The Society for Useful Knowledge (35 page)

54
L. Marx, 155.

55
Cooke,
Tench Coxe
, 201.

56
McCoy, 147–49. Based on his review of the Coxe family papers, which were previously unavailable to scholars, Jacob E. Cooke concludes that Coxe provided “the most decisive” influence on the text of the report, but that Hamilton augmented his recommendations with “a philosophical argument for the indispensability of American manufactures to an essentially agricultural and underdeveloped nation.” See Jacob E. Cooke, “Tench Coxe, Alexander Hamilton, and the Encouragement of American Manufactures,”
William and Mary Quarterly
, Third Series, 32 (3): 370–92.

57
BF to Benjamin Vaughan, July 26, 1784,
WBF
, 3: 275.

58
Peskin, 32.

59
BF to Timothy Folger, September 29, 1769.

60
Alexander Hamilton, “Report on Manufactures,”
PAH
, 6: 296. Washington strongly supported Hamilton's views on the relationship between domestic industry and national security.

61
Anthony F. C. Wallace and David J. Jeremy, “William Pollard and the Arkwright Patents,”
William and Mary Quarterly
, Third Series, 34 (3): 410.

62
Hugh Henry Brackenridge to Tench Coxe, March 18, 1790, quoted in Cooke,
Tench Coxe
, 107.

63
Joanne Loewe Neel,
Phineas Bond. A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1786–1812
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), 55–60.

64
Doron Ben-Atar, “Alexander Hamilton's Alternative: Technology Piracy and the Report on Manufactures,”
William and Mary Quarterly
, Third Series, 52 (3): 389.

65
Coxe,
Address to an Assembly
, 11.

66
PAH
, 19: 196.

67
Davis, 1: 369. Christopher Norwood,
About Paterson: The Making and Unmaking of an American City
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), 35.

68
Bernard C. Steiner,
The Life and Correspondence of James McHenry
(Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1907), 22.

69
PAH
, 3: 216.

70
William Nelson,
The Founding of Paterson as the Manufacturing Metropolis of the United States
(Newark, NJ: Advertiser Printing House, 1887), 9–14.

71
National Gazette
, July 14, 1792, quoted in Davis, 1: 472.

72
Nelson, 16.

73
Davis, 1: 494.

74
Davis, 1: 419, 470–84.

75
Philadelphia Advertiser
, January 7, 1792, quoted in Davis, 1: 430–31.

76
William Nelson and Charles A. Shriner,
History of Paterson and Its Environs
(New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1920), 348–50. Paterson was also the site, in 1913, of a crippling labor dispute between workers and mill owners over wages, hours, and working conditions. The strike, which garnered international attention, ended with the silk workers' defeat after five months.

77
“Prospectus of the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures,”
PAH
, 9: 144.

1
William Smith, “Being an Eulogium on Dr. Benjamin Franklin,”
The Works of William Smith
(Philadelphia: Hugh Maxwell and William Fry, 1803), 1: 50–51.

2
BF to Abiah Folger, April 12, 1750.

3
MDR
, 388.

4
Hindle,
David Rittenhouse
, 329.

5
Benjamin Rush,
Eulogium
, 26–27.

6
Ibid., 23–24.

7
Cooke,
Tench Coxe
, 149–51.

8
Dupree, “National Pattern,” 21–23. Bates,
Scientific Societies
, 28.

9
Bates, 26.

10
John C. Greene, “Science, Learning and Utility: Patterns of Organization in the Early American Republic,” in
The Pursuit of Knowledge in the Early American Republic
, ed. Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn C. Brown (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 6–7.

11
Thomas Jefferson to William Short, November 28, 1814,
PTJ
, 15: 108.

12
BF to Joseph Priestly, February 8, 1780,
WBF
, 8: 10.

13
BF to Joseph Banks, November 21, 1783,
WBF
, 10: 208.

14
For a prominent example, see I. Bernard Cohen, “Some Reflections on the State of Science in America during the Nineteenth Century,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
45 (5): 666–77. Like many of his colleagues, Cohen views the events of the past exclusively through the lens of modern science. From this perspective, those endeavors and discoveries that demonstrably led to the practice of science as we know it today, or to theoretical breakthroughs that remain important now, are seen in a positive light. Everything else is, essentially, misguided or a waste of time and rarely given serious attention. Thus, Cohen uses his “reflections” here to lament the failure of America to produce “a great scientific tradition in the nineteenth century.” This is, of course, not the only way to view the problem, as should be clear by now to readers of this volume.

15
Cohen, “Some Reflections,” 667.

16
Thomas Walker, “Defense of Mechanical Philosophy,”
North American Review
33 (72): 123. Walker was writing in response to Thomas Carlyle's “Sign of the Times,” in the
Edinburg Review
for 1829, which took a dim view of “mechanism” and its effects on the world.

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——.
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——.
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——.
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——.
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——.
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——.
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——.
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——.
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——.
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——. “How Practical Was Benjamin Franklin's Science?”
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——. “Prejudice Against the Introduction of Lightening Rods.”
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——.
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——. “Some Reflections on the State of Science in America during the Nineteenth Century.”
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——.
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——.
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