Not all colonial American contact with the works and thought of David Hume was a product of printed matter being transferred from Britain to America. A number of colonists traveling in Britain made a point to look Hume up. Records of those encounters offer a measure of Hume's escalating celebrity with early Americans of the Revolutionary era. As recorded by his American visitors, Hume's growing reputation prefigures the increased diffusion of his works in the colonies in the 1760s and, as we shall see, mirrors the reception of Hume and his thought in books, pamphlets, private papers, journals, and newspapers of the 1770s. The most famous of Hume's eighteenth-century American visitors was Benjamin Franklin. Their personal relationship is interesting in its own right but also important for the light it casts on Hume's wider colonial American reception — one that Franklin's efforts arguably did much to shape.

HUME'S COLONIAL AMERICAN VISITORS

Pursuits of business and pleasure took Franklin to Scotland twice: first in 1759 and then again in 1771. We know that Franklin read Hume's works and met with Hume on a number of occasions in Edinburgh and London. The record of their earliest meetings, however, is sketchy. The precise date of their first encounter is unknown — it was probably during the winter of 1758/59 in London where they may have been introduced by WilliamStrahan, a mutual friend.