| | 1 | Name: | Thomas Bacon | | | Year Elected: | 1768 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1700 | | | Death Date: | 5/24/1768 | | | | | | |
Thomas Bacon (c. 1700–24 May 1768) was a customs manager, printer, and Anglican priest, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election. Bacon was probably born on the Isle of Man, and little is known of his life before his employ first managing a coal depot and then the Dublin Customs House in the 1730s. He found his greatest success as a printer publishing the semi-weekly Dublin Mercury and then the official records of the Irish government (as the Dublin Gazette) during the early 1740s. After the loss of that contract, Bacon read theology, became a priest in 1745, and sailed for Maryland, landing at St. Peter’s in White Marsh. Erudite and affable, Bacon won quick acceptance to Annapolis’s literary Tuesday Club, in the Masonic lodge, and as a clever and talented poet, violinist and cellist, offering verse and minuets in small venues and grander concerts for charitable benefit. His concern for Maryland’s enslaved population was both genuine but also emblematic for its limits. Sermons to masters and slaves highlighted mutual obligations: masters and mistresses should encourage Christianity among their enslaved and treat them humanely; the enslaved should remain obedient. He founded a short-lived charity school for the orphaned, poor, and enslaved, which would instruct them in preparation for apprenticeship, but construction costs and the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War shortened its life. He labored a decade on a six-volume abridged collection of the laws of Maryland. His 1758 appointment to All Saints in Frederick sustained these labors with an annual income of £400, a quarter of which he used to hire a curate to lighten his pastoral load. Problems in his personal life, including being libeled for the rape of a mixed-race woman (victor in the suit) and a strangely lax attitude for canon rules when it came to his own remarriage (quietly forgotten) damaged his political connections, but he was broadly respected as a pastor until the end of his days. (PI) | |
| 2 | Name: | Lynford Lardner | | | Year Elected: | 1768 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 7/18/1715 | | | Death Date: | 10/6/1774 | | | | | | |
Lynford Lardner (18 July 1715–6 October 1774) was a public officeholder, businessman, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1768. He was born in London into a wealthy family, but his father lost his fortune when the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720-1721. Lardner was then apprenticed to his future brother-in-law Richard Penn, Sr. and his brother Thomas, who were then in the woolen business. Believing his family connections would afford him more opportunities across the Atlantic, he relocated to Philadelphia in 1740, where Thomas Penn immediately appointed him joint Receiver General of Pennsylvania. This position would prove the first in a series of similar appointments in the service of Pennsylvania and its proprietors, including the position of overseer of Thomas Penn’s personal estate and a position on the Governor’s Council. Lardner’s marriage to the daughter of a wealthy merchant provided the financial means he desired to leave these offices and set up his own business ventures, including a forge and farming operation. Though not active in the APS, he invested time and money in other cultural institutions in Philadelphia, among them subscribing to the Silk Society, serving as a director of the Library Company, acting as a trustee of the College of Philadelphia, and helping to found the Society of the Sons of St. George. His nephews John Penn and Richard Penn, Jr. were APS members. (PI) | |
| 3 | Name: | Arthur Lee | | | Year Elected: | 1768 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 12/21/1740 | | | Death Date: | 12/12/1792 | | | | | | |
Arthur Lee (21 December 1740–12 December 1792) was a diplomat, politician, lawyer, physician, and prolific polemicist, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1768. Born into a prominent planter family in Westmoreland County, Virginia, he received an M.D. from the University of Edinburgh and a law degree from London’s Inns of Court. Following a brief medical practice and election to the Royal Society, he turned to politics. Over the course of his life, he published numerous pamphlets and periodical essays attacking British imperial policy and slavery under nearly a dozen identifiable pseudonyms, including “Monitor,” “Raleigh,” and “Junius Americanus.” He is most famous for his oft-reprinted Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain (1774). Lee spent much of the 1770s in London, where he served as an agent of Massachusetts, assisted Benjamin Franklin in undermining Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson, sought to unite the opposition faction in British politics to the American resistance movement, and aided the Continental Congress as a confidential correspondent. During the Revolution, he also served on the American diplomatic corps in Paris, negotiating for aid from France, Spain, and Prussia. Exacerbated by Lee’s personal eccentricities, these often frustrating missions led to public controversies with fellow diplomats Silas Deane and Franklin involving accusations of financial impropriety. After being recalled from his post in 1779, Lee was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1781 and served in the Continental Congress from 1782 to 1784. He was a negotiator of Indian treaties at Fort Stanwix and Fort McIntosh in the winter of 1784-1785 and, between 1785 and 1789, sat on the new nation’s Board of Treasury. His brother Francis Lightfoot Lee I, his nephew Thomas Lee Shippen, and his brother-in-law William Shippen, Jr. were APS members. (PI, ANB, DAB) | |
| 4 | Name: | Francis L. Lee | | | Year Elected: | 1768 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 10/14/1734 | | | Death Date: | 1/17/1797 | | | | | | |
Francis Lightfoot Lee (14 October 1734–17 January 1797) was a planter, slaveholder, and legislator, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election. Born to the famed Stratford branch of the Lee family of Virginia, his place in colonial British North America was assured. After early education and the death of his father Thomas, Francis inherited a plantation in Loudoun County after 1750 where he used enslaved labor to cultivate tobacco and corn for trade, while experimenting with a variety of the planter classes’ hobbies, including exotic plants and silkworms; with friend and APS Member Landon Carter Francis exchanged ideas about improving each other’s farms. Loudoun elected him to the House of Burgesses first in 1758–68, before his move to Richmond County, which he served thereafter until the Revolution. Lee rapidly established his patriotic credentials in the Stamp Act crisis, was elected to Virginia’s Revolutionary conventions in 1774–75, and then the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in summer 1775. He was a leading advocate of independence by 1776 and wholeheartedly backed his brother, Richard Henry Lee, in his July 2 resolution to declare it. For a number of reasons Lee effectively left public life in 1779. Beyond his support of the new federal plan—not least because Washington was—Lee otherwise became a homebody, content with his plantation experimentations and his books and the small pleasures of hosting guests. (PI) | |
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