By Terry Liddle
Tom Paine, The Life of a Revolutionary. Harry Harmer. 122pp. Haus Publishing Ltd, 2006. ISBN 1 904950 24 8. £18
Could this be the same Harry Harmer who was a South London contact for Republic in the 1980s? Why having written on Martin Luther King, the Labour party and slavery he chooses to write a biography of Paine when there are already enough of them to fill a small library I can’t imagine. Unless it is his way of thanking his father who introduced him to Paine. The book adds nothing new to our knowledge of Paine’s life and ideas, but having said that for anyone who is not familiar with them it is •a useful short introduction if somewhat expensive for a work of 122 pages.
It seems odd that Paine who came from a Quaker background should have chosen to go to sea as a privateer and saw violence against the French. Perhaps it was more exciting than being a staymaker, a job Paine obviously found boring. Not that being an exerciseman was much better. And it was only with his departure for America that Paine’s life as a revolutionary started. Paine never profited from his revolutionary writings and the proceeds from their sale went to good causes. The profits from the sales of his 1796 The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, The American Foreign Affairs Ministry bought 1,000 copies, went to relieve the dreadful plight of debtors in the Newgate Prison.
Paine was no socialist as Harmer points out, he supported private property and the market and thought that trade would bring peace but he could be seen as a pioneer of the welfare state that would be introduced by the post-war Labour government. He advocated a retirement age of 60 with a pension of £10. At a time when Blair’s government complains that it can’t afford pensions and wants to make us all work until 68, Paine still seems far in advance of his times. Curiously like his friend Franklin Paine developed a pre- Marxian labour theory of value.
Harmer makes much of Paine’s drinking habits and seems to lend substance to the view that Paine was something of a sot. Harmer writes that towards the end of his life Paine was consuming a quart of brandy in an evening. Today this seems excessive (would Paine have been served with an ASBO?) but in an era when the ruling class was pickled with claret and port and the poor drowned their sorrows in gin, as depicted in Hogarth’s famous drawing, this was normal.
Paine was capable of making both close friends and bitter enemies. When Paine produced his plans for a French naval invasion of England and the overthrow of its government one of the few to support him was Napoleon fresh from his victories against the Austrians in Italy. Napoleon advocated building golden statues of Paine in every city and claimed to keep a copy of Rights of Man beside his pillow. But when Napoleon became a dictator Paine was denounced as a “butcher of liberty”. Among the guests at a banquet to celebrate the French victory at Jemappes were the poet Wordsworth and Edward Fitzgerald who had Paine made a member of the United Irishmen.
Again like Franklin, who had once owned household slaves, Paine advocated the abolition of slavery. But the economies of powerful states like Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, where Christian priests found biblical support for slavery, depended on slavery and they were powerful enough to stop Paine. It took nearly another century and a bloody civil war to end slavery. Paine also took a positive view of the Native Americans who in the l9th century were subjected to genocide.
If Paine had not been a revolutionary he could have made a success as a bridge builder or a maker of smokeless candles. Sentenced to death in his own country for his attack on the Hanoverian monarchy in Rights of Man ( King George is said to have read a copy in a bookshop in Windsor ) imprisoned in France and all but abandoned by his friends in America such as Washington Paine was reviled on his return to America for his attack on organised religion in his The Age of Reason which was wrongly seen as atheist. He was refused a vote in an American election because it was alleged he was not an American citizen although without him America would never have existed. Even near to death his home was invaded by clergymen but he made them take away their “Popish stuff” His funeral was poorly attended although one wonders who the coach load of Irishmen who travelled from Greenwich were. After his death his remains removed to England by Cobbett vanished. But it is Paine’s revolutionary democratic ideas, not his bones that were, and still are, important. The America of the born again former alcoholic and imperialist warmonger Bush is not the America of Paine.
If you have little time this book is useful. But if you want more detail there are many other books to read. However, the book does have many good suggestions for further reading on Paine, the American and French Revolutions.