General Washington of the Continental Army had no opinion about achieving independence. Most people were advocating reconciliation, to make peace, make a deal and carry on, with Britain still in charge of the American people: men like Benjamin Rush and John Dickinson, praised by history as “Founders,” led the movement for reconciling.

Following the language of Common Sense, 96 local and state Declarations ofIndependence were written, repeating the language of Common Sense, leading to the national declaration, and largely incorporating Paine’s ideals, as well as the steps needed to follow these ideals.

This was the beginning of the Age of Democratic Revolutions, and the concept of democracy based on equality.

When the first edition of Common Sense appeared in colonial bookshops, the work was unsigned, and its author remained a mystery to many readers. It became an instant bestseller.

Robert Bell, the first printer of Common Sense refused to allow Paine to make additions when it came time for subsequent printings, but Paine still had a lot to say.

Another printshop, owned by William and Thomas Bradford, stepped in, put Paine’s name on the cover, and soon, updated new editions poured off their presses.

From a Thomas Paine letter to Henry Laurens, January 14, 1779:

“I think the importance of that pamphlet was such that if it had not appeared, and at the exact time it did, the Congress would not now be sitting where they are (representing independent states). The light with which that performance threw upon the subject gave a turn to the politics of America which enabled her to stand her ground. Independence, followed in six months after it, although, before it was published, it was a dangerous doctrine to speak of…

In order to accommodate that pamphlet to every man’s purchase and to do honor to the cause, I gave up the profits I was justly entitled to… I gave permission to the printers in other parts of this State (Pennsylvania) to print it on their own account. I believe the number of copies printed and sold in America was not short of 150,000 – and is the greatest sale that any performance ever had since the use of letters..”

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By Gary Berton 

Part Two of Two Parts – See part one here.

Thomas Paine’s first principles built the structure of democracy. The mechanisms central to Paine’s political theories are rooted in his ideology of first principles. The basic foundation of these principles is equality, and as a direct result, justice. If equality is practiced, then people share equal justice. 

“Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation,” he wrote in Common Sense, “the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance.” 

“When a people agree to form themselves into a republic (for the word REPUBLIC means the PUBLIC GOOD, or the good of the whole, in contradistinction to the despotic form, which makes the good of the sovereign, or of one man, the only object of the government) when, I say, they agree to do this, it is to be understood, that they mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support and maintain this rule of equal justice among them. They therefore renounce not only the despotic form, but the despotic principle, as well of governing as of being governed by mere Will and Power, and substitute in its place a government of justice.” (Dissertations on Government, 1786) 

The structure of his democratic theory is like a house: the foundation of that house is equality and justice; everything else rests upon it. If this principle is compromised and weakened, the whole structure is vulnerable to corruption and oppression.

Inherent in the equality/justice principle are rights. both natural and civil — civil rights arising from natural rights. Natural rights are inherent and received upon birth, without exception. Defending these rights is the object of democratic government. 

Resting on this foundation of rights are four support pillars constructing the structure of democracy. (1) Rejection of precedent, (2) No one should live worse than in the state of nature. (3) Recognition of the natural sociability of humanity. (4) Enlightenment and reason solve problems. A few thoughts on each:

1. Rejection of precedent 

Precedent got us into the problems of government. They represent the failures to ensure equality and justice. Precedent is the “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution; it’s the way things were always done, which is the excuse to maintain “tradition.” Precedent is the wall preventing people from building the democratic structures of a better world, Precedent reinforces structures that promote elitism, privilege, and injustice. 

2 No one should live worse than in the state of nature. 

If civilization has progressed, why are masses of the people worse off than if they lived in small groups in nature? That is not progress. The wellbeing of every person is what democracy insists upon. If many or most people live worse off than as small groups in nature, civilization is not progressing; it’s regressing. Why is another discussion for another day. 

3. Recognize the natural sociability of humanity. 

Humans evolved as social animals. The human mind, Paine wrote, is “unfitted for perpetual solitude.” That natural sociability is the basis of democracy. Building upon it is fundamental to democracy.

4. Enlightenment and reason solve problems 

Knowing and using the real world around us must be the basis for knowledge, and applying that knowledge to solve problems. Anything else is invented to manipulate and confuse the people in their decision-making, which is anti-democratic. 

Atop the pillars is a roof protecting the structure of government from outside elements. The roof consists of constitutions with democratic structures and laws. 

Building the opposite structure is the bizarro world of Edmund Burke, whose political theory is oligarchy. His foundation is order, not equality. Burke’s pillars are “defending historical precedent,” following “tradition,” (not the Enlightenment ideals Paine advocated). Burke sought continuity, not change for the better. Burke saw humanity as a collection of “disconnected individuals.” His roof atop government is prescriptive for elite rule, not democratic order, government by the people. 

Paine challenged and changed the entire philosophical structure of government, not just for the people in the 18th century, but for everyone in the world today.

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The majority of historians have gone along with ignoring or misrepresenting Paine in history, from 18th century UK Tories to 21st century American biographer J.C.D. Clark.

The reality was that the Federalists took over, wrote a constitution enabling plutocracy, and repressed the truth of Paine. Only two Paine biographers (Linton and Vale) were even half right about him.

Working class Americans last century were conscious of Paine and his reputation. U.S. Air Force mechanics in WWII England painted “Tom Paine” on the side of bombers, quoting him about conquering tyranny with the gifts these planes were dropping.

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Part One of Two Parts 

Thomas Paine is the founder of modern democracy. In word and deed, he crafted the democratic movement in three countries, and it spread on its own around the world. As a result, Paine was slandered, attacked and marginalized for 200 years, a victim of the largest disinformation campaign in history. His image and words were actually banned, right up to and including the McCarthy era in America, when his books were banned, even the fictional accounts like Citizen Tom Paine (1943) by Howard Fast. 

The pre-eminent founder of American democracy was not recognized as such for centuries. “But such is the irresistible nature of truth,”Paine said, “that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.” 

The Thomas Paine Historical Association was founded to correct this situation. In 1884 New York City, dozens of leaders of the progressive era came together under this organization to hold up Paine as the symbol of democratic rights and government. United by their commitments to civil rights, free speech and women’s reproductive rights, they were key suffragists, socialists, anti-clericalists, antimonopolists, anti-imperialists, and idealists. An organization with Paine’s name on it must have the soul of Paine as its engine. 

We cannot discuss the roots and ideology of democracy without Thomas Paine. The literal origin of modern democracy is Common Sense, Paine’s call for revolution against British rule, in particular, and against monarchy itself. Among all the Whigs (the name back then for the progressive-leaning political figures), only Paine endorsed this qualitative leap of ending monarchical government. Paine started and popularized among people the idea of democracy without kings — not Locke, not Montesquieu, who looked after their class, not common people. Paine later followed up with Rights of Man, which became the bible for the Age of Democratic Revolution. 

Paine himself, in his life and works, is the “Democratic Manifesto.” In 1777 Philadelphia, in the heat of defeating not only Britain but also the American Tories, Paine formed the Whig Society, the first revolutionary party in the world. He followed it up in 1791 Paris by forming the Social Circle of anti-monarchical activists, the second revolutionary party in the world. [For clarity, The Sons of Liberty was not a political party. 

The militant Boston group in the early 1770s focused on disrupting the British militarily, but it lacked an ideological foundation or vision of government to be a real political party.] In Philadelphia and in Paris, Paine helped craft the world’s first two truly democratic constitutions. The first lasted 14 years in America before succumbing to the oligarchic structures of the Federalist Party’s new constitution. The second was never enacted due to the 1795 counterrevolution in France. These documents reveal the origins of today’s struggle.

Do not be confused by the antiquated structures called “democracy” from ancient Greece, where every landed elite sat together and made laws as slaves served them food and drink. Modern democracy could not emerge until the Enlightenment took root, and the political theory of Paine was deeply rooted in it. The emerging new classes coming out of the Dark Ages would contend for dominance. Paine stood with the lower classes, where he came from, and never wavered. 

The very word “democracy,” as we use it today, originated with Paine’s Rights of Man. Before that, “democracy” only referred to the Greek’s elite government. The term is still used in that context today, when we hear oligarchs using it to defend their privileges while the majority still languishes in need.

See part two here.

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By Gary Berton – Secretary, Thomas Paine National Historical Association Coordinator, Institute for Thomas Paine Studies (Iona College)

The great historian E. H. Carr said, “By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.” In an essay published as part of a new collection of writings by and about Thomas Paine (Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, Yale U. Press, 2014), J. C. D. Clark has pushed this premise to absurd limits.

In contradistinction to the rest of the book, which contains a selection of primarily major works of Thomas Paine, Clark tries to refute any influence Paine had on the world, and scolds scholars for claiming he did. There is a long history of marginalizing Thomas Paine by conservative historians, from Jared Sparks to Forest MacDonald to David McCulloch. Clark’s essay is the latest. In an awkward juxtaposition with Paine’s own writings, Clark questions the need to read Paine at all.

The Thomas Paine National Historical Association and the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College knew about the preparation for this book through Clark himself, who attended the 2012 Conference on Paine Studies at Iona. He was eager to refute the originality, impact and significance of Paine. He latched onto the Institute’s Text Analysis Project, hoping to refute the authorship of as many of Paine’s attributed works as possible. His list of disputed works was exaggerated, however.

Despite better advice, the editors of Selected Writings of Thomas Paine went ahead and put Thoughts on Defensive War as their first selection, with the note that its “attribution has never been questioned”. The Institute questioned this in writing to Dr. Clark. And Clark himself makes reference to linguistic studies of Paine’s writings without ever acknowledging the Institute as the source, or the Institute’s complete analysis of the documents. But this a minor flaw compared to Dr. Clark’s essay, which is full of vitriol and demonstrably false statements about Thomas Paine, unworthy of a scholarly presentation. There is a chip on Clark’s shoulder which has tilted his stance, and it comes from the long tradition of conservative historians who have repeatedly tried to bury Paine. Perhaps Clark’s forthcoming book will provide evidence otherwise lacking in his essay Thomas Paine: The English Dimension.

Clark organizes his attack on Paine in the disguise of an “historic Paine” versus a “usable Paine”. To Clark, “historic” means the actual Paine he will supposedly define for us untouched by ideology. “Usable” means how other scholars, with a political leaning (unlike him), incorrectly appraised Paine in the past. Clark is to raise the questions and reveal the truth which everyone has missed because of ideological blinders. He will set us all on the correct path of dethroning Paine from his lofty perch. Unfortunately, Clark falls prey to the very thing he attacks – prolepsism: imposing one’s own views and prejudices upon a previous historical era and searching for evidence, often invented, to justify one’s views.

At the 2012 Thomas Paine Studies Conference, Clark, from the University of Kansas, did not submit an abstract yet attended anyway. He was given time to speak in deference to his reputation. He talked about what direction Paine Studies should take, but he was never clear upon what “direction” meant. It subsequently became clear. He was there to gather pieces of evidence to show there really shouldn’t be any Paine studies (other than finding reasons to dismiss him) because he believed Paine never said or thought anything original and his influence was marginal at best. His motives became evident when he declared “you can’t prove Paine was against the death penalty”, though all of the writings which documented Paine’s stance were listed. He went on to the issues of women’s rights and the abolition of slavery, where there was some disagreement – Paine never made these subjects the focus of his writings despite his personal views in support of them. But Clark pushed it further, and it was apparent where he was going. He arrived there finally with his essay.

In this essay, which stands in stark contrast to the reasoned, balanced introduction by Ian Shapiro, Clark begins by briefly examining why American scholarship of Paine outstrips British and French scholarship, and he blithely deals with it thus: “…there is some academic attention to Paine in France and Britain, but [there is] a major Paine industry in the United States”. The explanation is clear: in the United States Paine was swept up into the republic’s myth of origins.’ Many academics still implicitly treat Paine as an American whose primary significance is for that society’s present-day ‘civil religion’.” Leaving aside for the moment the Americanism of Paine, it is evident Clark’s relocation to Kansas (he was originally at Oxford) was a shock, witnessing the attention Paine is receiving here in comparison to Britain. Clark assumes there is some mania over Paine due to a myth of “civil religion” and a “myth of origins”, neither of which he accepts. But Paine was kept out of the “myth” of America’s origins for 200 years, he was not part of it, and was deliberately left out of it. Look at the 19th (and most 20th) century books written about the founding of America: nowhere is Paine part of the “myth of origins”. He has been marginalized, slandered, reduced to a quirky, disheveled side-line pamphleteer at best. Perhaps because he was not part of this myth creation story scholars finally asked why a man of such crucial importance to American history is left out of textbooks. I know that is why I started my scholarship on Paine 45 years ago. It is fair to attack the American myth of origins, but Clark accepts the conservative myths, which dominate, without question. What he doesn’t accept is any basis which shows there was a radical trend in the founding of the country.

As to Paine’s “primary significance” to academics in his use of promoting “civil religion”, the reference he makes in his footnote is to an essay by Bellah in Daedalus which refutes his point. Bellah excludes Paine from the founders who would be happy to create a non-specific religious creed acceptable for civil society. To Bellah, Paine is the exception to this civil religion which sought to coexist with Christianity, unlike the other leading founders – Franklin, Jefferson, Washington and others. (It is a separate question whether Bellah is correct in putting Franklin and Jefferson on his list in NOT favoring an end to organized religion – see Nature’s God by Matthew Stewart.) Paine is not an example of founders favoring the parallel existence of civil religion as Clark is posing him (although Clark clearly opposes Paine’s designation as a founder). So this does not explain why North American scholars are researching Paine. Clark’s disdain for American research, which he refers to as the “Paine industry”, arises in his belief Paine never ever acted as an American, nor an internationalist, but only as a befuddled, dogmatic Englishman.

Although to Clark’s credit, he does point out correctly the use which American propaganda makes of Paine concerning the country’s founding. But this does not explain the scholarship which preceded such propaganda. The propaganda began with Reagan, who decided to make use of Paine after the 200 year forced exile from academia. The breakthrough scholarship began with Alfred Young and Staughton Lynd in the 60’s, gained traction with Aldridge and Claeys in the 80’s (although Claeys’ scholarship is based from England not America), and E. Foner in the same period. After establishing and reanimating Paine based on these works, Paine studies increased to the dismay of Clark. He wanted Paine left buried in obscurity, as he is in England.

At least Clark is honest. Most conservative historians simply neglect and marginalize. Clark comes right out as a defender of the status quo, and he exposes his ideology when he states: “the most famous and successful example of the representative system, the Westminster Parliament, was already operative in the Britain that Paine rejected with hatred.” Meaning, there was no need to alter the British system of government in the 1790s! It was the “most successful” representative structure! (“Successful” for whom?) No need for the Reform Act of 1832, as small a step as it was. Certainly no need for a Rights of Man. No wonder Paine draws Clark’s ire.

Enlightenment thinking

The ensuing lecture from Clark lays out a series of negative rebuttals to Paine’s worth. The first is the concept that “Since the idea of ‘the Enlightenment’ was absent in Paine’s lifetime, his society’s reforming causes were not united under any overarching ideology: many campaigns or crusades were therefore missing from the historic Paine’s commitments that later commentators expected to find there.” Clark declares academics “proleptic”, inventing ideas and placing them in Paine’s head. Yes, academics have labelled the historic process (philosophic, social, intellectual, political) the “Enlightenment” because they needed a term (much like “civil religion”) to describe a real phenomenon. Just as Washington, Franklin and Jefferson did not know the term “civil religion” but promoted the concept without being aware of future conceptualizations, so too can people join the phenomenon of “Enlightenment” thinking without being aware of future designations. One does not negate the other. Clark is demonstrating idealist thinking, where the concept being made conscious determines its existence. The Enlightenment is the belief that science and reason are the real source of knowledge and understanding instead of religion and tradition. This is exactly Paine’s philosophy – opposition to organized religion and to the dependence on the traditions of hereditary government. According to Clark, Spinoza, for example, could not have advocated for Enlightenment thinking because he did not know the term – just ignore all the passages about reason, an objective material world, the role of science in human society. Spinoza wasn’t aware of 20th century conceptualizations of his period, so he could not have been part of the Enlightenment?

Clark is attacking the “misinterpretations” of scholars in leaping to link Paine to 19th century movements that carried into present day. While there are certain exaggerations in some interpretations, Clark is wrong on substance throughout all his negatives. Take the Enlightenment for example: there were references to self-knowledge about this revolution in thinking, well-documented by Jonathan Israel. The French were even referring to it as the “luminere” before Paine was born, and like-minded Enlightenment thinkers found each other, like the Encyclopedists. That demonstrates some common philosophy with common goals. We now know it as the Enlightenment, back then they knew they shared the same world outlook. And Paine’s core tenets fit exactly into this Enlightenment period. Clark is grasping at straws to try and prove a thesis which is unsustainable.

Clark’s thesis is: Paine’s “mindset, values, and frame of reference remained largely those of an English freethinker of the reign of George II, confidently repeating his religious teaching and its political consequences in the new situations into which he blundered.” (Notice the use of “blundered”, a repeated pattern throughout the essay of denigrating Paine.) In order to maintain this thesis, Clark must negate the core of what Paine wrote because it does not fit into his own misinterpretation.

Clark denies Paine’s relevance by showing Paine was not aware of movements like socialism, democracy, or Enlightenment thinking, and then denying Paine ever had a philosophy which linked to them anyway. In his denials he reduces Paine to an English yeoman, half-educated in the 1750’s intellectual trends, who never progressed past them. But to accomplish that, Clark must also deny reality, and the reality of the content of Paine’s writings.

Suffrage and constitutions

Let’s start with the most egregious insult to both Paine’s legacy and the scholars who have meticulously uncovered it, in his depiction of Paine’s lack of democratic ideals. Clark uses the tactic of attacking the strength of an opponent by hitting Paine on the issue of voting and constitutions:

“Was Paine a democrat? True, he always favored a wide franchise, but on older premises he generally held that ‘men’ (ignoring women) were entitled to vote as taxpayers or property owners rather than as individuals.” (The women’s rights issue is dealt with below.) Clark read every word of Paine looking for tidbits to feed his theories, but a simple read of Dissertation on the First Principles of Government would have shown him the falsity of his statement:

“Personal rights, of which the right of voting for representatives
is one, are a species of property of the most sacred kind: and he that would employ his pecuniary property, or presume upon the influence it gives him, to dispossess or rob another of his property or rights, uses that pecuniary property as he would use fire-arms, and merits to have it taken from him.”

“Whenever it be made an article of a constitution, or a law, that
the right of voting, or of electing and being elected, shall appertain exclusively to persons possessing a certain quantity of property, be it little or much, it is a combination of the persons possessing that quantity to exclude those who do not possess the same quantity. It is investing themselves with powers as a self-created part of society, to the exclusion of the rest.”

“In any view of the case it is dangerous and impolitic, sometimes
ridiculous, and always unjust to make property the criterion of the right of voting.”

Instead, Clark grabs onto obscure statements taken out of context to prove his negative view, like the franchise should be as “universal as taxation” from Rights of Man. The quote is part of Paine’s analysis of the fight between Fox and Pitt over the rights of Parliament: “With respect to the House of Commons, it is elected but by a small part of the nation; but were the election as universal as taxation, which it ought to be, it would still be only the organ of the nation, and cannot possess inherent rights.” Paine divided taxations into two parts, direct and indirect. He made this point clearly in Dissertation on the First Principles of Government where all consumers pay an indirect tax. The phrase used shows nothing, but that’s the best Clark’s biased hunt could come up with.

On women’s rights, Clark should have taken time to read an essay by Eileen Hunt Botting in the same book his essay appears, who gives a scholarly analysis of the question, summarizing thus: “Much of what Paine argued in the latter part of his career, especially in Rights of Man, Part the Second (1792) and Agrarian Justice (1797), either explicitly or implicitly endorses women’s equal rights with men, especially welfare rights but also political rights such as suffrage.” This does not fit Clark’s thesis so he ignores it. It would be hard to find women’s rights in the 1750 English countryside, or universal male suffrage not based on property qualifications, so when facts disagree with his imagined thesis, to Clark, they can’t be valid.

To an unprejudiced mind, Paine’s philosophy on suffrage would be plain enough. And this view of voting rights is central to Paine’s political philosophy, as is his theory of constitutions. But Clark also states: “It has now been established that Paine had no hand in drafting the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, whose extensive franchise is still sometimes taken as demonstrating his views.” Paine did have a strong hand in that Constitution. The “established” reference is to P. Foner who remarked that Paine had left for the war before the actual writing of the constitution. But the philosophy and even the structure of the 1776 constitution rest on Paine’s fourth Forester letter and Four Letters on Interesting Subjects, the letters being left behind as the model for the constitution as he was enlisting in the army. [Four Letters has been verified by the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies’ Text Analysis Project as clearly Paine’s work, as Aldridge anticipated.] And Paine took the Pennsylvania Constitution as the model for the French Constitution of 1793. By dismissing Paine’s link to revolutionizing the nature of constitutions with this off-hand remark, Clark avoids having to deal with the immense impact Paine had in this area. [See Robin West’s Tom Paine’s Constitution for an analysis of the democratic road not travelled in America.]

Paine’s theory of constitutions is the most democratic form ever devised, but Clark would prohibit us from calling it democratic because Paine didn’t know the word. The features of the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution can be found in the Four Letters article, and also in To the People and Candid and Critical Remarks on a Letter signed Ludlow, the latter of which Clark tried to de-attribute from Paine as well, but was tested to be Paine’s. The public debate between the radicals and the moderates in Philadelphia, to present a model constitution for the rest of America, had Paine at the center, and the radicals won. I won’t belabor the point here by listing the structure of the Pennsylvania constitution and these articles, but any reasonable scholar can discern Paine’s clear influence on the former. Issues like a plural executive, unicameralism (more on this below), a Bill of Rights reflecting natural rights, etc., all begin with Paine popularizing these democratic issues. All the public debates on Constitutions in the spring of 1776 – from Tiberius to Cato to Forester – all center on Common Sense.

Constitutional theory is one of Paine’s greatest contributions to political philosophy, and to democratic structures. To dismiss it like Clark does is not being honest or accurate. But he couldn’t find this new theory of constitutions in 1750 England, so he had to flippantly dispose of it.

Class and labor

The same can be said of Clark’s labored attempt to sever any connection between Paine and the emerging labor movement. His claim that “Paine’s economics thus had nothing to do with the new doctrine of socialism, which emerged only in the 1820’s” while technically true is used by Clark not only to scold academics who link Paine to that emerging ideology, but to denigrate Paine’s motivations and world view. To Clark, Paine “did not conceive of ‘the working class’ or any synonym for it, and did not defend such a reification.” To Clark, all that exists is “Paine’s very English ambition … to become a small freeholder, an independent yeoman … although a failure as a farmer in America.” [Another in a long list of vitriolic characterizations from Clark – Paine took up farming at age 67, in retirement, and was too old for the work until he had a stroke 2 years after. Clark calls that a “failure”.] Clark’s claims that since ‘class’ was an unknown concept in Paine’s day, there couldn’t have been class views, class interests, or class contradictions. Another idealist position. Clark gloats over the fact that in academia (at least in Kansas) there exists the “progressive weakening of the politics of class in recent decades” and then states that “a language [of class] was devised only after Paine’s lifetime.” If Clark had properly studied Paine, he would have noticed a letter in 1778 to Henry Laurens:

To Henry Laurens Spring 1778

As we are forming government on a new system, that of representation I will give you my thoughts on the various classes and merits of men in society so far as relates to each other.

The first useful class of citizens are the farmers and cultivators. These may be called citizens of the first necessity, because every thing comes originally from the earth.

After these follow the various orders of manufacturers and mechanics of every kind. These differ from the first class in this particular, that they contribute to the accommodation rather than to the first necessities of life.

Next follow those called merchants and shopkeepers. These are convenient but not important. They produce nothing themselves as the two first classes do, but employ their time in exchanging one thing for another and living by the profits.

Perhaps you will say that in this classification of citizens I have marked no place for myself; that I am neither farmer, mechanic, merchant nor shopkeeper. I believe, however, I am of the first class. I am a farmer of thoughts, and all the crops I raise I give away. I please myself with making you a present of the thoughts in this letter.

THOMAS PAINE.

And as a “farmer of thoughts” he was no failure.

Clark states the obvious that Paine did not know the word “socialism”. But Clark uses this to negate scholars who tie Paine to the socialist movement. When Paine wrote: “This is putting the matter on a general principle, and perhaps it is best to do so; for if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.” (Agrarian Justice), he was not planning the socialist revolution, but he was contributing to the labor movement which evolved into the socialist movement. Why divorce his contribution to that growing consciousness among workers? He was the most influential writer in his time to the ordinary laboring and dispossessed people, he wrote directly to them and contributed to the awakening in them to their rights, individually and collectively. Because he didn’t know the term ‘socialism’ does not diminish his influence in the movement. There is a firm reason why the early unions of New York City hosted and toasted Paine. While the politics of class struggle mostly passed Paine by just before his death (as Alfred Young points out), it doesn’t mean workers (or mechanics or artisans) were not aware of his contributions at the time.

Clark makes similar arguments about “liberalism” and “radicalism”. He accuses scholars of drawing links to Paine, and then denying Paine did anything that advances these trends. The method is consistent throughout.

Clark even questions Paine’s uncompromising attack on monarchy. He reduces Paine to favoring one group of monarchs over another. “Paine’s mind was formed in the decades before 1760, years in which the legitimacy of monarchy was framed almost wholly as a dynastic alternative between the houses of Hanover and Stuart, not between monarchy as such and republicanism.” I guess all the passages in Common Sense, Rights of Man, Address to the Addressers, etc., were to get the Stuarts back on the throne? Paine’s watershed stance against monarchy was an historical leap. All the other reformers and Dissenters in the 1770s never broke with monarchy completely — Price, Cartwright, Burgh, Priestley and their precursors Locke and Montesquieu, wanted only reform of monarchy, giving more power to others, especially the emerging mercantile classes. It was Paine in Common Sense that caused the crack in the dam of political thinking which couldn’t be mended — no compromise with monarchy on principle. Breaking with the unquestioned traditions of hereditary rule and organized religion completely, and not in small reformist steps, was a major contribution of Paine, and it is what made him revolutionary.

Poverty

Clark makes the unsupported claim that “Poverty was not central to his [Paine’s] political thought.” Let’s look at how poverty was central to his political thought:

“It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am
pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it
is unjust. It is absolutely the opposite of what it should be, and it
is necessary that a revolution should be made in it. The contrast of
affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye,
is like dead and living bodies chained together.” Agrarian Justice

The existence of poverty, which Paine declared increases with the advance of civilization, was the central focus of his attacks on monarchy. His politics and remedies all centered on ending poverty. The plans in Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice, for instance, present concrete ways to at least alleviate the issue, to curb the accumulation of wealth to benefit society.

“All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a
man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and
he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of
civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from
whence the whole came.” Agrarian Justice

Clark claims that “Even his program of social security chiefly extended the practice of English poor relief in his youth,” and “Paine had been a member of the vestry of St. Michal’s parish, and was involved in the regular payments to the poor,” to try and show no original thought. But again he obscures the main point: Paine sought to make government, not private charity, the means to solve the problem, government intervention to redistribute wealth. The last phrase is a modern description of what Paine did, eventually creating the basis for social democracy and the welfare state by popularizing this new approach to government.

Poverty was not seen as endemic to capitalist production by Paine, obviously, even though he made reference to workers not getting fair value in a previous quote. He did show the sources of poverty lie in unfair compensation, tax policies, and theft of land. Capitalism had not matured to industrial capitalism, the systemic impoverishment of populations by the new system had not emerged fully, yet still, the problem of poverty appears throughout Paine’s writings from Europe, and is repeatedly targeted as the problem that cannot be solved by monarchy. Monarchy and hereditary succession were the immediate obstacles to human progress (along with their religious organizations). That was what Paine was dealing with. Yet the seeds in the arguments to overthrow monarchy as a system and mindset did grow into movements on other fronts once the lid on Pandora’s box was removed, and Paine was ever present in postulating new approaches and new concepts to advance humanity’s condition. By popularizing, to the majority of the people, the issues of the new age, Paine played a pivotal role in the mass politics of the new era that carried into the 19th century movements.

###American Revolution

Clark even tries to make the case Paine had no idea what was going on in America in 1776, that the impact of Common Sense was exaggerated, and it did not have wide distribution. No evidence is given except to mention Common Sense was only reprinted as a pamphlet in 7 of the 13 colonies. Of course he neglects all the newspaper reprints, all the comments in newspapers about Common Sense from every state, the 96 declarations of independence based on the language of Common Sense written from every state, etc. He makes fun of the 500,000 copies figure some scholars used, but fails to say it included foreign printings where French editions outpaced American.

By confusing the motives of scholars with the objective role historic people play should immediately discount Clark’s ideas, as his English-centric (to the exclusion of everything else) model has ideological fingerprints all over it, from hands that have used these marginalization techniques against Paine for 200 years. In an attempt to lecture uncontrollable scholars, Clark has an eye to downgrade Paine’s role in history, and his dismissive terminology demonstrates this: Clark refers to Paine “blundering” into situations and applying his disjunctive ideas to alien phenomenon; Clark declares that “Common Sense was more of a bitter negation of his homeland” than a blueprint for American society, “bitter” being a slander taken from the book about former Englishmen trying to get even with their mother country; “Paine failed in a project of universal citizenship” is a claim made by Clark after declaring Paine could never separate himself from the culture of parochial England; Clark claims throughout Paine never learned anything outside of his first two decades in the English countryside, a preposterous claim, but slanderous in its presentation; “Paine was out of his depth in the French Revolution”; “a failure as a farmer in America”; “the society that developed [in America] after 1776, Paine understood little.”; and “Paine’s ideas are seldom now employed functionally to solve present-day problems.”

This last brusque statement is another flaw running throughout Clark’s analysis — because the world did not follow Paine’s philosophy, he had no influence. Because Britain followed the monarchical representative system and not Paine’s system, he had no influence; since America had a bicameral system, Paine had no influence in America; since the French Revolution devolved into tyranny, Paine was irrelevant, etc. Clark confuses the movements to challenge the status quos with the status quo. Paine has been the inspiration for many progressive movements, from free speech to national liberation in South America. This is what makes Paine the perennial revolutionary, not the narrow-minded yeomen stuck intellectually in 1750 Norfolk. To “functionally” apply Paine’s philosophy would entail a level of democratic rule that is scarce in the world, evidenced by struggles for democracy around the world, including the US. It would mean the implementation of FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights, or the abolition of corrupt monarchies, including Britain, or an American government free of oligarchic rule.

But despite the shortcomings of history, Paine has already won, not failed. The conventional wisdom — although not necessarily in practice but in ideals — was Paine’s wisdom: democracy (people, not elites, should control government), a complete separation of church and state, and a loosened, if not severed, grip of organized religion on society.

Obscurantism

There is so much more to untangle from Clark’s gnarled analysis. Here are a few misinterpretations, negative spins, and false claims not already mentioned:

• “Paine was widely read in his day, but a politically aware mass reading public was the creation of the Reformation and the 1640s, not the late eighteenth century”. By denying that Paine created a mass reading public, he slurs over the fact that the reading public of the 1640s was confined to the elite — Paine enlarged that base to the majority.
  
• “Although he had worked as an artisan, he never attributed to artisans, even urban artisans, any special political character or role.” Eric Foner’s documentation on this to the contrary is sound, and issues like the Bank of Pennsylvania cannot be explained outside the political stance of the mechanics of Philadelphia, where Paine’s support was.
  
• “Although Paine protested against the cruelty and misconduct of governments, especially in their colonies, he never systematized these critiques to protest against ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’, concepts that derived from the economic theory of the late nineteenth century.” Again, because Paine didn’t use the term ‘colonialism’ his opposition to British plunder and rule doesn’t count because he did not systematize it, as if America was not a colony. Paine stood in the middle of the first great anti-colonial struggle, yet Clark cannot find a link to more modern forms of colonialism.
  
• Rights of Man “contained no worked out theory of natural rights”. From Rights of Man:
  

  “Every history of the Creation, and every traditionary account,
  
  whether from the lettered or unlettered world, however they may vary in their opinion or belief of certain particulars, all agree in establishing one point, the unity of man; by which I mean that men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural rights, in the same manner as if posterity had been continued by creation instead of generation, the latter being only the mode by which the former is carried forward; and consequently, every child born into the world must be considered as deriving its existence from God. The world is as new to him as it was to the first man that existed, and his natural right in it is of the same kind.”
  

  
  

And:

“Hitherto we have spoken only (and that but in part) of the natural rights of man. We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to show how the one originates from the other. Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. But in order to pursue this distinction with more precision, it is necessary to make the different qualities of natural and civil rights.

A few words will explain this. Natural rights are those which apper tain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others. Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society.

Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual, but to the enjoyment of which his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection.

From this short review, it will be easy to distinguish between that class of natural rights which man retains after entering into society, and those which he throws into the common stock as a member of society.

The natural rights which he retains, are all those in which the power to execute is as perfect in the individual as the right itself. Among this class, as is before mentioned, are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind: consequently, religion is one of those rights.

The natural rights which are not retained, are all those in which, though the right is perfect in the individual, the power to execute them is defective. They answer not his purpose. A man, by natural right, has a right to judge in his own cause; and so far as the right of the mind is concerned, he never surrenders it: but what availeth it him to judge, if he has not power to redress ? He therefore deposits his right in the common stock of society, and takes the arm of society, of which he is a part, in preference and in addition to his own. Society grants him nothing.

Every man is proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right. From these premises, two or three certain conclusions will follow.

First, That every civil right grows out of a natural right; or, in other words, is a natural right exchanged.

Secondly, That civil power, properly considered as such, is made up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of power, and answers not his purpose, but when collected to a focus, becomes competent to the purpose of every one.

Thirdly, That the power produced from the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in power in the individual, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights which are retained in the individual, and in which the power to execute is as perfect as the right itself.

We have now, in a few words, traced man from a natural individual to a member of society, and shown, or endeavored to show, the quality of the natural rights retained, and those which are exchanged for civil rights. Let us now apply those principles to governments.”

This seems like a worked out theory of natural rights far beyond the 1750 English political discussions of Paine’s youth.

• Clark even questions Paine’s legacy in freethought: “Only in the history of English freethinking did Paine enjoy a posthumous prominence; but freethinking was to lead via agnosticism to atheism, positions that the deist Paine had repudiated.” Clark fails to see the legacy that Paine has in the freethought movement is his stance against organized religion. The Age of Reason still inspires new freethinkers and remains the enchiridion of freethought.
  
• Paine “has written nothing in condemnation of British ‘colonialism’ or ‘imperialism’; indeed he had been an enthusiastic combatant in the war of 1756-1763…” A teenage sailor was “enthusiastic” about extending the British empire? e,e, cummings was a soldier in W.W. I, so that proves he really wasn’t an anti-war poet?
  
• Paine’s famous quote “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” from Common Sense is reduced by Clark to a sermon from the pulpit: “In a secular sense this was impossible, and his pamphlet demands interpretation not as a prophetic emancipation but as a product of Paine’s English religious experience, mobilized in a new context.” This ignores the fact that this phrase summed up Paine’s detailed argument of how America can break free of the old Europe and invent its own government philosophy free of privilege and anciens regimes. And in a secular sense it did prove possible, and has inspired nascent revolutionary movements ever since.
  
• Clark claims Paine was not aware of the link between the American and French Revolutions until Part II of Rights of Man. But his letters to Rush and Washington in 1790 and 1791 refute that. He states that to debunk Paine’s supposed self-image as “progenitor of revolutions”, but Paine describes himself as a servant to the cause, never its originator, even as he proposed ideas that were original in their application. Clark goes on to deny any effect on France from the American Revolution anyway, which stands opposed to the fact that revolutionary leaders in France paid homage to American leaders, including Paine.
  

And there are dozens of other poorly supported statements, easily refuted:

• “Paine moved in a cultural cocoon.”
  
• “He wrote nothing to show that he recognized anything essentially different about American culture.” And then he contradicts himself later with: “What attuned Paine with the American population was his use of English religious imagery and argument” but states he hid his deistic views, showing a sophisticated awareness of American culture at the time of Common Sense.
  
• Clark speaks of a passage in Rights of Man where Paine uses an account from Lafayette, describing it as “awkwardly inserted” and Paine “unknowingly swallowed” the “self-serving” account.
  
• After 1802 on Paine’s return to America, “Paine persisted in a lurid binary view of American party politics, a view still indebted to the English polarity that dated from the Exclusion Crisis of the 1680s.” The binary view was the struggle between two ideologies, Federalism and Republicanism, being fought out in America. To stretch that back to the Exclusion Crisis is creative, although myopic.
  
• “Two revolutions had made little difference to his core beliefs; although he extrapolated those beliefs in a few areas, he seldom did so logically or systematically.”
  
• “…he became open to the idea of bicameral assemblies, although this again echoed the Westminster model rather than the new American states.” It echoed neither because his openness was not to bicameralism, as in Lords and Senates, but to having assemblies debate separately and come together afterwards to pass laws. Paine objected strenuously to the idea of a House of Lords or a Senate, and said so consistently.
  
• “…his celebrity in his lifetime is more difficult to explain”. Only in Clark’s world is this easy to imagine.
  

John Adams was a major ideological opponent of Paine, because Adams regarded Paine as a threat for being “so democratical”. He summarized Paine’s role in history as he was experiencing it: “I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs or the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.” It seems that Clark is channeling Adams. Like Adams, Clark can’t understand why Paine is so popular. It is clear from even his opponents of the day that Paine was an impactful player, his philosophy was threatening the old regimes, and he was unleashing forces the old guard could not control. It appears Clark has the same grudges. He would rather slander than explain, bear false witness than show scholarship.

Or perhaps Clark’s essay was meant as farce, a lampooning of conservative interpretations of Thomas Paine. If it was not meant that way, he has still provided one.

As if by accidental metaphor, Paine refuses to remain buried.

“Slander belongs to the class of dastardly vices. It always acts under cover. It puts insinuation in the place of evidence, and tries to impose by pretending to believe.” – Thomas Paine

The post Burying Thomas Paine appeared first on .

by Gary Berton

Van Buren Denslow, in his book on the great thinkers of western civilization, said of Thomas Paine: “If a set of opinions could be entitled to a place among political philosophers by reasons of millions having come to believe in and praise them, then indeed Paine would stand, more than any other, as the founder of the American school of political philosophy, as he certainly is the founder of the creed of American democracy”.1 This creed was formulated in Common Sense, that great declaration of independence – independence not only from a foreign power, but integral to that, from the hereditary transmission of political power. To accomplish this independence, Paine laid out the system of democratic republicanism for an oppressed world.

Viciously attacked from the first printing by the entrenched economic and political powers, both in London and in the American colonies, Common Sense still emerged as the great political manifesto of the 18th century. It marked the beginning of the era of democratic revolutions, providing its rationale and philosophy, and opening up to the masses of the disenfranchised people the world of political participation. In fact, it was Paine who later introduced democracy (literally) as a positive term and concept to the modern era.2 This era continues today.

And so do these same attacks. These attacks first came from the landed and wealthy American aristocracy who saw in Common Sense a democratic threat to their power. These aristocrats (and their admirers like John Adams) created an American myth of the founding, a myth that put the most conservative wing at the center of importance and marginalized and distorted the contributions of the true radicals. “The history of American radicalism has long been buried or blurred by a liberal-conservative consensus”.3 This conservative view of history is responsible more than anything else for the 200 years of attack and slander on Thomas Paine.

While Common Sense’s essential role of turning the country towards independence is acknowledged in the prevailing catechism of the Federalist interpretation of history its political philosophy is ignored or ridiculed. I call this catechism “Federalist” because the opposition to Paine and his philosophy was centered in the Federalist camp and the Federalist leaders are given the primary role in the founding of the country by this liberal-conservative consensus. This skewed version of history is best seen in the denial of the role Common Sense played in the creation of the Declaration of Independence. Pauline Maier in her book American Scriptures4, goes to great lengths to marginalize Common Sense and attack its significance. Maier, who greatly admires John Adams, accepts without question his every utterance, and she also adopts his prejudices. Like Adams, she appears to be obsessed with Paine and can’t understand how “History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine”.5

Common Sense has been marginalized and attacked for its unswerving insistence on real democracy as essential to the founding of this country. As Richard Rosenfeld says:

“Tom Paine urges freedom from Britain to secure American democracy, to achieve freedom and equality for every citizen. Freedom from Britain (independence), freedom of trade or property (free enterprise), the freedom of English subjects (“ordered liberty”), and the freedom of democracy (equality) are different “freedoms,” and Common Sense urges democratic freedom as the basis for an American Revolution.”6

This democratic basis of the American Revolution is what made Federalist John Adams choke on Common Sense, and consequently makes Maier choke as well. But even using Maier’s facts, an objective mind cannot fail to see how Common Sense gave birth to the Declaration of Independence.

There are two approaches which will demonstrate this fact – one historical, one analytical.

Historically, before Common Sense no one dared speak of independence publicly. As Paine noted at the time in Crisis III, “Independence was a doctrine scarce and rare, even towards the conclusion of the year 1775…” It was merely whispered in parlor rooms, and more often denounced as traitorous. Common Sense had the effect of producing an “almost unrivaled political somersault”7 in transforming the attitudes in America. As Washington said, it was “working a powerful change …in the minds of many men”8, not only for independence from Britain, but independence from monarchy. Gordon Wood points out a sudden and almost complete revolution in thinking towards republicanism taking place in the attitudes of the Americans in the spring of 1776.9

As Hazelton10 and Burnett11 have shown, most of the old leaders who were in the Congress during the war rewrote their own history after the fact to fit with the myths that had been created. They scurried to lay claim on the heritage of the Declaration. Some of their memoirs contain boasts exclaiming how they supported independence before Common Sense appeared, but a quick read of what they were saying at the time refutes that. No one but Paine had the courage to stand up and proclaim it, and then to defend it in a tour de force of prose. One after another “founding father” took an opposite view of independence until Common Sense appeared.

Despite John Adams’ protestations to the contrary, he never stood up and defended the necessity for independence before the appearance of Common Sense. His claim that independence was repeatedly discussed in Congress before Common Sense is his attempt to minimize Paine’s role. His dismissal of Common Sense in his memoirs as trite would be just sad if it weren’t for Pauline Maier’s use of this quote to “prove” that Common Sense should be marginalized.12 She even concludes from this lone quote that Congress “was already moving apace toward Independence”.13 Her attempts to establish Adams as the focus of all activity and wisdom requires that Paine be pushed aside, and therefore she must lay doubt on the political somersault Common Sense caused.

Maier’s own facts contradict her conclusion: “But throughout 1775 every Congressional petition, address or declaration…sought a settlement of their differences with the Mother Country not Independence”.14 And, “Even the most radical members of Congress professed a strong preference for remaining in the empire”.15 And she observes that even by June of l776, the delegates “lagged behind” the people in regards to independence.16 Maier’s conclusion that therefore Congress was already moving apace towards independence is contradicted by facts she herself supplies.

And Adams himself testifies to the importance of Common Sense in a letter in April, 1776: “…Common Sense , like a ray of revelation, has come in seasonably to clear our doubts, and to fix our choice”.17 Adams’ objection to Common Sense was not its call for independence, but rather its democratic foundation. Adams complains of Paine: “His plan is so democratical”.18 Adams knew full well the impact of Common Sense on the rapid shift towards independence, and expressed it repeatedly. His hatred for Paine, who he called the “disastrous meteor”19 of democracy, clouded his account of the period. It would seem that Maier falls under the same prejudice.

Others of the time support Adams’ opinion of the importance of Common Sense in producing an about-face in the attitude toward independence. From a Bostonian on the impact of Common Sense, “Independence a year ago could not have been publickly mentioned with impunity. Nothing else is now talked of, and I know not what can be done by Great Britain to prevent it”.20 In Maryland a letter to a newspaper said, “If you know the author of Common Sense tell him he has done wonders and worked miracles, made Tories Whigs and washed blackmoors white. He has made a great number of converts here”.21 And in South Carolina, after denouncing Gadsden for introducing a call for independence in February, having been one of the few to read Common Sense by then, the Assembly turned an about face and issued its Declaration in April after Common Sense had been circulated there.22 A similar account took place in the New York Assembly.23

Perhaps the best summation of the role Common Sense played is given by an Englishman, Sir George Trevelyan, in the 19th century:

“It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting…It was pirated, parodied and imitated, and translated into the language of every country where the new republic had well-wishers…According to contemporary newspapers Common Sense turned thousands to independence who before could not endure the thought. It worked nothing short of miracles and turned Tories into Whigs.”24

Despite Maier’s animosity towards Paine, and repeated attempts to minimize his role, she cannot hide certain historical facts. For example, she shows how in the spring of 1776, from April to July, some 90 Declarations of Independence were spontaneously produced by towns, counties, cities and states. Her conclusion is that this is proof that the minds of the people were moving towards independence. She fails to state the obvious and fails to link the appearance of Common Sense as the cause of this effect. Certainly Paine was not writing in a vacuum, and he drew on the sentiments and potential among the people. But Maier’s ignoring Common Sense as a prime factor demonstrates prejudice overcoming sound professional judgment.

Even a cursory look at the content of these Declarations shows the underlying influence of Paine’s work. The first recurring theme in them is condemning the King. From Maryland: “..the King of Great Britain has violated his compact with this people, and that they owe no allegiance to him”.25 “America may become a free and independent state” is another typical theme.26 In Massachusetts they condemned an unfeeling king, and Virginia even uses “Tis time to part”.27 Does Maier say these are isolated cases, and that a few might have used some language from Common Sense? No, just the opposite: “the contents of the various state and local resolutions on Independence are virtually identical”.28 And: “What they said was, however, everywhere remarkably alike”.29 What force of words existed in early 1776 to create such a phenomenon? To anyone but Maier the answer is plain – Common Sense.

Here is where Maier makes her second error. Given all the weight of the evidence, how could she marginalize Common Sense? Like this: referring to all these Declarations she says, “The case was tightly argued and essentially convincing. It was not, however, the argument of Thomas Paine”.30 She says Paine attacked monarchy, but the Declarations did not, therefore Paine’s influence was marginal. According to Maier, Paine merely provoked debate, and thereafter the argument for separation turned on what the Mother country did.31 But what had Britain done between January and April to cause the fury of Declarations? She has no answer. And whatever occurrences of British tyranny existed would be magnified in the wake of Common Sense. These tyrannies had been going on for 12 years, why would they become suddenly so horrific? Weren’t the oppressive acts of the previous years more egregious? Only the radical call to revolution in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense could turn these disputes into a cry for Independence.

The obvious explanation for not condemning the monarchial system in the Declarations is that they were not the proper forum. Even Paine, in his outline of the Declaration in Common Sense, leaves no room for an attack on monarchy. That is the political philosophy behind writing the Declaration, but not its content. It was the fuel, not the fire; the cause not the effect. But the several attacks on the King in these 90 Declarations, attacks which never existed to any scale before Common Sense, demonstrate Paine’s influence. The separation would produce an independent sovereignty, and it was a separation with Britain AND their system that pervades every Declaration.

The conservative wing of the Americans who supported separation but feared democracy have always made the case (even back then) to leave the door open for a new monarchy. Adams, Maier’s hero, was the leader in this agitation, as shown when he wrote: “What do you mean …by Republican systems? . . . You seem determined not to allow a limited monarchy to be a republican system, which it certainly is, and the best that has ever been tried. . .”32 Separating Common Sense into a useful Independence pamphlet and a “disastrous meteor”, “so democratical”, was Adams’ way of diminishing Paine’s importance, and keeping monarchy alive. Unlike Adams, Paine stood for a democratic republic, and the two sides have still not reconciled, nor should they.

Now let us examine the analytical criteria for determining the role Common Sense played in the creation of the Declaration of Independence. To do that we need to see that all of Common Sense, when read cover to cover, leads up to the conclusion of declaring Independence. In fact Paine emphasized the importance of this in his Crisis 13:

“The cause of America made me an author. The force with which it struck my mind, and the dangerous condition the country appeared to me in, by courting an impossible and an unnatural reconciliation with those who were determined to reduce her, instead of striking out into the only line that could cement and save her, A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, made it impossible for me, feeling as I did, to be silent…”33

Paine concludes Common Sense with “nothing can settle our affairs so expeditiously as an open and determined declaration for independence”34 followed by four reasons. The first three formed the basis for much of the content of the arguments in favor of declarations of independence throughout America: no state could intervene as mediator, no assistance could be made, and foreign nations view us as only rebels without a declaration of independence. The fourth point reads:

“Were a manifesto to be published, and despatched to foreign courts, setting forth the miseries we have endured, and the peaceful methods which we have ineffectually used for redress; declaring at the same time, that not being able any longer to live happily or safely under the cruel disposition of the British court, we had been driven to the necessity of breaking off all connections with her; at the same time, assuring all such Courts of our peaceable disposition towards them, and of our desire of entering into trade with them; such a memorial would produce more good effects to this continent, than if a ship were freighted with petitions to Britain.”35

If we now look at the Declaration of Independence we see essentially six sections, being: introduction, the foundation for a bill of rights, a list of charges against the King(the bulk of the document), peaceful methods of redress, the necessity of separation, and the benefits of an independent state. Paine’s paragraph above outlines the last four sections of the Declaration of Independence. And it does so in the same order, using the same terminology. Quite a coincidence for a publication which only sparked a debate and did not share the arguments of the Declarations! This should lead any honest scholar of the Declaration to at least mention this paragraph, even if only to discredit it. Maier spends hundreds of pages documenting all the links to the Declaration, but has no room for this one. It is because this is the smoking gun, the part of Common Sense that obviously greatly influenced the author of the Declaration of Independence, directly or indirectly.

To be thorough let’s compare the Declaration text to the above paragraph from Common Sense. “The miseries we have endured” is plain enough: the end of the second paragraph of the Declaration says “The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations, among which no one fact stands single or solitary to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest…”, followed by the long list of grievances endured.

“The peaceful methods which we have ineffectually used for redress” is reflected in the Declaration in the third to last paragraph(immediately after the end of the grievance list): “In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress, in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated injuries.”

“We have been driven to the necessity of breaking off all connections with her” from the above quote from Common Sense is mirrored in the Declaration in the second to last paragraph: after a recounting of the “common” ties to be renounced forever it says “The road to happiness and to glory is open to us too; we will climb it, apart from them, and acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our eternal separation.”

And lastly, the phrase “assuring all such Courts of our peaceable disposition towards them, … would produce more good effects to this continent, than if a ship were freighted with petitions to Britain” is reflected in the last paragraph of the declaration, “…as free and independent states they shall hereafter have power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce,…” etc.

But there is more. In Maier’s analysis of Jefferson’s Declaration, she omits these last three sections for discussion. Why? If you read her book, you would think the Declaration consisted of the introduction, the bill of rights and the list of grievances alone.

There is even more content correspondence between the Declaration and Common Sense. The political philosophy of Thomas Paine reflected in Common Sense is evident throughout the central themes of the Declaration. “All men are created equal”, for example, is not unique to Paine in this era. But its application to the principles of government identical to both Common Sense and the Declaration are unique to this time. To point out that these principles appear in some other Declarations in the spring of 1776 simply reinforces the link. “Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could not be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance.. .” from Common Sense is one of the most profound and revolutionary principles of Paine, one which seeped into the subconscious of the American people. When the Declaration says, “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”, it echoes Common Sense’s thesis on the design and end of government.

Even smaller concepts like “he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them” from the Declaration is unique to Common Sense in origin. Uses of words such as “common blood”, “common king” and “common kindred” in the Declaration is a concept introduced by Paine in Common Sense, where he never speaks of a mother country or parent country but always America and Britain as equals. Or compare, “These facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, and manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren” to similar sentiments in Common Sense such as “our affections wounded”, and “forever renounce a power in whom we have no trust”. And where else does the unique concept of labeling the King a “tyrant” come from except Common Sense – a term Adams took exception to in both documents.36 Even the phrase and concept “free and independent states” is at the end of both documents(the added appendix in Common Sense.

Upon examination, therefore, it becomes evident that the concepts and language of Common Sense pervade not only the 90 Declarations written in the spring of I776, and not only the dialogue in newspapers, journals, assemblies and taverns of the period, but also the national Declaration of Independence itself.

Far more than a treatise that stirred debate, more than the best selling piece of literature of the era, and more than a rallying cry for independence – Common Sense laid the groundwork for the official founding document of this country. All the principles of democratic republicanism and a government of laws based on a popular constitution are found in the unofficial founding document – Common Sense. It ushered in the epoch of democracy for the world, skillfully presented in sound and convincing arguments, and opened up a struggle to secure its aims that continues to this day. It was the manifesto of the American school of political philosophy, and the founding document of American democracy from which subsequent documents, from the Declaration of Independence, to the Gettysburg Address, to the Civil Rights laws of the 1960’s have their roots.

Footnotes

1. Van Buren Denslow, Modern Thinkers, Chicago: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1880, pg. 167.
2. R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1959, pg 19.
3. Alfred Young, ed., The American Revolution, DeKalb, IL: N. Illinois U. Press, 1984, pg x. By “radical”, I take the meaning in the sense of internal radicalism – all those without power who were interested in ‘who shall rule it home’.
4. Pauline Maier, American Scripture, New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1997.
5. John Adams quote in John H. Hazelton, The Declaration of Independence: Its History, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1906,
6. Richard Rosenfeld, American Aurora, New York: St. Martins Press, 1997, pg 268-269.
7. Nicholas Murray Butler. speech at the l50th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence banquet of the American Society in London, 7/5/26.
8. Quoted from Winthrop D. Jordan’s article, “Familial Politics” in Sept. 1973 Journal of American History, pg295.
9. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, New York: WW Norton & Co, 1969, pg 92-93.
10. John H. Hazelton, The Declaration of Independence: Its History, New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1906.
11. Edmund C. Burnett, The Continental Congress, New York: Macmillan, 1941.
12. Maier, op. cit., pg. 33. In a petty fit to once again try and bury Paine, Adams in his Autobiography says independence “had been urged in Congress a hundred times” prior to Common Sense. No corroborating evidence has ever been developed to support this claim, and frankly all evidence suggests just the opposite, but Ms. Maier continues using it as “scripture”.
13. Maier, pg 33.
14. Maier, pg 18.
15. ibid, pg 21.
16. Maier, pg 58.
17. Hazelton, pg 50.
18. Adams in Thoughts on Govemment, quoted from Richard Rosenfeld, American Aurora, New York: St. Martin’s press, 1997, pg 278.
19. Adams quoted in Rosenfeld, pg 270.
20. In John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life. New York: Little Brown,1995, pg 113.
21. W.E. Woodward, Tom Paine: America’s Godfather, New York: EP Dutton, 1945, pg 80.
22. See Beard, Basic History of the United States, New York: New Home Library, 1944, pg 106; and Woodward, pgs 80-81.
23. Moncure Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, New York: GP Putnam & Sons, 1893, Vol I, pg 62.
24. Quoted from Woodward, Pg 80.
25. Maier, pg 83.
26. ibid.
27. Maier, pg 91.
28. Maier, pg 74.
29. Maier, pg 49.
30. Maier, pg 90.
31. Maier, pg 91.
32. Rosenfeld, pg490.
33. Moncure Conway, ed, Writings of Thomas Paine, New York: AMS Press, 1967,Vol. I pg 376.
34. Conway, Vol I, pg 110.
35. Conway, Vol I, pg 11 l.
36. Maier, pg.122-123.

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The Federalist Party, anointed by most historians as the founding party of the new United States, shaped the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1787. Their conservative and nationalist ideas were voiced in 85 newspaper essays, collected in “The Federalist Papers,” to counter arguments against the plan from those who wanted more democracy in the new government. 

America’s first official political party, Federalists dominated the government from 1789 to 1801. Founded by Alexander Hamilton, fronted by President John Adams, The Federalist Party favored plutocracy, a strong central government ruled by a few rich power brokers. Their 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts legalized deporting immigrants and stifling free speech. 

Drawing on deep Tory sympathies in New England, the Federalists advocated London’s agenda in America. They blocked Paris interests after the French Revolution. British leaders called the Federalists the “English Party” and “Oligarch Party.” Adams was seen as a monarchist after proposing hereditary succession for the U.S. presidency. 

The Federalist Party lost the 1800 election to the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson, who won votes by upholding states’ rights over Hamilton’s federal power, as with the central bank. Jefferson fought Hamilton’s autocratic claim of “implied powers” not granted in the Constitution. President Jefferson in 1802 invited Thomas Paine to return to America after his imprisonment in France by Robespierre, urged on by the American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, a Federalist. 

Writing letters to the nation from New Rochelle and then Greenwich Village, Paine waged war against the Federalist usurpation of the American Revolution. He championed the principles of democracy. Federalists were his enemy as much as the British lords. Here are some of Paine’s analyses. 

The post Thomas Paine on the Federalists and Oligarchy appeared first on .

By Gary Berton

In March, 1775, an article appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal in Philadelphia denouncing the institution of slavery in America – “African Slavery in America”. It was signed “Justice and Humanity”, and the pseudonym, a predominate practice of the period, left authorship open to interpretation. It lay unattributed until Moncure Conway included the article in his four volume set of The Writings of Thomas Paine¹ in 1894, since then repeated in other collections, and still referred to as Paine’s work by many to this day. 

Thomas Paine was the philosophical leader of the age of democratic revolutions. Through works like Common Sense and Rights of Man, he opened the possibility of a democratic republican system of government, grounded in natural rights and equality. Fighting for the universal application of “the natural rights of all mankind” (in the Introduction to Common Sense)², Paine’s life was a selfless struggle for liberty, equality and fraternity. 

So it was natural to assume that he wrote this important essay in 1775. The article is one of the earliest strong statements against slavery, whose language and salient points led to the creation of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully held in Bondage a month later. The Society was led by Anthony Benezet³, but disbanded due to the Revolutionary War, and re-established by most of its founding members in 1784 as the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Paine was not a founding member in 1775, per the Society’s founding documents at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, but after the Society relaunched after the Revolution in 1784, Paine did join and by records attended meetings in 1787⁴. 

Other scholars have questioned Paine’s authorship of “African Slavery in America”, led by James V. Lynch⁵. There are specific clues in the text that do not point to Paine: the article was sent to the Pennsylvania Journal, not the Magazine where Paine was editor at the time; the essay includes religious references that Paine would not use, like referring to “our religion” of Christianity (Paine was not a Christian) and referring to the slave trade as in “opposition to the Redeemer’s cause”; and Paine uses references to other authors which he never used in other works, or would use, as Lynch points out. 

Paine’s authorship of “African Slavery in America” can be analyzed now by a more objective criteria: computer text analysis.  During the process of this analysis, the real author has come to light. I am taking the opportunity to demonstrate Author Attribution Methodology (AAM) which will become a vital tool for historians to settle many questionable claims which have little basis, such as this slavery essay. It was used to uncover undiscovered Paine works, and clarify  collaborative writings that have gone unknown for centuries, as was done in the forthcoming Thomas Paine: Collected Works, due out in January, 2026 from Princeton University Press. 

Misattribution 

The source of the attribution of “African Slavery in America” to Paine traces back to Benjamin Rush in a letter in 1809, after Paine’s death, who claims he was told that Paine was the author. 

“About the year 1773 I met him [Paine] accidentally in Mr. Aitken’s bookstore and was introduced to him by Mr. Aitken. We conversed a few minutes, when I left him. Soon afterwards I read a short essay with which I was much pleased, in one of Bradford’s papers, against the slavery of Africans in our country, and which I was informed was written by Mr. Paine. This excited my desire to be better acquainted with him. We met soon afterwards at Mr. Aitkin’s(sic) bookstore, where I did homage to his principles and pen upon the subject of the enslaved Africans. He told me the essay to which I alluded was the first thing he had ever published in his life. After this Mr. Aitkin employed him as the editor of his Magazine…”⁶

However Rush has numerous errors in recounting these events more than thirty years after the events. The year is wrong: they would have met in early 1775 since he did not arrive in America until November 30, 1774. The allusion to “the first thing. . .ever published” was a statement Paine made about Common Sense, not this article.  For example John Adams complained: “There was one circumstance in his conversation with me about the pamphlets, which I could not account for. He was extremely earnest to convince me that “Common Sense” was his first born; declared again and again that he had never written a line nor a word that had been printed, before “Common Sense”.⁷  Paine would have said something similar to Rush a year after the meeting referred to by Rush. Rush also confuses the hiring of Paine by Aitken after the essay appeared, when Paine started two months before in January, after Paine contributed 3 articles in January, and took over editorship in February. 

And Rush also claims elsewhere in this letter that he gave the idea of writing Common Sense to Paine⁸ (Paine said Franklin gave him the idea in October 1775⁹), as well as its title, which appears to be an aging Rush exaggerating his role in history. Secondary sources are not reliable, as demonstrated here. New tools are needed, and AAM is the most reliable, accurate tool to use. 

Attributed by Moncure Conway in his breakthrough biography completed in 1893¹⁰, and since repeated by most Paine collections and biographies, “African Slavery in America” was accredited to Paine, as a key treatise of the abolitionist movement. Conway went so far as to anoint Paine as one of the first abolitionists¹¹. It is safe to say that in sentiment he may well have been, but as an author, there is no clear justification to support the contention. It is most probable that Paine did not write “African Slavery in America” based on a lack of evidence, on the language used in the essay, and on our computer analysis of the text. 

Paine’s Support for the Abolition of Slavery 

Paine referred to his support of the abolition of slavery in letters and elsewhere with unreserved hatred for the practice, upholding the revolutionary principle that people must free themselves. For example, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, March 16, 1790 (the letter has been mistakenly assigned as 1789 by Foner): 

“I despair of seeing an abolition of the infernal traffic in Negroes. We must push that matter further on your side of the water. I wish that a few well instructed could be sent among their brethren in bondage; for until they are enabled to take their own part, nothing will be done.” 

This letter may have fixed the association of Paine to “African Slavery in America” in Rush’s mind. Lynch is correct to an extent however in demonstrating the dichotomy of Paine’s private views and public efforts. 

Paine’s support for the Haitian slave uprising, his comments in congratulations to Thomas Addis Emmett on his work against the slave trade¹², his association with abolitionists in England in the early 1790s and his support for the abolitionist bill in England in 1790, and his intimate friendship with two of the leading abolitionists in New York in the years before his death, with whom he made the executors of his will – Morton and Emmett, demonstrate Paine’s abolitionist sentiment. But most notably, his close association with Franklin and their political comradeship led to his membership in Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery when Franklin was its President. Mariam Touba sums up this allegiance to antislavery in an essay presented at the 2012 First International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies at Iona College.¹³ 

Paine’s support for the abolition of slavery can be seen in other contexts. His support for the Haitian slave uprising and his statements in letters to Jefferson, such as the following, exhibit a profound hatred of slavery: 

“It is chiefly the people of Liverpool that employ themselves in the slave trade and they bring cargoes of those unfortunate Negroes to take back in return the hard money and the produce of the country. Had I the command of the elements I would blast Liverpool with fire and brimstone. It is the Sodom and Gomorrah of brutality.”¹⁴ 

From the Forester’s Letters in the spring of 1776 Paine was an early opponent of slavery: 

“…can America be happy under a government of her own, is short and simple, viz. As happy as she please; she hath a blank sheet to write upon. Put it not off too long.” Footnote by author: “Do not forget the hapless African.”¹⁵ 

In 1796, in a poem to a female acquaintance, “On the Descent upon England¹⁶”, where his stanzas iterate the crimes of Britain, is this notable one (Lynch also refers to this poem): 

“See Afric’s wretched offspring torn 

From all the human heart holds dear, 

See millions doomed in chains to mourn, 

Unpitied even by a tear. . .” 

Other scholars have questioned Paine’s authorship of “African Slavery in America”, such as Hazel Burgess and Jonathan Clark (who take their lead from Lynch¹⁷). There are specific clues in the text that do not point to Paine: the article was sent to the Pennsylvania Journal, not the Magazine where Paine was editor as I mentioned; the essay includes religious references that Paine would not use, like referring to “our religion” of Christianity (Paine was not a Christian) and referring to the slave trade as in “opposition to the Redeemer’s cause”; and Paine uses references to other authors which he never used in other works of this time period, as Clark points out. Clark assigns it to Anthony Benezet, based on the note accompanying the article to the publisher signed “A.B.” But A.B. was also used by Hopkinson in several essays, so that is not proof, just a guess. 

Lynch is correct in scolding many noted academics for using faulty references for proof of Paine’s abolitionism, something that will only be corrected by an official Collected Works. Despite a few errors¹⁸, the Lynch article makes a sound argument about the dichotomy of Paine’s private and public views, and correctly attributes to Paine the strength of his overarching ideology of universal human rights, and how abolitionism is ensconced under that banner, despite Lynch’s hostility to Paine. 

But Lynch assumes also that Paine “joined other revolutionaries in the conviction that American citizens would only be white.”¹⁹  And Lynch goes on to use examples from Louisiana and Haiti to support his contention that Paine saw only a white republic. But here is where Lynch’s bias rooted in his conservative world view oversteps the complete analysis. He attacks Paine for opposing expansion of slavery into Louisiana on practical grounds, yet ignores the fact he is trying to convince the power structure through Jefferson to do what is good for them, and so Lynch denies Paine’s humanitarian desires. He does the same in regards to Haiti, where Paine was writing to the President about the best approach to the revolution in Haiti for American interests. Lynch rightly asserts that Paine was not focused on individual issues, but on the wider era of democratic revolutions, where these particular issues would be resolved. And Lynch selects passages that suit him, and ignores the others: for example, the conclusion of “To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana”, Paine sums up his argument by making two points: “The case to which is being found in direct injustice is that which you petition for power, under the name of rights, to import and enslave Africans! Dare you put up a petition to heaven for such a power, without fearing to be struck from the earth by its justice? Why, then, do you ask it of man against man? Do you want to renew in Louisiana the horrors of Domingo?”²⁰ Lynch talks about the last sentence not the vehemence of the first part. Paine uses both the moral and the practical, so Lynch’s claim that Paine never publicly denounced slavery is not correct, just from these few quotes mentioned in this article. 

And Lynch does quote Paine’s true reasons for not writing about slavery, which belies other parts of his essay: “an unfitter person for such a work could hardly be found. The cause would have suffered in my hands. I could not have treated it with any chance of success; for I could never think of their condition but with feelings of indignation.”²¹ Lynch also repeatedly denies that Paine “seems” to deny blacks equal citizenship, that only whites could rule a republic. But here too his concept of civilization was paramount, not his attitude towards races, and it is misleading to say Paine only supported a Republic of whites . There are many out of context quotes in Lynch’s essay, which must wait for another article to lay out. 

But the question then remains, who wrote “African Slavery in America”? 

The Petrovic Method²² of Author Attribution 

Moncure Conway and Philip Foner in their collections of Paine’s works included “African Slavery in America,” however they did not have the tools we have today. 

The Text Analysis Project at the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona University developed a computer-based author attribution procedure to help in the problem of identifying authorship of texts attributed to Paine, or texts previously not attributed to Paine that should be. Several articles have been published, and peer reviewed to great acclaim. We focus on the style of the documents in the computer analysis, not the content, but then confirm the results through thorough analysis of its content by Paine scholars familiar with the philosophy and approach to political issues of Paine, and the forensic clues to geographical, personal content, and internal evidence in the document. Techniques to identify other styles not yet in JGAAP (Java Graphical Author Attribution Program), like the use of alliteration, were being developed by the Institute, but abandoned, and will be put to use in future analyses as we continue to perfect the Methodology. JGAAP is a free source of programmed style features that can be used to test texts using style(s) features. 

Stylistic features identified in JGAAP are often used unconsciously and consistently by authors, and, if correctly identified, will correctly reveal the identity of the author. It is much like fingerprints, which are hardwired in the author’s head, who can only explain, argue, or express themselves with their unique brain patterns. We use machine learning where special algorithms use documents of known authorship as training examples to train the computer to recognize each author’s writing style, or syntax, based on the use of 17 accepted author attribution features. Once the computer is trained, the completed model is tested against the disputed document to assess the nearest fit to the author training sets. 

Using JGAAP as a starting point, the method takes accepted features of style identification from established software of lexical features, and combines them in four types of machine learning methods and features that our team developed in a statistical array to generate percentages of likelihood of authorship. The results produced a self-testing, accurate measure of authorship attribution. Author files need to be created, from 2000 to 3000 words from definitive works of each author, as well as a program to group selective author files to which to test. 

The number of authors used was twenty-nine here, including Paine, Franklin, Benezet, Jefferson, Hopkinson, Price, Priestley, John and Sam Adams, Hopkins, Witherspoon, Madison, Monroe, Young, Cassandra, Matlack, G. Morris, Peale, Rittenhouse, and others. Authors are selected by time period and physical availability. A “leave-one-out” method of testing each author’s file is done: one of the works in an author’s file of works is tested against the remaining works, and so on through all the works. When using this method of testing the integrity of Paine’s file, we noticed that “African Slavery in America” stood out with a very low percentage. By removing it, the remaining works tested at 100%, assuring that Paine’s file was accurate. The same tests were done on all the author files to be certain of their purity. In all we use over 100 author files that we have covered French, English, and American authors in testing. Non-English texts are Google-translated, which has proved to be extremely accurate so that all tests are done in English. 

Some of the features used: 

• Character NGrams (Cg) – uses a sequence of n (2 or 3) characters to compare. For example, “Character NGrams” has these 2-grams: Ch, ha,ar,rc,ct,te,er,r_, _N, NG, Gr,ra,am,ms. This has proven very reliable in text mining applications. 
• First Word In Sentence (Fwis) – compiles the first words used in all sentences and compares. 
• MW Function Words (Mwfw) – from Mosteller-Wallace “Federalist Papers” work. Function words are the most common words, like prepositions, pronouns, articles, etc. They are content neutral and are used in a subconscious manner, and are most reliable in author attribution works. 
• Prepositions (Prep) 
• Special Words 2 (Sw2) – developed by our Text Analysis Project, these include use of period words like “hath”, “juster”, “wilfull”. 
• Suffices (Suf) – looks at the last three letters of each word. 
• SW French Origin (Swfo) – words are compared to an English words of French origin compilation. 
• Vowel-initial Words (Viw) 
• Word NGrams (Wg) – uses a sequence of words for comparison 

Learning methods used and abbreviations 

• Centroid Driver, Cosine Distance (CdCosd) – nearest-neighbor approach using normalized product distance 
• Centroid Driver, Histogram Distance (CdHisd) – nearest-neighbor approach using Euclidian distance 
• Linear SVM (Lsvm) – generates a linear separator to divide the feature space into regions, each corresponding to a specific author 
• Multilayer Perceptron (Mp) – an artificial neural network that maps sets of input data onto appropriate outputs. 

Using individual features separately, the results obtained only ranged from 37% to 73% accuracy in predicting authorship. With the combined method that we are employing, the accuracy was at 78% consistently in 2012, and then the accuracy was improved to over 90% through 2021. 

Random guessing would only expect to see a 6% result for each of 16 authors on a random test. The precision of the “leave-one-out” tests showed accuracy of 90%. This was achieved by weighting the features for each author for the features that work best for that author. Some authors showed, for example, a more reliable outcome consistently using function words, while it performed badly consistently using French origin. So we weighted function words for that author. The 62% threshold that we use ensures that only features that show effective accuracy above the median are used for the analysis. 

Testing “African Slavery in America” 

With different combinations of all possible authors, here are some results, taken from testing all the above authors: 

There are several things to notice in these tests: first, Paine shows little to no support; second, Hopkins shows very strong support; third, Anthony Benezet also shows little support; and lastly, there are no indications that the author is not present. Normally in leave-one-out testing procedures to insure accuracy, if one author among several achieves over 40%, with no other author above 20%, it is a strong indication that the 40% one is the author. A consistent 50% result shows a very high probability that the author has been found. If the real author is not present, the results would show several authors with under 40% support, with no clear winner. For example, here is a test that does not include Hopkins for “African Slavery in America”: 

Without Hopkins in the author choices, there is no clear probable author, a pattern that recurs whenever the actual author is not included in the test. 

Who is Samuel Hopkins? 

Samuel Hopkins was a Congregational minister and theologian from Rhode Island. Hopkinsianism bears his name, also referred to as the New Divinity, which he helped develop with Jonathan Edwards. He was a type of Calvinist. And he was one of the original ministers to denounce slavery, and his Congregationalist Church was the first to publicly denounce slavery. Hopkins wrote at least three other articles against slavery. He would have been familiar with Anthony Benezet’s Quaker objections to slavery who had written against it since the 1760s. It is likely that he sent this article to Benezet to be published in the center of political activity, Philadelphia, thus explaining the note to the publisher, signed A.B. 

The content of Hopkins’ “A Dialogue concerning the Slavery of the Africans,” written a year after “African Slavery in America,” exhibits the same arguments. 

From “A Dialogue”:

“And I take leave here to observe, that if the slavery in which we hold the blacks, is wrong; it is a very great and public sin; and therefore a sin which God is now testifying against in the calamities he has brought upon us, consequently must be reformed, before we can reasonably expect deliverance, or even sincerely ask for it.. . . we have no way to exculpate ourselves from the guilt of the whole, and bear proper testimony against this great evil, but by freeing all our slaves.” 

From “African Slavery”:

“How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which providence threatens us? We have enslaved multitudes, and shed much innocent blood in doing it; and now are threatened with the same. And while others evils are confessed, and bewailed, why not this especially, and publicly; than which no other vice, if all others, has brought so much guilt on the land?” 

From “A Dialogue”: 

“Let no Christian then, plead this permission to the Jews to make bond slaves of their neighbours, as a warrant to hold the slaves he has made, and consequently for universal slavery.” 

From “African Slavery”:

“But some say, “the practice was permitted to the Jews. To which may be replied. The example of the Jews, in many things, may not be imitated by us . . .” 

The two essays exhibit the same philosophy, with the same religious arguments, and the same remedies – 

From “A Dialogue”:

“Let them be subject to the same restraints and laws with other freemen; and have the same care taken of them by the public. And be as ready to direct and assist those who want discretion and assistance to get a living, as if they were your own children; and as willing to support the helpless, infirm and aged. And give all proper encouragement and assistance to those who have served you well, and are like to get a good living, if not put under peculiar disadvantages, as freed negroes most commonly are; by giving them reasonable wages for their labour, if they still continue with you, or liberally furnishing them with what is necessary in order to their living comfortably, and being in a way to provide for themselves.” 

From “African Slavery”:

“To turn the old and infirm free, would be injustice and cruelty; they who enjoyed the labors of their better days should keep, and treat them humanely. As to the rest, let prudent men, with the assistance of legislatures, determine what is practicable for masters, and best for them. Perhaps some could give them lands upon reasonable rent, some, employing them in their labor still, might give them some reasonable allowances for it; so as all may have some property, and fruits of their labors at their own disposal, and be encouraged to industry; the family may live together, and enjoy the natural satisfaction of exercising relative affections and duties, with civil protection, and other advantages, like fellow men.” 

Conclusion 

The aim of the use of this Author Attribution Methodology article is to exhibit and assist in learning this methodology, is provide an objective, scientific method to help analyze texts attributed to historical authors, and discover text not attributed to the proper author(s), in order to be able to significantly close the debate on many documents. With this tool, we will be able to bring the full collected works of Thomas Paine to the forefront in the discussion on his legacy, his place in the history of political philosophy, and his continuing role in the struggle for democracy. In the process, we have discovered other documents that can be attributed to specific writers of the period. By determining that “African Slavery in America” with high probably is not Paine’s work, it does not diminish his role in the history of human freedom. And especially after the “Slave Letter” has been proved to be Paine’s using this Methodology.²³ And it does allow for the full recognition of the early abolitionists, like Anthony Benezet and Samuel Hopkins, to take a position of greater importance in American history. 

AAM also has demonstrated that most political and philosophical essays in the 18th century were written collaboratively, and several years were directed towards testing collaborative works. We have developed accuracy in authorship down to the paragraph level, and in individual sentences if necessary. The Collected Works will demonstrate it, as Paine led a group of writers in a collaborative manner to avoid discovery. No secondary references could break down the collaborative works. For example, it appears by our testing analyses, that the Federalist Papers are mainly inaccurate, having relied on secondary sources, and by using only one feature by Mosteller and Wallace.²⁴

“But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.” (Rights of Man) 

By Gary Berton, President of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association and Founder of the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona University 

Appendix: Paine’s Antislavery Legacy: Some Additional Considerations 

By Miriam Touba 

When assessing his legacy, modern commentators have noted Thomas Paine’s consistent objections to African slavery.  Paine’s strong antislavery stand was, however, seldom cited and often unknown to those “in the trenches,” the 19th-century abolitionists who were actually fighting the peculiar institution in antebellum America.  Reasons for this ignorance can easily be found:  Paine’s religious writings made him unpalatable to the churches, many of whom provided the energy for the abolitionist and reform movements of the first half of the 19th century.  Thus, the very Christian-based publications that printed arguments against slavery ran them virtually side-by-side with denigrating stories about the “infidel” Thomas Paine.  Furthermore, most of Paine’s antislavery writings were either unsigned articles, ephemeral newspaper remarks, or were entirely unknown before being brought to light by his dedicated biographer, Moncure Conway (an abolitionist in his own right) only late in the 19th century, when the fight against North American slavery was over. 

Not previously cited in this context is the wide circulation in the antislavery literature of the letter addressed to Thomas Paine by the British abolitionist Edward Rushton sometime around 1805.  Rushton’s persistent fight against slavery was admirable, carried on despite his blindness.  Among his efforts were letters written to George Washington and Thomas Paine pleading with them to use their influence against slavery.  To these pleas, Rushton never received a reply from Washington and, apparently, never a formal answer from Paine, then living in New York.  His letter to Paine, wrongly suggesting that Paine never published a syllable against slavery, would find its way into such influential abolitionist papers as The Liberator and the National Antislavery Standard much later in the mid-19th century. 

This presentation will discuss Rushton, his letter, and whatever influence it may have had on 19th-century abolitionists in viewing Paine as indifferent, timid, or lukewarm in the antislavery cause.  This study will also then briefly try to answer Rushton’s reasonable question:  Why did Paine oppose slavery and yet devote so little of his writings to the injustice of slavery? 

Finally, this paper will bring to light one piece of evidence of Paine’s commitment to the cause of antislavery just about the time Rushton was writing to him.  It is found in a greeting in a letter in the TPNHA/Iona Collection.  From New Rochelle, Paine sends on his congratulations to Thomas Addis Emmet, the Irish émigré lawyer who would later serve as Paine’s executor.  In this unpublished 1805 letter, Paine wishes to commend Emmet, whose first case before the bar in the United States was a successful effort on behalf of fugitive slaves.  While the details of the case appear lost to history, Paine’s passing reference to “the Affrican Affair” [sic] is just a reminder that there are new things to be discovered in the collection as it is being catalogued and made more widely available.

Mariam Touba is the Reference Librarian at the New-York Historical Society, March 2012

ENDNOTES

1. Conway, Moncure, The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. I, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1894, pg. 4.
2. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, (New York, 1945), I, 3.
3. Antony Benezet (1713-1784), born in France as a Huguenot, converted to Quakerism in America.
4. Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, March 5, 1787, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
5. James V. Lynch, “The Limits of Revolutionary Radicalism: Tom Paine and Slavery,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, (July 1999) CXXIII, 3, 177.
6. L.H. Butterfield, Rush, Benjamin, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, (Princeton, 1951), II, 1007.
7. John Adams, Collected Works, (Boston, 1850) II, 510. This insistence by Paine to have never written before was a means of protecting his Whig writing group in England starting in 1758. His revolutionary, underground activity using the printing press included a dozen like minded writers of note, and Paine was its leader (proof to be published in January, 2026 in Thomas Paine: Collected Works, in January, 2026.) 
8. L.H. Butterfield, Rush, Benjamin, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, (Princeton, 1951), II, 1008.
9. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, (New York, 1945), I, 89.
10. Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (2 vols., New York, 1892,1893), p. 41.
11. Ibid., p.95.
12. From an unpublished letter to John Fellows, April 18, 1805 in the TPNHA Collection at Iona College.
13. See Appendix for the essay.
14. See Paine’s letters to Jefferson in January, 1805, in Foner, Vol. II, ibid., pgs. 1453-63.
15. Foner, V. II, Letter 3, pg. 82.
16. Original at the Morgan Library.
17. XXX footnotes await access to these books.
18. Lynch for example refers to Paine’s religion as Quakerism. Paine was not a Quaker, but he was exposed to its teachings. See p. 188.
19. Lynch, p. 180.
20. Foner, II, pg. 968.
21. From John Epps, The Life of Thomas Walker (London, 1832), p .142, quoted by Lynch on p. 196.
22. Dr. Smiljana Petrovic of Iona University led the programming to create two packages needed to analyze text.
23. For a detailed look at Paine’s anti-slavery view, see “Identifying “A Slave”: The Iona College Text Analysis Project Explores a Mystifying Letter to Thomas Jefferson”, Gary Berton, Smiljana Petrovic, Michael Crowder, Lubomir Ivanov, in Mark Boonshoft, Nora Slonimsky, and Ben Wright, eds., American Revolutions in the Digital Age (CornellUniversity Press, 2024)
24. Frederick Mosteller (1916-2006) was professor of statistics at Harvard University. David L. Wallace (1928-2017) was professor emeritus of statistics at the University of Chicago. Their feature is one of the 17 features we used in our methodology. Unfortunately, using only one feature only results in less than 50% accuracy, and thus the Federalist Papers, which they tested, are only 50% accurate. That will be a future study, to correct the authorship of the Federalist Papers.

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Part Three of Three Parts 

When most founding members of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association no longer served on the TPNHA board, others joined the association and took active leadership roles. They reflected the founding philosophy and ideas that prevailed at the turn of the century. 

The philosophy of “anarchism” was popular in leftwing circles in the early 1900s. The American socialism advocated by northeastern progressives often mixed with anarchism. Emma Goldman, the ideological lightning rod, advocated an “anarcho-communist” philosophy that did not separate from socialism, per se, until after World War I. 

Edwin C. Walker and Theodore Schroeder stepped into TPNHA leadership in the early 1900s. Walker was presiding at meetings by 1901, becoming vice president as TPNHA incorporated in 1906. Schroeder became the secretary at that time. 

Edwin C. Walker was respected as a political philosopher and outspoken opponent of the Comstock Law. He wrote the 1903 pamphlet, Who is the Enemy: Anthony Comstock or You? 

His 1904 book, Communism and Conscience, espoused free-market anarchism (related then to individualist anarchism, anarcho-capitalism and libertarian socialism). “I can have little faith,” Walker wrote, ”in the professed love of liberty of one who denies to me the opportunity to hear what he or she does not care to hear, just as I can have little faith in the professions of the Censor who denies to me the opportunity to read what he does not care to read.” 

The TPNHA’s leadership had anarchist affiliations beyond Walker. The leading representative and advocate for anarchism, Emma Goldman, had ties to TPNHA’s Ned Foote and William van der Weyde, plus the Manhattan Liberal Club and the Liberal League. 

Theodore Schroeder grew up in Wisconsin, earned an 1898 law degree, practiced in Utah until relocating to New York in 1900. In 1902, Schroeder formed the Free Speech League (precursor of ACLU) with Lincoln Steffens, TPNHA founder Ned Foote. and other progressives. As a lawyer advocating free speech rights and sexual freedom, he defended Emma Goldman at her Comstock trial in Denver circa 1910. 

At the 1905 rededication of the Paine Monument in New Rochelle, the speakers featured Schroeder with surviving TPNHA founders Thaddeus Wakeman and Ned Foote plus the New Rochelle mayor. A year later Schroeder was voted secretary of the TPNHA. 

Schroeder wrote on the legal absurdities of Comstock. The Free Speech League in 1906 published his booklet, What is Criminally “Obscene”? and a three-part, Freedom of the Press and ‘“Obscene’”Literature. He compiled the 1909 Free Press Anthology. He wrote the 1911 book on press freedoms, “Obscene” Literature and Constitutional Law. Years later he wrote two 1945 biographic pamphlets about Thomas Paine. A Paine statuette sat on Schroeder’s desk until he died in 1953. 

Leonard Abbott exemplified a blend of anarchism and socialism among Progressive Era TPNHA leaders in the early 1900s The son of a wealthy English merchant, he read Paine’s Rights of Man as a student before immigrating to the United States in 1898. 

Shortly after arrival in New York, Abbott met anarchist Emma Goldman. He befriended J. William Lloyd, a libertarian individualist anarchist and “natural law” mystic, The pair published Free Comrade from 1900 to 1912. Abbott joined the executive board of the Socialist Party of America in 1900. He joined Eugene V. Debs in leading the Social Democratic Party. He introduced Upton Sinclair to socialism in 1902. Abbott in 1906 joined the founding board of the Rand School. He was active in the TPNHA by 1908 and became president for one year in 1910. 

After the 1909 execution in Spain of freethinker Francisco Ferrer, Abbot worked with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to establish the Ferrer School and colony as educational centers for anarchist philosophy. The school was forced to close after a 1914 anarchist bombing against John D. Rockefeller. Abbott spoke about the bombers killed to a crowd of 5,000.

TPNHA links to activist anarchists could not have happened without the blessings of founder Thaddeus Wakeman, a guiding hand of the association until his passing in 1913. Respected as a political philosopher, T.B. Wakeman was a social progressive with an affinity for anarchist views. A Monist (monism versus dualism), he held that all existence has one origin, so all individuals share natural unity and equality. Wakeman stepped up when needed to become president in 1908 and 1911, meanwhile mentoring younger TPNHA leaders. 

James F. Morton, an anarchist writer, served as the president between Wakeman in 1911 and William van der Weyde in 1914. Morton encapsulated the politics of previous leading board members. He graduated from Harvard with W.E.B. DuBois and became active in the NAACP in opposition to bigotry. A personal friend of writer H.P. Lovecraft, Morton wrote for Truth Seeker, Discontent and Mother Earth. He was part of the Ferrer School in New York City. 

William van der Weyde, a noted photojournalist, succeeded Schroeder as TPNHA secretary in 1909. He served as secretary until becoming president in 1914, serving as president until he died in 1929. His legacy includes locating Paine’s death mask and a lock of his hair, still archived in New Rochelle. 

An innovator in photography for newspapers and night photography, he photographed significant people of his day, such as Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Capt. Alfred Dreyfus of France. 

William van der Weyde and his photographer father were members of the Manhattan Liberal Club. For Mother Earth, he wrote, “Thomas Paine’s Anarchism.” His premise and arguments have since been undercut by modern Paine scholars, yet his anarchist influence is clear. “Paine was an ardent believer in civilization and education,” he wrote. “Were men [sic] but sufficiently civilized, they would have no need for government.” 

More than anarchism, Paine and free thought have united and guided the TPNHA since 1884.

Premiere 1900s events for TPNHA — rededication of the Paine monument in 1905, the 1909 centennial of Paine’s death — were covered by Truth Seeker editor George Macdonald, who succeeded brother Eugene. He led TPNHA committees into the 1910s. 

Honorary TPNHA vice presidents active in the 1910s and 1920s included Ernst Haeckel (German zoologist, Darwinian biologist and Monist with ties to Wakeman); Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner (freethinking English philosopher and peace activist, the daughter of English atheist writer and Member of Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh); Anatole France (Nobel Prize winning author and freethinker); Eden Phillpotts (English novelist, poet and dramatist), Georg Brandes (Danish critic and scholar who advanced realism and naturalism); and William Archer (Scottish author, theatre critic and reformer in London).

The association in 1925 built the Thomas Paine Memorial Building in New Rochelle near the Paine Monument, backed by freethinking inventor Thomas Edison. He became vice president. His advertising manager at New York Edison, Cyril Nast, became the treasurer to manage construction under van der Weyde. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Norman Thomas, a perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate, gave the keynote address. 

TPNHA president van der Weyde took ill shortly after completion of the Memorial Building. He finally died in 1929 at the onset of the Great Depression. The association’s fortunes declined with depleted resources. 

As leaders departed, the association was sustained by well-meaning staffers. The Memorial Building was used by other groups. TPNHA in the 1980s united with the local Huguenot historical group that ran the relocated Paine Cottage museum at the site. 

Paine advocates began to reassert management of the Memorial Building in the 1990s. TPNHA regained independence. The association has evolved substantially since its first four decades, dropping politics and beliefs other than Paine’s own views. 

The formative first 40 years of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association provides the historical memory informing our efforts. A broad-minded board now directs our affairs. We’re renovating the Memorial Building, reviving The Beacon and revamping our website (stay tuned). The association today plays a leading role in Thomas Paine Studies, advancing scholarship on Paine and his impact in world history. We’re a global resource for those researching Paine’s life and works. We’re now preparing for the 2026 release of the six-volume Thomas Paine: Collected Works, coinciding with the 250th anniversary for the publication of Common Sense. 

The association remains an all-volunteer organization supported by the American and world freethought community and friends of Thomas Paine. Educating the public on Paine and his legacy is increasingly vital today. 

Thomas Paine is an inspiring mentor for progressives to libertarians who value reason, freedom of thought and democracy. As T.B. Wakeman said at our founding, we act “to perpetuate the memory and works of Thomas Paine, to obtain and disseminate accurate information about him, to refute the various slanders and fables that have been circulated concerning him.”

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Part Two of Three Parts

Responding to assaults on civil liberties under the 1873 Comstock Act, freethinkers played central roles in the social reform movement opposing abuses of the rich and powerful in the Gilded Age. They were guided by Thomas Paine and Enlightenment Age ideals of democracy, equality and natural rights. 

The TPNHA’s founding board represented the freethinking liberal movement in late 19th century America, which fought Gilded Age repressions. 

Founded in 1884, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association upheld its founders’ philosophical foundations in freethought, free speech, women’s rights, labor organizing, anarchism, and socialism.This shifted after the first world war as society shifted. 

TPNHA founders were tied to the Liberal League, People’s Party of New York and the Populist Party. Many met through the Manhattan Liberal Club, a New York locus for free thought. The People’s Party was an east coast version of agrarian populism, which sprouted among south and west farmers and spread to the trade unions. The TPNHA was formed just before the National Liberal League split into factions. 

The strongest bond uniting the TPNHA founders in 1884 was free thought and the leading freethought newspaper, The Truth Seeker. Nine TPNHA founding members had direct ties to The Truth Seeker’s editor, D.M. Bennett (De Robigne Mortimer Bennett). In 1879, he was arrested and convicted under the Comstock Act for mailing an anti-marriage tract. His sentence was 13 months of hard labor. 

Bennett called on freethinkers when he spearheaded the 1881 fund-raising drive to renovate the vandalized Thomas Paine Monument in New Rochelle, erected in 1839. At the Memorial Day rededication, Bennett delivered a speech and visited the farmhouse where Paine lived before his 1809 death. Bennett died in 1882. 

Meet the TPNHA founders tied to Bennett: 

Thaddeus Wakeman, a former university president, was D.M. Bennett’s lawyer, defending the editor from his Comstock Act prosecution. He was active in New York politics as the President of the Liberal League. Wakeman was the main force behind TPNHA formation, chairing the organizing meeting in the Liberal Club on January 29, 1884, at the club’s annual celebration of Paine’s birthday, a date observed widely by freethinkers. 

Dr. Edward Bond Foote, Jr., established the National Defense Association and worked with the National Liberal League in efforts to repeal Comstock laws and support Comstock Act victims. “Ned” was a founding member of the Free Speech League and Manhattan Liberal Club. He took leadership roles in organizations backing a woman’s right to contraception, defying Comstock morality. He gave financial support to Mother Jones and Emma Goldman. 

Dr. Edward Bliss Foote, Sr., Ned’s father, a free speech activist, was among the very first arrested under Comstock for promoting sexual education and contraception rights. He also ran for the New York Senate under the Populist and People’s Party banners. Ned and his father were personal friends of Bennett. 

Asenath Chase Macdonald, a Civil War widow and freethinker, was among America’s first trained nurses. Her sons joined Bennett at The Truth Seeker. 

Eugene and George Macdonald, the sons of Arsenath, first worked for Bennett as a printer and printer’s devil, respectively. Years later, Eugene with partners bought the enterprise. George became the editor in 1907, serving in the role until 1937. 

A.E. Chamberlain, a People’s Party member and Truth Seeker contributor, was a founder of the National Defense Association along with Dr. E.B. Foote Jr, and T.B. Wakeman. Formed to fight “Comstockery,” NDA evolved into the American Civil Liberties Union. 

Theron Leland, a friend of Bennett, was an abolitionist and among New York’s first “phonographers” (phonetic shorthand stenographer) A member of the National Liberal League and Liberal Club, he staffed the office of the American Industrial Union. 

Wilson MacDonald, a noted sculptor, was a liberal and spiritualist. He created the bust atop the Paine Monument and made the medallion on the D.M. Bennett monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery. He made busts of George Washington, Washington Irving, Wm. Cullen Bryan and others. MacDonald stayed active in the TPNHA through the turn of the century. 

Daniel E. Ryan, another friend of Bennett, was a Liberal League and Liberal Club member. He’s named in the TPNHA founding meeting minutes. 

Louis Freeland Post, not directly tied to Bennett, was a prominent Georgist who upheld Paine’s Agrarian Justice to assert income from land innately belongs equally to all. He was editor of the pro-labor New York Truth. In 1913 Post became Asst. Secretary of Labor under Woodrow Wilson, doing the job until 1921. He witnessed the Bureau of Immigration conducting the Palmer Raids to deport noncitizen immigrants under the 1918 Anarchist Exclusion Act. He could not stop the red-scare witch hunt, but his 1923 memoir called the raids “deportation delirium,” labeling them a “stupendous and cruel fake.” 

Stephen Pearl Andrews was an abolitionist, labor movement advocate and women’s suffrage supporter. A linguist and political philosopher, the “libertarian socialist” and “individualist anarchist” wrote 17 books on personal autonomy and related topics. 

Samuel Porter Putnam, a former Congregational and Unitarian minister, departed Christianity for freethinking. When the Liberal League split, he allied with the American Secular Union. In 1892 Putnam formed the Freethought Federation of America, which in 1895 merged with the American Secular Union. He urged separating church and state. 

Charles P. Somerby was a freethinking New York publisher and bookseller. He published titles like The Ultimate Generalization (a philosophy of science). 

Capt. George Loyd, a Civil War veteran in the Populist Party, for years cared for Paine’s gravesite. 

Two local women are named in the 1884 TPNHA organizing meeting minutes. Mrs. Kate G. Foote, the wife of Dr. Foote Jr., and Mrs. Hannah A. Allen. Their backstories are unknown. 

These are the freethinkers who in 1884 founded the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. In response to renewed repressions in the 20th century, the organization would evolve.

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Part One of Two Parts

In the wake of the Civil War and the attempt at Reconstruction, the capitalist era entered the Gilded Age, where the wealthy monopolized most of the wealth as the working classes became more impoverished. The reactions to the situation resulted in the activist reform movement. At the same time the federal government took the anti-constitutional step of employing religion to repress that reform movement. 

Several groups were forming to oppose the nature of the Gilded Age on such issues as suffrage for women, health services for women, freedom of the press, freethinking, labor organizing, labor rights, race equality, and more. The basic concepts of modern democracy, built on equality, and natural and civil rights, were the foundation of the movement, as established by the life and legacy of Thomas Paine. 

Starting in 1872 and completed in 1873, the Comstock Act brought the weapon of religion against these groups. It was named for Anthony Comstock, a zealous Christian anti-“vice”fanatic who was put in charge of using the Act against the democratic forces emerging to challenge the monopoly of wealth, and the repressive nature of society unfolding. To a large extent, this struggle continues. 

Anthony Comstock was a leader of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose purpose was to uphold “Christian morality”, which opposed obscene literature, abortion, contraception, masturbation, gambling, prostitution, and patent medicine.

Comstock worked through the Postal Department, using local police, on his authority alone, to enforce “morality.” Anyone sending literature through the mails that Comstock disliked was subject to arrest. 

In the same year, and most probably in response, The Truth Seeker magazine was established by D. M. Bennett, with these principles: 

Devoted to: science, morals, free thought, free discussions, liberalism, sexual equality, labor reform, progression, free education and whatever tends to elevate and emancipate the human race. 

Opposed to: priestcraft, ecclesiasticism, dogmas, creeds, false theology, superstition, bigotry, ignorance, monopolies, aristocracies, privileged classes, tyranny, oppression, and everything that degrades or burdens mankind mentally or physically. 

Bennett turned into Comstock’s prime target. In 1878, when Bennett published a piece on free-love, he was imprisoned for nearly a year, destroying his health. Bennett died four years later. (The Truth Seeker today carries on efforts to obtain a posthumous pardon for Bennett.) 

In 1878, eventual TPNHA founders Dr. E.B. Foote, T.B. Wakeman, E.A. Chamberlain, and others founded the National Defense Association (NDA) to organize against the Comstock Law. Formation of the NDA, a forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union, led to dissension in the movement. 

The National Liberal League had been a unifying force in the formative period of progressive thinking, advocating its “Nine Demands of Liberalism.” The demands centered around the separation of church and state, opposition to favoritism shown to religious creeds in government functions. 

The Liberal League in 1884 split into factions over whether social and political issues other than freethought should be included in their agenda. 

A year after Bennett’s death, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association (TPNHA) was formed on January 29, 1884, the anniversary of Paine’s birth. A majority of the Board consisted of people tied to The Truth Seeker. Representing activists who were leading the reform movements, they chose Thomas Paine as the symbol of the democratic struggle, and they created an organization that could coordinate and collaborate on political struggles through one body. 

The leading force in TPNHA’s formation was Thaddeus Wakeman, President of the Liberal University in Oregon and later in Missouri, a leading activist in New York politics, a political philosopher, freethinker, publisher of activist literature.

Liberal League leaders became key leaders in founding the TPNHA. Foote, Wakeman and Chamberlain continued to advocate freethinking in such social issues as free speech. women’s rights, labor struggles, and social justice. Integral to this faction was The Truth Seeker, based in Manhattan. 

TPNHA’s formation triggered a split with the group led by secularist Robert Ingersoll, who formed the American Secular Union. More conservative Ingersoll never joined TPNHA, yet he was a lifelong Paine advocate. 

Formation of TPNHA was part of the developing 19th century drive to inform people about the issues of free speech, labor rights, women’s rights, education, prison reform, and freethought. Thomas Paine was the uniting figure in American history these organizations had in common. The re-establishment of Thomas Paine as a preeminent founding father was part of this public education movement, and that continues today. 

Comstock’s law is still on the books as a relic from the period of repression in 19th century America. The old law is now being revived by the latest movement to abolish women’s reproductive rights along with access to reproductive health information and services.

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By Gary Berton

Frances Wright has been called the “female Thomas Paine.” In important ways, she was. Fanny Wright was the first American feminist, a radical abolitionist, labor champion, powerful public orator, and one of the first philosophers making a public case for freethought. But it does her a disservice to be seen in terms of someone else’s achievements. Even if it’s the incomparable Thomas Paine. 

Fanny Wright deserves her own standing as an American hero and her own place of honor in American memory. 

Frances Wright was born 1795 in Scotland to radical parents who supported the French Revolution and disseminated Rights of Man. Orphaned by three, she was raised by a progressive aunt in England who schooled her in the Enlightenment ideas of French materialists like Denis Diderot, who believed the world is made up of one substance, matter, which can be studied and understood. 

By age 18, Fanny wrote her first book, the classic freethought treatise, A Few Days in Athens, which supported the ideas of Epicurus, the foundational touchstone for Western freethought and the ideals of free government. Inspired by Democritus, Epicurus asserted all matter is made up of tiny particles, called atoms. Wright finished writing her book in 1813, but it was not published at that time. 

In 1818, she traveled to America and toured the new nation for two years, meeting and exchanging views with many of America’s progressive minds. That experience became Views of Society and Manners in America, the 1821 analysis of U.S. society and government that offered insights well ahead of De Tocqueville’s 1835 Democracy in America. The success of Views enabled Wright to get Athens printed in 1822. 

Society and Manners opened doors for Wright. She was introduced in Europe to Lafayette, who admired the book. After a conversation with the author, he admired Fanny’s talent and worldview, as well. 

Wright accompanied Lafayette on his trip to America in 1824. They developed a platonic yet close relationship that led to her meeting Robert Owen in Indiana and visiting New Harmony, America’s first socialist community. Wright embraced the ideals of socialism. She also embraced the need to end slavery to save the soul of America. After Lafayette returned to Europe, Wright stayed and became an American citizen. 

She launched two projects that would define her for decades to come. With Owen, she started The Free Inquirer, the first freethought newspaper in America, and she began a failed attempt to liberate America’s slaves held as chattel property. 

The Free Inquirer set the standard for future freethought periodicals. It served to unite into one philosophical movement the components of progressivism: women’s liberation (including the right to contraception and sexual freedom), abolition of slavery, labor liberation (including socialism), and free universal education. Wright and Owen both embraced these tenets, which were rooted in the works of Thomas Paine. 

Although Paine did not specifically spell out these movements, his legacy led to the birth of these 19th century forces, evidenced by early annual celebrations of Paine’s birthday held in the centers of these movements, a trend Wright herself helped to create. 

In 1825, Wright helped form a multi-racial community near Memphis on land gained through Lafayette. To justify her plan to educate slaves for freedom. Wright wrote, “A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South.” The experiment was plagued with problems — the cost of transporting slaves from Haiti, a free-love atmosphere stirring personal relationship crises, and mismanagement — all leading to its early demise. 

Frances Wright is most renowned for being the first woman orator in America. at a time when women were not accepted as public speakers. Starting in 1829, cresting 1833 to 1836, she toured the USA, speaking on women’s sexual and educational liberation, the abolition of slavery, socialism and the evils of capitalism. Tying it together, she spoke on freethought and the absurdity of organized religion. 

Drawing thousands to her speeches, She spoke in every major city in America, where “Fanny Wright societies” sprang up as centers for a growing social and political movement. Wright’s success made her the target of an alliance between the clergy and press to oppose her. 

Her movement was stymied by being too far ahead of its time, but it produced activists and laid the intellectual groundwork for the latter half of the 19th century when these movements reached maturity. 

Wright married in 1838, at age 43 bearing one child. She soon divorced and spent her remaining years in Ohio, releasing compilations of her lectures. She remained inactive except for her involvement with women’s health issues. She died at age 57 in 1852 and was buried in Cincinnati.

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