Cadwallader Colden (16)

Elected to the original American Philosophical Society.

Cadwallader Colden (7 February 1688–20 September 1776) was a scientist, historian, politician, and diplomat and an enthusiastic early member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1744. Born in Ireland to Scottish parents, Colden studied divinity at the University of Edinburgh and received medical training in London before immigrating to Philadelphia in 1710. In 1717 he relocated to New York, where he became surveyor general in 1720. Colden had interests in astronomy, cartography, and botany; invented a form of stereotype printing; translated Cicero and wrote works on politics, history, and philosophy (many of them unpublished); and corresponded with APS members like Benjamin Franklin and European naturalists like Carolus Linnaeus, who printed Colden’s catalogue of Hudson Valley flora in the transactions of the Swedish Royal Society. In 1721 he was appointed to the Provincial Council and led a press campaign to discredit Governor William Cosby as an enemy of popular liberty. After serving as chief adviser to Governor George Clinton between 1746 and 1753, Colden led the colony as lieutenant governor for four terms between 1760 and 1775. Drifting from the Whig principles of his youth to a defense of royal prerogative and metropolitan oversight of colonial affairs, Colden became the object of popular ire when indignation about his handling of local controversies merged with resentment against the Stamp Act during the lead-up to the Revolution. The aging Loyalist retired to his estate as an independent government began to form and died there shortly afterwards. His published works include a treatise on Newtonian physics and an influential account of the Iroquois that grew out of his role as a representative to the Confederacy. While she was not an APS member, his daughter Jane Colden is often called America’s first female botanist. (PI, ANB, DNB, DAB)