Part One of a Three-Part Historiography

Even before Paine’s death, his life was being dissected by those around him on both sides of the Atlantic. The earliest “biographies” of Paine were highly critical, politically-motivated smear campaigns funded by political enemies in high places. Each writer set out to debunk Paine’s major works, especially Common Sense; The Crisis; and the Rights of Man. 

The earliest published works were political hatchet jobs by Paine’s enemies. Francis Oldys, a 1793 biographer, really was George Chalmers, masquerading as a University of Pennsylvania divinity professor. Chalmers painted Paine as a drunken, lazy wife-beater. 

William Cobbett, another British expatriate in America, joined Chalmers in verbally tarring and feathering Paine. Cobbett’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1797) built upon the foundation of Chalmers’ work and quoted heavily from it. 

Like Chalmers, Cobbett offered a running editorial commentary about Paine’s embrace of enlightenment thinking and then picked up with Paine’s life through his release from prison during the French Revolution. Cobbett wrote: 

Whenever or wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow nor compassion… men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous, by a single monosyllable, Paine. 

This statement demands a word about the long and erratic relationship between Cobbett and Paine, the downs and ups of their often parallel lives.

Both were sons of the British working class. Both were successful pamphleteers, although Paine was more commercially successful. Both suffered some degree of egotism and arrogance. 

Cobbett, the angry polemicist, later made a drastic emotional U-turn and disinterred Paine’s corpse from its New Rochelle resting place for an envisioned monument to honour Paine in England, where it was not permitted. 

The Cheetham Biography 

Shortly after Paine died in 1809, his enemies and friends began sharpening their quills. Some spewed vitriol, while others offered praise. 

James Cheetham, the New York publisher of a newspaper called The Citizen, was a colleague of Paine turned bitter foe. Cheetham’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1809) opened with a description of his first meeting with Paine in New York in 1802, shortly after Paine returned to the United States from France. A more unsavory description of the encounter cannot be imagined, which is interesting because Cheetham published Paine’s writing in The Citizen for five years until a falling out (evidently over pay) led to Paine’s refusal to write for him anymore. 

Claiming impartiality, Cheetham wrote that his goal was “neither to please or displease any political party. I have written the life of Mr. Paine, not his panegyrick [sic].” Rather than telling the life of Thomas Paine, Cheetham brought an indictment. 

Cheetham said he’d interviewed many who knew Paine personally, describing them as people of the highest echelons of society. He ridiculed/ Common Sense as “Defective in arrangement, inelegant in diction…” While ostensibly analyzing all of Paine’s writings, Cheetham relentlessly criticized them. 

So vituperative is Cheetham’s tone that one wonders if there’s any value in reading it, but it captures the ethos of the Painehaters, giving a better understanding of the constant bile Paine faced throughout his life in the public eye. 

Harford, Rickman, Sherwin, and Carlile 

Ten years after Paine’s death, a quartet of biographies appeared within months of each other: John S. Harford’s Some Account of the Life, Death, and Principles of Thomas Paine (1819); Thomas Clio Rickman’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1819); W. T. Sherwin’s Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine (1819); and Richard Carlile’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1820). 

Harford picked up where Cheetham left off, offering a scathing portrait of a despicable human being. The other three mounted a defense against the virulent misrepresentations of Paine’s life. Rickman, Sherwin and Carlile actually knew Paine and believed that fear of progressive ideas, not facts, were behind the grotesque portrayals being offered. 

John Harford came from a wealthy British banking family. While he shared Paine’s abolitionist sentiments and began his biography promising to be less vindictive than Cheetham, he unleashed an equally critical diatribe. While conceding that Paine did have “considerable natural talent, ” Harford presented Paine as cruel, unclean, constantly drunk, and miserly. He painted Paine as being possessed of an “inordinate spirit of egotism and selfishness which rendered him incapable of friendship to a single human being.” He described those who befriended Paine as “chiefly low and disreputable persons.” 

Clio Rickman, a lifelong friend of Paine, set out to rescue his friend “from the undeserved reproach… cast upon it by the panders of political infamy.” Rickman knew Paine better than anyone and had much in common with him. He grew up in Lewes, the coastal Sussex town where Paine lived, worked and became politically active between 1768 and 1774. The two men shared Quaker beliefs and a love of books. Rickman eventually moved to London, became a publisher of political pamphlets, and a lifelong friend. 

William Thomas Sherwin, a London publisher, wrote the first unbiased assessment of Paine’s life. For Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine, Sherwin interviewed Paine’s personal and political friends to offer a biography devoid of mudslinging and name-calling. 

Sherwin pointed at Chalmers, who was paid £500 to smear Paine’s reputation. He pilloried Cheetham as a “treacherous apostate” and “illiterate blockhead.” 

One year later Richard Carlile, released The Life of Thomas Paine. Carlile also rebutted Cheetham’s work by presenting an entirely laudatory portrait, built upon the same structure of analyzing each work in counterpoint to Paine’s life at the time of its writing. 

Carlile’s Paine is a man above reproach, a man so honest that he would not let a friend correct one of his grammatical errors, saying, “he only wished to be known as what he really was, without being decked with the plumes of another.” 

Vale and Linton 

These early works cannot be read as traditional biographies, but they prove useful as a way to understand Anglo-American radicalism in the eighteenth-century. Cobbett, Harford, Rickman, and Carlile all lived with one foot in America and the other in Britain. Much like Paine they were “ideological immigrants.” 

A Compendium of the Life of Thomas Paine (1837) by Gilbert Vale was the first biographical study intended to look at Paine through an American lens, untinged by Whig versus Tory politics. Vale was London-born, but he openly tried to remove Paine’s story from friends and foes on European shores. 

Vale wrote from avowed neutrality, determined to neither debase nor laud. He declared, “We are not… about to write a eulogy; to enhance his virtues, or to suppress his faults, or vices. Paine was a part of human nature, and partook of its imperfections.” 

William James Linton’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1841) clearly shows where his sympathies lay. Linton called Paine a “sturdy champion of political and religious liberty.” In subsequent editions, Linton wove in brief profiles with homage quotes from some of Paine’s notable cohorts — such as Benjamin Franklin and Mary Wollstonecraft — to further humanize him. 

By the mid-1800s, Paine had become a man instead of a monster. The dawn of the 20th century would bring a new scrutiny to his life.

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By Richard Briles Moriarty

Thomas Paine and the banning of his works have long been intertwined. Suppression of his Rights of Man by the English government raged as he joined the French National Convention. 

After King Louis XVI was convicted of treason in 1792, Thomas Paine argued that the former king had become “Citizen Louis Capet.” Rather than execute him, Paine said he should be banished to America for immersion and education in republican principles.

During his startlingly bold presentation to the French National Convention, Paine quoted Robespierre’s arguments in 1791 that “the death penalty is essentially unjust and… the most repressive of penalties,” that it “multiplies crimes more than it prevents them” and constitutes “cowardly assassinations” through which one crime is punished by another. 

As Marat assaulted Paine’s arguments, Robespierre remained silent, but likely gritted his teeth as Paine quoted his own eloquent and unanswerable plea against capital punishment. Paine’s persuasiveness nearly turned the tide. 

Paine’s position was dramatically more radical than that of Robespierre and Marat. Instead of treating Louis as a king gone bad, Paine proposed, consistent with his arguments since Common Sense, that all kings, simply because they are kings, are tyrants. 

Paine’s arguments were dangerous to the increasing yet tenuous dominance of Robespierre and the Jacobins. His plea not to kill the king was published by the French government in 1792, yet Paine’s efforts resulted in his 1793 imprisonment. 

Now jump ahead in time. Gutzon Borglum, designer of Mount Rushmore, sculpted an eight-foot statue of Paine for unveiling in Paris on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1937. The statue showed Paine pleading to the National Convention to spare Louis Capet. 

When Nazi Germany conquered France, the statue was hidden from the Vichy Government, which at the instigation of the Nazis ordered removal of all “statues and monuments of copper alloys situated in public places and administrative locales,” purportedly “to recycle the metallic components for industrial production.” The real purpose was sending metals to Germany for recycling into military uses. 

In 1945, W.E. Woodward predicted that Borglum’s hidden statue would be unveiled in Paris in the near future, which it was in 1948. Despite plans for moving the statue to America, it remains far more appropriately in Paris on display in Parc Mountsouris. 

During World War II, Borglum’s statue was at risk less because Paine’s books were banned by the Nazis — although they were — and more because military lust demanded metal. 

Governments purportedly devoted to free speech are hardly immune to banning Pane’s books. 

R. Wolf Baldassarro observed in a 2011 blog post, “Banned Books Awareness: Thomas Paine,” that Common Sense in the 1950s was barred from U.S. Information Service libraries during the McCarthy era by the government of the United States of America, the country whose name and perhaps existence Paine created through that very pamphlet. 

For more than a quarter-century, from 1795 to 1822, Paine’s The Age of Reason was banned in the United Kingdom, reports The Banned Books Compendium by Grigory Lukin. He noted that an English publisher of The Age of Reason was sentenced in 1797 to a year of hard labor. 

In 1819, Richard Carlile was prosecuted because he included The Age of Reason in a collection of Paine’s works. Carlile read the entire book into the court record, ensuring even wider publication. He then was sentenced to a year in prison. Carlile actually served six years, Lukin wrote, because “he refused any ‘legal conditions’ on his release.” 

Lukin identified the 32 books most often banned worldwide. Two of those books, Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, were authored by Paine. 

As true from Common Sense forward, governments purporting to support democracy and free speech will resist the radical impact of Paine’s thoughts. People themselves can seek out his thoughts, absorb and act on them, a bottom-up legacy which would make Paine rejoice. 

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“Remarks on Thomas Paine” at Iona College in New Rochelle, October 19, 2012 [an edited transcript excerpt]

On being asked ten years ago to speak to the Thomas Paine National Historical Association here in New Rochelle, I assumed that it would be a simple matter of stringing together the literary equivalent of a laurel wreath and setting it upon the head of a statue. It had been several years since I’d read The Age of Reason or Rights of Man, but in my own writing I’d borrowed more than one of Paine’s lines of argument, often unwittingly, nearly always to good effect, and I didn’t think I’d have much trouble placing the figure of Paine on the pedestal of the heroic American past. 

Before appearing on the lectern I fortunately took the precaution of re-reading Common Sense, and instead of finding myself in the presence of a marble portrait bust I met a man still living in what he knew to be “the undisguised language of historical truth,” leveling a fierce polemic against a corrupt monarchy that with no more than a few changes of name and title, could as easily serve as an indictment of the complacent oligarchy currently parading around Washington in the costumes of a democratic republic. 

Invariably in favor of a new beginning and a better deal, Paine was speaking to his hope for the rescue of mankind in a voice that hasn’t been heard in American politics for the last forty years, and the old words brought with them the sound of water in a desert: 

When it shall be said in any country in the world, ‘My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want; the taxes are not oppressive…’ when these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and its government. 

Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor?

The abundance of Paine’s writing flows from his affectionate and generous spirit. During the twenty years of his engagement in both the American and French revolutions, he counts himself “a friend of the world’s happiness,” believing that the strength of government and the happiness of the governed is the freedom of the common people to mutually and naturally support one another. 

Republican democracy he conceived as a shared work of the imagination among people of disparate interests, talents and generations, and therefore as the holding of one’s fellow citizens in thoughtful regard, not because they are beautiful or rich or famous, but because they are one’s fellow citizens….. 

The force of Paine’s writing is of a match with his purpose, which is to empower his readers with the confidence to know the value of their own minds. He frames his thoughts in language plain enough to be understood by everybody in the room, his remarks addressed not only to the learned lawyer and the merchant prince but also to the ship chandler, the master mechanic and the ale-wife. Paine’s writing is revolutionary because it is a democratic means to a democratic end…. 

Unlike the political theorists employed by our own self-important news media, Paine doesn’t think it the duty of the political writer to keep things running quietly and smoothly. His aim is to arm ordinary individuals with the weapon with which to defend themselves against organized deception and arbitrary power. The intention is explicit in the composition of Common Sense, which is why it excited so welcome a response among readers everywhere in the colonies when it was published in January 1776.

Lewis Henry Lapham edited Harper’s Magazine from 1976 to 1981, and 1983 to 2006. He founded Lapham’s Quarterly to focus on history and literature.

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