By Terry Liddle
Transoceanic Radical: William Duane, Nigel Little. London, Pickering and Chatto. ISBN 9781851969296. Hardback, 230pp. £60.00
Thomas Paine called himself a citizen of the world and as if to sustain this claim was an active revolutionary in Britain, France and America. If any one of his contemporaries deserves the title more it is William Duane. While for reasons of political expediency he often described himself as an American, his life and political activity took in Canada, America, India, Ireland and Britain. He was one of the first internationalists.
Duane’s roots were in Ireland, in Clowns!, County ‘Tipperary, though he was born in St John’s, Newfoundland, which would have made him a British subject. This was then disputed territory between Europeans, native Americans, British and French. His family returned to Ireland then returned to America, settling in the area around Lake Champion, upper New York. His political opponents said he was not entitled to American citizenship as his family had left America again before the Declaration of Independence.
Little writes: ” …William Duane appeared by 1795 to be a perfect version of Thomas Paine’s “citizen of the World”. By the early 1800s he had become an American citizen. But his vision of citizenship was heavily influenced by Painite radicalism. Cut loose from the British Empire, this “Citizen of the World” contributed to attempts to finish the project of nation-building that Paine had begun in the 1770s.”
In 1765 he lost his father and after having wandered around in America he and his mother returned to Ireland. In 1779 he married Catherine Corcorariet, a member of the. Church of Ireland, despite his Catholic family’s opposition. Duane broke with Catholicism and became a Deist, which in turn led him on to Painite radicalism. To support his wife, he took a job as an apprentice printer on the Hibernian Advertiser. Its owner, a Freemason, was known for his Whig and reformist Ideas. Some of these must have rubbed off onto Duane.
In 1782 Duane with his family moved to London and he became a journeyman printer. He also began to write as a parliamentary reporter and journalist.
Beset by financial problems, Duane was approached in 1786 by Philip Young, the principal proprietor of the India Gazette with an offer to become editor of his Calcutta newspaper. British India was then ruled by the East India Company which made no effort to understand the Indian people, but sought to exploit them at every turn. Duane’s family returned to Ireland and to finance his passage to India Duane enlisted as a private in the EIC’s army. Many of the officers in the army were mercenary adventurers while many of its troops were displaced Radicals. Not a few United Irishmen served in it including Wolfe Tone’s brother, William. Mutiny was always a real threat to the establishment. The job with the India Gazette did not materialise and on being discharged from the EIC’s army, Duane became editor and manager of the weekly Bengal Journal.
The role of Freemasonry in the American and French Revolutions is well known and in India Duane became an active mason. Indian masonry was split between the wealthy gentlemen who opposed the French Revolution and the more radical artisans who supported it. This theme of class conflict between gentlemen willing to compromise principles and uncompromising artisans runs all through Duane’s political activity.
Duane got himself into trouble for an attack on Colonel Canaple, the Royalist leader who had fled to Calcutta following a revolution in French India. Instead of apologising as ordered Duane berated Canaple about the rights of the press and the rights of man. For this Duane came near to being deported.
Duane now published a new paper The World which publicised the grievances of officers in the EIC’s army. With the outbreak of war between Britain and revolutionary France in 1793, the authorities resolved to deport Duane to Britain. Held below decks on the ship he arrived back in Portsmouth and made his way to London.
Back in Britain, he was reunited with his family, joined the London Corresponding Society, one of forty Jacobin societies founded in the wake of the French Revolution, and contributed and edited to its press attacking the EtC in print. Little writes: “If Duane had been French one would have seen him in the ranks of the sans- culottes, working like Marat on a paper like the Am! De People…” Fifty years on, The Chartist George Harney would take the name Friend of the People for one of his papers. Duane chaired a mass LCS demonstration against the war but when Pitt’s government passed repressive legislation against seditious meetings and treasonable practices Duane thought it wise to depart to America.
In America he made his living as a jobbing printer and writer. In 1796 under the pen-name Jasper Dwight he wrote an attack on the then President George Washington accusing him of being a quasi-king using the ideology of Federalism to set up a quasi- monarchy. He criticised Washington’s view of Paine saying that while he upheld the religion of Christ he negated the rights of man by owning slaves. The pamphlet was published and sold in the offices of Benjamin Franklin Bache’s paper The Aurora. It brought on him the ire of William Cobbett. Himself a political exile from Britain, he was then an anti-radical and author of vicious attacks on Paine who he damned as an ‘Infidel anarchist”. Later he tried to make amends by returning Paine’s bones to Britain where they became lost.
Duane went to work for Bathe and when Bathe died of the yellow fever, which also took Duarte’s wife, he took over the paper and later married Bache’s widow. He became deeply embroiled in the bitter feud between the pro-British Federalists and the revolutionary democratic Republicans. When Cobbett attacked the United Irishmen Duane argued that their rebellion in 1798 had much in common with the American War of Independence.
In 1799 Duane was arrested after a riot broke out after he had gone to St Mary’s Catholic Church to gather signatures on a protest against the Alien Friends EMIT. Brought to trial, he was found not guilty. That year a rebellion broke out amongst German- speakers against Federalist tax policy. Duane supported them. For this he was beaten up by the pro-Federalist McPherson’s Blues militia. In retaliation Duane took part In the formation of the Republican Philadelphia Militia Legion.
In 1800 Thomas Jefferson was elected President and this ended the persecution of Duane by the government during which time he had been imprisoned for a month for libel. Duane established a correspondence with Jefferson which lasted for twenty years and wrote that Afro-Americans should be incorporated in the American Army and Native Americans should be represented in Congress. The Republicans suffered a split into Quids and Democrats on the class lines mentioned above.
In 1812 Britain and America went to war and the British burned Washington but were roundly defeated in the Battle of New Orleans in Louisiana, which Napoleon had sold to the United States in 1803. Sadly he never built a golden statue of Paine there or anywhere else. Duane became a colonel in the American army and wrote military manuals. He had at last become an American citizen in 1802, although his opponents had accused him of rape and murder in Ireland.
Duane opposed Federalist big government and therefore opposed a central banking system and a standing army. America suffers both from the Federal Reserve and an Army which rivals that of ancient Rome as a symbol of imperialist oppression.He argued for an elected judiciary.
Duane befriended many Latin American revolutionary miles and visited Columbia in a bid to obtain payment for arms supplied to Columbia revolutionaries. Suffering great poverty, at 69 he became a protonotary of the Supreme Court for the eastern district of Pennsylvania. He was nominated as a candidate for Congress, coming fourth in the election. He also became a kind of mentor to the Working Men’s Party, which was heavily influenced by Robert Dale Owen. It was one of the first attempts at working class organisation in America and the Priestess of Beelzebub Frances Wright was involved in it. He wrote a tract on money Notes on Gold and Silver. He continued printing The Aurora until a lack of subscribers forced him to stop. He died on November 24, 1835.
Today George Bush is a worse despot than Washington ever could have been and his America plays the role once played by the British Empire. Blair could have fit easily into the role of Pitt, and his repressive legislation in the so-called war on terror reminds one of the measures taken to silence the friends of revolutionary France. Little’s biography is superb radical history and highlights a man who played a leading role in the struggle for liberty in three continents. Sadly, its high price may prevent many of today’s radicals obtaining it.