Thomas Paine
The Lost Founder
Thomas Paine has often been the
forgotten Founding Father.
by Harvey J. Kaye
The American Prospect magazine,
July 2005
On July 17, 1980, Ronald Reagan stood
before the Republican national convention and the American people
to accept his party's nomination for president of the United States.
Most of what he said that evening was to be expected from a Republican.
He spoke of the nation's past and its "shared values."
He attacked the incumbent Carter administration and promised to
lower taxes, limit government, and expand national defense. And,
invoking God, he invited Americans to join him n a "crusade
to make America great again?'
Yet Reagan had much more than restoration
in mind. He intended to transform American political life and
discourse. He had constructed a new Republican alliance-a New
Right-of corporate elites, Christian evangelicals, conservative
and neoconservative intellectuals, and a host of right-wing interest
groups in hopes of undoing the liberal politics and programs of
the past 40 years, reversing the cultural changes and developments
of the 1960s, and establishing a new national governing consensus.
All this was well-known. But that night,
Reagan startled many by calling forth the revolutionary, Thomas
Paine, and quoting Paine's words of 1776, from the pamphlet Common
Sense: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again?'
American politicians have always drawn
upon the words and deeds of the Founders to bolster their own
positions. Nevertheless, in quoting Paine, Reagan broke emphatically
with longstanding conservative practice. Paine was not like George
Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or Thomas Jefferson. Paine had
never really been admitted to the most select ranks of the Founding
Fathers. Recent presidents, mostly Democrats, had referred to
him, but even the liberals had generally refrained from quoting
Paine the revolutionary. When they called upon his life and labors,
they usually conjured up Paine the patriot, citing the line with
which, during the darkest days of the war for independence, he
opened the first of his Crisis papers: "These are the times
that try men's souls."
Conservatives certainly were not supposed
to speak favorably of Paine, and for 200 years, they had not.
In fact, they had for generations publicly despised Paine and
scorned his memory. And one can understand why: Endowing American
experience with democratic impulse and aspiration, Paine had turned
Americans into radicals, and we have remained radicals at heart
ever since.
However, for more than a quarter-century,
we have allowed the Republican right to appropriate the nation's
history, define what it means to be an American, and corral American
political imagination. It is time for the left to recover its
fundamental principles and perspectives and reinvigorate Americans'
democratic impulse and aspiration. And we must start by reclaiming,
and reconnecting with, Paine's memory and legacy and the progressive
tradition he inspired and encouraged. We must redeem Paine's revolutionary
vision, his confidence in his fellow citizens, and his belief
in America's extraordinary purpose and promise. Doing so will
help us to remember not only what we stand in opposition to but,
all the more, what we stand in opposition for.
Contributing fundamentally to the American
Revolution, the French Revolution, and the struggles of Britain's
Industrial Revolution, Thomas Paine was one of the most remarkable
political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical
of a radical age. Yet this son of an English artisan did not become
a radical until his arrival in America in late 1774, at the age
of 37. Even then he had never expected such things to happen.
But struck by America's startling contradictions, magnificent
possibilities, and wonderful energies, and moved by the spirit
and determination of its people to resist British authority, he
dedicated himself to the American cause. Through his Common Sense
pamphlet and the Crisis papers, he inspired Americans not only
to declare their independence and create a republic; he also emboldened
them to turn their colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war,
defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive
fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional
purpose and promise.
Five feet 10 inches tall, with a full
head of dark hair and striking blue eyes, Paine was inquisitive,
gregarious, and compassionate, yet strong-willed, combative, and
ever ready to argue about and fight for the good and the right.
The story is told of a dinner gathering at which Paine, on hearing
his mentor Franklin observe, 'Where liberty is, there is my country,"
cried out, "Where liberty is not, there is my country!"
A workingman before an intellectual and author, Paine developed
his revolutionary beliefs and ideas not simply from scholarly
study but all the more from experience-experience that convinced
him that the so-called lower orders, not just the highborn and
propertied, had the capacity both to comprehend the world and
to govern it. And addressing his arguments to those who traditionally
were excluded from political debate and deliberation, not merely
to the governing classes, he helped to transform the very idea
of politics and the political nation. At war's end Paine was a
popular hero, known by all as "Common Sense!' And yet he
was not. 00"-.i finished. To him, America possessed extraordinary
political, / - / economic, and cultural potential. But he did
not see that potential as belonging to Americans alone. -o2 T
He comprehended the nation's - .;-: history in universal terms-"The
cause of America is the cause - of all mankind"-and believed
that the actions of his fellow citizens-to-be were filled with
world-historic significance. "The sun never shined on a cause
of greater worth;' he wrote. "'Tis not the affair of a city,
a county, a province, or a kingdom but of a continent-of at least
one-eighth part of the habitable globe. 'Tis not the concern of
a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in
the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end
of time, by the proceedings now!'
America's struggle had turned Paine into
an inveterate champion of liberty, equality, and democracy, and
after the war he went on to apply his revolutionary pen to struggles
in Britain and France. In Rights of Man, he defended the French
Revolution of 1789 against conservative attack, challenged Britain's
monarchical and aristocratic polity and social order, and outlined
a series of public-welfare initiatives to address the material
inequalities that made life oppressive for working people and
the poor. In The Age of Reason, he criticized organized religion,
the claims of biblical Scripture, and the power of churches and
clerics. And in Agrarian Justice, he proposed a democratic system
of addressing poverty that would entail taxing the landed rich
to provide grants or "stakes" to young people and pensions
to the elderly.
Reared an Englishman, adopted by America,
and honored as a Frenchman, Paine often called himself a "citizen
of the world." But the United States always remained paramount
in his thoughts and evident in his labors, and his later writings
continued to shape the young nation's events and developments.
And yet as great as his contributions were, they were not always
appreciated, nor were his affections always reciprocated. Paine's
democratic arguments, style, and appeal-as well as his social
background, confidence, and single-mindedness-antagonized many
among the powerful, propertied, prestigious, and pious and made
him enemies even within the ranks of his fellow patriots such
as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris.
Elites and aspiring elites-New England
patricians and professors, Middle Atlantic merchants and manufacturers,
southern slaveholders and solemn preachers-feared the power of
Paine's pen and the democratic implications of his arguments.
In reaction, they and their heirs sought to disparage his character,
suppress his memory, and - limit the influence of his ideas. And,
according to most accounts, they succeeded. For much of the 19th
century, and well into the 20th, Paine's pivotal role in the making
of the United States was effectively erased in the official -
- telling. Writing in the 1880s, Theodore Roosevelt believed he
could characterize Paine, with impunity, as a "filthy little
atheist" (though Paine was neither-it, little, nor an atheist).
Not only in the highest circles but also in various popular quarters,
particularly among the religiously devout, Paine's name persistently
conjured up the worst images, leading generations of historians
and biographers to assume that memory of Paine's contributions
to American history had been lost.
Yet those accounts were wrong. Paine had
died, but neither his memory nor his legacy ever expired. His
contributions were too fundamental and his vision of America's
meaning and possibilities too firmly imbued in the dynamic of
political life and culture to be so easily shed or suppressed.
At times of economic and political crisis, when the republic itself
seemed in jeopardy, Americans, almost instinctively, would turn
to Paine and his words. Even those who apparently disdained him
and what he represented could not fail to draw on elements of
his vision. Moreover, there were those who would not allow Paine
and his arguments to be forgotten.
Contrary to the ambitions of the governing
elites, as well as the presumptions of historians and biographers,
Paine remained a powerful presence in American political and intellectual
life. Recognizing the persistent and developing contradictions
between the nation's ideals and reality, diverse Americans - native-born
and immigrant - struggled to defend, extend, and deepen freedom,
equality, and democracy. Rebels, reformers, and critics such as
Fanny Wright, Thomas Skidmore, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, Ernestine Rose, Susan B. Anthony, Walt Whitman,
Herman Melville, Abraham Lincoln, William Sylvis, Albert Parsons,
Robert Ingersoll, Mark Twain, Henry George, Emma Goldman, Eugene
Debs, Hubert Harrison, Alfred Bingham, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Howard Fast, A.J. Muste, Saul Alinsky, C. Wright Mills, George
McGovern, John Kerry (of the Winter Soldiers movement years),
and Todd Gitlin (among other young people of Students for a Democratic
Society), along with innumerable others right down to the present
generation, rediscovered Paine's life and labors and drew ideas,
inspiration, and encouragement from them.
Some honored Paine in memorials. Many
more honored him by adopting his arguments and words as their
own. Workingmen and women's advocates, utopians, abolitionists,
freethinkers (as well as democratic evangelists!), suffragists,
anarchists, populists, progressives, socialists, labor and community
organizers, peace activists, and liberals have repeatedly garnered
political and intellectual energy from Paine, renewed his presence
in American life, and served as the prophetic memory of his radical-democratic
vision of America.
Ironically perhaps, in these years of
conservative ascendance and the retreat of liberalism and the
left, we have witnessed an amazing resurgence of interest in Paine,
extending all the way across American public culture. Indeed,
Paine has achieved near-celebrity status. His writings adorn bookstore
shelves and academic syllabi. References to him appear everywhere,
in magazine articles, television programs, Hollywood films, and
even the works of contemporary musical artists, from classical
to punk. Arid while Paine's image may not have become iconic,
the editors of American Greats, a hall-of-fame-like volume celebrating
the nation's most wonderful and fascinating creations, enshrined
his pamphlet Common Sense as popular Americana, alongside the
baseball diamond, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Coca-Cola recipe, and
the Chevrolet Corvette. Media critic John Katz dubbed Paine the
"moral father of the Internet."
Paine has definitely achieved a new status
in public history and memory and come to be admired and celebrated
almost universally. Nothing more firmly registered the change
than the October 1992 decision by Congress to authorize the erection
of a monument to Paine in Washington, D.C., on the National Mall.
The lobbying campaign for the memorial involved mobilizing truly
bipartisan support, from Ted Kennedy to Jesse Helms. And more
recently, in 2004, while Howard Dean and Ralph Nader were issuing
pamphlets modeled on Common Sense, and the online journal TomPaine.com
was publishing liberal news commentary, Republicans and Libertarians
were quoting Paine in support of their own political ambitions.
Paine's new popularity truly has been
astonishing, leading Paine biographer Jack Fruchtman to muse,
"Who owns Tom Paine?" The very extent of it has made
it seem as if it had never been otherwise. Reporting on a campaign
to have a marble statue of suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Osborne Mott moved into the Capitol
Rotunda, a Washington-based journalist wrote, "Imagine a
statue of Benjamin Franklin shoved into a broom closet in the
White House. Or a portrait of Thomas Paine tucked behind a door.
That would never happen." And in Columbus, Ohio, a reporter
noted without reservation: "Some politicians evoke Abraham
Lincoln or Thomas Paine to express Middle America's ideal of honesty
and patriotism."
Undeniably, Paine's attraction is related
to the recent wave of "Founding Fathers Fever." But
saying that simply raises the questions: Why have we become so
intent on re-engaging the Founders, and why, specifically, Paine?
Historically, we have turned to our revolutionary
past at times of national crisis and upheaval, when the very purpose
and promise of the nation were at risk or in doubt. Facing wars,
depressions, and other travails and traumas, we have sought consolation,
guidance, inspiration, and validation. Some of us have wanted
to converse with the Founders, and others to argue or do battle
with them. All of which is to be expected in a nation of grand
political acts and texts. As historian Steven Jaffe has noted:
"The Founders have come to symbolize more than just their
own accomplishments and beliefs. What did [they] really stand
for? This is another way of asking, 'What is America? What does
it mean to be an American?"
In recent years we have faced events and
developments that once again have led us to ask ourselves, "What
does it mean to be an American?" Commitment to the "American
creed of liberty, equality, democracy," the "melting-pot
theory of national identity," and the idea of American exceptionalism
endures. We continue to comprehend our national experience as
entailing the advancement of those ideals and practices. And we
still want that history taught to our children. Nevertheless,
globalization, immigration, ethnic diversification, the expansion
of corporate power, the intensification of class inequalities,
political alienation, the enervation of civic life, and domestic
and international terrorism have instigated real anxiety and trepidation
about the nation's future and the political alternatives available.
In the 1990s, those very concerns fomented "culture wars"
and a discourse of social and political crisis reflected in works
with titles like The Disuniting of America; America: What Went
Wrong?; Democracy on Trial; The End of Democracy?; The Twilight
of Common Dreams; Bowling Alone; and Is America Breaking Apart?
In the wake of September 11, many of those
titles no longer seem relevant. The Islamic terrorists' attacks
on America and the nation's ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
dramatically refashioned the prevailing sense of crisis and danger.
However, they did not resolve the critical questions of American
identity and meaning. Not at all. They simply posed them anew
and in a more urgent manner.
We sense that America's purpose and promise
are in jeopardy and we wonder what we can and should do. Like
other generations confronting national crises and emergencies,
we have quite naturally looked back to the Revolution and the
Founders in search of answers and directions.
Still, why have we become so eager to
reconnect specifically with Paine? Perhaps because when compared
with the other Founders, he has come to look so good. He was no
slaveholder or exploiter of humanity. Nor did he seek material
advantage by his patriotism. But that explains his popularity
in an essentially negative manner. Besides, as admirable as Paine
was, the answer lies not in his life alone. It also has to do
with our own historical and political longings. However conservative
the times appear, we Americans remain with all our faults and
failings resolutely democratic in bearing and aspiration. When
we rummage through our Revolutionary heritage, we instinctively
look for democratic hopes and possibilities. Arid there we find
no Founder more committed to the progress of freedom, equality,
and democracy than Paine. Moreover, we discover that no writer
of our Revolutionary past speaks to us more clearly and forcefully.
In spite of what might have seemed a long estrangement, we recognize
Paine and feel a certain intimacy with his words.
Heartened and animated by Paine, progressives
have pressed for the rights of workers; insisted upon freedom
of conscience and the separation of church and state; demanded
the abolition of slavery; campaigned for the equality of women;
confronted the power of property and wealth; opposed the tyrannies
of fascism and communism; fought a second American Revolution
for racial justice and equality; and challenged our own government's
authorities and policies, domestic and foreign. We have suffered
defeats, committed mistakes, and endured tragedy and irony. But
we have achieved great victories, and far more often than not,
as Paine himself fully expected, we have in the process transformed
the nation and the world for the better.
Now, after more than two centuries-facing
our own "times that try men's souls"-it seems we have
all become Painites. Today, references to Paine abound in public
debate and culture; in contrast to the past, not only the left
but also the right claims him as one of their own.
Yet appearances and rhetoric can deceive,
for if we all truly revered Paine, we surely would have built
the promised monument to him on the Mall in the nation's capital.
We would have placed his statue where it belongs, near the images
of and memorials to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, and the
veterans of the Second World War, as well as those of Vietnam
whose lives and acts he so powerfully informed and motivated.
And we would have engraved Paine's words in marble to remind us
of how it all began, and to keep us from forgetting that "much
yet remains to be done."
But the truth is that not all of us are
Painites. For all of their many citations of Paine and his lines,
conservatives really do not-and truly cannot-embrace him and his
arguments. Bolstered by capital, firmly in command of the Republican
Party, and politically ascendant for a generation, they have initiated
and instituted policies and programs that fundamentally contradict
Paine's own vision and commitments. They have subordinated the
republic-the res publica, the public good - to the marketplace
and to private advantage. They have furthered the interests of
corporations and the rich over those of working people, their
families, unions, and communities, and they have overseen a concentration
of wealth and power that, recalling the Gilded Age, has corrupted
and debilitated American democratic life and politics. They have
carried on culture wars that have divided the nation and undermined
the wall separating church and state. Moreover, they have pursued
domestic and foreign policies that have made the nation both less
free and less secure politically, economically, environmentally,
and militarily. Even as they have spoken of advancing freedom
and empowering citizens, they have sought to discharge, or at
least constrain, America's democratic impulse and aspiration.
In fact, while poaching lines from Paine, they and their favorite
intellectuals have disclosed their real ambitions and affections
by once again declaring the "end of history" and promoting
the lives of Founders like Adams and Hamilton, who, in decided
contrast to Paine, scorned democracy and feared "the people?'
Still, conservatives do, in their fashion,
end up fostering interest in Paine. It's not just that, aware
of his iconic status, they insist on quoting him. It's also that
their very own policies and programs, by effectively denying and
threatening America's great purpose and promise, propel us, as
in crises past, back to the Revolution and the Founders, where
once again we encounter Paine's arguments and recognize them as
our own. Arguably, the heightened popular interest in Paine we
have witnessed these past several years reflects anxieties and
longings generated not simply by the grave challenges we face
but also by the very triumph of right-wing politics.
Yet those of us who might make the strongest
historical claim on Paine have yet to properly reappropriate his
memory and legacy. In the course of the late '60s and early '70s,
the left not only fell apart; it also lost touch with Paine. And,
while we continue to cite him and his words, we have failed to
make his vision and commitments once again our own. In contrast
both to the majority of our fellow citizens and to generations
of our political predecessors, liberals and radical reformers
no longer proclaim a firm belief in the nation's exceptional purpose
and promise, the prospects and possibilities of democratic change,
and ordinary citizens' capacities to act as citizens rather than
subjects. We have lost the political courage and conviction that
once motivated our efforts.
Electrified by America and its people,
and the originality of thought and action unleashed by the Revolution,
Paine argued that the United States would afford an "asylum
for mankind," provide a model to the world, and support the
global advance of republican democracy. But many on the left have
eschewed notions of American exceptionalism and patriotism and
allowed politicians and pundits of the right to monopolize and
define them. Presuming that such ideas and practices can only
serve to justify the status quo or worse, and ignoring how, historically,
progressives have articulated them to advocate the defense and
extension and deepening of freedom, equality, and democracy, many
of us have failed to recognize their critical value as weapons
against injustice and oppression.
Moreover, whereas Paine declared that
Americans had it in their power to "begin the world over
again," too many of us seem to have all but abandoned the
belief that democratic transformation remains both imperative
and possible. While we reject the right's end-of-history declarations,
we do not actually counter them with an overarching public philosophy,
a grand vision of democratic possibilities, or fresh ideas and
initiatives-ideas and initiatives that would stir the American
imagination and offer real hope of addressing the threats to our
freedom and security, the causes of our deepening inequalities,
and the forces undermining our public life and solidarities by
enhancing the authority of democratic government and the power
of citizens against the authority of the market and the power
of corporations. We must rediscover and reinvigorate the optimism,
energy, and imagination that led Paine to declare, "We are
a people upon experiments;' and, "From what we now see, nothing
of reform on the political world ought to be held improbable.
It is an age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked
for?'
And while Paine had every confidence in
working people and wrote to engage them in the Revolution and
nation building, we, for all our rhetoric, have remained alienated
from, if not skeptical of, our fellow citizens. Asking labor unions
to underwrite their campaigns and appealing to working people
for their votes, Democrats-the party of the people-hesitate to
actually mobilize them to fight for democratic political and social
change. Taking office in January 1993, eager to signal a new,
progressive direction in public life after 12 years of Republican
administrations, William Jefferson Clinton-who would also speak
of Paine at various times in his two terms-made every effort to
identify himself with the revolutionary author of the Declaration
of Independence, Thomas Jefferson. En route from Arkansas to the
capital to take the oath of office, Clinton retraced Jefferson's
inaugural trek from Monticello to Washington and filled his inaugural
address with Jeffersonian references. But the way Clinton presented
the Founder and third president, however stirring it may have
sounded, revealed an elitist dread of popular democratic energies
and a desire to keep "the people" at some distance from
power. Calling on Americans to "be bold, embrace change,
and share the sacrifices needed for the nation to progress,"
he stated, "Thomas Jefferson believed that to preserve the
very foundations of our nation, we would need dramatic change
from time to time?' Yet as Clinton surely knew, Jefferson did
not say that we needed merely change to sustain the republic.
What Jefferson said was, "I hold that a little rebellion
now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political
world as storms in the physical" [emphasis added]. Committed
to cultivating democratic life, liberals and other progressives
must ensure that Democrats not only commission expert panels,
draft plans, and line up legislative votes in a top-down fashion
but also engage American aspirations and energies and enhance
public participation in the political and policy-making process.
Paine would assure us that the struggle
to expand American freedom, equality, and democracy will continue,
for as he proudly observed of his fellow citizens after they turned
out the Federalists in 1800, "There is too much common sense
and independence in America to be long the dupe of any faction,
foreign or domestic?' Indeed, we have good reason not only to
hope but also to act, for Americans' persistent and growing interest
in and affection for Paine and his words signify that our generation,
too, still feels the democratic impulse and aspiration that he
inscribed in American experience. Responding to those yearnings,
we might well prove-as Paine himself wrote in reaction to misrepresentations
of the events of 1776-that, "It is yet too soon to write
the history of the Revolution?'
Harvey J. Kaye is the Rosenberg Professor
of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green
Bay and author of the forthcoming Thomas Paine and the Promise
of America from which this article is drawn.
**********
The Fate of Thomas Paine
(written by Bertrand Russell)
Thomas Paine, though prominent in two
revolutions and almost hanged for attempting to raise a third,
is grown, in our day, somewhat dim. To our greatgrandfathers,
he seemed a kind of earthly Satan, a subversive infidel rebellious
alike against his God and his King. He incurred the bitter hostility
of three men not generally united: Pitt, Robespierre, and Washington.
Of these, the first two sought his death, while the third carefully
abstained from measures designed to save his life. Pitt and Washington
hated him because he was a democrat; Robespierre, because he opposed
the execution of the King and the Reign of Terror. It was his
fate to be always honored by opposition and hated by governments:
Washington, while he was still fighting the English, spoke of
Paine in terms of highest praise; the French nation heaped honors
upon him until the Jacobins rose to power; even in England, the
most prominent Whig statesmen befriended him and employed him
in drawing up manifestoes. He had faults, like other men; but
it was for his virtues that he was hated and successfully calumniated.
Paine's importance in history consists
in the fact that he made the preaching of democracy democratic.
There were, in the eighteenth century,, democrats among French
and English aristocrats, among Philosophes and nonconformist ministers.
But all of them presented their political speculations in a form
designed to appeal only to the educated. Paine, while his doctrine
contained nothing novel, was an innovator in the manner of his
writing, which was simple, direct, unlearned, and such as every
intelligent workingman could appreciate. This made him dangerous;
and when he added religious unorthodoxy to his other crimes, the
defenders of privilege seized the opportunity to load him with
obloquy.
The first thirty-six years of his life
gave no evidence of the talents which appeared in his later activities.
He was born at Thetford in 1739, of poor Quaker parents, and was
educated at the local grammar school up to the age of thirteen,
when he became a stay-maker. A. quiet life, however, was not his
taste, and at the age of seventeen he tried to enlist on a privateer
called The Terrible, whose captain's name was Death. His parents
fetched him back and so probably saved his life, as 175 out of
the crew of 200 were shortly afterward killed in action. A little
later, however, on the outbreak of the Seven Years' War, he succeeded
in sailing on another privateer, but nothing is known of his brief
adventures at sea. In 1758, he was employed as a staymaker in
London, and in the following year he married, but his wife died
after a few months. In 1763 he became an exciseman, but was dismissed
two years later for professing to have made inspections while
he was in fact studying at home. In great poverty, he became a
schoolmaster at ten shillings a week and tried to take Anglican
orders. From such desperate expedients he was saved by being reinstated
as an exciseman at Lewes, where he married a Quakeress from whom,
for reasons unknown, he formally separated in 1774. In this year
he again lost his employment, apparently because he organized
a petition of the excisemen for higher pay. By selling all that
he had, he was just able to pay his debts and leave some provision
for his wife, but he himself was again reduced to destitution.
In London, where he was trying to present the excisemen's petition
to Parliament, he made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin,
who thought well of him. The result was that in October 1774 he
sailed for America, armed with a letter of recommendation from
Franklin describing him as an "ingenious, worthy young man."
As soon as he arrived in Philadelphia, he began to show skill
as a writer and almost immediately became editor of a journal.
His first publication, in March 1775, was a forcible article against
slavery and the slave trade, to which, whatever some of his American
friends might say, he remained always an uncompromising enemy.
It seems to have been largely owing to his influence that Jefferson
inserted in the draft of the Declaration of Independence the passage
on this subject which was afterward cut out. In 1775, slavery
still existed in Pennsylvania; it was abolished in that state
by an Act of 1780, of which, it was generally believed, Paine
wrote the preamble. Paine was one of the first, if not the very
first, to advocate complete freedom for the United States. In
October 1775, when even those who subsequently signed the Declaration
of Independence were still hoping for some accommodation with
the British Government, he wrote:
I hesitate not for a moment to believe
that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain.
Call it Independency or what you will, if it is the cause of God
and humanity it will go on. And when the Almighty shall have blest
us, and made us a people dependent only upon him, then may our
first gratitude be shown by an act of continental legislation,
which shall put a stop to the importation of Negroes for sale,
soften the hard fate of those already here, and in time procure
their freedom.
It was for the sake of freedom-freedom
from monarchy, aristocracy, slavery, and every species of tyranny_
that Paine took up the cause of America.
During the most difficult years of the
War of Independence he spent his days campaigning and his evenings
composing rousing manifestoes published under the signature "Common
Sense." These had enormous success and helped materially
in winning the war. After the British had burned the towns of
Falmouth in Maine and Norfolk in Virginia, Washington wrote to
a friend (January 37, 7776): "A few more of such flaming
arguments as were exhibited at Falmouth and Norfolk, added to
the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning contained in the
pamphlet Common Sense, will not leave numbers at a loss to decide
upon the propriety of separation."
The work was topical and. has now only
a historical interest, but there are phrases in it that are still
telling. After pointing out that the quarrel is not only with
the King, but also with Parliament, he says: "There is no
body of men more jealous of their privileges than the Commons:
because they sell them." At that date it was impossible to
deny the justice of this taunt.
There is vigorous argument in favor of
a Republic, and triumphant refutation of the theory that monarchy
prevents civil war. "Monarchy and succession," he says,
after his summary of English history, "have laid . . . the
world in blood and ashes. 'Tis a form of government which the
word of God bears testimony against, and blood will attend it."
In December at a moment when the fortunes of war were adverse,
Paine published a pamphlet called The Crisis, beginning: "These
are the times that try men's souls The summer soldier and the
sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service
of their country; but he that stands it now deserves the love
and thanks of man and woman."
This essay was read to the troops, and
Washington expressed to Paine a "living sense of the importance
of your works." No other writer was so widely read in America,
and he could have made large sums by his pen, but he always refused
to accept any money at all for what he wrote. At the end of the
War of Independence, he was universally respected in the United
States but still poor; however, one state legislature voted him
a sum of money and another gave him an estate, so that he had
every prospect of comfort for the rest of his life. He might have
been expected to settle down into the respectability characteristic
of revolutionaries who have succeeded. He turned his attention
from politics to engineering and demonstrated the, possibility
of iron bridges with longer spans than had previously been thought
feasible. Iron bridges led him to England, where he was received
in a friendly manner by Burke, the Duke of Portland, and other
Whig notables. He had a large model of his iron bridge set up
at Paddington; he was praised by eminent engineers and seemed
likely to spend his remaining years as an inventor.
However, France as well as England was
interested in iron bridges. In 1788 he paid a visit to Paris to
discuss them with Lafayette and to submit his plans to the Academic
des Sciences, which, after due delay, reported favorably. When
the Bastille fell, Lafayette decided to present the key of the
prison to Washington and entrusted to Paine the task of conveying
it across the Atlantic. Paine, however, was kept in Europe by
the affairs of his bridge. He wrote a long letter to Washington
informing him that he would find someone to take his place in
transporting "this early trophy of the spoils of despotism,
and the first ripe fruits of American principles transplanted
into Europe." He goes on to say that "I have not the
least doubt of the final and compleat success of the French Revolution,"
and that "I have manufactured a bridge (a single arch) of
one hundred and ten feet span, and five feet high from the cord
of the arch."
For a time, the bridge and the Revolution
remained thus evenly balanced in his interests, but gradually
the Revolution conquered. In the hope of rousing a responsive
movement in England, he wrote his The Rights of Man on which his
fame as a democrat chiefly rests.
This work, which was considered madly,
subversive during the anti-Jacobin reaction, will astonish a modern
reader by its mildness and common sense. It is primarily an answer
to Burke and deals at considerable length with contemporary events
in France. The first part was published in 1791, the second in
February 1792; there was, therefore, as yet no need to apologize
for the Revolution. There is very little declamation about Natural
Rights, but a great deal of sound sense about the British Government.
Burke had contended that the Revolution of z688 bound the British
for ever to submit to the sovereigns appointed by the Act of Settlement.
Paine contends that it is impossible to bind posterity, and that
constitutions must be capable of revision from time to time.
Governments, he says, "may all be
comprehended under three heads. First, superstition. Secondly,,
power. Thirdly, the common interest of society and the common
rights of man. The first was a government of priestcraft, the
second of conquerors, the third of reason." The two former
amalgamated: "the key of St. Peter and the key of the Treasury
became quartered on one another, and the wondering, cheated multitude
worshiped the invention." Such general observations, however,
are rare. The bulk of the work consists, first, of French history
from 1789 to the end of 1791 and, secondly, of a comparison of
the British Constitution with that decreed in France in 179 ,
of course to the advantage of the latter. It must be remembered
that in 1791 France was still a monarchy. Paine was a republican
and did not conceal the fact, but did not much emphasize it in
The Rights of Man.
Paine's appeal, except in a -few short
passages, was to common sense. He argued against Pitt's finance,
as Cobbett did later, on grounds which ought to have appealed
to any Chancellor of the Exchequer; he described the combination
of a small sinking fund with vast borrowings as setting a man
with a wooden leg to catch a hare-the longer they run, the farther
apart they are. He speaks of the "Potter's field of paper
money"-a phrase quite in Cobbett's style. It was, in fact,
his writings on finance that turned Cobbett's former enmity into
admiration. His objection to the hereditary principle, which horrified
Burke-and Pitt, is now common ground among all politicians, including
even Mussolini and Hitler. Nor is his style in any way outrageous:
it is clear, vigorous, and downright, but not nearly as abusive
as that of his opponents.
Nevertheless, Pitt decided to inaugurate
his reign of terror by prosecuting Paine and suppressing The Rights
of Man. According to his niece, Lady Hester Stanhope, he "used
to say that Tom Paine was quite in the right, but then, he would
add, what am I to do? As things are, if I were to encourage Tom
Paine's opinions we should have a bloody revolution." Paine
replied to the prosecution by defiance and inflammatory speeches.
But the September massacres were occurring, and the English Tories
were reacting by increased fierceness. The poet Blake-who had
more worldly wisdom than Paine-persuaded him that if he stayed
in England he would be hanged. He fled to France, missing the
officers who had come to arrest him by a few hours in London and
by twenty minutes in Dover, where he was allowed by the authorities
to pass because he happened to have with him a recent friendly
letter from Washington.
Although England and France were not yet
at war, Dover and Calais belonged to different worlds. Paine,
who had been elected an honorary French citizen, had been returned
to the Convention by three different constituencies, of which
Calais, which now welcomed him, was one. "As the packet sails
in, a salute is fired from the battery; cheers sound along the
shore. As the representative for Calais steps on French soil soldiers
make his avenue, the officers embrace him, the national cockade
is presented"-and so on through the usual French series of
beautiful ladies, mayors, etc.
Arrived in Paris, he behaved with more
public spirit than prudence. He hoped-in spite of the massacres-for
an orderly and moderate revolution such as he had helped to make
in America. He made friends with the Girondins, refused to think
ill of Lafayette (now in disgrace), and continued, as an American,
to express gratitude to Louis XVI for his share in liberating
the United States. By opposing the King's execution down to the
last moment, be incurred the hostility of the Jacobins. He was
first expelled from the Convention and then imprisoned as a foreigner;
he remained in prison throughout Robespierre's period of power
and for some months longer. The responsibility rested only partly
with the French; the American Minister, Gouverneur Morris, was
equally to blame. He was a Federalist and sided with England against
France; he had, moreover, an ancient personal grudge against Paine
for exposing a friend's corrupt deal during the War of Independence.
He took the line that Paine was not an American and that he could
therefore do nothing for him. Washington, who was secretly -negotiating
Jay's treaty with England, was not sorry to have Paine in a situation
in which he could not enlighten the French Government as to reactionary
opinion in America. Paine escaped the guillotine by accident but
nearly died of illness. At last Morris was replaced by Monroe
(of the "Doctrine"), who immediately procured his release,
took him into his own house, and restored him to health by eighteen
months' care and kindness.
Paine did not know how great a part Morris
had played in his misfortunes, but he never forgave Washington,
after whose death, hearing that a statue was to be made of the
great man, he addressed the following lines to the sculptor:
Take from the mine the coldest, hardest
stone,
It needs no fashion: it is Washington.
But if you chisel, let the stroke be rude,
And on his heart engrave-Ingratitude.
This remained unpublished, but a long,
bitter letter to Washington was published in 1796, ending:
And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private
friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of
danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled
to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether
you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.
To those who know only the statuesque
Washington of the legend, these may seem wild words. But 1796
was the year of the first contest for the Presidency, between
Jefferson and Adams, in which Washington's whole weight was thrown
into support of the latter, in spite of his belief in monarchy
and aristocracy; moreover, Washington was taking sides with England
against France and doing all in his power to prevent the spread
of those republican and democratic principles to which he owed
his own elevation. These public grounds, combined with a very
grave personal grievance, show that Paine's words were not without
justification.
It might have been more difficult for
Washington to leave Paine languishing in prison if that rash man
had not spent his last days of liberty in giving literary expression
to the theological opinions which he and Jefferson shared with
Washington and Adams, who, however, were careful to avoid all
public avowals of unorthodoxy. Foreseeing his imprisonment, Paine
set to work to write The Age of Reason, of which he finished Part
1 six hours before his arrest This book shocked his contemporaries,
even many of those who agreed with his politics. Nowadays, apart
from a few passages in bad taste, there is very little that most
clergymen would disagree with. In the first chapter he says:
I believe in one God, and no more; and
I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious
duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring
to make our fellow creatures happy.
These were not empty words. From the moment
of his first participation in public affairs-his protest against
slavery in 1775---down to the day of his death, he was consistently
opposed to every form of cruelty, whether practiced by his own
party or by his opponents. The Government of England at that time
was a ruthless oligarchy, using Parliament as a means of lowering
the standard of life in the poorest classes; Paine advocated political
reform as the only cure for this abomination and had to fly for
his life. In France, for opposing unnecessary bloodshed, he was
thrown into prison and narrowly escaped death. In America, for
opposing slavery and upholding the principles of the Declaration
of Independence, he was abandoned by the Government at the moment
when he most needed its support. If, as he maintained and as many
now believe, true religion consists in "doing justice, loving
mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy,"
there was not one among his opponents who had as good a claim
t: J be considered a religious man.
The greater part of The Age of Reason
consists of criticism of the Old Testament from a moral point
of view. Very few nowadays would regard the massacres of men,
women, and children recorded in the Pentateuch and the Book of
Joshua as models of righteousness, but in Paine's day it was considered
impious to criticize the Israelites when the Old Testament approved
of them. Many pious divines wrote answers to him. The most liberal
of those was the Bishop of Liandaff, who went so far as to admit
that parts of the Pentateuch were not written by Moses, and some
of the Psalms were not composed by David. For such concessions
he incurred the hostility of George III and lost all chance of
translation to a richer see. Some of the Bishop's replies to Paine
are curious For example, The Age of Reason ventured to doubt whether
God really commanded that all males and married women among the
Midianites should be slaughtered, while the maidens should be
preserved. The Bishop indignantly retorted that the maidens were
not preserved for immoral purposes, as Paine had wickedly suggested,
but as slaves, to which there could be no ethical objection. The
orthodox of our day have forgotten what orthodoxy was like a hundred
and forty years ago. They have forgotten still more completely
that it was men like Paine who, in face of persecution, caused
the softening of dogma by which our age profits. Even the Quakers
refused Paine's request for burial in their cemetery, although
a Quaker farmer was one of the very few who followed his body
to the grave.
After The Age of Reason Paine's work ceased
to be important. For a long time he was very ill; when he recovered,
he found no scope in the France of the Directoire and the First
Consul. Napoleon did not ill-treat him, but naturally had no use
for him, except as a possible agent of democratic rebellion in
England. He became homesick for America, remembering his former
success and popularity in that country and wishing to help the
Jeffersonians against the Federalists. But the fear of capture
by the English, who would certainly have hanged him, kept him
in France until the Treaty of Amiens. At length, in October 1802,
he landed at Baltimore and at once wrote to Jefferson (now President):
I arrived here on Saturday from Havre,
after a passage of sixty days. I have several cases of models,
wheels, etc., and as soon as I can get them from the vessel and
put them on board the packet for Georgetown I shall set off to
pay my respects to you. Your much obliged fellow citizen,
THOMAS PAINE
He had no doubt that all his old friends,
except such as were Federalists, would welcome him. But there
was a difficulty: Jefferson had a hard fight for the Presidency,
and in the campaign the most effective weapon against him unscrupulously
used by ministers of all denominations had been the accusation
of infidelity. His opponents magnified his intimacy with Paine
and spoke of the pair as "the two Toms." Twenty years
later, Jefferson was still so much impressed by the bigotry of
his compatriots that he replied to a Unitarian minister who wished
to publish a letter of his: "No, my dear Sir, not for the
world! . . . I should as soon undertake to bring the crazy skulls
of Bedlam to sound understanding as to inculcate reason into that
of an Athanasian . . . keep me therefore from the fire and faggot
of Calvin and his victim. Servetus." It was not surprising
that, when the fate of Servetus threatened them, Jefferson and
his political followers should have fought shy of too close an
association with Paine. He was treated politely and had no cause
to complain, but the old easy friendships were dead.
In other circles he fared worse. Dr. Rush
of Philadelphia, one of his first American friends, would have
nothing to do with him: ". . . his principles" he wrote,
"avowed in his Age of Reason, were so offensive to me that
I did not wish to renew my intercourse with him." In his
own neighborhood, he was mobbed and refused a seat in the stagecoach;
three years before his death he was not allowed to vote, on the
alleged ground of his being a foreigner. He was falsely accused
of immorality and intemperance, and his last years were spent
in solitude and poverty. He died in 1809. As he was dying, two
clergymen invaded his room and tried to convert him, but he merely
said, "Let me alone; good morning!" Nevertheless, the
orthodox invented a myth of deathbed recantation which was widely
believed.
His posthumous fame was greater in England
than in America. To publish his works was, of course, illegal,
but it was done repeatedly, although many men went to prison for
this offense. The last prosecution on this charge was that of
Richard Carlile and his wife in 1819 he was sentenced to prison
for three years and a fine of fifteen hundred pounds, she to one
year and five hundred pounds. It was in this year that Cobbett
brought Paine's bones to England and established his fame as one
of the heroes in the fight for democracy in England. Cobbett did
not, however, give his bones a permanent resting place. "The
monument contemplated by Cobbett," says Moncure Conway,*
"was never raised." There was much parliamentary and
municipal excitement. A Bolton town crier was imprisoned nine
weeks for proclaiming the arrival. In 1836 the bones passed with
Cobbett's effects into the hands of a receiver (West). The Lord
Chancellor refusing to regard them as an asset, they were kept
by an old day laborer until 1844, when they passed to B. Tilley,
13 Bedford Square, London, a furniture dealer. In 1854, Rev. R.
Ainslie (Unitarian) told E. Truelove that he owned "the skull
and the right hand of Thomas Paine," but evaded subsequent
inquiries. No trace now remains, even of the skull and right hand.
Paine's influence in the world was twofold.
During the American Revolution he inspired enthusiasm and confidence,
and thereby did much to facilitate victory. In France his popularity
was transient and superficial, but in England he inaugurated the
stubborn resistance of plebeian Radicals to the long tyranny of
Pitt and Liverpool. His opinions on the Bible, though they shocked
his contemporaries more than his Unitarianism, were such as might
now be held by an archbishop, but his true followers were the
men who worked in the movements that sprang from him those whom
Pitt imprisoned, those who suffered under the Six Acts, the Owenites,
Chartists, Trade-Unionists, and Socialists. To all these champions
of the oppressed he set an example of courage, humanity, and single-mindedness.
When public issues were involved, he forgot personal prudence.
The world decided, as it usually does in such cases, to punish
him for his lack of self-seeking; to this day his fame is less
than it would have been if his character had been less generous.
Some worldly wisdom is required even to secure praise for the
lack of it.
Democracy
in America
Heroes
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