On June 1 the ship reached Sandy Hook. Three days later Dr. and Mrs. Priestley ‘landed at the Battery in as private a manner as possible, and went immediately to Mrs. Loring’s lodging-house close by.’ The next morning the principal inhabitants of New York came to pay their respects and congratulations; among others Governor Clinton, Dr. Prevoost, bishop of New York; Mr. Osgood, late envoy to Great Britain; the heads of the college; most of the principal merchants, and many others; for an account of which amenities one must read Henry Wansey’s Excursion to the United States in the Summer of 1794, published by Salisbury in 1796, a most amusing and delectable volume.
Priestley missed seeing Vice-president John Adams by one day. Adams had sailed for Boston on the third. But he left word that Boston was ‘better calculated’ for Priestley than any other part of America, and that ‘he would find himself very well received if he should be inclined to settle there.’
Mrs. Priestley in a letter home says: ‘Dr. P. is wonderfully pleased with everything, and indeed I think he has great reason from the attentions paid him.’ The good people became almost frivolous with their dinner-parties, receptions, calls, and so forth. Then there were the usual addresses from the various organizations,—one from the Tammany Society, who described themselves as ‘a numerous body of freemen, who associate to cultivate among them the love of liberty, and the enjoyment of the happy republican government under which they live.’ There was an address from the ‘Democratic Society,’ one from the ‘Associated Teachers in the City of New York,’ one from the ‘Republican Natives of Great Britain and Ireland,’ one from the ‘Medical Society.’
The pleasure was not unmixed. Dr. Priestley the theologian had a less cordial reception than Dr. Priestley the philosopher and martyr. The orthodox were considerably disturbed by his coming. ‘Nobody asks me to preach, and I hear there is much jealousy and dread of me.’ In Philadelphia at a Baptist meeting the minister bade his people beware, for ‘a Priestley had entered the land.’ But the heretic was very patient and earnest to do what he might for the cause of ‘rational’ Christianity. The widespread infidelity distressed him. He mentioned it as a thing to be wondered at that in America the lawyers were almost universally unbelievers. He lost no time in getting to work. On August 27, when he had been settled in Northumberland only a month, he wrote to a friend that he had just got Paine’s Age of Reason, and thought to answer it. By September 14 he had done so. ‘I have transcribed for the press my answer to Mr. Paine, whose work is the weakest and most absurd as well as most arrogant of anything I have yet seen.’
Priestley was fully conscious of the humor of his situation. He was trying to save the public, including lawyers, from the mentally debilitating effects of reading Paine’s Age of Reason, while at the same time all the orthodox divines were warning their flocks of the danger consequent upon having anything to do with him.
Honors and rumors of honors came to him. He was talked of for the presidency of colleges yet to be founded, and was invited to professorships in colleges that actually were. He went occasionally to Philadelphia, a frightful journey from Northumberland in those days. Through his influence a Unitarian society was established. He gave public discourses, and there was considerable curiosity to see and hear so famous a man. ‘I have the use of Mr. Winchester’s pulpit every morning … and yesterday preached my first sermon.’ He was told that ‘a great proportion of the members of Congress were present,’ and we know that ‘Mr. Vice-President Adams was a regular attendant.’
In company with his friend Mr. Russell, Priestley went to take tea with President Washington. They stayed two hours ‘as in any private family,’ and at leavetaking were invited ‘to come at any time without ceremony.’
About a year later Priestley saw again Washington, who had finished his second term of office. ‘I went to take leave of the late president. He seemed not to be in very good spirits. He invited me to Mt. Vernon, and said he thought he should hardly go from home twenty miles as long as he lived.’
Priestley was not to have the full measure of the rest which he coveted. He had left England to escape persecution, and persecution followed him. Cobbett, who had assailed him in a scurrilous pamphlet at the time of his emigration, continued his attacks. Priestley was objectionable because he was a friend of France. Moreover he had opinions about things, some of which he freely expressed,—a habit he had contracted so early in life as to render it hopeless that he should ever break himself of it. Cobbett’s virulence was so great as to excite the astonishment of Mr. Adams, who said to Priestley, ‘I wonder why the man abuses you;’ when a hint from Adams, Priestley thought, would have prevented it all. But it was not easy to control William Cobbett. Adams may have thought that Cobbett was a being created for the express purpose of being let alone. There are such beings. Every one knows, or can guess, to what sort of animal Churton Collins compared Dean Swift, when the Dean was in certain moods. William Cobbett, too, had his moods.
Yet it is impossible to read Priestley’s letters between 1798 and 1801 without indignation against those who preyed upon his peace of mind. He writes to Lindsay: ‘It is nothing but a firm faith in a good Providence that is my support at present: but it is an effectual one.’ His ‘never failing resource’ was the ‘daily study of the Scriptures.’ In moments of depression he loved to read the introduction to Hartley’s second volume, those noble passages beginning: ‘Whatever be our doubts, fears, or anxieties, whether selfish or social, whether for time or eternity, our only hope and refuge must be in the infinite power, knowledge and goodness of God.’