asunder by religious warfare and political division. Neo-Stoicism held especial appeal in Scotland, where a community of tolerant and moderate aristocrats, courtiers, and officeholders were disempowered by the 1603 union of the Scottish and English crowns.11 In the first decades of the seventeenth century, William Drummond of Hawthornden retreated to his family estate and produced pastoral poetry heavily indebted to the ancient writings of Cicero. Drummond’s associate, Sir William Alexander, first Earl of Stirling (a distant relation of Colden’s friend, James Alexander), simultaneously wrote plays emulative of Seneca, another celebrated Roman Stoic. Alexander’s dramas compared the sufferings of ambitious courtiers to the happiness of rural philosophers. Similarly, a 1624 verse, “Sonnet in Praise of a Solitary Life,” by the Roxburghshire noble, Sir Robert Kerr, first Earl of Ancram (the great-grandfather of Colden’s patron, William Kerr, second Marquess of Lothian), juxtaposed a “Sweet Solitary Life” in the country against the troublesome realities of court life.12 Scotland’s embrace of neo-Stoicism continued after the Restoration. For instance, Ancram’s eldest son, the first Earl of Lothian, stocked his family library in Roxburghshire with the books of classical authors, including Cicero, and a wealth of neo-Stoic works. Two decades later, Gilbert Burnet, the French-educated father of the New York governor, William Burnet, and a man described by one historian as “the archetype of the well-connected, broadly-educated, moderately conservative and thoroughly cosmopolitan Scottish intellectual,” attempted his own philosophic retirement after breaking with the Stuart monarchy before the Glorious Revolution.13 The fashion for neo-Stoicism extended beyond Scotland to other parts of the British world. English verse about rural retirement proved immensely popular, even though it reflected the values of country gentlemen more than ordinary farmers. Charles Cotton, a seventeenth-century poet with a fondness for fly-fishing, did much to promote the trend by translating Guillaume

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du Vair’s The Moral Philosophy of the Stoicks and Montaigne’s Essais from French to English. Cotton’s own poem, The Retirement, invoked neoStoicism with such lines as “Farewell, thou busy world, and may / We never meet again.”14 John Pomfret’s The Choice, a widely read poem first published in 1700, relished retreat and retirement in like manner. A plainspoken rejection of urban vice, it promoted bucolic retreats and celebrated calm, rational, useful, and moderate learning. “No Minutes bring us more Content,” Pomfret wrote, “than those in pleasing, useful Studies spent.”15 Philosophers joined poets in the neo-Stoic fad for country retirement. In 1710 the Irish immaterialist, Bishop George Berkeley, made the point that modern thought had lost its way by depicting contemporary intellectuals as being trapped in garden labyrinths.16 Subsequently, in Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), he portrayed an immaterialist, Philonous, relaxing in “the Solitude of a Garden and Tranquility of the Morning” while a troubled materialist, Hylas, paced around restlessly.17 Berkeley later set Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732), a diatribe against Deists written during a three-year spell in Rhode Island, in a “remote corner of the country,” a “distant Retreat, far beyond the Verge of that great Whirlpool of Business, Faction, and Pleasure, which is called the World.”18 His famous 1726 poem, “America, or the Muse’s Refuge, A Prophecy” more overtly associated the New World with the Stoic Garden by identifying it as a place away from “The Pedantry of Courts and Schools.”19 Mid-century colonial intellectuals used neo-Stoicism to legitimate their provincial situation. A twenty-four-year-old Yale-educated, New York lawyer, William Livingston, published a poem, Philosophic Solitude, or the Choice of a Rural Life, in 1747. Just a few years later, an eighteen-year-old Harvard student, Benjamin Church, produced a similar piece, The Choice: A Poem after the Manner of Mr. Pomfret.20 Benjamin Franklin, meanwhile, embarked on his own Ciceronian retirement. For someone famously associated with a Protestant, capitalist work ethic, Franklin was surprisingly, if intermittently, smitten with the idea of giving up his business and politics for philosophy. As a teenager, he created a persona, Silence Dogood, who lived her earliest years in the country and often “in some shady Retirement, with the best of Company, Books.”21 Two decades later, he published James Logan’s translation of Cicero’s Cato Maior de Senectute (Discourse on Old Age), the first English edition of a classical work printed in North America.22 In 1748, he informed Colden that he had given up printing, removed to a quieter part

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of Philadelphia, and chosen not to run in Pennsylvania’s Assembly election. Franklin wrote that he planned to “read, study, make Experiments, and converse at large with such ingenious & worthy Men as are pleas’d to honour me with their Friendship or Acquaintance, on such Points as may produce something for the common Benefit of Mankind.” Envisioning a life of leisurely retirement, he joyously proclaimed that he was no longer “at every one’s Call but my own” (a line he ripped from a popular eighteenthcentury song).23 Otium had some colonial critics, and Franklin became one of them. His retirement was fleeting. Franklin discovered that he liked too much to be in the thick of things to enjoy rural farm life; Philadelphia, London, and Paris suited him more than the American backcountry. He also came to question the Ciceronian conflation of retreat and virtue. While it gave expression to feelings of nostalgia, comfort, and reassurance, and while it suggested a rational order beneath surface flux and chaos, neo-Stoicism offered no sense of urgency and no guidelines for political action. Put simply, it was an impractical philosophy that encouraged potential leaders to hide their heads in the sand during warfare and other serious crises. In addition, it was heavily elitist, an ideology of the country mansion alien to America’s artisans. Franklin never fully accepted neo-Stoic ideas even as he chased gentility in the mideighteenth century. Two years after declaring his own retirement, he advised Colden to put his public duty before his “Love of Philosophical Amusements.” In perhaps the most-quoted line in Colden’s published papers, Franklin added, “Had Newton been Pilot but of a single common Ship, the finest of his Discoveries would scarce have excus’d, or atton’d for his abandoning the Helm one Hour in Time of Danger; how much less if she had carried the Fate of the Commonwealth.”24 Colden’s friendship with Franklin is emblematic of the increased scientific activity and association that occurred in mid-eighteenth-century British America. Colden met Franklin by chance while traveling to or from New England to decide a land dispute between the colony of Connecticut and the Mohegan Indians. The two men had not crossed paths before, although Franklin may have already heard of Colden from Logan, Bartram, or Collinson.25 The likelihood of this kind of accidental encounter of two scientifically minded colonials had grown as new roads and better communications allowed British Americans to move about. Indeed, Franklin was

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returning to Philadelphia from Boston, where he had witnessed the electrical demonstrations of Dr. Archibald Spencer, an itinerant Scottish showman.26 Spencer later traveled to New York, where he conversed with James Alexander, before heading south and meeting John Mitchell, who moved in the opposite direction, leaving Virginia in the autumn of 1744 to spend time with Bartram and Franklin in Philadelphia. That year, Colden visited Bartram and probably Franklin in the same town.27 John Rutherfurd, meanwhile, traveled south, where he stopped off at Bartram’s house and met with “several Gentlemen of ye Chiefest distinction in Philadelphia.”28 Colden and Franklin had the good fortune of bumping into each other when they were both beginning exciting philosophical ventures. The New Yorker had begun to revisit topics such as mathematics, physics, and physiology after two decades of thinking about more overt political matters, such as history, cartography, geography, and trade. Within three years he would publish his theory of active matter for the first time.29 For his part, Franklin had begun to form a colonial intellectual organization. He had undertaken similar projects before. Shortly after returning to Philadelphia from London in late 1726, and missing the club life of the British capital, he had gathered a group known as the Junto. A few years later, he had proposed a public library, paving the way for the creation of the Library Company of Philadelphia, which obtained an air pump in 1738 and hosted demonstrations of this equipment. In 1737 Franklin received a commission as the Philadelphia postmaster in charge of the dissemination of mail—and therefore information. Now, in 1743, he issued A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America, which called for the formation of a society of “Virtuosi or ingenious Men residing in the several Colonies, to be called The American Philosophical Society.”30 Social and intellectual aspirations underpinned Franklin’s scheme. Like Colden and many others in the eighteenth century, Franklin took it for granted that learned British gentlemen and aristocrats knew more and knew better than the lower orders of society. Artisanal and folk knowledge were valued, but elite institutions such as the Royal Society of London assumed ultimate authority for collecting and evaluating information. Colonials accordingly made a set of social claims when they identified themselves as intellectuals. Colden had been carefully cultivating his genteel persona since at least 1716, when he arrived in Philadelphia with a periwig and a plan to

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become a colonial physician. Franklin’s refinement was newer and less complete. The Philadelphian printer had just begun to shed his artisanal background. It would take him another five years to retire from his craft and to confirm his transition to gentility, a change he made without abandoning his desire to advance the colonial and transatlantic circulation of knowledge, and without fully embracing the aristocratic neo-Stoic ideals of Colden.31 Although Colden was considerably less sociable than Franklin, he maintained a keen interest in intellectual associations and the use of print to build scientific ties at a distance. Bartram asked Colden to join Franklin’s new society in March 1744. The New Yorker expressed cautious optimism about the venture’s potential. But, when he subsequently received little news about the society’s progress, Colden began to suspect that it had met “with obstruction from the want of proper incouragement.”32 He shrewdly recommended that Franklin concentrate his efforts on publishing a periodical, arguing that this journal would give “men of Learning or Genius [in America] some knowledge of one another,” and thereby lay a suitable foundation for a colonial scientific society.33 This plan initially appeared unnecessary as enrollment in the philosophical society expanded. Most new members were Philadelphians but at least five, including James Alexander, came from New York and New Jersey.34 New York Chief Justice James DeLancey and Councilors Daniel Horsmanden, Joseph Murray, and William Smith Sr. all applied to join by late 1744.35 However, the early flush of interest in and enthusiasm for the society dissipated quickly. By August 1745, Franklin conceded that it contained “very idle Gentlemen.”36 In November, and following Colden’s earlier proposal, he revealed plans to publish “an American Philosophical Miscellany, Monthly or Quarterly,” starting in January 1746.37 Franklin, consumed by political duties, missed that deadline, though he did manage to collect enough material for five or six issues by October 1746.38 Still, the distraction of public affairs did not ease, and the planned society and journal eventually petered out.39 The growth of colonial print culture had the potential to greatly enable American and transatlantic scientific communications in the mid-eighteenth century. Colden became fascinated by print technology in the 1740s as he sought to share his ideas with a wider colonial and international community. At the time he met Franklin in 1743, Colden had just completed a paper proposing a new printing method.40 About to fashion himself as a commercial

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author by issuing a new edition of his History of the Five Indian Nations, he considered that printers produced too many poor quality books, “most of which are nothing but unskilful and erroneous copies of good works, written only for ostentation of learning, or for sordid profit.” He complained that readers were left “lost in the wilderness of numberless books,” and authors, especially those who produced “more difficult” and “more masterly” texts, gained little by way of financial profit. To solve these problems, Colden proposed a form of stereotyping that would allow books to be stored as permanent metal plates and printed on demand.41 This scheme suggests he would have liked further involvement in the production and distribution of his own publications. In this sense, his location at Coldengham did impose serious limitations. Distanced from New York City, and even more so from London, he could not directly negotiate with publishers and relied on agents, notably James Alexander and Peter Collinson. His ability to manage the circulation of his writings was severely limited. It was the American “Wilderness,” not the “wilderness of numberless books,” that Colden addressed in a letter to Johan Frederik Gronovius, the Dutch botanist, in 1745. The New Yorker observed that colonials had improved their environment to the extent that “in some places” it now looked like Europe’s “Cultivated grounds.”42 He promoted himself as both an enlightened improver of the American landscape and a retired, quasiaristocratic philosopher entirely at leisure. “I have made a small spot of the World,” he remarked to Peter Collinson in 1742, “which when I first enterd upon it was the habitation only of wolves & bears & other wild Animals now no unfit habitation for a civilized family so that I may without vanity take the comfort of not having been entirely useless in my Generation.” 43 This ideology of improvement gave American neo-Stoicism a sense of dynamism that European neo-Stoicism lacked. By turning their wilderness into a safe, philosophical retreat (a New World Stoic garden), Americans created a site for philosophy away from all the commercialization, disputation, and confusion of Europe. Colden and Collinson played up this theme as they established their correspondence. “We have in America for some time past made great progress in Aping the Luxury of our Mother Country,” Colden wrote in 1744. “I am glad that some now indeavour to imitate some of its Excellencies.” 44 “I expect Something New from your New World,” the London Quaker replied, “our Old World as it were Exhausted.” 45 Collinson put it

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even more succinctly two decades later by declaring, “All Arts Seem to be travelling Westward,” a sentiment that echoed Berkeley’s poem “America, or the Muse’s Refuge.”46 Scientific practices at Coldengham were far less leisurely and purely philosophical than Colden’s neo-Stoic discourse implied. It was not just that Colden, as a provincial surveyor general and councilor, remained involved at some level in public affairs. His retirement to the country also resulted in wealth-enhancing land investments. The New York official, for example, spent considerable time in the early 1730s developing the town of Newburgh along the west bank of the Hudson River, around thirty miles north of Coldengham. A party of impoverished German Lutheran refugees from the Palatinate had settled this location in 1709, later obtaining a patent that created nine lots ranging from one hundred to three hundred acres in size, with an added five hundred acres reserved for a glebe. Frustrated by the infertility of the soil, the Palatines sold their farms to newcomers, and the town gradually became less German and more English, less Lutheran and more Anglican. At the end of 1729, Colden organized a group of seven investors (mostly Ulster County locals but including James Alexander) to purchase the centrally located Lot No. 4. In a small, noisy room in the village of Goshen, not far from his home, he drew up an agreement to divide these one hundred acres into numerous plots, with each partner assigned six at random. He also arranged for the construction of a wharf, a store house, and a home for a storekeeper. Newburgh developed quickly. By 1731 Colden co-owned a public house, which he rented for £12 per year. From 1744 he attempted to establish an Anglican public school in the town. It is also likely that he had Newburgh in mind when he wrote Franklin in 1749 that universities should be built “in the Country” where “Schollars will be freed from many temptations to idleness & some worse vices that they must meet with in the City.”47 Colden’s eldest son, Alexander, became one of Newburgh’s most important mid-eighteenth-century leaders. Schooled there in Latin by an Anglican missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Alexander Colden settled permanently in the town, bought up land, built a mill, established a ferry service across the Hudson, and won election as a trustee of the glebe. In 1751 he and fifteen others petitioned the governor for ownership of the glebe acres, where they planned to establish an Anglican church

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and employ a schoolmaster. A patent issued the following year formally created the Parish of Newburgh. Today an avenue called Colden Street runs parallel to the river.48 The arrival of Governor William Cosby in New York in 1732 encouraged Colden senior to enhance his property holdings even further. The two ambitious men initially aligned.49 The governor, who was determined to make a profit from his stay in America, almost immediately asked his surveyor to assess the current state of land grants. Cosby did not do so out of any passion for reform. In fact, he showed little interest when Colden proposed a bill in 1733 to abolish existing land taxes and instead establish a new quit-rent of 2 shillings and 6 pence per hundred acres on all grants.50 Greed rather than good government underpinned the governor’s curiosity about land in New York. Fortunately, he found in Colden a surveyor general who, for all of his commitment to curbing corruption and ending the holding of large undeveloped estates, showed a willingness to bend rules in order to profit personally from land speculation. Cosby soon received from Colden instructions on how to use proxies to circumvent Crown restrictions on the size of land grants. It was a method that Colden used himself to good effect.51 Relations between the governor and the surveyor soured in 1734 as an opposition movement formed around some of Colden’s friends. A dispute over the “oblong” or the “equivalent”—a sixty thousand-acre parcel of land conceded to New York by Connecticut in a 1683 agreement— contributed to this separation. In the early 1730s, several leading members of New York’s elite, including Colden, combined to fund the running of the New York– Connecticut partition line on the basis that they would gain tracts in the oblong. At the same time, New York assemblyman Francis Harison and a number of well-connected Englishmen secured a rival patent for the identical lands from the king. Harison joined with Governor Cosby and tried to use the jury-less Chancery Court to vacate the grant made to Colden’s party. Served with a subpoena to appear before that legal institution in 1735, Colden recommended that he and his fellow patentees challenge the legitimacy of the Chancery Court, which had been controversially erected without the consent of the Assembly. He knew that most New Yorkers viewed the court as “illegal” and perhaps even “of ill Consequence to their Liberty & Property.”52 Cosby, however, simply refused to allow any such arguments to be made against the Chancery Court when the case was first heard on 5 June 1735. The governor insisted on the legitimacy of the court, as did the Board

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of Trade, but the suit rumbled on. Colden probably wrote the answer submitted by the New York patentees to the Chancery Court in November 1735. That effort was in vain as Cosby’s death in 1736 prevented a second hearing. When Harison later fled New York for other reasons, the legal case against Colden and his co-patentees finally fell by the wayside.53 In addition to managing political, legal, and business affairs, Colden’s philosophical retirement involved a considerable amount of physically demanding natural history. The early arrival in New York of an exciting and innovative Linnaean botanical system prompted much of this work. In 1740 a Dutch New Yorker, Isaac DuBois, completed his medical education at the University of Leiden and returned to America with copies of Linnaeus’s Genera Plantarum (1737) and the first part of Gronovius’s Flora Virginica (1739).54 Colden borrowed these books and by 1742 he had gained a thorough enough understanding of the Linnaean approach to be able to recommend it to John Bartram.55 Colden gathered plant specimens and descriptions, which he sent on to Gronovius the following year.56 The impressed Dutch naturalist duly sent back the second part of his own Flora Virginica, just published in 1743; a recent issue of Linnaeus’s Fundamenta Botanica, probably the third edition issued in Amsterdam in 1741; and his own copy of Linnaeus’s 1737 Critica Botanica, which he claimed to have read “more than 50 times.”57 By 1744 Colden’s botanical thoughts, specimens, and descriptions had reached not just Gronovius but also Linnaeus. The Swedish naturalist published some of Colden’s writings in the Acta Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Upsaliensis (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Science at Uppsala), and also named a plant genus in Colden’s honor.58 In 1749, one of Linnaeus’s students, Peter Kalm, traveled to America and hand-delivered letters and books from his mentor to Colden, along with a request for a biographical sketch to be published in a “Biographia Botanicorum.”59 Not surprisingly, the resulting autobiographical statement, which remains one of our best sources of information on Colden’s early life, emphasized the impact of Linnaean botany.60 By the 1750s, Colden had joined a transatlantic network of male naturalists, but also come to view himself as too old and poorly sighted to conduct botanical fieldwork. At that point, he took the bold and unusual decision of training his smartest daughter, Jane, as a Linnaean expert. As eighteenthcentury botany was an almost exclusively male preserve, the New Yorker had to justify his decision carefully. In a gendered twist on the neo-Stoic

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association of leisure and intellectual activity, he explained to Gronovius that “botany is an Amusement which may be made agreable for the Ladies who are often at a loss to fill up their time.” Moreover, he emphasized that Jane, for all her “inclination to reading” and “curiosity for natural phylosophy or natural History,” could only learn the Linnaean system with his knowledgeable and patriarchal guidance.61 Two years later, when he sent Jane’s description of a potential new genus to John Fothergill, an English plant collector, Colden similarly explained that his daughter only mastered botany after he translated Linnaeus’s ideas into “common [E]nglish” for her. “She eagerly swallow’d the bait,” he added.62 Historian Sara Gronim has convincingly shown that this father-daughter arrangement simultaneously challenged a traditional understanding of natural history as a male occupation and invoked common eighteenth-century notions of gender, such as the belief that women were physiologically suited to fast, lively intellectual tasks.63 Jane was undoubtedly a determined and talented woman botanist who achieved much in a predominantly male realm. As the first woman in the world proficient in the Linnaean system of classification, she waded through bogs and across streams around Coldengham in order to advance natural history. She drew, impressed, and catalogued hundreds of American plants, discovering one new genus.64 Further, she actively participated in an international exchange of knowledge, although usually through male intermediaries. The Scottish botanist Alexander Garden, who met Jane when he visited Coldengham in 1754, arranged for her plant description to be published in Edinburgh in 1756. That year, Jane thought that she had found another unknown genus. John Ellis, whom Garden judged “the Compleatest Naturalist that England has just now,” agreed and translated her description into Latin so that he could forward it to Linnaeus.65 Unfortunately, it arrived too late. The same discovery had just previously been made in Asia, and so Jane received no formal credit for her finding. Nevertheless, she had already won the respect of Garden, Ellis, and others for her capability and dedication as a botanist. Today, she is deservedly acknowledged as a pioneering woman scientist who operated within eighteenth-century understandings of family and gender. If the strenuous physical activity of botanist Jane was incompatible with neoStoic notions of retirement and leisure at Coldgenham, so were the electrical experiments of her youngest brother, David. An international dispute

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caused by the publication of a French translation of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity in March 1752 inspired this research. Franklin’s book was ultimately a great success, appearing in eleven separate European editions between 1751 and  1776. Yet, it initially drew criticism in France when a Newtonian, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, organized a translated edition to which he added a preface criticizing his Cartesian rival, Abbé Jean-Antoine Nollet. When Buffon’s translator and his assistant subsequently set up and successfully tested a lightening rod in Marly, a village outside of Paris, Franklin’s ideas about electricity gained further fame and credibility in France. Nollet, who had spent a decade investigating electricity and devising a comprehensive and mechanical explanation, was not about to let an American steal his thunder (or lightning, for that matter). He attacked Franklin in a 1753 publication, Lettres sur l’électricité.66 News of this controversy reached Coldengham quickly. Franklin had arranged for Philadelphia-made electrical equipment (probably a Leyden jar) to be shipped to the New York farm in 1747.67 Cadwallader Colden engaged in some electrical experiments, but his son David showed considerably more interest in this type of research.68 When a letter from Franklin arrived at Coldengham in 1753 stating that Nollet had “lately wrote and published 6 Long Letters . . . in which he imagines he has taken me all to pieces,” the young New Yorker immediately embarked on a series of experiments at Coldengham designed to defend Franklin against the French abbé.69 Unlike his sister Jane, David commenced his scientific activities while in frail physical health. According to his father, he had developed “some deformity in his shape” at the age of fourteen and now constantly had “a difficulty of breathing on the least excess in motion, & a continued wheezing, a short cough, and frequently pains in his breast.” His blood circulation was “so weak that it frequently ceased in one or the other hand, so that the hand for some little time seem’d, to all appearance to be dead.” David responded to his disability by experimenting with his body. He asked to be inoculated at great risk against smallpox.70 In like manner, he inserted himself into his experiments. The accounts of these experiments that appeared in later editions of Franklin’s work show that electricity literally coursed through David’s body as he transferred charges between Leyden jars.71 It is reasonable to assume that a significant degree of scientific collaboration and coercion occurred at Coldengham. If nothing else, the physically

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weak David surely needed assistance. Did friends or family members help out? Perhaps, but it is just as likely that the science of David Colden rested on the labor of domestic slaves. After all, as we have seen, his father used a slave in an experiment on the mechanics of digestion in the 1720s. It is impossible to tell how often slaves were employed as scientific assistants. Colden’s neo-Stoic discourse of “retirement” conveniently excised the reality that the labor of slaves was essential to his leisure. But then slavery had not bothered early Stoics either. Colden owned slaves from at least the early 1720s. He ordered “three or four” in late 1721, specifying then that he wanted “two negro men about eighteen years of age” for labor, and “a negro Girl of about thirteen years old . . . [chiefly] to keep the children & to s[e]w.”72 Possibly, he sent one of these men to Ulster County after the “carelessness” of a previous farm manager, one Gallespy (or Gillespie), presumably an Irish local, resulted in the loss of several cows and pigs. In 1724 Colden informed his aunt that he was very pleased with the enslaved “Negro man upon my Farm.”73 Within eight years, he had four male and two female slaves on his farm. They had no time for leisurely retirement. When Alice Colden reported that all of the Coldengham slaves “do their bussines cheerfully & seem contented,” she ignored the fact that her husband sold slaves who proved troublesome.74 In 1717 he banished a thirty-three-year-old “good House Negro” to Barbados because of her “Alusive Tongue” and “her sullenness.”75 Almost a decade later, he sent his slave Gabriel to North Carolina to keep him from his trusted domestic slave, Tamar, who was then pregnant. When Gabriel returned, James Alexander arranged for his sale rather than leave Colden “at a Loss what to do” with his most defiant slave.76 Later, in 1747, the surveyor general elicited Franklin’s help to retrieve a runaway servant, who was perhaps also a slave. These fleeting mentions do not offer a comprehensive picture of slave life at Coldengham, but they do show the farm was never a site of pure cheer, contentment, and leisure.77 Free as well as enslaved laborers worked at Coldengham. Ulster County neighbors were recruited on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis. A farm journal covering the years 1727 to 1736 identifies some of these persons, including Andrew McDowal and Patrick McClaghry, two men Colden used as his surrogates in artful, if not illegal, land deals.78 It is likely that several of Colden’s employees were part of an Irish group who traveled to the region in

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1731 under the leadership of Charles Clinton (grandfather of New York governor DeWitt Clinton), whom Colden befriended and appointed as his deputy surveyor. Beside Africans and Irishmen, Colden relied on the domestic toil of family members, especially his wife and daughters. Advice Colden sent in 1738 to his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, who had just entered into an unhappy marriage with Peter DeLancey, brother of the New York chief justice, reveals the extent to which he expected women to manage the household. Colden saw women as playing a crucial role in maintaining the sort of calm and leisurely home that could support otium. He asked dramatically if anyone could bear the “waste and destruction in the family, the disorder, the sickness, the discontent and haggard looks of a drone of a mistress” in a badly run home. He then instructed his daughter that the chief business of a wife is to take care of the servants within doors, to have them often in her eye, to keep them to their work, to guard against their pilfering or wasting, and often to search into every corner of the house to discover their tricks, or neglects,—If servants find the mistress of a family careless you cannot imagine how much they will waste, destroy, and give away; and if they get a habit of sluttishness and wastefulness it will be much more difficult to cure them of it than it would have been to prevent them falling into these faults. . . . Whatever company you may have you may for some little time slip away from them to cast your eye about, and put your servants in mind of their duties, this will save a great deal of chiding and trouble both to your self esteem, and them.79

While wives were expected to create an ordered and efficient household, other family members were made responsible for storing and communicating ideas. From his early fifties, Colden sought to pass down his intellectual discoveries to his progeny. In a letter addressed to his “dear Children,” he stated his desire to explain the “Benefite of any knowledge” acquired from a life spent mostly “in Speculation or in various kinds of Business.”80 Increasingly, the aging New York savant looked not to his children but to his grandchildren, especially the bookish Peter DeLancey, son of his daughter, Elizabeth. In 1757, fearing for his safety during the French and Indian War, Colden moved reluctantly from Ulster County to Long Island.81 Three years later, he temporarily returned to Coldengham, where he enjoyed a visit from sixteen-year-old Peter, who was about to enter the College of Philadelphia

Figure 4. Matthew Pratt (1734–1805), Cadwallader Colden and His Grandson Warren DeLancey, ca. 1772. Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in. (127 x 101.6 cm). Courtesy of the Morris K. Jessup Fund, 1969 (69.76). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA. Image Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, USA. Image Source: Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 5. Lieutenant- Governor Cadwallader Colden and a Little Girl, attributed to Matthew Pratt (1734–1805), ca. 1772. Oil on canvas, 48 ⅛ x 39 ⅛ in. (122.2 x 99.5 cm). Courtesy of the Collection of Peter Titcomb, Tacoma, WA. Photo courtesy of Tacoma Art Museum.

(now the University of Pennsylvania). Grandfather Cadwallader took this opportunity to provide Peter with the essay on the history of ideas that most fully explained his understanding of the eighteenth century as an “enlightened age.”82 This lecture surveyed intellectual history to show that standard contemporary theories of passive matter result in the philosophical dead end

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of Berkeleyan immaterialism. Colden introduced his own principles of active matter as a corrective to Berkeley. He also criticized “idle, monkish, useless men” whose ideas serve “no good purpose in life.” The utility of knowledge was thus stressed. “The gentleman, who proposes to be generally useful in society, ought not to fix his thoughts simply on any one branch of science,” Colden recommended. “The mere scholar, the mere physician, the mere lawyer, musician or painter, takes them out of their own way, and they are often more insipid, than the mere plowman.”83 It was the burden of a true intellectual, then, to be both superior in mind and well rounded and practical in character. Two portraits that Colden probably commissioned for himself in the 1770s capture him as an aged man leaving his ideas to a future generation. In both images, the New York philosopher is seated at a desk, beside scientific papers and equipment, and next to a grandchild. In the better-known picture, the scholarly grandfather rests his right hand on the shoulder of a grandson, Warren DeLancey (Peter’s brother), born 1761, while his left hand touches a scientific drawing (figure 4). The other portrait shows Colden holding the hand of an unidentified granddaughter while he sits at a table filled with a globe and books. A copy of his Principles lies open, next to works of Newton and Cicero, as well as a seventeenth-century French physician, Lazare Rivière (figure 5). These twin images show a colonial intellectual as he wanted to be remembered: as a learned neo-Stoic and Newtonian natural philosopher.84 Matthew Pratt, the Philadelphia-born artist who completed one, and probably both, of these portraits, painted the same subject at least one other time in the 1770s. Commissioned by the New York Chamber of Commerce, an organization that Colden chartered in his capacity as lieutenant governor, this third picture remained on display in the Merchants’ Coffeehouse in Manhattan during the Revolution. One tradition has it that British soldiers almost destroyed this painting with their bayonets.85 Whether or not that story is true, the portrait, which can now be seen in the State Museum at Albany, serves to remind us that the separate images we have of Colden as a philosopher and politician overlapped considerably. Indeed, in a quite literal sense, they were painted by the same brush.

Chapter 6

Philosophical Actions

The Anglo-Irish philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley, who spent almost three years in Rhode Island between 1729 and 1732, called into question the intellectual credibility of new scientific knowledge. He rejected calculus on the basis that it invoked confusing and philosophically unsustainable terms, and also, more famously, claimed that matter was imperceptible and therefore unknowable. Colden believed these arguments threatened the eighteenth century’s historic opportunity to create an enlightened age of useful knowledge. The defeat of Berkleyan philosophy became his intellectual passion. To this end, he penned an essay on fluxions in 1743 and produced a theory of active matter that was published in 1746. Colden sent copies of the latter pamphlet to Franklin in Philadelphia, Johnson in Stratford, Connecticut, and Collinson in London. By the end of the year, an English bookseller had released an unauthorized copy. Translated editions later appeared in Hamburg and Paris.1 Colden’s colonial philosophy thus reached a broad intellectual audience and served to integrate European and American scientific thought.

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In attempting to answer Berkeley, Colden became embroiled in religious as well as philosophical controversy. The concept of active matter offended some religious moderates who protested that a self-moving material universe reserved no place for God. It also challenged a basic assumption of mechanistic natural philosophy that matter was inert. Colden, who associated enlightened thought with religious orthodoxy, sought to distance himself from the atheistic implications of active matter by creating a duality of nonthinking active matter and nonmaterial intelligence. At the same time, he openly abandoned his previous allegiance to mechanism and aggressively rebranded himself as a materialist. These efforts to reconcile religion and a natural philosophy of active matter drew considerable criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. Colden encountered several other major problems as he sought to spread his theory of active matter. European snootiness toward colonial philosophy was one of the more obvious difficulties. However, it is also true that Colden undermined himself by failing to explain his ideas with great clarity and usefulness. The practical difficulties of managing from British America the European distribution of intellectual publications posed a more unavoidable hindrance. Although Colden secured a prominent London printer for his largest book, The Principles of Action in Matter, he could not respond quickly to well-grounded criticisms, nor could he get a second edition of that volume published. Scottish connections offered some hope in the 1760s that a revised edition might be printed, but that possibility soon disappeared. Colden thereon spent his last years ranting against the shallowness of contemporary culture. He had played a significant role in creating an intellectual culture spanning two continents, but the experience had left him frustrated and disillusioned. “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way.”2 In 1729, three years after writing this famous line, the poet, philosopher, and Anglican cleric George Berkeley arrived in Rhode Island believing that the Old World was in decline.3 The dean of Derry, as he was then, looked to the New World to save learning and virtue. He had traveled with a patent to build an Anglican college in Bermuda, a cluster of Caribbean islands that he judged to be a safe, secure, and well-connected part of British America.4 Rather than go straight to Bermuda, however, he settled at Newport, Rhode Island, the hub of Anglicanism in New England, where he waited in vain for a £20,000 govern-

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ment grant to arrive from London. He increasingly thought that Newport or possibly even New York would make a better site for his college than Bermuda, but remained tied to the terms of his patent.5 Although his scheme eventually failed, his impact on cultural life in British North America was substantial. During his thirty-three month stay, Berkeley stimulated colonial intellectual activity by entertaining learned visitors and encouraging several local men to form a “Society for the promotion of knowledge and virtue.”6 No colonial was more impressed by Berkeley than the Reverend Samuel Johnson of Stratford, Connecticut. Born in October 1696 in Guilford, Connecticut, this son and grandson of Puritan deacons had received a conservative education at Saybrook College (now Yale). He enriched his studies by immersing himself in a large library of religious and philosophical works gifted to Connecticut by the colony’s English agent. The extracurricular reading fueled Johnson’s dislike for the extemporaneous prayers and divisive preaching of Puritan New England. Equally, it fed his desire for a more urbane, orderly, and decent form of religion. In 1722 he and a small group of intimates rejected Congregationalism for Episcopalianism, sending a theological shockwave throughout Connecticut. Amid accusations of cultural betrayal, Johnson took orders in the Church of England and became the Anglican minister at Stratford. Johnson believed that natural philosophy might add a welcome dose of polish, moderation, and enlightenment to colonial culture. Yet, he simultaneously worried about the religious implications of new scientific thought. During the mid-1720s he regularly visited New York and fell in with Governor Burnet, apparently without meeting Colden at that time. At Burnet’s suggestion, Johnson read books by Newtonian theologians such as Samuel Clarke and William Whiston. Even in these moderate and religious works, he detected the troubling signs of a creeping apostasy. Unsure of how to react, the Connecticut clergyman read Scripture and apologists for the trinity and orthodoxy in an effort to reconcile Newtonian natural philosophy with his religion. Still, he remained perplexed in 1729 when the dean of Derry landed in Rhode Island with a set of possible answers.7 Berkeley’s A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge questioned a basic assumption of modern science: that the cosmos consisted of an inactive substance called matter. It argued that scientific claims for a material physical reality have no philosophical legitimacy because they invoke an inert, empty substratum outside of our powers of perception. All we

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know are ideas, Berkeley insisted. So we cannot be sure of the existence of anything other than ideas. When we think we perceive an external, physical reality, we must actually perceive fixed and stable thoughts that exist in the mind of God. This line of thought both intrigued and troubled Johnson. Do different people see God’s ideas in the same way? Were Newtonian concepts of absolute time and space valid? Was there such a thing as a human mind apart from the action of perceiving? If not, what happens to the mind when we sleep and stop dreaming? Johnson rushed to present these and other questions to Berkeley in Newport. Sadly, he did not get the answers he wanted. Berkeley fobbed off his guest with several of his books and an instruction to read with greater attention. Forced now to find his own solutions, Johnson threw himself into those works and eventually decided the dean had got most things right. By the time Berkeley finally gave up on his Bermuda scheme and returned to London in 1732, Johnson was his leading colonial acolyte and the principal figure in what Colden would later describe as a “sect” of Berkeleyan immaterialists in British America.8 Berkeley’s criticism of new scientific thought went beyond the philosophical rejection of matter that he brought to America. In 1734, the same year in which he was appointed bishop of Cloyne, Berkeley published The Analyst; or, A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician, which attacked Newton’s calculus of fluxions—a mathematical procedure that imagined lines, surfaces, and solids as the continuous motions of flowing quantities or “fluents,” and then calculated the velocities (“fluxions”) of these fluents at particular instants. Two of Colden’s probable London acquaintances had helped to promote this form of calculus at the start of the century; Charles Hayes had published his Treatise on Fluxions in 1704, and William Jones had covered the same topic in a textbook that appeared two years later.9 Newton had himself issued an explanation of fluxions in two appendices to the first edition of his Opticks, published in 1704. Following the famous Newton-Leibniz priority dispute (which William Burnet helped to swing in Newton’s favor), interest in calculus waned in Britain until the publication of The Analyst.10 In that treatise, Berkeley acknowledged calculus had practical uses, but also declared the existence of fluxions was philosophical nonsense. What is instantaneous velocity, he asked? If velocity is measured as the distance covered in a certain period of time, how can it exist when that period of time is zero? To say that calculus measures an infinitesimal change in distance dur-

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ing an infinitesimal period of time is no better. For, infinity is also unknowable. So whereas Newton insisted that fluents and fluxions actually existed in nature, Berkeley claimed that they were artificial and philosophically unsound constructs. Fluxions, he famously wrote, were the “Ghosts of departed Quantities.”11 This intentionally provocative claim made calculus once more the subject of fashionable intellectual debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Captain John Rutherfurd agreed with Berkeley on fluxions. A learned Scottish military officer who arrived in New York in 1742, he was the eldest son of a Roxburghshire baronet and family friend of the Coldens. He had been educated at Lincoln’s Inn, London, and the University of Leiden, and had toured Europe in the early 1730s before winning election to the British Parliament, where he had maintained a low political profile until his sudden alignment with the Argathelian faction led to accusations of corruption.12 Finding his character “taken to pieces,” the Member of Parliament (MP) for Roxburghshire had resigned from political office and removed himself to Albany as captain of an independent company of foot soldiers.13 Rutherfurd now licked his political wounds in a remote American town and refashioned himself as a neo-Stoic retiree. After a pleasurable two months spent in Manhattan with “the people of Fashion,” he settled at Albany and lived “in an easy indolent Monkish manner,” with a “Large Trunk of books” that he had brought from Europe. Over the winter of 1742–1743, he read works by Newton and a textbook on mathematics. He also took a visit to Coldengham to see a family friend.14 Colden had been thinking about the ontology of infinitesimally small entities since at least the 1720s, when his treatise on the “animal oeconomy” detailed a theory of spermist preformationism and considered the possibility that light might contract infinitely. The arrival of Rutherfurd prompted him to return to this issue two decades on. Perhaps pacing through the garden at Coldengham like a New York version of Berkeley’s Hylas and Philonous, the surveyor general and the captain took opposite sides in an international debate over fluxions. While the former sided with Newton, the latter aligned with Berkeley. Colden and Rutherfurd enjoyed their conversation so much that they subsequently continued it in letters for several months. Colden maintained that fluxions were more than figments of our imagination, arguing that we can know of their existence through our reason, if not our

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senses. Rutherfurd replied that we do not have “any distinct Ideas of ’em.” Neither man conceded any ground. Fluxions remained actual entities to one, and pure fiction to the other.15 By April 1743, the discussion broadened into a more general assessment of Newton and his Opticks. Colden argued that the Sun emitted light particles, a point he would repeat in his later natural philosophy. Following Descartes, not Newton, Rutherfurd preferred to think of light as waves. He poked fun at his friend’s “veneration” for Newton, a man “who never enjoyed any pleasure in Society, dyed a Virgin, & wrote upon the Revelations.”16 This banter came to a temporary end when Rutherfurd returned temporarily to Britain in the autumn of 1743. The two men remained in disagreement but on polite terms. Rutherfurd promised his friend that he would “buy up” and bring back to New York “any new books, Pamphlets &.c.” that might further “divert us.”17 Shortly before Rutherfurd departed America, Colden met Johnson in Connecticut in the summer of 1743. The Stratford minister hoped the smart New Yorker might become another Berkeleyan convert. He dispatched almost all of Berkeley’s books to Coldengham over the following months. An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713), Alciphron; or, The Minute Philosopher (1732), The Theory of Vision or Visual Language . . . Vindicated and Explained (1733), The Analyst (1734), and A Defence of Free-thinking in Mathematics (1735) probably all arrived at the New York farm around November 1743.18 By mid-1746, De Motu (1721), as well as possibly Berkeley’s most popular book, Siris (1744), which advocated tar water as a universal panacea, reached Coldengham too.19 Primed by his dialogue with Rutherfurd, Colden turned first to Berkeley’s rejection of the calculus of fluxions. In the winter of 1743–1744, he produced an extended riposte, which he both entered into his copybook and sent to Johnson.20 It began by stating the calculus of fluxions was the “Arithmetic of Infinites,” and that infinites were commonly understood as quantities that finites could never reach. True, it is impossible to form mental images of infinites as we do of finites. All the same, we can know infinite quantities as “objects of our reason.” Colden had made this point earlier to Rutherfurd. Now, he elaborated on it. Consider, for instance, two lines (AB and CD) of different length. If both are divided into an infinite number of equal parts,

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then the length of each of the infinitesimal parts of AB will be in the same ratio to the length of the infinitesimal parts of CD as the length of the line AB is to the length of the line CD. Colden asserted that fluxions are ratios also. Imagine a line created by a point flowing along the course of the line in an infinitely small amount of time. The fluxion is the speed at which the point moves, or the ratio of the infinitesimal distance traveled by the point to the infinitesimal period of time it took the point to move that far.21 In this way, Colden sought to make the inconceivable conceivable. Yet, he managed to do no more than replace one mathematical abstraction with another. His paper failed to demonstrate that fluxions were anything other than ghostly qualities. Despite its intellectual limitations, this fluxions manuscript helped to realize new networks of enlightened knowledge. Colden sent copies to Johnson in Stratford, James Alexander in Manhattan, and Franklin and James Logan in Philadelphia.22 Johnson forwarded his copy to two New England mathematicians.23 In addition, in late 1745, he recommended that the essay be published, envisioning that one copy of the printed edition would be sent to Berkeley. Colden dismissed the suggestion by remarking that a colonial bookseller would struggle to offload even twenty copies of a study of fluxions. Eventually, however, his paper did appear in print as an appendix to another work, his Principles of Action in Matter. It was the only published work on fluxions to be authored in British America.24 By 1745 Colden had turned his attention away from fluxions and toward his theory of active matter. He concentrated on completing a preliminary statement of his ideas. An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation appeared in print at the start of 1746.25 It may well be the brassiest book in the history of American scientific writing. In a prefatory letter to James Alexander, Colden announced his ambition “to establish new Principles in Physics, different from those, of all Writers before me; To attempt to explain the Cause of Gravitation, after all the great Men in Philosophy have failed, and after Sir Isaac Newton stopt short.” The grand statements did not end there. Colden went on to proclaim with utter conviction that he had discovered the cause of gravity. The “Force of the Evidence on my Mind,” he wrote, “is as strong as that of Day-Light after the Sun is up in cloudy Weather.” Colden added that his discovery opened up “a Prospect of great Improvement in all the useful Sciences in human Life.”26 This treatise was fundamentally an answer to Berkeley. It opened with a statement that matter is commonly conceived as something extended and

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impenetrable. Colden then proposed that there are at least three different species of matter, each distinguished by its particular essential property of resistance, motion, or elasticity. One kind of matter, he explained, resists all forces that attempt to alter its state of motion or rest. Colden defined the “Species of Matter” possessed with this power of resistance—or vis inertiae—as “an Agent, or active Substance, Subsistence, Existence, or Being, endowed with a certain Power or Force.”27 He took the concept of vis inertiae (meaning “force of inertia”) from the writings of Newton, notably Definition 3 of the Principia. After Descartes had earlier rejected the notion that, in the absence of external forces, bodies will seek their natural place (as Aristotelians argued) or come to a standstill (as Johannes Kepler had proposed), Newton introduced vis inertiae to explain that bodies continue in their current state of motion unless acted upon.28 Colden now invoked vis inertiae to claim—against Berkeley—that the characteristic extension and impenetrability of matter results from a force or action that we can perceive and know. Colden’s reliance on vis inertiae was problematic. The concept remained open to fundamentally different interpretations. On the one hand, it signaled the passivity of matter. Newton, for instance, wrote in Definition 3 of the Principia that “because of the inertia of matter, every body is only with difficulty put out of its state either of resisting or of moving.” On the other hand, vis inertiae suggested matter was active. It appeared even within the same definition by Newton as an “inherent force of matter” and a “power of resisting.”29 Colden invoked vis inertiae entirely in this sense. He had no doubts that it was an active force essential to matter. He claimed in a letter to Alexander Garden that Newton defined inertia not as a “negation of power,” but as “a negative power to all other powers by which its present state can be changed.”30 Elsewhere, he explained, It is difficult to find an English word to convey a proper idea of [Newton’s Vis inertia]. It has been commonly turned into the word Inactivity, and this was done, I suppose, in favour of the prevailing opinion, that matter is absolutely passive and inactive. But this can never express Sir Isaac Newton’s meaning: for to talk of a power or force which does nothing, can only serve to make people laugh. It is as plain a contradiction to say force without action as to say force without force. Power without force, and force without action, or which does nothing is as unintelligible as any absurdity can be. This power is more

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properly called the power of resisting any change in its present state, whether it be in motion or at rest, as Sir Isaac defines it; for resistance carries the idea of force and of action with it, or of doing something.31

Colden identified resistance as the characteristic action of one of three species of matter. For a second species, the definitive action was motion. A third species, composed of fine, subtle aether, transmitted these resisting and moving forces through its elasticity. By reducing the universe to three actions, each of which was equated with a different species of matter, Colden’s Explication attempted to demonstrate that matter was something other than the unknowable inert substratum ridiculed and dismissed by Berkeley. Matter in this form was always doing something, even when it continued in its present state of motion or rest. Beyond disarming Berkeley’s attack on Newtonian science, Colden’s theory of active matter promised to advance useful knowledge by providing simple explanations of puzzling natural phenomena. To demonstrate this point, the second chapter of An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter claimed to offer a plausible and practical account of the cause of gravity. In reality, Colden had produced something that was overly elaborate and hard to follow. While layers of complex mathematics showed off his erudition, they also undermined the usefulness of his chapter. Readers had to dig deep to find Colden’s basic argument, which essentially ran along the following line. Imagine a body of resisting matter surrounded by a sea of elastic aether. The action of resistance will be communicated through the aether, growing weaker as it spread out from the resisting matter. If a body of moving matter is placed in the aether, it will encounter more resisting force on the side closest to the body of resisting matter. As a result, the force of motion will be strongest on the side of the moving matter furthest from the resisting matter. So, if the ratios of resistance to motion are correct, the body of moving matter will move toward the body of resisting matter. Thus, the effect of gravity results from a balance of actions, rather than from a single force of attraction. This scheme raised a number of theological questions: If matter acts by itself, then what does God do? Is he present in the universe? Did he simply set the cosmos running and then leave it alone? Does active matter even need God, or can it organize itself? Such questions were at the heart of Newton’s

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own brand of Newtonianism, which described a universe in which gravity moved matter around on God’s behalf. But if gravity is God’s go-between, is it material or spiritual? Newton himself was not clear on this point. When he proposed in his Opticks that aether conveyed gravity through its inherent elasticity, he may have thought of it as somehow both. Colden followed a similar line by assuming the universe was filled with an elastic aether, but his primary motivation was to answer Berkeley’s assault on enlightened knowledge. The New Yorker was no atheist, but neither did he immediately worry about the irreligious implications of active matter. In the context of eighteenth-century intellectual culture, this unresolved stance proved untenable. John Hutchinson, a largely self-educated employee of the Duke of Somerset, was one the most important critics of Newton in eighteenth-century Britain. His two-volume work, Moses’s Principia, which was published between 1724 and 1727, that derived natural knowledge from Scripture. Convinced that Newton was an advocate of Godless active matter, Hutchinson insisted that gravity was a mechanical phenomenon. He claimed that the Bible showed a subtle fluid began in the sun as fire, then pervaded the universe as light, before condensing into air and returning to the sun to recommence the cycle. This argument initially attracted only a small number of interested followers. They included the Scottish lord advocate Duncan Forbes, who published summaries of Hutchinson’s ideas in the 1730s.32 Forbes’s edition of Hutchinson’s writings found an avid reader in Connecticut. Samuel Johnson became a keen follower of Hutchinsonian as well as Berkeleyan thought. In late 1745 he sent Colden a letter detailing Hutchinson’s “System of Philosophy & Theology.”33 A few months later, he challenged his New York correspondent’s conceptualization of matter. “Matter,” Johnson wrote in April 1746, is “a mee[r] passive thing” that is acted upon by “that intelligent self-active Being who is the Cause of Gravity, Attraction, Repulsion &c in every thing that occurs to our Senses or Imaginations.”34 Colden responded by questioning this conflation of intelligence and action. Why cannot a force act without intelligence, he asked?35 It was a provocative reply. The notion of a “blind senseless power or principle of activity” was “repugnant” to Johnson, who wrote back that the universe clearly runs in accordance with “the wisest laws and rules.”36

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Thomas Clap, president of Yale College, worried too about the irreligious implications of active matter. Having received a copy of Colden’s Explication from Johnson in 1746, he complained that it implied “something like Epicurus’s Notion of self moving or self-exerting Atoms” and therefore risked coming dangerously close to atheism.37 Colden explained that his scheme did indeed leave a role for God “Why may I not say in my way of speaking that God gave at the Creation to different kinds of matter different & distinct kinds of Action?” he asked Johnson. In a more combative tone, he then declared that his system actually demonstrated rather than denied the existence of immaterial beings or spirits because it separated quantifiable material actions from unmeasurable immaterial actions.38 This exchange over religion led to a discussion of moral philosophy. The fact that Johnson had authored a treatise on the subject in 1746 prompted Colden to produce a similar essay by early 1747.39 “Of the First Principles of Morality” described a dualism of unthinking material actions and intelligent nonmaterial actions. It claimed that humans do not behave in one uniform way, rather they select actions that will most avoid pain and most procure pleasure. Colden then took this Epicurean argument in a Stoic direction. Morality, he argued, is “the art and science” of making choices that produce the most happiness. A “religious and virtuous life” brings “the greatest pleasure.” The universe possesses a “most perfect harmony” that could only have been “framed by a wise or intelligent agent.” In other words, life is best lived in accordance with God’s design. This argument reassured Johnson of Colden’s piety, though it also put too much emphasis for the clergyman’s liking on God’s wisdom rather than on his will.40 In this fashion, one of the most important conversations in early American philosophy came to an end. It has conventionally been described as a fierce battle between opposing founders of American philosophical materialism and immaterialism.41 But, when viewed in another way, Johnson and Colden appear as collaborators seeking to establish a colonial culture of polite and learned debate. Granted, their exchanges were sometimes heated. Both implied the other veered toward “Spinozism,” a code word for radicalism and atheism in the eighteenth century.42 They did so, though, because they were similarly invested in defining the ideological boundaries of learned thought in eighteenth-century British America. A moderate, religious Enlightenment triumphed in the colonies in part because Johnson blunted the

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atheistic edge of Colden’s materialism and because Colden defended the material world against Berkeleyan skepticism. Colden’s Explication created debate in Europe as in America. It broke new ground as a colonial work of scientific theory that reached a relatively sizable readership on both sides of the Atlantic, even though it was initially intended for no more than a small circle of intimates and experts. Colden dispatched a few copies to his agent, Peter Collinson, in London with instructions that two or three be sent on to “Dr [Johan Frederik] Gronovius or to any other of your foreign Correspondents.”43 This plan took an unexpected turn when a London printer got his hands on one volume and swiftly ran off a pirated version that all but exhausted demand in London. Stuck with a pile of imported New York books, Collinson donated one to the Royal Society and sent others to Holland, Germany, France, Sweden, Scotland, and Russia. As translated editions appeared in Hamburg and Paris, the colonial treatise gained extensive international exposure (figure 6).44 The bold claims of An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter nettled some Europeans and led the secretary of the Royal Society of London to insist that it must be a shipwrecked European pamphlet fraudulently repackaged as a colonial product.45 Colden’s German translator, the mathematician Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, similarly noted the unlikelihood of obtaining “from America, the solution of difficulties in Physicks, which have seem’d insurmountable to the greatest Geniuses in Europe,” but he also offered substantial criticism in a lengthy piece printed alongside his translation. Kästner questioned the value of describing inertia as a resisting power. Why should natural philosophers accept that idea? Colden argued that his simple and clear theory would assist human understanding of natural phenomenon. His German critic quite reasonably judged resisting matter and elastic aether to be unnecessary and overcomplicated speculations that had no obvious advantages over other explanatory devices for the cause of gravity.46 Before receiving Kästner’s comments, Colden expanded his two-chapter Explication into the eight-chapter work he considered to be his intellectual masterpiece. The Principles of Action in Matter was published in London in 1751 by the illustrious printer, Robert Dodsley.47 Like Newton’s Principia, which it echoed in its title, it was a grand book that first offered a mathematical explanation of the universe, and then used this theory to explain

Figure 6. Title page of Erklärung der ersten wirkenden Ursache in der Materie, und der Ursache der Schwere (Hamburg, 1748). This publication included Abraham Gotthelf Kästner’s German translation of and commentary on Colden’s An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation (New York, 174[6]). Courtesy of the Göttingen State and University Library, 8 PHYS II, 2249.

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gravity, the orbits of planets and comets, and the rotation of the sun and planets around their axes. It also included astronomical observations and the author’s 1744 treatise on fluxions. The Principles of Action in Matter overtly included God in a way that An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter had not. The first chapter stated that unquantifiable actions were evidence of “an immaterial substance, or of spirit.”48 Later, Colden rejected the notion that “motion comes immediately from the Divine Being,” suggesting instead, and much like Newton, that light served as God’s mediator by communicating motion. Indeed, he proposed that light from the sun caused the motion of the planets.49 The seventh chapter, “Of the Intelligent Being, and of the Formation and Duration of the Several Systems in the Universe,” claimed that material actions proceed automatically and would create chaos without some sort of intelligent and divine oversight. On the question of how material and intelligent actions intersect, Colden answered that each system of matter possessed a single point where intelligence was able to influence matter. This explanation was vague and mysterious, but it also hinted at some sort of Stoical pneuma. In another nod to Stoicism, as well as to early modern chemistry, the New York philosopher added that every material system would eventually disintegrate in accordance with the plan of an infinite intelligent being, Archeus.50 The grandiose format of Colden’s philosophy proved unmarketable. The Principles of Action in Matter was a complex, difficult work without an obvious readership. Costing five shillings, it was not overly expensive. Still, its publisher had earlier expressed his doubts over “the Sale of a Work that so few people are Judges off,” and must have regretted not following this instinct.51 In any case, he refused to publish a further edition.52 Colden’s ideas nevertheless reached a sizable audience as his 1751 work was abridged and serialized in the popular Gentleman’s Magazine, quoted at length in the London Magazine, and summarized in a long article in the Monthly Review.53 Despite its relatively wide circulation, Colden’s philosophy of active matter did not take hold. “I do not find [your principles] are Espoused by any one,” Collinson regretfully reported from London.54 It surely cannot have helped that a blunt review of The Principles of Action in Matter was read before the Royal Society of London, especially given that it came from Leonhard Euler, the famous Swiss mathematician then at the Berlin Academy. Euler had received a copy of Colden’s book from Johann Kaspar Wett-

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stein (who was also known as Caspar Wetstein), the Swiss-born chaplain to the British royal family. The “American philosopher who wished to explain the physical causes of universal gravity,” Euler stated in his critique, “hides behind the little knowledge that he has in mechanics” and shows “a blatant ignorance of the principles of motion.” Colden’s “explanation taken from the elasticity of the ether” was dismissed as “so very poorly thought out that it is entirely contrary to the first principles of hydrostatics.” There was considerable self-promotion behind this strong critique. For Euler went on to compare Colden’s attempt at attributing the cause of gravitation to an elastic aether to a similar argument he had made in a prize-winning essay, “Dissertatio de magnete” (“Dissertation on Magnets”) (1743). Euler insisted that his account was much more successful, not least because it “conformed very strictly to the principles of mechanics” in a manner that Colden’s theory of gravitation did not.55 Colden interpreted the criticism of Kästner and Euler as a snobbish European rejection of his American theory. He took up the fight for “the Honour of the American Philosophy” (as Franklin later termed the cause), and penned replies to his leading European critics.56 Collinson received both in London and tried to have Colden’s response to Euler read before the Royal Society. Unfortunately, it disappeared into the hands of one of its fellows, who took little interest in it.57 Attempts to have it published in the Gentleman’s Magazine also failed.58 However, the Monthly Review did publish a paper on active matter that Colden wrote while anticipating the publication of a second edition of his Principles of Action in Matter. This piece inspired a detailed response from William Kendrick, a writer and acerbic critic, who accused Colden of complicating physics with a hypothesis about nonmechanical powers.59 A reply from the New York author that subsequently appeared in the Monthly Review did little more than reiterate that the principles of active matter matched the most accurate observations of natural phenomena (“the evidence of facts”).60 Yet again, then, Colden failed to make a strong case for the practical value of his theory. The unmechanical nature of Colden’s physics drew both praise and criticism from two leading Hutchinsonians, Samuel Pike and Robert Spearman. Unlike Kendrick, their motivation was religious. A revival of John Hutchinson’s fiercely anti-Newtonian Scripture-based mechanistic natural philosophy occurred when his complete works appeared in print in 1748. Several interested scholars, including Pike and Spearman, sought to reconcile

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Newtonianism and Hutchinsonianism.61 Having earlier read An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter with a great deal of interest, Pike carefully engaged with Colden’s Principles in the hope that it might help achieve this aim. The English scholar went on to discuss Colden’s system in an appendix included in his own work, Philosophia Sacra, published in 1753. It fundamentally rejected the notion of active matter and insisted on the importance of revelation and mechanism.62 In a letter sent to Colden in 1753, Pike directly urged the New Yorker to consider if his ideas were “confirm’d clear’d & explain’d” in the Bible. He also asserted his belief that matter was “in itself a dead motionless thing.”63 Spearman meanwhile summarized Colden’s ideas in his 1755 publication, Enquiry after Philosophy and Theology, and reiterated Pike’s call for a mechanistic natural philosophy supported by revelation.64 The attention of these European scholars flattered Colden, even though he told Franklin it did not increase his “vanity” too much. The New Yorker sent a copy of Pike’s book to his correspondent in Philadelphia.65 Further, he replied to Pike in the hope that he might obtain another useful contact in London. Nevertheless, Colden refused to budge philosophical ground and instead stressed the incompatibility of his philosophy and Hutchinsonianism.66 Pike sent back a warning that the New Yorker was “running into unmechanical, unmeaning, principles & occult qualities.”67 The two sides were clearly irreconcilable. Whereas the Hutchinsonians were uncompromising mechanists, Colden had decided by the 1750s that the material cosmos was more than a machine. When pushed by Pike on the religious implications of his natural philosophy, Colden declared, “We must allow that God has created active principles or substances, or all action must proceed immediately from God.” As the latter alternative denied human free will, he went with the former.68 In this way, he distanced himself from the one intellectual group in Europe that had expressed a strong admiration for his theories. Why did a widely circulated mid-eighteenth-century colonial philosophy of active matter fail to take hold? European suspicion of American intellectual ability was certainly one reason, but its importance can be easily exaggerated as Kästner in particular offered cogent criticism and the Hutchinsonian mechanists rejected Colden’s materialism without worrying too much about its geographical source. More significant was the problem of controlling the international production, dissemination, and reception of published ideas from a remote corner of British New York. Additionally, Colden’s

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groundbreaking writings promised more than they delivered. The theory of active matter offered an interesting rebuttal to Berkeleyan idealism, but it did not amount to a compelling account of matter, motion, and gravitation. As Kästner’s review suggested, if Colden had actually presented the cause of gravity in a convincing fashion, then the Old World would have applauded loudly. Colden combined his investigations into natural philosophy with a revived interest in medicine and physiology during the 1740s. The former physician published articles in the New York press urging city magistrates to adopt a program of urban sanitation. He presented himself as a popular reformer, even though he included more Latin in his pieces than the local printer was able to typeset accurately.69 A faddish cure derived from pine tar further stimulated Colden’s medical interests. Tar water (as that cure was called) was recommended in a book, Siris, that Berkeley published in 1744. A craze for the medicine then spread throughout Britain and its colonies. In 1745, the New York family of James Alexander literally drank tar water by the gallon each night in order to survive an epidemic. The wealthy Manhattanite also used the same medicine to treat his flatulence, gout, and sweaty feet.70 Colden meanwhile gave tar water his public approval in a pamphlet, An Abstract from Dr.  Berkley’s Treatise on Tar-Water, published in New York in 1745.71 It was the first of several public medical statements. Two articles on “simple and unexpected remedies” for cancer in America “discovered by the experience of the vulgar, and . . . kept as secrets among them” appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1750s, as did a letter from Colden describing an “Indian Remedy for the Venereal Disease.”72 Thus, the New York intellectual positioned himself as a colonial informant capable of bridging folk and enlightened culture. Colden’s revived interest in medicine coincided with an important theoretical shift. Pure mechanical explanations of the “animal oeconomy” fell out of vogue during the 1740s when among others the influential Dutch physiologist and teacher, Herman Boerhaave, distanced himself from suggestions that humans and animals were simply machines.73 A debate ensued in mid-century Scotland, where William Porterfield and Robert Whytt, two Edinburgh professors who were to become Colden’s correspondents, provided competing explanations of how the mind or soul controlled the body. Porterfield was the more senior figure, having been appointed professor of

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medicine in 1724, twenty-three years before Whytt. In an analysis of the human eye, Porterfield argued that voluntary, rational decisions actually caused apparent reflex actions, such as the simultaneous movement and focusing of two eyes. By contrast, Whytt theorized that a “sentient principle” or feeling, rather than rational thought, steered the body movements of animals.74 In a separate but parallel fashion, Colden spent part of his industrious winter of 1744–1745 writing a new essay on animal physiology. In so doing, he abandoned the mechanical explanation he had offered in the 1720s and since periodically updated. The new work began by stating that Lorenzo Bellini and Archibald Pitcairne had demonstrated the mechanical effects of the heart, arteries, and other muscles on the blood. It offered a brief description of how the blood is pumped along arteries and veins, “hollow pipes” that get progressively small like branches of a tree. Colden then pointed out that the blood must lose motion because of friction, especially in the smallest branches. Thus, in order for blood to return to the heart at the same rate that the heart and arteries pump it, “some power or force” must add motion to blood in the veins. This was a classic Newtonian move. Much as Newton claimed motion was lost in the universe and regenerated by an active principle, so Colden made a nonmechanical force necessary to the workings of the animal body.75 He decided the force adding motion to blood was chemical in origin and argued that a process of fermentation took place “in the smaller branchings of the animal tubes.” Through a sort of chemical reaction, “the parts of any fluid or body” are transformed. They acquire “a very different degree of cohesion & different properties, & becom[e] entirely of a different nature from what [they were] before.” Underlying this treatise, then, was a realization that the mechanistic physiology of Bellini and others did not provide all of the answers. As Colden put it, “principle functions of the Animal Oeconomy are subject to other & higher principles, to which the Mechanic powers are only like tools or instruments.”76 The mechanistic understanding of the animal body was not disregarded entirely. Colden offered a mechanical explanation of how fluids might enter an absorbent vessel already full with blood. Imagining a horseshoe-shaped artery connected before the bend to a perspiring tube and then after the bend to an absorbing tube, he determined that blood or animal fluid moving around the curve would drive perspiration into the perspiring tube and away from the blood, while fluid pushed by atmospheric pressure or any other force would be drawn into the blood stream via the absorbing tube.

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Franklin received a copy of this treatise in the summer of 1745. Having been puzzled for some time by the question of how something could sail “against Wind and Tide” into sweat-emitting skin, he was intrigued by this explanation of secretion and blood circulation, but doubted the viability of separate perspiring and absorbing ducts. Being an experimenter and craftsman, Franklin built a model out of cane and glass tubes to test it out.77 In so doing, he exposed the limitations of abstract reasoning by performing a physical demonstration of how liquid might flow in opposite directions within a single system. Colden believed he had the leisure and genius requisite to think through fundamental problems in medicine and natural philosophy. In actuality, as Rutherfurd, Kästner, Euler, and Franklin noticed, his clever musings too often produced ideas detached from the observable world. John Mitchell offered a mechanistic explanation of yellow fever around this time. While visiting Philadelphia in 1744, the Virginian physician passed a paper on the subject to Franklin, who sent it on to New York.78 An exchange between Colden and Mitchell, two Scotsmen, ensued. The Virginian, who had conducted autopsies on patients who had died of yellow fever, identified inflammation of the stomach, liver, and brain as the key symptom of the disease. He recommended a treatment of purging.79 Colden suggested in return that the inflammation might be more chemical than mechanical in nature. That is, it perhaps resulted from “burning or corrosive humours” in the bile, not from “a stagnation of the globular parts of the blood in the capillaries.”80 A few months later, as he prepared his thoughts on gravity for publication, the New Yorker confirmed that he was “fully convinced that the alterations in the Animal juices very litle depend on Mechanical principles & that even the first & principal mover in the Circulation is no way Mechanical.” Colden made this point in a letter to Mitchell that also contained a short autobiography that described his early training in and acceptance of mechanistic physiology and subsequent embrace of nonmechanical explanations of certain bodily functions.81 This cordial debate over mechanistic physiology led into a discussion of the pros and cons of printing scientific material. Shortly before he published his own treatise on active matter and gravitation, Colden suggested that Mitchell print his yellow fever paper. The Virginian replied that he wanted first to complete a much broader study of it. Behind this comment lay the reality that Mitchell had tried to publish his piece in Edinburgh, only to be advised by Alexander Monro, founder of the Edinburgh Medical School, to

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expand its scope. “I think this world is pestered with this Itch of many to appear in print,” Mitchell complained. It was a sentiment that his New York correspondent, who had recently invented a new printing method to promote the publication of lasting scientific works, undoubtedly appreciated. The two Scotsmen shared a desire to see fewer but better books.82 This mutual outlook helped to create a friendship that lasted even after Mitchell returned to Britain in 1746. Naturalist Alexander Garden was another scientifically minded Scottish immigrant who befriended Colden. He lived in Charles Town, South Carolina, and visited Coldengham in 1754. The following year, he informed Colden that the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh had published the first volume of its Essays and Observations, which contained an exchange on active matter between Henry Home, Lord Kames, senator of the College of Justice, and the Edinburgh professor of natural philosophy, John Stewart.83 News of that Scottish debate led Colden to think that he might be able to secure publication in Edinburgh of the second edition of his Principles of Action in Matter. He provided Garden with a summary of that edition, which he asked to be forwarded to “my countrymen . . . the gentlemen of the Edinburgh [Philosophical] Society.”84 This letter, which mentioned Leibniz in a postscript, caused Garden to send back a copy of a paper gifted to him by Professor Thomas Reid of the University of Aberdeen on the differences between Leibniz and Newton. Completed in 1748, Reid’s “Essay on Quantity” is an early piece by one of Scotland’s most famous philosophers. It made two key points. First, taking aim at Francis Hutcheson’s influential An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), it argued that mathematics cannot provide a basis for moral philosophy. Second, and more importantly for Colden, Reid commented on the vis viva dispute, a controversy concerning the proper mathematical description of the force of a body in motion. Whereas Descartes and Newton both measured motion as momentum (or mv, the product of mass and velocity), Leibniz measured it as vis viva, a “living force” (or mv 2, the product of mass and the square of velocity), thereby asserting the presence of a fundamental force or activity in the universe that the Cartesians and early Newtonians rejected. The French mathematician, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, dismissed the whole debate in 1743 as a “dispute of words too undignified to occupy the philosophers any longer.”85 Writing five years

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later, and probably without knowledge of d’Alembert’s assessment, Reid similarly concluded that the vis viva controversy was a problem of conflicting definitions, neither of which was false per se. He proposed ending the dispute through diplomacy—a treaty or agreement—rather than through experiment or reasoning.86 Reid’s Essay on Quantity presented Colden with an opportunity to demonstrate his intellectual prowess via Garden to Scottish philosophers who might support publication of his revised Principles. Writing to his Charles Town correspondent in 1756, Colden offered to clear up the vis viva dispute by demonstrating that Leibniz misunderstood the velocity of objects projected vertically by supposing that an ascending body moves with a constant velocity and stops abruptly. Colden argued correctly that bodies move upwards at an infinite number of different velocities, their speed changing as they slow from their initial velocity to a halt at their zenith.87 This explanation delighted Garden, who apparently “read it again & again with great pleasure” before sending a copy to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society in early 1757.88 By this time, the manuscript of Colden’s revised Principles had sat for years with the Oxford mathematician, John Bevis. Colden began to think that his theory of active matter might “die in obscurity in America.”89 His mood changed when he received from Scotland a copy of Whytt’s Physiological Essays, a book where the Edinburgh professor attributed the actions of muscles to “a living sentient Principle” in the same way that gravity “must finally be resolved into the power of the Being who upholds universal nature.”90 Keen to develop a new contact in the Scottish capital, Colden dispatched to Whytt a discussion on light and color occasioned by an article by Whytt’s nephew, Thomas Melvill, that had appeared in the second volume of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society’s Essays and Observations.91 He also enclosed a copy of a letter that he had earlier sent to Garden. It claimed “some kind of Mechanism or peculiar disposition of the material powers” excited the mind into intellectual action.92 In his cover letter to Whytt, Colden made dramatic mention of his book manuscript. “I have sometimes thoughts of ordering them to be committed to the flames,” he wrote, before stating that he would rather see his unpublished writings “buried in the university” where he was educated, “in hopes of a further resurrection.”93 A self-declared “smatterer in Mathematical knowledge,” Whytt replied with a letter on medical and botanical matters that mentioned Porterfield’s

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forthcoming volumes on vision.94 Colden sent back a long letter to Edinburgh in July 1759 but heard nothing in response. In April 1760, almost a full year later, the New Yorker wrote to Scotland once again. By that time he had read Porterfield’s book and begun to think more seriously about how the mind might direct motion in the body.95 His second letter impressed Whytt so much that he included parts of it in the second edition of his own Physiological Essays, published in 1761.96 Moreover, he sent his American correspondent a letter that differentiated his own views from those of Porterfield. The two Edinburgh professors had fallen out after Porterfield criticized his colleague in his 1759 publication, A Treatise on the Eye, the Manner and Phænomena of Vision. In writing to Colden, Whytt stated that Porterfield had taken his ideas from the German physiologist, George Ernest Stahl, who held that the soul directly moves the body through its reason. It was a charge that he repeated in print in 1763.97 Before he heard back from Whytt, Colden opened up a correspondence with Porterfield, who happened to be the uncle-in-law of Colden’s daughter, Jane, who had married in 1759. Using this connection as his introduction, Colden sent the Edinburgh professor an explanation of the interaction of mind and matter. Intelligence, he argued, directs the material powers of the body, much as God arranges for planets to move in orbits. Without that intelligent input, matter would be organized in an “ineffectual and useless” way.98 Porterfield responded with a long letter that, unfortunately, never arrived in New York. Whytt eventually forwarded another copy of Porterfield’s letter in September 1763, by which time Colden was consumed with political affairs.99 These new Scottish contacts encouraged Colden to revive his plans to publish a new edition of The Principles of Action in Matter. He must have been encouraged when Whytt urged him against burning his manuscript even if “the taste of the present age is so little for metaphysical disquisitions, that the shorter any work of this kind is, it will meet with the better reception.”100 At the start of 1762, Colden replied that he had arranged for the manuscript of his revised Principles of Action in Matter to be sent from London to Edinburgh. He wrote Whytt, “My design is that they may take their fate from you, either to dye in obscurity, or to appear in the world in such manner or shape as you shall think proper.” He then added wishfully, “Perhaps the Principles which I adopt may be more favourably received in Scotland than in England.”101

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Whytt received the revised Principles around March 1763 and passed it on to another professor, Adam Ferguson, to be assessed. Although he would go on to admire Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations, Ferguson apparently provided no or negative comments on Colden’s Principles as the second edition went unpublished. Colden continued to emit some smaller intellectual pieces, parts of which were read to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh. For instance, at Whytt’s urging, he wrote an essay on “the Principles of Vital Motion.” He also completed a long treatise in response to Porterfield’s book.102 But his updated Principles was simply deposited in the University of Edinburgh archives, where it can still be found today. Ultimately, Colden attributed this disappointing outcome to the spirit of his age. He remarked that ideas are received not on their merit, but on “concomitant circumstances,” such as the support of nobility, and “the general temper & bent of mens minds at the time.” “Books of meer amusement or which favour a licentious spirit are the delight of the present age,” he complained, before calling in 1763 for a “reformation” that “will give glory to the King & happiness to his Dominions.”103 It was the sentiment of a disappointed author, despairing partisan of enlightenment, and committed royalist.

PART III

Politics

Chapter 7

Against Partisanship

Eighteenth-century British New York contained a remarkable variety of ethnic, racial, religious, kinship, and economic groups. This heterogeneous and polyglot mix— combined with the growing strength of the provincial Assembly, competition over a limited number of imperial offices, the relatively individualistic, pragmatic, and materialistic outlook of New Yorkers, and the regular arrival of unscrupulous governors—turned the colony into a hotbed of interest politics and popular mobilization. Discordant ruling elites chased the public approval and the electoral votes of an increasingly literate, consumeristic, and refined middling sort. Print culture expanded, especially around the time of provincial elections. A culture of satire took hold, and open criticism of governing figures became commonplace.1 Because of these trends, colonial New York is now widely remembered as a nurturing ground for American liberalism and democracy. However, the picture was not so clear in the eighteenth century. Parties and factions were heavily associated with social disunity, corruption, conspiracy, tyranny, and anarchy. They seemed at the time more like the residue of the traumatic

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1640s and 1650s in England than the harbinger of an auspicious American future. In this sense, they represented the very opposite of enlightened progress.2 So although it has been retrospectively argued that factious colonial New Yorkers innovated a protomodern understanding of partisanship as an effective way to balance power, it is important to acknowledge that much of their public discourse tried either to transcend or to deplore the politics of self-interest and popular participation. Colden made the case against partisanship more aggressively than any New Yorker. He did not do so as an isolated and innate Tory-Royalist, but as an alert protagonist who determined over time that the volatile politics of his colony could not be reconciled with moderate and enlightened culture.3 After a period of political pamphleteering and mobilization, he decided from the 1740s that excessive local factionalism put order and stability at risk. Conspiring demagogues had seized too much power. The local political balance was off-kilter. Reason, harmony, and civility needed to be restored. Shortly before he departed for London in 1719, Governor Robert Hunter boasted that “the very Name of Party or Factions seems to be forgot” in New York.4 Like many an outgoing politician, he stretched the truth to polish his legacy. Polarized landed and mercantile interests maneuvered behind the scenes, and open belligerence soon returned to New York. An opposition faction led by the wealthy and powerful Adolph Philipse and tied to the colony’s largest merchants took control of the Assembly in the 1720s. One year after being ousted from the Council by Governor William Burnet, in part to make way for Cadwallader Colden, Philipse won a by-election in Westchester County in 1722. Myndert Schuyler, a vocal opponent of Burnet’s imperial policies, joined him in the Assembly in 1724. The opposition party then enjoyed a banner year in 1725 when Philipse replaced an ailing Robert Livingston as Speaker of the House, and three of his allies—Richard Merrill, Benjamin Hicks, and Stephen DeLancey—won separate by-elections occasioned by the deaths of sitting assemblymen. Burnet made a clumsy and unconstitutional effort to block DeLancey’s admission, but his refusal to administer the oath of office to a newly elected representative on the false premise that the French-born Huguenot lacked the requisite New York citizenship only served to provoke outrage and swell the ranks of the opposition. The House voted unanimously to admit DeLancey in September 1725, and later punished the governor further by funding his administra-

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tion for just three years, rather than the anticipated five years. Burnet responded by calling a general election—New York’s first since his arrival— in a bid to wrestle back political control. 5 The election of 1726 helped to initiate a crucial relationship between politics and print in New York. John Peter Zenger, a German immigrant who had recently set up a print shop, the second such business in the colony, used the occasion to expand his titles from a few Dutch and English religious tracts to include three anonymous campaign pamphlets on fiscal policy. Colden authored at least the first of these political publications and possibly the whole exchange. Either way, the pamphlet series as a whole marks the start of a consequential association between members of Burnet’s circle and Zenger. The 1726 election pamphlets addressed the funding of the provincial government, a problem that had long divided landed and mercantile elites in New York. The colony mostly raised revenue through various import and export duties, tonnage duties on visiting foreign ships, an excise tax on retail liquor sales, and occasional direct property taxes. This arrangement, which placed a larger financial burden on merchants than on the landed gentry, dated from the end of the seventeenth century. It became controversial as commerce picked up at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession.6 Lewis Morris defended the status quo before the 1713 provincial election by publishing an open letter entitled “To the Inhabitants and Free-holders of Westchester County,” which was read throughout the colony. By recommending the use of trade and excise duties, especially on luxury items such as liquor, Morris’s campaign pitch helped to unite a coalition of New York’s landowners, farmers, and urban craftsmen against the colony’s “rich, vain and extravagant” city merchants.7 The Interest of the Country in Laying Duties, a pamphlet written by Colden and published by Zenger in Dutch and English language versions, repeated Morris’s strategy in 1726. In a bid to influence the outcome of the Assembly election held that year, it asked how government could be supported without burdening the people or hindering commerce and manufacturing. A solution was outlined in the form of three maxims: (1) the trade, industry, and labor of the people always benefit from low taxation; (2) government has a moral duty to tax “whatsoever else is prejudicial to the good of the Society”; and (3) “the Labour and Manufactures of the Province” should be taxed less than commerce because merchants are dependent on the products of farmers and

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craftsmen.8 Colden’s political piece caused enough of a stir to provoke a reply, The Interest of City and Country to Lay No Duties, which Zenger also issued. This second pamphlet, much like the first, covered old ground. Its anonymous author voiced well-worn mercantile complaints that trade tariffs ultimately impacted consumers and that the “Free Ports” in neighboring colonies took business away from tax-heavy New York. With more novelty, it then suggested (as Colden himself liked to do) that a land tax had the positive benefit of discouraging huge, undeveloped tracts. Finally, the pamphlet proposed raising funds through a general property tax targeted at both “City and Country” dwellers.9 With two well-established positions laid out, the 1726 election debate proceeded in amicable fashion toward a rational rapprochement that was presumably designed to bring undecided voters over to the governor’s side. Colden penned a second part to The Interest of the Country in Laying Duties that acknowledged the essential unity of rural and urban life and accepted that land taxes might help reduce the problem of “some private men” holding on to large unimproved tracts. Conjointly, he rejected the proposal for an estate tax on the specific point that the suggested scheme allowed ordinary people to elect their own assessors and so put “the Mob” in charge of raising government revenue. “Experiments are allways Dangerous especially in Politicks,” the author counseled.10 This manuscript went unpublished at the time, conceivably because Colden revised it into the final pamphlet in the series. The Two Interests Reconciled was as conciliatory as its title suggested. It highlighted the agreement of the “Country-Man” and the “Citizen” on the necessity of government support, as well as the shared desire of these two writers to avoid excessive financial hampering of the trade and industry of New York. From this placatory stance, The Two Interests Reconciled moved to reject the citizen’s land tax on the practical basis that cash-strapped landowners would vehemently oppose taxes on the “dead Treasure” of their unimproved acres. It instead recommended a set of targeted excise taxes, especially duties on goods such as wine, slaves, cocoa, and salt that encouraged “Luxury and Debauchery.” Thus, the final publication in the series came down in favor of landed party policy, albeit with an added concession that some precise reductions in commercial taxes might boost overseas trade.11 This mildest of pamphlet wars—which was perhaps a phony war entirely concocted by Colden and other Burnet allies—signaled the ambivalence of

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New York elites toward partisanship. By weighing up two sides, and by presenting selected commercial taxes as reasonable and broadly beneficial, it paradoxically sought to transcend political factionalism even as it invited public debate and endorsed landed party policy. The series’ overall aim was to place Burnet’s faction above the political fray by aligning it with reason and the common good rather than the narrow-minded interests of a clique. Unfortunately, the polite and placid assessment of fiscal policy failed to excite colonial readers and voters. Both rival parties ended up winning seats in 1726. The governor remained in an unenviable political position. The Assembly—as independent and emboldened as before the election— asserted its power by instructing Burnet and the Council how to spend government money, as Hunter had informally allowed the House to do in the past. Desperate to fund a fort on Lake Ontario, Burnet almost agreed to these orders. But he reconsidered after Colden warned him that the Assembly’s power grab endangered “the Constitution of this Government & the Dependance of this Province on [G]reat Britain.”12 The limitations of polite, rational debate in early eighteenth-century New York were further exposed when the mercantile faction spread “Scandalous Stories” about Burnet that continued even after the governor took up a new post in Massachusetts in spring 1728. James Alexander reportedly heard one rumor that May that was “more vile & base” than any he had heard before.13 Just nine years after Hunter had bragged about the disappearance of partisanship in New York, the colony’s political culture was as factious and poisonous as ever. With acrimony, scorn, and character assassination marring the end of Burnet’s administration, Colden threw himself into the hostility and muckraking by writing at least two anonymous letters to “Ape” (an insulting contraction of Adolph Philipse’s name), both of which Zenger published. These pieces concerned a 1727 Assembly resolution that denounced the juryless Chancery Court as a threat to “the Libertys and properties” of New Yorkers.14 The Chancery Court, on which the governor was the sole judge, was theoretically designed to ensure justice in cases where the common law provided inadequate or unfair solutions. It was often regarded as oppressive and unconstitutional in the colony.15 Even so, the 1727 Assembly resolutions came somewhat out of the blue. Burnet and his allies blamed them on Philipse, who had recently found himself on the wrong end of a

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Chancery decree.16 Colden’s anonymous letters accordingly pretended to help Philipse respond to the allegation that he had “Cunningly and designedly” attacked the Chancery Court for personal gain. In so doing, they satirically accused the opposition leader of “selfishness, disingenuity, resentment, and malice.”17 The arrival of Burnet’s successor, John Montgomerie, in New York in April 1728 eased political tensions but only to a certain extent. Montgomerie acted pleasantly to everyone, but on the side quietly forged an alliance with Philipse and the mercantile faction. Colden started to fear for his own future when the governor hesitated to renew his commission as surveyor general as required by the death of King George I. At that moment, he joined James Alexander in considering a more structured and formal political party.18 Simultaneously, however, he revealed a deep ambivalence about the partisanship that had taken hold of New York. “Let the world see that we hate Contention,” he wrote to Alexander. Colden was in two minds. He advocated a quieting of public debate rather than a return to the sort of reasoned political argument he had attempted in 1726. Yet, he also encouraged Alexander to make strong and passionate appeals to the New York public. Colden warned that unenlightened enemies of truth and reason are “indefatigable in hoodwinking the People.”19 When Alexander requested additional letters against Philipse be written with “rather more reservedness of Epithets, no passion but clear truth & reason well painted,” Colden replied, “Truth & Honesty does not almost always prevail.”20 The former pamphleteer then added that statements “as clearly Demonstrated as any Proposition in Euclid” have little impact on “the minds of the People.”21 Colden’s response reflected the fact that the development of intellectual culture in early eighteenth-century New York had widened social divisions. Educated and genteel elites had gained increased confidence in their own superior rationality, politeness, and ensuing moral right to govern. To the ruling class, the minds of the people appeared ever more weak, irrational, and unenlightened. It was therefore shocking to Alexander and Colden that some elites might behave with reckless and unrefined abandon. Yet, just such an incident occurred after Chief Justice Lewis Morris Sr. refused to accept a £50 salary reduction imposed by Governor Montgomerie at the behest of the Assembly.22 Alexander, who brokered a temporary solution designed to enable Morris to appeal his case to London, was left infuriated—as was Colden—when the chief justice’s son, Lewis Morris Jr., reacted violently to

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his father’s treatment. Morris, Jr., abruptly criticized the governor’s conduct and duly received a suspension from the Council. Alexander compared young Morris’s actions to “Landing on a Shoar for invading, & burning the vessels which brought the invaders to prevent their own retreat.”23 He braced himself for “Shotts Spadoes & Stillettos from hidden Corners” as he refused to sign the Council warrant for Morris’s salary reduction in September 1729.24 Only timely news from London prevented further conflict. While leading colonial New Yorkers battled each other for power, place, and prestige, they also generally operated within the imperial framework and accepted Crown decisions. Consequently, the Morrises conceded defeat when they heard that the Board of Trade had confirmed the removal of Morris Jr. from the Council.25 The truce proved temporary as the sudden death of Governor Montgomerie in July 1731 once again set public affairs “upon the wheel.”26 One of the great political battles in New York history occurred after Governor William Cosby arrived in New York as Montgomerie’s replacement the following August. Cosby demanded one half of the salary and fees paid to the interim provincial executive, Rip Van Dam. When Van Dam refused to comply, the new governor attempted to recover his money in the local courts. He knew a jury would likely side with the New Yorker Van Dam and was unable as the chancellor to use the Chancery Court to settle his own case, so he instructed the colony’s supreme court judges to form another equity court. Chief Justice Morris Sr. declared that move illegal and consequently lost his office in August 1733. An opposition faction that included the lawyers James Alexander and William Smith Sr. formed around the Morrises. It organized a political campaign against the governor that involved unprecedented popular mobilization and blurred social boundaries in New York. In particular, the middling sort assumed new political importance. Colden would later note that even Cosby was forced to become “more familiar with the people” to the point that he “invited many of low rank to dine with him such as had never pretended or expected so much respect.”27 All the same, neither the governor nor the leading Morrisites embraced egalitarianism. They remained aristocratic and elitist and abandoned popular politics as soon as they decided it had served its purpose.28 Despite the persistence of such social attitudes, the political disputes of the 1730s contributed to significant changes in colonial life. Most notably, they

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advanced the creation of an opposition press and accelerated popular participation in colonial politics. Morris Sr. won an Assembly seat in a dramatic Westchester County by-election in October 1733. The first issue of New York’s second newspaper, the New York Weekly Journal, appeared days later. Printed by Zenger, it espoused libertarian ideals and mounted satirical attacks on the governor and his party. Cosby responded by ordering copies to be burned. He then had Zenger arrested for libel in November 1734. Alexander and Smith jumped to the defense of their printer, but were disbarred in April 1735 after they questioned the impartiality of the supreme court judges. At this point, the Morrisites called in a renowned Philadelphia lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, who delivered a rousing trial speech on 4 August 1735 that convinced the jury to ignore contemporary law and accept the publication of truth as a legitimate defense against libel. The packed courtroom filled with cheers when Zenger was acquitted and set free after eight months of incarceration. The 1735 legal decision did not end the local partisanship, and nor did Cosby’s death in March 1736. In a defiant last act, the dying governor managed to remove Van Dam from the Council and anoint George Clarke as his immediate successor. This situation left two rivals battling for control of the provincial government. While the Morrisites backed Van Dam and used Zenger’s press to whip up popular support for their candidate, the Assembly split on the issue. Tensions reached new heights when Lewis Morris Sr. returned from London, where he had gone in late 1734 to plead in person against Cosby and for his reinstatement as chief justice. Clarke at that moment took cover in Fort George fearing a popular uprising. New York, in Colden’s assessment, stood on the verge of “civil War.”29 That fate was only avoided by news of the Crown’s appointment of Clarke as lieutenant governor. On hearing of the king’s decision, Van Dam gave up the fight. Meanwhile, Morris Sr. abandoned populist politics and accepted the governorship of New Jersey. Clarke eased tensions further by returning Alexander and Smith Sr. to the bar in October 1737. The importance of the Zenger trial has been heavily debated. Although it did not instantly overturn libel law, it did impede government censorship and also in effect sanctioned honest public criticism of government officials. Moreover, it altered the political dynamic of New York by engaging a large section of the colony’s population in political resistance against a corrupt

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Crown official. Additionally, it strengthened the connection between politics and print in New York and demonstrated the power of well-produced propaganda.30 However, the significance of these changes only became apparent over time. It is therefore best to view the Zenger trial not as a singular heroic event, but as one part of a decades-long evolution of New York political culture. The conflicts of the mid-1730s unsettled many New Yorkers. Concerns about the legitimacy of a partisan print culture became a central feature of local public debate, as they were elsewhere in eighteenth-century Britain. Writers on both sides of the Atlantic denounced factionalism as an abandonment of restraint, moderation, and order. Colden reacted in Stoical fashion to the turmoil of the 1730s by hurrying “out of Town to avoid entring in to new Disputes in which my friends were taking opposite sides.”31 Away from the maelstrom of Manhattan, he announced himself as an opponent of all political factions. When his wife visited New York City that spring, escaping the “tedious Solitaryness” of her life in the country, Colden praised her for visiting and conversing without any regard to party allegiances.32 Later in the year, he informed his aunt, Elizabeth Hill, that he had been “careful to carry an upright heart” amid all the partisan quarrels.33 Self-serving pragmatism certainly underpinned this high-minded rhetoric. Colden was closely associated with leading Morrisites, particularly James Alexander, but also stood to profit handsomely from a Clarke administration. After a decade of blaming Clarke (who had served as Horace Walpole’s New York agent) for the loss of his Crown salary in the mid-1720s, the surveyor general forged a lucrative relationship with the new and notoriously greedy lieutenant governor.34 While surveying land in the Mohawk River valley in the fall of 1736, Colden received a letter from Clarke instructing him to lay out tracts for them both.35 He was then closing in on his fifties, and glad to gain another opportunity to boost his family’s wealth. That October, he secured patents on the Mohawk River near Canajoharie for his two eldest children, Alexander and Elizabeth. The following year, he obtained land in Warren County from his farm hands and stooges, Andrew McDowal and Patrick McClaghry. Colden bought land in their names and subsequently had it deeded back to himself.36 It should be acknowledged that ideology and psychology were at least as important to Colden’s stance against political partisanship as the prospect of

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material gain. In a long account of the Cosby and Clarke administrations, probably written in late 1737 after news arrived in New York that King George II had named Clarke as lieutenant governor, Colden both condemned Cosby as an “ignorant willfull avaricious man,” and criticized partisan politics. In particular, and surprisingly given some of its author’s previous journalism, Colden disapproved of the Morrisite writers who had “exposed the Actions of Govrs party in the worst light they could place them & . . . raked into mens private Weaknesses & secrets of Families which had no Relation to the publick.” He described New York’s “civil War” in the bleakest of terms—a period when “resentment & Anger” burned “in every mans breast.”37 Similar criticism of popular politics appeared in an anonymous letter (almost certainly written by Colden) published in the New-York Weekly Journal in the fall of 1737. After rejecting a report “industriously spread over the Country” that newly elected assemblymen had privately agreed to give the governor all the money he desired, its author asserted that “all attempts for Popularity appear now with a very ill grace in them” and that the “Affectation of Popularity is now so very unbecoming . . . that it turns people’s Stomachs.” The published letter called for greater cooperation between the different branches of the provincial government and stressed the indispensable role of governors, notwithstanding all the failings of Cosby. In other words, it played up the importance of a constitutional balance of power.38 Antipartisan sentiments coincided in the 1740s with other concerns. Population growth had made Manhattan crowded. Food supplies were short. Poverty and hardship were marked. Epidemics were more common. Crime rates were unusually high.39 As these social difficulties mounted, Britain declared war on Spain in the fall of 1739. Soldiers now left Manhattan to do battle in the Caribbean, rendering New York more vulnerable to attack than usual. A series of fires that started in the spring of 1741 with a destructive inferno at Fort George threw already anxious Manhattanites into hysteria. The number and pattern of the blazes raised suspicion of arson, even though there was no reliable evidence of any such crime. The questionable testimony of a young indentured servant, Mary Burton, caused investigators to focus on New York’s sizable slave community. Whites recalled the slave riot of 1712 and panicked that something even worse was now under way. Colden heard of the supposed conspiracy from his eldest daughter while serving on

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a boundary commission in Providence, Rhode Island. Elizabeth DeLancey reported by letter that two New York slaves, Quack and Cuffee, had been burned at the stake after confessing to a plot to “burn the City & Murder the Whites.” In a desperate last effort to save themselves, the condemned men had disclosed the involvement of a white tavern owner John Hughson. “I think no death can be too bad for him,” Elizabeth DeLancey wrote of the alleged ringleader.40 New York magistrates rushed to uncover the full plot. Twenty whites and 152 blacks were arrested by August 1741. A series of trials led by the ambitious Supreme Court Judge Daniel Horsmanden resulted in the execution by hanging or burning at the stake of thirty blacks and four whites. Over seventy slaves were expelled to the West Indies. The prosecutions concluded by blaming the conspiracy on John Ury, an alleged Catholic priest hanged on 29 August. How can we explain all that took place in New York in 1741? Fear, racism, and anti-Catholicism certainly fueled the trials. Their power stemmed in part from the fact that they ran counter to contemporary British aspirations for a moderate and enlightened eighteenth century. Horsmanden boasted that he had exposed the “popery” behind “a Scheme wch must have been brooded in a Conclave of Devils, & hatcht in the Cabinet of Hell.” 41 After years of political instability in New York, Colden was now more inclined than ever to agree that order and authority had to be aggressively defended, especially at a time of war. In this mode, he arranged for the arrest in Ulster County of an Irish Catholic schoolteacher who had gone into hiding after refusing to toast the health of King George II and after apparently declaring allegiance to King Phillip of Spain. Colden did not actively participate in the conspiracy trials except to brush away criticism that arrived from New England. On returning from Rhode Island, he received an anonymous letter that compared the New York trials of 1741 to Salem’s witchcraft trials of 1692. The correspondence, which we now know came from Josiah Cotton, a judge from Plymouth, Massachusetts, demanded “an end to the bloody Tragedy . . . lest all the poor People of the Government perish in the merciles flames of an Imaginary Plot.”42 Colden forwarded the document to Lieutenant-Governor Clarke with a recommendation that material relating to the trials be published “to prevent the prevailing of such an Opinion.”43 As before, then, New York’s elite saw print culture as a means to secure public approval and legitimacy. Horsmanden

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accordingly issued a twisted account of his judicial proceedings in an effort to protect his reputation.44 Convinced that “Popular Notions” had prevailed in New York politics and destroyed “Civil Discipline,” Colden decided by 1741 that the colony needed strong and enlightened rule.45 He had some confidence that the new governor, George Clinton, might provide that sort of leadership. This brother of the Earl of Lincoln brought a set of powerful imperial connections. Most notably, he was related via his brother’s marriage to British Prime Minister Henry Pelham and Secretary of State Thomas Pelham-Holles, the Duke of Newcastle.46 Clinton had powerful patrons but unfortunately suffered from bad timing. He landed in New York in September 1743, just months before France formally declared war on Britain as part of the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). The British government at that point renewed its plans for a military invasion of Canada. Most New Yorkers opposed such a venture. They worried about its financial cost, the potential danger of a retaliatory French invasion of British America, and the certain disruption to their profitable trade with Canada.47 Ignoring popular local opinion, Clinton followed his orders from London and agreed to join with Massachusetts and Connecticut in an expedition north. His decision, which Colden supported, gave the Assembly another opportunity to increase its power.48 The House permitted its commissioners to distribute the new defense expenditure without oversight from the governor or Council, and thereby basically gave itself the right to spend, as well as raise and award, government funds—the very arrangement Colden had earlier persuaded Burnet to reject. James DeLancey acted as Clinton’s main counsel at this time. The eldest son of Stephen DeLancey, the chief justice had gained an education in England at the University of Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn before commencing a legal career in New York in the mid-1720s. He had entered politics by joining the provincial Council in 1729 and become a supreme court judge in 1731. Two years later, he had replaced Lewis Morris as chief justice. Subsequently, DeLancey, an ambitious and skilled political operator, amassed influence over the Assembly during the seven-year administration of Lieutenant Governor George Clarke. He further reinforced his position by maintaining an alliance with four councilors: Horsmanden, Joseph Murray, Stephen Bayard, and John Moore. Councilor Philip Livingston would also

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side with DeLancey by the end of 1746. Once derided by Lewis Morris Sr. as a chamber of “leapsticks” who followed the governor like trained spaniels, the Council had assumed greater independence after 1736, when the Board of Trade prohibited governors from joining the legislature. Joint control over the Assembly and Council enabled DeLancey to ease Clinton’s earliest months in New York. He was duly rewarded with a new commission as chief justice under the term “during good behavior” rather than “at the king’s pleasure,” a change of status that in effect gave him the post for life. Months later, his brother-in-law, British naval officer Peter Warren, the husband of DeLancey’s wife, captured a French fort at Louisbourg, Île Royale (now Cape Breton). It was a grand victory that brought Warren fame, wealth, and political clout. DeLancey’s standing in London improved because of the achievements of his close relation.49 From this position of strength, the chief justice broke with Clinton during what must have been an explosive evening dinner in February 1746.50 DeLancey then consolidated his power by organizing a joint committee of councilors and assemblymen to consider the Canada expedition. In language that echoed Horsmanden’s description of the 1741 slave conspiracy, Colden described this joint committee as “a cabal” of the chief justice’s “friends & descendents . . . where every thing was to be concerted & prepared” in secret.51 The division between Clinton and DeLancey became truly apparent in the summer of 1746 when the governor undertook a crucial conference with the Iroquois at Albany ahead of the planned invasion of Canada. Having lost his previous adviser, he turned to New York’s senior councilor, who also happened to be an experienced diplomat and chronicler of Indian history. The DeLancey party simultaneously reached out to the same pivotal figure. Called by the governor to Manhattan and away from his work on gravity, Colden did not know how to proceed. His eldest daughter’s marriage to Peter DeLancey, the chief justice’s brother, pulled him in one direction. At the same time, the turmoil of the 1730s had left him ideologically in favor of a strong provincial executive and distanced from popular opposition to the Canada invasion. While staying at his daughter’s Westchester home in late June or early July 1746, Colden mulled over Clinton’s request to attend the Indian conference. Even though he could reasonably hope to secure lucrative positions for his sons by befriending the governor, he remained undecided when a “strong debate” broke out in the Council over who should travel to Albany.52 It ended in the unanimous nomination of the senior

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councilor, who accepted the role once he gained assurances that Clinton would pay his expenses.53 Two other Albany-based councilors—his good friend, Captain John Rutherfurd, who had returned from Scotland, and Philip Livingston, secretary of Indian Affairs—joined Colden and Clinton on this diplomatic venture. The conference began slowly. Albany was rife with smallpox, and no Indian delegates were present when Clinton and Colden arrived. Things improved when New York’s Indian agent, William Johnson, a Scotsman, “dressed and painted after the Manner of an Indian War Captain,” led a Mohawk party into the town.54 Colden found himself enjoying the occasion. He held conversations with Rutherfurd, and felt “more cheerfull” than he had been for years.55 His growing friendship with the governor undoubtedly contributed to his buoyant mood. When Clinton fell sick, Colden stepped forward and took over negotiations. He introduced himself to the Indian sachems as “the next Person to him [the governor] in the Administration.”56 The approach of winter rendered an immediate assault on Canada impossible. Colden departed Albany in late September or early October firmly established as Clinton’s “prime minister.” In confident mood, he drafted a speech for the governor to deliver to the Council and Assembly. Clinton once again fell ill, and so the address was read in his absence.57 It requested funds for the winter encampment of troops, but also made an impolitic reference to the House’s “artful and designing Men.”58 Colden may have presented DeLancey and Assembly Speaker David Jones with advanced copies of this speech.59 Be that as it may, the Assembly took these words as a gross insult. It voted to support the winter camp, but subsequently accused Colden of illegally instructing the Albany sheriff to seize stores for the encamped troops from two Assembly-appointed commissioners.60 Rutherfurd encouraged his friend to give the Assembly “such an answer as it deserves.” Colden complied by publishing an anonymous account of the 1746 Albany conference that stated members of the New York Council had declined to attend the conference at Albany.61 DeLancey and his associates felt insulted and resolved to discover the author of the pamphlet. The Assembly duly censured Colden after he admitted his part. Colden spent the winter of 1746–1747 at his Ulster County farm grumbling about his maltreatment.62 He fretted that his reputation in London was hurt and that his chances of replacing Clarke as lieutenant governor were sunk.63 He tried to discredit DeLancey. A letter that Colden drafted for Clinton to send to the

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British prime minister pointed to “the power of a Faction, that is otherwise influenced, than by the publick service.” It also asserted that the “low condition of life and ignorance” of most assemblymen and councilors made them susceptible to the control of “one man of superior fortune and numerous Relations.”64 Colden’s target was clear. But DeLancey had too much influence in the British capital to be so easily smeared. New Yorkers were by now used to satire, and supporters of DeLancey used the local press effectively to ridicule their leading opponent. One newspaper advertisement poked fun at Colden’s intellectual aspirations. In a short Time will be Published a New Method of Controversey, or an easie Way of Shortening Debates, by allowing only ONE SIDE to publish Their Thoughts. Containing also Reasons for abolishing the Liberty of the Press. By that renow’d profound Adept in the Occult Sciences. C—r C—n.65

Later, and with a playful nod to the ideals of neo-Stoical retirement from public affairs, a letter appeared in the press arguing that the senior councilor should cease “bedawbing, the weekly News Papers with the Excrements of his Brain” and return to the “Folly and Vanity” of his natural philosophy.66 Colden’s intellectual authority was thus turned into a reputation for unwarranted arrogance. The Assembly reinforced that shift by publicly attacking Colden as an “artful craft designing Man” of “unbounded Pride and Vanity” who had selfishly pursed an office that “from his Birth, Education, personal Qualities, Principles, and Character, he had little, very little Reason indeed, to expect ever to be exalted to.”67 Drawn back into party politics, Colden performed effectively in Ulster and Orange Counties, where he aided Clinton’s appointment of officials.68 When the governor called an election in 1747 and sought to mobilize New York City’s middle-class voters by suggesting that they were being squeezed by an alliance of wealthier and poorer sorts, Colden more or less assumed the role of campaign manager for the southern Hudson counties.69 He successfully supported Ulster County candidates and wrote campaign material, including an anonymous address to the freeholders of New York that appeared in the New-York Gazette. Reiterating old themes that resonated even more strongly after the 1741 trials and executions, this tract attacked the partisanship and conspiratorial nature of the DeLanceyites, accusing them of generating “scurrilous and [a]busive Language,” and “Rumour and

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Report.” The “probable consequences of our publick dissensions,” Colden warned, were either that Parliament would instill a more authoritarian rule or that French or Spanish enemies might take advantage.70 The governor’s party won in the lower Hudson, but failed to take overall control of the Assembly. A tense political stalemate set in, during which time Clinton built up his political base and regained leadership of the Council.71 In 1747 he suspended councilors Horsmanden and Bayard.72 The deaths of Philip Livingston and John Moore two years later, followed by Sir Peter Warren’s death in 1752, opened up even more seats for Clinton’s allies. The end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748 reduced some of the local opposition to the governor. Royal instructions dispatched in 1753 also helped by formally requiring councilors to defend Crown prerogative.73 Along the way, Clinton decided he could do better than Colden and recruited new advisers, namely William Johnson, William Smith Sr., Lewis Morris Jr., and James Alexander, who regained his Council seat in 1750.74 The governor simultaneously asked the Crown to suspend DeLancey as lieutenant governor.75 (Delancey had been appointed as Clarke’s successor in 1747.) Things must have looked up when Secretary of State John Russell, Duke of Bedford, hinted that he might consider this option. “Sr P. W. [Sir Peter Warren]: disgusted,” read one report from London in 1749.76 Colden was an obvious candidate to replace DeLancey as lieutenant governor, but he faced competition from his old friend, Rutherfurd, who put his own name forward while in London in 1749 and quite possibly also spread rumors in the British capital about the “general dislike to Mr Colden” among New Yorkers.77 DeLancey ultimately retained his office until his death in 1760. Clinton’s support in London proved too weak to accomplish the suspension of such a well-connected and powerful lieutenant governor. “There is great pushing against [Clinton]” in London, Peter Collinson informed Colden in 1750.78 Meanwhile, at home, a highly contested provincial election that took place in the summer of 1750 sparked an explosion of political print culture, but failed to dislodge DeLancey’s control of the Assembly. The competing parties emerged exhausted and decided on a truce that lasted until another election battle in 1752 and Clinton’s eventual departure from New York in 1753. It was perhaps in the fall of 1750, when he visited Manhattan and enjoyed “nothing personally but complaisance” from both the Clintonites and DeLanceyites, that Colden commissioned a portrait of himself as a welldressed and successful middle-aged gentleman.79 It was painted by an En-

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Figure 7. John Wollaston (c. 1710– c. 1767), Cadwallader Colden, 1749–1752. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm). Courtesy of the Bequest of Grace Wilkes, 1922 (22.45.6). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

glish artist, John Wollaston, who resided in New York between 1749 and 1752 (figure 7). There is no indication in the image that the subject was ready to remove himself from public affairs and focus on philosophy. But Colden was indeed on the verge of another retirement. He arranged in the early 1750s to split the office of surveyor general with his eldest son, Alexander,

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and also declined an opportunity to become secretary of Indian Affairs.80 He was, as he informed James Alexander, ready to live “with more ease & quiet” and surrounded by useful “philosophical amusement.”81 The notion of philosophical retirement must have seemed more attractive than ever to Colden in the 1750s. Scientific culture was gathering pace in the colonies. Moreover, while some eighteenth-century New Yorkers may have accepted the normalcy of political partisanship earlier than most other Britons, Colden remained firmly opposed to the idea of organized factions and interest politics. Through numerous letters and reports sent to London, he condemned the DeLanceyites as a secretive and mischievous cabal that sacrificed national interests and colonial security for private gain. Colden insisted that the opposition faction spread “Vile aspersions” about the governor that were dangerous and entirely unnecessary in a colony where appeals against the executive could be made to the King.82 He also claimed that the Delanceyites undermined Crown authority and rendered “his Majesty’s officers odious to the people.”83 Ironically, these reports only served to undermine Colden’s standing by inadvertently creating the impression in London that Clinton and his adviser had mismanaged the colony and created instability. Some ministers speculated—wrongly—that Colden might be secretly aiding the DeLanceyite opposition in reporting the “loss of the Kings authority.”84 This concern was all the more important because the British ministry began to adopt a more aggressive style of colonial management from around 1748. The Privy Council ordered the Board of Trade to prepare a formal assessment of New York in 1749. The resulting report, which took two years to produce, drew heavily on Colden’s letters to London and acknowledged the Assembly had encroached on the governor’s control of expenditures, nominations, salaries, and Indian and military affairs. It called—as Colden did—for stronger protection of Crown authority.85 The falling reputation of Clinton in London, combined with the continuing high standing of DeLancey, complicated Colden’s desired alignment with the British imperial administration. He was regarded in Whitehall as a controversial colonial who would likely cause a popular reaction and so destabilize New York affairs. Colden tried as best he could to use his scientific network to improve his reputation and position. When the office of deputy post master general of America, which carried a fixed salary, became

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available in 1751, he put himself forward and asked Collinson for assistance.86 He also attempted to get John Mitchell and Rutherfurd, both of whom were in Britain, to contact the Duke of Argyll and the Board of Trade on his behalf.87 Neither of these men were ideal choices; Rutherfurd had probably already criticized Colden in London, and Mitchell wanted the job for himself. Collinson proved more loyal and effective, but even he was simultaneously working to help Franklin secure the same office. Bearing a copy of The History of the Five Indian Nations, he approached Secretary of State Robert D’Arcy, fourth Earl of Holdernesse, in early 1752.88 Months later, Collinson sounded out George Montagu-Dunk, Earl of Halifax, the new president of the Board of Trade.89 Toward the end of 1752, the Board informed Clinton that Colden would not be allowed to take over the administration of New York on an interim basis should Clinton depart. The Board then instructed the governor to remain in office until a permanent replacement could be found.90 The following spring Halifax wrote Colden directly, reassuring him that he had not been slighted because of any “disapprobation of [his] Character” and noting that the idea of suspending DeLancey had been rejected in London because it was “judged impolitic and unsafe.”91 Although it was not the reply he wanted, the New York councilor took heart from the fact that the Board president had written to him.92 Colden adjusted his sights and tried once again to secure a salary as surveyor general.93 On at least two occasions, Collinson personally visited Halifax to press his case, but these efforts did not meet with immediate success. The king’s ministers considered that the quit rents were insufficient to sustain a salary and that the colonial official profited enough through his fees.94 Clinton, who had wanted to return to England for some time, finally got permission to leave New York in 1753.95 His successor, Sir Danvers Osborne, landed that year on 7 October with instructions to roll back Assembly encroachments and strengthen Crown prerogative.96 Osborne met with and apparently asked Colden to remain in the city for a few days so that they could discuss “some affairs of Consequence.” One wonders what might have happened had the newly arrived administrator not hanged himself from a garden fence on 12 October, just two days after his inauguration.97 Colden may have mulled over the same question as he bore Osborne’s casket to its burial or as DeLancey took over the administration. Almost simultaneously, he heard the disappointing news that his old correspondent Franklin had

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beaten him to the office of postmaster of America.98 Despite these setbacks, Colden continued to defend his name.99 Further, through Collinson, he attempted to get his youngest son, David, a government position.100 The threat of another Anglo-French war forced Colden to focus on military as well as political issues in the mid-1750s. After Indian raids occurred just miles from Coldengham, he gave serious thought to the state of New York’s frontier defenses. By the time a new governor, Sir Charles Hardy, arrived in 1755, Colden had drawn up a scheme to construct a line of blockhouses, or small forts, to improve frontier security.101 In mid-1756, he reported to the governor that farmers in Ulster and Orange Counties were struggling to meet the demands of “constant military duty.”102 Around that time, two men were killed in an Indian attack less than twenty miles from his home. Even though Hardy dispatched troops to the frontiers shortly before he departed as governor in May 1757, Ulster County remained an unsafe place to live.103 Urged by his adult children to move, Colden relocated with his wife to Flushing, Long Island, where he constructed a new home, Spring Hill, and expected to enjoy a few final years of philosophical retirement.104 This new retreat kept him at some distance from New York’s partisanship—but not for long. Personal ambition, a sense of duty, and unexpected events would once again pull Colden back to Manhattan and the sort of politics that he ideologically opposed.

Chapter 8

Colden’s Ordeal

New York City became a vibrant cultural center bursting with provincial pride in the 1750s and 1760s. An English company brought professional theater to the town in March 1750 with a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III. The following year a team of “New Yorkers” beat a team of “Londoners” in a two-inning cricket match on the local commons. A touring troupe of London comedians entertained Manhattanites in 1753. The impressive brick Royal Exchange building, completed in 1754, hosted concerts, balls, and other entertainments. King’s College (now Columbia) and the New York Society Library were founded in 1754. Additional playhouses were constructed in 1758, 1761, and 1767. The production of newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides expanded rapidly, especially during the election years of 1750, 1759, 1761, 1768, and 1769. New York’s first magazine, the Independent Reflector, appeared in 1752. The taverns of Manhattan—which numbered 282 in 1766 and 396 by 1773—provided new sites for committees, clubs, and societies, as well as a place for the “polite Beaux” to down their ale and slur their toasts. The best way to make friends in New York, according

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to one contemporary visitor to Manhattan, was to “drink stoutly” and “pour down seas of liquor.”1 Amid this environment, a tight-knit and high-minded cohort of young, educated Manhattanites assumed cultural and political leadership of the entire colony of New York during the last quarter century of British rule. Like Colden, these learned elites asserted the benefits of enlightened and useful knowledge. Yet, they were more embedded in local associations and institutions. Whereas previous New York intellectuals had looked keenly to London and the authority of the King, this new generation concentrated on building local cultural institutions and stirring vigorous public debate among colonials. Colden warned that these efforts would create disorder and ultimately lead to the destruction of enlightened and moderate imperial government. He died in 1776 as the onset of the American Revolution appeared to confirm the accuracy of his assessment. American-born, Yale-educated Presbyterians provided the core of New York’s second generation of eighteenth-century literati. Lawyers benefiting from mid-century reforms that gave greater stability and legitimacy to the provincial legal profession numbered heavily among the group.2 William Smith Jr. and William Livingston—two close friends, fellow Yale alumni, and law partners—were at the head. Livingston’s neo-Stoic poem, Philosophic Solitude, or the Choice of a Rural Life, published in New York in 1747, the year before he was admitted to the bar, was a precocious statement of intellectual prowess. In 1749, under the pen name of “Hippocrates Mithridate, Apothecary,” he authored a pamphlet on New York’s proposed university. Livingston then joined with Smith to produce some of New York’s most important mid-century publications, including a coedited compilation of New York laws issued in 1752, the same year in which Livingston organized the Independent Reflector. Livingston additionally authored A Review of the Military Operations in North America, an anonymous defense of recent British war efforts that was published in London and Dublin in 1757. Smith rounded off a highly impressive and productive decade of scholarship when he published a large and important history of New York in the same year.3 Livingston, Smith, and their circle emerged as a powerful cultural force in a colony renowned for privileging commerce over refinement. “Ignorance, horrid Ignorance! Reigns in every Act, Trade, Business and Character,” ranted one local newspaper in 1749, not long after Colden had been mocked

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in the local press for his intellectual pretentiousness. Smith emphasized the cultural crudeness of earlier New Yorkers in his History of the Province of New-York by naming the Cambridge-educated lieutenant governor James DeLancey as the only senior intellectual in the colony in 1757. (The oversight of Colden was presumably a deliberate slight.) Smith went on to identify himself as one of thirteen “academics” in “the morning of life” who were bringing new refinement to the colony.4 Livingston was an obvious other. The remaining eleven included three of Livingston’s brothers, as well as his brother-in-law, Hendrick Hansen. All of these figures had attended Yale, as had five others: Caleb Smith, William Peartree Smith, Benjamin Woolsey, and Samuel Johnson’s step-sons, William Nicoll and Benjamin Nicoll.5 So of the thirteen, only John McEvers Jr., a New York City attorney, and John Van Horne, probably a Harvard graduate, lacked a Yale background.6 This fresh-faced, ambitious, and sober intelligentsia appeared in New York City while Colden was perfecting his theories of active matter at Coldengham. In February 1749, a local newspaper noted the organization of a secret society of “twelve or fourteen” philosophers who opposed the debauchery and licentiousness of the other “Weekly Clubs, and Societies.” The group, which apparently met weekly “in a private Apartment,” included musicians and physicians, as well as a single “Mechanick.” It experimented with innumerable “Instruments, Philosophical, Mechanical, Optical, and Astronomical,” and pursued truths in “all the branches of natural Philosophy.” This announcement appeared shortly after a heated public exchange on drink and politeness had taken place in the New York press.7 It is reasonable to assume that the philosophical gathering included many, if not all, of the thirteen academics named in Smith’s History. John Bard, a physician who presented a paper on medicine to one meeting of a “Weekly Society of Gentlemen in New-York” in January 1749, probably also took part.8 Anthony Lamb, New York’s first mathematical instrument maker, may have been the society’s mechanic.9 Livingston was almost certainly involved because he informed an old Yale friend in January 1750 that he was a member of “a Society for improving themselves in useful Knowledge.”10 New York’s bumper-drinkers had a good laugh at the priggish intellectuals. Within a fortnight of the original announcement, a letter appeared in the New York press mocking “the Sage Philosophers” who met as a “great and important Society.”11 William Peartree Smith, a cousin of William Smith, published a reply in March 1749, which simply provoked another

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satirical letter. Addressed to “Mr. S―th Clerk and Tachygraphist of a Society, said to be instituted for the Promotion of useful Knowledge,” it quoted lines from “that Insipid, Studied Poem, you had the Vanity to tack you[r] Name to,” a reference to the preface Peartree Smith had added to Livingston’s Philosophic Solitude.12 The attack on the “sage philosophers” echoed the earlier ridicule of Colden. It drew its humor from a popular suspicion of genteel intellect, and perhaps also from some popular resentment toward the increasing refinement of a rowdy port town. The young New York intellectuals were at the forefront of that cultural change by the 1750s, and played an important role in the expansion of local print culture. They began by producing a magazine modeled on London’s influential early eighteenth-century journal, The Spectator, which Joseph Addison and Richard Steele issued between 1711 and 1714. Livingston informed a close Connecticut friend in 1749 that he, Smith, Peartree Smith, and another lawyer, John Morin Scott, planned to publish “weekly Essays as soon as possible.”13 It took another three years for that project to come to fruition. The first edition of the Independent Reflector appeared in November 1752. By promising to expose public corruption and vice without “the Use of rude and virulent Expressions,” this magazine offered a forum for critical public debate on pressing political issues, even if it simultaneously limited popular participation by insisting on a high degree of politeness and polish. Early issues condemning abuses of taxation, road regulation, and local policing stirred little controversy. Things changed when the sixth issue attacked the intolerance of Protestant ministers toward other sects, specifically the Moravians. New York’s Episcopalians mounted a swift and forceful response against the “Reflectors,” setting the stage for a heated political battle over the founding of a university in New York City that helped to accelerate the politicization of the local print culture.14 Episcopalianism was a rising cultural and political force in mideighteenth-century New York. A majority of the colony’s French Huguenots, including James DeLancey, had switched to the Anglican Church by the 1730s. Many members of the Dutch Reformed Church made a similar transition by the 1740s.15 Trinity Church could no longer accommodate the growing Anglican community, so another church was built. St. George’s chapel was completed and consecrated in 1752. In confident mood, New York’s Anglicans looked to found a university they could call their own. Harvard, Yale, and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) were either

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Congregationalist or Presbyterian institutions. The College of Pennsylvania was for all intents and purposes nondenominational. The College of William and Mary was Anglican, but far to the south. When a series of public lotteries was held in New York to raise funds to support a university, Anglicans pushed hard to create an Episcopalian establishment founded by royal charter and capable of countering the republican tendencies of New England, as well as the enthusiasm earlier spread by the revivals known as the Great Awakening. They had influence in the Assembly; by one contemporary assessment, the House was filled entirely with Episcopalians, except for “two Presbyterians and two or three corrupted Dutchmen and one English.”16 Just as significantly, seven of the ten trustees appointed to organize the new college were Anglican. Furthermore, in 1752, New York’s Trinity Church donated land for the university. The Reflectors opposed the creation of a sectarian university. It was rumored that James Alexander was the “father” in charge of the protests, but in reality Livingston led the movement.17 In six issues of the Independent Reflector, and with more polemic than politeness, he warned that bigoted churchmen were taking over the college and called for a nonsectarian university chartered by the provincial Assembly, not the Crown. Livingston’s writings sparked a heated and extensive paper war. The Reverend William Smith (a recently arrived Scottish Episcopalian unrelated to the New York Smiths) published a response. Samuel Johnson also took a central role in the dispute, initially as an adviser to the New York Anglicans, and later as the first president of the new university, King’s College. He complained to the Archbishop of Canterbury in June 1753 that the “Reflectors . . . endeavor to spirit up the people against us and to make it a sort of free thinking latitudinarian seminary.”18 Anglican pressure shut down the Independent Reflection, but the Reflectors simply created another mouthpiece for their views, the Occasional Reverberator (1753). A series of “Watch-Tower” articles published in the New-York Mercury (1754–1755) additionally espoused the position of the Reflectors, while Anglican arguments appeared in the NewYork Mercury and in a short-lived periodical, John Englishman: In Defence of the English Constitution (1755). The whole controversy came to an end when the Assembly agreed to a compromise by which only half of the available lottery funds were granted to the college. Colden played no significant role in the King’s College dispute. Although he had earlier proposed a university at Newburgh, he showed little interest

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in the organization of a college on Manhattan. As a result, his serious interaction with the “sage philosophers” only began in 1759 when he read Smith’s History and took great offense. Before that point, Colden could legitimately claim to be the outstanding expert on New York history. The very appearance of Smith’s book therefore undermined his status. Even worse, it seemed to make a targeted attack on Colden by recounting how, in the late 1730s, a Scottish captain, Laughlin Campbell, attempted to settle around five hundred Highland Scots on land in Albany County granted to him by Governor Cosby. In the judgment of Smith, Campbell was prevented from obtaining the land by the “sordid views of some persons in power, who aimed at a share in the intended grant.”19 Understandably, this line incensed the man who had served as New York’s surveyor general at the time of the Campbell grant. Colden wrote Smith that it was an “absolutely false & an egregeous calumny of the persons, who at that time had the administration of Government in their hands.” He complained that the accusation had occasioned a “discourse in town” about his integrity.20 Additionally, he insisted that the Scottish immigrants had simply decided they did not want to be Campbell’s tenants. When Smith refused to amend his account, Colden embarked on his own history of New York, which he sent in ten long letters to his son, Alexander. He included a revised account of the Campbell affair as well as a statement that Smith could not be trusted because of his “republican and independent principles.”21 New York’s two leading historians were now at loggerheads. For all their similar elitist and intellectualist outlooks, they were separated by religion, age, and personal ambition. Their battles would only escalate. The sudden death of James DeLancey brought Colden to power at the age of seventy-two. As the province’s most senior councilor, he automatically became New York’s interim leader in 1760. A few months later, he was formally appointed DeLancey’s successor as lieutenant governor. It was a great honor, but also one that came too late in life. Most of Colden’s generation of New York politicians had already gone the way of DeLancey: Lewis Morris Sr. in 1746; Adolph Philipse in 1750; James Alexander in 1756; John Rutherfurd at the Battle of Ticonderoga in 1758; and George Clarke in England in 1760. The new lieutenant governor therefore moved into Fort George with few friends and even fewer political allies. Moreover, he did so amid great personal trauma because his son John and daughter Jane passed away in 1750

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and 1760, respectively, and his wife, Alice, was seriously ill; Colden would lose both his wife and his daughter, Catherine, in 1762.22 Colden’s transition to lieutenant governor coincided with George III’s succession to the throne, which brought new Crown instructions, an election, and a different political era to New York.23 For the first time in over a decade, neither the DeLanceyites nor the Anglicans had a strong hold on the Assembly. An uncertain period of political realignment ensued, and a triumvirate of lawyers—Livingston, Smith, and John Morin Scott— emerged with considerable power.24 Colden saw them as a group of conspiring and destabilizing republicans. He referred to them as a “new set of Men” who “make use of every artifice they can invent to calumniate the administration in every Exercise of the Prerogative.”25 Surely, he also had them in mind when he wrote a 1765 report that separated New Yorkers into the “different Ranks” of landowners, lawyers and judges, merchants, and the “bulk of the People.” In Colden’s opinion, the lawyers, with a “Priestly Lust of Power” and family connections to the largest landowners, had seized control the province.26 Colden determined that the lawyers were antithetical to enlightened government. “It is not to be expected that any reformation can come from lawyers,” he remarked at one point. After all, lawyers operate out of self-interest rather than from a reasoned pursuit of useful knowledge. They convince society that it is “necessary to study several years in the inns of court, and to have 2 or 300 books” in order to know justice. By defending any “rogue” or “villain” with money, lawyers seek “knowingly to pervert or at least to delay justice, in favour of the rogue, and to the prejudice of the innocent.” A lawyer, then, is “a sort of licensed pickpocket.”27 A battle over judges’ commissions fueled Colden’s opinion. In eighteenthcentury England, judges were appointed “during good behavior,” a custom that effectively made the judiciary independent of the crown. By contrast, colonial judges were often appointed under the less secure terms of “at the king’s pleasure.” DeLancey was an obvious exception, but Colden refused to appoint the deceased chief justice’s successor “during good behavior” because to do so would go against the king’s instructions. Although there is some evidence that the new lieutenant governor tried without success to convince William Smith Sr. to hold the chief justice’s post “at the king’s pleasure,” he soon decided it was best to keep the seat vacant and let the British ministry sort out the problem.28

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The death of King George II complicated that plan by bringing the commissions of the three remaining supreme court judges into question. These judges had also been appointed during good behavior and unsurprisingly refused to renew their commissions on any other terms.29 Colden maintained that he could not ignore Crown orders. Amid this standoff, and with New York’s legal system grinding to a halt, he managed to convince a Massachusetts lawyer, Benjamin Pratt, to become New York’s chief justice under the less secure terms of “at the king’s pleasure.” Unfortunately, Pratt lacked legitimacy as the lieutenant governor’s placeman and did not last long. “Insulted, abused, and lampooned” in the press, and unpaid by the Assembly, he returned to his native Boston within six months.30 The triumvirate of Livingston, Smith, and Scott orchestrated much of the political and popular opposition to Colden and his short-lived chief justice. Smith, for instance, ushered a bill through the Assembly that permitted salaries for supreme court judges appointed during good behavior, sending a clear message that the Assembly wanted judges appointed in that way.31 Smith also established himself as the chief adviser of Governor Robert Monckton, who landed in New York in the autumn of 1761, but remained less than a month before sailing off to lead an assault on the French island of Martinique. During that brief stay, Monckton found enough time to criticize Colden before the Council for not renewing the judge’s commissions during good behavior. On Smith’s advice, he also laid claim to one half of the lieutenant governor’s salary and perquisites for the period of the Martinique expedition.32 Colden fought back by delivering an attack on the legal profession before the Assembly in November 1761, but then found his income restricted when the House resolved to set fees for all government officials, including the surveyor general.33 Hit in the pocket in this way, the lieutenant governor relented and signed a bill that provided salaries only to judges appointed during good behavior.34 He was later censured in Whitehall for making judges’ salaries “dependent on a condition expressly contrary to Your Majesty’s instruction.”35 Put simply, Colden was caught in an impossible position. In a further politicization of local print culture, New York politicians used the press to apply popular as well as political pressure on the lieutenant governor. In 1762 Colden’s opponents set up a newspaper, the American Chronicle, with the specific intention of tarnishing his reputation. The first issue described a bad ruler paid “infinitely beyond his Deserts,” “intoxicated

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with the Grandeur of his Elevation,” and “brooding over some dirty Project to fill his Purse.”36 A later article on “luxury and extravagance” that bemoaned the absence in New York of judges appointed on a “constitutional Basis” complained with a firm understanding of Colden’s rhetoric that “this would doubtless be deemed by some an Encroachment on Prerogative; and to favour of Anti-monarchical and Republic Principles.”37 Elsewhere, the same newspaper made fun of the lieutenant governor’s lack of height (“To raise a mean Fellow to an exalted Station, is acting like a Statuary, who places a little image on a huge Base”). After Colden granted permission for a new theater to be built in New York in 1761, it requested that “sixteen Play-houses, and half that Number of Masquerades” be erected at public expense in order to divert the populace. The only plays excepted were The Drummer and The Mock-Doctor. These were actual dramas performed in New York in the 1750s, but they also conveniently conjured an image of Colden as a quack, and it is surely little coincidence that an effigy of the lieutenant governor dressed a Jacobite drummer was burned during the Stamp Act riots of 1765.38 Colden’s intellectual ambitions were by now well-established targets for ridicule. “Those who understand the Doctrine of Action and Reaction, ought to be particularly cautious of injuring others,” one American Chronicle article warned in April 1762. The same edition stated, “Some modern Politicians are like the old Philosophers: They silence the Clamours of the people with secret Instructions, as the others did the Inquiries of their Disciples with occult Qualities.”39 Two weeks earlier, the newspaper had advertised a supposed pamphlet, “A Dissertation on Political Empiricism,” that explained why it was sometimes best not to follow John Locke’s “antiquated Rule of Speech” that “we ought always to use our Words as the Signs of our Internal Conceptions.” Rather, under certain conditions, it was “absolutely necessary to excite in the Mind of the Hearer, very different Ideas from those in the Mind of the Speaker.”40 These satirical writings cast their target as a conceited demagogue and put him on the wrong side of enlightened thought by aligning him with “old Philosophers” and against Locke. The American Chronicle played up its own enlightenment credentials by asserting that it was the true voice of New York public opinion and an organ of free speech. Repeating an image used by Joseph Addison in the Guardian, the successor to the Spectator, it asked contributors to drop their papers into the open mouth of a lion statue which it reassured would “Roar at no

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honest Man whatsoever.” 41 In subsequent issues, the newspaper included letters under the header, “From the Lion’s Mouth,” and took the liberty of the press, the “roar” of the people, as his defining cause. “I think Roaring for sufficient Reasons, is the undoubted Prerogative of all LIONS,” proclaimed one piece.42 Colden considered the American Chronicle to be an inflammatory and partisan rag—the very opposite of moderation, politeness, restraint, and enlightenment. He reported to the Board of Trade that the newspaper attempted “to impress on the Minds of the People, Calumnies so absolutely false and dangerous to the Peace of the Province that the Authors were they not affraid of punishment appear capable of any villany that may serve their purpose.”43 Later he reflected how the “Domination” of his opponents was “founded on the same Principles and carried on by the same wicked artifices that the Domination of Priests formerly was in the times of ignorance in the papeish Countries.” He once again denounced the actions of lawyers, remarking that “nothing is too wicked for them to attempt which serves their purposes—the Press is to them what the Pulpit was in times of Popery.”44 After issuing an outburst of harsh attacks on the lieutenant governor, the American Chronicle came to an abrupt end. Formed during the dispute over the judges’ commissions, it lost its main purpose when a Crown mandate that judicial commissions should only be awarded at the king’s pleasure arrived in New York in 1762. Two supreme court judges agreed to accept appointments on these terms. The other declined to accept any commission “on account of his age & Infirmities.”45 Colden gloated that the judges’ compliance greatly defeated “the designs of the Authors of the American Chronicle.” 46 Even so, the newspaper would probably have continued had not a suspicious fire (all the more suspicion after the events of 1741) destroyed its editor’s printing house. Only one issue appeared after that incident. It offered a reward of fifty guineas for the conviction of the “dastardly Incendiary,” but no arsonist was ever caught.47 Colden meanwhile wallowed in what he considered to be a triumph of reason and moderation over poisonous partisanship. He reassured the Board of Trade in June 1762 that “the minds of the people are as much at ease, & the Province in as great tranquility, as ever it was at any time.”48 The following year, an entirely different sort of violence broke out in the form of a street brawl between two merchants, Waddel Cunningham and

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Thomas Forsey, during which Cunningham viciously stabbed his opponent with a concealed sword. Forsey brought a suit against his assailant, and a jury in New York’s Supreme Court awarded him £1,500 plus costs in damages. But Cunningham refused to pay up and instead asked the lieutenant governor and Council to hear his appeal.49 Livingston and Smith, who represented Forsey, denounced this request as a threat to the integrity of jury trials in the province. They urged New York’s bench and bar to oppose the appeal.50 Colden ignored the objections of Livingston and Smith, as well as the advice of his Council and attorney general, and, on the basis of a Crown instruction to Governor Monckton, he issued writs staying supreme court proceedings in the Cunningham case. In addition, he demanded the trial records from Chief Justice Daniel Horsmanden, who refused to comply.51 The affronted lieutenant governor now went to the Council and railed against the common law courts of New York for their “many iniquitous or false Verdicts.” He declared the king “the Fountain of Justice” and insisted the Crown had the right to set up and define courts in New York as it pleased. Without the possibility of an appeal to the king, Colden furiously proclaimed, false verdicts would only be overturned at the “will & pleasure” of local judges.52 This outburst stunned the Council and provoked an unforeseen response: the councilors unanimously refused Cunningham’s appeal to the Crown.53 The challenge of New York’s legal profession left Colden politically isolated but also invigorated. He had a clear enemy in the lawyers and a driving mission to end interest politics, dissent, and popular mobilization. “I meet with the greatest opposition in the affair of appeals,” the lieutenant governor informed one correspondent in January 1765, “but . . . nothing shall deter me from using my best endeavours to effect it.”54 Lawyers and judges, he informed the Board of Trade, were “deluding the People with false & imaginary Jealousies.”55 Elsewhere, he noted that the judges “refuse an appeal to the King & at the same time appeal to the People.”56 Colden’s opponents attacked their rival as a tyrant intent on undermining British rights and liberties. Skilled in using provincial print culture to their advantage, they published Horsmanden’s November 1764 speech against Cunningham’s appeal, along with a preface by John Morin Scott that branded Colden’s actions “unconstitutional and illegal” and “alarming to every British Subject.”57 A series of articles published in a local newspaper under the title of “Sentinel” repeated this charge. These publications, as

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Colden later acknowledged, turned “the Edge of the popular Fury against the Person of the Lieutenant Governor, which before that Time they had not been able to do.”58 The lieutenant governor had not anticipated that the articles would have this crucial impact. He initially trusted the “Sentinel” would go the same way as the American Chronicle. The lawyers have “sunk their own Reputation” by behaving in this manner, Colden proclaimed confidently in April 1765.59 Perhaps he was complacent. Or perhaps there was nothing else for him to say or do. When he considered prosecuting the publisher of the “Sentinel,” the Council advised this action might provoke a popular backlash.60 Not wanting to publish a response in the press and risk inciting further public dissension, his only option was to put on a brave face, complain about the lawyers in his correspondence, and hold out for a resolution from London. In October 1765, Colden received the good news that a Crown order had permitted Cunningham’s appeal. The lawyers were defeated and the Council quickly fell in line. Colden issued a new writ instructing the Supreme Court to provide the Forsey v. Cunningham trial records. Still, in what amounted to a bold defiance of the king’s instructions by the man who had built up his reputation by prosecuting the 1741 conspiracy trials, Chief Justice Horsmanden refused to comply, and so once again brought Cunningham’s appeal to a halt. The legal profession and the lieutenant governor were at a stalemate. The controversy had battered and bruised Colden’s colonial standing and ridiculed imperial authority shortly before a resented parliamentary act was due to take effect. A tax on colonial commercial and legal documents, as well as newspapers and other publications, the Stamp Act was unpopular across British America. It ordered the regular use of paper imported from London and embossed with a royal stamp. Colonials were expected to purchase this stamped paper from local distributors. However, when fear of popular retribution caused the New York distributor to resign from office, the task of implementing the Stamp Act in New York fell on the lieutenant governor.61 Colden had no substantial plan of action. He simply hoped that a new governor would arrive in the colony before the 1 November deadline. Thus, in good neo-Stoic fashion, he looked to escape a tough political situation and return to his books. Meanwhile, he complained to other imperial officials of the “many inflammatory Papers” designed “to excite Sedition.”62 With three lawyers in

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mind, he informed Lieutenant-General Jeffery Amherst in October 1765 that “no man in this Place doubts who the authors are.”63 This readiness to see conspiracy, sedition, and faction behind every action of his rivals blinded Colden to the extent of popular discontent in 1765. Resistance to the Stamp Act did not begin or end with the triumvirate of Livingston, Smith, and Scott. Indeed, the Constitutional Courant, which Colden recognized as the “most remarkable” of the opposition papers, had nothing to do with these three men. “Printed by Andrew Marvel, at the sign of the Bribe Refused, or Constitutional Hill, North America,” it appeared as a single issue dated 21 September 1765 with the striking picture of a snake divided into eight pieces (an emblem devised by Franklin to represent the divided colonies) at its masthead along with the motto “join or die.” The Constitutional Courant originated in New Jersey but spread throughout the colonies when it was reprinted in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia. In October 1765, Colden reported to Franklin, who was by then the deputy postmaster of North America, and Secretary of State Henry Seymour Conway that post riders distributed the broadside around the country.64 The lieutenant governor incorrectly suspected that James Parker (the publisher of his own Explication who had since relocated to New Jersey) was responsible. He considered prosecuting Parker, but understood the practical difficulty of putting on trial a printer supported by the New York bench and bar. The “only method . . . to prevent mischief,” Colden decided around this time, was “to have such a Military force present as may effectually discourage all opposition to the Laws.” He added in a letter to Major General Thomas Gage, commander of the British forces, that “a weak force which the Seditious can have any hopes of overcoming, may be productive of great mischief.”65 A merchant ship carrying stamped papers sailed into New York harbor on 23 October. A raucous crowd of two thousand spectators heckled its arrival.66 With the Edward anchored under the guns of Fort George, and no official distributor to take charge of the paper, everyone waited on Colden’s orders. The lieutenant governor had a delicate choice to make. Allowing the Edward to unload risked a riot, but not to do so would dismay merchants with goods onboard. After some deliberation, he ordered the stamped papers to be moved into the fort where he resided. Seven boxes were removed from the ship. A further three boxes remained behind, buried too deep in the hold to be easily taken out. With the stamped paper now in its midst,

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New York City verged on revolt. Printed and scribal broadsides circulated around town. Colden reported that threatening papers were “posted up on the Doors of every public office.” He blamed the lawyers, of course. As “infamous scurrilous Papers” rendered him “Odious in the Eyes of the People,” he recommended that some “proper Judges” be sent from England to curb the “Seditious spirit” raised in New York.67 Fort George was now the focal point of menacing popular discontent. It became even more so after Colden allowed a fleeing Maryland stamp distributor and stamped paper from Connecticut and New Jersey to be sheltered within its walls.68 New York’s quasi-status as the military and administrative capital of British North America had made the city the frontline of a mounting imperial crisis. But could Fort George withstand a mob attack? To make sure, reinforcements of men and ammunition had been added after a military engineer examined the fort’s defenses in early September. Perhaps thinking back to 1741, Colden decided that this strengthening was necessary to prevent against an attack “from a Mob, or from the Negroes.”69 He even took the extra precaution of advising Captain Archibald Kennedy to arrange naval vessels in the harbor to protect the fort and, if necessary, bombard the city (figure 8).70 New York was primed for violence. With the Stamp Act due to go into effect on the following day, over two hundred merchants met at Burns’ Tavern on the last October afternoon and agreed to boycott imports until the Stamp Act was repealed. Outside, crowds gathered and rumor spread that a mob planned to attack the fort and bury its commandant alive. Colden sought help from the city’s mayor and magistrates, but was simply told to ready for a riot.71 When 1 November came, the lieutenant governor received a note that read, “You’ll die a Martyr to your own Villainy, & be Hang’d like Porteis [Porteous], upon a Sign-Post, as a Memento to all wicked Governors.”72 He had no reason to doubt the warning and reinforced Fort George with British seamen.73 His son, Alexander, placed his wife and children on board one of the naval ships in the harbor before loyally joining his own parent in the fort. Father and son sheltered together and waited for nightfall.74 Church bells rang across the city as the sky darkened. A mob of around two thousand marched on the fort carrying a portable gallows, as well as effigies of the devil and Colden dressed up as a Jacobite. When the crowd failed to break into the fort, it turned on a neighboring coach house, from where it stole the lieutenant governor’s prized chariot, before moving on to

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Figure 8. William Cockburn, The City of New York. A Perspective View across the North River, Showing the Positions of His Majesty’s Ships as they were stationed on the 1st Day of November 1765. Courtesy of the National Archives, London (MPI 1/168, extracted from ADM. 1/2012). According to this illustration, HMS Coventry (F) was positioned to protect the wharf and arsenal (E), HMS Garland (G) was ordered to “scour the street and defend the Fort gate,” and HMS Hawke (H) was “to preserve a Communication between his Majesty’s ships & the Fort by covering the landing boats at [I] the flat rock.” Colden spent the night of the Stamp Act riots sheltering in Fort George (A). His effigy and coach were burned on the bowling green (D).

the bowling green in front of the fort gates. Rioters climbed the fort walls, threw rocks, and baited soldiers to fire from the ramparts. They struck up a bonfire and set Colden’s effigy and coach alight.75 A short distance away, the fort’s commandant’s large townhouse and library of “three hundred choise Books” burned too.76 Colden survived that night and spent the following days in an understandable panic. He called an emergency session of the Council and explained that he had no instructions from London regarding the stamps. With the arrival of a new governor soon expected, the councilors recommended that the lieutenant governor announce he would leave the stamps alone and let the incoming executive take up the matter. Colden did exactly that.77 Nevertheless, the threat of bloodshed and disorder continued. An oyster shell left at the fort gate on 3 November contained ominous advice. “Evil is determined against you & your Adherents,” it warned Colden before urging him to renounce the Stamp Act under oath and stating, “Your Life may depend upon the Notice you take of this Advice.”78 Broadsides now appeared around the city calling for an assault on the fort. On 5 November, the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’s attempt to blow up Parliament, Colden predicted that “the Fort will

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be stormed this night.” He informed the master-general of the ordnance that “everything is done in my power to give them a warm reception.”79 The lieutenant governor’s reputation—and quite possibly his life—hung in the balance. Colden did not want any more violence and knew he had to get the stamped paper out of Fort George. Kennedy refused to store it on a naval ship in the harbor, perhaps fearing his personal property in the city might be attacked if he did so. Fortunately, the municipal government offered a way out by agreeing to keep the paper at City Hall.80 Still, Colden hesitated. Would not such a move concede defeat and “encourage perpetual mobish proceedings hereafter”?81 What other options were there? He considered “the effusion of Blood & the calamities of a civil War” that might result if he kept the stamped paper at the fort. Then, he relented. Out of desperation, he handed the embossed sheets over to the mayor and effectively gave the people control over this inflammatory imperial material.82 Manhattan was in “perfect tranquility” when Governor Sir Henry Moore stepped ashore on 13 November. At least, that is what Colden told the Board of Trade.83 Moore painted a different picture. He reported to London that the lieutenant governor was an irrational paranoid locked up in Fort George for no good reason. Moore brought a remarkable change of attitude. He embraced the people of New York by throwing open the gates to Fort George and allowing everyone in to hear the reading of his commission. Crowds accompanied the governor to City Hall and celebrated his arrival “with Bonfires and Illuminations throughout the whole City.”84 Unsurprisingly, Colden did not think much of the Governor’s effort “to ingratiate himself with the People.” He informed one correspondent in 1766 that Moore “openly caressed the Demagogues—Put on a Homespun Coat, the Badge of the Faction, & suffered the Mob to insult the officers of Government without interposing.”85 The lieutenant governor saw such gestures as pandering to people’s passions and wrote to the secretary of state that the “dependency or Independency of the Colonies is at its crisis” because Moore’s approach depreciated the status of the governor’s office, weakened the position of the Crown, and encouraged public sedition.86 Colden was not alone. The Stamp Act crisis shocked many propertied elites in New York and awoke fears of anarchy and instability. Ironically, it was the triumvirate of Livingston, Smith Jr., and Scott who led the calls for moderation and order. “It is now a question whether the Men who excited

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this seditious Spirit in the People, have it in their power to suppress it,” Colden noted in February 1766.87 In the meantime, the British Parliament pondered if the underlying problem was the lieutenant governor, who appeared to be “universally disliked” in New York.88 Colden struck back by writing a vindication of his administration. With the assistance of Peter Collinson, he printed 120 anonymous copies of The Conduct of Cadwallader Colden in London in 1767. The tract was not intended for sale, but rather for distribution among nobles and politicians in Britain.89 Once again, however, Colden was unable to control the spread of his publication. The Conduct of Cadwallader Colden was reprinted without identifying his authorship and without his authority in New York, where it caused considerable controversy.90 Two of Colden’s long-standing enemies, Assemblyman and Judge Robert R. Livingston and Chief Justice Daniel Horsmanden, cajoled the Supreme Court into declaring the work to be “a very vile infamous false and libellous reflection on his Majesties Council Assembly Courts of Justice and the whole body of the law in this Province.”91 A joint committee of the Assembly and Council organized by Livingston censured the anonymous pamphlet as a misrepresentation of actual events. It recommended that the author and publisher be discovered and punished. An investigation ensued until Livingston suffered electoral defeat in March 1768.92 Moore’s death in September 1769 thrust Colden back into the negotium of New York City. By that time, a popular party led by Captain James DeLancey, the son of the late Lieutenant Governor James DeLancey, controlled the Assembly. Fearing that he might otherwise call an election, the Assembly gave sizable support to Colden. The opposition party, led by several members of the Livingston family, sided with the radical Sons of Liberty to protest the Colden-DeLancey coalition.93 On 16 December 1769, Alexander McDougall, a Scottish captain and merchant, a member of the Sons of Liberty, and a long-standing ally of the Livingstons, published a pamphlet against the Assembly that also accused the lieutenant governor of collaborating with the DeLanceyites for personal gain. “Mr. Colden knows, from the Nature of Things, that he cannot have the least Prospect to be in Administration again,” McDougall wrote, “and therefore, that he may make hay while the Sun shines.”94 Colden and the Assembly prosecuted McDougall for libel, but only managed to turn the Scottish radical into a cause célèbre.95 Twice imprisoned, though never indicted, McDougall sat in jail for a total of 162 days. Crowds of supporters paid him visits. Livingston

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and Scott served as his lawyers, and the former published a series of “Watchman” articles defending both his client and free speech. The prosecution of McDougall not only kept up the popular resentment of the lieutenant governor, but also confirmed the inability of provincial executives to control New York public debate.96 William Livingston found another reason to satirize his political opponent in 1770. When Moore’s successor as governor of New York, John Murray, Lord Dunmore, sued Colden in the Chancery Court for a share of money he earned as interim governor, Livingston published a biting satire. A Soliloquy, which pretended to be the voice of the lieutenant governor, was in many ways a mocking version of The Conduct of Cadwallader Colden. It ridiculed its subject’s pretensions to scientific knowledge, while showing off Livingston’s own literary skill and intellect. A typical passage ran, Besides, if the Moon will get in Opposition to the Sun, she may depend upon being eclipsed: And this Contest of mine will probably be considered as our Meeting in the Nodes of the Ecliptic, upon which such Obscuration always ensues. ’Tis truly an intricate Point.97

Political tensions in New York temporarily eased after the ColdenDeLancey coalition dropped its prosecution of McDougall. In July 1774, Colden informed the British ministry that “the most considerable Merchts and Men of cool Tempers” had restored calm.98 Weeks later he wrote, “Men now speak & publish Sentiments, in favour of Government, and argue upon the political Subjects of the Times, with much greater freedom & security than has been known here for some years past.” Colden hoped that this change was a sign “that the licentious Spirit which has governed the People to their great Disgrace, is check’d—We have no more burning of Effigies, or putting cut throat Papers under Peoples Doors.”99 New Yorkers appeared to have embraced a less critical and more rational political discourse than they had known for some time. Perhaps there was hope for enlightened culture after all. The Battle of Lexington and Concord ended that optimism. Colden presented a New York printer with an account of the event by Major General Thomas Gage, but John Hancock and Samuel Adams suppressed its publication, and New Yorkers entered into what their lieutenant governor termed

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a “Time of Delusion.”100 After Myles Cooper, Samuel Johnson’s successor as president of King’s College, was driven out of the colony in May 1775 for publicly condemning resistance to the Crown, Colden remarked that “it must excite the most poignant sensations of Pain and anxiety . . . in every Breast where the Principles of Humanity and Common Sense are not obliterated by the Rage of political Enthusiasm to see a People thus calmly Determine to involve a Country in a dreadful War and Desolation.”101 In this sour mood, he withdrew one final time to his home in Flushing, Long Island. In the fall of 1776, twelve thousand British soldiers gathered on the meadows of Newton Creek a few miles away. On 15 September, they crossed the East River, landing at a deep-water cove, Kip’s Bay. They then took lower Manhattan. George Washington’s American army retreated to the north and held the high grounds of Harlem. With the war thus poised, Colden died on 20 September. The following morning, by accident or arson, fire erupted at the Manhattan docks. Fueled by strong, dry winds, the flames cracked and spread fast. New Yorkers ran panicked through cramped, smoke-filled streets. By night, a quarter of their town lay in ashes. In many accounts, the American Enlightenment is tied to the American Revolution. It is a teleological tale of unfolding liberty and equality. For Colden, though, the onset of revolution meant something else— chaos and disorder. From the time of his education at Edinburgh, the New York intellectual had thought hard about what the eighteenth century was and what it could be. He consistently hoped for an era in which new scientific knowledge steadily improved society and industry. Sadly, he found himself living at a time when self-interested groups spread enthusiasm, ignorance, and destruction. Colden died as he was born: amid a revolution. He was buried in the grounds of Spring Hill, now part of the Cedar Grove and Mount Hebron cemeteries in Queens, New York City. His house, built in 1761, stood until 1930. His grave lost its marker before the end of the nineteenth century.102 His historical reputation has fared just as poorly. He deserves better. For all of his flaws and limitations, Colden was an important champion of colonial intellect who helped to define the social and ideological contours of moderate, transatlantic enlightenment.

Abbreviations

Persons

AC BF CC GB JA JFG JL JM JR PC PK RH RW

Alice Colden Benjamin Franklin Cadwallader Colden George Berkeley James Alexander Johan Frederik Gronovius James Logan John Mitchell John Rutherfurd Peter Collinson Peter Kalm Robert Hunter Robert Whytt

170

SJ WB WD WK

Abbreviations

Samuel Johnson William Burnet William Douglass William Keith

Institutions

EUL HSP NYHS

University of Edinburgh Library Historical Society of Pennsylvania New-York Historical Society

Works

BFP CP

CLB CSP

DHNY DRCHNY

LMP ODNB PWCC

Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 41 vols. New Haven, CT, 1959–2014. The Letters and Papers of Cadwallader Colden. 9 vols. Collections of the New-York Historical Society, 1917–1923, 1934–1935. The Letter Books of Cadwallader Colden. 2 vols. Collections of the New-York Historical Society, 1876–1877. W. Noel Sainsbury et al., eds. Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series; America and West Indies. 45 vols. London, 1860–1994.  E. B. O’Callaghan, ed. The Documentary History of the State of New-York. 4 vols. Albany, NY, 1849–1851. E. B. O’Callaghan and Berthold Fernow, eds. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York. 15 vols. Albany, NY, 1853–1887. Eugene R. Sheridan, ed. The Papers of Lewis Morris. 3 vols. Newark, NJ, 1991–1993. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, ed. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford, 2004. Scott L. Pratt and John Ryder, eds. The Philosophical Writings of Cadwallader Colden. Amherst, 2002.

Abbreviations

SJP

US&PP WMQ

171

Herbert and Carol Schneider, eds. Samuel Johnson, President of King’s College: His Career and Writings, 4 vols. New York, 1929. Unpublished Scientific and Political Papers and Notes. Cadwallader Colden Papers. New-York Historical Society. The William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd ser., 1944–.

Notes

Introduction 1. CC to John Bartram, [1743], CP 3:25–27, quotes on 26. On Colden’s printing method, see “An Original Paper of the Late Lieut. Gov. Colden, on a New Method of Printing Discovered by Him,” American Medical and Philosophical Register (1811): 439–50; John  M. Dixon, “Between Script and Specie: Cadwallader Colden’s Printing Method and the Production of Permanent, Correct Knowledge,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8, no. 1 (2010): 75–93. 2. On scientific knowledge and enlightenment in British America, see Joyce  E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York, 2006), 22–25; James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); Sara Stidstone Gronim, Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York (New Brunswick, NJ, 2007). For a fuller assessment of the historiography of the Enlightenment and America, see John  M. Dixon, “Henry F. May and the Revival of the American Enlightenment: Problems and Possibilities for Intellectual and Social History,” WMQ 71, no. 2 (2014): 255–80.

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3. Robert Hunter, Androboros: A B[i]ographical Farce in Three Acts, viz. The Senate, the Consistory, and the Apotheosis (Monoropolis [New York], 1714); Gilbert Gigliotti, “The Vicious Cycle of Abundance and Want: An Edition and Translation of Louis Rou’s ‘A Prospect of Chess-Play and Chess-Players,’ ” Modern Language Studies 34 (2004): 8–15. 4. CC to JM, Coldengham, 7 November 1745, CP 8:328–38, quote on 337. See also CC to PC, [ca. 29 October 1745], US&PP, NYHS. This letter is undated except for Colden’s note that it was written “at the beginning of the winter.” The date of this letter can be further estimated because it replied to Peter Collinson’s 26 April 1745 letter to Colden, which arrived in New York on 29 August 1745 (see JA to CC, New York, 1 September 1745, CP 3:145–46, esp. 145), and also enclosed correspondence to Dutch botanist Johan Frederik Gronovius, dated 29 October 1745 (CC to JFG, 29 October 1745, American Journal of Science and Arts 44, no. 1 [1843]: 98–101). 5. An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation (London, 1746); Erklärung der ersten wirkenden Ursache in der Materie und der Ursache der Schwere, trans. Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (Hamburg, 1748); Explication des premières causes de l’action dans la matière et de la cause de la gravitation, trans. Dominique Castet (Paris, 1751). The French translator of Colden’s treatise, Dominique Castet, was the librarian of the Académie Royale des Sciences, Belles-lettres et Arts de Bordeaux.

1. Enlightened Age 1. Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London, 2007), 1; Simon Werrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History (Chicago, 2010), 85–91. 2. Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981); Barbara Shapiro, “Natural Philosophy and Political Periodisation: Interregnum, Restoration, and Revolution,” in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge, 2001), 299–327. On Sibbald, see John M. Cowan, “The History of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh,” Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 19 (1933–1938): 1–62; Roger L. Emerson, “Sir Robert Sibbald, Kt., the Royal Society of Scotland and the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Annals of Science 45, no. 1 (1988): 41–72; Roger L. Emerson, “Scottish Cultural Change 1660–1710 and the Union of 1707,” in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1995), 121–44; Charles W. J. Withers, “Geography, Science and National Identity in Early Modern Britain: The Case of Scotland and the Work of Sir Robert Sibbald (1641–1722),” Annals of Science 53, no. 1 (1996): 29–73; Charles  W.  J. Withers, Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland since 1520 (Cambridge, 2001), 70–84; Clare Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge, 2003), 27–31. 3. For an overview of the historiography of the Enlightenment, see Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, “Enlightenment Studies,” in Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan

Notes to Pages 12–13

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Charles Kors, 4 vols. (Oxford, 2003), 1:418–30. On the Moderate Enlightenment as a Newtonian, religious alternative to a radical, secular Enlightenment, see Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976); Margaret  C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, 2nd ed. (Morristown, NJ, 2003 [1981]); Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); David Jan Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008). 4. The literature on the intellectual relationship between the Scottish and American Enlightenments is now sizable. A classic but dated starting point is John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, “England’s Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America,” WMQ 11, no. 2 (1954): 200–13, which should be supplemented with Ned C. Landsman, “The Provinces and the Empire: Scotland, the American Colonies and the Development of British Provincial Identity,” in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (London, 1994), 258–87. See also Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten, Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton, 1990); Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth- Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago, 2006). On the importance of Scottish science to the development of the Scottish Enlightenment, see Roger L. Emerson, “Natural Philosophy and the Problem of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 242 (1986): 243–91; Withers, Geography, Science and National Identity. On the Scottish Enlightenment in general, see Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, 1945);  H.  R. Trevor-Roper, “The Scottish Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967), 1635–58; Nicholas T. Phillipson, “Towards a Definition of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in City and Society in the Eighteenth Century, ed. P. Fritz and D. Williams (Toronto, 1973), 125–47; Nicholas T. Phillipson, “Culture and Society in the Eighteenth-Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1974), 2:407–48; Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985); Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (1997; repr. Edinburgh, 2001), 185–99; Roger L. Emerson, “The Contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge, 2003); Roger L. Emerson, “What Is to Be Done about the Scottish Enlightenment?,” in Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment: “Industry, Knowledge and Humanity” (Farnham, 2009), 225–48; Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (New York, 2013), esp.  3–6; Colin Kidd, “The Phillipsonian Enlightenment,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 1 (2014): 175–90. 5. From the 1690s, Edinburgh students were taught that Newton usurped Descartes to usher in new era of knowledge; Christine Mary King Shepherd, “Philosophy and Science in the Arts Curriculum of the Scottish Universities in the 17th Century” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1974–1975), 74. 6. CC, “An Introduction to the Study of Phylosophy Wrote in America for the Use of a Young Gentleman,” ca. July 1760, US&PP, NYHS, and in American Philosophic

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Addresses, 1700–1900, ed. Joseph L. Blau (New York, 1946), 289–311, and PWCC, 37–56, quote on 53. For an undated draft of this essay, see CC, “An Introduction to the Study of Physics or Natural Philosophy for the use of Peter DeLancey the Younger,” US&PP, NYHS. 7. Daniel Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, 2006), 21–69, esp. 25–28. 8. Roger Ariew and Alan Gabbey, “The Scholastic Background,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth- Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1998), 425–53, esp. 429–32; Ann Blair, “Natural Philosophy,” in Park and Daston, Cambridge History of Science, 3:365–406, esp. 390; Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” 26–27; Steven Nadler, “Doctrines of Explanation in Late Scholasticism and in the Mechanical Philosophy,” in Garber and Ayers, Cambridge History of SeventeenthCentury Philosophy, 1:513–52. 9. Brian P. Copenhaver, “Aristotelianisms,” in The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, ed. Richard H. Popkin (New York, 1999), 280–92; Blair, “Natural Philosophy”; Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” 33–36. 10. Charles B. Schmitt, “Towards a Reassessment of Renaissance Aristotelianism,” History of Science 11 (1973): 159–93; Roger Ariew, “Aristotelianism in the Seventeenth Century,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig, vol. 1 (London, 1998), 386–93; Ariew and Gabbey, “Scholastic Background”; Copenhaver, “Aristotelianisms”; Blair, “Natural Philosophy,” esp. 371. 11. Margaret C. Jacob and Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1995), 4–5. 12. Peter Hans Reill, “The Legacy of the ‘Scientific Revolution’: Science and the Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4: Eighteenth- Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge, 2003), 23–43, esp. 25–26. 13. Jacob and Dobbs, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism, 13; Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes’ System of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 2002); Garber, “Physics and Foundations,” 47–52. 14. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge, 2002), 19–52, 166–68, 191–212, 213–49, quote on 248. See also Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton, 1970), esp. 3–16; Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1980), esp. 271, 308, 422, 505–6, 508–11, 644–48, 748–49, 794. 15. Discussions of Newton’s theories on light and color appeared in Scottish university lectures from the 1670s. Newtonian mechanics and astronomy were taught by the 1680s. See Christina M. Eagles, “David Gregory and Newtonian Science,” British Journal for the History of Science 10, no. 3 (1977): 216–25, esp. 223; Christine M. Shepherd, “Newtonianism in Scottish Universities in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner (Edinburgh, 1982), 65–85; Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities (Edinburgh, 2008), 545. 16. Eagles, “David Gregory and Newtonian Science”; Anita Guerrini, “The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne, and Their Circle,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 3

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(1986): 288–311; Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman, OK, 2000), 25–27; John Friesen, “Archibald Pitcairne, David Gregory and the Scottish Origins of English Tory Newtonianism, 1688–1715,” History of Science 41, no. 2 (2003): 163–91. 17. On the British preference for Newtonianism over Cartesianism, see J. L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1982), 26–35; G. A. J. Rogers, “Descartes and the English,” in The Light of Nature: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science Presented to A. C. Crombie, ed. J. D. North and J. J. Roche (Dordrecht, 1985), 281–302; John Gascoigne, “Ideas of Nature: Natural Philosophy,” in Porter, EighteenthCentury Science, 4:285–304. On Clarke, see Jacob and Dobbs, Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism, 96–98. On Le Clerc and his influence, see Rosalie L. Colie, Light and Enlightenment: A Study of the Cambridge Platonists and the Dutch Arminians (Cambridge, 1957), 31–35; Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment: Newtonian Science, Religion, and Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century, trans. Sue Brotherton (Amherst, 1995), esp.  66–71, 77–78, 101–4, 157–59; Margaret  C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (Oxford, 1997), 82–83. On Le Clerc’s relation to Scottish Newtonianism in particular, see Rienk Vermij, “The Formation of the Newtonian Philosophy: The Case of the Amsterdam Mathematical Amateurs,” British Journal for the History of Science 36, no. 2 (2003): 183–200. 18. For recent accounts of the Glorious Revolution, see Harris, Revolution; Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT, 2009). 19. Harris, Revolution, 376–78; Christopher A. Whatley, with Derek J. Patrick, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh, 2007), 40, 263. 20. Harris, Revolution, 379–409. 21. Act Ratifying the Confession of Faith and Settling Presbyterian Church Government in Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707 (http://www.rps.ac.uk /, ed. Keith M. Brown, et al., 1690/4/43). 22. Rosalind Mitchison, 2nd ed., A History of Scotland (London, 1982), 285. On the strength of Episcopalianism in post-Revolution Scotland, see Whatley, Scots and the Union, 40. 23. Richard B. Sher, “Professors of Virtue: The Social History of the Edinburgh Moral Philosophy Chair in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford, 1990), 87–126, esp. 89. On the Town Council’s administration and policing of the University of Edinburgh in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Shepherd, “Philosophy and Science in the Arts Curriculum,” 311–13; Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, 136–39; Roger L. Emerson, “The Founding of the Edinburgh Medical School,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 59, no. 2 (2004): 183–218, esp. 186; Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, 212–13, 226, 235–36. 24. Robert K. Hannay, “The Visitation of the College of Edinburgh in 1690,” The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club 8 (1916): 79–100; Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, 213–26. 25. Shepherd, “Philosophy and Science in the Arts Curriculum,” 305–6. 26. Newton, quoted in David B. Wilson, Seeking Nature’s Logic: Natural Philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment (University Park, PA, 2009), 34.

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Notes to Pages 18–20

27. For Robert Hunter’s views of Keill, see JL to PC, 2 August 1737, in Edwin Wolf 2nd, The Library of James Logan of Philadelphia, 1674–1751 (Philadelphia, 1974), 262–63, quotes on 263. See also John Henry, “John Keill (1671–1721),” ODNB. 28. John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), 145–49. 29. Paul Wood, “Science in the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Broadie, Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, 94–116; Emerson, “The Contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment,” 9–30, esp. 19; Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, 231–33. 30. On the history of these chairs, see Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, 211–363. For their legal patrons, see Roger L. Emerson, Professors, Patronage and Politics: The Aberdeen Universities in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen, 1992), 140–41. 31. Emerson, “Founding of the Edinburgh Medical School”; Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, 273–309. 32. First Laureation Album, EUL Special Collections, EUA IN1/ADS/STA/1/1. The signatures of Colden (class of 1705) and his father (class of 1675) appear on pages 62 and 81. For more on the 1705 class, see Andrew Dalzel, History of the University of Edinburgh From its Foundation, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1862), 2:291. 33. For contemporary accounts of the library and Common Hall, see Thomas Morer, A Short Account of Scotland (London, 1702), 77–83; Edmund Calamy, An Historical Account of My Own Life, with Some Reflections on the Times I Have Lived In (1671–1731), ed. John Towill Rutt, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London 1829–1830), 2:174–75. For descriptions of Edinburgh’s laureation ceremony, see Charles Morthland, An Account of the Government of the Church of Scotland, As It Is Established by Law; and of the Discipline and Worship Presently Practiced by That Church (London, 1708), 23–24; [Joshua Oldfield], “A Narrative of the Scotch Commencement,” in John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, Citizen of London, 2 vols. (London, 1818), 2:678–95. 34. William Law, Theses philosophicæ, quas Favente Numine, Generosi aliquot & ingenui juvenes, Universitatis Jacobi Regis Edinburgenæ alumni, hac vice cum laurea emittendi, Eruditorum Examini subjicient; ad 27 Diem Aprilis, H. Lq. S. (Edinburgh, 1705). 35. On Colden’s admission to the University of Edinburgh, see Alfred  R. Hoermann, Cadwallader Colden: A Figure of the American Enlightenment (Westport, CT, 2002), 76. 36. JL to RH, 23 January 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 160, Logan Family Papers, HSP, Philadelphia. For more information on Colden’s birthplace and background, see Edwin  R. Purple, “Notes, Biographical and Genealogical of the Colden Family, and of Some of its Collateral Branches in America,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 4, no. 4 (1873): 161–82; Saul Jarcho, “Biographical and Bibliographical Notes on Cadwallader Colden,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 32 (1958): 322–34, esp. 323–24. For brief biographies of Colden’s relations in the Presbyterian Church, see Hew Scott, Fasti Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ: The Succession of Ministers in the Church of Scotland from the Reformation, vol. 2: Synods of Merse and Teviotdale, Dumfries and Galloway (Edinburgh, 1917), 5, 9, 136.

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37. According to one local history, Rev. Colden was one of just two ministers “left to maintain the Presbyterian cause” in the border region at the end of the seventeenth century; James Tait, Two Centuries of Border Church Life (Kelso, 1889), 6. 38. CC to JM, 6 July 1749, CP 9:18–34, esp. 19. 39. Rev. Colden is identified as “one of those [Presbyterian ministers] obliged to leave Ireland in March, 1689, the troublous time of the Revolutionary wars” in Clarke H. Irwin, A History of Presbyterianism in Dublin and the South and West of Ireland (London, 1890), 239. According to one historian, Rev. Alexander Colden was among “the more eminent clergy of the Revolution Settlement”; John Hill Burton, History of Scotland: From the Revolution to the Extinction of the Last Jacobite Insurrection (1689–1748), 2 vols. (London, 1853), 1:251. 40. James Hardy, ed., The Session Book of Bunkle and Preston, 1665–1690 (Alnwick, 1900), xli–xlii; Scott, Fasti Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ, 2:4; David M. Bertie, Scottish Episcopal Clergy, 1689–2000 (Edinburgh, 2000), 106. 41. Scott, Fasti Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ, 2:5, 9, 136. 42. Thomas Boston, A General Account of My Life by Thomas Boston, A.M., Minister at Simprin, 1699–1707 and at Ettrick, 1707–1732, ed. George D. Low (London, 1908), 33n1. See also James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 14 June 1743, CP 8:145–46 at 145; the Borders Family History Society publication, Oxnam Monumental Inscriptions, transcribed by Elizabeth Leitch, Joanne Burns, and Davina Smart (Galashiels, n.d.), 71. 43. George Robson, An Elegy upon the Death of That Godly, Pious and Painful Minister, Mr. Alexander Colden, Late Minister of the Gospel at Oxname (Edinburgh, 1739). 44. Rev. Alexander Colden to Elizabeth Hill, Oxnam, Scotland, 15 February 1717, CP 8:27–29, quote on 28. 45. Fasti Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ states that Alexander Colden and Janet Colden had five children: Cadwallader, Ebenezer, William (who “died in America”), James, and Elizabeth (Scott, Fasti Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ, 2:136). This account may be incorrect. Although James and Elizabeth are well documented, there is no obvious record of William. Ebenezer was buried with his parents in Oxnam (Oxnam Monumental Inscriptions, 35). Cadwallader and James were the only Colden children to outlive their father according to Robson, Elegy upon the Death of . . . Mr. Alexander Colden, 23. 46. Boston, General Account of My Life, 64–65; Thomas Boston, Memoirs of the Life, Time, and Writings, of the Reverend and Learned Thomas Boston, A.M. (Edinburgh, 1776), 121. 47. Janet Colden to AC, Oxnam, Scotland, 5 February 1717, CP 8:19–20, esp. 20. 48. Emerson, Professors, Patronage and Politics, 5; John M. Simpson, “Ker, John, First Duke of Roxburghe (c. 1640–1741),” ODNB; Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, 7–8, 15–16n11. See also Alexander Murdoch, “The People Above”: Politics and Administration in Mid-Eighteenth- Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1980); John Stuart Shaw, The Management of Scottish Society, 1707–1764: Power, Nobles, Lawyers, Edinburgh Agents and English Influences (Edinburgh, 1983); John Stuart Shaw, The Political History of Eighteenth- Century Scotland (Basingstoke, 1999). 49. James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 3 December 1725, CP 8:101–7, esp. 103. 50. Chrystie became minister of Simprin, Berwickshire, in 1717. A few years later Roxburghe sparked violent protests by nominating Chrystie over the established

18 0

Notes to Pages 22–23

probationer for the Roxburghshire parish of Morebattle (James Chrystie to AC, Simprin, Scotland, 10 January 1724, CP 8:90–95; Scott, Fasti Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ, 2:81). 51. Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment, 22, 28–29, 59–60, 63, 74, 85. 52. CC to JM, 6 July 1749, CP 9:18–34, esp. 19. See also James A. Henretta, “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton, 1972), 131–33. On the younger brother, see Roger  L. Emerson, An Enlightened Duke: The Life of Archibald Campbell (1682–1761), Earl of Ilay, 3rd Duke of Argyll (Kilkerran, 2013). Also useful are Emerson, “The Scientific Interests of Archibald Campbell, 1st Earl of Ilay and 3rd Duke of Argyll (1682–1761),” Annals of Science 59, no. 1 (2002): 21–56; Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment; Emerson, “Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll (1682–1761): Patronage and the Creation of the Scottish Enlightenment,” in Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment, 21–38. 53. For an example of the interaction between the second Marquess of Lothian and the Colden family, see Rev. Alexander Colden to CC and AC, Oxnam, Scotland, 14 February 1717, CP 8:20–27, esp. 26. On Lothian, see Stuart Handley, “Kerr, William, Second Marquess of Lothian (bap. 1661, d. 1722),” ODNB. Colden also sought out the patronage of the third Marquess of Lothian in the 1730s; see Lewis Morris, Sr., to William Kerr, third Marquess of Lothian, London, 26 March 1735, CP 2:124–28. 54. James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 26 March 1742, CP 2:248–50, quotes on 249. See also Rev. Alexander Colden to CC, Oxnam, Scotland, 5 August 1732, CP 2:72–80, esp. 74. 55. After Colden’s father turned this post down, not wanting to leave Oxnam, he unsuccessfully tried to get Cranstoun to appoint James Chrystie, Colden’s brother-in-law (Rev.  Alexander Colden to CC, Oxnam, Scotland, 3  October 1721, CP 8:57–63, esp. 60–61). 56. Sir Alexander Grant, The Story of the University of Edinburgh during Its First Three Hundred Years, 2 vols. (London, 1884), 2:335–36; Sher, “Professors of Virtue,” 92–93. 57. CC, “Annotationes in Physicam Generalem D. Joannis Clerici a D. Guilielmo Law Dictatae et per me Cadwallader Colden Conscriptae Edinburgi 1705,” 1704/5, EUL, Gen 71D; Shepherd, “Philosophy and Science in the Arts Curriculum,” 220–22, 280–82. Colden’s notes summarized parts of Jean Le Clerc’s textbook, Physica sive de rebus corporeis libri quinque (London, 1696). For a useful point of comparison, see the 1675 theses defended by Colden’s father; William Paterson, Senatui Edinburgeno vere honorando D. Jacobo Currie . . . theses hasce philosophicas . . . Magisterii candidati . . . D.C.Q. (Edinburgh, 1675), EUL–Da.Th. 58. CC to SJ, 20 December 1752, sent with postscript dated 29 January 1753, SJP 2:299–301, esp. 301. Peter DeLancey’s tutor, the Reverend Samuel Johnson, went further by hoping that his bright student might become a bishop in America; SJ to CC, 19 February [1753], SJP 2:302–5, esp. 305. 59. Cadwallader Colden’s statement is recorded in James Colden to CC, Oxnam, Scotland, 15 February 1723, CP 8:71–76, quote on 73. It is interesting to note that two of James Colden’s sons became apprentices to Edinburgh shoemakers and cabinetmakers; James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 14 June 1743, CP 8:145–46. Another son showed a talent for mathematics; James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 26 March 1742, CP 2:248–50 at 249.

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60. James Colden to CC, Oxnam, Scotland, 22 September 1724, CP 8:97–99, quote on 98. Colden discusses his decision not to join the Scottish Church in his two main autobiographical statements; CC to PC, May 1742, CP 2:257–63, esp. 261; CC to PK, ca. January 1751, CP 4:258–61, esp. 258–59.

2. Pursuit of Gentility 1. T. M. Devine, The Scottish Nation, 1700–2000 (London, 1999), xix–xx; Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society, 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, Towards Industrialism (Manchester, 2000), 1, 18, 21–22. 2. On Scotland’s intellectual tradition, see Alexander Broadie, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh, 1990); David Allan, Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (Edinburgh, 1993); David Allan, Philosophy and Politics in Later Stuart Scotland: Neo-Stoicism, Culture and Ideology in an Age of Crisis, 1540–1690 (East Linton, 2000). 3. T. C. Smout, “The Road to Union,” in Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 1689– 1714, ed. Geoffrey Holmes (London, 1969), 176–96; T. M. Devine, The Tobacco Lords: A  Study of the Tobacco Merchants of Glasgow and Their Trading Activities, 1740–1790 (Edinburgh, 1975);  T.  M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire and the Shaping of the Americas, 1600–1815 (Washington, DC, 2003), 26–48; Christopher  A. Whatley, “Taking Stock: Scotland at the End of the Seventeenth Century,” in Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900, ed. T. C. Smout (Oxford, 2005), 103–25; Christopher A. Whatley, with Derek J. Patrick, The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh, 2007). For a useful historiographical survey, see Karin Bowie, “New Perspectives on Pre-Union Scotland,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History, ed. T. M. Devine and Jenny Wormald (Oxford, 2012), 303–19. 4. Arnulf Johannessen, Torderød gård og andre Chrystie hjem (Moss, NO, 1995). 5. James Chrystie to CC, Simprin, Scotland, 4  January 1718, CP 8:37–41, esp.  41; David Chrystie to CC, Kelso, Scotland, 15 January 1718, CP 8:42–45, esp. 42–43; David Chrystie to AC, Kelso, Scotland, 9 March 1719, CP 8:48–50, esp. 48. 6. Theodore M. Brown, “The College of Physicians and the Acceptance of Iatromechanism in England, 1665–1695,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44, no. 1 (1970): 12–30; Theodore M. Brown, The Mechanical Philosophy and the “Animal Oeconomy”: A Study in the Development of English Physiology in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Century (New York, 1981); Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, NY, 1986); Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2010), 214–15. 7. Hugh Graham to CC, London, 15 June 1719, CP 1:97–98, quote on 98. 8. Roger L. Emerson, “The Founding of the Edinburgh Medical School,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 59, no. 2 (2004): 183–218; Helen M. Dingwall, “A Famous and Flourishing Society”: The History of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 1505–2005 (Edinburgh, 2005); Anita Guerrini, “Alexander Monro Primus and the Moral Theatre of Anatomy,” The Eighteenth Century 47, no. 1 (2006): 1–18; Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and

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Notes to Pages 28–29

St. Andrews Universities (Edinburgh, 2008), 273–324; Roger L. Emerson, “The World in Which the Scottish Enlightenment Took Shape,” Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment: “Industry, Knowledge and Humanity” (Farnham, 2009), 1–20; Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 152. 9. CC to Hugh Graham, Philadelphia, October 1716, US&PP, NYHS, in Saul Jarcho, “The Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham on Infectious Fevers (1716–1719),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 30, no. 3 (1956): 195–212 on 204–6. 10. Quote from Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744 (Chapel Hill, 1948), 116. Douglass informed Colden that “an exact scrutiny” made in February 1722 found “Boston consisted of 10.565 souls, whereof about 6.000 have now had the small Pox and of these 844 dyd”; WD to CC, Boston, 1 May 1722, CP 1:141–44, quote on 142. 11. Douglass noted in 1722 that around 240 people had been inoculated in Boston; WD to CC, Boston, 25 July 1722, CP 1:144–45, esp. 145. 12. On the possibility that inoculated patients might have helped spread the disease, see Elaine G. Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America (New York, 2012), 32–33. 13. Douglass wrote Colden in May 1722 that “Your reasons against Inoculation of the small Pox are strong, and I return you thanks for the communication” (WD to CC, Boston, 1 May 1722, CP 1:141–44, quote on 141). Unfortunately, Colden’s preceding communication is lost. 14. WD to CC, Boston, 25  July 1722, CP 1:144–45, quote on 145. Colden maintained reservations about inoculation in the 1730s; see James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 27 April 1732, CP 2:63–65, esp. 63. For Colden’s later acceptance of inoculation as a practice, see CC to Elizabeth DeLancey, Coldengham, New York, 21  February 1753, Copy Book, 1737–1753: 303–8, Rosenbach Museum and Library (Ams 434/20), Philadelphia; CC to Dr. Bard, Flushen, Long Island, New York, 5 July 1758, CP 5:234–47. 15. On the Boston inoculation controversy, see Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, IL, 1970), 417–26, 435–42; Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York, 2006), 22–23; Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic, 27–36. 16. Iatromathematics was a medical system developed in the seventeenth century that sought to understand the workings of the human body as a set of mathematical rules. It can be thought of as a branch of iatromechanism, which analyzed the body as a machine. See Lester S. King, The Philosophy of Medicine: The Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1978), 95–124; Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 102, 105. 17. On the copying and sale of lecture notes in Edinburgh, see Christine Mary King Shepherd, “Philosophy and Science in the Arts Curriculum of the Scottish Universities in the 17th Century” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1974–1975), 5–6; Christina M. Eagles, “David Gregory and Newtonian Science,” British Journal for the History of Science 10, no. 3 (1977): 216–25, esp. 219–20. 18. Trigonometria planorum geometria practica et astronomia tractatus (1706) and Geometria de motu (1706), Cadwallader Colden Papers, box 12, NYHS. Compare to David

Notes to Pages 29–31

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Gregory, Trigonometria planorum, Geometria practica, Astronomia, and Geometria de motu (Mechanica) (1705), EUL, Dc.7.69; David Gregory, Geometria de motu (1692), EUL, La.III.170; Francis Pringle’s Notebook (ca. 1694–1705), EUL, Dc.6.12. Roy Lokken has speculated that William Jones may have tutored Colden; Roy N. Lokken, “Discussions on Newton’s Infinitesimals in Eighteenth- Century Anglo-America,” Historia Mathematica 7, no. 2 (1980): 141–55 at 143. There is no firm evidence to support this supposition. 19. Emerson, “Founding of the Edinburgh Medical School,” 190–91, quote on 191. 20. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, 275. 21. CC to PC, May 1742, CP 2:257–63, esp. 261–63; CC to PK, ca. January 1751, CP 4:258–61, quotes on 258. 22. In her article, “Anatomists and Entrepreneurs in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 59, no. 2 (2004): 219–39, on pages 225 and 227, Anita Guerrini notes in passing that advertisements for George Wilson’s chemistry course were printed in the London Daily Courant in 1706 and 1710, about the time Colden would have been in London. On vocational medical courses in eighteenth-century London, see Roy Porter, “Medical Lecturing in Georgian London,” British Journal for the History of Science 28, no. 1 (1995): 91–99. 23. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment, 280. 24. CC to PC, May 1742, CP 2:257–63, quote on 261. 25. CC to PK, ca. January 1751, CP 4:258–61, quote on 259. 26. See Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America, 493–94. 27. Plockhoy was a pamphleteer from the port town of Zierikzee in the southern Netherlands. In America, he organized a protosocialist commune that English forces conquered in 1664. Plockhoy probably died around the time of the English conquest, and his widow married Willem Clasen, another member of the 1663 Dutch party. A census conducted in 1671 records Clasen living with three children—two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, and his stepson, Cornelis Plockhoy. Possibly, Elizabeth Clasen is Colden’s aunt. The fact that Elizabeth Hill gifted land to Cornelis Wiltbanck, a cousin of Cornelis Plockhoy, supports this theory. For more information, see Peter Stebbins Craig, 1671 Census of the Delaware (Philadelphia, 1999), 75n262, 76–77. On Plockhoy, see Henk Looijesteijn, “ ‘Born to the Common Welfare’: Pieter Plockhoy’s Quest for a Christian Life (c. 1620–1664)” (PhD thesis, European University Institute, 2009); Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia, 2012), 240, 247–51. 28. JL to William Penn, Philadelphia, 17 November 1708, in Correspondence between William Penn and James Logan, Secretary of the Province of Pennsylvania, and Others, 1700–1750, ed. Edward Armstrong, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1870–1872), 2:307–10, quote on 309. 29. On John Hill, see Craig W. Horle et al., eds., Lawmaking and Legislators in Pennsylvania: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 1: 1682–1709 (Philadelphia, 1991), 426–30. For unpublished warrants appointing John Hill as commander-in-chief of Lewes (25 October 1692), deputy collector and chief officer of the customs for Sussex County (6 May 1683), and ranger for Sussex County (24 April 1693), see Cadwallader Colden Papers, box 12, fols. 45–47, NYHS.

184

Notes to Pages 31–33

30. Records of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1841), 8, 9, quote on 8; Charles Augustus Briggs, American Presbyterianism: Its Origin and Early History (New York, 1885), 161. 31. See Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America, 493–94. Quote from Charles Preston to James Petiver, 24 September 1708, in Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America, 493. For more on Petiver, see Raymond Phineas Stearns, “James Petiver: Promoter of Natural Science, c. 1663–1718,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 62, no. 2 (1952): 243–365. 32. CC to PK, ca. January 1751, CP 4:258–61, quote on 261. 33. This estimate of voyage mortality is drawn from Farley Grubb, “Morbidity and Mortality on the North Atlantic Passage: Eighteenth- Century German Immigration,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 3 (1987): 565–85, esp.  567–72; Raymond L. Cohn, “Maritime Mortality in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Survey,” International Journal of Maritime History 1, no. 1 (1989): 159–91; Robin Haines, Ralph Shlomowitz, and Lance Brennan, “Maritime Mortality Revisited,” International Journal of Maritime History 8, no. 1 (1996): 133–63; Herbert S. Klein, Stanley L. Engerman, Robin Haines and Ralph Shlomowitz, “Transoceanic Mortality: The Slave Trade in Comparative Perspective,” WMQ 58, no. 1 (2001): 93–118. 34. Margaret and Ann Goudie to AC, Kelso, Scotland, 7 January 1716, CP 8:5–6. 35. Cadwallader Colden Jr. to a Cousin in Scotland, 1796, in An Outline History of Orange County, by Samuel W. Eager (Newburgh, NY, 1846–1847), 245–48, quotes on 245. 36. Andrew Chrystie to CC, Brevieg [Brevik], Norway, 6 September 1725, CP 1:182–84, quote on 183. 37. Cadwallader Colden Jr. to a Cousin in Scotland, 1796, in Eager, An Outline History of Orange County, 245. 38. CC to Hugh Graham, Philadelphia, December 1718, US&PP, NYHS. 39. James Chrystie to CC, Kelso, Scotland, 22 April 1715, CP 1:81–82, quote on 81. 40. CC to PK, ca. January 1751, CP 4:258–61, quote on 259. 41. CC to JR, [1743], CP 3:15–16, quote on 16. On Colden’s early business difficulties, see CC to Thomas Bruce, Philadelphia, 1 April 1713, CP 1:12; CC to William Dry, [Philadelphia, ca. 1713], CP 1:13; CC to Benjamin Bartlette, Philadelphia, 12 June 1714, CP 1:17–19. 42. CC to Alexander Arbuthnot, [Charles Town], November [1711], CP 1:3–4; CC to Arbuthnot, Charles Town, 18 December 1711, CP 1:4–5. On Arbuthnot, see Edwin Wolf, The Library of James Logan of Philadelphia, 1674–1751 (Philadelphia, 1974), 215. Arbuthnot’s death in 1719 is also mentioned in JL to CC, Philadelphia, 17 March 1720, CP 1:102–3. 43. CC to Samuel Perez, Charles Town, November 1711, CP 1:3; CC to Alexander Arbuthnot, Charles Town, 18 December 1711, CP 1:4–5. 44. Quote on CC to John Rochead, [Philadelphia], 7 May 1712, CP 1:8. See also CC to Rochead, Philadelphia, 1 May 1712, CP 1:6–8; CC to Rochead, Philadelphia, 15 May 1712, CP 1:8–9; CC to Thomas Bruce, Philadelphia, 25 May 1712, CP 1:10; CC to Bruce, Philadelphia, 25 June 1712, CP 1:11. 45. CC to William Dry, [Philadelphia, 1712], CP 1:10–11; CC to Dry, [Philadelphia, 1712], CP 1:11–12.

Notes to Pages 34–35

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46. Colden probably sailed first to Antigua; CC to Thomas Bruce, Philadelphia, 1 April 1713, CP 1:12; CC to William Dry, [Philadelphia, 1713], CP 1:13. On Colden’s business dealings with Barbadian merchants, see his correspondence with John Townsend, Jacob Valverde, and Jacob Franco Nunes, and related documents in CP 1:13– 16, 19, 21, 23–25, 26, 28–30, 32, 63–80, 82–87, 89–90. On Colden’s Madeira trade, see also his letters to Madeira merchant Benjamin Bartlette in CP 1:17–19, 22, 23, 26, 27, as well as CC to George Miffline, Philadelphia, 4 August 1714, CP 1:20; CC to Amos Garrat, Philadelphia, 13 August 1714, CP 1:20–21; CC to Garrat, Philadelphia, 2 December 1714, CP 1:27; CC to Francisco Xavier Aranha, 15 April 1716, CP 1:30; CC to Richard Miles, 16 August 1716, CP 1:31. 47. CC to BF, Coldengham, 19 November 1753, in CP 4:413–18, esp. 417–18. See also, CC to PC, Coldengham, 28 May 1754, CP 4:445–48, esp. 445–46. 48. Most of the extant Colden-Graham correspondence is published in Jarcho, “Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham.” 49. On the status and practices of university-educated physicians in early America, see Richard Harrison Shryock, Medicine and Society in America, 1660–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1960), 7–18; Breslaw, Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic, esp. 41–42, 47–52, 58–59. On medicine in Philadelphia, see Simon Finger, The Contagious City: The Politics of Public Health in Early Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY, 2012). 50. King, Philosophy of Medicine, esp. 64–94, 118–20; Antonio Clericuzio, “From van Helmont to Boyle: A Study of the Transmission of Helmontian Chemical and Medical Theories in Seventeenth-Century England,” British Journal of the History of Science 26, no. 3 (1993): 303–34; Allen G. Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate: Van Helmont to Boerhaave (Canton, MA, 2001). 51. Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, 1973); King, Philosophy of Medicine, 95–124; Robert G. Frank Jr., Harvey and the Oxford Physiologists: Scientific Ideas and Social Interaction (Berkeley, CA, 1980), 2–9; Cook, Decline of the Old Medical Regime; Thomas Fuchs, The Mechanization of the Heart: Harvey and Descartes, trans. Marjorie Grene (Rochester, NY, 2001); Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe. 52. Brown, “College of Physicians and the Acceptance of Iatromechanism”; Brown, Mechanical Philosophy and the “Animal Oeconomy.” 53. The sizable literature on British Newtonianism includes Robert E. Schofield, Mechanism and Materialism: British Natural Philosophy in an Age of Reason (Princeton, 1970); Margaret  C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY, 1976); Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660–1750 (Cambridge, 1992). On Newtonianism and medical theory, see Theodore  M. Brown, “From Mechanism to Vitalism in Eighteenth-Century English Physiology,” Journal of the History of Biology 7, no. 2 (1974): 179–216; Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman, OK, 2000); Shirley  A. Roe, “The Life Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4: Eighteenth- Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge, 2003), 397–416. 54. Archibald Pitcairne in Mordechai Feingold, “Mathematicians and Naturalists: Sir Isaac Newton and the Royal Society,” in Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy, ed.

18 6

Notes to Pages 35–37

Jed Z. Buchwald and I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 77–102, quote on 88. See also, King, Philosophy of Medicine, 109–18; Brown, Mechanical Philosophy and the “Animal Oeconomy,” chaps.  4–5; Anita Guerrini, “James Keill, George Cheyne, and Newtonian Physiology, 1690–1740,” Journal of the History of Biology 18, no. 2 (1985): 247–66. On Newton’s “quest for certainty,” see Alan E. Shapiro, Fits, Passions, and Paroxysms: Physics, Method, and Chemistry and Newton’s Theories of Colored Bodies and Fits of Easy Reflection (Cambridge, 1993), 12–30. 55. Brown, Mechanical Philosophy and the “Animal Oeconomy,” esp. 289; Guerrini, “James Keill, George Cheyne, and Newtonian Physiology,” 252; Anita Guerrini, “Archibald Pitcairne and Newtonian Medicine,” Medical History 31, no. 1 (1987): 70–83; Theodore M. Brown, “Medicine in the Shadow of the Principia,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 4 (1987): 629–48; Feingold, “Mathematicians and Naturalists,” esp. 88–89. 56. Alexander Tomson to CC, 18 April 1714, US&PP, NYHS. For publications by Tompson, see Alexandri Thomson,  M.D. Dissertationes medicae (Lugduni Batavorum [Leiden], 1705); “An Enquiry into the Mineral Principles of Montrose Water, by Alexander Thomson M.D. Physician at Montrose” and “Medical Qualities of Montrose Well, with some Instances thereof, by the Same,” both printed in Medical Essays and Observations, Revised and Published by A Society in Edinburgh, second edition, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1737), 3:60–95, 3:96–106. 57. Archibaldi Pitcarnii Scoti Dissertationes Medicae (Edinburgh, 1713). It was later published in English as Archibald Pitcairne, The Whole Works of Dr Archibald Pitcairn, trans. George Sewell and J. T. Desaguliers (London, 1715). 58. Debus, Chemistry and Medical Debate, 160–63. On Bower’s relationship to Pitcairne, see Roger L. Emerson, Professors, Patronage and Politics: The Aberdeen Universities in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen, 1992), 21–22, 30. 59. Archibald Pitcairne, “A Dissertation upon the Circulation of the Blood Through the Minutest Vessels of the Body,” and “A Dissertation upon the Motion which Reduces the Aliment in the Stomach, to a Form Proper for the Supply of the Blood,” in The Whole Works of Dr. Archibald Pitcairn, trans. by George Sewell and J. T. Desaguliers, 2nd ed. (London, 1727), 33–65, 106–38; Guerrini, “James Keill, George Cheyne, and Newtonian Physiology,” esp. 251. 60. James Keill, An Account of Animal Secretion, The Quantity of Blood in the Humane Body, and Muscular Motion (London, 1708), 8, quoted in Guerrini, “James Keill, George Cheyne, and Newtonian Physiology,” 256. 61. CC to Richard Hill, Philadelphia, 22 November 1716, CP 1:33. 62. CC to William Innys, Philadelphia, ca. 3 December 1716, CP 1:34–35; CC to John Fair, Philadelphia, 22 January 1717, CP 1:36–39; CC to Fair, New York, 6 August 1718, CP 1:40–41; CC to Innys, New York, 6 August 1718, CP 1:41–42. 63. Rev. Alexander Colden to CC, [Oxnam, Scotland, ca. September 1715], CP 8:1–2; CC to Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, New York, 21  March  1748, CP 4:21–25, esp. 24; CC, “Copy of a Paper sent to the Secretary of State [Henry Seymour Conway]—Endorsed—A Narrative of some facts relative to Mr Colden, occasioned by a Libell Printed in New York, Nov. 4, 1765, which it is believed the Printer was really compelled by force to Print,” ca. 4 November 1765, CLB 2:63–64.

Notes to Pages 37–40

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64. Extract from Proclamations of Banns and Marriages, 14 November 1715, Old Parochial Register for Kelso, Roxburghshire, supplied by the National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh. 65. CC to Hugh Graham in London, Philadelphia, 25 May 1716, US&PP, NYHS, in Jarcho, “Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham,” 202. James Logan noted in the flyleaf of his copy of Hayes’s Treatise of Fluxions that “this Author was a fellow Student with Alexander Arbuthnot who came over to Pensilvania about ye year 1703 and died in 1719 in ye University of Aberdeen. His true name was Charles Hay, but when he came to Engld he enlarged it by calling himself Charles Hayes”; Wolf, Library of James Logan, 215. 66. CC, “An Account of the Fever which Seiz’d 19 of 26 Persons that wer[e] on Board the Gloucester Galley of London . . . ,” enclosed with CC to Hugh Graham, Philadelphia, 25 May 1716, US&PP, NYHS, in Jarcho, “Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham,” 203–4, esp. 203. 67. CC, “Of Animal Secretion” in “A Treatise on the Animal Oeconomy,” [n.d] US&PP, NYHS. 68. CC to Richard Hill, Philadelphia, 13 September 1716, CP 1:31. 69. CC, “Copy Book of Letters on Subjects of Philosophy, Medecine, Friendship,” US&PP, NYHS. For a complete list of the contents of this journal, see CP 7:375–76. 70. CC to Hugh Graham, Philadelphia, 25 May 1716, US&PP, NYHS, in Jarcho, “Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham,” 202. 71. CC to William Jones, 25 September 1717, US&PP, NYHS. 72. CC to WD, Philadelphia, August 2, 1716, US&PP, NYHS. 73. CC to Hugh Graham, Philadelphia, October 1716, US&PP, NYHS, in Jarcho, “Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham,” 204–6, quote on 205. 74. CC, “An Account of the Fever which Seiz’d 19 of 26 Persons that wer[e] on Board the Gloucester Galley of London . . . ,” enclosed with CC to Hugh Graham, Philadelphia, 25 May 1716, US&PP, NYHS, in Jarcho, “Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham,” 203–4. 75. CC to Hugh Graham, Philadelphia, October 1716, US&PP, NYHS, in Jarcho, “Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham,” 204–6, quotes on 205. 76. Hugh Graham to CC, February 1717, US&PP, NYHS, in Jarcho, “Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham,” 206–7. On John Freind, see J. S. Rowlinson, “John Freind: Physician, Chemist, Jacobite, and Friend of Voltaire’s,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 61, no. 2 (2007): 109–27; J. R. R. Martin, “Explaining John Freind’s History of Physick,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 19 (1988): 399–418. Mead recalled a similar episode in his A Discourse on the Small Pox and Measles (London, 1748), v–vi. 77. CC to Hugh Graham, June 1717, US&PP, NYHS, in Jarcho, “Correspondence of Cadwallader Colden and Hugh Graham,” 207–8, quote on 208. 78. Frederick B. Tolles, James Logan and the Culture of Provincial America (Boston, 1957); Roy N. Lokken, “The Social Thought of James Logan,” WMQ 27, no. 1 (1970): 68–89; James Logan, “The Scientific Papers of James Logan,” ed. Roy N. Lokken, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 62, no. 6 (1972): 1–94; James Logan, Of the Duties of Man as They may be Deduced from Nature, ed. Philip Valenti (Philadelphia, 2013).

188

Notes to Pages 41–44

79. JL to William Logan, Philadelphia, 23 January 1717, Letter Book vol. 2 1702– 1720: 160–61, quotes on 161, Logan Family Papers, HSP, Philadelphia. 80. On the relationship between Keith and Bower, see JL to RH, ca. end of 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 171–73. On the tavern activities of Keith, Colden, and their acquaintances, see WK to CC, Philadelphia, 27 November 1718, CP 1:94. 81. Colden also enjoyed a notable relationship with the second Earl of Macclesfield. At the prompting of Peter Collinson, he dedicated his The Principles of Action in Matter, the Gravitation of Bodies, and the Motion of the Planets, Explained from Those Principles (London, 1751) to the earl in 1751; PC to CC, London, 11 December 1751, CP 9:109. Colden and Macclesfield, who became president of the Royal Society in 1752, thereafter shared a scientific correspondence, albeit one disrupted by the earl’s political and personal trials. Among other things, Colden wanted Macclesfield to support the publication of a second edition of his Principles of Action in Matter. For this correspondence, see Macclesfield to CC, Woodsbury Hall, England, 18 August 1752, Copy Book, 1737–1753: 151–59, Rosenbach; CC to Macclesfield, Coldengham, 12 February 1753, Copy Book, 1737–1753: 293–98, Rosenbach; CC to Macclesfield, Coldengham, 16 February 1753, CP 4:370–71; CC to Macclesfield, Coldengham, 2  April 1753, CP 4:379–81; PC to CC, London, 5 April 1753, CP 4:381; PC to CC, London, 2 June 1753, CP 4:391–92; CC to PC, Coldengham, 7 July 1753, CP 4:395–96; PC to CC, London, 18 October 1753, CP 4:408–9; CC to PC, Coldengham, 5 December 1753, CP 4:418–20; CC, “Letters to Lord Macclesfield and observations astronomical, 1753,” US&PP, NYHS; PC to CC, London, 10 March 1754, CP 4:377–79; CC to PC, Coldengham, 19 November 1754, CP 4:473–74; PC to CC, London, 13 March 1755, CP 5:6–7; CC to Macclesfield, New York, [October 1755?], CP 5:40–41. 82. CC to William Jones, 25 September 1717, US&PP, NYHS. 83. “Accuratarum Observationum Astronomicarum, anno Superiore & Currente, cum Reg. Societate Communicatarum Sylloge,” Philosophical Transactions 30, no. 357 (1717): 827–58, esp. 853. 84. JL to RH, Philadelphia, 7 November 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 169. Colden wrote in 1751, “In the year 1718 [presumably he meant 1717] I had the Curiosity to visit New York without the least thought of changeing my place of residence”; CC to PK, ca. January 1751, CP 4:258–61, quote on 259. It is possible that Colden did not initially think of relocating to New York when he visited it in mid-1717, but by November 1717 he was seeking to arrange such a move. 85. JL to RH, 5  March  1718, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 175–77, quote on 17[6].

3. Intellectuals 1. James Fontaine et al., Memoirs of a Huguenot Family, trans. and comp. Ann Maury (New York, 1853), 298. 2. “State of the British Plantations in America,” 8 September 1721, in DRCHNY 5:591–630, esp. 600–2; CC, “Of the Trade of New York,” New York, ca. 25 June 1723, in DRCHNY 5:685–90; Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of

Notes to Pages 44–46

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Communication and Community (New York, 1986), 298–300; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 118–37. 3. Mary Lou Lustig, Robert Hunter, 1666–1734: New York’s Augustan Statesman (Syracuse, 1983), 98. 4. For an example of the shared intellectual interests of Logan and Hunter, see JL to RH, Philadelphia, 25 February 1714, Letter Book, 1712–1715: 174–75, esp. 174, Logan Family Papers, HSP, Philadelphia; Frederick B. Tolles, James Logan and the Culture of Provincial America (Boston, 1957), 97–98; Edwin Wolf, The Library of James Logan of Philadelphia, 1674–1751 (Philadelphia, 1974), 17, 21; Lustig, Robert Hunter, 144–47. 5. JL to RH, Philadelphia, 22 September 1715, Letter Book 1712–1715: 315–16, Logan Family Papers, HSP; Frederick  E. Brasch, “James Logan, a Colonial Mathematical Scholar, and the First Copy of Newton’s Principia to Arrive in the Colony,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 86, no. 1 (1942): 3–12. 6. Logan sent Hunter a copy of Marin Mersenne’s Harmonicorum Libri. See JL to RH, Philadelphia, 8  January 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 147–50, Logan Family Papers, HSP; JL to RH, Philadelphia, 17  January 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 150–51; Wolf, Library of James Logan, 317. For mention of Colden’s treatise on secretion, see JL to RH, Philadelphia, 24 October 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 167, Logan Family Papers, HSP; JL to RH, Philadelphia, 31 October 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 168, Logan Family Papers, HSP. 7. JL to RH, Philadelphia, 24 October 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 167, Logan Family Papers, HSP. 8. JL to RH, Philadelphia, 31 October 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 168, Logan Family Papers, HSP. Presumably, Logan’s reference is to James Keill’s An Account of Animal Secretion (London, 1708), a book that he owned. Logan’s marginalia show that he thought Keill had erred in some of his calculations; Wolf, Library of James Logan, 261. 9. JL to RH, Philadelphia, 7 November 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 169, Logan Family Papers, HSP; JL to RH, ca. end of 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 171–73, quote on 172, Logan Family Papers, HSP. See also, Tolles, James Logan and the Culture of Provincial America, 98–99. 10. CC to PK, ca. January 1751, CP 4:258–61, quote on 259. 11. Fontaine, Memoirs of a Huguenot Family, 296. 12. James Logan informed Hunter that Colden “has had ye affliction of seeing his very good wife in a most distressed condition all this winter past arising from a mismangemnt in Child bearing of wch he was ignorant till it was too late”; JL to RH, ca. end of 1717, Letter Book, vol. 2, 1702–1720: 171–73, at 172, Logan Family Papers, HSP. See also Janet Colden to CC, Oxnam, Scotland, 17  November 1718, CP 8:45–47; David Chrystie to AC, Kelso, Scotland, 9 March 1719, CP 8:48–50, esp. 48. 13. Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971), 85–86; Lustig, Robert Hunter, esp. 124–26, 142–47; Mary Lou Lustig, Privilege and Prerogative: New York’s Provincial Elite, 1710–1776 (Madison, NJ, 1995), 18–32. 14. CC to PK, ca. January 1751, CP 4:258–61, quote on 259. 15. Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of NewYork, 1691–1765, 2 vols. (New York, 1764–1766), 1:429; “Calendar of Council Minutes,

19 0

Notes to Pages 46–49

1668–1783,” New York State Library Bulletin 58 (1902): 269. For fees awarded to masters in Chancery in New York in this period, see An Ordinance for Regulating and Establishing the Fees to be Hereafter Taken by the Officers of the Court of Chancery in the Province of New-York (New York, 1723). 16. Calendar of N.Y. Colonial Manuscripts: Indorsed Land Papers; In the Office of the Secretary of State of New York, 1643–1803 (Albany, 1864), 126, 127, 128–29. 17. Colden’s complaint is recorded in James Chrystie to CC and AC, Simprin, Scotland, 9 September 1720, CP 8:53–56, quote on 55. 18. The Boston News-Letter, no. 824, 25 January 1720, reported New York’s premature spring-like weather. On natural philosophy as winter entertainment in colonial New York, see passing comments in John Rutherford to Hew Dalrymple, Albany, 18  November 1742, Papers of Hamilton-Dalrymple Family of North Berwick, GD 110/908/911/7, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh; and PC to CC, London, 4 September 1743, CP 3:27–29 at 29. 19. Colden mentions this correspondence in his letter to Governor Hunter, 26 January 1720, US&PP, NYHS, printed in Saul Jarcho, “Obstacles to the Progress of Medicine in Colonial New York. The Letter of Cadwallader Colden to Governor Robert Hunter (1720),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36 (1962), 450–61 at 460–61. 20. CC to William Innys, New York, 6 August 1718, CP 1:41–42. 21. Query 5 in Newton, Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light, second English edition (London, 1718), 314; CC to RH, New York, 26 January 1720, US&PP, NYHS, printed in Saul Jarcho, “Obstacles to the Progress of Medicine in Colonial New York. The Letter of Cadwallader Colden to Governor Robert Hunter (1720),” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36 (1962). 22. CC to RH, New York, 26 January 1720, in Jarcho, “Obstacles to the Progress of Medicine in Colonial New York,” quotes on 457, 459, 460. 23. WK to CC, [Philadelphia], 8 March 1720 CP 1:101–2, quote on 101. 24. CC to JL, New York, 13 March 1720, US&PP, NYHS. 25. The Scottish physician George Cheyne similarly summarized the opposing propositions of Boyle and Newton when he remarked in 1715 that, while some consider that the spiral shape of air particles accounts for the elasticity of air, others suppose air “to consist of small Particles, which endeavor to recede from one another, with a Force reciprocally proportional to the Distances betwixt their Centers”; George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Religion: Natural and Revealed (London, 1715), 65–66, quote on 66. For Colden’s later theory of the elasticity of air, see CC, The Principles of Action in Matter, the Gravitation of Bodies, and the Motion of the Planets, Explained from Those Principles (London, 1751), 150. 26. CC to JL, New York, 13 March 1720, US&PP, NYHS. 27. Ibid. 28. JL to CC, Philadelphia, 17 March 1720, CP 1:102–3, quotes on 103. 29. Colden wrote to one New York governor, that the surveyor general was “under your Excelly’s Correction at Pleasure by removing him of an Office or some Value”; CC to “His Excellency,” “Interpretation of the Governor’s Power of Granting Lands,” n.d., US&PP, NYHS. This appears true as a New York rival apparently applied for Colden’s role in 1728; CC to WB, Coldengham, New York, 19 November 1728, CP 1:273–74 at

Notes to Pages 49–50

191

274. Nevertheless, Colden’s position was quite safe. In 1775, he noted that “the Tenure of the Commission [of Surveyor General] for 50 years past has been during good Behaviour”; CC to the Earl of Dartmouth, New York, 3 January 1775, CLB 2:376–77 at 377. Despite opposing “good behavior” appointments for judges in the 1760s, Colden sought such tenures for his sons, Alexander and David, who succeeded him as surveyor general; JA to CC, 10 December 1750, CP 4:239–41, esp. 240; CC to JA, 15 December 1750, CP 4:242–43; CC to Governor George Clinton, [December] 1750, CP 4:244; CC to Clinton, Coldengham, 15 December 1750, CP 4:244–45; JA to CC, New York, 2 January 1751, CP 4:245–50; CC to the Earl of Dartmouth, New York, 3 January 1775, CLB 2:376–77. 30. Alexander Colden reported in 1767 that the surveyor general of New York received no salary, but collected fees established “by custom & long usage.” Following “the practice of forty years past” (i.e., the practice of his father), Alexander Colden charged the equivalent of five shillings and ten pence sterling on every one hundred acres of land granted, in addition to the surveying costs. He complained that this fee “on small Grants of Lands, is not adequate to my Trouble” and also that he conducted many services as surveyor for which he received no fee or reward at all; Alexander Colden, “Report of the Surveyor General of New-York on his Fees,” DRCHNY 7:926. 31. RH to CC, England, 11 July 1720, CP 8:157. 32. WB to the Board of Trade, 26 November 1720, DRCHNY 5:576–81, quote on 578. 33. Eugene R. Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 1671–1746: A Study in Early American Politics (Syracuse, 1981), 118–21, 123–25; Lustig, Robert Hunter, 143–44, 154–59; Cathy D. Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore, 1998), 243–45. 34. Lewis Morris, “Dialogue between a South and a North Countryman,” in LMP 1:286–326 at 288. From internal evidence, Eugene Sheridan, editor of the Morris papers, dates this piece as 1727–1728. A reference to “the Leapsticks” also appears in a 1728 letter from James Alexander to Colden, suggesting Sheridan’s dating is correct; JA to CC, New York, 5 May 1728, CP 1:259–61 at 260. For more on the Council, see Nicolas Varga, “New York Government and Politics during the Mid-Eighteenth Century” (PhD diss., Fordham University, 1960), 208–49. 35. CC, “Comments on Government in General,” US&PP, NYHS. On New York’s ruling elite, see Cynthia A. Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675–1790 (Ithaca, 1992), esp. 164. Carl Becker’s seminal study, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (Madison, WI, 1909) describes a small, landed and commercial aristocracy that controlled provincial politics until the time of the Stamp Act riots in 1765. Since the 1970s, historians have portrayed New York’s colonial elite not as a coherent class but as a fluid set of factious, self-interested, and unprincipled partisans. See Milton M. Klein, “Democracy and Politics in Colonial New York” and “Politics and Personalities in Colonial New York,” in The Politics of Diversity: Essays in the History of Colonial New York (Port Washington, NY, 1974), 11–34, 35–47; Milton M. Klein, “Detachment and the Writing of American History: The Dilemma of Carl Becker,” in Perspectives on Early American History: Essays in Honour of Richard B. Morris, ed. Alden T. Vaughan and George Athan Billias (New York, 1973), 120–66; Bonomi, Factious People; Alan Tully, Forming American Politics: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1994).

192

Notes to Pages 50–52

36. CC, “Observations on the Balance of Power in Government,” ca. 1744, CP 9:251– 57, quotes on 254. 37. WB to the Board of Trade, 26 November 1720, DRCHNY 5:576–81 at 579; CSP 32:253–54, 257; Board of Trade to WB, Whitehall, 6 June 1722, DRCHNY 5:647–48 at 647; 3 August 1721 entry, “Calendar of Council Minutes, 1668–1783,” 281. For Colden’s own account of this period, see CC to Alexander Colden, ca. December 1759, CP 5:310–19, also printed in William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of New-York, ed. Michael Kammen, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 1:308–14. See also Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 123–25. 38. WB to the Board of Trade, Burlington, NJ, 9 March 1721, DRCHNY 5:584; CSP 32:297. Morris was sworn in on 2 October 1721; “Calendar of Council Minutes, 1668– 1783,” 282. 39. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 7 November 1724, DRCHNY 5:711–13 at 713; CSP 34:361. Livingston was sworn in and took his seat on 14 October 1725; “Calendar of Council Minutes, 1668–1783,” 299. 40. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 24 November 1725, DRCHNY 5:766–68 at 768; Board of Trade to WB, Whitehall, 24 June 1726, DRCHNY 5:779–80 at 779. Kennedy joined the Council on 13 April 1727; “Calendar of Council Minutes, 1668–1783,” 303. For more on Kennedy, see Paul Tonks, “Empire and Authority in Colonial New York: The Political Thought of Archibald Kennedy and Cadwallader Colden,” New York History 91, no. 1 (2010): 25–44. 41. Alice Mapelsden Keys, Cadwallader Colden: A Representative Eighteenth Century Official (New York, 1906), 33. For a record of Colden’s early surveying, see “Cadwallader Colden’s Note Book” [Journal, 1721–1726], US&PP, NYHS. 42. CC, “The Error of the Circumferentor, or Common Surveying Compass, Generally Used in America,” Copy Book, 1737–1753: 18–28, 49, quotes on 18, Rosenbach Museum and Library (Ams 434/20), Philadelphia. 43. On Gilbert Burnet and his influence, see John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), esp.  148–49; Tony Claydon, “Latitudinarianism and Apocalyptic History in the Worldview of Gilbert Burnet, 1643–1715,” Historical Journal 51, no. 3 (2008): 577–97. 44. Richard Nash, John Craige’s Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology (Carbondale, IL, 1991). 45. Gilbert Burnet, A Supplement from Unpublished MSS. to Burnet’s History of My Own Time, ed. H. C. Foxcroft (Oxford, 1902), 512. 46. Bernardino Zendrini, “Tre problemi geometrici e con un sistema sopra la gravità proposti dal sig. Giovanni Ceva e sciolti dal sign. Bernardino Zendrini,” Giornale de’ Letterati 4 (1710): 317, quoted in Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment: Newtonian Science, Religion, and Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century, trans. Sue Brotherton (Amherst, 1995), 288n30. Burnet’s letter to Hans Sloane, secretary of the Royal Society, dated 12 October 1708, and describing the “Icy Mountains of Switzerland” appeared in Philosophical Transactions 26 (1708–1709): 316–17. On Burnet’s European tour, see Fausto Nicolini, “Su taluni rapporti di cultura tra l’Italia, l’Olanda e l’Inghilterra al principio del settecento: Da lettere inedite di Guglielmo

Notes to Pages 53–55

193

Burnet, Guglielmo Giacobbe, ’s Gravesande, Tommaso Johnson e Celestino Galiani,” Atti della Reale Accademia di scienze morali e politiche 53 (1930): 153–71; Ferrone, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment, 71–76, 130, 285–86n81, 288n30, 291n54, 325n2; Silvia Mazzone and Clara Silvia Roero, Jacob Hermann and the Diffusion of the Leibnizian Calculus in Italy (Florence, 1997), 296–301, 305, 306, 447–56, 456–61, 462, 464, 468, 471, 474, 475, 484, 507, 509, 538. 47. Shaun F. D. Hughes, “Elizabeth Elstob (1683–1756) and the Limits of Women’s Agency in Early-Eighteenth-Century England,” in Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison, 2005), 3–24, quote on 13. 48. Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay, from the Charter of King William and Queen Mary, in 1691, Until the Year 1750 (Boston, 1767), 366. 49. Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:165. 50. Hutchinson, History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay, 365. 51. American Weekly Mercury, no. 188, 18–25 July 1723; Certificate of Governor William Burnet and Cadwallader Colden about Josiah Qu[i]nby, [1723], CP 8:185–86. For links between the Morrises and Quinby, as well as information on another of Quinby’s inventions, see “An Invention to Preserve the Town of Boston,” in Year-Book of the Society of Colonial Wars in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for 1899 (Boston, 1899), 102–6. 52. CC to Alexander Colden, Coldengham, 31 December 1759, in Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:314–17, quote on 314. For the reception of Burnet’s religious ideas in New England, see Samuel Sewall to WB, 23 September 1723, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 6th ser., vol. 2 (Boston, 1888), 154–56; and Hutchinson, History of the Province of Massachusetts-Bay, 366. 53. Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 132. 54. WB, An Essay on Scripture-Prophecy (New York, 1724). Firmin Abauzit’s Discours historique sur l’Apocalipse circulated as a clandestine manuscript in France before it was published in London in 1770. An anonymous English translation had already been published as A Discourse Historical and Critical on the Revelations Ascrib’d to St. John (London, 1730). Another English translation, as well as a letter from Abauzit to Burnet, appeared in Miscellanies of the Late Ingenious and Celebrated M. Abauzit, on Historical, Theological, and Critical Subjects, trans. E. Harwood (London, 1774), 242–48, 283–376. On the link to Voltaire, see Mina Waterman, “Voltaire and Firmin Abauzit,” Romanic Review 33 (1942): 236–49. 55. WD to CC, Boston, 1 May 1722, CP 1:141–44; WD to CC, Boston, 25 July 1722, CP 1:144–45. 56. John Kearsley to CC, Philadelphia, 25 July 1723, CP 1:148–49; CC to Kearsley [1723], CP 1:149–50; Thomas Graeme to CC, Philadelphia, 2 August 1723, CP 1:150–51; Graeme to CC, Philadelphia, 15 August 1723, CP 1:151–52; CC to Graeme, [1723], CP 1:152–54; Graeme to CC, [1723], CP 1:154–55; WB to CC, Burlington, NJ, 4 October 1723, CP 1:155; Graeme to CC, 31 October 1723, CP 1:156–57; John Johnston to CC, Amboy, NJ, 9 February 172[7], CP 1:194–96. 57. CC to Captain John Waldron, 13 July 1721, in Jacob Judd, “Dr. Colden’s Cure,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1961): 251–53. 58. CC, “A Treatise on the Animal Oeconomy,” [n.d], US&PP, NYHS.

19 4

Notes to Pages 55–61

59. RH to CC, London, 5 February 1722, CP 1:140; CC, “An Acct of Some Plants the Seeds of Which Were Sent to Brigadier Hunter at His Desire for the Earl of Islay,” October 1725, US&PP, NYHS. 60. Colden also cites Jacobus Hovius’s Tractatus de circulari humorum motu in oculis, another book ordered from William Innys in 1718; CC to Innys, New York, 6 August 1718, CP 1:41–42 at 41. For Burnet’s library, see Bibliotheca Burnetiana: Being a Catalogue of the Intire Library of His Excellency William Burnet Esq; Deceased; Late Governor of New-England (London, 1730). 61. Confusion has resulted over the date of Colden’s “A Treatise on the Animal Oeconomy” because Colden wrote his manuscript mostly on the recto pages of a notebook, and then later added (usually on the verso pages) material that included a list of books taken from the Medical Essays and Observations of Edinburgh, vols. 2–4 (1734– 1737), and a piece by Alexander Monro (“An Essay on the Nutrition of Foetuses”), published in the Medical Essays and Observations of Edinburgh, vol. 2 (1734). Roy N. Lokken discusses this manuscript and its revisions in “Cadwallader Colden’s Attempt to Advance Natural Philosophy beyond the Eighteenth- Century Mechanistic Paradigm,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122, no. 6 (1978): 365–76, at 366, 367. Elsewhere, he dates the manuscript to 1719; Roy N. Lokken, “Discussion of Newton’s Infinitesimals in Eighteenth- Century America,” Historia Mathematica 7, no. 2 (1980): 141–55 at 154. 62. Clara Pinto-Correia, The Ovary of Eve: Egg and Sperm and Preformation (Chicago, 1997); Karen Detlefsen, “Biology and Theology in Malebranche’s Theory of Organic Generation,” in The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E. H. Smith (Oxford, 2014), 137–56. 63. CC, “A Treatise on the Animal Oeconomy”; Lokken, “Discussion of Newton’s Infinitesimals in Eighteenth-Century America,” 145–46. 64. Newton, Opticks, 375. 65. Newton, Opticks, 349. 66. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge, 2002), 38–45, 150–66, 216–49. 67. CC, “A Treatise on the Animal Oeconomy.”

4. Knowledge of Empires 1. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 118–37. On the 1712 revolt and on slavery in New York in general, see Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626– 1863 (Chicago, 2003), esp. 32, 34–40. On the historiography of slavery in early New York, see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Slavery in Colonial New York City,” Urban History 35, no. 3 (2008): 485–96. 2. On William Burgis’s panorama, see I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, 6 vols. (New York, 1915–1928) 1:239–51; Gloria Deák, Picturing New York: The City from its Beginnings to the Present (New York, 2000), 18–19.

Notes to Pages 61–66

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3. For the development of British provincial towns, see Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989). 4. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ, 1992), 62. 5. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, esp. 155. For more on New York City’s population increase, see Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, NY, 1972), 6–9; Robert V. Wells, “The New York Census of 1731,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 57 (1973): 255–59; Gary B. Nash, “The New York Census of 1737: A Critical Note on the Integration of Statistical and Literary Sources,” WMQ 36, no. 3 (1979): 428–35. 6. David Dobson, Scottish Emigration to Colonial America, 1607–1785 (Athens, GA, 2004), esp. 6, 86–94; Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot, 142–44. 7. This argument is made in W. J. Eccles, Canada under Louis XIV, 1663–1701 (Toronto, 1964), 249. For a counterargument, see Dale Miquelon, “Ambiguous Concession: What Diplomatic Archives Reveal about Article 15 of the Treaty of Utrecht and France’s North American Policy,” WMQ 67, no. 3 (2010): 459–86, esp. 463–64. 8. James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge, 2004), 358–401; Paul Mapp, The Elusive West and the Conquest for Empire, 1713– 1763 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 122–43. 9. Pritchard, In Search of Empire, 403–8; Mapp, Elusive West, esp. 147–63. 10. For classic assessments of the relatively light imperial administration of British America prior to the Seven Years War, see Stanley Nider Katz, Newcastle’s New York: Anglo-American Politics, 1732–1753 (Cambridge, MA, 1968); James A. Henretta, “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle (Princeton, NJ, 1972). 11. Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, New Voyages to NorthAmerica, 2 vols. (London, 1703), 1:180–83, 187–88. 12. CSP 30:119–20, quotes on 119. 13. Robert Livingston to Peter Schuyler, Albany, 23  August 1720, DRCHNY 5:559–61, quote on 560. On Livingston, see Lawrence H. Leder, Robert Livingston, 1654–1728, and the Politics of Colonial New York (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1961). 14. [James Smith], Some Considerations on the Consequences of the French Settling Colonies on the Mississippi (London, 1720), quotes on 41. 15. See Sara Stidstone Gronim, “Geography and Persuasion: Maps in British Colonial New York,” WMQ 58, no. 2 (2001): 373–402, esp. 382. 16. Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York, 1984), 10–17. 17. For a statement by Colden on the superior French knowledge of North America, see CC to PC, [ca. December 1743], CP 3:42–45 at 43. Paul Mapp finds that unreliable sources, inaccessible routes, and linguistic barriers impacted French surveys of North America in the eighteenth century, and that French depictions of North America were accordingly less accurate and complete than French maps of France, Russia, and China; Mapp, Elusive West, 194–257. Even so, they were more advanced than contemporary British maps of North America.

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Notes to Pages 66–68

18. Nelson-Martin Dawson, L’Atelier Delisle: l’Amérique du Nord sur la table à dessin (Sillery, QC, 2000); Christine Marie Petto, When France Was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France (Lanham, MD, 2007), 153–60. 19. Gronim, “Geography and Persuasion,” 382–84. 20. WB to the Board of Trade, 26 November 1720, DRCHNY 5:576–80 at 577. See also Sara Stidstone Gronim, Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York (New Brunswick, NJ, 2007), 169–70. 21. James Logan noted this connection; Joseph E. Johnson, “A Quaker Imperialist’s View of the British Colonies in America: 1732,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 60, no. 2 (1936): 97–130 at 118. 22. CSP 31:31–41, quotes on 32, 40. See also “Papers Furnished by James Logan to Sir William Keith, then Governor of Pennsylvania,” in Samuel Hazard, ed., Register of Pennsylvania 3, no. 66 (1829), 210–12; Johnson, “A Quaker Imperialist’s View,” 106; Frederick B. Tolles, James Logan and the Culture of Provincial America (Boston, 1957), 107–9; Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 285–87. 23. “State of the British Plantations in America, in 1721,” DRCHNY 5:591–630, esp. 600–2; Ian K. Steele, Politics of Colonial Policy: The Board of Trade in Colonial Administration, 1696–1720 (Oxford, 1968), 166–70; Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 (Cambridge, 2011), 183–87. 24. See, for instance, WK to CC, Philadelphia, 16 January 1722, CP 1:139–40; Lewis Morris to JA, Morrisania 18 January 1722, LMP 1:219–21 at 220 and 221n3. 25. 7 July 1720 entry, in Calendar of N. Y. Colonial Manuscripts: Indorsed Land Papers; In the Office of the Secretary of State of New York, 1643–1803 (Albany, 1864), 143; Lewis Morris to CC, 23 July 1720, CP 1:104–5; “Memorial of Cadwallader Colden, SurveyorGeneral,” New York, 27 July 1720, CP 8:157–60. 26. CC, “The Power of Setting Out Lands,” n.d., CP 9:258–60, quotes on 258, 260. 27. Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New-York, 2 vols. (Albany, 1861), 1:469, 470, 473, 474, 475; WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 30 November 1721, DRCHNY 5:644. 28. “Representation of Cadwallader Colden, Surveyor-General of the Province of New York, to Governor William Burnet, against the Bill for Facilitating the Partition of Lands in Joint Tenancy, November, 1721,” n.d., CP 8:160–64, quotes on 163, 164. 29. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 30 November 1721, DRCHNY 5:644; Board of Trade to WB, Whitehall, 6 June 1722, DRCHNY 5:647–48 at 648; Board of Trade to Lord Carteret, Whitehall, 26 September 1722, DRCHNY 5:650; “Representation of the Lords of Trade to the King,” Whitehall, 26  September 1722, DRCHNY 5:650–54. 30. Horace Walpole to the Lords of the Treasury, 28 June 1720, DRCHNY 5:545–48; “Brigadier Hunter’s Observations on Mr. Walpole’s Memorial,” Whitehall, 18 August 1720, DRCHNY 5:558–59; Eugene R. Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 1671–1746: A Study in Early American Politics (Syracuse, 1981), 116. 31. CC to Archibald Kennedy, [September 1722?], CP 8:166–70, quote on 169. For Colden’s view of the Assembly, see CC to William Shirley, New York, 25 July 1749, CP 4:119–29 at 120–21.

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32. Caleb Heathcote to the Lords of the Treasury, New York, 28 January 1716, quoted in Dixon Ryan Fox, Caleb Heathcote, Gentleman Colonist: The Story of a Career in the Province of New York, 1692–1721 (New York, 1926), 181. 33. See, for instance, CC to William Popple, Secretary of the Board of Trade, New York, 4 December 1726, DRCHNY 5:805–6. 34. 7 December 1722 entry, “Calendar of Council Minutes, 1668–1783,” New York State Library Bulletin 58 (1902): 289. Colden had earlier petitioned for the Council to use the quit rents to reimburse him £40 of surveying costs he had incurred, as well as to provide “the small Sallary of fifty pounds a Year allow’d me by order of Council or such other reward for my time & trouble as that Board shall think proper”; CC to Archibald Kennedy, [September 1722?], CP 8:166–70, quote on 169. 35. Horace Walpole to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, 26 April 1722, CSP 33:44–48. See also “Representation of the New York Assembly,” [26 June 1721], in LMP 1:214–19; Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 128–30. 36. CC to PC, May 1742, CP 2:257–63, esp. 263. 37. On the expansion of the Five Nation Iroquois League into an Iroquois Confederacy that encompassed Six Nations and other Indian allies, see Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (London, 2008), 70–73. After years of thinking of the Iroquois as a noble league of perpetual warriors who experienced a tragic decline, historians are now rediscovering the Iroquois as informed, adaptive participants in a dynamic colonial world. Important older works include Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1970); Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire; Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992); William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman, OK, 1998). See also Daniel K. Richter, “Cultural Brokers and Intercultural Politics: New York–Iroquois Relations, 1664–1701,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988): 40– 67, revised and reprinted as “Brokers and Politics: Iroquois and New Yorkers,” in Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America (Philadelphia, 2013), 113–32. For recent revisionist accounts, see Jon Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534– 1701 (East Lansing, MI, 2010); Gail  D. MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of History (Philadelphia, 2011). For a fuller assessment of the new historiography, see Edward Countryman, “Toward a Different Iroquois History,” WMQ 69, no. 2 (2012): 347–60. 38. Colden notes that Burnet read “all the Registers of the Indian Affairs” and “took more Pains to be informed of the Interest of the People he was set over . . . than Plantation Governors usually do”; The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, pt. 2 (London, 1747), iii. See also Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 287. 39. His Excellency’s Speech to the General Assembly of the Province of New-York, the 13th day of October, 1720 (New York, 1720); WB to the Board of Trade, 26 November 1720, DRCHNY 5:576–81. 40. For Burnet’s justification of this act, see his postscript to WB to the Board of Trade, 26 November 1720, DRCHNY 5:576–81 at 581. For the Board of Trade’s response, see Board of Trade to WB, Whitehall, 6 June 1722, DRCHNY 5:647–48.

198

Notes to Pages 69–71

41. An Act to Lay a Duty of Two Pounds on Every Hundred Pounds Value Prime Cost of All European Goods Imported into This Colony, passed 19 November 1720, in The Colonial Laws of New York from the Year 1664 to the Revolution, 5 vols. (Albany, 1894), 2:32–34; An Act for the Encouragement of the Indian Trade and Rendring of it More Beneficiall to the Inhabitants of this Province and for Prohibiting the Selling of Indian Goods to the French, passed 19 November 1720, in Colonial Laws of New York, 2:8–12. Under pressure from London merchants, the King’s Privy Council disallowed the 2 percent import duty in April 1724; “Order in Council Repealing New-York Act Laying Duties on European Goods,” 30 April 1724, DRCHNY 5:706; Board of Trade to WB, 17 June 1724, DRCHNY 5:706–7; Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New-York, 1:516–17. 42. For a modern account of the fur trade, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1991), 94–141. 43. Stefan Bielinski, “The People of Colonial Albany, 1650–1800: The Profile of a Community,” in Authority and Resistance in Early New York, ed. William Pencak and Conrad Edick Wright (New York, 1988), 1–26; Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire: The Albany Congress of 1754 (Ithaca, 2000), 120–27. For an eighteenth-century description of Albany, see Pehr [Peter] Kalm, Travels into North America, 3 vols., trans. John Reinhold Forster (Warrington, 1770–1771), 2:239–71. 44. “Colden’s Account of the Conference between Gov. Burnet and the Five Nations, 1721,” CP 1:128–34. 45. Colden wrote that this meeting occurred in a “room” and in “the house,” by which he probably meant the Stadt Huys; ibid., at 128, 130. 46. J. A. Brandão and William A. Starna, “The Treaties of 1701: A Triumph of Iroquois Diplomacy,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 2 (1996): 209–44; Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy, 62–64. 47. CC, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada (London, 1747), 156. Decanisora is referred to in a number of different ways in Colden’s papers, including “Consora,” “Cannassora,” and “Dekanesora.” 48. Quote from WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 16 October 1721, DRCHNY 5:630–34, on 632. 49. “Colden’s Account of the Conference between Gov. Burnet and the Five Nations, 1721,” CP 1:128–34, quotes on 130. On Fort Niagara, see Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy, 65. 50. “Colden’s Account of the Conference between Gov. Burnet and the Five Nations, 1721,” CP 1:128–34, quote on 131; WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 16 October 1721, DRCHNY 5:630–34, esp. 632–34; “Conference between Governor Burnet and the Indians,” Albany, 7 September 1721, and “Answer of the 5 Nations,” Albany, 9 September 1721, DRCHNY 5:635–40. 51. Colden had earlier provided a short description of Indian religion and government to Hugh Graham; CC to Hugh Graham, Philadelphia, December 1718, US&PP, NYHS. 52. Colden would later observe that the Iroquois illustrate that “the natural Origin of all Power and Authority among a free People, and whatever artificial Power or Sovereignty any Man may have acquired, by the Laws and Constitution of a Country, his

Notes to Pages 71–73

19 9

real Power will be ever much greater or less, in Proportion to the Esteem the People have of him”; History of the Five Indian Nations (1747), 2–3. On Ferguson’s use of Colden, see Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 86. 53. On Colden’s rejection of “Hypotheses” in political thought, see CC, History of Five Indian Nations (1727), xvii. 54. “Colden’s Account of the Conference between Gov. Burnet and the Five Nations, 1721,” CP 1:128–34, quotes on 133, 134. 55. This problem had been raised a decade earlier by the diplomatic visit of four Iroquois leaders to London. For more on this visit, see Eric Hinderaker, “The ‘Four Indian Kings’ and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire,” WMQ 53, no. 3 (1996): 487–526. 56. “Colden’s Account of the Conference between Gov. Burnet and the Five Nations, 1721,” CP 1:128–34, quote on 129. 57. “Conference between Governor Burnet and the Indians,” Albany, 27  August 1722, and “Answer of the 5 Nations,” Albany, 1 September 1722, DRCHNY 5:657–61; “Further Propositions of Governor Burnet to the Five Indian Nations,” Albany, 13 September 1722, and “Second Answer of the 5 Nations,” Albany, 14 September 1722, DRCHNY 5:664–69. For more on the 1722 Conference, see Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy, 73–77; Eric Hinderaker, The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 117–23. 58. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 25 June 1723, DRCHNY 5:684–85, quote on 685. 59. On the decline of the French fur trade in the 1720s, see White, Middle Ground, 120–22. 60. CC, “Of the Trade of New-York,” New York, ca. 25 June 1723, in DRCHNY 5:685–90. 61. WB to Lord Carteret, New York, 16 December 1723, DRCHNY 5:704–5. 62. “A Petition of the Merchants of London to His Majesty, Against the Said Act,” printed in Papers relating to an Act of the Assembly of the Province of New-York, for Encouragement of the Indian Trade, &c. and for Prohibiting the Selling of Indian Goods to the French, viz. of Canada (New York, 1724), 1–2, quotes on 2. For the Continuation Act, see An Act for Continuing the Acts Made for Prohibiting the Selling of Indian Goods to the French with Some Alterations, passed in New York on 24 July 1724 and repealed by the King on 11 December 1729, in Colonial Laws of New York, 2:197–98. 63. “Extract of the Minutes of the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations,” 7 July 1724, in Papers relating to an Act of the Assembly of the Province of New-York, 4; “Representation of the Lords of Trade to the King,” 14 July 1724, DRCHNY 5:707–9, also in Papers Relating to an Act of the Assembly of the Province of New-York, 5–6. 64. Sara Gronim has suggested that this 1724 map repeated Delisle’s 1718 map so exactly that Colden’s input was not needed (Gronim, “Geography and Persuasion,” 384n14). However, it was likely derived from Colden’s 1723 manuscript copy of Delisle. For more information on the map, see Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan Island, 6:259. It is also worth noting that Colden apparently began but did not complete “a correct

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Notes to Pages 74–77

Map of N. America” in 1724; WD to CC, Boston, 14 September 1724, CP 1:164–67, quote on 165. 65. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 7 November 1724, DRCHNY 5:711–13, quote on 712. See also WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 9 August 1724, DRCHNY 5:709–10; WB to the Duke of Newcastle, New York, 9 August 1724, DRCHNY 5:710–11. 66. CC, “A Memorial concerning the Fur Trade of the Province of New York,” New York, 10 November 1724, DRCHNY 5:726–33, quotes on 726, 727. 67. Ibid., quotes on 730, 732, 733. 68. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 11 November 1724, DRCHNY 5:725. See also WB to the Duke of Newcastle, New York, 21 November 1724, DRCHNY 5:734–35; WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 21 November 1724, DRCHNY 5:735–40; “Report of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs,” Albany, 12 November 1724, DRCHNY 5:740–42. Colden’s final memorial did not explain how French smuggling could be curtailed. However, an earlier draft envisioned the appointment of salaried imperial officers and called for Indian affairs to be put “into one hand with sufficient Power & authority to execute it effectually”; CC, “An Account of the Indian Trade and its Importance,” ca. November 1724, US&PP, NYHS. See also “Colden’s Memorial concerning the Fur Trade,” ca. November 1724, Cadwallader Colden Papers, box 12, fol. 69, NYHS. 69. Papers relating to an Act of the Assembly of the Province of New-York. 70. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 7 November 1724, DRCHNY 5:711–13, quote on 712. 71. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 12 May 1725, DRCHNY 5:756–57, quotes on 756. 72. Board of Trade to WB, Whitehall, London, 4 May 1725, DRCHNY 5:745. 73. Quotes from “Further Proceedings of the Lords of Trade on the New-York Indian Trade Acts,” Whitehall, 13 May 1725, DRCHNY 5:757. See also “Proceedings of the Lords of Trade on the N. York Acts regulating the Indian Trade,” Whitehall, 5 and 12 May 1725, DRCHNY 5:745–56; “Representation of the Lords of Trade on the New-York Indian Trade Acts,” Whitehall, 16 June 1725, DRCHNY 5:760–63. 74. WB to the Board of Trade, 14 October 1726, DRCHNY 5:781–83. The New York Assembly passed An Act for Regulating and Securing the Indian Trade to the Westward of Albany, and for Defraying the Charge Thereof on 11 November 1726. It was repealed by King George II on 11 December 1729. See Lincoln, Colonial Laws of New York, 2:366–71. 75. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 4 December 1726, DRCHNY 5:783–86, quote on 784. See also “Conference between Governor Burnet and the Indians,” DRCHNY 5:786–800, esp. 791. For the map, see National Archives, London, CO 700/ New York17; P. A. Penfold, ed., Maps and Plans in the Public Record Office: 2. America and the West Indies (London, 1974), 342 entry 1999. 76. WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 9 May 1727, DRCHNY 5:818–19. 77. The second edition of Colden’s book repeated this assertion in its full title, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, Which are Dependent on the Province of NewYork in America, and are the Barrier between the English and French in that Part of the

Notes to Pages 77–79

201

World (London, 1747). For more on the notion of Iroquois dependency, see Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 10–24. 78. Both Claude Charles Le Roy Bacqueville de la Potherie’s Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale: Relation d’un séjour en Nouvelle-France (Paris, 1722) and Lahontan’s New Voyages to North-America are listed in the catalog produced for the 1731 sale of Burnet’s library (Bibliotheca Burnetiana: Being a Catalogue of the Intire Library of His Excellency William Burnet Esq; Deceased; Late Governor of New-England [London, 1730]). On Colden’s use of the Commissioners’ minutes, see “Narrative of Indian Conferences, Albany, 1677–1689,” Cadwallader Colden Papers, box 12, fol. 66, NYHS; “Minutes of Indian Conferences at Albany 1686–1690,” Cadwallader Colden Papers, box 12, fol. 70, NYHS. See also Peter Wraxall, An Abridgment of the Indian Affairs Contained in Four Folio Volumes, Transacted in the Colony of New York, from the Year 1678 to the Year 1751, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, MA 1915). 79. CC, History of the Five Indian Nations (1727), quotes on x, ix. 80. H. M. Höpfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17, no. 2 (1978): 19–40; Christopher J. Berry, Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment (1997; repr. Edinburgh, 2001); Aaron Garrett, “Anthropology: The ‘Original’ of Human Nature,” and Christopher J. Berry, “Sociality and Socialisation,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie (Cambridge, 2003), 79–93 and 243–57; Frederick G. Whelan, Enlightenment Political Thought and Non-Western Societies: Sultans and Savages (New York, 2009); Silvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress (New York, 2013). 81. CC, History of the Five Indian Nations (1727), quotes on xvii, iii. 82. Ibid., xiv–xvii, quotes on xv, xvi. 83. Ibid., 19. On the alignment of this oral history with other evidence, see Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, 14–18. 84. CC, History of the Five Indian Nations (1727), quotes on 110, 118. 85. CC to PC, [ca. December 1743], CP 3:42–45 at 44. 86. CC, History of the Five Indian Nations (1727), quote on x. For Colden’s own explanation of why he delayed writing a second part, see CC to PC, [New York], ca. March 1741, CP 2:208–11 at 209–11. 87. For more on Collinson, see John Fothergill, Some Account of the Late Peter Collinson . . . In a Letter to a Friend (London, 1770); Norman G. Brett-James, The Life of Peter Collinson F.R.S., F.S.A. (London, 1926); Alan W. Armstrong, ed., “Forget not Mee & My Garden . . .”: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, F.R.S. (Philadelphia, 2002). 88. CC, “The Error of the Circumferentor, or Common Surveying Compass, Generally Used in America,” Copy Book, 1737–1753: 18–28, 49, Rosenbach Museum and Library (Ams 434/20), Philadelphia; “A New Quadrant or an Improvement of Those Already in Use for Celestial Observation in a Letter to James Alexander Esq at New York, Coldengham, 28 October 1740,” Copy Book, 1737–1753: 29–35, Rosenbach Museum and Library; CC to PC, [New York], ca. March 1741, CP 2:208–11 at 209–11. 89. George Graham to PC, Fleet Street, London, 17 February 1741, CP 2:206–7.

202

Notes to Pages 79–81

90. PC to CC, London, 5 March 1741, CP 2:207–8. See also, PC to CC, London, 7 March 1742, CP 2:245–47 at 245–46. 91. CC to PC, draft, n.d., [1741], CP 2:208–11 at 210–11. For these revisions, see Cadwallader Colden Papers, box 10, NYHS. The third part of Colden’s History was eventually published as “Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations, Continuation 1707–1720,” CP 9:359–434. 92. Henry Barclay to CC, 7 December 1741, Cadwallader Colden Papers, box 10, fol. 4, NYHS. A portion of this letter appears in Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations (1747), 18–19. 93. See, for instance, Colden’s dedication to General James Edward Ogelthorpe in History of the Five Indian Nations (1747), iii–ix. 94. CC, History of the Five Indian Nations (1747), 135–37, quotes on 135. 95. CC to PC, New York, 9 April 1742, CP 2:250–51, esp. 251. 96. CC to PC, May 1742, CP 2:257–63. 97. CC to PC, [1743], CP 3:12–14 at 12. 98. PC to CC, London, 2 March 1743, CP 3:10–11, quote on 10. 99. CC to PC, [December 1743], CP 3:42–45, quote on 44. 100. PC to CC, London, 27 March 1747, CP 3:367–70 at 369. For more on Mitchell, see Theodore Hornberger, “The Scientific Ideas of John Mitchell,” Huntington Library Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1947): 277–96; Raymond Phineas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, IL, 1970), 539–54; Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, Dr. John Mitchell: The Man Who Made the Map of North America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1974). 101. PC to CC, London, 1 June 1747, CP 3:394; Thomas Osborne to CC, [London], 12  June 1747, CP 3:402–3; PC to CC, [London, 12  June 1747], CP 3:403; PC to CC, London, 3 August 1747, CP 3:410–12; PC to CC, London, 20 June 1748, CP 4:67; PC to CC, 24 February 174[9], CP 4:103–4. 102. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 24 September 1747, CP 3:424–25, quote on 424. See also BF to CC, Philadelphia, 6 August 1747, CP 3:414–15 at 415; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 13 August 1747, CP 3:418. Thomas Osborne selected Read as his Philadelphia agent on the recommendation of Collinson; see PC to CC, London, 27 March 1747, CP 3:367–70 at 370; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 24 September 1747, CP 3:424–25 at 424. 103. CC to BF, New York, 28 September 1747, BFP 3:177–78; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 1 October 1747, CP 3:427. Osborne included a set of charters that Franklin had previously published as A Collection of Charters and Other Publick Acts Relating to the Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1740). Versions of The Treaty held with the Indians of the Six Nations, at Philadelphia, in July, 1742, which Franklin had published in Philadelphia in 1743, and A Treaty, held at the Town of Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, by the Honourable the Lieutenant- Governor of the Province, and the Honourable the Commissioners for the Provinces of Virginia and Maryland, with the Indians of the Six Nations, in June, 1744, which Franklin had had published in Philadelphia in 1744, also appeared at the end of Colden’s book. In addition, Osborne reprinted Papers relating to an Act of the Assembly of the Province of New-York (New York, 1724) and A Treaty, between His Excellency the Honourable George Clinton . . . And the Six United Indian Nations, and Other In-

Notes to Pages 81–83

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dian Nations, Depending on the Province of New-York: Held at Albany in the Months of August and September, 1746 (New York, 1746). 104. JA to CC, New York, 7 March 1748, CP 4:16–19 at 16–17. 105. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 27 January 1748, CP 4:5–6. 106. Thomas Osborne to CC, London, 6 June 1748, CP 4:64–66, quotes on 64. 107. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 29 September 1748, CP 4:78–80, quotes on 79. See also BF to William Strahan, Philadelphia, 19 October 1748, BFP 3:321–23, which mentions that Osborne had sent packages of books to James Parker in New York and William Parks in Virginia. Possibly, Colden connected Osborne to Parker. 108. Thomas Osborne to CC, Gray’s Inn, London, 20 July 1751, CP 4:270–71. According to Collinson, Osborne originally intended to charge five shillings for Colden’s book; PC to CC, London, 27 March 1747, CP 3:367–70 at 370. However, it was advertised for six shillings in Pedro Lozano, A True and Particular Relation of the Dreadful Earthquake which Happen’d at Lima, the Capital of Peru, and the Neighbouring Port of Callao (London, 1748), 343–44. 109. CC, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, Which Are the Barrier between the English and French in That Part of the World. . . . (London, 1750). For the pricing of the 1750 edition, see the advertisements in François-Ignace Espiard de la Borde, The Spirit of Nations (London, 1753), 423, and Madame de Maintenon, The Letters of Madam de Maintenon and Other Eminent Persons in the Age of Lewis XIV (London, 1753), 325. 110. CC, The History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada, Which Are Dependent on the Province of New-York in America, and Are the Barrier between the English and French in That Part of the World. . . . 2 vols. (London, 1755). 111. JM to CC, London, 25 March 1749, Huntington Library (HM 22340), in Theodore Hornberger, “A Letter from John Mitchell to Cadwallader Colden,” Huntington Library Quarterly 10 (1947): 411–17; CC to JM, 6 July 1749, CP 9:18–34 at 19. 112. JM to CC, London, 5 April 1751, CP 9:87–91, quote on 87. 113. PC to CC, London, 4 March 1752, CP 4:312–13, and enclosed copy of PC to the Earl of Holdernesse, 10 February 1752, CP 4:313–14. 114. Earl of Halifax to CC, Grosvenor Square, London, 17 May 1753, CP 4:389–91. 115. CC to PC, Coldengham, 28 July 1752, CP 9:116–19 at 117; CC to PC, New York, 6 September 1753, BV New Netherland, fol. 55, NYHS; CC to PC, Coldengham, 5 December 1753, CP 4:418–20; CC to PC, Coldengham, 4 October 1754, CP 4:465–69; PC to CC, London, 13 March 1755, CP 5:6–7; CC to PC, [New York, 20 October 1755], CP 5:35–38; Earl of Halifax to PC, Buskey Park, 12 October 1760, CP 5:346–47. 116. The original entry in the L’Encyclopédie reads, “Je n’entrerai point dans les détails: on peut consulter si l’on veut la rélation que M. de la Potherie a donné des Iroquois au commencement de ce siecle dans sa description de l’Amérique septentrionale; mais il faut lire sur ce peuple l’ouvrage récent de M. Colden, intitulé, History of the five nations, London, 1753, in–8.° c’est une histoire également curieuse & judicieuse”; Louis de Jaucourt, “Iroquois,” L’Encyclopédie, vol. 8 (1765), 906. 117. Robertson-MacDonald of Kinlochmoidart Papers, MS3954, fols. 11–50, National Library of Scotland.

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Notes to Pages 83–88

118. Adam Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767), 129, 130, 139. 119. Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, ou mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’histoire de l’espece humaine, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1770), 1:116; James Adair, History of the American Indians (London, 1775), 52; Hugh Blair, Essays on Rhetoric (Dublin, 1784), 49; Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (London, 1800), 155.

5. Otium 1. CC to Elizabeth Hill, New York, 1 June 1724, CP 8:173–75, quotes on 174, 173. 2. CC, “Farm Journal, 1727–1736, Coldengham, Orange County, New York,” Rosenbach Museum and Library (Ams 434/18), Philadelphia, in Jacquetta  M. Haley, “Farming on the Hudson Valley Frontier: Cadwallader Colden’s Farm Journal, 1727– 1736,” Hudson Valley Regional Review 6, no. 1 (1989):1–34. 3. CC to WD, ca. 1728, CP 1:271–73, quotes on 271, 271–72. 4. CC to JA, [Coldengham], December 1729, CP 7:324–25, quote on 324. See also, CC to JM, Coldengham, 7 November 1745, CP 8:328–38 at 337. 5. WD to CC, Boston, 14 September 1724, CP 1:164–67, quote on 167; WD to CC, Boston, 14 July 1729, CP 1:308. 6. James Chrystie to CC, Morbattle, Scotland, 28 February 17[30], CP 2:7–9, quote on 7. 7. James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 27 April 1732, CP 2:63–65, quotes on 64. 8. JR to CC, Albany, 10 January 1743, CP 3:1–3, quotes on 1. 9. Margaret J. Osler, ed., Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cambridge, 1991); David Allan, Philosophy and Politics in Later Stuart Scotland: Neo-Stoicism, Culture and Ideology in an Age of Crisis, 1540–1690 (East Linton, 2000); Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought (Cambridge, 2002), 27–33, 89–92, 96–117, 156–66, 199–209, 234–35. 10. Steven Shapin, “ ‘A Scholar and a Gentleman’: The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as If It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore, 2010), 142–81, esp. 146. 11. See Allan, Philosophy and Politics in Later Stuart Scotland. 12. Ibid., 111. 13. Ibid., 185. 14. Cotton’s poem was originally published in The Compleat Angler, vol. 2, in 1676. It is quoted here from M. C. Bradbrook, “Marvell and the Poetry of Rural Solitude,” Review of English Studies 17, no. 65 (1941): 37–46 at 45. 15. John Pomfret, The Choice. A Poem, 4th ed. (London, 1701), quote on 4. On Pomfret and his influence in America, see David S. Shields, “Happiness in Society: The Development of an Eighteenth-Century American Poetic Ideal,” American Literature 55, no. 4 (1983): 541–59.

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16. George Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Dublin, 1710), esp. 1–2. 17. Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (London, 1713), 2. 18. George Berkeley, Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher, 2 vols. (London, 1732), quotes on 1:2–3. 19. Berkeley, “America or the Muse’s Refuge, A Prophecy,” in A. A. Luce, The Life of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (London, 1949), 96. Berkeley’s poem was written in 1726 but not published until 1752. 20. William Livingston, Philosophic Solitude: Or, the Choice of a Rural Life. A Poem (New York, 1747); Benjamin Church, The Choice: A Poem after the Manner of Mr. Pomfret (Boston, 1757). 21. Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood, No. 1, in the New-England Courant, 2 April 1722, repr. BFP 1:8–11, quote on 10. 22. Marcus Tullius Cicero, M. T. Cicero’s Cato Major; or, His Discourse of Old-Age, trans. James Logan (Philadelphia, 1744). 23. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 29 September 1748, CP 4:78–80, quotes on 79, 78. Franklin’s line appears in the song, “The Miser’s Misery.” See The Hive: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Songs, 4 vols. (London, 1732), 4:54. 24. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 11 October 1750, CP 4:226–27, quotes on 227. 25. This suggestion in made in Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York, 2006), 95. 26. J. L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley, 1979), 324; Chaplin, First Scientific American, 94, 98. On Spencer, see I. Bernard Cohen, “Benjamin Franklin and the Mysterious ‘Dr. Spence,’ ” Journal of the Franklin Institute 235, no. 1 (1943): 1–25. On electricity in British America, see James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 27. On Spencer’s meeting with Alexander, see JA to CC, New York, 22 January 1744, CP 3:45–48 at 46. On Spencer and Mitchell, see JM to CC, Urbanna, VA, 10 September 1745, CP 8:314–28 at 321; CC to JM, Coldengham, 7 November 1745, CP 8:328–38 at 338. On Mitchell’s visit to Pennsylvania, see John Bartram to CC, 2 November 1744, CP 3:78– 79. On Colden’s trip to Philadelphia, see CC to Bartram, December 1744, CP 3:94–95 at 94. 28. John Bartram to CC, 26 June 1743, CP 3:23–24, quote on 23. 29. CC, An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation (New York, 174[6]). 30. BF, A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America (Philadelphia, 1743), repr. in BFP 2:378–83, quote on 381. 31. J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2, Printer and Publisher, 1730– 1747 (Philadelphia, 2006), esp. 452–99; Chaplin, First Scientific American, 39–71. On the continuities in Franklin’s multiple careers and personae, as well as on the impact on Franklin of his accidental meeting with Colden in 1743, see Nick Wrightson, “ ‘[Those with] Great Abilities Have Not Always the Best Information’: How Franklin’s Transatlantic Book-Trade and Scientific Networks Interacted, ca. 1730–1757,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8, no. 1 (2010): 94–119.

20 6

Notes to Pages 91–94

32. CC to BF, December 1744, CP 3:92–94, quote on 93. See also CC to PC, June 1744, CP 3:60–61; Carl van Doren, “The Beginnings of the American Philosophical Society,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87, no. 3 (1943): 277–89, esp. 281. 33. CC to BF, December 1744, CP 3:92–94, quote on 94. 34. These five members were James Alexander, John Coxe, Archibald Home, David Martin, and Robert Hunter Morris; BF to CC, New York, 5 April 1744, BFP 2:406–7. 35. JA to CC, New York, 12 November 1744, CP 3:80–83, at 82–83. See also JA to CC, 16 March 1744, Robert R. Livingston Papers, NYHS. 36. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 15 August 1745, CP 3:139–43, quote on 143. On the failures of the society, see also Bartram to CC, 4 October 1745, CP 3:158–60 at 159–60. 37. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 28 November 1745, CP 3:180–83, quote on 182. 38. BF to CC, [Philadelphia, early 1746], CP 3:184–85 at 184; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 16 October 1746, CP 3:273–76, at 275–76. 39. van Doren, “The Beginnings of the American Philosophical Society,” 288–89. 40. See CC to BF, [October 1743], BFP 2:385–87; CC to Strahan, n.p., [3 December 1743], CP 3:37–39. 41. “An Original Paper of the Late Lieut. Gov. Colden, on a New Method of Printing Discovered by Him,” American Medical and Philosophical Register (1811): 439–50, quotes on 439, 440; John M. Dixon, “Between Script and Specie: Cadwallader Colden’s Printing Method and the Production of Permanent, Correct Knowledge,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8, no.1 (2010): 75–93. 42. CC to JFG, Coldengham, 1745, CP 3:96–98, quotes on 97. 43. CC to PC, May 1742, CP 2:257–63, quote on 263. 44. CC to PC, [New York], June 1744, CP 3:60–61, quote on 61. 45. PC to CC, London, 23 August 1744, CP 3:68–70, quote on 69. 46. PC to CC, London, 20 March 1766, CP 7:104–5, quote on 105. 47. CC to BF, Coldengham, November 1749, CP 4:156–58, quotes on 157; BF, Proposals relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania (Philadelphia, 1749); David C. Humphrey, From King’s College to Columbia, 1746–1800 (New York, 1976), 5–9, 316n4. On Colden’s development of Newburgh, see CC to JA, Goshen, 18  November 1729, CP 7:310–11; CC to JA, Coldengham, 19 November 1729, CP 7:313–15; Michael Dunning to [JA?], Goshen, 23 November 1729, Alexander Papers, box 2, folder 7 (folio 137), NYHS; CC to JA, Coldengham, 28  November 1729, CP 7:317–18; JA to CC, New York, 1 December 1729, CP 8:194–96; CC to JA, Coldengham, 15 December 1729, CP 7:322–23; CC to JA, December 1729, CP 7:324–25; JA to CC, New York, 21 December 1729, CP 1:302–7; JA to CC, New York, 27  December 1729, CP 1:307–8; CC to JA, 9 January 1730, Alexander Papers, box 3, folder 1 (folio 124), NYHS; CC and Elizabeth Colden to Elizabeth Hill, Coldengham, 29 June 1731, CP 8:197–99; CC to JA, Coldengham, 6  December 1731, Alexander Papers, box  2, folder 7, NYHS; CC to JA, 21 March 1732, Alexander Papers, box 3, folder 1 (folio 126), NYHS; JA to CC, New York, 30 April 1732, CP 2:60–61; Edward Manning Ruttenber, History of the Town of Newburgh (Newburgh, 1859), 33. 48. Ruttenber, History of the Town of Newburgh, 30–34, 37–41, 132. 49. Cosby summoned Colden to New York in March 1733 and probably also called on him at Coldengham some months later. William Cosby to CC, New York,

Notes to Pages 94–95

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19 March 173[3], CP 2:86; William Cosby to CC, Burlington, NJ, 3 August 1733, CP 8:207. 50. Colden asserted that such an act would destroy the extravagant grants that hampered the development of the colony and raise an impressive £4,000 each year for the support of government; “Original Draft of Cadwallader Colden’s Memorial to Gov. Cosby on the State of the Grants of Land in the Province of New York,” February 1733, Colden Papers, box 12, fol. 62, NYHS, in DHNY 1:376–89. This proposal got nowhere. A note in Colden’s handwriting on the manuscript copy held by the New-York Historical Society reads, “It is now twenty years since I delivered the above Memorial to Col. Cosby, soon after his arrival. I question whether ever he read it”; DHNY 1:388. 51. Colden named Andrew McDowal, one of his Coldengham employees, as his surrogate. See CC to [William Cosby], n.d., [ca. 1732], in The Historical Magazine, and Notes and Queries, concerning the Antiquities, History and Biography of America, 2nd ser., vol. 2 (Morrisania, NY, 1867), 226–27. For the original, see Miscellaneous Papers, Cadwallader Colden, box 24, New York Public Library. 52. CC to JA, 27 March 1735, CP 2:128–31, quotes on 131. 53. On the “oblong” and Chancery Court disputes, see CC to Micajah Perry [n.p., 29 June 1730?], CP 2:26–30; JA to CC, New York, 3 July 1731 and undated, CP 2:23, 24–26; JA to CC, New York, 22 November 1731 and 23 December 1731, CP 2:35–39, 39–42; CC to JA, 27 March 1735, CP 2:128–31; JA to CC, New York, 8 April 1735, CP 2:134–35; William Cosby to the Board of Trade, New York, 10 June 1735, CSP 41:449–54, esp. 453– 54; CC, “Answer of the Proprietors of the Equivalent Lands to the Attorney Generals Bill in Chancery Before Governor Cosby,” ca. November 1735, BV New York State Boundaries, NY & CT Boundary, Oblong or Equivalent Lands, 1644–1733, box 1, folder 4, NYHS; CC, “History of William Cosby’s Administration as Governor of the Province of New York and of Lieutenant-Governor George Clarke’s Administration through 1737,” CP 9:281–355, esp. 305–18; Alice Mapelsden Keys, Cadwallader Colden: A Representative Eighteenth Century Official (New York, 1906), 37–41; Joseph H. Smith and Leo Hershkowitz, “Courts of Equity in the Province of New York: The Cosby Controversy, 1732–1736,” American Journal of Legal History 16, no. 1 (1972): 1–50; Philip J. Schwarz, The Jarring Interests: New York’s Boundary Makers, 1664–1776 (Albany, 1979), 64–73. For evidence that the “oblong” dispute played a critical role in dividing Colden and Cosby, see Alured Popple to CC, Whitehall, 16 September 1735, CP 2:140–41. 54. Isaac DuBois to CC, [1745?], US&PP, NYHS; Sara Stidstone Gronim, “What Jane Knew: A Woman Botanist in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 3 (2007): 36. 55. JB to CC, 16 January 1743, CP 3:3–6 at 5. 56. PC to CC, London, 9 March 1744, CP 3:50–52, esp. 50–51. 57. JFG to CC, Leiden, 6 August 1743, CP 3:31–33, quote on 32. Colden did not receive these books until late 1744; see CC to JFG, [December 1744], CP 3:83–91, esp. 83–84. 58. CC to PC, [January 1744], CP 3:42–45; PC to CC, London, 9 March 1744, CP 3:50–52; CC, “Plantae Coldenghamiae in Provincia Noveboracensi Americes sponte crescentes: Quas ad methodum Cl. Linnaei Sexulem, anno 1742 &c.,” Acta Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Upsaliensis 4 (1743): 81–136 and 5 (1744–1750): 47–82. On the plant genus, see JB to CC, 6 October 1746, CP 3:270–72.

208

Notes to Pages 95–98

59. PK to CC, Philadelphia, 4 January 1751, CP 4:250–52, quote on 251. 60. CC to PC, ca. January 1751, CP 4:258–61. 61. CC to JFG, New York, 1 October 1755, CP 5:29–32, quotes on 29, 30. 62. CC to John Fothergill, Coldengham, 18 October 1757, CP 5:202–5, quotes on 203. 63. Gronim, “What Jane Knew.” 64. Ibid., 33–59. 65. AG to CC, Charles Town, SC, 22 November 1755, CP 5:41–43, quote on 42. 66. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 344–72; Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), 69–103; Chaplin, First Scientific American, 103–14, 123–39. 67. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 5 June, 1747, CP 3:396–98 at 397; CC to BF, New York, 3 August 1747, CP 3:409–10; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 6 August 1747, CP 3:414–15 at 414; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 13 August 1747, CP 3:418. On Leyden jars, which were often no more than glass bottles filled with water and covered in metal, see Chaplin, First Scientific American, 104. 68. Franklin sent Colden notes on his electrical experiments in 1750; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 28  June 1750, CP 4:218–19; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 11  October 1750, CP 4:226–27. Colden then offered some initial thoughts on the cause of electricity and called for more experimentation; CC to BF, 28 October 1751, BFP 4:200–201. Franklin replied in the form of a set of questions and answers; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 31 October 1751, BFP 4:201–5. In March 1752, Colden informed Franklin of “some experiment made in my house” with electricity; CC to BF, Coldengham, 16 March 1752, CP 4:314–17, quote on 315. Franklin encouraged Colden to engage in further experimentation; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 23 April 1752, CP 4:319–23 at 321. In October 1752, Colden returned to Franklin a copy of Benjamin Wilson’s A Treatise on Electricity (London, 1752) and remarked that “my youngest son . . . hopes to be able to make Electrical experiments tolerably well”; CC to BF, Coldengham, [24] October 1752, CP 4:351–53, quote on 351. See also CC to BF, n.d., CP 4:337–39. 69. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 12 April 1753, CP 4:382–84, quote on 382. 70. CC to Samuel Bard, Flushen, Long Island, 5 July 1758, CP 5:234–47, quotes on 235. 71. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 1 January 175[4], CP 4:358–59; David Colden, “Remarks on Nollet’s Letters,” 4 December 1753, BFP 5:135–44. See also Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments: A New Edition of Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, ed. I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge, MA, 1941); Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 358–59; Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility, 68, 90. 72. CC to Dr. Home, New York, 7 December 1721, CP 1:51. 73. CC to Elizabeth Hill, New York, 1 June 1724, CP 8:173–75, quotes on 174. 74. AC to Elizabeth Hill, Coldengham, 8 September 1732, CP 8:200–2, quote on 202. 75. CC to Mr. Jordan, Philadelphia, 26 March 1717, CP 1:39. 76. JA to CC, New York, 14 March 1729, CP 1:274–77, quote on 276. See also CC to Capt. Van Pelt, New York, 17 December 1726, CP 1:59. It is possible that Colden’s aunt sent Gabriel to Governor William Burnet around 1725, when she wrote Colden, “I would be glad to know of ye Governours good Success about Gabriel” (Elizabeth Hill to

Notes to Pages 98–102

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CC, [December] 1725, CP 8:182). Gabriel may have previously caused problems for Elizabeth Hill. Tamar was certainly owned by Hill, who remarked to Colden in 1726 that, “I have a great deal of trouble with [Tamar] & her brother & sisters, in bringing them up & never had one days work from any of them.” Hill enclosed a bill for twenty shillings to enable Tamar “to buy her baby clouts [clothes]”; Elizabeth Hill to CC, Philadelphia, 28 November 1726, CP 1:193–94, quotes on 194. See also Elizabeth Hill to CC, Philadelphia, 24 [January] 1727, CP 8:183–84. 77. CC to BF, New York, 28 September 1747, BFP 3:177–78; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 1 October 1747, BFP 3:178–79. 78. Haley, “Farming on the Hudson Valley Frontier,” esp. 23–34. 79. CC to Elizabeth DeLancey, [17 March 1738], DeLancey Family Papers, 49.48.62, Museum of the City of New York. The dating of this letter is taken from the version in Copy Book, 1737–1753: 11–15, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia. On Elizabeth DeLancey’s marriage, see Cadwallader Colden Jr. to a Cousin in Scotland, 1796, in An Outline History of Orange County, by Samuel W. Eager (Newburgh, NY, 1846– 1847), 245–48, esp. 246. 80. CC to “my Dear Children,” Coldengham, 29 February 1740, in Copy Book, 1737– 1753: 17, Rosenbach Museum and Library. 81. On Colden’s relocation, see Alexander Colden to CC, [1757], CP 5:111–14 at 111– 12; Alexander Colden to CC, New York, 22  August 1757, CP 5:176–78; Alexander Colden to CC, New York, 1 September 1757, CP 5:181–82; Alexander Colden to CC, New York, 6 October 1757, CP 5:192–97 at 193; Alexander Colden to CC, New York, 13 October 1757, CP 5:198–200 at 200; CC to James DeLancey, [November 1757?], CP 5:209–11 at 211. 82. CC, “An Introduction to the Study of Phylosophy Wrote in America for the Use of a Young Gentleman,” ca. July 1760, US&PP, NYHS, in PWCC, 37–56, quote on 53; see also attached letter CC to Alexander Colden, Coldengham, 10 July 1760, US&PP, NHYS. For Peter DeLancey’s College of Philadelphia class, see Thomas Harrison Montgomery, A History of the University of Pennsylvania: From Its Foundation to A.D. 1770 (Philadelphia, 1900), 530–54. On the College of Philadelphia, see  J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges (New York, 2002), 155–80. On Johnson as a tutor and an apparently lax one at that, see CC to SJ, 20 December 1752, sent with postscript on 29 January 1753, SJP 2:299–301; SJ to CC, 19 February [1753], SJP 2:302–5; CC to Elizabeth (Colden) DeLancey, [ca. February 1754], CP 4:339–40; Elizabeth (Colden) DeLancey to CC, Westchester, 20 February 1754, CP 4:431–33. 83. CC, “An Introduction to the Study of Phylosophy,” PWCC, quotes on 48, 56. 84. For more on these portraits, see Brandon Brame Fortune and Deborah J. Warner, Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth- Century America (Washington DC, 1999), 39–41. 85. Waldo Walker, “Chamber of Commerce Has Its Hall of Fame,” New York Times, 3 July 1927; Charles T. Gwynne, “Welcome,” Proceedings of the New York State Historical Association 25 (1927): 44–48, esp. 45; Karl Kusserow, Picturing Power: Portraiture and Its Uses in the New York Chamber of Commerce (New York, 2013).

210

Notes to Pages 103–107

6. Philosophical Actions 1. An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation (London, 1746); Erklärung der ersten wirkenden Ursache in der Materie und der Ursache der Schwere, trans. Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (Hamburg, 1748); Explication des premières causes de l’action dans la matière et de la cause de la gravitation, trans. Dominique Castet (Paris, 1751). 2. George Berkeley, “America or the Muse’s Refuge, A Prophecy” in A. A. Luce, The Life of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne (London, 1949), 96. 3. See George Berkeley, An Essay towards Preventing the Ruine of Great Britain (London, 1721), esp. 1–2. 4. Edwin S. Gaustad, George Berkeley in America (New Haven, CT, 1979), 26–27. 5. Luce, Life of George Berkeley, 110; Gaustad, George Berkeley in America, 51, 129–31. Samuel Johnson recalled that Berkeley “wrote to his friends to do their utmost to get the patent altered for some place (which probably would have been New York) on the Continent, but they could never gain the point”; Samuel Johnson, “Autobiography,” SJP 1:1–49, vol. 1, quote on 25. 6. Luce, Life of George Berkeley, 120. 7. Johnson, “Autobiography,” SJP 1:20–27. 8. SJ to GB, Stratford, 10 September 1729, GB to SJ, 25 November 1729, SJ to GB, Stratford, 5 February 1730, GB to SJ, 24 March 1730, in SJP 2:263–70, 270–74, 274–82, 282–84; Luce, Life of George Berkeley, 128–31; Gaustad, George Berkeley in America, 52–80; Joseph  J. Ellis, The New England Mind in Transition: Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, 1696–1772 (New Haven, CT, 1973), esp. 145–70; Don R. Gerlach and George E. DeMille, Samuel Johnson of Stratford, New England, 1696–1772 (Athens, GA, 2010). For Colden’s discussion of a Berkeleyan “sect” in America, see CC, “An Introduction to the Study of Phylosophy Wrote in America for the Use of a Young Gentleman,” ca. July 1760, US&PP, NYHS, in PWCC, 37–56, quote on 45. 9. Charles Hayes, A Treatise of Fluxions; or, An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London, 1704); William Jones, Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos; or, A New Introduction to the Mathematics (London, 1706), 226–30. 10. Carl B. Boyer, The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development: The Concepts of the Calculus (New York, 1959); Niccolò Guicciardini, The Development of Newtonian Calculus in Britain 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 1989); George Berkeley, De Motu and The Analyst: A Modern Edition, with Introductions and Commentary, ed. and trans. Douglas M. Jesseph (Dordrecht, 1992). 11. Berkeley, De Motu and The Analyst, quote on 199. 12. For links between the Colden and Rutherfurd families, see James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 26  March  1742, CP 2:248–50 at 249; James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 9 September 1743, CP 3:29–30 at 29; James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 14 June 1743, CP 8:145–46 at 145; James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 15 October 1746, CP 8:151–54 at 154. For Colden’s description of Rutherfurd, see CC to [PC], [1743], CP 3:16–17. 13. James Oswald to Henry Home, later Lord Kames, 1742, in James Oswald, Memorials of the Public Life and Character of the Right Hon. James Oswald of Dunnikier

Notes to Pages 107–109

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(Edinburgh, 1825), 27–29, quote on 27. For more on Rutherfurd’s political alliances, resignation from Parliament, and relocation to Albany, see letters from JR to Hew Dalrymple, 1733–ca. 1742, in Papers of Hamilton-Dalrymple Family, GD 110/908/911/1, GD 110/908/911/5, GD 110/908/911/7, GD 110/908/911/8, GD 110/908/911/9, National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh; letters from Robert Rutherfurd to Hew Dalrymple, Genoa, 1741–1742, in Papers of Hamilton-Dalrymple Family, GD 110/934/1–4, National Records of Scotland; Romney Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 1715–1754, 2 vols. (London, 1970), 2:397. 14. Quotes from JR to Hew Dalrymple, Albany, 18  November 1742, Papers of Hamilton-Dalrymple Family, GD 110/908/911/7, National Archives of Scotland. On Rutherfurd’s time at Albany, see also JR to CC, Albany, 10 January 1743, CP 3:1–3; CC to JR, n.d., CP 3:15–16; James Colden to CC, Whitsome, Scotland, 9 September 1743, CP 3:29–30; CC to AC, Albany, 24  July 1746, 29  July 1746, 20  August 1746, 19 November 1746, CP 3:229–30, 232–33, 259, 284; JR to CC, Albany, 22 April 1745, 26 June 1746, CP 3:112–13, 218–19; Eleanor Rutherfurd to CC, Albany, 9 December 1746, CP 3:292–93. 15. JR to CC, Albany, 19 April 1743, CP 3:17–21, quote on 17. For more on Colden’s engagement with infinitesimals, see Roy N. Lokken, “Discussions on Newton’s Infinitesimals in Eighteenth-Century Anglo-America,” Historia Mathematica 7, no. 2 (1980): 141–55. 16. JR to CC, Albany, 19 April 1743, CP 3:17–21, quotes on 19, 20. 17. JR to CC, Edgerston, Scotland, 1 September 1743, CP 8:297–98, quote on 298. On his return to New York, Rutherfurd provided Colden with a copy of “Leibnitz’s Systems explained & defended”; JR to CC, Albany, 30 July 1745, CP 3:132–33 at 132. 18. SJ to CC, Stratford, 21 November 1743, CP 3:39–40. 19. SJ to CC, Stratford, 22 April 1746, CP 3:205–8 at 206; SJ to CC, Stratford, 24 July 1746, CP 3:228–29 at 228. 20. CC, “An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions, or the Arithmetic of Infinites,” [1743], Copy Book, 1737–1753: 36–48, Rosenbach Museum and Library (Ams 434/20), Philadelphia, in CC, Principles of Action in Matter, 189–215. 21. CC, “An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions,” in Principles of Action in Matter, quotes on 191, 213. 22. JA to CC, New York, 10 June 1744, CP 3:61–63 at 62–63; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 25 October 1744, CP 3:77–78 at 77; CC to BF, December 1744, CP 3:92–94 at 92. 23. SJ to CC, Stratford, 20 October 1744, CP 3:76–77 at 76; SJ to CC, 25 February 1745, CP 3:104–5; SJ to CC, Stratford, 26 June 1745, CP 3:120–22 at 120–21. 24. SJ to CC, Stratford, 10 July 1745, CP 3:127–28 at 127; CC to SJ, 3 September 1745, CP 3:148–49 at 149. On the uniqueness of Colden’s published colonial work on fluxions, see Lokken, “Discussions of Newton’s Infinitesimals in Eighteenth- Century Anglo-America,” 148. For a broader British context, see Guicciardini, The Development of Newtonian Calculus in Britain. 25. CC, An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation (New York, [1746]). Published in New York around March 1745/6, this treatise was dated 1745, reflecting the Old Style calendar then in use in Britain. For further background on its publication, see JA to CC, New York, 30 January 1746, CP 3:194–96;

212

Notes to Pages 109–113

JA to CC, New York, 23 February 1746, CP 3:196–99; JA to CC, New York, 7 March 1746, CP 3:200–201. 26. CC, Explication, iv. 27. Ibid., 4, 3. 28. I. Bernard Cohen, The Newtonian Revolution (Cambridge, 1980), 182–94, 257, 335n36, 352n21; I. Bernard Cohen, “Newton’s Concepts of Force and Mass, with Notes on the Laws of Motion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, ed. I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith (Cambridge, 2002), 57–84, esp. 60–62; Domenico Bertoloni Meli, “Inherent and Centrifugal Forces in Newton,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 60, no. 3 (2006): 319–35. 29. Ernan McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity (Notre Dame, 1978), 33–43. Quotes taken from Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 404. 30. CC to Alexander Garden, Coldengham, [1 October] 1755, US&PP, NYHS, in PWCC 216–23, quotes on 217. Colden wrote this statement in response to an essay by the Edinburgh professor of natural philosophy, John Stewart. For more on Stewart’s position, see Michael Barfoot, “James Gregory (1753–1821) and Scottish Scientific Metaphysics, 1750–1800” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1983), esp. 56–62, 66–68. 31. CC, “An Introduction to the Study of Phylosophy,” PWCC, quote on 47. 32. Duncan Forbes, A Letter to a Bishop, concerning Some Important Discoveries in Philosophy and Theology (London, 1732); Forbes, Some Thoughts concerning Religion, Natural and Revealed (London, 1735). On Hutchinson, see C. B. Wilde, “Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth Century Britain,” History of Science, 18 (1980): 1–24; Nigel Aston, “From Personality to Party: The Creation and Transmission of Hutchinsonianism, c. 1725–1750,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, pt. A, 35, no. 3 (2004): 625–44; John Friesen, “Hutchinsonianism and the Newtonian Enlightenment,” Centaurus 48, no. 1 (2006): 40–49. 33. SJ to CC, Stratford, 5 October 1745, CP 3:160–64, quote on 163. The published version of this letter is incomplete. For the missing part, see SJ to CC, “Fire, Light and Air: Symbolism of the Bible,” n.d., US&PP, NYHS. 34. SJ to CC, Stratford, 22 April 1746, CP 3:205–8, quotes on 207. 35. CC to SJ, Coldengham, 2 June 1746, CP 3:212. 36. SJ to CC, Stratford, 23 June 1746, SJP 2:290–92, quotes on 291. 37. SJ to CC, Stratford, 12 January 1747, CP 3:330–32, quote on 331. 38. CC to SJ, New York, 19 November 1746, CP 3:281–83, quote on 283. 39. SJ, Ethices Elementa; or, The First Principles of Moral Philosophy; And especially that Part of it which is called Ethics (Boston, 1746); SJ to CC, Stratford, 24 July 1746, CP 3:228– 29 at 229; CC to SJ, 27 January 1747, SJP 2:293–94. 40. CC, “Of the First Principles of Morality; or, of the Actions of Intelligent Beings,” Copy Book, 1737–1753: 125–37, 142–48, 335, Rosenbach Museum and Library, and in PWCC, 99–119, quotes on 109, 114, 117; SJ to CC, Stratford, 15 April 1747, CP 3:372–75; CC to SJ, New York, 18 May 1747, SJP 2:296–98; SJ to CC, Stratford, 6 June 1747, CP 3:398–400.

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41. For a classic survey of philosophical materialism in early America, see I. Woodbridge Riley, American Philosophy: The Early Schools (New York, 1907), 323–472. 42. CC to SJ, New York, 18 May 1747, SJP 2:296–98 quote on 297. Spinozism is also mentioned in CC to SJ, 3 September 1745, CP 3:146–48 at 147; and SJ to CC, Stratford, 6 June 1747, CP 3:398–400 at 399. 43. CC to PC, New York, 8 July 1746, CP 3:222–24, quote on 224. See also CC to JM, Coldengham, NY, 7 November 1745, CP 8:328–38, esp. 336–37; CC to SJ, Coldengham, NY, 12 April 1746, CP 3:202–5, esp. 205. Colden placed a bundle of nine copies of his treatise on the snow Sally to London. He did not know that ship’s master, having previously relied on Captain William Bryant of the Albany to deliver his botanical specimens and scientific correspondence to the British capital. Bryant, however, had been recently captured in the English Channel by privateers and taken to the port of Dieppe in northern France. See PC to CC, London, 30 March 1756, CP 3:109–11; CC to JFG, Coldengham, 30 May 1746, CP 3:209–11; CC to PC, New York, 20 June 174[6], CP 3:117–20, esp. 119. 44. PC to CC, London, 27 March 1747, CP 3:367–70. 45. PC to JL, London, 4 April 1748, Logan Family Papers, HSP, Philadelphia; PC to BF, London, 12 April 1747, CP 3:371–72. 46. Abraham Gotthelf Kästner’s animadversions appear in Erklärung der ersten wirkenden Ursache in der Materie und der Ursache der Schwere, 87–108. The English translation quoted in Chapter  6 of this volume is from a document held at the New-York Historical Society and mislabeled “Criticism of the Principles of Action in Matter,” quotes on 1, 2, 7, 14, US&PP, NYHS. This translation is almost certainly the one provided to Colden by a local German-speaking Lutheran minister, John Christopher Hartwick, in 1752. See PC to CC, London, 15 January 1752, CP 9:110–11; CC to BF, Coldengham, 20 May 1752, CP 4:325–28 at 328; CC to PC, Coldengham, 28 July 1752, CP 9:116–19 at 118–19; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 14 September 1752 CP 4:343–44, CC to BF, Coldengham, [24] October 1752, CP 4:351–53 at 352. 47. CC to PC, New York, 15 June 1751, HM8255, Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA; PC to CC, London, 11 December 1751, CP 9:109. On Dodsley, see Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print (Carbondale, IL, 1996). 48. CC, Principles of Action in Matter, the Gravitation of Bodies, and the Motion of the Planets, explained from those Principles (London, 1751), quote on 3. 49. Ibid., [73]. 50. Ibid., 157–67. 51. PC to CC, London, 11 December 1751, CP 9:109. 52. PC to CC, London, 18 October 1753, CP 4:408–9. 53. Gentleman’s Magazine 22 (1752), 498–500, 589–90; Gentleman’s Magazine 23 (1753), 65–66; London Magazine 21 (1752), 560–62; [William Bewley], “Review of The Principles of Action in Matter, the Gravitation of Bodies, and the Motion of the Planets, Explained from those Principles,” Monthly Review 7 (1752): 459–67. On these magazine excerpts of Colden’s book, see also BF to CC, Philadelphia, 12 April 1753, CP 4:382–84 at 384. 54. PC to CC, London, 10 March 1754, CP 4:377–79, quote on 378.

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55. Leonhard Euler to Johann Kaspar Wettstein, Berlin, 21 November 1752, trans. John Glaus, Euler Archive, http://eulerarchive.maa.org. For the translated extract of this letter that was sent to Colden, see PC to CC, 7 March 1753, CP 4:355–57. 56. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 12 April 1753, CP 4:382–84, quote on 383. 57. Colden’s responses to Kästner and Euler are both held at the University of Edinburgh; Colden Material, DC 1.25–26, EUL. Colden’s reply to Euler is marked “Read at R.S. January 10. 1754.” It is not clear if Colden’s response was read in its entirety to the Royal Society, whose Journal Book records that on 10 January 1754, “The title of Mr Cadwallader Colden’s answer, to Mr Professor Euler’s remarks on Mr Colden’s principles of action in matter was read, and the same was referred to Dr Brackenridge [William Brakenridge] to give an account of”; JBO/23, Royal Society of London. See also PC to CC, London, 10 March 1754, CP 4:377–79 at 378–379. For Benjamin Franklin’s input on Colden’s reply to Kästner, see BF to CC, Philadelphia, 28 February 1753, CP 4:371–73. For Collinson’s role, see CC to PC, Coldengham, 7 July 1753, CP 4:395–96; PC to CC, London, 18 October 1753, CP 4:408–9. Colden kept a record of his reply as “An Answer to Professor Euler’s remarks June 27th 1753,” Copy Book, 1737–1753: 331–33, Rosenbach Museum and Library. 58. PC to CC, London, 1 September 1753, CP 4:404–6 at 406; PC to CC, London, 10 March 1754, CP 4:377–79 at 378–79. 59. CC, “Letter to the Authors of the Monthly Review,” New-York, 6 August 1759, Monthly Review 21 (1759): 397–403; William Kendrick, “Letter to the Authors of the Monthly Review,” Monthly Review 21 (1759): 500–12. 60. CC, “Letter to the Authors of the Monthly Review,” New York, 7 July 1760, Monthly Review 23 (1760): 380–87, quote on 381; William Kendrick, “Reply to Cadwallader Colden,” Monthly Review 23 (1760): 387–89. 61. Friesen, “Hutchinsonianism and the Newtonian Enlightenment.” 62. Samuel Pike, Philosophia Sacra; or, the Principles of Natural Philosophy. Extracted from Divine Revelation (London, 1753), 133–50. On Pike’s reading and admiration of Colden’s Explication, see Samuel Pike to CC, [London], 10 July 1753, CP 4:396–99 at 396–97. 63. Samuel Pike to CC, [London], 10 July 1753, CP 4:396–99, quotes on 398. 64. See Robert Spearman, An Enquiry after Philosophy and Theology (Edinburgh, 1755), 76–78. 65. CC to BF, Coldengham, [29] November 1753, CP 4:413–18, quote on 415; CC to BF, Coldengham, 13 February 1754, BFP 5:196–98; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 30 August 1754, CP 4:462–64 at 462. 66. CC to Samuel Pike, [1753?], PWCC, 210–13. 67. Samuel Pike to CC, 9 September 17[5]5, Gratz Collection, HSP, cited in Alfred R. Hoermann, Cadwallader Colden: A Figure of the American Enlightenment (Westport, CT, 2002), 99. 68. CC to Pike, [June] 1755, PWCC, 214–16, quote on 216. See also CC to Samuel Pike, New York, 12 May 1755, CP 5:7–9. 69. CC, “Observations on the Fever Which Prevailed in the City of New-York in 1741 and 2,” New-York Weekly Post Boy, nos. 49–51 (26 December 1743 to 9 January 1744), repr. in American Medical and Philosophical Register 1 (1810–1811): 310–30. On the printing of

Notes to Pages 119–120

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this piece, see JA to CC, New York, 22 January 1744, CP 3:45–48 at 46. For Colden’s thoughts on epidemical disease, see also CC to JM, Coldengham, 7 November 1745, CP 8:328–38. Colden’s newspaper articles were reprinted in Pennsylvania Gazette, nos. 787, 789–90 (11 January to 2 February 1744). See also CC, “[Thoughts on] the Late Sickness in New York,” Copy Book, 1737–1753: 89–98, Rosenbach Museum and Library, in “Account of the Climate and Diseases of New-York,” American Medical and Philosophical Register 1 (1810–1811): 304–10; Saul Jarcho, “Cadwallader Colden as a Student of Infectious Disease,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 29, no. 2 (1955): 99–115; Saul Jarcho, “A Papal Physician and the Sanitation of New York City,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52, no. 3 (1978): 410–18. 70. JA to CC, New York, 22 September 1745, CP 3:154–56; JA to CC, New York, 6 October 1745, CP 3:164–66. On Alexander’s flatulence, gout, and sweaty feet, see JA to CC, New York, 18 March 1745, CP 3:107–9 at 107–8; CC to JM, Coldengham, 7 November 1745, CP 8:328–38 at 335. 71. CC to JM, Coldengham, 7 November 1745, CP 8:328–38 at 336; CC, An Abstract from Dr.  Berkley’s Treatise on Tar-Water: With Some Reflexions Thereon, Adapted to Diseases Frequent in America (New York, 1745). This work was initially printed in the New-York Weekly Post Boy in February–March  1745. See also “Some Reflexions on Dr. Berkeley’s Treatise on Tar Water Adapted to Diseases Frequent in America” Copy Book, 1737–1753: 50–55, Rosenbach Museum and Library; Saul Jarcho, “The Therapeutic Use of Resin and of Tar Water by Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) and Cadwallader Colden (1688–1776),” New York State Journal of Medicine 55, no. 6 (1955): 834–40. For the printing of Colden’s treatise, see JA to CC, New York, 10 February 1745, CP 3:102–3 at 102; JA to CC, New York, 18 March 1745, CP 3:107–9 at 108. Colden sent copies of his tar-water publication to Samuel Johnson; CC to SJ, 3 September 1745, CP 3:148–49 at 149; and to Johan Frederik Gronovius; CC to JFG, Coldengham, 1745, CP 3:96–98 at 98; CC to JFG, Coldengham, 30 May 1746, CP 3:209–11 at 211. 72. CC, “The Cure of Cancers: From an Eminent Physician at New-York,” Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 21 (1751), 305–8, quotes on 305; CC, “Further Account of the Phytolacca,” Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 22 (1752), 302; CC, “Extract of a Letter from an Eminent Physician of the Province of New York, concerning an Indian Remedy for the Venereal Disease,” Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 27 (1757), 405–6. For a manuscript copy of Colden’s essay on cancers, see CC, “Of Cancers,” Copy Book, 1737–1753: 99–102, Rosenbach Museum and Library. For more on plant remedies, see John Hubbard to SJ, [1745], CP 3:123–25; CC to RW, 1758, PWCC, 224–29 at 227; CC to [RW], New York, 15 February 1758, CP 5:215–18. 73. See John P. Wright, “Metaphysics and Physiology: Mind, Body, and the Animal Economy in Eighteenth-century Scotland,” in M. A. Stewart, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 1990), 251–301, esp. 263. See also Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2010), 106. 74. R. K. French, Robert Whytt, The Soul, and Medicine (London, 1969); Wright, “Metaphysics and Physiology.” 75. William Porterfield had similar ideas; Wright, “Metaphysics and Physiology,” 273. 76. CC, “A Summary Account of the Principal Functions of the Animal Oeconomy,” 7 January 1745, Copy Book, 1737–1753: 56–70, 111–12, Rosenbach Museum and Library,

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quotes on 56, 70, 58, 68. James Alexander requested a copy of this treatise along with Colden’s work on gravity in March  1745; JA to CC, New York, 18  March  1745, CP 3:107–9 at 108. 77. BF to CC, Philadelphia, 15 August 1745, CP 3:139–43, quote on 140; BF to CC, Philadelphia, 28 November 1745, CP 3:180–83; Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York, 2006), 97–99. 78. JM, “Account of the Yellow Fever in Virginia in 1741–2,” in Philadelphia Medical Museum, ed. John Redman Coxe (1805) 1:1–20. 79. JM to BF, [March 1745?], BFP 3:17–21. 80. CC to JM, Coldengham, 8 June 1745, US&PP, NYHS, in American Medical and Philosophical Register 4 (1814): 378–83, quotes on 380. See also JM to CC, Urbanna, VA, 10 September 1745, CP 8:314–28. 81. CC to JM, Coldengham, 7 November 1745, CP 8:328–38, quote on 334. 82. JM to BF, Urbana, VA, 12 September 1745, CP 3:151–54, quote on 153. 83. Alexander Garden to CC, Charles Town, SC, 14 January 1755, CP 5:1–4; Alexander Garden to CC, Charles Town, SC, 18  February 1755, CP 5:4–5. The KamesStewart debate is analyzed in Barfoot, “James Gregory (1753–1821) and Scottish Scientific Metaphysics, 1750–1800.” 84. Alexander Garden to CC, Charles Town, SC, 23 May 1755, CP 5:10–12; CC to Alexander Garden, Coldengham, [1 October] 1755, in PWCC, 216–23, quote on 223. 85. Thomas L. Hankins, “Eighteenth-Century Attempts to Resolve the Vis viva Controversy,” Isis 56, no. 3 (1965), 281–97, quote on 282. 86. Alexander Garden to CC, Charles Town, SC, 22 November 1755, CP 5:41–43; Thomas Reid, “An Essay on Quantity,” US&PP, NYHS; L. L. Laudan, “The Vis viva Controversy, a Post-Mortem,” Isis 59, no. 2 (1968): 130–43; Carolyn Iltis, “Leibniz and the Vis Viva Controversy,” Isis 62, no. 1 (1971): 21–35; Hankins, “Eighteenth- Century Attempts.” 87. CC, “Remark on Mr. Reid’s Essay on Quantity,” US&PP, NYHS. 88. Alexander Garden to CC, Charles Town, 20 April 1756, CP 5:69–71, quote on 69. 89. CC to Alexander Garden, Coldengham, [1  October] 1755, in PWCC, 216–23, quote on 223. 90. RW, Physiological Essays (Edinburgh, 1755), quotes on 188, 187. On the delivery of Whytt’s book to Colden, see Alexander Garden to CC, Charles Town, 15 April 1757, CP 5:141–43. 91. Thomas Melvill, “Observations on Light and Colours,” in Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary 2 (Edinburgh, 1756), 12–90; CC, “Remarks on Mr. Melvill’s Observations on Light & Colours,” US&PP, NYHS. 92. CC to Alexander Garden, Coldengham, 23 June 1757, CP 5:151–55, quote on 152–53. 93. CC to RW, [1758], PWCC, 224–29, quotes on 229. 94. RW to CC, Edinburgh, 27 October 1758, CP 5:261–63, quote on 261. 95. CC to RW, New York, 21 July 1759, PWCC, 229–23; CC to RW, Coldengham, 15 April 1760, PWCC, 233–35. 96. RW to CC, Edinburgh, 14 May 1761, CP 6:33–34 at 34; RW, Physiological Essays, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1761), 261–62.

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97. RW, An Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1763), 343n, in Wright, “Metaphysics and Physiology,” 286. Wright finds this charge misleading; see p. 275. 98. CC to William Porterfield, Coldengham, 19 May 1760, PWCC, 236–41, quote on 239. 99. CC to RW, 3 September 1763, CP 6:272–74. 100. RW to CC, Edinburgh, 20 October 1760, CP 5:349–58, quote on 356. 101. CC to RW, New York, 25 February 1762, CLB 1:166–71, quotes on 167. 102. CC, “An Inquiry in the Principles of Vital Motion,” 13 March 1763, US&PP, NHYS; CC, “The Reading of an Elaborate Treatise on the Eye by the Learned and Ingenious Dr. Porterfield Is the Occasion of the Following Reflections,” ca. 1760, PWCC, 121–49. For Porterfield’s reply, see William Porterfield to CC, Edinburgh, 6 November 1767, William Porterfield Misc. MSS, NYHS. 103. CC to RW, 3 September 1763, CP 6:272–74, quotes on 272, 273.

7. Against Partisanship 1. On the protomodern nature of politics in colonial New York, see Carl Becker, “Nominations in Colonial New York,” American Historical Review 6, no. 2 (1901): 260–77; Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971); Alan Tully, Forming American Politics: Ideals, Interests, and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania (Baltimore, MD, 1994), esp. 390–415. On refinement and literacy in eighteenth-century British America, see Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974); Richard  L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1992);  T.  H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004);  E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America (Amherst, MA, 2005). Recent investigation into the conspiracy trials and executions held in Manhattan in 1741 finds that any advancement in political liberty was achieved in conjunction with the brutal exploitation of enslaved blacks and impoverished whites; Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth- Century Manhattan (New York, 2005); see also Serena R. Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia, 2009). Simultaneously, we have been reminded of the importance of royalism and imperial connections in a colony that served as the North American hub of the First British Empire; Patricia  U. Bonomi, “New York: The Royal Colony,” New York History 82, no. 1 (2001): 5–24; Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), esp. 159–65. 2. On notions of partisanship in eighteenth-century Britain, see Caroline Robbins, “ ‘Discordant Parties’: A Study of the Acceptance of Party by Englishmen,” Political Science Quarterly 73, no. 4 (1958): 505–29; Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA, 1968), esp. 119–21; Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley, CA, 1969); J. A. W. Gunn, Factions No More: Attitudes to

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Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth- Century England (London, 1972); J. C. D. Clark, “A General Theory of Party, Opposition and Government, 1688– 1832,” Historical Journal 23, no. 2 (1980): 295–325. 3. On Colden’s notorious conservatism, see Stanley Nider Katz, Newcastle’s New York: Anglo-American Politics, 1732–1753 (Cambridge, MA, 1968), 177–78; Bonomi, A Factious People, 153; Tully, Forming American Politics, 132. 4. Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of NewYork. Began the 9th day of April 1691; and Ended the 27th day of September 1743, 2 vols. (New York, 1764), 1:437, in Bonomi, Factious People, 79. 5. WB to the Duke of Newcastle, New York, 17 November 1725, DRCHNY 5:764– 66, esp.  765–66; George Clarke to Horace Walpole, New York, 24  November 1725, DRCHNY 5:768–71; WB to the Duke of Newcastle, New York, 2 June 1726, DRCHNY 5:775; WB to the Board of Trade, New York, 2 June 1726, DRCHNY 5:776–79 at 778; WB to the Board of Trade, 14 October 1726, DRCHNY 5:781–83 at 783; CC to Alexander Colden, [ca. 1 March 1760], CP 5:310–19; Eugene R. Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 1671– 1746: A Study in Early American Politics (Syracuse, 1981), 134; Mary Lou Lustig, Privilege and Prerogative: New York’s Provincial Elite, 1710–1776 (Madison, NJ, 1995), 37. 6. Bonomi, Factious People, 79–81. 7. Lewis Morris, “To the Inhabitants and Free-holders of Westchester County,” [New York, April 1713], in LMP 1:155–60, quote on 155. See also RH, To All Whom These Presents May Concern (New York, 1713), esp. 7; Lewis Morris, “Dialogue on Trade,” ca. August 1726, in LMP 1:249–67; Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 108–10, 115; Bonomi, Factious People, 82–87, 94–95. 8. CC, The Interest of the Country in Laying Duties (New York, 1726), quotes on 7, 8; CC, Het voordeel van het land in de oplegginge van tollen (New York, 1726). 9. The Interest of City and Country to Lay No Duties (New York, 1726), 17, 18. Cathy Matson has suggested that Colden possibly wrote this piece; Cathy D. Matson, Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore, 1998), 167. However, his authorship cannot be confirmed and the internal evidence is ambiguous. Although the land tax argument is consistent with Colden’s other writings, the idea of an estate tax is not. 10. CC, “The Second Part of the Interest of the Country in Laying Duties Addressed More Particularly to the City” (1726), CP 9:265–79, quotes on 268, 272, 273. 11. CC, The Two Interests Reconciled (New York, 1726), quotes on 4, 10, 27. This anonymous pamphlet has been attributed to Cadwallader Colden although his authorship is not definitively established. See Beverly McAnear, “Mr. Robert R. Livingston’s Reasons against a Land Tax,” Journal of Political Economy 48, no. 1 (1940): 63–90 at 72; Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York, 1975), 185; Matson, Merchants and Empire, 167. 12. “Draft of a Report of a Committee of Council on an Address of the General Assembly,” ca. 21 October 1726, CP 1:191–93, quote on 192. For Colden’s authorship of this report, see Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New-York, 2 vols. (Albany, 1861), 1:542– 43. Governor Burnet paid for Fort Oswego out of his own pocket; William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of New-York, ed. Michael Kammen, 2 vols.

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(Cambridge, MA, 1972), 1:184; Kammen, Colonial New York, 194–95; Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 137. 13. JA to CC, New York, 5 May 1728, CP 1:259–61, quotes on 260. 14. Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly 1:562– 63. 15. Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:146–47, 165–66, 188, 269–72. On the establishment of the Chancery Court in the late seventeenth century, see Martin L. Budd, “Law in Colonial New York: The Legal System of 1691,” Harvard Law Review 80, no. 8 (1967): 1757–72, esp. 1767– 68, repr. in Courts and Law in Early New York: Selected Essays, ed. Leo Hershkowitz and Milton M. Klein (Port Washington, NY, 1978), 7–18; Joseph H. Smith and Leo Hershkowitz, “Courts of Equity in the Province of New York: The Cosby Controversy, 1732–1736,” American Journal of Legal History 16, no. 1 (1972): 1–50, esp. 6–7. 16. Smith and Hershkowitz, “Courts of Equity in the Province of New York,” esp. 12–15; Joseph H. Smith, “Adolph Philipse and the Chancery Resolves of 1727,” in Hershkowitz and Klein, ed., Courts and Law in Early New York, 30–45. For details on the suit against Philipse, see Obadiah Palmer, Nehemiah Palmer, Sylvanus Palmer, Solomon Palmer, Josiah Quenby, Tho. Townsend, Richard Cornwall and Henry Cock, Complainants against Jacobus van Cortland & Adolph Philipse, defendants, in Cancellaria Novae Eborac (New York, 1726); J. Thomas Scharf, History of Westchester County, New York, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1886), 1:858. For Colden’s account of Philipse’s motives, see CC to Alexander Colden, ca. December 1759, in Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:308–14 at 313. Colden chaired a Council committee that investigated the Assembly’s action and produced a report printed in the local press at the start of 1728; New York Gazette, no. 114, 1–7 January 1728; New York Gazette, no. 115, 8–15 January 1728. 17. For both letters, see Sir, In My Former I Frankly Informed You in What Manner Your Adversaries Blamed Your Conduct in the Resolves of the Last Assembly against the Chancery (New York, 1728), quotes on 1. These letters were anonymous but are attributed here to Colden on the basis that in May 1728 James Alexander encouraged Colden to write “a 3d & a 4th Letter to Ape” and “further Letters to Ape”; JA to CC, New York, 5 May 1728, CP 1:259–61, quotes on 260. Mention of Colden’s use of “Ape” is also made in JA to Lewis Morris, n.d., Rutherfurd Collection 1:51, MS531, NYHS. 18. CC to JA, 1 June 1728, Rutherfurd Collection 1:52, MS531, NYHS. For Colden’s account of the Montgomerie administration, see CC to Alexander Colden, Coldengham, 31 January 1760, in Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:317–22. 19. Quotes from CC to JA, 1 June 1728 and 21 June 1728, Rutherfurd Collection 1:51, 53, MS531, NYHS. 20. JA to CC, New York, 5 May 1728, CP 1:259–61, quote on 260. 21. Quotes from CC to JA, 1 June 1728, Rutherfurd Collection 1:51, MS531, NYHS. For Colden’s thoughts on partisanship in the late 1720s, see CC, “Vindication of Governor [William] Burnet,” n.d, Rutherfurd Collection 1:47, MS531, NYHS; CC to JA, New York, 17 May 1728, Rutherfurd Collection 1:49, MS531, NYHS; CC to JA, Coldengham, 30 June 1728, Rutherfurd Collection 1:53, MS531, NYHS; CC, “Origin of Dispute with Governor [William] Burnet,” n.d., Rutherfurd Collection 1:63, MS531, NYHS; CC to JA, [Coldengham], 6 September 1728, Rutherfurd Collection 1:81, MS531, NYHS; CC

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to JA, 8 November 1728, Rutherfurd Collection 1:91, MS531, NYHS; CC to JA, Coldengham, 29 November 1728, Rutherfurd Collection 1:93, MS531, NYHS; Bonomi, Factious People, 99–100. 22. On the salary of Morris, Sr., see JA to CC, New York, 14  March  1729, CP 1:274–77 at 275; JA to CC, New York, 14 April 1729, CP 1:278–80, esp. 278. 23. JA to CC, New York, 28 June 1729, CP 1:287–89, quote on 289. See also CC to JA, 13 June 1729, Rutherfurd Collection 1:127, MS531, NYHS. 24. JA to CC, New York, 12 August 1729, CP 1:291–95, quote on 293; CC to JA, 29 August 1729, Rutherfurd Collection 1:131, MS531, NYHS; JA to CC, New York, 11 September 1729, CP 1:295–301. 25. Sheridan, Lewis Morris, 142–45. 26. This phrase is taken from Rev. Alexander Colden to CC, Oxnam, Scotland, 6 February 1727, CP 8:117–23, quote on 118. 27. CC, “History of Governor William Cosby’s Administration and of LieutenantGovernor George Clarke’s Administration through 1737,” CP 9:281–355, quote on 298. 28. For a similar judgment, see Tully, Forming American Politics, esp. 240, 244; McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 159– 65. 29. CC, “History of Cosby’s Administration and Clarke’s Administration,” CP 9:349. 30. There is an extensive literature on Cosby and Zenger. Useful starting points are Livingston Rutherfurd, John Peter Zenger: His Press, His Trial and a Bibliography of Zenger Imprints (New York, 1904); Vincent Buranelli, “The Myth of Anna Zenger,” WMQ 13, no. 2 (1956), 157–68; Leonard W. Levy, “Did the Zenger Case Really Matter? Freedom of the Press in Colonial New York?” WMQ 17, no. 1 (1960): 35–50; Stanley Nider Katz, introduction to James Alexander, A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger, Printer of the New York Weekly Journal (Cambridge, MA, 1963 [1736]), 1–38; Tully, Forming American Politics, 94–106; Alison Olson, “The Zenger Case Revisited: Satire, Sedition and Political Debate in Eighteenth Century America,” Early American Literature 35, no. 3 (2000): 223–45; Eben Moglen, “Considering Zenger: Partisan Politics and the Legal Profession in Provincial New York,” Columbia Law Review 94, no. 5 (1994): 1495–1524; McConville, The King’s Three Faces, 159– 65. 31. CC to Elizabeth Hill, Coldengham, 12 July 1736, CP 8:242–44, quote on 242. 32. CC to AC, [Coldengham], 6 May 1736, CP 8:240–41, quote on 240. 33. CC to Elizabeth Hill, [ca. November–December 1736], CP 8:247–48, quote on 247. 34. See, for instance, CC to Archibald Kennedy, [ca. 1727–1728], CP 8:186–90; CC to Alured Popple, New York, 15 December 1727, DRCHNY 5:844–45. 35. George Clarke to CC, New York, 13 September 1736, CP 8:245–46. On speculation on Mohawk lands in the 1730s, see Eric Hinderaker, The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 150–56. 36. Deed to Cadwallader Colden for Land in Present Warren County, NY, 24 August 1738, CP 8:258–59. See also, CC to [William Cosby], n.d., [ca. 1732], in The Historical Magazine, and Notes and Queries, concerning the Antiquities, History and Biography of America, 2nd ser., vol. 2 (Morrisania, NY, 1867), 226–27. 37. CC to AC, New York, 11 September 1737, CP 2:179; CC, “History of Cosby’s Administration and Clarke’s Administration,” CP 9:283–355, quotes on 305, 318–19, 349. See also, CC to JA, 3 December 1735, Rutherfurd Collection 2:85, MS531, NYHS.

Notes to Pages 138–141

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38. CC, “A Letter to a Friend in the Country,” 1 August 1737, CP 9:241–44, quotes on 241, printed anonymously in New-York Weekly Journal, no. 196, 8 August 1737. 39. Kammen, Colonial New York, 281–86. 40. Elizabeth DeLancey to CC, New York, 1 June 1741, CP 8:264–66, quotes on 265. 41. Daniel Horsmanden to CC, 7 August 1741, CP 2:224–28, quote on 225. 42. Anon. [Josiah Cotton], “Letter to Cadwallader Colden about the Negro Plot in New York, 1741, CP 8:269–72, quotes on 270, 271. For identification of Cotton, see Jill Lepore, New York Burning (2006 ed.), 209, 304–305n10. 43. CC to George Clarke, [August 1741], CP 8:272–73, quote on 272. 44. Daniel Horsmanden, A Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy Formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and Other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York in America, and Murdering the Inhabitants (New York, 1744). See also Proposals for Printing by Subscription, A Journal of the Proceedings in The Detection of the Conspiracy, Formed by Some White People in Conjunction with Several Negroe and Other Slaves, for Burning the City of New-York, in America, and Murdering the Inhabitants Thereof (New York, 1742). 45. CC to George Clarke, [August 1741], CP 8:274–76, quotes on 274, 276. 46. On Clinton’s connections and administration, see Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 164–244. 47. Bonomi, Factious People, 150–51. 48. Colden supported Clinton’s request at a meeting of the Council and Assembly in early September, calling specifically for a strengthening of the western frontiers. See “Observations of Cadwallader Colden concerning the Erection of a Fort at Oswego as Proposed at a Conference, Sept. 5, 1744,” CP 3:72–74; “Address of a Member of the Council at a Conference of the Council with the General Assembly of New York, on September 5, 1744,” CP 8:307–9; Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of NewYork, 2:859; Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 171–73. 49. The best account of DeLancey remains Bonomi, Factious People, 140–78. 50. For various explanations of the Clinton-DeLancey split, see CC to his “Dear Children,” Coldengham, 5 December 1748, Copy Book, 1737–1753: 181–84, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia; Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 2:72– 73; [William Livingston], A Review of the Military Operations in North-America: From the Commencement of the French Hostilities on the Frontiers of Virginia in 1753, to the Surrender of Oswego on the 14th of August, 1756 (London, 1757), 19; Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 166–76; Bonomi, Factious People, 149–58; Lustig, Privilege and Prerogative, 63–69. 51. CC, “The Rise and Progress of the Publick Dissensions of New York,” 18 October 1748, quotes on 2, US&PP, NYHS. For more on the joint committee, see Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly 2:114; Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New-York 2:930–31; “Memorandum in the Handwriting of Cadwallader Colden,” CP 3:183–84; Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 175; Tully, Forming American Politics, 128–29. On the Canada expedition, see Arthur H. Buffinton, “The Canada Expedition of 1746. Its Relation to British Politics,” American Historical Review 45, no. 3 (1940): 552–80. 52. CC to AC, New York, 3 July 1746, CP 3:221–22, quote on 222. See also CC to AC, New York, ca. end of June 1746, CP 3:220; “Representation to Clinton of Seven

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Members of the Council in Reference to Colden’s Pamphlet on the Treaty with the Six Nations,” 16 December 1746, CP 3:294–305, esp. 296. 53. Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 177–78. 54. CC, Treaty, Between His Excellency the Honourable George Clinton . . . And the Six United Indian Nations, and Other Indian Nations, Depending on the Province of New-York (New York, 1746), 8. See also Fintan O’Toole, White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (New York, 2005), esp. 77–78. 55. CC to AC, Albany, 4 August 1746, CP 3:238–39, quote on 238. See also CC to AC, Albany, 29 July 1746, CP 3:232–33; CC to AC, Albany, 10 August 1746, CP 3:239– 40; “Commission Issued to Cadwallader Colden, Jr. as Commissary of Musters,” August 24, 1746, CP 3:261–62. 56. Colden made this controversial statement in CC, Treaty, Between George Clinton . . . And the Six United Indian Nations, 9. On Colden’s role in Albany, see also CC to AC, Albany, 20 August 1746, CP 3:260–61. 57. For this speech, see Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly 2:124–25; Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New-York 2:946–47; New-York Evening Post, no. 101, 27 October 1746. For evidence of Colden’s authorship of this and other Clinton speeches, see Eleanor Rutherfurd to CC, Albany, 9 December 1746, CP 3:292–93; Alice Mapelsden Keys, Cadwallader Colden: A Representative Eighteenth Century Official (New York, 1906), 150, 155. 58. Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New-York 2:946–47, quote on 947. 59. CC to JM, 6 July 1749, CP 9:18–34 at 26–27. 60. Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly 2:130–32, 132–34, 134–35, 137–39; Keys, Cadwallader Colden, 150–55. For Colden’s thoughts on this affair, see CC to AC, New York, 3, 7, 9, 11, 18 November 1746, CP 3:276–77, 277–78, 278, 279, 280–81; CC to George Clarke, New York, 26 November 1746, CP 3:290–91. 61. JR to CC, Albany, 19  November 1746, CP 3:284; CC, Treaty, Between George Clinton . . . And the Six United Indian Nations. 62. Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New-York 2:957–58; “Minute of New-York Legislative Council,” 4 December 1746, DRCHNY 6:330–31. On the Council’s rebuke of Colden, which appeared in a local newspaper, the Weekly New-York Post Boy, on 8 December 1746, see “The Present State of the Province of New-York,” 12 December 1746, DRCHNY 6:460–63; “Representation to Clinton of Seven Members of the Council in Reference to Colden’s Pamphlet.” 63. CC to Clinton, Coldengham, 5 January 1747, CP 3:328–30; CC to George Clarke, Coldengham, 18 January 1747, CP 3:336–37; CC to Clinton, 19 January 1747, CP 3:339– 56. Colden’s friends offered their support; see JR to CC, Albany, 18 January 1747, CP 3:334–35; Archibald Kennedy to CC, 9 February 1747, CP 3:358–59. 64. Clinton to the Board of Trade, New York, ca. 8  December 1746, DRCHNY 6:328–29, quotes on 329. For Colden’s input on this letter, see “Memorandum in Colden’s Handwriting,” CP 3:306–7. 65. New-York Evening Post, 9 November 1747; Sara Stidstone Gronim, Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York (New Brunswick, NJ, 2007), 150.

Notes to Pages 143–144

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66. New-York Evening Post, 8  February 1748, quoted in Sara Stidstone Gronim, “What Jane Knew: A Woman Botanist in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 3 (2007): 37. 67. Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly 2:169–87, 191–93, 198, 202–5, 206–21. 68. George Clinton to CC, New York, 15 December 1748, CP 4:82–83; Bonomi, Factious People, 161. 69. George Clinton to CC, New York, 2 January 1748, CP 4:1–2; CC to Clinton, [January 1748], CP 4:2–5; CC to Clinton, Coldengham, 29 January 1748, CP 4:6–10; Clinton to the Board of Trade, New York, 30 October 1748, DRCHNY 6:458–60; “The Present State of the Province of New-York,” 12 December 1748, DRCHNY 6:460–63. 70. New-York Gazette and Supplement to the New-York Gazette, no. 261, 18 January 1748; “Address to the Freeholders & Freemen of the Cities & Counties of the Province of New York on Occasion of the Ensueing Elections for Representatives in General Assembly by a Freeholder in the same Province,” CP 3:312–28, quotes on 315, 321, 324. A response appeared on 25 January and referred again to Colden as “an artful designing Man . . . with a private View”; New-York Gazette, no. 262, 25 January 1748. See also CC to Clinton, Coldengham, 29 January 1748, CP 4:6–10, esp. 8–9. 71. Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 189–92. 72. Clinton justified his suspension of Horsmanden, whom he described “a principal contriver and actor” in the Delanceyite faction, in “Governor Clinton’s Reasons for Suspending Mr. Horsmanden,” 27 September 1747, DRCHNY 6:380–82, quote on 380. On Clinton’s suspension of Bayard, see Clinton to the Board of Trade, New York, 29 September 1747, DRCHNY 6:404. 73. Journal of the Legislative Council of the Colony of New-York, 2:1126–29; Nicolas Varga, “New York Government and Politics during the Mid-Eighteenth Century” (PhD diss., Fordham University, 1960), 247. 74. JA to CC, New York, 16 November 1750, CP 9:81–83; JA to CC, New York, 10 December 1750, CP 4:239–41; Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 189. On tensions between Clinton and Colden in the early 1750s, see JA to CC, New York, 2 January 1751, CP 4:245–50; CC to JA, 17 January 1751, CP 4:253–54. 75. George Clinton to CC, New York, 15 December 1748, CP 4:82–83. Clinton was probably encouraged to suspend DeLancey by his wife, as well as by Colden and James Alexander; Varga, “New York Government and Politics,” 143. 76. John Asycough to CC, 9 May 1749, CP 4:109–10, quote 109. For expressions of Clinton’s confidence, see Clinton to CC, New York, 5 February 1750, CP 4:198; George Clinton to CC, [March] 1750, CP 4:201–2. 77. Katz, Newcastle’s New York, 236–37. Rutherfurd reportedly “drank a bottle” with a leading DeLanceyite; Clinton to CC, New York, 2 January 174[8], CP 4:1–2, quote on 2. The statement against Colden appears in a memorial held in the National Archives of Scotland that appears to be in Rutherford’s hand; “Memorial for Capt. John Rutherfurd,” London, 2 April 1749, Papers of Hamilton-Dalrymple Family, GD 110/629, National Archives of Scotland. 78. PC to CC, London, 3 October 1750, CP 9:78–79, quote on 78.

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79. CC to AC, New York, 25 September 1750, CP 9:77–78, quote on 77. 80. On the split of the surveyor general office, see JA to CC, New York, 10 December 1750, CP 4:239–41; CC to JA, Coldengham, 15 December 1750, CP 4:242–43; CC to George Clinton, [ca. 15 December 1750], CP 4:244; CC to Clinton, Coldengham, 15 December 1750, CP 4:244–45; JA to CC, New York, 2  January 1751, CP 4:245–50. On Colden and the secretary of Indian Affairs position, see JA to CC, New York, 2 January 1751, CP 4:245–50; CC to JA, 17 January 1751, CP 4:253–54; JA to CC, New York, 23 January 1751, CP 4:255. 81. CC to JA, Coldengham, 15 December 1750, CP 4:242–43, quotes on 243. 82. CC to the Duke of Newcastle, New York, 21 March 1748, CP 4:21–25, quote on 23. For other descriptions of the DeLanceyite faction and cabal, see Clinton to the Duke of Newcastle, New York, 11 May 1747, DRCHNY 6:340–42 at 342; a draft of this letter exists in Colden’s handwriting, CP 3:390–94; CC to Clinton, Coldengham, 21 March 1748, CP 4:25–27; CC, “Draft of a Proposed Letter from Governor Clinton to Henry Pelham, Chancellor of the Exchequer,” marked “Never made use of,” 15 August 1748, CP 8:353– 56; Clinton to the Duke of Bedford, New York, 15 August 1748, DRCHNY 6:428–32; Clinton to the Board of Trade, New York, 30 October 1748, DRCHNY 6:458–60; CC to Clinton, Coldengham, 19 February 1749, CP 4:100–3; JA to CC, New York, 16 November 1750, CP 9:81–83; Clinton to the Board of Trade, New York, 25  November 1751, DRCHNY 6:752–53; John Ayscough to CC, New York, 21 May 1752, CP 4:329; “Governor Clinton’s Reasons for Suspending Mr.  Horsmanden,” 27  September 1747, DRCHNY 6:380–82. 83. CC to Clinton, Coldengham, 19 June 1750, CP 4:213–18, quote on 217–18. 84. Clinton to CC, New York, 9 February 1750, CP 4:188–91, quote on 190. 85. “Report of the Privy Council upon the State of New-York,” Whitehall, 2 April 1751, DRCHNY 6:614–39; “Abstract of the Evidence in the Books of the Lords of Trade Relating to New-York,” 2 April 1751, DRCHNY 6:639–703. 86. CC to PC, 12 and 14 June 1751, CP 9:95–98. 87. CC to John Mitchell, Coldengham, 18 July 1751, CP 9:98–102; JR to CC, London, 16 August 1751, CP 4:287. 88. PC to Holdernesse, 10  February 1752, copy enclosed in PC to CC, London, 4 March 1752, CP 4:312–14. 89. CC to PC, Coldengham, 28 July 1752, CP 9:116–19; PC to CC, London, 5 April 1753, CP 4:381; PC to CC, [London], 10 June 1753, CP 4:393. 90. Board of Trade to George, Whitehall, 29 November 1752, DRCHNY 6:770. 91. Earl of Halifax to CC, Grosvenor Square, 17 May 1753, CP 4:389–91, quotes on 389, 390. 92. See, for instance, CC to BF, Coldengham, 19 November 1753, CP 4:413–18 at 415; CC to PC, Coldengham, 4 October 1754, CP 4:465–69. 93. For Colden’s efforts to obtain a salary as surveyor general, see CC to PC, Coldengham, 28 July 1752, CP 9:116–19 at 117; Earl of Halifax to CC, Grosvenor Square, 17 May 1753, CP 4:389–91 at 390; JA to CC, New York, 30 July 1753, CP 4:401–2; CC to PC, New York, 6 September 1753, BV New Netherland, fol. 55, NYHS; CC to PC, Coldengham, 5 December 1753, CP 4:418–20 at 420. 94. PC to CC, London, 13 March 1755, CP 5:6–7.

Notes to Pages 147–150

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95. JA to CC, New York, 13 March 1752, CP 4:314; Bonomi, A Factious People, 171. 96. These orders were contained in the King’s thirty-ninth instruction to Osborne. This unusual and controversial instruction resulted from the 1751 Board of Trade report on the state of New York, a report prompted in large part by Colden’s letters home; Varga, “New York Government and Politics,” 194–96, 247. In November 1753, DeLancey’s printer, Hugh Gaine, was brought before the Assembly for publishing Osborne’s 39th instruction in his newspaper, the New-York Mercury, without the permission of the Speaker of the Assembly. Gaine apologized and was reprimanded; Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly 2:358–59. 97. CC to AC, New York, 14 October 1753, CP 4:407–8, quote on 407. 98. CC to AC, New York, 14 October 1753, CP 4:407–8 at 408. 99. CC to PC, Coldengham, 4 October 1754, CP 4:465–69. 100. CC to PC, Coldengham, 3 June 1755, CP 5:12–15; PC to CC, London, 26 September 1755, CP 5:27–28; CC to PC, New York, 20 October 1755, BV New Netherland, fol. 61, NYHS, in CP 5:35–38. 101. JA to CC, New York, 11 December 1755, CP 5:48–51; Charles Hardy to CC, New York, 22 December 1755, CP 5:53–54; CC to Col. Charles Clinton, New York, 7  March  1756, CP 5:66; Hardy to CC, New York, 16  May 1756, CP 5:77–78; CC to Hardy, [Summer 1756], CP 5:105–7; CC to [Hardy?], [ca. 1757], CP 5:110–11. See also “At a Council Held at Fort George in the City of New York on Fryday the Fourth Day of November 1757,” CP 5:208–9; James DeLancey to CC, New York, 4 November 1757, CP 9:172; CC to DeLancey, [ca. November 1757], CP 5:209–11; CC to PC, Flushen, Long Island, 31 December 1757, CP 5:211–14. 102. CC to Charles Hardy, [11 May 1756], CP 5:74–76, quote on 75. 103. CC to Archibald Kennedy, 17 November 1756, CP 9:165–67; Charles Hardy to CC, New York, 3 December 1756, CP 5:98–99; CC to Hardy, Coldengham, 5 December 1756, CP 5:100; CC to Captain James Cuningham, Coldengham, 6  December 1756, CP 5:100–103 at 103; CC to Lord Loudoun, Coldengham, 11 October 1757, CP 5:200–2; CC to Lord Loudoun, Coldengham, 21 October 1757, CP 5:205–7. 104. On Colden’s relocation, see Alexander Colden to CC, [1757], CP 5:111–14; Alexander Colden to CC, New York, 22 August 1757, CP 5:176–78; Alexander Colden to CC, New York, 1 September 1757, CP 5:181–82; Alexander Colden to CC, New York, 6 October 1757, CP 5:192–97; Alexander Colden to CC, New York, 13 October 1757, CP 5:198–200.

8. Colden’s Ordeal 1. Quotes from a visitor to Manhattan are taken from Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., Gentleman’s Progress: The Itinerarium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744 (Chapel Hill, 1948), 88, 43 in William Livingston et al., The Independent Reflector; or, Weekly Essays on Sundry Important Subjects More Particularly Adapted to the Province of New-York,, ed. Milton M. Klein (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 67n2. For details on the cricket match, see New-York Gazette, Revived in the Weekly Post-Boy, no. 433, 6 May 1751. On the cultural devel-

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opment of mid-eighteenth-century Manhattan, see Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York, 1803), esp. 2:354–58; Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York, 1987), 9–25. On New York’s taverns, especially as sites of political mobilization, see Benjamin  L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford, 2007), 62–98. For the number of taverns and the impact of elections on local print culture, see Michael Kammen, Colonial New York: A History (New York, 1975), 245, 282. 2. Milton M. Klein, “The Rise of the New York Bar: The Legal Career of William Livingston,” WMQ 15, no. 3 (1958): 334–58. Some professionalization of medicine also occurred in New York during the 1750s and 1760s; David C. Humphrey, “The King’s College Medical School and the Professionalization of Medicine in Pre-Revolutionary New York,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 49, no. 2 (1975): 206–34. 3. William Livingston, Philosophic Solitude: Or, the Choice of a Rural Life. A Poem (New York, 1747); William Livingston, Some Serious Thoughts on the Design of Erecting a College in the Province of New-York. . . . By Hippocrates Mithridate. Apoth (New York, 1749); William Livingston and William Smith Jr., Laws of New-York, from the year 1691, to 1751, Inclusive (New York, 1752); [William Livingston], A Review of Military Operations in North-America (New York, 1757); William Smith Jr., The History of the Province of New-York, ed. Michael Kammen, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1972). A Review of Military Operations in North-America is sometimes attributed to Smith not Livingston. For an excellent discussion of this pamphlet and the uncertainty surrounding its author, see Milton M. Klein, “William Livingston’s A Review of the Military Operations in NorthAmerica,” in The Colonial Legacy, vol. 2, Some Eighteenth- Century Commentators, ed. Lawrence H. Leder (New York, 1971), 107–40. On Smith and Livingston in general, see Dorothy Rita Dillon, The New York Triumvirate: A Study of the Legal and Political Careers of William Livingston, John Morin Scott and William Smith Jr. (New York, 1949); Milton M. Klein, introduction to Livingston et al., Independent Reflector, 1–50; Michael Kammen, introduction to Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:xvii–lxxiii; Milton M. Klein, The American Whig: William Livingston of New York (New York, 1993). 4. Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 2:82–83. Quote on ignorance from New-York Weekly Journal, no. [7]91, 13 February 1749. 5. The three Livingston brothers were Peter VanBrugh Livingston, John Livingston, and Philip Livingston. For brief biographies of each of these Yale graduates, see Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, October, 1701–May, 1745 (New York, 1885), 430–31, 484–85, 509–11, 582–85, 682–86, 709, 719–20, 747–48, 767, 769–70. 6. For a list of New York attorneys that includes John McEvers Jr., see David T. Valentine, History of the City of New York (New York, 1853), 394–95. On John Van Horne, see Clifford K. Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, vol. 11: Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College in the Classes, 1741–1745; With Bibliographical and Other Notes (Boston, 1960), 484–85. 7. New-York Weekly Journal, no. [7]91, 13 February 1749. For the debate over drink and politeness, see “An Essay on Bumpers,” New-York Gazette, Revived in the Weekly

Notes to Pages 151–155

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Post-Boy, no. 309, 19 December 1748, and the responses in New-York Weekly Journal, no. 786, 9 January 1749, and New-York Weekly Journal, no. 789, 30 January 1749. 8. John Bard, “An Essay on the Nature and Cause of the Malignant Pleurisy . . . Drawn up at the Request of a Weekly Society of Gentlemen in New-York, and Addressed to Them at One of Their Meetings, January, 1749,” in American Medical and Philosophical Register 1, no. 4 (1811): 409–21. The original is held in the New York Academy of Medicine Library. 9. Silvio A. Bedini, “At the Sign of the Compass and Quadrant: The Life and Times of Anthony Lamb,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74, no. 1. (1984): 1–84. 10. William Livingston to Noah Welles, ca. February 1750, Livingston-Welles Correspondence, no. 55, Johnson Family Papers, HM14, Yale University. For more on the philosophy club, see Klein, introduction to Livingston et  al., Independent Reflector, 18–19. 11. New-York Weekly Journal, no. 793, 27 February 1749. 12. New-York Weekly Journal, no. 796, 20 March 1749; Supplement to the New-York Weekly Journal, no. 798, 3 April 1749. See also Carp, Rebels Rising, 75–76. 13. William Livingston to Noah Welles, 18 February 1749, Livingston-Welles Correspondence, no. 49, Johnson Family Papers, HM14, Yale University. 14. Livingston et al., Independent Reflector, quote on 57. 15. Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ, 1992), chap. 9. 16. SJ to William Samuel Johnson, New York, 27 May 1754, in SJP 4:10–13, quote on 11. In reply, Johnson’s son pointed out that just two or three “corrupted Dutchmen” and “Presbyterians” could prevent public funding of the college; William Johnson to SJ, Stratford, 31 May 1754, in SJP 4:13–15, quote on 13. 17. William Johnson to SJ, 14 June 1754, SJP 1:186–87, quote on 187; SJ to William Samuel Johnson and William Johnson, New York, 10 June 1754, SJP 4:15–17 at 15. 18. SJ to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 25 June 1753, in SJP 4:3–4. See also William Smith to SJ, 23 July 1753, in SJP 4:4–5. 19. Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:195. 20. CC to William Smith Jr., Flushen, 15 January 1759; Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:278–80, “absolutely false” quote on 278; CC to William Smith, Sr., Flushen, 15  January 1759, Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:280–81, “discourse” quote on 280. 21. See CC to Alexander Colden, 15 June 1759, 25 June 1759, 5 July 1759, 25 September 1759, 15 October 1759, ca. December 1759, 31 December 1759, 31 January 1760, and twice on 21 February 1760, in Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 1:287–91, 291–94, 294–99, 299–302, 302–8, 308–14, 314–17, 317–22, 322–25, 325–28, quote on 327. 22. On Colden’s move to Fort George, see CC to Jeffery Amherst, New York, 11 August 1760, CLB 1:7. For his grief at Alice’s death, see CC to Robert Monckton, New York, 30 March 1762, CLB 1:183–84. For a public announcement of Jane (Colden) Farquhar’s death, which is often incorrectly dated, see New York Mercury, no. 396, 17 March 1760. On the death of DeLancey, see CC, “Circular Letter to the Several Governors on the Death of the Lt Governor,” New York, 4 August 1760, CLB 1:1–3.

228

Notes to Pages 155–156

23. On the death of George II and the succession of George III, see John Pownall to CC, Whitehall, 29 October 1760, CP 5:366; Board of Trade to CC, Whitehall, 31 October 1760, CP 5:368–69; Robert Charles to CC, London, 31 October 1760, CP 5:369–70; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 5 April 1761, CLB 1:78–80. 24. See Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (New York, 1971), 230–36, esp. 232; Mary Lou Lustig, Privilege and Prerogative: New York’s Provincial Elite, 1710–1776 (Madison, NJ, 1995), 107. 25. CC to John Pownall, New York, 5 April 1761, CLB 1:80–82, “new set” quote on 81; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 7 April 1762, CLB 1:186–92, “make use of” quote on 187. For Colden’s views of lawyers, see CC to Board of Trade, New York, 7 November 1764, CLB 1:394–98. 26. CC, “State of the Province of New York,” 6 December 1765, CLB 2:68–78, quotes on 68, 72. 27. CC, “An Introduction to the Study of Phylosophy Wrote in America for the Use of a Young Gentleman,” ca. July 1760, US&PP, NYHS, in PWCC, 37–56, quotes on 40, 41. 28. Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 2:254; Lustig, Privilege and Prerogative, 109. For an alternative account, see Thomas Jones, History of New York during the Revolutionary War and of the Leading Events in the Other Colonies at that Period, ed. Edward F. DeLancey. 2 vols. (New York, 1879), 1:222–25. 29. CC to Thomas Pownall, New York, 22 August 1760, CLB 1:12–13; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 6 October 1761, CLB 1:122; CC to William Pitt, New York, 6 October 1761, CLB 1:122–23; Jones, History of New York, 1:227. 30. Quote from Jones, History of New York, 1:228. See also Benjamin Pratt to CC, Boston, 22 August 1761, CP 6:68–69; CC to Pratt, New York, 7 September 1761, CLB 1:113–14; Pratt to CC, Boston, 14 September 1761, CP 6:76–78; Pratt to CC, Boston, 3 October 1761, CP 6:81–82; CC to Pratt, New York, 12 October 1761, CLB 1:123–24; Pratt to Thomas Pownall, New York, 7 January 1762, CP 6:113–16; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 11 January 1762, CLB 1:148–50; CC to the Earl of Egremont, New York, 12 January 1762, CLB 1:150–53; CC to John Pownall, New York, 12 January 1762, CLB 1:154– 55; CC to John Pownall, New York, 6 February 176[2], CLB 1:162–63; CC to Pratt, New York, 7 March 1762, CLB 1:171; Pratt to William Nicoll, New York, 15 March 1762, CLB 1:174–75; William Nicoll to Pratt, New York, 16 March 1762, CLB 1:175–76. 31. CC to Board of Trade, New York, 5 April 1761, CLB 1:78–80; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 2 June 1761, CLB 1:88–90; CC to William Pitt, New York, 11 August 1761, CLB 1:103–5; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 12 August 1761, CLB 1:105–7; CC to William Pitt, New York, 24 September 1761, CLB 1:116–17; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 25 September 1761, CLB 1:118–20. 32. Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 2:258–62; CC to the Board of Trade, New York, 7  April 1762, CLB 1:186–92; Robert Monckton to CC, New York, 11 November 1761, CP 6:88; Monckton to CC, New York, 11 November 1761, CP 6:89; CC to Monckton, New York, 12 November 1761, CLB 1:129–30; CC to William Pitt, New York, 23 November 1761, CLB 1:133–35. 33. Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of NewYork. Began the 9th day of April 1691; and Ended the 27th day of September 1743, 2 vols.

Notes to Pages 156–159

229

(New York, 1764), 2:669–70, 672–73; Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 2:262–63. 34. CC to Board of Trade, New York, 11 February 1762, CLB 1:159–61; Smith Jr., History of the Province of New-York, 2:264; Journal of the Votes and Proceedings of the General Assembly of the Colony of New-York, 2:682–84. 35. “Representation of the Lords of Trade respecting the Assembly of New-York,” Whitehall, 11 June 1762, DRCHNY 7:505–6, quote on 506. 36. American Chronicle, no. 1, 20 March 1762. 37. American Chronicle, no. 3, 5 April 1762. 38. American Chronicle, no. 4, 12 April 1762. For further references to Colden as a Jacobite drummer, as well as a “little Chap,” “little Man,” and “an artful designing Man,” see the New-York Gazette, no. 262, 25 January 1748. Advertisements for The Mock-Doctor and The Drummer can be found in New-York Mercury, no. 333, 1 January 1759, and NewYork Mercury, no. 337, 29 January 1759. 39. American Chronicle, no. 5, 19 April 1762. 40. American Chronicle, no. 3, 5 April 1762. 41. American Chronicle, no. 4, 12 April 1762. See also Guardian, no. 98, 3 July 1713; Guardian, no. 114, 22  July 1713; Guardian, no. 121, 30  July 1713; Guardian, no. 124, 3 August 1713. Jürgen Habermas makes reference to Addison’s lion in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 42. 42. American Chronicle, no. 5, 19 April 1762. 43. CC to the Board of Trade, New York, 7 April 1762, CLB 1:186–92, quote on 189. 44. CC, “State of the Province of New York,” 6 December 1765, CLB 2:68–78, quotes on 71. 45. CC to the Board of Trade, New York, 7 April 1762, CLB 1:186–92, quote on 189; Board of Trade to CC, Whitehall, 11 December 1761, CP 6:105–6; CC to Monckton, New York, 30 March 1762, CLB 1:183–84; Colden to Board of Trade, New York, 7 April 1762, CLB 1:186–92. 46. CC to Board of Trade, New York, 7 April 1762, CLB 1:186–92, quote on 190. 47. American Chronicle, no. 18, 22 July 1762. 48. CC to Board of Trade, New York, 12 June 1762, CLB 1:212–14, quotes on 213. 49. “Protest of George Harrison, October 29, 1764,” Y– Oct 29, 1764, NYHS; Herbert A. Johnson, “George Harison’s Protest: New Light on Forsey versus Cunningham,” New York History 50, no. 1 (1969): 61–82. 50. Milton M. Klein, “Prelude to Revolution in New York: Jury Trials and Judicial Tenure,” WMQ 17, no. 4 (1960): 439–62, at 453–55. 51. John Tabor Kempe to CC, 16 November 1764, CP 6:378; George Harison to CC, New York, 24 November 1764, CP 6:387–88. 52. “Question of Appeals, Referred to the Governor’s Council” [January 1765], CP 7:1; CC, “Opinion on Appeals,” CP 7:1–7, quotes on 1, 6. 53. Klein, “Prelude to Revolution in New York,” 456–57. 54. CC to William Johnson, New York, 6 January 1765, CLB 1:442–44, quote on 443. 55. CC to Board of Trade, New York, 22 January 1765, CLB 1:446–56, quote on 447. See also CC to Halifax, New York, 23 January [1765], CLB 1:456–59; CC, The Conduct

230

Notes to Pages 159–161

of Cadwallader Colden, Esq. Lieutenant Governor of New-York; elating to the Judges’ Commissions, Appeals to the King, and the Stamp Duty (New York, 1767), 19–20. Colden asked for the most offensive author, Judge Robert R. Livingston, to be removed as “no Cause of any consequence can come before him in which or in similar Cases he or the Livingston Family are not interested”; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 27 January 1765, CLB 1:461–63, quote on 462. 56. CC to Board of Trade, New York, 14 April 1765, CLB 1:476–77, quote on 476. See also Colden to [unknown], Fort George, NY, 3 March 1765, BV New Netherland, fol. 69, NYHS. 57. The Report of an Action of Assault, Battery and Wounding, Tried in the Supreme Court of Judicature for the Province of New-York, in the term of October 1764, between Thomas Forsey, Plaintiff, and Waddel Cunningham, Defendant (New York, 1764), quotes on iii; New-York Gazette, or the Weekly Post-Boy, no. 1148–55, 3 January–21 February 1765; Klein, “Prelude to Revolution in New York,” 457. 58. Conduct of Cadwallader Colden, quote on 32. The first “Sentinel” essay appeared in the New-York Gazette, or the Weekly Post-Boy, no. 1156, 28 February 1765. It ran in the New-York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy until 29 August 1765. 59. CC to Halifax, New York, 27 April 1765, CLB 1:479–80, quote on 480. See also CC to Board of Trade, New York, 13 December 1764, CLB 1:421–25; CC to John Pownall, New York, 27 April 1765, CLB 1:480; CC to Robert Monckton, New York, 3 May 1765, CP 7:28–29; CC to Halifax, 31 May 1765, CLB 2:4–5; CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 26 October 1765, CLB 2:47–50. 60. John Tabor Kempe to CC, New York, 31 May 1765, CP 7:38; CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 23 September 1765, CLB 2:33–37 at 36. 61. James McEvers to CC, [August 1765], CP 7:56–57; CC to William Johnson, Spring Hill, 31 August 1765, CLB 2:27–28; CC to McEvers, New York, 3 September 1765, CLB 2:28; “Minutes of Council relative to the Stamp Duties in New York,” 4 September 1765, CP 7:59–60. 62. CC to Capt. Archibald Kennedy, New York, 3 September 1765, CLB 2:29–30, quote on 29. See also CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 23 September 1765, CLB 2:33–34; James McEvers to Colden, [August 1765], CP 7:56–57; Thomas Gage to CC, New York, 31 August 1765, CP 7:57–58. 63. CC to Jeffery Amherst, New York, 10 October 1765, CLB 2:44–45, quote on 44. 64. CC to Benjamin Franklin, New York, 1  October 1765, CLB 2:38–39; CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 12 October 1765, CLB 2:45–46. 65. CC to Thomas Gage, Spring Hill, 2 September 1765, CLB 2:30–31, quotes on 30. See also Gage to CC, New York, 31 August 1765, CP 7:57–58; William Johnson to CC, Johnson Hall, 11 October 1765, CP 7:81–82; “Minutes of Council relative to the Stamp Duties in New York,” 9 September 1765, CP 7:60–62; CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 23 September 1765, CLB 2:33–37. 66. The figure of two thousand spectators comes from John Montresor, Journals of Captain John Montresor, ed. G. D. Scull, in Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1881 (New York, 1882), 336. On the arrival of the stamped papers, see also CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 26  October 1765, CLB 2:47–50; David

Notes to Pages 162–164

231

Colden to the Commissioners of the Stamp Office in London, New York, 26 October 1765, CLB 2:50–52. 67. CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 26 October 1765, CLB 2:47–50, quotes on 49. 68. Jared Ingersoll to CC, New Haven, 9 September 1765, CP 7:74–75; CC to Ingersoll, New York, 14 September 1765, CLB 2:32–33; CC to Zacharias Hood, New York, 16  September 1765, CLB 2:33; William Franklin to CC, Burlington, 25  September 1765, CP 7:79–80; CC to William Franklin, New York, 29 September 1765, CLB 2:38; David Colden to Ingersoll, New York, 28 October 1765, CLB 2:52–53; Ingersoll to CC, New Haven, 31 October 1761, CP 7:83–84. 69. CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 3 September 1765, CLB 2:33–37, quote on 34. See also John Montresor, “Report on Means of Strengthening Fort George,” 6 September 1765, CP 7:73–74; “Minutes of Council relative to the Stamp Duties in New York,” 7 September 1765, CP 7:60–61; CC to Jeffery Amherst, n.d., CLB 2:124–26. 70. CC to Capt. Archibald Kennedy, New York, 3 September 1765, CLB 2:29–30. 71. CC to John Cruger, New York, 31 October 1765, CLB 2:53; CC to Capt. Archibald Kennedy, New York, 1 November 1765, CLB 2:53. 72. “Notice Served on Governor Colden concerning the Stamp Act,” CP 7:84–85, quote on 85; “Minutes of Council relative to the Stamp Duties in New York,” 2 November 1765, CP 7:64–66. 73. CC to Capt. Archibald Kennedy, Fort George, New York, 1 November 1765, CLB 2:53. 74. CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 21 February 1766, CLB 2:97–100 at 98. 75. “Minutes of Council relative to the Stamp Duties in New York,” 2 November, CP 7:64–66; CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 5 November 1765, CLB 2:54– 56; No Stamped Paper to be Had (Philadelphia, 1765). 76. Thomas James to CC, HMS Garland, 6 November 1765, CP 7:89–90, quote on 90; Thomas James, The History of the Herculean Straits, Now Called the Straits of Gibraltar. 2 vols. (London, 1771), 1:133, 179, 306n5. 77. “Minutes of Council relative to the Stamp Duties in New York,” 2 November 1765, CP 7:64–66. Colden was later criticized in London for making a public declaration that he was not going to act before the arrival of the new governor (Henry Seymour Conway to CC, London, 15 December 1765, CP 7:96–98). 78. “Anonymous Warning Sent to Cadwallader Colden,” CP 7:88. 79. CC to the Marquis of Granby, New York, 5 November 1765, CLB 2:54. 80. “Minutes of Council relative to the Stamp Duties in New York,” 5 November 1765, CP 7:66–68; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 6 December 1765, CLB 2:78–82. 81. CC to Thomas Gage, New York, 5 November 1765, CLB 2:56. 82. CC to Mayor John Cruger and Corporation of New York, New York, 5 November 1765, CLB 2:57. See also Thomas Gage to CC, New York, 5 November 1765, in “Minutes of Council relative to the Stamp Duties in New York,” CP 7:70; CC to Thomas James, New York, 6 November 1765, CLB 2:58–60. 83. CC to Board of Trade, New York, 6 December 1765, CLB 2:78–82, quote on 81.

232

Notes to Pages 164–166

84. Henry Moore to the Earl of Hillsborough, New York, 9 May 1768, DRCHNY 8:66–68, quote on 67. 85. CC to Jeffery Amherst, Spring Hill, 24 June 1766, CLB 2:110–13, quote on 112. 86. CC to Henry Seymour Conway, 13 December 1765, CLB 2:66–68, quote on 67. See also Henry Moore to Conway, New York, 20 February 1766, DRCHNY 7:810–11; CC to Conway, New York, 22 February 1766, CLB 2:101–2. 87. CC to Henry Seymour Conway, New York, 21 February 1766, CLB 2:97–100, quote on 99. 88. Thomas James to CC, [London, December 1765], CP 7:98–101, quote on 99. See also CC to James, Spring Hill, 1 May 1766, CLB 2:108–9; CC to the Earl of Shelburne, New York, 20 October 1767, CLB 2:129–31; CC to Shelburne, New York, 23 November 1767, CLB 2:131–37; CC to Shelburne, [New York], 21 January 1768, CLB 2:142–45; CC to Lord Mansfield, [New York], 22 January 1768, CLB 2:146–50; CC to George Grenville, [New York], 29 January 1768, CLB 2:157–60; CC to the Earl of Halifax, 29 January 1768, CLB 2:161–66; CC to [unknown], 25 April 1768, CLB 2:166–73. 89. CC to Jeffery Amherst, Spring Hill, 10 November 1766, CLB 2:118–19; CC to PC, New York, 10 November 1766, CLB 2:119–21; PC to CC, London, 30 January 1767, CP 7:116–17; PC to CC, London, 12 February 1767, CP 7:117–19; PC to CC, London, 11 August 1767, CP 7:126–27. 90. Colden suspected that a handwritten copy of the pamphlet, “privately taken from one of the copies printed in London,” was passed to the New York printer by “a Lawyer, who is one of the Judge’s sons”; CC to the Earl of Shelburne, New York, 23 November 1767, CLB 2:131–37, quotes on 132; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 23 November 1767, CLB 2:137–42. 91. CC to [unknown], 25 April 1768, CLB 2:166–173, quote on 172. 92. CC to the Earl of Shelburne, New York, 23 November 1767, CLB 2:131–37; CC to Board of Trade, New York, 23 November 1767, CLB 2:137–42; CC to Shelburne, [New York], 21 January 1768, CLB 2:142–45; CC to Mansfield, [New York], 22 January 1768, CLB 2:146–50; Henry Moore to the Earl of Hillsborough, New York, 9  May 1768, DRCHNY 8:66–68. 93. See Cynthia A. Kierner, Traders and Gentlefolk: The Livingstons of New York, 1675–1790 (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 190–91. 94. Alexander McDougall, To the Betrayed Inhabitants of the City and Colony of NewYork (New York, 1769), 2. 95. In a reference to a popular English politician and writer whose arrest for libel in 1763 had become a cause célèbre, Colden noted that McDougall was the “[John] Wilkes of New York”; CC to the Earl of Dartmouth, New York, 6 July 1774, CLB 2:346–47, quote on 346. 96. The first “Watchman” article appeared in the Supplement to the New-York Journal; or the General Advertiser, no. 1421, 29 March 1770. “The Watchman No. II” and “The Watchman No. III” pieces were printed in the New-York Journal; or the General Advertiser, no. 1423, 12 April 1770, and no. 1424, 19 April 1770. 97. William Livingston, A Soliloquy (Philadelphia, 1770), 3. 98. CC to the Earl of Dartmouth, New York, 6 July 1774, CLB 2:346–47, quote on 346.

Notes to Pages 166–167

233

99. CC to the Earl of Dartmouth, New York, 7 September 1774, CLB 2:359–60. 100. CC to Thomas Gage, Spring Hill, 31 May 1775, CLB 2:414–16, esp. 414; CC to the Earl of Dartmouth, New York, 7 June 1775, CLB 2:419–26, quote on 421. 101. CC to the Earl of Dartmouth, New York, 7 June 1775, CLB 2:419–26, quote on 420–21. 102. Edwin R. Purple, “Notes, Biographical and Genealogical of the Colden Family, and of Some of its Collateral Branches in America,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 4, no. 4 (1873): 161–82; “Colonial Governor Lies in Unmarked Grave,” Long Island Daily Press, 29 August 1935; “The Willett Family of Flushing, Long Island,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 80, nos. 1–2 (1949): 1–9, 83–96; Saul Jarcho, “Biographical and Bibliographical Notes on Cadwallader Colden,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 32 (1958): 322–34.

Bibliographic Note

The bulk of Colden’s extant papers were gifted by his descendants to the New-York Historical Society in 1852. Many personal and political documents were subsequently published in eleven volumes of the society’s Collections. Two letter books recording Colden’s time as lieutenant governor of New York first appeared in 1876 and 1877. A large body of additional papers later filled the Collections for 1917–1923 and 1934–1935. Sadly, much of Colden’s intellectual material was judged at that time to be too specialized to warrant publication. However, a calendar of these valuable scientific and philosophical sources was at least added to the Collections for 1923. Copies of the documents themselves are now available from the New-York Historical Society on two rolls of microfilm. Unpublished material relating mostly to Colden’s politics can also be found in the Rutherfurd Collection, an important four-volume set of letters and other documents. The Rutherfurd Collection is preserved on the first two reels of the Rutherfurd Papers microfilm at the New-York Historical Society.

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Bibliographic Note

Further archival material is located at the University of Edinburgh, which possesses some of Colden’s student notes, as well as his unpublished revised edition of The Principles of Action of Matter. Meanwhile, the Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia, owns one of Colden’s most significant copy books (dated 1737–1753) and a farm journal (dated 1727–1736). A transcription of the latter appears in Jacqetta M. Haley, “Farming on the Hudson Valley Frontier: Cadwallader Colden’s Farm Journal, 1727–1736,” Hudson Valley Regional Review 6, no. 1 (1989): 1–34. Technology has made Colden’s major publications increasingly accessible. The History of the Five Indian Nations (New York, 1727) and An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and of the Cause of Gravitation (New York, 174[6]) can be accessed through Readex’s digitized collection, Early American Imprints, ser. 1: Evans (1639–1800). Electronic versions of An Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and of the Cause of Gravitation (London, 1746), The History of the Five Indian Nations (London, 1750), The Principles of Action in Matter (London, 1751), and The Conduct of Cadwallader Colden (London and New York, 1767) are likewise available via Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online. For those who prefer old-fashioned paper and ink, The Philosophical Writings of Cadwallader Colden (Amherst, NY, 2002), edited by Scott L. Pratt and John Ryder, provides an introductory selection of readings, and Cornell University Press offers a modern edition of The History of the Five Indian Nations (Ithaca, NY, 1958).

Index

Abauzit, Firmin, 54, 193n54 Act for the Encouragement of the Indian Trade, An (1720), 69, 72–73 active matter: Colden’s theory of, 6–7, 103–4, 109–12, 116–17; failure of Colden’s theory to take hold, 118–19; irreligious implications of, 112–13 Act of Union (1707), 63 aether, elasticity of, 15, 111, 112, 117 air, elasticity of, 47, 190n25 air pressure, 48–49 Albany: 1721 Anglo-Iroquois conference at, 69–71; 1722 Anglo-Iroquois conference at, 72; 1746 Anglo-Iroquois conference at, 141–42 Alexander, James, 50, 53–54, 68, 119, 134–35, 146 Alexander, Sir William, first Earl of Stirling, 87 Algonquins, 78 American Chronicle, 156–58

American colonies: Colden and enlightenment of, 1–2; Colden’s first journey to, 31–34; Colden’s second journey to, 38–39; Enlightenment in, 3–4; intellectual relationship with Scotland, 12; regulation of physicians in, 28 American Philosophical Society, The, 90–91 American Revolution, 167 Analyst; or, A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician, The (Berkeley), 106 Androboros (Hunter), 4 Anglicanism, 152–53 animal oeconomy: Colden’s essay on (1745), 120–22; Colden’s treatise on (ca. 1721), 55–57, 107, 194n61; pure mechanical explanations of, 119–20 animal secretion, 35–41 Anjou, Duke of, 64 Arbuthnot, Alexander, 33, 34, 37, 187n65 Argathelians, 22

238

Index

Argyll, Archibald Campbell, third Duke of, 22, 82 Argyll, John Campbell, second Duke of, 22 Aristotelianism, 13–14 astronomy, 41, 47–48 Astruc, Jean, 35 Baconian empiricism, 15 Bard, John, 151 Bartram, John, 90, 91 Battle of Lexington and Concord, 166–67 Berkeley, George, 88, 103, 104–9, 210n5 blood flow, 120–21 Board of Trade, 46–47, 66, 73, 75–76 Boerhaave, Herman, 119 Boston, Thomas, 21 botany, 29, 95–96 Boyle, Robert, 14 Boylston, Zabdiel, 28, 29 Bradford, William, 75 Bryant, William, 213n43 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 97 Burgis, William, 61–63 Burnet, Gilbert (father of William), 51, 87 Burnet, Gilbert (son of William), 53 Burnet, Mary Stanhope, 53 Burnet, William, 19fig.; blocks Stephen DeLancey’s admission to Assembly, 130–31; clique of, 4; and Indian trade controversy, 69, 75–77; interest in Scripture prophecy, 54; and Iroquois relations, 69–71; patronage and influence of, 45; politics of, 49–50; scandalous stories spread about, 133; scientific credentials and reputation of, 51–53; and taxation debate, 133; trade policies of, 73; tutored by John Craige, 18, 51–52; wager with Josiah Quinby, 53–54 calculus, 52–53, 103 calculus of fluxions, 106–9 Campbell, Laughlin, 154 Canada: British invasion of, 140, 141, 142; commerce with, 69, 72–73 Carlos II, 64 Cartesianism, 14–15 cartography, role of, in contest over North America, 65–66 Chancery Court, 94–95, 133–34 Charleton, Walter, 14

chemists, versus mechanists, 35 Cheyne, George, 21, 190n25 Choice, The (Pomfret), 88 Chrystie, Alice, 32, 33, 37, 45, 189n12 Chrystie, James, 26, 32–33, 85, 179–80nn50,55 Church, Benjamin, 88 civilization, progression of, 78, 83 Clap, Thomas, 113 Clarke, George, 136, 137, 138 Clarke, Samuel, 15–16 Clasen, Elizabeth, 183n27 Clasen, Willem, 183n27 Clinton, Charles, 99 Clinton, George, 140–42, 143–44, 146, 147 Colden, Alexander (father of Cadwallader), 20–21, 31, 179nn37,39,45, 180n55 Colden, Alexander (son of Cadwallader), 38, 93–94, 145–46, 162, 191n30 Colden, Alice Chrystie, 32, 33, 37, 45, 189n12 Colden, Cadwallader: birth of, 20; Cadwallader Colden and His Grandson Warren DeLancey, 100fig.; career choice of, 22–24; death of, 167; early letters of, 38–39; education and career of, 4–5, 29–30; and enlightenment of American colonies, 1–2; established as colonial gentleman, 26; first trip to America, 31–34; first trip to New York, 44–45; fur trade memorial, 74–76; intellectual authority of, 6–7; as lieutenant governor, 154–66; Lieutenant- Governor Cadwallader Colden and a Little Girl, 101fig.; marriage of, 37; patrons of, 21–22; positions of, in New York, 46–47; and rethinking American Enlightenment, 7–8; second trip to America, 38–39; social and intellectual connections of, 40–42, 121–25; success of, as physician, 39–40; success of, in London, 37–38; as surveyor general, 49, 51, 67–69; turn toward despair and conservatism, 5–6; uses enlightenment to reflect on life’s meaning, 12–13; Wollaston portrait of, 144–45 Colden, David (b. 1717), 45 Colden, David (b. 1733), 96–98 Colden, Ebenezer, 179n45 Colden, Elizabeth (daughter of Cadwallader), 47, 99, 139 Colden, Elizabeth (sister of Cadwallader), 179n45

Index Colden, James, 22, 23–24, 179n45 Colden, Jane, 95, 96 Colden, Janet Hughes, 21, 179n45 Colden, Sarah, 84 Colden, William, 179n45 Coldengham, 84–86, 93, 97–99 Collinson, Peter, 6, 79, 80–81, 92–93, 114, 144, 147 Compagnie d’Occident, 64, 66 Conduct of Cadwallader Colden, The, 165 Constitutional Courant, 161 Convention of the Estates, 16–17 Cooper, Myles, 167 “Copy Book of Letters on Subjects of Philosophy, Medecine, Friendship,” 38 corruption, Colden’s crusade against, 67–69 Cosby, William, 94–95, 135, 136, 138 Cotton, Charles, 87–88 Cotton, Josiah, 139 Craige, John, 18, 51–52 Cranstoun, William (Lord Cranstoun of Crailing), 22 Cunningham, Waddel, 158–60 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 83, 122 D’Arcy, Robert (Earl of Holdernesse), 82–83, 147 Davis, Lockyer, 82 Decanisora, 70, 72 de Lahontan, Baron, 65, 77 DeLancey, Elizabeth Colden, 47, 99, 139 DeLancey, James, 83, 140–44, 154 DeLancey, Peter (grandson of Colden), 23, 99–101 DeLancey, Peter (son-in-law of Colden), 99 DeLancey, Stephen, 130–31 DeLancey, Warren, 100fig., 102 Delanceyites, 143–44, 146 de la Potherie, Claude Charles Le Roy Bacqueville, 76, 77 Delisle, Guillaume, 66, 199n64 deputy post master general, 146–48 Descartes, René, 14 Diderot, Denis, 83 digestion, 35, 55 Discours historique sur l’Apocalipse (Abauzit), 193n54 Dongan, Thomas, 75, 79 Douglass, William, 27–29, 38–39, 71–72, 85

239

Drummer, The, 157 Drummond of Hawthornden, William, 87 DuBois, Isaac, 95 Edward, 161 electricity, 96–98, 208n68 Ellis, John, 96 Enlightenment, 3–4; beginnings of, 11–12; intellectual relationship between Scotland and America, 12; rethinking American, 7–8 Epicureanism, 86 Episcopalianism, 152–53 Erskine, Robert, 30 “Essay on Quantity” (Reid), 122–23 Euler, Leonhard, 116–17, 214n57 execution by fire, 80 Experiments and Observations on Electricity (Franklin), 97 Explication of the First Causes of Action in Matter; and, of the Cause of Gravitation, An (Colden), 6, 109–11, 114 Far Indians, commerce between New York and, 69, 72–77 Ferguson, Adam, 71, 83, 125 fever, Colden’s treatment of, 39–40 fire, execution by, 80 fluxions, 106–9 Forbes, Duncan, 112 Forsey, Thomas, 158–59 Forsey v. Cunningham, 158–60 Fort George, 161–64 France: competition over North America, 64–67; depiction in The History of the Five Indian Nations, 79 Franklin, Benjamin, 32, 45, 81, 88–91, 97, 121, 208n68 French fur trade, 72–77 French maps of North America, 65–66, 195n17 fur trade, 72–77 fur trade memorial (Colden), 74–76 Gabriel (slave), 98, 208–9n76 Galenism, 34–35 Garden, Alexander, 96, 122, 123 Gassendi, Pierre, 14 generation, 55–56 George II, 156

24 0

Index

George III, 155 Glorious Revolution, 16–17 Graham, George, 79 Graham, Hugh, 27, 34, 37, 40 gravity: Colden’s theory of, 109–12; Hutchinson on, 112; Newton’s theories regarding, 15 Great Britain: competition over North America, 64–67; political and military crisis in, 36–37; possibilities through creation of, 30 Gregory, David, 15, 17–18, 29 Gronim, Sara, 96 Gronovius, Johan Frederik, 92 Halifax, George Montagu-Dunk, Earl of, 83, 147 Hall, David, 82 Halley, Edmund, 37 Hamilton, Andrew, 136 Hansen, Hendrick, 151 Hardy, Sir Charles, 148 Harison, Francis, 68, 94 Harvey, William, 34 Hayes, Charles, 37, 106, 187n65 Heathcote, Caleb, 68 Hill, Elizabeth, 30–31, 208–9n76 Hill, John, 31 Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale (de la Potherie), 76, 77 History of the Five Indian Nations, The (Colden), 5, 63–64, 71, 77–83 History of the Province of New-York (Smith), 151, 154 Hobbes, Thomas, 14 Horsmanden, Daniel, 139–40, 160, 165 Hughes, Janet, 21, 179n45 Hunter, Robert, 4, 44–49, 76, 130 Hutchinson, John, 112 Hutchinsonianism, 117–18 iatromathematics, 182n16 Independent Reflector, 149, 150, 152, 153 infinitesimals, 55–56, 107, 108–9 innate heat, 56–57 inoculation, 28–29 intelligence, and material powers of body, 124 Interest of City and Country to Lay No Duties, The (Anon.), 132, 218n9

Interest of the County in Laying Duties, The (Colden), 131–32 Iroquois, 69–80, 141–42, 198–99n52; 1721 Albany conference with, 69–71; 1722 Albany conference with, 72; 1746 Albany conference with, 141–42 Italian Enlightenment, 52 Jacobites, 36–37 James II (of England) and VII (of Scotland), King, 16, 36 Jedburgh, William Kerr, fifth Lord, 22 Jedburgh, William Kerr, sixth Lord, 36–37 Johnson, Samuel, 105, 106, 108–9, 112–14, 153, 180n58, 210n5 Johnson, William, 142 Jones, William, 37, 41–42, 106 judges’ commissions, 155–56, 158 Kalm, Peter, 95 Kästner, Abraham Gotthelf, 114, 118, 119, 214n57 Keill, James, 36, 41 Keill, John, 18 Keith, William, 41, 42, 66, 72 Kendrick, William, 117 Kennedy, Archibald, 46, 50 Kennedy, Captain Archibald, 162, 164 Kerr, Jean (Lady Cranstoun), 22 Kerr, Sir Robert (first Earl of Ancram), 87 Kerr, William (fifth Lord Jedburgh and second Marquess of Lothian), 22 Kerr, William (sixth Lord Jedburgh and third Marquess of Lothian), 36–37 King’s College dispute, 153–54 Lahontan, Baron de, 65, 77 Lamb, Anthony, 151 land grants, 67–68, 94, 207n50 land investments, 93–95 land reforms, 67 Law, William, 23 lawyers, 155, 159–60 Le Clerc, Jean, 15–16 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 52, 122–23 lieutenant governor, 82–83, 154–65 light, 57, 108 Linnaean botanical system, 95–96 Linnaeus, Carl, 95

Index Livingston, Judge Robert R., 165, 230n55 Livingston, Philip, 50, 142 Livingston, Robert, 65 Livingston, William, 88, 150–52, 153, 155, 156, 159, 166 Logan, James, 40–41, 42, 44, 48–49, 66, 187n65, 189n12 London, Colden’s success in, 37–38 Lothian, William Kerr, fifth Lord Jedburgh and second Marquess of, 22 Lothian, William Kerr, sixth Lord Jedburgh and third Marquess of, 36–37 Macclesfield, George Parker, second Earl of, 41, 188n81 Machin, John, 37 Makemie, Francis, 31 “Map of the Countrey of the Five Nations, Belonging to the Province of New York, A” (Colden), 73–74, 76, 77 material physical reality, Berkeley on, 105–6 Mather, Cotton, 28 matter: in Aristotelian thought, 13; in Cartesian thought, 14; Johnson on, 112; in Newtonian thought, 15–16; types of, in Colden’s theory of active matter, 110–11. See also active matter McClaghry, Patrick, 98, 137 McDougall, Alexander, 165–66 McDowal, Andrew, 98, 137 McEvers, John Jr., 151 Mead, Richard, 40 mechanistic medicine, 34–38, 55–56, 119–21 mechanistic physics, rise of alternative, 14 Mitchell, John, 81, 82, 121–22, 147 Mock-Doctor, The, 157 Moderate Enlightenment, 2–3, 20 Monckton, Robert, 156 Montgomerie, John, 134, 135 Moore, Sir Henry, 164, 165 moral philosophy, 113 More, Henry, 14–15 Morris, Lewis Jr., 50, 134–35 Morris, Lewis Sr., 131, 134–35, 136 motion, 56–57, 111, 122–23 natural history, 95–96 neo-Stoicism, 87–89, 92–93 Newburgh, New York, 93–94

241

Newton, Sir Isaac: Berkeley attacks calculus of fluxions, 106–7; Burnet and, 52; on gravity, 15, 112; and motion and innate heat, 56–57; theories of, in Scottish university lectures, 176n15; views on motion, 122–23; and vis inertiae, 110–11 Newtonianism, 15–16, 22–23, 35 New Voyages to North-America (de Lahontan), 77 New York: Colden’s first trip to, 44–45; Colden’s positions in, 46–47; commerce between Far West and, 72–77; crusade against corruption in, 67–69; as cultural center, 149–50; diverse demographics of, 61–63, 129; early eighteenth-century, 43–44; Enlightenment in, 3–4; entwining of scientific and political lives in, 53–54; frontier defenses for, 148; hysteria in, 138–40; importance of, in British America, 66–67; Iroquois and imperial significance of, 69–72; politics in, 129–30 New York elites: ambivalence toward partisanship, 132–33; depiction of, 191n35; new generation of, 150–54; and provincial Council, 50–51; role of, in Enlightenment, 3–4 New York merchants, mobilization of, 49–50 New York Weekly Journal, 136–37 Nicoll, Benjamin, 151 Nicoll, William, 151 Nollet, Abbé Jean-Antoine, 96–97 North America: French and British competition over, 64–67; study of, 63–64 Nunes, Jacob Franco, 33 Occasional Reverberator, 153 “Of the First Principles of Morality” (Colden), 113 Opticks (Newton), 47, 48, 56–57 Osborne, Sir Danvers, 147, 225n96 Osborne, Thomas, 81, 82, 202n103 otium cum dignitate, 85–86. See also retirement, country Paine, Thomas, 32 Paracelsus, 34 Parker, James, 161 partisanship: ambivalence of New York elites toward, 132–33; Colden argues against, 130, 137–38, 143–44, 146; tensions due to, 133–35

242

Index

Partition Act, 67–68 Petiver, James, 31, 33 Philipse, Adolphe, 50, 130, 133–34 physical reality, Berkeley on, 105–6 physicians: privately trained, 29–30; university-trained, 26–29 Physiological Essays (Whytt), 123, 124 Pike, Samuel, 117–18 Pitcairne, Archibald, 15, 17, 35–36 Plockhoy, Cornelis, 183n27 Plockhoy, Pieter Cornelisz, 30, 183n27 pneuma, 86 politics: and change in colonial life, 135–37; Colden argues against partisanship, 137–38; Colden’s removal from, 145–46; in colonial New York, 129–30; difficulties with James DeLancey, 140–44; and hysteria in New York, 138–40; partisan tensions, 133–35; plans for funding provincial government, 131–33 Pomfret, John, 88 Porterfield, William, 119–20, 124 Pratt, Benjamin, 156 Pratt, Matthew: Cadwallader Colden and His Grandson Warren DeLancey, 100fig., 102; Lieutenant- Governor Cadwallader Colden and a Little Girl, 101fig., 102 preformationism, 56, 107 Preston, Charles, 29–30, 31 prime matter, 13 Prince of Wales, birth of, 11, 16 Principles of Action in Matter, The (Colden), 6, 104, 114–18, 122, 123, 124–25 print/printing: partisanship in, 137; politicization of, culture, 156–57; relationship between politics and, 131–33; of scientific material, 121–22; technology, 91–92; young New York intellectuals’ influence on, culture, 152 provincial Council/provincial Assembly, 50–51, 67–69, 142–43 provincial government, funding of, 131–33 Queen Anne’s War, 64 Quinby, Josiah, 53–54 Reflectors, 152–53 Reid, Thomas, 122–23 religious controversy, 104

resistance, material action of, 110 Restoration, 11–12 Restoration Settlement, Scottish, 16 retirement, country: of Colden, 84–86; impact on Colden’s printing endeavors, 92; land investments and Colden’s, 93–95; natural history and Colden’s, 95–96; neo-Stoicism and, 87–89; Stoicism and, 86–87 Retirement, The (Cotton), 88 Revolutionary War, American, 167 Revolution Settlement, Scottish, 17 Robertson, William, 83 Roxburghe, John Ker, Earl of, 21–22 Royal College of Physicians, 26–27, 35 Royal Society of London, 11, 53 Rutherford, John, 85, 90, 107–8, 142, 144, 147 “sage philosophers,” 151–54 Schuyler, Myndert, 130 Schuyler, Peter, 46, 50 Scotland: change in, 25–26; intellectual relationship with America, 12; opportunities in, 26; unsettlement of, 17 Scott, John Morin, 152, 155, 156, 159 Scripture prophecy, 54 secretion, animal, 35–38 “Sentinel” articles, 159–60 Sibbald, Sir Robert, 11–12 slave conspiracy, 138–40 slaves, 28, 55, 98–99 smallpox epidemic, 39–40 Smith, Caleb, 151 Smith, James, 65 Smith, Reverend William, 153 Smith, William Jr., 150–51, 154, 155, 156, 159 Smith, William Peartree, 151–52 social development, 78, 83 social division, development of intellectual culture’s impact on, 134–35 Soliloquy, A (Livingston), 166 Sons of Liberty, 165 South Prospect of ye Flourishing City of New York in the Province of New York in America, A (Burgis), 61–63 Spearman, Robert, 117–18 Spectator, The, 152 Spencer, Archibald, 90

Index spermist preformationism, 107 Spotswood, Alexander, 72 Spring Hill, 148, 167 Stahl, George Ernest, 124 Stamp Act, 160–64 Stanhope, Mary, 53 Stoicism, 86–87, 116. See also neo-Stoicism substantial form, 13, 56 surveyor general: Colden appointed as, 49; Colden’s activities as, 51, 67–69; opening for, 46; salary of, 191n30 Tamar (slave), 98, 209n76 tar water, 119 taxation, 131–33 Tomson, Alexander, 35 Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, A (Berkeley), 105–6 “Treatise on the Animal Oeconomy, A” (Colden), 55–57, 107, 194n61 Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 64, 66 Two Interests Reconciled, The (Anon.), 132 University of Edinburgh, 17–20

Valverde, Jacob, 33 Van Dam, Rip, 135, 136 Van Horne, John, 151 velocity, instantaneous, 106 vis inertiae, 110–11 vis viva, 122–23 vita activa, 86 vita contemplativa, 86 Walpole, Horace, 68 Ward, John, 82 War of the Spanish Succession, 64 Warren, Peter, 141 Whytt, Robert, 119–20, 123–25 William of Orange, Prince, 16–17 Wilson, George, 30 Wollaston, John, 144–45 women, Colden’s views on responsibilities of, 99 Woolsey, Benjamin, 151 yellow fever, 121–22 Zendrini, Bernardino, 52 Zenger, John Peter, 131, 132, 136–37

243