The complete essay from the TPNHA Collection:

Although pious legends picture Thomas Paine as terrified of death, his only fear was lest he should live too long, and suffer like his parents from helpless age. When at length death was plainly approaching his only dread was excited by the zealous aggressions of proselytizers, whose eagerness for some miraculous manifestations from heaven or hell, at the death bed of the famous deist was likely, he foresaw, to fabricate a fabulous fulfillment. He therefore sent for the widow of friend Elihu Palmer, who had been left in poverty, to watch beside him till his death. His next anxiety was lest fanatics, in their disappointment that he was neither converted nor carried off by Satan, should subject his body to indignities, and, his parents having been Quakers, he requested burial in the Friends’ graveyard in New York. This was refused solely because of his deism, nothing whatever being alleged against his character. He was buried at New Rochelle on the farm presented to him by the State of New York at the close of the Revolution because of his services in that struggle.

And even then Paine entered on his posthumous career. There was no Quaker formula against deism, and the refusal of a grave to Paine, resented by some members of that Society, began a controversy which as I believe resulted twenty years later in a split, and the establishment of the rationalistic Society now known as “Hicksite Quakers”.

A plain headstone was placed at Paine’s grave, but bits of it were chipped away by visitors. A Fragment is sometimes shown at Paine’s celebrations in New York, and the destruction of the headstone ascribed to orthodox vandalism. But Gilbert Vale, who in 1837 edited The Beacon, said in that paper that it was done by “admiring visitors”. In his paper of July 15, 1837, Vale says: “After Cobbett violated the grave, and removed the bones from the remains of Paine, the headstone as broken, and pieces successively removed by different visitors; one large fragment was preserved by a lady in an opposite cottage, in which Mr. Paine had sometimes boarded; but this fragment gradually suffered diminution, as successive visitors begged a piece of what they could no longer steal. To preserve the last remnant the lady has had it plastered up in a wall.” The cottage alluded to is the Bayeaux house, and the lady Mrs. Badeau, who lived there with her mother, the widow Bayeaux, when Paine was a boarder. Her son, Mr. Albert Badeau, whom I visited in New Rochelle in 1891, preserved various relics of Paine. He saw Cobbett’s workmen digging up Paine’s bones about dawn.

In September 1819 Cobbett wrote from America a public letter to Lord Folkstone in which he advised him to read Paine’s “Decline and Fall of the British System of Finance”: “and then blush at the use of the words ‘Lower Orders’; blush to think that this man, born in humble life, knew more than all the ‘higher orders’ put together. Yet while such a fellow as pensioned Johnson, ‘that slave of state’, stands in colossal marble in St. Paul’s, Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America. There, however, he shall not lie, unnoticed, much longer. He belongs to England. His fame is the property of England; and if no other people will show that they value that fame, the people of England will. Yes, my Lord, among the pleasures that I promise myself, is that of seeing the name of Paine honoured in every part of England, where base corruption caused him, while alive, to be burnt in effigy. Never will England be what it ought to be until the marble of Pitt’s monument is converted into a monument to the memory of Paine.”

In the same month the remains were dug up. “Our expedition”, wrote Cobbett, “set out from New York in the middle of the night; got to the place (twenty-two miles off) at peak of day; took up the coffin entire; and just as we found it, goes to England. Let it be considered the act of the Reformers of England, Scotland and Ireland. In their name we opened the grave, and in their name will the tomb be raised.” (Cobbett’s Register xxxv. P.382.) According to The Beacon (Dec. 27,1845) a little finger of Paine was left in America, and was “in the possession of a friend <?Quaker> on Long Island.”

In Manordes’s “Biographical Treasury” it is said, “Many however assert that Cobbett did not take that trouble, but brought over from America the remains of a criminal who had been executed.” There is not however the slightest room for doubt on this point. Not only did Mr. Albert Badeau of New Rochelle witness the removal of the coffin, but the grave itself long bore the like witness. Dr. Clair J. Grece of Redhill has sent me an extract from a diary kept by his uncle Danial Constable while in America, who visited the grave on July 26,1822, and says “The grave is surrounded by a stone wall 16 feet by 12 and l8 inches thick, about 4 feet high. The grave is sunk in about the depth of a coffin. Some of the neighbors aided the three men who came with a wagon a little before day. They say had the proper authorities had known in time they would prevented the outrage.”

An aged Quaker informed me that a number of “Friends” who were on the “Elizabeth” when Cobbett came aboard with the big box, at New York, left the ship on learning its contents; but those who looked for a striking judgment on the vessel were disappointed. Cobbett with his strange freight landed at Liverpool on November 21,1819.

Before relating the adventures of Paine’s bones it may be of interest to record that the project of a monument to Paine at New Rochelle originated in 1837 with Gilbert Vale, who compiled a biography of Paine, and Mrs. Badeau, who, with her mother Mrs. Bayeaux, – both orthodox, – preserved an affectionate memory of the author and his sojourn as a boarder in their home at New Rochelle. The graceful monument was designed by John Frazee, an eminent architect, gratuitously, and was constructed at James’s marble works in New Rochelle. The portrait was cut from a medal of the time, owned by a Mr. Gill and is – or was- a good likeness. The monument is not exactly over the grave but near its head. The farmer into whose hands the surrounding land had passed would not permit the committee to reach the twelve square feet which had been reserved inviolably for Paine’s grave, by Madame Bonneville, so they had to purchase, at a cost of $50, twenty square feet of ground at the corner of the road and the lane leading to Paine’s house. The largest subscription for the monument was that of Hiram Parker, $30, the others having mostly one dollar each. The total cost, including the land, was $1,634. The monument was erected in November 1839, in the presence of about fifty persons, but without any formalities or speeches.

The reaction caused by the French Revolution was beginning to subside when Cobbett brought to England the bones of its famous outlaw, who, the Attorney General had declared in 1792, should never enter the country again except in vinculis. The “Painites” were reviving interest in their hero, and Richard Carlile had just been sent to prison for publishing the “Age of Reason”. And by the way, soon after his arrival Cobbett visited Carlile in gaol: the prisoner said “Ah, had I been in America, they would not have thrown me in prison.” “No”, replied Cobbett, “they would have tarred and feathered you.”

Cobbett’s enterprise was met with mingled wrath and ridicule. Probably most people now have no association with the incident except the four lines of Byron (following an equally cynical epitaph on Pitt) in a letter to Moore, from Ravcuna, Jan. 2,1820

“In digging up your bones, Tom Paine, Will Cobbett has done well: You visit him on earth again, He’ll visit you in hell.”

“Pray”, adds Byron, “let not these versiculi go forth with my name except among the initiated, because my friend H. has foamed into a reformer, and I greatly fear will subside into Newgate.” Even while the poet was writing, his friend H. – John Cam Hobhouse – was already in Newgate. It was for a pamphlet on Lord Erskine, so severely contrasting his earlier with his reactionary position, that it must almost have seemed to summon Paine as a Banquo at the feast of his once noble defender, but afterwards ennobled prosecutor. In fact Byron, in his Southern retreat, interested only in his alter ego Don Juan, was little aware of the political situation in England, and took the laughter over Paine’s bones to be more genuine than it was. The merriment was not that of the Tories, but rather an effort of the old Whigs to hooh-pooh an incident fallen at the most serious crisis since the French Revolution.

In August had occurred the terrible suppression of the mass meeting at Manchester (“Peterloo”). The trials of the Carliles and other heretical publishers and writers were filling the radicals with consternation. The storm was rising concerning Queen Caroline around whom the liberals were gathering with intense wrath against the Prince Regent whose full reign was at hand. Eight days after the arrival of Paine’s bones at Liverpool three different Bills were introduced into Parliament, all heavily loaded guns aimed against the recovery by the people of rights lost during the French revolution – the Seditious Meetings Bill, the Training Prevention Bill, and the Blasphemous Libels Bill. The promoters of these measures were not slow in availing themselves of the Paine-Cobbett incident. On December2 Mr. Wilmot made a strong point of it in the House of Commons:

“Does anybody advocate the principle of these meetings? If such a man exists it can only be in the person of the individual just returned from America, who has dug up the unhallowed bones of the blasphemer, and has brought them to this country for the purpose of creating a frenzied feeling in favour of his projects, and like old John Ziska, who desired that his skin be made into a drum to rouse his countrymen, wished to stir up impiety and disaffection by the exhibition of this mummery to the initated people of this country.”

After that, the Whig ridicule began, as if by mot d’ordre, and on December 17 a leading opponent of the government Bills, Earl Grosvenor, utilized the ridicule to prove them unnecessary:

“To prove still further the feelings by which people are actuated, I beg leave to mention the way in which a posthumous production, the bones of Thomas Paine, has been treated in this country. The person by whom that vile experiment has been tried found that he had a little mistaken the feeling and character of the people of England. Was there ever any subject treated with more laughter, contempt, and derision than the introduction of these miserable bones, – whether the bones of Thomas Paine or not I will not undertake to decide.”

Mr. Edward Smith of Walthamstow, Cobbett’s able biographer, does not share my suspicion that this ridicule was artificial. He says that Paine’s religious heresies had obliterated his political ideas.” In England he was known by his theology; and was branded as an Atheist by the hirelings who could not, or dare not try to refute him.” He reproaches Cobbett for not knowing that such things do not strike or interest the English mind. But two years later the performance was imitated by the importation in a ship of what was left of the bones of Major Andre for burial in Westminster Abbey, and Cobbett wrote: “All the differences between me and the Duke of York is, that I bring home the bones of an Englishman famed throughout the world for his talents and writings; and that the Duke brings home the bones of one who was hanged as a spy.” As for the ridicule, it was, apart from newspaper paragraphs, chiefly represented by some anonymous rhymes written with skill, but with an affectation of rudeness, and printed in the cheapest form. The date of the first effusion in December1 819, about three weeks after the bones were heard of in London, and it was entitled, “The Political House that Jack Built”. In a picture Cobbett is seen in a boat marked “Rights of Man”, seated on a coffin, and rowed by two Negroes.

“B is a boat that used to ply Across the Brooklyn Ferry; To Market Slip that’s called the Fly, A pretty kind of wherry.

“And ’tis constructed on a plan That’s best to cut the waves: The name of it is rights of man, And rowed by Negro slaves.

“This boat Bill Cobb hired for a week, And entered on a trip, A passage over sea to seek In Merchant Brig or Ship

“A coffin with him too he took When Paine’s Bones lay in state, And tried each bark from Sandy Hook, In vain – quite to Hell’s Gate.

“And thither was his utmost scope, Nor farther has he been; The massive door refused to ope Just yet – to let him in.”

Another piece is headed “sketches of the Life of Billy Cobb and the death of Tommy Pain”. The woodcut here shows Cobbett under an apple tree, his hat on the ground full of apples, with Paine’s skeleton on one side seizing him by the throat, and on the other the Devil touching him on the shoulder. The muses tell that when Paine was dying the Devil appeared and said his skull was now to be buried “for ever and ever.”

“One boon and only one I crave”, Said Thomas with a sigh, “Let it be till there pass my grave A caitiff worse than I.”

The Devil thinks it quite safe to agree to this, but when Cobbett touches the grave Paine springs up, and attacks him on old scores, for Cobbett had reproduced “Oldys”‘ libels in America, and was connected to Painism only in after years. The Devil is at first rather pleased with the fight, being afraid that he may be “superceded” on his throne by one of them, but finally he reconciles them in view of the mischief they can do in England. Another woodcut shows Cobbett, coffin on shoulder; and next we see the ship.

“E for Elizabeth doth stand And that’s a vessel’s name, That lately sailed from Yankey-Iand And to the Mersey came.”

Another hand identified in Notes and Queries, Feb. 29, 1868 as Thomas Rodd, Sr., (“John English” is the pseudonym) wrote an “Ode on the Bones of the Immortal Thomas Paine, newly transported from America to England by the no less immortal William Cobbett, Esq. Hic labor hic opus. Great Paine for little trumpery.” (4 to pp 8). This privately printed poem (now very rare) tries at points to be satirical, without much success; it is severe on Paine’s theological negations, but discloses a certain admiration for the arch-heretic. I quote a specimen:

“No Judge or Jury does he fear, Nor e’en the Attorney General’s frown Nor dread lthuriel with his spear Can knock this doughty Champion down.

‘Tis cowardice to strike the slain, ‘Tis cowardice to strike Tom Paine High high in dust the hero lies, And from his narrow box his face defies.

Who shall the great Arch-Flamen be Of this new god? Upon whose shrine Let brass and farthing candles shine; His pen once gain’d the victory,

And still victorious reigns, in spite Of all the Bishop could indite: None but the mighty hand of Law Against this daring Chief the quill could prosperous draw.”

Whether under more auspicious circumstances Cobbett could have received any enthusiasm for Paine can now be only a matter of conjecture. In 1820 George the Third, born in the same year with Paine, gave a fatal blow to all interest in his bones by dying on Paine’s birthday, January 29. Thenceforth popular feeling was entirely occupied with the sufferings of Queen Caroline and the affairs of George IV. Cobbett at once began his efforts to get into Parliament, and Paine’s bones were stored away and forgotten for many a long year. It appears, however, that he occasionally exhibited the bones. The Rev. Gerald Davies, of Charterhouse, wrote to the “Surrey Times”, Feb. 2, 1889, that he was told by the late James Wyatt, of Bedford, geologist, that in boyhood, being at Normandy Farm, Cobbett’s last residence, he said, “Is it true you keep the bones of Tom Paine, the infidel?” Cobbett replied, “What do you know about Tom Paine?” But he took the boy up stairs and showed him the bones. William Cobbett dies June 18, 1835, at Normandy Farm, near Guilford. His son J.P. Cobbett found himself unable to pay off his father’s debts and his own, and the effects were sold by Thomas Piggott at auction in the autumn of the same year, on the premises. This information was communicated to the “Surrey Times”, Jan. 19, 1889,b y D.M. Stevens, who adds:

“My informants, who were present at the sale, told me that a box was pointed out as containing the remains of Paine, and they believed that the box and its contents were described in the catalogue, and that some allusion being made to the fact, the auctioneer refused to bring the lot under the hammer. What eventually became of the box and its contents is an unsolved problem, and, notwithstanding my own efforts to solve it, had better to remain so. The whole subject is a painful one, and I have no doubt that Cobbett, of whom we Surrey men have abundant reason to be proud, often regretted that he had not left the noted Freethinker’s bones to remain in their original American resting-place.”

Gilbert Vale, who was in correspondence with English freethinkers, stated in “The Beacon”, Dec.27, 1845, “The bones fell into the hands of an elderly female, a nurse in Cobbett’s family, and by her given or sold to Lta King’s gardener.'” Lord King, who died two years before Cobbett, was a nobleman who held many opinions in common with Paine. His residence, Ockham, was not far from that of Cobbett.

I have a letter (autograph) written by Gilbert Vale, Aug. 20, 1860, in which he says: “Cobbett did take the bones of Paine to London: they are in the hands of the friends of Paine, who will one day put a monument up to him. I saw some of the parties in charge of them in 1848, and I have a pamphlet on the subject which I suppose I brought from England in that year.”

The pamphlet was: “A Brief History of the Remains of the late Thomas Paine, from the time of their disinterment in 1819 by the late William Cobbett M.P., down to the year 1846. London: J. Watson, 1847” pg.8.

I was acquainted with James Watson, and gave the address at his burial, in 1874. He was an able and exact man, and as he no doubt wrote the pamphlet himself, the following statements in it were undoubtedly those Watson received from Benjamin Tilly, – a tailor, and a factotum of Cobbett in London. According to the pamphlet Cobbett brought the coffin-plate, inscribed “Thomas Paine, died June 8, 1809, aged74 years.” (Both Watson and Tilly would certainly know that laine was- born January 29, 1737, and this pres6rvation of an error as to his age, probably due to Madame Bonneville who ordered the coffin, is a certificate of the genuineness of this plate, which must still be in existence.) Cobbett placed Paine’s remains for a short time “in the keeping of a well known friend of his in Hampshire” (Lord King?), but they were brought to London, and remained in Cobbett’s house, Bolt Court, until January 1833, when Tilly sent them to Normandy Farm. There they remained until Cobbett’s death (June 18, 1835). James Paul Cobbett (his son and executor) inscribed his own name in several places on the skull, and on the larger bones. This gentleman was charged with insolvency by one Jesse Oldfield, who had been his father’s shopman, and the litigation resulted in the appointment of a receiver for the Normandy Farm estate, George West, a neighboring farmer. In January 1836, when Cobbett’s effects were sold at his Farm, the auctioneer refused to offer Paine’s remains, and they were retained by the receiver to await the orders of the Lord Chancellor, who, on the subject being mentioned to him in Court, refused to recognize them as part of the estate, or to make any order. Georgel West’s receivership ended in 1839. After keeping Paine’s remains nine years, he ascertained that Tilly wished to carry out Cobbett’s intentions concerning them, and he therefore, saysW atson, conveyed them in March, 1844, to Mr. Tilly (13 Bedford Square, East, London) “by whom they will in all probability be kept, until a public funeral of them can be arranged.”

In “Notes & Queries”, January 25, 1868, a writer signing “A Native of Guilford” states that in the summer of 1849 he saw Paine’s bones in a box in the house of John Chennell, corn merchant in Guilford, who told him that they had been purchased at the Cobbett sale at Ash by someone ignorant of the contents of the chest. A writer in the “Surrey Times”, January 19, 1889, states that the same merchant, Chennell, possessed a porcelain jar, with parchment cover inscribed “The GreatP aine’s Bones”, but that “only a few bones were inside the jar”. To this the Surrey editor adds: A correspondent from the United States was assured that in 1849 they were lying in the cellar of Mr. Chennell’s house, and inquiries are being anxiously made in the States for any authentic information as to them..” This American correspondent had probably got his information from the “Native of Guilford” in “Notes & Queries”, which can hardly be correct. It does not harmonize with the porcelin jar story, and the latter is inexact; the sale was not at Ash, but on the Normandy Farm premises. Chennell may have kept the remains for some years for the receiver George West, but if any were there in 1849 it could only have been a few of the bones which, as will presently appear got separated from the rest. In that year they were seen in possession of Benjamin Tilly.

About 1860 Tillv died in the house of a Mr. Ginn, wood-merchant, Bethnal Green, and left with him a number of Cobbett’s MMS. and Paine relics, but apparently without careful information. According to a statement made to me by Mr. George Reynolds of 23 Stepney Green, his attention was called to these relics in 1879 by a daughter of Mr. Ginn, who was a member of the Baptist Church of which he (Reynolds) was then minister. He purchased the box of papers and relics which proved to be the MSS. Of Cobbett, and some of the brain and hair of Paine, of which Mr. Reynolds is still in possession. From these papers he ascertained that Tilly had owned Paine’s skeleton, and he at once inquired about it. Mrs. Ginn said that in cleaning the room after Tilly’s death she found a lot of bones in a large bag and sold them to a rag-and-bone collector. Mr. Reynolds says she did not appear to know they were human bones. Mr. Ginn, however, knew they were human, and said it was “a skeleton with the exception of the skull and leg or arm.”

On hearing this story of Mrs. Ginn it struck me that there was an accent of sophistication about it. The rag-and-bone collector must have known they were-human bones, if she did not. She may have expected to gain some credit with the Baptist pastor for having turned the remains of “Tom Paine” into more rubbish and dust. I have since discovered that her story is not true, and also, what Mr. Reynolds did not know, that the skull and right hand of Paine had indeed, before Tilly’s death, been removed and gone on a career of their own.

It is probable that Tilly never. knew that any of the bones had been removed from the box. Mr. Joseph Cowen (of the “Newcastle Chronicle”) tells me that about 1853-54 he was consulted by James Watson concerning the propriety of a public burial of Paine’s bones at Kensal Green. Watson said they were in the possession of a tailor who kept them in a box on which he sat while at work.. Mr. Cowen went with Watson to the shop of the tailor who however was not at home. On his next visit to London he again went to the place, but the tailor had removed without leaving any address. Mr. Cowen says it was in the neighborhood of Red Lion Square, and he does not remember he name; but it was no doubt Tilly, who might have been temporarily working in that neighborhood. Mr. Cowen never heard of the matter again, but he remembers asking James Paul Cobbett about the bones, and finding that he knew not what had become of them, and evidently did not wish to talk on the subject.

In December 1874 I inserted in the “National Reformer” an inquiry concerning Paine’s remains. I received the same week a note from Mr. James Dickens of Denham Vila, Guilford, who said that he had made inquiries there, but could only learn that at the Cobbett sale “there was no bidder” for the box and its contents. My inquiry, however, was taken up, and Mr. J. Darbyshire of Manchester, in a letter of September 18, 1875, to “The Secular Chronicle” (London) suggested that “Messrs. Bradlaugh, Watts, G.L. Holyoake, Foote, Mrs. Law and Mrs. Besant, and others should be requested to look after the remains of Thomas Paine and conduct a public funeral, and that a monument be erected over his grave.” Mr. Darbyshire was “sure that sufficient cash would be obtained for so good an object.” Therein he was no doubt right, but Paine’s remains were not discovered.

Meanwhile, however, a lecture I gave in London in 1876 on Thomas Paine attracted the attention of Edward Truelove, the veteran publisher rationalist literature, who wrote me (Dec. 2,1876) that in 1853 or 1854 the Rev. Robert Ainslie came into his shop in the Strand, and observing Paine’s Works “volunteered the very startling information that he, the Rev. Robert Ainslie – of all men! – had in his possession the skull and right hand of Thomas Paine, but did not say how he came by them, evading my question.”

Mr. Ainslie was not aware that Mr. Truelove knew his name, but the bookseller recognized him as the Secretary of the London City Mission, under whose auspices many years before a course of lectures had been given in Eagle Street Chapel against “Infidel Socialism”. Mr. Ainslie gave one of the lectures, and Mr. Truelove was naturally startled that any remains of Paine should have fallen into such orthodox hands. However, he did not mention to Mr. Ainslie that he recognized him. But on a later occasion, when the minister again entered his shop (removed to Holborn) he asked him what had become of Paine’s bones, and his question was not answered.

Mr. Ainslie probably became the owner of Paine’s skull and right hand before George West brought the box to Benjamin Tilly. His daughter Margaretta (first wife of the late Sir Russell Reynolds) having received an inquiry of mine addressed to her father (1877) who died before it arrived, answered:

“Mr. Thomas Paine’s bones were in our possession. I remember them as a child, but I believe they were lost in the various movings which my father had some years ago. I can find no trace of them, but if I do by more inquiries.”

I heard nothing more from Mrs. Russell Reynolds, and she died in 1880. The late Sir Russell Reynolds had, as he lately wrote me, “an obscure recollection of having seen the bones of a hand a great many years ago.” As Margaretta Ainslie was married in 1852, her childhood recollections probably extended into the years preceding 1844, when Watson says the bones were brought to London. This marriage took place at Fromer House, Bromley, Kent, where Mr. Ainslie resided at the time, and it is not Improbable that his near neighbor, Charles Darwin, inspected the skull of his predecessor in heresy. But it is a more picturesque reflection that eventualities should have brought Paine’s skull back to the vicinity of his favourite haunt, -the so-called “Tom Paine Tree”, an ancient oak in the grounds of the old Bishop’s Palace.

As this tree has not, I believe, been mentioned in any book, it may interest the reader to know that there is such a tree, and that it is said by long tradition to be the favourite resort of Paine while writing the “Age of Reason”. I recently visited the tree, in company of Mr. Coles Childs, present owner of Bromley Palace. The trunk, about 25 feet in girth at the ground, is entirely hollow, but the foliage is ample, and there is hardly a dead branch. As a matter of history Paine did pass some time in Bromley, and a very intelligent watchmaker there, Mr. How, told me that he remembers his aged father pointing out the rather handsome residence, “Church Cottage”, as that in which Paine resided. There is no evidence that Paine wrote any part of the “Age of Reason” at Bromley, but it is not improbable. In my historical introduction to the “Age of Reason”, just published, I have shown that parts were written long before its publication; the subject was always near his heart, and he was fond of discussing it with his neighbors. In the early months of 1792 Paine was residing with his publisher, Clio Rickman, at 7 Upper Marylebone Street (still a bookbinding with the old bookshelves remaining), where the swarming of radicals left too little leisure for writing. “Mr. Paine goes out of town tomorrow to compose what I call Burke’s funeral sermon”, says John Hall in his diary, April 20,1792. This was at Bromley, where, on May l4, he heard of the summons of the publisher of “Rights of Man”, and hastened to London, and claimed the right to stand in the publisher’s place. He then doubtless resumed work at Bromley, and one may indulge the picturesque legend that there in “Church Cottage”, which was ecclesiastical property, and beneath the giant oak on the bishop’s grounds, this heresiarch worked on the book that was to shake temples. From the “Tom Paine Tree” one may almost see Down homestead, where Darwin still more shook the temples, though the most venerable of them became his monument.

The Rev. Robert Ainslie had a brother who was an eminent veterinary surgeon, and in his professional or some other capacity was, I am told, connected with the estate of Lord King at Ockham, not far from Cobbett’s place. It was through him that the Rev. Robert Ainslie heard of Paine’s bones. His son. Mr. Oliver Ainslie, tells me that the remains were then in the rooms of the auctioneer Richards( 43 Rathbone Place) “for sale”, and that the skull and right hand were there purchased by his father. It is thus clear that all of the facts were not known to Tilly and Watson. In Watson’s pamphlet it is stated that the bones were brought up to London by George West and given to Tilly, at 13 Bedford Square East. But Benjamin Tilly’s name does not appear at that place in the directories of the time; indeed it does not appear at all until 1852. It seems possible that the tailor had no such fixed residence as would carry as his name into the directory, and that he confided the box of bones to the auctioneer Richards until he had a house of his own. If so Richards, or some subordinate, may have abstracted th e skull and hand and sold them to Mr. Ainslie, Tilly remaining ignorant of the trespass. It is possible, however, that the skull and hand had been sold by West the receiver to Chennell of Guilford before the remains were brought to Tilly, who did not examine them. Mr. Edward Smith tells me that he “interviewed” the son of Chennell in 1877, and heard that Paine’s bones had been sold, and brought 7s 6d. Mr. Truelove says that when he told Watson that Ainslie had the skull he smiled in credulously, yet amid all the tangle of conjectures the certainties are that Tilly had the skeleton without the skull and right hand, a portion of the brain and several pieces of hair, and that Ainslie possessed the cranium and right hand.

Mr. Oliver Ainslie remarked that the smallness and delicacy of Paine’s hand were such that the late Professor John Marshall, of the Royal College of Surgeons, at first thought it the hand of a female. “The head was also small for a man, and of the Celtic type I should say, and somewhat conical in shape, and with more cerebellum than frontal development.” ‘Some little time after his father’s death the skull and hand were brought from 7l Mornington Road, where the Rev. Robert Ainslie had resided, to Mr. Oliver Ainslie’s house 48 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, whence they were taken away by a Mr. Penny, to whom had been confided some arrangements of the room containing them for a new tenant. Mr. Oliver Ainslie became interested in the remains only when too late to save them, and has not been able to find Mr. Penny, nor does he know his full name. He fears that Penny may have disposed of the skull to one of the wastepaper dealers nearby. But this appears to me improbable. Every physician must possess a skull, which is worth more than a wastepaper dealer would pay. This skull of Paine also had the name of J.P. Cobbett written, or perhaps scratched, on it. If an obvious remark may be forgiven, Mr. Penny would hardly be so pound foolish as to dispose of a skull so inscribed as mere rubbish, and it is probable that Paine’s skull is now in some doctor’s office or craniological collection.

The Rev. Robert Ainslie, whom I met at Brighton in 1863, was a man of ability, and my conjecture would be that his purchase of Paine’s skull may have been due to an interest in phrenology, were it not that he bought the hand also. Mr. George Jacob H lyoake tells me that he spoke to Mr. Ainslie about these bones, but that the minister did not wish his name publicly connected with them at the time. There were sufficient reasons for this, but they have long since passed away.

Mr. Ainslie had been, it will be remembered, an official member of the City Mission, which consists of men belonging to different denominations, but has a reputation of being very strict about their orthodoxy. Mr. Ainslie’s orthodoxy was assailed by some of his fellow-labourers in the City Mission, and though he warmly resented this at the time it would appear that his assailants saw the tendencies of some of his views more clearly than himself, for some years after the controversy he became (1860) minister of a liberal chapel at Brighton, where he remained until 1870. Mr. Ainslie had come into possession of Paine’s skull some years before his orthodoxy was called in question, and the hue and cry might have been disagreeably renewed had it reached the public that while Secretary of the City Mission he had the bones of the terrible “Tom Paine” in his house.

It appears certain that when he purchased the skull and hand, Mr. Ainslie was quite unconscious of any heretical symptoms. If it were admissible for Painites to believe in the potency of saintly relics they might point to the fact that Paine’s skull fell into the hands of an orthodox member of the City Mission, and Paine’s brain into those of an orthodox Baptist Minister (Rev. George Reynolds), and that both of these ministers subsequently became unorthodox. And indeed it seems not improbable that these relics may have contributed something to the result, by exciting in the two divines some curiosity to know what thoughts had played through the lamp whose fragments had come into their possession. And it is difficult for one who reads the “Age of Reason” to remain precisely the simple believer he was before.

That Paine’s skull is still somewhere in London is highly probable, and were any found with the name “Cobbett” on it its genuineness could be easily proved by another word or two on it which for the present I reserve. As to the other remains of Paine’s skeleton they were not destroyed, as Mrs. Ginn’s story might imply, for they were seen in by the Rev. Alexander Gordon, now a Unitarian tutor at Manchester, in 1873, and heard of in 1876. Although that gentleman gives no further particulars, the correspondence which has passed between us leaves no doubt on my mind that he was led by his respect for Paine (despite divergences from that author’s religion) to secure for the remains quiet burial, – perhaps near his parents at Thetford. I find especial satisfaction in this belief since reading in the “New York World” (January 26,1896) the following statement:

“Out in the country, somewhere back of New Rochelle, in a lonesome spot, there is a mound with a monument raised over it, and an inscription to the effect that the remains of Thomas Paine lie beneath that stone. If this is not true a great many worthy people are wasting their indignation, for the majority of those who pass the monument and know to whom it is erected, throw stones at it. Thus do Christians show their contempt for those whose opinions do not agree with theirs.”

This stone-throwing ceased, I believe, some years ago; the pious anti-Painites may have found that they were really adding to the author’s cairn by attributing such importance to his writings long after those of his opponents were forgotten.

Of the remains of Thomas Paine exhumed by Cobbett there are now traceable a portion of his brain and two locks of his hair. One of the latter was presented to me by Mr. Edward Smith, biographer of Cobbett. Paine’s hair never became grey. The hair before me (on the old paper wrapping of which is written in Tilly’s hand “Mr. Paine’s Hair”) is soft and dark, with a reddish tinge. The portion of Paine’s brain owned by Mr. George Reynolds is about the size of one’s fist, and quite hard. It is under glass and beside it is a note in Tilly’s writing:

“On Tuesday January 7th 1833 I went to 11 Bolt Court, Fleet Street, and there with Mr. Entrell and Mr. Dean, I saw, at the house of Mr. Cobbett, the remains of Mr. Thomas Paine, when I procured some of his hair, and from his skull I took a portion of his brain, which had become hard, and which is almost perfectly black. – B. Tilly”

There are other personal relics of Paine. During the American revolution Paine wrote the fifth number of his “Crisis” at the house of the Hon. William Henry at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and his spectacles and shoe-buckles were left there. These were presented by a grand-daughter of Mr. Henry to the National Museum at Washington, where I examined them. The spectacles (silver) have small glasses of extraordinary power. Paine’s arm-chair and his brass and irons are in the possession of Albert Badeau at New Rochelle. It is said that a walking cane of his exists but I cannot discover it. Mr. G.J. Holyoake has a copy of Paine’s portrait (Sharp’s engraving of Romney’s picture) with the author’s presentation to Rickman on it. Claire J. Grece, of Redhill, possesses Paine’s snuff-box presented to his uncle, Daniel Constable, in 1807, by Paine. Edward Truelove possesses the writing-table used by Paine while in Rickman’s house in 1792. Alfred Hammond, of Lewes, possesses imprints of his (portrait) seal while an exciseman in that town, Louis Breeze, Stratford-by-Bow, has a piece of wood from the birthhouse of Paine, at Thetford, now destroyed. Of course there are many autograph letters of Paine, but no manuscript of anything he ever wrote for publication has been preserved.

A considerable number of these relics were among the five hundred articles shown at the Paine Exhibition in South Place Chapel, openedD ecember 2 , 1895.There were also first editions of his works, and many polemical caricatures, books, and pamphlets called forth by these works; there were portraits of famous men – American, English, French – whose swords were unsheathed to maintain or assail the republic of Paine’s vision, with its rainbow flag; but most impressive of all was the darkened bit of brain whence radiated the inner light of that miraculous Thetford Quaker.

If we pass from personal relics to relics of personality, those of Paine are innumerable; and among these the most important are the legends and fictions told concerning him by enemies, unconscious that their romances were really tributes to his unique influence. Nothing concerning Paine seems to have been too marvelous for acceptance, in the past, and even in our own time one occasionally meets with inventions suggesting a certain praeternaturalism in his character. Thus on September 21, 1895,a London journal, “Answers”, gravely published as a genuine autograph letter of Paine’s, in the possession of one of its Dublin readers, the following, said to be addressed to a linendraper at Chelmsford:

“Chapter Coffee House

London, May 8th, 1793

“Sir, – in perusing the Chelmsford paper I see you are a vendor of Fleecy Hosiery, and as you are a man after my own heart, a Leveller and a Talker of Treason, please to send six pair of the above Fleecy Hosierie to me at Chapter, and I will send you the money. Yours, Tom Paine.”

I wrote to the editor asking to be put into communication with the owner of this letter signed “Tom(!) Paine”, and written more than seven months after Paine had left England forever, but he could not do so -of course.

I must venture to repeat here, though it is mentioned in my edition of the “Age of Reason”, a legend told me by Mr. Van der Weyde, the eminent London photographer, who remembers when a boy a sermon in which the preacher said that Tom Paine was so wicked that he could not be buried. The earth would not hold him. His bones were placed in a box and carried about from one place to another, until at last they came into the hands of a button-maker, and now his bones are traveling about the world in the form of buttons! This variant of the Wandering Jew legend recalls to me a verse which William Allingham added with pen to his admirable poem “The Touchstone” in a volume in my possession. The original poem, it will be remembered, closes with burning the formidable man’s touchstone, and strewing the ashes on the breeze, little guessing that each grain of these `conveyed the perfect charm.’ The manuscript addition is:

“North, South, in the rings and amulets, Throughout the crowded world ’tis borne, Which, as a fashion long outworn, Its ancient mind forgets.”

The post The Adventures of Thomas Paine’s Bones appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Mariam Touba

Slipped into the newspaper in 1827 was an “Anecdote of Thomas Paine.” As such stories go, it was far from the worst, but it was meant to be denigrating. A visitor stops in to see the elderly Paine while he is denouncing the Bible among his cohorts and interrupts with questions of his own, and Paine, supposedly bested in argument, leaves the room without so much as a word. This little vignette was repeated often and was typical and mild fare for the time, especially as the newspaper was co-edited by a Presbyterian minister. The paper was not otherwise ordinary, as Freedom’s Journal was the first newspaper in the United States to be issued by and for African-Americans and, significantly, was begun in New York City in the year that slavery was to be finally abolished in the Empire State. This, however, was how the editors chose to depict Thomas Paine, an early and consistent opponent of black slavery in all forms.

The pattern can be seen even more starkly elsewhere in much of the antislavery press in the decades before the Civil War. A Massachusetts paper representing the distinctly abolitionist Liberty Party had this to say of Thomas Paine in 1845:

He was an open blasphemer and a contemner of God and all things sacred. He was a shameless debauchee, and a most loathsome, degraded sot. He trampled upon the decencies of civilized society, and was a slave to the vilest and most sensual of the animal appetites and passions. He was also void of moral honesty: for, on his dying bed, he called, in the bitterness of his soul, upon Jesus Christ, whom, during his life, he had affected to despise and had uniformly ridiculed and blasphemed.

And so, Thomas Paine’s strong antislavery stand was hardly appreciated and often unknown to those “in the trenches,” the 19^th century abolitionists who were actually fighting the peculiar institution in antebellum America.

Reasons for this ignorance can easily be found: For one, scholars contend that revolutionary era abolitionism had little hold over this new generation of mostly New England reformers. Except for his 1804 “To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana,” Paine’s antislavery publications were contained in unsigned newspaper articles and were entirely unknown before being brought to light by his dedicated biographer Moncure Conway-an abolitionist in his own right-only late in the 19^th century, when the fight against North American slavery was over. Paine’s religious writings made him unpalatable to the churched, many of whom provided the energy for the abolitionist and reform movements of the first half of the 19^th century. Thus, the very Northern, Christian-based publications that printed arguments against slavery ran them virtually side-by-side with denigrating stories about the “infidel” Thomas Paine.

The exceptions to this pattern were rare and noteworthy, and one is stunned by Wendell Phillips lecturing the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1858 where he goes so far as to say that Thomas Paine and the Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards – “their names found side by side in the anti-slavery societies of the revolutionary periods”-would “embrace” as they mount this antislavery rampart together (although he does not make the distinction, Phillips is undoubtedly referring to Jonathan Edwards, Junior, more of Paine’s contemporary). Nonetheless, Phillips is very much the exception both in being aware of Paine’s antislavery commitment and daring to make this bold link with Edwards. Wendell Phillips would move farther away from conventional Christianity in the post-Civil War period, and this pattern can be found in other abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and, of course, Moncure Conway. As Harvey Kaye documents, the appreciation of these longtime radicals for Paine augments with their post-Christian evolution, but it is largely a post-War phenomenon. Phillips stands out as the only prominent leader who links Paine to the cause at hand.

There was, however, something additional that added fuel to this abolitionist ignorance about Thomas Paine. Turning up in the abolitionist press in 1849 was “Mr. Rushton’s Letter to Thomas Paine.” “Mr. Rushton” was Edward Rushton, a British poet and early abolitionist with an interesting life story: Like John Newton, he found himself working on an 18^th-century slave ship, but, unlike Newton, young Rushton seems to have been forced there as part of his apprenticeship in a Liverpool shipping company. Appalled by what he witnessed, Rushton threatened mutiny; later, he went himself and ministered to the sick among the shackled slave cargo. The contagion on this particular ship was one that affected the eyes, and Rushton, at age 19, was blinded as a result of his compassion. He spent the rest of his years advocating for the blind and the enslaved. Unlike his contemporary, William Wilberforce, who approached antislavery from the Tory side, Rushton was a radical, a Paineite himself, and his enthusiasm for the American revolutionary cause led him to address letters to his heroes George Washington and Thomas Paine pleading with them to use their influence against slavery. In recounting Rushton’s admirable life and writings, it is common to lump the two letters together, but they differed in tone and circumstance. The letter to Washington was intemperate and written just at the close of Washington’s second term as President. Washington was smarting from criticism (not least by Thomas Paine) and returned Rushton’s missive unopened. Feeling rebuffed, Rushton then printed his communication as an angry pamphlet in 1797. The letter to Paine was written after Paine had returned from Europe to live in New York and probably dates from 1804 or 1805. It is admiring in tone and, as it appears with some later editorial commentary, suggests that Rushton was aware of Paine’s comment on Rushton’s native Liverpool, wondering why God Almighty did not blast it with a thunderbolt given its prominent role in the slave trade (Paine, it be might recalled, wrote something similar to Thomas Jefferson). In an addendum Rushton admits that “since his [Paine’s] receipt of this, he has frequently sent me his verbal respects, but will not commit himself to paper on the subject.” Nonetheless, Rushton’s original letter, later published in the main antislavery literature of mid-century America, has this unfortunate misstatement: “As the clear and energetic champion for broad and general liberty, you have not a superior in the annals of mankind; yet through the whole of your writings I do not recollect a single passage that is particularly pointed against the slavery of the negroes.”   

How did, what was meant to be a private letter from Rushton to Paine in about 1805, find its way into the antislavery newspapers of 1849? We can trace that with some probable accuracy as it appeared just after Paine’s death in the Belfast Monthly Magazine of December 1809. Nearly 40 years later, in 1848, the Massachusetts abolitionist, Anne Warren Weston was helping to compile a gift annual called the Liberty Bell. Gift annuals, as their name implies, were attractive books issued each year and stocked with poems, illustrations, and light literature, and marketed as Christmas or New Year’s presents. With the Liberty Bell, however, the American Anti-Slavery Society was adopting this popular medium for the cause, and Weston, always desperate for more material, implored her contact in Dublin, activist Richard Davis Webb, for more antislavery writings. Webb complied in part by sending the published letter of Rushton’s, most likely taken from the Irish magazine of 1809. From the Liberty Bell, the Rushton letter rather naturally found its way into both William Lloyd Garrison’s the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, both additional organs of the American Anti-Slavery Society, papers with a relatively small circulation but deeply influential with activists.

The well-meaning Rushton unwittingly did Paine a lasting disservice then, but his basic question is a reasonable one: Why did Paine oppose slavery and yet devote so little of his writings to the injustice of slavery?

In addressing this, we should first be aware that we may not have access to all of Paine’s writings: Most of his unpublished papers burned, and he was not in the habit of signing everything he had printed. Approaching a subject such as antislavery, with adherents on both sides of the ramparts of Federalist and Republican in the United States, Tory and Whig in England, Girondist and Jacobin in France, may have caused Paine to step lightly or work anonymously. One notes that Henry Redhead Yorke, upon visiting Paine in Paris in 1802, observed that Paine was isolated and held in contempt, and he attributed it to Paine’s support of the black Haitians against the French general Charles LeClerc. These Paris writings have not surfaced and beg the question, Are there fugitive writings by Paine that were translated into the French newspapers?

One of Paine’s biographers, David Freeman Hawke, sees a partial answer to Paine’s seeming reticence on slavery in his letter from Paris to Benjamin Rush in 1790, “I despair of seeing an Abolition of the infernal traffic in Negroes-we must push that matter further on your Side the water [sic]-I wish that a few well instructed Negroes could be sent among their Brethern [sic] in Bondage, for until they are enabled to take their own part nothing will be done.” On the one hand, Hawke is dismissive of Paine’s suggestion that the cause needed the input of the African victims themselves. But to contemporary ears, Paine’s prescription, far from passing the buck, sounds acutely modern, and one that black activists such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth would embrace.

Hawke goes on about Paine, “He was not a joiner; rather, he was something of a prima donna, disinclined to share credit when honors were being handed out. No reform movement that required group action ever attracted his interest.” Paine did refrain from joining clubs in the flurry of the French Revolution and seems not to have been a conventional committee man, but Hawke overreaches when suggesting that Paine was not likely to work as a simple foot soldier in a cause. Paine not only wrote on behalf of groups he supported, but did so anonymously: In England, he penned John Horne Tooke’s speech for the Friends of Universal Peace and Liberty, he wrote the manifesto for the Société Républicaine in the immediate aftermath of the Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes; during the American Revolution he offered to go on a dangerous mission incognito to England to write in support of the American cause; some have suggested, and there is a bit of evidence for this, that Paine may have contributed in perfect anonymity to the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

Hawke does quote Paine’s most succinct statement on the subject: The question was put to Paine by the English physician John Walker, “How it was to be accounted for, that he had not taken up the pen to advocate the cause of blacks,” and where Paine’s response was recalled by Walker as, “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.”

Paine’s explanation requires a certain amount of self-awareness about himself and his role as a writer. Those who tend to view Paine as a sort of “natural talent,” who wrote easily and without hesitation on what he believed, may be cynical about this reason, but Paine does more than once write about the need to be “always the master of one’s temper in writing,” and how a writer’s argument is lost when his judgment is “disordered by an intemperate irritation of the passions.” Even Hawke, one of the more skeptical of Paine’s modern biographers, concludes, this “excuse from one known for his impassioned writing sounds flimsy, but given his literary credo-warm passions must always be combined with a cool temper-it may have been the truth.” And, indeed, we may have to leave it at that.

Just about the time Rushton was chiding him for his inaction, Paine expressed once more his feelings about slavery. This is found tucked away in a greeting right here in the Thomas Paine National Historical Association/Iona Collection, in an unpublished letter, written from New Rochelle to his good friend John Fellows on April 18, 1805. Paine offers news about the farm, gives instructions about the Bonneville boys, and provides specifications for wallpapering the cottage. And then he tells Fellows, “And also call on Counsellor Emmet with my congratulations on his eminent success in the Affrican [sic] Affair.” What is the African Affair?

Counselor Emmet is Thomas Addis Emmet, the Irish émigré lawyer whose sojourn was not so different from other prominent participants in the failed Irish uprisings of the 1790s. It would involve years of imprisonment, followed by exile to the Continent (where Emmet spent time in Paris and got to know Paine’s good friend Nicolas de Bonneville) before Emmet could emigrate to the United States in late 1804. He was persuaded to remain in New York and practice law, and since there was a vacancy in the local bar-given that a prominent lawyer, Alexander Hamilton, had met an untimely death that summer-New York’s Republican leaders were willing to expedite the process for Emmet’s entry into the profession. Some Federalists resisted, and the matter became just became more fodder for partisan controversy. The Republicans prevailed, and Emmet was allowed to argue before the New York bar in 1805. And his 19^th century biographer describes

Very soon after Mr. Emmet appeared at our bar, he was employed in a case peculiarly well calculated for the display of his extraordinary powers. Several slaves had escaped from a neighbouring state and found a refuge here. Their masters seized them, and the rights of these masters became a matter of controversy. Mr. Emmet, I have been informed, was retained by the society of friends…and of course espoused the cause of the slaves. His effort is said to have been overwhelming. The novelty of his manner, the enthusiasm which he exhibited, his broad Irish accent, his pathos and violence of gesture, created a variety of sensations in the audience.

Records of this case have not been found, but the tradition is repeated even into this decade when writing of Emmet. The diligent records of a current researcher into slavery cases in the Early Republic reveal, however, that this most likely was not a fugitive slave case, but rather the major prosecution of a slave trader. Emmet assisted, on behalf of the New York Society for the Manumission of Slaves, in seeing to it that one Philip M. Topham was brought to justice in federal court on April 1, 1805. The Manumission Society was one place where prominent Federalists and Republicans worked together in this highly partisan age, and Emmet may have found it a natural entry to the polarized legal community. The case did not receive newspaper publicity, but Paine could have heard of it from his friend Walter Morton, serving as the Manumission Society’s secretary. Emmet and Morton were two of Paine’s most trusted friends; indeed he would choose them as co-executors of his will. Looking further from this event, one learns that Emmet goes on to become counsel for the Manumission Society. In addition to clarifying a long-obscured aspect of Thomas Addis Emmet’s biography, the episode illustrates how deeply Thomas Paine’s closest friends were engaged in the antislavery struggle, demonstrates Paine’s own interest in the matter, and suggests that there is indeed more to be discovered in the collection here at Iona.

Notes

Freedom’s Journal (New York), March 30, 1827. The paper was edited by the Presbyterian minister Samuel Cornish and by John Russwurm.

From the Worcester County Gazette (Worcester, Mass.), as reprinted in the Liberator (Boston), December 5, 1845. Some of the vehemence is a reflection of the rivalry between the Liberty Party and the American Anti-Slavery Society (or Garrisonians). This quotation was, in fact, a direct response to William Lloyd Garrison’s paper The Liberator, but the statements about Paine were believed to be true, and neither mentions Paine’s firm opposition to slavery. Similarly, some of the attacks on Paine in moderate Christian antislavery publications were ultimately directed toward doctrinaire Christian abolitionism that had begun to be seen as “infidel” See, for example, “Thomas Paine,” New York Evangelist, January 31, 1850, p. 19.

James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996) p. 43.

“‘Speech of Wendell Phillips,’ New York Anti-Slavery Society: Phonographically reported for the Liberator by Mr. Yerrinton” Liberator, May 28, 1858. Phillips was arguing against letting sectarian considerations weaken the abolitionist movement, demonstrating that he had already moved toward making the antislavery cause paramount over theology.

Even the most historically minded abolitionist would have known little of Paine’s antislavery opinions: Phillips’s awareness that Paine joined an antislavery society may have been because his name appears in the published history of the Pennsylvania Society, Edward Needles, An Historical Memoir of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1848), p. 29. This is when Paine was elected to join the Society as it was reconstituted after the war in 1787. Not surprisingly, he comes with an asterisk and this note:

Perhaps it might be proper to remark, that the latter individual, who subsequently acquired an unenviable notoriety as an infidel writer, was only known at this time as a patriot and lover of equal rights to all men, his peculiar principles in regard to theology not having been publicly known, as they were subsequently developed during his residence in France, where, in the time of the Revolution, he made the public avowal of his sentiments by the publication of his most obnoxious work, “The Age of Reason.”

Benjamin Rush’s recollection that he was drawn to Paine by his early antislavery essay had been published in James Cheetham’s otherwise hostile biography of 1809, but the specific discovery that Paine wrote the essay, “African Slavery in America” in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser (postscript) March 8, 1775, was an outgrowth of Conway’s research in the late 1880s or early 1890s; Conway clearly just followed the lead in Rush’s reference to [William]”Bradford’s paper” by paging through the newspaper in an archive until he hit upon an essay that obviously fit that description (See “Thomas Paine and Charles Bradlaugh,” The Open Court, March 5, 1891). Some recent scholars, such as Alfred Owen Aldridge and Eric Foner, thought Conway’s evidence was unpersuasive, given that Rush’s memory proved to be faulty, Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology (Newark: University of Delaware, 1984) pp. 289-290; Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Library of America, 1995) p. 835; this is more strongly stated in James V. Lynch, “The Limits of Revolutionary Radicalism: Thomas Paine and Slavery,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 123, no. 3 (July 1999) pp. 177-199. Similarly, Paine’s authorship of “A Serious Thought,” signed Humanus, in the Pennsylvania Journal of October 18, 1775 was also only brought to light by Conway who credited a Joseph N. Moreau with this unpublished attribution (Moncure Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine [New York: G. P. Putnam, 1892] vol. 1, p. 59). Conway also claimed to be the first to include “The Forester’s Letters” of 1776 (No. 3 contains Paine’s footnote: “Forget not the hapless African.”) among Paine’s published works. Thus it may be that Paine’s letter of 1804, “To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana,” that does appear in earlier versions of Paine’s collected writings, was his only published antislavery work that was available to mid-19^th century abolitionists.

Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005) p. 150. Reasons for this departure from Christianity may have had its roots in James Brewer Stewart’s assertion about the abolitionists at the height of their struggle, “These spiritually restless young men and women had now invented a religion of their own, a sanctified community which filled the enormous void created when they had rejected orthodox revivalism and which would sustain them during the struggles that lay ahead,” Stewart, Holy Warriors, pp. 57-58; see also this “antislavery theological innovation” described in detail in Molly Oshatz, Slavery and Sin: The Fight Against Slavery and the Rise of Liberal Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) pp. 44-51. For many, there was no turning back to orthodox Christianity.

Rushton’s name may sound familiar to dedicated Paineites because his son, Edward, Jr., figures in the long saga of William Cobbett and Paine’s remains, Paul Collins, The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 273-274.

Rushton’s Expostulatory Letter to Washington, of Mount Vernon, in Virginia, on his Continuing to be a Proprietor of Slaves (Liverpool, 1797) may have had its greatest impact in New York City, where it was reprinted in the Republican newspaper the Time Piece on May 26, 1797, and where it touched off a debate, much of it in poetic form. See David N. Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006) pp. 167-169.

Paine shared similar commentary about Liverpool when writing to Thomas Jefferson at about the same time: “Had I the command of the elements I would blast Liverpool with fire and brimstone. It is the Sodom and Gomorrah of brutality.” Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 25, 1805 in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. by Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1945) vol. 2, p. 1462 (Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 350).

Richard Davis Webb to Anne Warren Weston, October 20, 1848, Antislavery Collection, Boston Public Library, HYPERLINK “https://www.archive.org/details/lettertomydearfr00webb43” \t “_blank” https://www.archive.org/details/lettertomydearfr00webb43; Ralph Thompson, “The Liberty Bell and Other Anti-Slavery Gift Books,” New England Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1 (March 1934) pp. 154-168.

Liberator, February 23, 1849; National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 14, 1849; the latter may have come directly from Richard Davis Webb since he was a regular correspondent for the paper.

Henry Redhead Yorke, Letters from France, in 1802 (Printed for H.D. Symonds by Bye and Law, 1804) vol. 2, p. 338.

Thomas Paine to Benjamin Rush, Paris, March 16, 1790, reprinted in The Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions [vol. 1, no. 1], 1943, p. 20-22.

David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) p. 150.

Mariam Touba, “Thomas Paine’s Offhand Remark,” Bulletin of Thomas Paine Friends, vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2011) HYPERLINK “https://www.thomas-paine-friends.org/touba-mariam_thomas-paines-offhand-remark-2011.html” https://www.thomas-paine-friends.org/touba-mariam_thomas-paines-offhand-remark-2011.html. For Paine and clubs, see Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 2, p. 46

John Epps, The Life of John Walker, M.D. (London: Whittaker, Treacher, and Co., 1831) pp. 140-41.

“Thomas Paine to the Citizens of the United States, Letter IV” [December 3, 1802] in Foner, Complete Writings, vol. 2, p. 926 (Conway, Writings, III, 402); Letter to Abbé Raynal in Foner, Complete Writings, p. 214 (Conway, Writings, II, 70). These writings are identified and discussed in Harry Hayden Clark, “Thomas Paine’s Theories of Rhetoric,”  Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, vol. XXVIII (1933) pp. [307]-339. Clark puts great emphasis on Paine’s recognition of the need for self-discipline in writing, a legacy, he believes of 18^th century deists who believed in living in harmony with the laws of nature, pp. 330-334.

Hawke, p. 37, also citing Clark.

Thomas Addis Emmet, Memoir of Thomas Addis and Robert Emmet with their Ancestors and Immediate Family (New York: Emmet Press, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 395, 406.

Charles Glidden Haines, Memoir of Thomas Addis Emmet (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1829) pp. 87-88.

Emmet’s law firm, Emmet, Marvin & Martin, LLP included this fact in their bicentennial publication in (naturally) 2005:

HYPERLINK “https://www.emmetmarvin.com/pdf/emmetMarvin.pdf” \t “_blank” https://www.emmetmarvin.com/pdf/emmetMarvin.pdf ; Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, edited by Roger K. Newman, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 187.

New York Manumission Society Records, 1785-1849, vol. 7, p. 278, New-York Historical Society. The minutes suggest that the case was heard on April 1 in the Second Circuit court with Justice William Paterson hearing the case. Emmet and his fellow counsel were commended by the society for their “very zealous able ingenious management of this complicated and severely contested suit.” I am very much indebted to Sarah Levine-Gronningsater for finding this case and adding further insight into the role the Manumission Society may have played in Emmet’s legal career. Emmet‘s admission to the U.S. Supreme Court bar preceded his clearing his final hurdle to be admitted to the New York Bar, Emmet, Memoir, vol. 1 p. 406. William Paterson’s presence can merely be inferred from John E. O’Connor, William Paterson, Lawyer and Statesman, 1745-1806 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1979) p. 276; William Paterson to Euphemia Paterson, New York, April 1, 1805, Folder 14, William Paterson Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries. Topham’s case appears to have dragged on in the courts, and President Jefferson would pardon Topham in 1808. The pardon was due to his inability to pay the $16,000 fine, and was apparently approved by the Manumission Society, Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President, Second Term, 1805-1809 (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974) p. 547, n. 19.

All that could be gleaned from the newspapers is: “The Circuit Court of the United States, was opened yesterday morning at the City Hall. An elegant address was delivered to the grand jury by the hon judge Patterson [sic],” Morning Chronicle [New York], April 2, 1805.”

“Report of Dr. Macneven in relation to Mr. Emmet’s Monument, “in Emmet Monument (New York: Printed for the subscribers, 1833) p. 1.

Mariam Touba

October 2012

The post Paine’s Anti-Slavery Legacy appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Fayette Arnold

“Paine Was The Voice Of The Revolution And Was An Independent Thinker On The Level Of Voltaire And Goethe”.

From Thomas Paine Apostle of Freedom By Jack Fruchman Jr. – Paine Scholar

Paine Is An Impressive Figure As He Took A Tax Rebellion And Transformed It Into A Revolution And Independence. This is What Neither Side Expected Or Wanted.

Fayette Arnold, Three St. Croix Lofts Drive, Unit 104, St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin 5402, CHANGING THE 18TH CENTURIES VIEW OF LIFE

“In My Judgment, Thomas Paine Was the Best Political Writer That Ever Lived. What He Wrote Was Pure Nature, And His Soul And His Pen Went Together. Ceremony, Pageantry, And All the Paraphernalia Of Power Had No Effect Upon Him. He Examined Into The Why And Wherefore Of Things. He Was Perfectly Radical In His Mode of Thought. Nothing Short Of Bedrock Satisfied Him”1.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Introduction

Despite Thomas Paine’s numerous contributions to America and the world, his most significant accomplishment has escaped the attention of scholars as well as students of history. There is an important and vital area of his thought and creativity, completely neglected, which illuminates Paine’s unique role in American and World History. One of many factors that make Thomas Paine a great historical figure and force is his transformation of Lockean Philosophy. In fact, he significantly changed the structure and meaning of Locke’s thought system. In modifying the public’s understanding of Locke, Paine altered the character and destiny of American and World History. This may be Paine’s greatest contribution to mankind as well as the seminal aspect of his intellectual activities that makes him one of the world’s most prominent and original thinkers.

Thomas Paine’s ideas and efforts inspired and consolidated the American Revolution. He provided the colonists with the fuel to fire their rebellion. His majestic phrases rang through the colonies and united Americans in a common cause. Paine’s eloquence in speech and the power of his pen imparted the ideals and courage needed for the founding of a new nation. In his efforts to unite and direct the colonists, Paine created what may have been one of his greatest phrases – The United State of America.

The American concepts of freedom, equality, and human rights, which came from the mind and pen of Thomas Paine, set the 18th century world ablaze. He gave Americans and Europeans the rational, inspiration, and confidence to reject outmoded social and political structures of the past and the courage to create new ones that would provide a better future for mankind. Men and women were longing for a social order where there was justice as well as the ability to achieve their human potential.

Democracy would provide the new vehicle for reaching age old aspirations. A modification of the philosophy of John Locke would be a stepping stone to that brighter future. Thomas Paine went far beyond Locke’s thinking and created a new intellectual architecture and world view. Paine broke the bonds of the 18th centuries’ intellectual framework, philosophical, social and political. He shattered the structure that John Locke’s thinking was contained within and which his ideas supported. America is not founded on the ideas of John Locke per se, but upon the transformation of his concepts by Thomas Paine. In altering Locke, Paine gave his ideas meanings that John Locke would not have recognized or accepted.

Paine’s ideas and concepts about freedom, equality and independence were new and unique. They went well beyond the opinions embraced by Europeans and colonial Americans. For example, according to John Locke man was free, equal an independent in the state of nature, but gave up that status when he accepted the “Social Compact” and joined society. In Locke’s own words, “But though men when they enter society give up the equality, liberty and executive power they had in the state of nature into the hands of society… yet it being only with the intention in everyone to preserve himself, his liberty and property”.2 Locke apparently sees no conflict between individuals giving up equality, liberty, and executive power over self and their likely status and treatment within an autocratic society. His “Social Compact” takes away from the individual the very ideals Locke appears to be espousing. In the mind of Thomas Paine, men were free, equal and independent within society. This was a radical notion and a threat to the political and social structure of the 18th century world. The consequences of this shift in thinking were enormous as it fundamentally changed a world view and value system that Europeans had revered for centuries.

According to Locke’s conception of man and society, human beings are not free, equal or independent because they have accepted a “Social Compact”. Locke finds a variety of reasons for condoning inequality and injustice as well as a lack of freedom and independence within the social and political orders. He claims that the invention of money created conditions whereby men give their “consent” and “agree” that the earth’s possessions should be “disproportionate” and “unequal”. Further, Locke proclaims that the unequal conditions of wealth created by money operate outside the “bounds of society” as well as the “Compact”. Although he gives many reasons for human inequality, Locke still states that, “All men by nature are equal. I cannot propose to understand all sorts of equality. Age or virtue may give men a just precedence. Excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level. Birth may subject some, and alliance or benefits others…”3 It is obvious, except to Locke, that the ideals he professes do not apply in the social and political atmosphere existing in England. Locke is consistently inconsistent in his thinking and cannot logically reconcile his philosophy with the world of reality.

Locke fails to perceive the conflict between his abstract ideals and the reasons he give for their circumvention in the concrete world. In addition, he does not understand that most of the inequality and injustice existing in his day was due to the structure of society and government which favored the few and handicapped the many. His explanation of the reasons for differences in status and wealth within society ignores the impact of social and political arrangements that create inequity and limited opportunity for the majority of the population. Locke’s writings also lack political and social insights that could be utilized to create programs to alleviate injustice and inequity resulting from England’s feudal and autocratic traditions. Of course, his aims were not egalitarian but elitist.

John Locke does not utilize the term republic or republican in his writings, but frequently employs the word commonwealth which he defines as a civilized community. In fact, Locke in his “Essay Concerning Civil Government” uses the word commonwealth over 75 times. Further, the term democracy is only mentioned once and that is for the purpose of defining commonwealth as not meaning democracy. Locke’s philosophy is clearly concerned with the formation of a commonwealth rather than the creation of a republic. Locke affirms this by saying, “By commonwealth, I must be understood all along to mean, not a democracy, or form of government, but an independent community which the Latins signify by the word civitas, to which the word which best answers in our language is commonwealth, and most properly expresses such a society of men”4. Locke’s philosophy is focused on building a civilized society that would avoid the political and social strife that existed in his era. His goal was not to create a government based upon democratic values, but to establish a refined, rational, well mannered, and harmonious social order founded upon a traditional belief in limited monarchy.

Interpreters of Locke’s philosophy have extracted his belief in republican principles from his use of certain words, especially terms like “freedom”, “equality”, and “executive power over self”, and his emphasis on laws being created, not by the king but by the legislature. Locke indicates that the legislature in making laws not only checks the power of the sovereign, it also “puts men out of the state of nature into that of commonwealth”. He believes that the legislature is the means by which men achieve the purpose or end results of their entering into society. The reason human beings accept social institutions are the “enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety”. Further, the “instrument” and “means” of fulfilling this aim are the “laws established in society (by the legislature)”.5

Traditional expositions of John Locke’s philosophy credit him with creating democratic ideas that were responsible for inspiring the American and French Revolutions. In fact, customary explanations of his ideology express the belief that the structure of the American state is predicated upon Locke’s political and social ideals. Conventional proponents of Lockean thought also indicate he embraced the opinion that society and the state are independent of each other. This interpretation of Locke is founded on the conviction that the social order is based upon natural law and commonly shared moral rights. From his notion of natural law, exponents of Locke deduce that he supported the precept that the state and society are separate entities. To Lockes’ interpreters, this implies the formation of a social order that is democratic in nature and which requires very little in the way of government.

However, a close inspection of John Locke’s philosophy reveals that the above points of view are invalid. It is impossible to associate Locke’s beliefs concerning the reasons for as well as the role of government with the theory of natural law. The political and social functions of government devised and implemented by the English Aristocracy and Monarchy are in conflict with the doctrine of natural and moral law. In fact, Locke’s “Democratic Ideals” are abrogated by his “Social Compact” and his belief in Autocratic government. Again, according to Locke, it is government (Laws enacted by the legislature) that takes man out of the state of nature. Only by abandoning the freedom, equality and independence men possessed in the state of nature can mankind live in harmony within society. Locke’s fundamental precepts and the society he is attempting to create are diametrically opposed. It is quite apparent that his social and political orders are not separate entities. In fact, they are one and the same due to his replacing natural law with political laws that are derived from a government ruled by the Nobility and Sovereign. In John Locke’s thought system, God’s law has been replaced by man’s law. This results in the creation of a state and society that are neither separate from one another or republican in nature.

Thomas Paine offered mankind an alternative to John Locke’s conflicting and illogical thought system. Paine rejected any philosophy advancing the idea that social and political equality is best achieved in a society ruled by Patricians and Monarchs. In contrast to Locke, Paine created a democratic belief system based upon popular sovereignty. He replaced a medieval view of the social and political orders with an outlook that was both Modern and Egalitarian. By presenting an approach to society and government that was based upon an acceptance of natural law as well as upon his understanding of God’s will for mankind, Paine handed the world a new and different philosophy as well as an expanded world view in which men would be equal, free and independent within the social and political orders. He not only gave old words and ideas new meanings but also greater dimensions and depth. Thomas Paine’s beliefs and not John Locke’s “Social Compact” became the legal and social foundation of American society. Our nation’s intellectual and spiritual character came directly from the mind of Thomas Paine.

THOMAS PAINE AND JOHN LOCKE RE-EXAMINED

Thomas Paine’s fundamental belief system as well as his views on the origin and purpose of government are strikingly different than John Locke’s. His intrinsic principles were based upon a belief in freedom, equality, human rights and security for all of mankind. Paine’s opinions with respect to the reasons for and the objectives of government were, in fact, contrary to those of John Locke. To quote Thomas Paine, “Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here is the design and end of government, viz. “freedom and security”.6 His belief in human freedom rested upon the foundation of equal rights. In his own words, “Why then not trace the rights of man, to the creation of man. The illuminating and divine principle of equal rights of man (for it had its origin from the maker of man), relates not only to the living individuals; but to generations of men succeeding each other. Every history of creation… 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 rights’.7 “His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights”.8

Thomas Paine summed up his political and social viewpoint by saying, “Men are born; an always continue, free and equal in respect to their rights. The end of all political association, is, the preservation of the natural an imprescriptible rights of man… political liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not injure another. The exercise of the natural rights of every man has no other limit than those that are necessary to secure to every other man the free exercise of the same rights and these limits are determined by law”.9

Because men are born having equal rights and retain these rights within the social and political order, government according to Paine must be based upon the will of the people. To ensure their rights, citizens must be allowed to direct their own affairs. This belief in the consent of the governed presents a sharp contrast to John Locke’s philosophy in which government and society are based upon rule by monarchs and patricians. The objective of Locke’s social and political thinking is to protect those who have property and social status. Locke’s thought system certainly was not predicated on power to the people. His was an elitist conception of society. Dominate power in the social and political orders was shared by the king and aristocracy. In fact, the purpose of Locke’s writings were to confirm and justify existing conditions in English society and government, conditions that were inherited from a medieval world order and world view.

John Locke’s philosophy was founded upon exclusivity, selectivity as well as patrimony and not upon the universality and equality of mankind. Locke conceives of government as an institution that primarily serves and protects the noble and the few. Thus, government and the power structure that controls it are purposely designed to be undemocratic in nature. Paine believed that government should be constructed and operated so that it directed its efforts to serve the greater good of all citizens. Unlike John Locke, he did not feel that bloodline and property should determine one’s station and opportunities in life. Republican government is not based upon property and pedigree but on majority rule.

According to the philosopher Bertrand Russell, John Locke is “the most influential though by no means the most profound of philosophers”.10 Locke’s philosophy was “little more than a clarification and systematization of prevalent opinion in England”.11 “Even before the reformation theologians tended to believe in setting limits to kingly power”.12 “What Locke has to say about the state of nature and the law of nature, in the main, is not original, but a repetition of medieval scholastic doctrine”.13 Bertrand Russell states that his ideas can be traced back to the writings of “Saint Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius”.14 John Locke in dealing with the concepts of liberty, human rights, and equality was looking to the past at ideals that he felt were already established. Thomas Paine by contrast was looking to the future at ideals that needed to be actualized.

Although John Locke’s thinking was affected by the Renaissance and Reformation, his ideas on government and society find their roots in Medieval Europe. To be more specific, Locke’s philosophy is derived from the thought structure of the medieval Catholic Church which was based upon a combination of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian revelation. The Schoolmen of the middle ages, who were exponents of Scholasticism, propounded arguments to challenge the theory of the divine right of kings in order to justify the Popes position as being superior to that of monarchs. Despite the fact that Locke rejected Scholasticism, his political and social outlook was rooted in this system of thought. The Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation as well as the Enlightenment should not be viewed as sharply divided eras, but as a gradual transition occurring during a period of over 1300 years. The various ages did react against one another, sometimes with great passion. However, even with their predilection for zealotry, like children rebelling against their parents, much of the parent remained in the child.

Notwithstanding the impact of the past upon Thomas Paine, his philosophy and belief system was not acquired from Scholasticism. Paine’s ideas and ideals were inspired by the Enlightenment and his Deist theological beliefs. He felt that God revealed himself to man through nature. Thus, reason and science were the means of approaching both truth and one’s creator. In brief, Thomas Paine’s philosophy came from the Modern world and not the Middle Ages. America’s world view and value system is derived from Rationalism rather than Scholasticism.

There are additional reasons for concluding that Thomas Paine’s philosophy was not acquired from John Locke. Professor Jack Fruchtman, Jr. in the introduction to his book, Thomas Paine Apostle of Freedom, quotes Paine as saying, “I never read John Locke, nor ever had the work in my hand”.15 Thomas Paine’s philosophy was created from his belief in human reason and his vision of God’s ongoing plan for humanity. It was not acquired from reading John Locke or being influenced by the medieval power struggles of the Christian Church. Paine is clearly a product of the Enlightenment; Locke a reflection of the Reformation, Renaissance and Middle Ages. Unfortunately, we have attributed our modern view of freedom, equality and democracy to John Locke’s philosophical beliefs and have failed to perceive that our American thought and value system is unique and thus quite different than his.

Bertrand Russell also states that John Locke’s concepts with respect to the law of nature and the state of nature are not only unoriginal; they are in addition quite vague. Per Russell, “The nearest thing to a definition of the state of nature to be found in Locke is the following: Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth: with authority to judge between them; is properly called the state of nature”.16 Russell comments, “This is not a description of the life of savages, but of an imagined community of virtuous anarchists, who need no police or law courts because they always obey “Reason”, which is the same as “Natural Law”, which in turn, consists of those laws of conduct that are held to have divine origin”.17 Locke’s beliefs that human beings are equal, independent, and rational are naive and contradictory as well as disingenuous. The vague and contrary nature of Locke’s thinking has allowed us to read into his writings ideas and beliefs that he did not embrace. In fact, modern interpretations of his philosophy would have surprised him.

In Locke’s opinion the “State of Nature” was abrogated by a “Social Compact” which created government. The “State of Nature” is not dissolved by just any compact, but only one that can make a single body politic. In brief, Locke begins his thinking with a supposition that he refers to as a “State of Nature”. This state is antecedent to any and all human government. It is ruled by a “Law of Nature” which is based upon divine commands rather than being imposed by human legislation. Men finally emerged from this “State of Nature” by creating a “Social Compact” which became the means for inaugurating civil government. Of course in light of logic and man’s historical experience, the concept of the “Social Compact” seems absurd. However, it may have been the best and most practical explanation people could envisage to account for the creation of government and society.

According to John Locke, “The great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government is to protect their property, to which in the state of nature there are many things wanting”.18 Property plays a prominent and in fact dominant role in his political and social philosophy. It is obvious from his writings that property is the main reason for creating the institution known as government. In fact, Bertrand Russell proclaims that “Locke is driven by his worship of property.”19 Again, it should be noted that the purpose of government for Paine is to ensure freedom, equality, human rights, and security for all human beings.

Locke’s obsession with property must be emphasized as it reflects a belief system as well as a social and political outlook that is fundamentally at odds with Thomas Paine’s thinking and the American conception of democracy. John Locke’s thought system reserved political influence for those who were eminent both socially and economically. John Locke believed that economic power in the form of money was the real derivation of political power. He felt that predominate political control should be vested within the aristocracy. Those individuals in society who have conspicuous monetary interests should manage government. Citizens lacking pronounced wealth in either property or money did not deserve a voice in the affairs of state. In fact, the aristocracy feared the lower classes because they were the majority within society. A government and society based upon majority rule would not bode well for the nobility. In contrast to Locke, Paine believed in rule by the majority as well as universal suffrage so that all citizens could have a voice in government. Locke’s philosophy was not designed to support democracy or the welfare of the common man. His social, political and economic beliefs were the antithesis of Thomas Paine’s egalitarian views regarding humanity, government and society.

John Locke actually believed that English society and government correspond to his expressed ideals. Thomas Paine rejected the assumption that the English people were free, independent and lived within an egalitarian society. He bluntly stated that their government was not republican in nature. In his words, “If we will suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English Constitution, we shall find them to be base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new republican materials.

First: The remains of monarchial tyranny in the person of the King.

Second: The remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the Peers.

Thirdly: The new republican materials, in the persons of the Commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England.

The first two being hereditary, are independent of the people; wherefore in a constitutional sense they contribute nothing towards the freedom of the state. To say, “that the constitution of England is a union of three powers, reciprocally checking each other, is farcical, either the words have no meaning, or they are flat contradictions.”20 Paine avows that the British government is based upon the principles of despotism. In fact, he feels that in England there are despotic rivalries between the King, Parliament and the Church. The conflicts amongst these three entities were exacerbated because they functioned within a society which evolved out of feudalism. According to Paine, the remaining elements of feudalism within British society were also a form of tyranny. He believed that the fundamental nature of English culture and its government precluded it from being a democracy.

To properly compare the difference between John Locke’s and Thomas Paine’s philosophy, it is necessary to further explore their conflicting viewpoints regarding the nature of society and government. First we will allow Paine to speak for himself and then compare his thought system to John Locke’s. Paine indicates that there are “several sources from which governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded. First, superstition. Secondly, power. Thirdly, the common interests of society and the rights of man. The first was government of priest craft, the second of conquerors, and the third of reason”.21 Paine indicates that monarchy and aristocracy emerged from governments that were founded upon conquest. He is clearly annoyed with the idea of government and society being established on the basis of either superstition or conquest. Paine expresses his dissatisfaction withthese two kinds of government by saying, “I became irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by forceor fraud”.22

Paine indicates that in his day there were only two types of government. He states, “The two modes ofgovernment which prevail in the world are, first, government by election and representation: secondly, government by hereditary succession. The former is generally known by the name of republic; the latter by that of monarchy and aristocracy. These two distinct and opposite forms, erect themselves on two distinct and opposite bases of reason and ignorance”.23 According to Paine, prior to the American experiment there were no revolutions worthy of the name. He sees the American enterprise as the source of modern democracy. In brief, the modern republican form of government began with the American Revolution. Thomas Paine asserts, “What were formerly called revolutions, were little more than a change of persons, or an alteration of local circumstances”.24 “One of the great advantages of the American Revolution has been, that it led to the discovery of the principles, and laid open the impositions, of governments. All revolutions till then had worked within the atmosphere of a court, and never the great floor of the nation. The parties were always of the class of courtiers; and whatever was the rage for reformation, they carefully preserved the fraud of the profession. It is impossible that such governments that have hither to existed in the world could have commenced by any other means than a total violation of every principle, sacred and moral”.25

Paine in his analysis of the inadequacies of British government and society criticizes hereditary rule as irrational and in fact ludicrous. He points out that virtue, wisdom, intelligence and moral character are not evenly passed on from generation to generation. Their quality and variety vary through time to an extent that government is subject to being run by human passions and driven by accidents. Objections to hereditary rule could only be removed if virtue and wisdom as well as other attributes required by an overlord were, in fact, inherited. Paine declares that, “The representative system of government takes society and civilization for its basis; nature, reason, and experience for its guide. The hereditary system, therefore, is as repugnant to human wisdom, as to human rights, and is absurd, as it is unjust. A hereditary governor is an inconsistent as hereditary author”.26

In his writings Thomas Paine builds a strong case for the superiority of republican government due to its rationality and civility. He is also convinced that Britain fails to qualify as a republic, not only because of its governmental structure, but by reason of its lack of a constitution. Paine states that “Government without a constitution is power without a right. All delegated power is a trust, and all assumed power is usurpation”.27 He asserts that a constitution is not created by government, but by an act of the people. A constitution belongs to the nation and is not the property of those who rule. In fact, it is antecedent to and distinct from government. Paine cites America as being an example of a nation where constitutions are established by the authority of the citizenry. In contrasting England to America he declares that, “In the Magna Charta and Bill of Rights…we see nothing of a constitution, but only of restrictions on assumed power. From the time of William (the Conqueror) a species of government arose, issuing out of this coalition or rights…that can be described by no other name than despotic legislation…the only right it acknowledges out of itself, is the right of petitioning. Where is the constitution that either gives or restrains power”?28

Paine concludes his arguments against the British form of government by stating that it is a species of slavery, whereas representative rule establishes and secures freedom. He feels that because England lacks a true constitution there is nothing to regulate or restrain the abuse of power. As a result of the absence of a constitution, government is both irrational and tyrannical. Paine declares, “Government is but now beginning to be known. Hither to it has been the mere exercise of power, which forbade all effectual inquiry into rights, and grounded itself wholly on possessions. The rights of man are the rights of all generations of men, and cannot be monopolized by any”.29

According to modern interpretations of Lock’s philosophy, he believed that Britain was a “republic” because Parliament had the authority to make laws and check as well as control the executive branch of government (the King). Locke felt that power resided in the people or to be more precise in their chosen representatives. However, when referring to political power, the term people to Locke means men of property. In his political and social system, power is in the hands of the Aristocracy and Sovereign. Paine attacked the English government as it represented a combination of tyrannical Royalty and decadent Aristocracy. Because of its power structure and lack of a constitution, British style government placed severe limitations on the concept of democracy. There is a republican element in this system due to the fact that Parliament consisted of a House of Commons as well as a House of Lords. However, the House of Lords was the dominate power and the system of electing people to the House of Commons was far from democratic. The few rather than the many chose the nations representatives. It was not until the 20th century (Parliament Act of 1911) that legislative supremacy shifted to the House of Commons.

It is interesting that Locke in his discourses relating to the structure and functions of government has absolutely nothing to say about the judiciary. This is astonishing as debates regarding the judiciaries role within the framework of government were common. In fact, the subject was a heated topic of discussion in Locke’s day. A strong judiciary would have the potential to alleviate the imbalances of power within the British system of government and cause it to evolve along a more democratic path. Locke overlooked the importance, in fact the necessity, of an independent judiciary as a prerequisite for ensuring that government would be just, impartial as well as truly republican in nature. Not only was Locke’s view of government lacking in balance and substance, he failed to perceive that the government and social system that he was advocating was actually non-existent. To quote Bertrand Russell, “Locke seemed blandly unaware that, in all the countries of Europe, the realization of his programs (philosophy) would hardly be possible without a bloody revolution. The odd thing is that he could announce doctrines requiring so much revolution before they could be put into effect, and yet show no sign that he thought the system existing in his day unjust, or that he was aware of it being different from the system he advocated”.30

Locke’s attitude isn’t surprising if one realizes that he wasn’t advocating modern democracy, but the status quo of British society and government. The purpose of his writings were to provide a Justification for the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and 1689. John Locke was attempting to defend the past and to do so within the framework of traditional British society. Unlike Thomas Paine, he was not acting to create the future order of mankind. Locke did not envisage our modern American concept of republican government. He had no clue with respect to the nature of our egalitarian world view and value system. In essence, Locke’s philosophy reflected convictions that were popular in his day. Thus, Paine’s and Locke’s thought systems are dissimilar in origin and content. Because they often used similar terminology does not mean their words are synonymous.

According to Bertrand Russell, “Locke is the most fortunate of all philosophers. He completed his work in theoretical philosophy just at the moment when the government of his country fell into the hands of men who shared his political opinions. Both in practice and in theory, the views which he advocated were held, for many years to come, by the most vigorous and influential politicians and philosophers”.31 This statement is true until Paine’s entry upon the world stage in the latter half of the 18th century. Then John Locke would be forever transformed.

The increase in democratization within Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries was due to a delayed and reluctant response to revolutions in American and France. The English government did not just wake up in the 20th century and shift controlling power to the House of Commons because it finally understood John Locke. What impacted and moved the people of England to accept democratic reforms were the ideas and ideals born out of the American Revolution. An extreme slowness to embrace change and a hidebound worship of tradition lies at the heart of British character. To this day, modern English Democracy is combined with an archaic and debilitated monarchy. Bertrand Russell in trying to explain the English temperament, as well as to account for John Locke’s paradoxical thinking states, “A conflict between King and Parliament in the civil war gave Englishmen, once for all, a love of compromise and moderation, and a fear of pushing any theory to its logical conclusion, which has dominated them down to the present time”.32 When dealing with Locke there is an obvious difference between appearance and reality. The simplest way of resolving the evident paradox that exists in Locke’s political and social ideas that sharply conflict with his actual beliefs and life style, is to realize that Locke’s world view and value system are a mirror image of his understanding of past and current British culture. In brief, his value system and world view were not contrary to, but embraced traditional British institutions and their underlying precepts. Again, Locke was attempting to conserve and modify rather than dismantle the structure of the old world order. In brief, he was not trying to create new political and social formations.

In order to more fully comprehend the dissimilarity between the political and social outlook of John Locke and Thomas Paine, it is necessary to understand that they were born over 100 years apart (1632-1704 versus 1737-1809). Both were affected by unique social, political and religious forces and as a result had distinctive concerns and goals. Not only did Locke and Paine live in separate eras, they were from different social classes and did not share the same cultural views. The era in which they lived and their social class status resulted in divergent and conflicting philosophies. Paine’s goal was to usher in a new world order based upon fresh and untried social and political ideals and structures. Locke’s aim was to justify the political and social arrangements already in existence. Locke grew up during a time of civil war and social disorder. He believed that the only foundation for eliminating violence and securing peace within society was through government by a protestant monarchy that was checked as well as controlled by Parliament. In addition to limited monarchy and rule by the aristocracy, he visualized a comprehensive and tolerant church establishment that would embrace the majority of discordant religious sects within society. Locke felt that the appropriate balances between the branches of government, as well as between government and church, would result in civility and harmony within the social order. He was convinced that the current structure of British government and society provided for a peaceful and civilized culture. In contrast, it was Paine’s opinion that “All European governments (France now excepted) are constructed not on the principles of universal civilization, but on the reverse of it…”33 Paine felt that European governments (excluding France)actually placed themselves above the law and ignored both the will of the people and the will of God.

Paine like Locke grew up in a time of social unrest. However, instead of attempting to justify the social and political world about him, he rebelled against its restrictive and oppressive nature. In contrast to Locke, Paine who was born into a lower social class was repulsed by the injustice and adverse social conditions that flourished around him in English society. He said, “When…we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows in a civilized country, something must be wrong in the system of government. Why is it that scarcely any are executed but the poor? Young people should be educated and older people supported…The resources of a country are lavished upon kings, upon courts, upon hirelings. The poor are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them”…34 Paine displays his anger towards inequitable social conditions by saying, “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 about its constitution and government”.35

Thomas Paine believed that poverty, ignorance and injustice were a national disgrace. In order to eliminate injustice and resolve social problems, he advocated social and political reforms on a grand scale and in a manner that is original and modern. Not only did Paine extol modern republican government and the universal franchises, he recommended and pleaded for state sponsored programs such as medical care, guaranteed employment and compensation, maintenance and security for the elderly and indigent, as well as free universal education. No other person in the revolutionary period was pleading for social security, socialized medicine, free universal education and other forms of state welfare. Thomas Jefferson did suggest a state funded educational program. His plan was created years earlier by a curriculum committee [Jefferson’s educational program was devised by a committee of revisors at the College of William and Mary in 1779. It was presented by Jefferson to the Virginia legislature in 1817. 12.] Paine made it clear that his ideas and proposals were neither paternalistic or Christian philanthropy. According to Paine, these state supported social programs were not charity but a right.

In both social thought and humane policies, Paine stood alone and was ahead of his times. He advanced these and other ideas on government’s civic responsibilities almost 150 years before the rise of social democracy. No similar sweeping social reforms can be found in John Locke’s writings. In fact, they are conspicuous by their absence. Locke has been cited for representing liberal thought that grew out of the Renaissance and Reformation. It should be noted, his thinking is only liberal compared to that of the Middle Ages. It does not reflect modern liberalism which grew out of the Enlightenment. Thomas Paine is the father of modern liberalism. Our American view of the nature of government and society can be traced to his writings and not those of John Locke. The inspiration for radical change, within mankind’s social and political orders, came from the new and not the old world.

Another critical area of thought that distinguishes Thomas Paine’s Philosophy from John Locke’s relates to Paine’s seminal thinking regarding the nature of the relationship between society and government. One of the most original and creative aspects of Paine’s thought system, that made the modern world possible, is the discrimination he made between civil society and government. In brief, he changed mankind’s view concerning the relationship of society and government. “Common Sense” is the first modern political essay to make and defend a distinction (separation) between the concepts of state and civil society. Previous to the printing of this political tract the terms state and civil society were looked at as being the same. All American and European writers, including Locke, utilized the concept of civil society to portray political associations that bound people together. In European tradition the state and civil society are interchangeable terms. Elemental or conclusive power was originally vested in the king and over time increasingly shared with members of the aristocracy. Louis XIV summed up the old worlds political and social point of view (philosophy) when he said, “I am the state”. According to Thomas Paine the people are the state.

Paine turned the 18th century’s concept of government and society on its head. After and because of “Common Sense” people felt that they, rather than rulers and aristocrats, exercised ultimate control over both government and society. Past ways of looking at political and social relationships were inverted. Overlords would be viewed as subject of the citizenry. The divine right of king’s philosophy was challenged by a thought system that placed decisive authority and power in the hands of the populace. A shift in thinking took place in which government of, by and for the people became the new reality. The raison d’etre for government would be the rights and welfare of the people. America’s revolution was a struggle between two diametrically positioned philosophies, rule from the top or rule by the populace.

“Common Sense” treated previous political and social concepts and principles as obsolete and in fact irrelevant. In order to support a republican point of view, Paine had to disconnect the state/civil society couplet. He preferred to use the terms society and government. These words though related were conceived of as being separate entities. Paine believed that government is simply a delegation of power by the public to representatives who are to exercise its use for the common good. Power was to be utilized to provide universal benefits for the citizenry. Government exists to secure individual liberties and to protect the populace from harm whether caused by internal or external sources. In short, the role of government is to ensure the rights, well-being and advancement of its people.

“Common Sense” was brilliantly written and in fact a revolution in the use of language. It mesmerized the American public. Paine’s treatise boldly argued several critical social ideas from an American point of view. His essay did so with great power and enormous consequence. Its originality, creativity and uniqueness stimulated public discussions that forever changed America. After “Common Sense” American and World History would be profoundly altered and find new directions.

There are other factors in addition to those already presented that reveal a difference in the character of these two men. For example, Locke has stated, “Lastly those are not all to be tolerated who deny the being of God”.36 This statement displays a narrow minded and intolerant attitude that can be traced to his medieval world view and value system. Locke’s religious convictions certainly would not support republican government or a secular society. To further complicate the matter of understanding the disparity between Locke’s and Paine’s philosophies, history and reference books state that the enlightenment was an 18th century intellectual movement and John Locke was an exponent of its philosophy. However, Locke was born in 1632 and spent all but the last four years of his life in the 17thcentury. To designate a 17th century man as being the creation of the 18th century is, to say the least, a solecism. Either our dating schemes do not make sense or interpretations of Lockean thought are in error.

It is apparent that mankind’s intellectual activities cannot be neatly classified or demarcated by century boundary posts. Dating is a man made artificial construct. The fabric of history is a single piece. Change occurs continuously over long periods of time and at an accelerating pace as new ideas and inventions make further progress possible. In particular, the struggle between faith and reason has gone on for thousands of years and still persists in the 21st century. A shift in the balance with respect to these two entities has occurred since the Middle Ages. However, faith and reason are strong components of every period in history. It should be observed that no era has been noted for cornering the market on rationality. Thomas Paine, even thought he lived during the Enlightenment, was severely persecuted by the religious right of his day.

In spite of the fact that history is a continuum and boundary markers that differentiate eras are not easy to establish with great precision, each age does have characteristics that make it unique and distinguish it from other historical periods. For example, the Renaissance and Reformation produced ideas that undermined the Medieval world view. In the words of Dr. Crane Brinton, the intelligentsia of these overlapping eras were “Agents of Distinction” who set the stage for a new cosmology and worldview. Their intellectual achievements were impressive and had great impact upon world history by stimulating the development of Protestantism, humanism, rationalism and science. Even though the intelligentsia were progressive within certain fields of thought, in the social and political spheres, they embraced a traditional belief that society is based upon rule by Aristrocrats and Monarchs. Thus, they did not adopt a philosophy and value system that was democratic in nature.

It was not until the 18th century that our modern world view was created. To quote Professor Crane Brinton, “The democratic world-view was formulated in the eighteenth century at the end of three centuries of change”…37″Our central theme is how the Medieval view of life was altered into the eighteenth century view of life. This eighteenth century view of life, though modified in the last two centuries, is still at the bottom of our view of life, especially in the United States”.38 Thus, the Renaissance (14th into the 17th century) and Reformation (16thcentury) were a transition period between the Middle Ages (500 to approximately 1500 AD) and the Enlightenment (18th century) which gave birth to our modern democratic outlook on society and government. During the period of the Renaissance the forces of Feudalism and Scholasticism, which in the past had ordered human life, were visibly shattered. The time period between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment was significant because, it provided a view of life that was increasingly rational and scientific rather than mystical and theological.

On the important questions regarding the time span for and the interpretation of the Renaissance, the author is accepting Bertrand Russell’s viewpoint. “The Modern as opposed to the Medieval outlook began in Italy (14th century) with a movement called the Renaissance. At first, only a few individuals, notable Petrarch had this outlook, but in the 15th century it would spread to the great majority of cultivated Italians, both lay and clerical”.39 “The period of history which is commonly called `Modern’ has a mental outlook which differs from the Medieval period in many ways. Of these, two are most important: the diminishing authority of the church, and the increasing authority of science. With these two, others are connected. The culture of modern times is more lay than clerical. States increasingly replace the church as the governmental authority that controls culture”.40

In the world that was emerging, during the modern period of history, human reason and science rather than superstition and theology would become the major forces shaping our world. From the 14th to the 18th century mankind’s world was placed on foundations that were more materialistic and less theistic. During the 18th century men were willing to let go of the past and challenge the concept that people and their political and social orders were subservient to Kings, Clerics, and Aristocrats. From this point on the theory that power resided in the hands of Monarchs, Patricians, and the Church was supplanted by a belief in the rights of the common man. In brief, the 18th century contested the idea that the locus of power was in the Sovereign, Nobility and Religious Institutions. It was decided that the center of political authority was the will of the people.

The point of view expressed here regarding features of the various historical eras is critical not only for understanding the transition from the Medieval to the Modern World, it is crucial for comprehending the contributions of both Thomas Paine and John Locke to mankind as well as ascertaining their proper place in the United States and World History.

SUMMARY

In comparing and contrasting John Locke’s thought system with that of Thomas Paine’s, my main concerns are that Locke’s Philosophy, unlike Paine’s, is not modern, original, generative, or democratic. By embracing past and present social and political conditions in England as reflecting an existing egalitarian way of life, John Locke fails to comprehend and support the concepts and ideals of modern republican government. His system of thought differs from Paine’s because it is not based upon government of, by, and for the people. Democracy in our political tradition is predicated on the will of the majority rather than the desires of the few. In Locke’s thinking, the will of the people is precluded as the majority of individuals lack citizenship rights, including the right to vote. What Locke’s philosophy supports is a medieval faith in limited monarchy. It is incomprehensible that one could embrace a political and social system dominated by royalty and the nobility and claim to be an advocate of republicanism. As a corollary, it is also illogical to believe that Locke’s views on government and society are the source and model for American democracy. Paine’s and Locke’s social and political concepts lie at opposite ends of the speculative spectrum.

If we look at a variety of interrelated factors in John Locke’s thinking, such as, a medieval conception of the social and political orders, power in the hands of monarchs and aristorcrats, government not basedupon republican principles, absence of an independent an impartial court system, the majority being denied citizenship rights, preservation of property being the main motive that causes human beings to form governments, man’s position under the social compact, pedigree and property determining one’s opportunities and position in life, lack of a genuinely representative form of government, limited political and social freedoms, a society built upon an operated by despotic institutions, the state and civil society being coterminous; it becomes apparent that a wide intellectual and conceptual gulf exists between John Locke and Thomas Paine. If we add to the above components that represent Locke’s thinking the lack of a true British constitution, it also becomes evident that all of these items whencombined do not reflect the thinking of Thomas Paine or a democratic life style. Again, it is difficult to look at the array of principles, opinions and concepts that John Locke embraced and believe that his thought system is the foundation of American society.

Thomas Paine’s writings and speeches altered Lockean philosophy in particular and European thought in general. A shift in thinking, in which man was regarded as free, equal and independent within society, resulted in a new political and social architecture. Paine’s ideas and ideals not only transformed the philosophy of John Locke and the relationship between citizens and their government, they universalized the concept of revolution. Events in America might lead to the destruction and reordering of Europe’s political and social arrangements. This is one reason Paine was looked upon as a threat to the stability and structure of the 18th century world. America’s revolution would prove to be a harbinger of things to come.

Many people in colonial America and in Europe considered Paine’s agenda for government and society too liberal. Others felt his programs and proposals went beyond liberalism and were in essence anarchic. Thomas Paine did not view himself as being either liberal or radical. He simply believed that his ideas and efforts on behalf of freedom, equality and independence were a means of ushering in a new world order that would bring about the fulfillment of God’s plan for humanity. The values of democracy were in harmony with the universal mind and natural law. They were capable of properly linking human beings to one another as well as to creation and their creator. Thomas Paine persuaded and impelled men to abolish the political and social structures under which they existed. His essay “Common Sense” convinced the colonists that separation from Great Britain and the formation of a republic were a necessity. This composition transformed public opinion and created the American Revolution. In fact, this publication is the dividing line between British American and the United States History. Thomas Paine’s achievements are remarkable and transcend time and place. To give just one example, he wrote the three best-selling books of the 18th century (Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason). These works are the cornerstones of modern democracy as well as 21st century social and political thought.

Thomas Paine was the most prodigious political and social polemicist of the revolutionary era. His thinking is far more original and seminal than he has been given credit for by historians. Its scope is immense which is one of many reasons why he is something much more than a “Political Propagandist” and “Pamphleteer”. Such terms have been utilized in denigrating manner in order to limit Paine’s significance as a creative force in American and World History. His thinking encompassed the past, present and future of mankind. Few people in history have affected and changed the world as much as Thomas Paine. John Adams, our second president, said that “History will ascribe the (American) Revolution to Thomas Paine”.41 “Paine crystallized public opinion in favor of revolution and was the first factor in bringing about revolution”.42 John Adams also stated, “I know not whether any man in the world had had more influence on its in habitants or affairs for the last 30 years than Tom Paine. Call it the age of Paine”.43 It was apparent to many of Paine’s contemporaries that the cause of the American Revolution and the creator of the structure and values of Modern Democracy was Thomas Paine and not John Locke. In fact, many highly intelligent men in both America and Europe perceived Paine as being one of the world’s most creative and advanced minds. He was regarded by numerous prominent individuals as a man of genius who changed the nature and composition of government and society. Napoleon Bonaparte grasping Paine’s impact on his era asserted, “Paine deserved a statue in gold in every town”.44 Considering Paine’s contributions to the formation of the American State and the direction of modern World History, his life needs to be reexamined in the light of honesty in order that he may receive the long overdue recognition and respect that he justly deserves.

POSTSCRIPT

“Among enemies and friends alike, Paine earned a reputation as a citizen extraordinary — as the greatest political figure of his generation. He made more noise in the world and excited more attention than such well-known European contemporaries as Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Madame de Stael and Pietro Verri”.45

From TOM PAINE A POLITICAL LIFE

By John Keane (Prologue)

NOTE

John Adams detested Thomas Paine. They were at opposite ends of the republican spectrum. Adams was conservative and Paine even by today’s standards would be considered extremely liberal. However, one thing they did agree on was independence. Thomas Paine not only created modern liberalism, Eugene V. Debs in one of his speeches paid homage to the prophet of freedom by declaring that Paine isalso the father of the modern radical tradition in politics.

QUOTATIONS

1. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin Books, 1989 Pages 32 & 33

2. Burtt, Edwin A. The English Philosophers From Bacon To Mill

New York: Random House, Inc. 1939 Page 455

(Locke – Essay Concerning Civil Government)

3. Ibid Page 424 (Essay Concerning Civil Government)
4. Ibid Page 456 (Essay Concerning Civil Government)
5. Ibid Page 457 (Essay Concerning Civil Government)
6. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin Books, 1989 Page 68 (Common Sense)

7. Foner, Phillip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine

New York: The Citadel Press, 1969 Page 274 (Rights of Man)

8. Ibid Page 275 (Rights of Man)
9. Ibid Page 314 (Rights of Man)
10. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1945 Page 600

11. Ibid Page 601
12. Ibid Page 619
13. Ibid Page 623
14. Ibid Page 630
15. Fruchman, Jack Jr. Thomas Paine Apostle of Freedom

New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994 Page 6

16. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1945 Page 624 & 625

17. Ibid Page 625
18. Ibid Page 627 19
19. Ibid Page 632
20. Foner, Philip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine

New York: The Citadel Press, 1969 Page 7 (Common Sense)

21. Ibid Page 277 (Rights of Man)
22. Ibid Page 277 (Rights of Man)
23. Ibid Page 338 (Rights of Man)
24. Ibid Page 341 (Rights of Man)
25. Ibid Pages 360 & 361 (Rights of Man)
26. Ibid Pages 367 & 368 (Rights of Man)
27. Ibid Pages 375 & 376 (Rights of Man)
28. Ibid Page 383 (Rights of Man)
29. Ibid Page 396 (Rights of Man)
30. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1945 Pages 634 & 635

31. Ibid Page 605
32. Ibid Page 601
33. Foner, Philip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine

New York: The Citadel Press, 1969 Page 399 (Rights of Man)

34. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin Books, 1989 Pages 20 & 21 (Rights of Man)

35. Ibid Page 21 (Rights of Man)
36. Seldes, George. The Great Thoughts

New York: Ballantine Books, 1996 Page 274

37. Brinton, Crane. The Shaping of Modern Thought

Englewood Cliffs New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1963 Page 247

38. Ibid Page 24 20
39. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1945 Page 495

40. Ibid Page 491
41. Seldes, George. The Great Thoughts

New York: Ballantine Books, 1996 Page 353

42. Brooks, Van Wyck. The World of Washington Irving

New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1944 Page 57

43. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin Books, 1989 Page 28 & 29

44. Ibid Page 34
45. Keane, John. Tom Paine A Political Life

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995 Page IX (Prologue) 21

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Foot & Kramnic. The Thomas Paine Reader

New York: Penguin books, 1989

2. Foner, Phillip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine

New York: The Citadel Press, 1969

3. Fruchtman, Jack Jr. Thomas Paine Aspostle of Freedom

New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994

4. Keane, John. Tom Paine A Political Life

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1995

5. Paine, Thomas. Common Sense – Rights of Man

Delran New Jersey: The Classics of Liberty Library, 1992

6. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government

Delran New Jersey: The Classics of Liberty Library, 1992

7. Brooks, Van Wyck. The World of Washington Irving

New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1944

8. Seldes, George. The Great Thoughts

New York: Ballantine Books, 1996

9. Burtt, Edwin A. The English Philosophers From Bacon To Mill

New York: Random House, Inc., 1939

10. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy

New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1945

11. Russell, Bertrand. Wisdom of the West

New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1959

12. Whittemore, Robert C. Makers of the American Mind

New York: William Morrow & Company, 1964

13. Brinton, Crane. The Shaping of Modern Thought

Englewood Cliffs New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963

14. Bowersock, Brown & Graber. Late Antiquity

Cambridge Massachusetts: The Belknap Press, 1999.

15. Haskins, Charles Homer. The Renaissance of the 12th Century

New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960 22

16. Lindsay, A.D. The Modern Democratic State

New York: Oxford University Press, 1962

17. Stenton, Doris May. English Society In the Early Middle Ages

London: The Whitefriars Press LTD, 1959

18. Dawson, Christopher. The Making of Europe

New York: Meridian Books, Inc., 1960

19. McNeill, William H. The Rise of The West

Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1963

20. Rowan, Herbert H. A History of Early Modern Europe

New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., 1960

21. Morgan, Edmund S. The Birth of the Republic

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956

22. Degler, Carl N. Out Of Our Past

New York & Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962

23. Curti, Shryock, Cochran & Harrington. A History of American Civilization

New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. 1953

24. Taylor, Alan. American Colonies

New York: Viking Penguin, 2001

25. Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence

New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000

26. Bowen, Catherine Drinker. John Adams And The American Revolution

New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950

27. Boyer, Paul S. Editor. Oxford Companion to United States History

New York: Oxford University Press, 2001 23

The post How Paine Transformed Locke appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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.

The post Thomas Paine and the Declaration of Independence appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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 Thomas Paine Historical Association.

These lines from a children’s song richly capture the infamy that Thomas Paine had fallen into at the time of his death on June 8, 1809 in New Rochelle, New York:

Even with the passing of 215 years, Paine is still a relatively unknown figure despite his bestselling pamphlet, Common Sense (1776) which urged Americans to declare independence, and his popular American Crisis papers (1776–1783).

Read the full article:

https://medium.com/counterarts/heres-to-tom-paine-the-forgotten-founding-father-530f0c0fb3db?sk=8e5c8ed2d0e368b31dab245fa8e9a632

The post Here’s to Tom Paine—the Forgotten Founding Father appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Dr. Polin is Professor Emeritus of Government and Politics, St. John’s University, New York, and Mrs. Polin is his co-reseorcher and co-author of a work nearing completion on American political thought.

Quo warranto?

By what warrant, right, or authority may a government perform such acts and functions as make law, tax, regulate industry and education, try, fine, imprison, and even execute; and such additional duties as maintain armed forces, enter into treaties, make war and peace, set standards of measurement, license medical practice, erect roads and bridges, control the traffic that travels over them or through the air, conduct elections, and grant or recognize citizenship?

A simple answer that states the encompassing principle that can legitimate a government’s exercise of such numerous and varied powers was penned by Thomas Jefferson in the dictum in the Declaration of Independence that, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The means of giving consent in a proper way for a government to have widely known, proper powers, limitations, and duties is Thomas Paine’s concern in his treatment of constitutions. Paine purposed to realize for every individual, as much as possible, the God-given natural rights and liberty of mankind. Such a goal for any nation, Paine believed, is best and most easily accomplished through the agency of a constitution that by its sequence of adoption and substantive content accorded with what he advocated in Rights of Man (1791-92).

Paine takes care to eliminate from consideration, therefore, any consideration that a governmental contract could be the basis of a valid constitution or legitimate government. A governmental contract was one that followed the rationale of a feudal relationship contract: between unequals and often entered into under duress; Paine argued especially against its usual provision of translatio: translation or permanent alienation (transfer from) of a title (i.e., legal ownership of a property). Here Paine was reaffirming that our God-given natural rights and liberty cannot be alienated from us. Paine therefore responds energetically to Edmund Burke’s obsequiouslv employed illustration in his Reflections on the Revolution in France ( 1790) that recounted use of translatio (permanent and unlimited transfer) to vest the British monarch with assertions of sovereignty in a declaration by Parliament to William of Orange and Mary in 1688:

“The Lords Spirirual and Temporal, do, in the name of the people aforesaid.- (meaning the people of England then living) “most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities for EVER.” He also quotes a clause of another act of Parliament made in the same reign, the terms of which, he says, “bind us,” (meaning the people of that day) “our heirs and posterity, to them, their heirs and posterity, to the end of time.”

Paine indignantly retorts:

“Every age and government must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.”

What Thomas Paine favors as the basis of a constitution is a social contract, an agreement among “We, the People” as equals, to set up an arrangement or constitution that is limited in kinds and duration of grant of power: i.e., it is predicated on the principle of concessio (concession of limited extent of power that is conditional and therefore withdrawable when performance is not satisfactory). Paine regarded the recent American state and Federal constitutions as examples of social compacts and proper constitutions that enabled their governments to exercise their powers justly because limited in substance and as to due process, including method of amendment.

Paine stipulated prior adoption by the people-not the government – as a necessary authorization for institution or alteration of a constitution. Thus, he agreed with Alexander Hamilton’s statement in Federalist No. 22 that, “The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.” Paine presented the same idea but required the sequence of popular action beforehand:

A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting a government.

Paine reiterates: “A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution, is power without a right.”

For Paine, a constitution should provide the fundamental rules according to which the government is organized and operates as it decides on policies, maintains public order and safety, and protects liberty. He succinctly states: “The American Constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax.”

Paine’s definition of a constitution, is not as inclusive, flexible, or authoritative as the standard one by Lord Bolingbroke (Viscount Henry St. John) in his 1733 work, A Dissertation upon Parties. Bolingbroke properly allowed for traditional, unwritten, or partially written, constitutions as well as written ones of the type Paine demanded. Paine, instead, was a more tendentious polemicist who wanted to show that the British monarchical government was exercising unconsented-to power in ways dangerous to her own and other peoples; and he also wished there to be an order of procedure that would be more likely to produce: (1) the consent of the people as a whole to a constitution; and(2) a definite, widely known description of the limits as well as powers of the government, so that the people would be more secure from and better served by it.

We should not conclude without asking when would Thomas Paine have been satisfied with a constitution? Paine himself gives us an answer:

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; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness” – when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.

Finally, we should ask what most motivated Thomas Paine in developing his socio-politico-economic agenda? Clearly, the goals he set in his statement about the kind of constitution and country he wanted, were understood by him not to be fully achievable in his lifetime; but he felt compelled to declare them in order to encourage mankind to persist in the brave new era of the Enlightenment to make a better world by following deistic-Quaker religious principles. The central purpose of these teachings was to help one another, especially when in need.

In a footnote to his “Observations on the Declaration of Rights” (1791), Paine writes of an original pactum divinum (“a covenant with the Lord”) that antedates and outranks all other pacts and authority of government: “a compact between God and man, from the beginning of time.” In accordance with this covenant, we are commanded by God to love and serve one another and to keep also God’s other commandments. Thus, the much misrepresented Paine, although by no means saintly in attitude or behavior, was in fact sincerely devout in the best sense of the word: doing God’s will. Paine’s political thought and life of action should therefore be understood as deriving mostly from his religious faith and faithfulness to the word of God as he was taught and perceived it:

It is time that because of his wise words and brave deeds, Thomas Paine should be regarded as “a son of the commandments” that constitute “a covenant with the Lord.”

The post Thomas Paine’s View of Constitutions appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Harvey Kaye is the Ben and Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. This essay was printed in TPNHA’s journal in May, 2001, and it first appeared in his book, Firebrand of the Revolution (Oxford U. Press, 2000).

We should never fail to recount the story of the American Revolution. We should never forget that our nation was forged in struggle, a struggle — however inadequate and in need of continual renewal and advancement — that was revolutionary. And we should never fail to appreciate the fundamental role of the radical Thomas Paine in helping us to realize what we might become. Would there have been an American Revolution, an American war for independence, had Thomas Paine not written his stirring pamphlet Common Sense? Most likely, yes. However, the American Revolution might not have been the kind of republican and democratic struggle it became, and the course of the nation’s development would likely have been quite different.

Born January 29,1737, in Thetford, England, Thomas Paine was the only son of Joseph Pain, a Quaker staymaker, and Frances Cocke, the daughter of an Anglican lawyer. Neither a happy nor an affluent couple, Joseph and Frances nevertheless were extremely fond of their son and committed to his receiving a formal education. In addition to educating the boy in the Bible at home, they enrolled him in the Thetford Grammar School. Among his studies, he most enjoyed science and poetry.

But Tom’s parents could afford to keep him in school only so long. When he turned 13, they apprenticed him to his father. In his father’s workshop, he learned not only the craft of corsetmaking, but also the dissenting and egalitarian spirit of the Quakers and the historical memory of “turning the world upside down” in the English Revolution of the 1640s and 50s.

An artisan’s life apparently afforded insufficient excitement for the young man. Two weeks before his twentieth birthday, Tom ran away to serve aboard an English privateer, hoping to gain adventure and a bit of money. The encounters, rigors, and oppressions on board must have taught him a great deal, but hen soon had enough of life between “the devil and the deep blue sea.” After just a year, he disembarked for London, to work again as a journeyman staymaker.

During the next decade and a half, Tom suffered more than his share of tragic disappointments, mistakes and failures. In 1759,he set up shop as a master craftsman on the southeast coast where he met and married his first love, Mary Lambert. Yet, sadly, within a year Mary died in premature childbirth and, for lack of trade, Tom was forced to give up the business.

In 1764,he secured appointment as an excise officer, but he was expelled a year later, supposedly for having stamped goods without inspecting them (a not-unusual practice of over-worked excise officers). During the next few years he kept himself going by working as a staymaker, a teacher, and a preacher while he petitioned for reinstatement in the excise service.

Finally, in early 1768, he received a new posting, to Lewes in Sussex. There he boarded with a tobacconist, whose daughter, Elizabeth Ollive, he married on the shopkeeper’s death. Tom also became active in local affairs and a “regular” in the political debates at the White Hart Tavern. He soon developed a friendly reputation as a man who enjoyed a few good drinks and had a “skill with words.”

Recognizing his talents, Paine’s fellow officers chose him to lead their campaign for higher salaries. Thus, in 1772 he penned his first pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, and moved to London to lobby Parliament. His sojourn back in the capital both increased his knowledge and resentment of aristocratic government and politics and renewed his awareness of the popular radicalism of the middle and working classes. Additionally, it enabled him to renew his interest in natural philosophy through attendance at science lectures – occasions that placed him among circles of intellectuals and freethinkers which, fortuitously, included Benjamin Franklin.

Unfortunately, the campaign failed and the Excise Commission discharged Tom for ignoring his official duties. Making matters worse, the tobacco shop also failed, and Tom and his wife agreed to separate.

Now 37 years old, with few resources and without prospects, but possessed of a seemingly indefatigable willingness to try again, Tom resolved to go to America. The renowned Ben Franklin himself provided Tom with a letter of introduction, but little could either man have suspected that the mix of memories and skills, which Paine carried with him, would prove so volatile when brought into contact with America.

America would inspire Paine and he would not only refashion his own life, he would contribute, as well, to refashioning American life. Just a year after his arrival, he would declare: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And his words would fire the imagination of his new compatriots.

The America to which Paine journeyed was thriving, dynamic, and rebellious. The population of the l3 colonies had reached almost 3 million. The vast majority lived in the countryside, but Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston had developed into prosperous regional capitals.

Colonial life did not simply reflect life in the mother country. Americans were more pro-monarchy than the English themselves; but with the king and his ministers an ocean away they could afford to be. While rich gentlemen “lorded it” over others, actual aristocrats were a rare breed in America. And, though religious toleration varied from colony to colony, the Church of England never secured the authority it held at home. Rather, religious pluralism and enthusiasm characterized American life.

Moreover in contrast to Britain, America had little unemployment or poverty. Although the same property-holding qualifications to vote applied in America as in Britain, the colonies were far more democratic places. More than half of colonial white men held enough property to vote; they governed themselves through elected assemblies (subject to the veto power of royal governors); and they enjoyed the freest press of the eighteenth century. Like their British cousins, colonials celebrated their liberties, and the middle and lower classes – though excluded from formal political debates – effectively registered their views through street-crowd actions.

America seemed exceptional, yet serious contradictions marked the developing society. Fundamental inequalities shaped colonial life and antagonisms were intensifying. Women’s lives varied based on class and marital status, but all women suffered the restrictions of male domination. Colonials prided themselves on their liberties, but their economies depended upon denying freedom to others. To gain passage to America, poor white immigrants subjected themselves to indentured servitude. More cruelly, a vicious trade brought Africans to work as slaves and they numbered half a million. The rebelliousness of servants and slaves distressed their masters. And not far away lived the Native American peoples, determined to resist colonial expansion as best they could.

Real inequalities also prevailed among free whites. Landlordism and tenantry spread, periodically inciting farmers to riot in protest. Property also shaped urban life. Wealthy merchants had built fortunes on transatlantic commerce. Together with the southern planters and northern landlords, they constituted provincial ruling classes and dominated colonial assemblies. Also, an intellectual elite of lawyers and prominent Protestant clergy developed in close connection to these ruling classes.

Of course, the urban majority belonged to the working classes. The “master mechanics,” owned their own shops and hired journeymen and apprentices. These skilled artisans were Tom Paine’s folk. Literate and often interested in science and public affairs, they aspired to an independent livelihood and community respect, gained through hard work, moderation, and self-improvement. As well, they desired a greater role in public affairs.

Below the artisans, propertyless laborers grew in number, including sailors, dockworkers, hired servants, and the unskilled. Though better off in America than in Britain, they well knew both that they lacked the rights of the propertied and that the rich were growing richer. Their rising sense of injustice, and readiness to express it, made their superiors nervous.

Holding these diverse colonials together, and binding them to the empire, was their shared sense of “Britishness” (though not all were actually British or even of British descent). Like their British counterparts, they believed they enjoyed rights which other peoples did not – rights secured through the ages and assured by the English Constitution. Ironically, the very demands of the British Empire would soon wear away at the colonials’ attachments to Britain and its institutions.

Britain’s triumph in the Seven Years War – known to us as the French and Indian War (1756-63) – drove the French from Canada and secured British domination of North America and the Atlantic world. But victory and supremacy had a high price, exhausting the treasury and forcing the British Government to raise taxes and seek additional sources of income.

King George III and his chief financial minister, George Grenville, logically assumed that the costs of colonial security should be borne by the colonials themselves. The colonials did not share that assumption; they felt they had paid for the North American war with their blood.

As well, the British Government sought to more effectively regulate American commerce, and to protect Native American treaty rights against white encroachment. The resulting policies instigated a series of imperial crises.

In 1763, Grenville laid out a “Proclamation Line” along the Appalachian Mountains, which restricted white territorial expansion to the west. And during the next decade he and his successors announced a string of new taxes and regulations governing colonial commerce and administration: the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Acts, the Tea Act, and the so-called Coercive or Intolerable Acts.

The British Government believed that the (unwritten) English Constitution gave it the authority to make laws for the colonies, for all Englishmen were supposedly represented in Parliament whether or not they actually voted for its members. But most Americans believed that Parliament was acting in an arbitrary and unconstitutional way, and violating their rights as Englishmen by making laws without their active consent.

Angered by events, colonial leaders delivered speeches and wrote pamphlets decrying tyranny and the threat to liberty. They rightly worried about agitating the colonial masses, for their own words and actions did just that. And, once mobilized, middle and lower-class folk grew less and less willing to defer to their “betters.” They gathered in street protests; they hung figures in effigy; and they attacked British officials and their property.

Colonial defiance made the system unworkable. But every time Parliament repealed its latest revenue-raising law, it turned around and enacted new taxes. In reply, the colonials staged boycotts and actions like the Boston Tea Party. Occasionally, such confrontations turned violent, as in the Boston Massacre, when British troops fired into a protesting crowd and killed several people.

Resistance escalated. Colonials organized, first locally, then across colonial lines, creating groups like the Sons of Liberty and the Committees of Correspondence. By 1774, the dispute had become a full-blown imperial crisis. It came to a head when Parliament closed Boston Harbor and essentially placed Boston and the Massachusetts colony under siege. Outraged, the colonies sent delegates to Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress in September 1774. They promised aid to Massachusetts, called for a continental boycott of British goods, and issued a declaration against “taxation without representation.” Meanwhile, militias trained more seriously and the “Minutemen” readied themselves. The British had united the colonials in rebellion.

It was at this time that Paine sailed to America, landing in Philadelphia only weeks after the First Continental Congress adjourned. The eight-week voyage did not augur well for his future. The crossing was horrible, if not horrific. Following the usual seasickness, a deadly epidemic known as “ship fever,” probably typhus, struck passengers and crew alike. When they finally docked on November 30, l774, Paine had to be carried ashore on a stretcher and spend the next few weeks recuperating.

Given his past, Paine was remarkably fortunate (not just for having survived the journey). Traveling as a free man, with Franklin’s letter of introduction and a bit of money in his purse, Paine’s own status contrasted sharply with that of the majority of new arrivals. One hundred of the 120 passengers with whom he sailed came as indentured servants, and Philadelphia’s Slave Market could easily be seen from his rented lodgings.

In early January, Paine roused himself to get out and about. Though only a square mile in size, Philadelphia – with a fast growing population of 30,000 and America’s busiest harbor – had emerged as the unofficial commercial and cultural capital of British North America. The city’s prosperity and diversity clearly impressed him. Founded by William Penn, a Quaker, Pennsylvania had served as a haven for the Friends and Philadelphia reflected its Quaker heritage. Its European population included native and immigrant English Quakers, Anglicans and Catholics, German Lutherans and Mennonites, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and Jews.

Philadelphia’s politics also appealed to Paine. The merchant elite controlled economic affairs and colonial government. However, they faced challenges from below. The skilled mechanics resented the merchants’ domination and they began to demand a direct role in government. Not only the wealthier artisans, but also the poorer mechanics and laborers, numbers of whom had enlisted in Pennsylvania’s militia, started to demand rights of political participation. Such things thrilled Paine – and yet the paradox of white servitude and black bondage in the midst of a prosperous, liberty-loving and spirited people astounded him.

As Franklin had directed, Paine first arranged to meet Richard Bache, who immediately took a liking to the new arrival and promised both to help him find employment as a children’s tutor and to introduce him to the city’s leading figures.

Also, as he had in London, Paine quickly took to spending time in bookshops. One afternoon, the owner of his favorite shop, Robert Aitken, engaged him in conversation about his literary interests, leading Paine to show him several of his own writings. Aitken then amazed Paine by offering him the editorship of the Pennsylvania Magazine, a new periodical that he planned to co-publish with John Witherspoon, the president of the college of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton). Incredibly, only weeks off the ship, Paine had a new career as a journalist.

The first issue appeared on January 24, 1775. The magazine flourished. Paine himself contributed essays, poems and scientific reports, written, as was the custom, under various pseudonyms, such as “Atlanticus,” “Vox Populi,” and “Justice and Humanity'”

Expressing renewed optimism and a progressive view of the future, Paine developed a writing-style and a vocabulary that reflected the promise he sensed in American life. Notably, in his opening editorial he warned against “historical superiority” the idea that the present age represents the highest and final stage of history.

Appreciating American possibilities, Paine also confronted America’s contradictions. He criticized aristocratic and lordly pomposity. In one essay he considered the oppression of women. In yet another he vigorously aatacked slavery, calling for its abolition and insisting upon America’s responsibility to support the slaves following emancipation. Not long after, Franklin returned to Philadelphia and established the first American Anti-Slavery Society with Paine as a founding member.

Though Paine wrote critically of British imperialism, he continued to favor reconciliation. That is, until April I9, l775,when British troops opened fire on colonial militia at Lexington, Massachusetts leaving 8 militiamen dead and 10 wounded. News of the battle — “the shot heard round the world” — turned Paine into an American patriot and radical. Forsaking his Quaker background, he now argued the legitimacy of violence in defense of liberty and, in the poetic verses of The Liberty Tree, he aligned himself with the American cause.

Yet, what exactly was America’s cause: The restoration of “Englishmen’s rights”? The reform of the imperial system? or outright separation? Radicals — like Samuel Adams, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson — privately discussed separation but, publicly, they merely proposed reorganizing America’s colonial relationship to Britain. And even that seemed too extreme to many.

The Pennsylvania Magazine prospered under Paine’s editorship. Nevertheless, Paine’s relations with his bosses soured by the summer of 1775. Witherspoon turned against Paine for having the audacity to actually edit Witherspoon’s words. In revenge, Witherspoon spread rumors that Paine drank heavily, a slur that would follow him to the grave. Paine did drink, mostly wine and brandy, but not at all to the extent his enemies claimed. At the same time, salary questions divided Paine and Aitken. Increasingly confident of his literary abilities, Paine had requested a raise. Aitken refused. In the autumn, Paine left the magazine.

Paine quit not simply because he became fed up with his employer. More important, he had decided upon a new and very daring project: to write a pamphlet calling for separation from Britain.

Ever since the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April l775, a state of war had prevailed. In May 1775, the Second Continental Congress had convened in Philadelphia and created a Continental Army under the command of George Washington. Still, peace overtures continued and American goals remained undefined. Tom Paine, the newcomer, would revolutionize American thinking.

Paine’s writings had started to garner significant attention and he had been befriended by one of Congress’s more radical members, the young Philadelphia doctor, Benjamin Rush. When Paine told him of his writing plans, Rush counseled moderation, fearing the time was not yet right. However, Paine would not be deterred. He was absolutely convinced that although Americans did not speak openly of it they yearned for independence. Whatever his reservations, Rush welcomed Paine’s commitment and, in turn, Paine regularly sought his new friend’s editorial advise.

Starting in September 1775, Paine devoted his energies to producing the pamphlet. History beckoned, and he could not afford to hesitate. Determined to reach the broadest possible audience, he held nothing back. He summoned forth his memories of Britain and his affection for America. He drew upon his readings of eighteenth-century liberal and republican political thought- readings that emphasized individual freedom and contended that individuals constitute representative government to protect their rights to life, liberty and property. Paine articulated those ideas with his understanding of popular, democratic political aspirations. He quoted the Bible, he cited historical examples, and called upon the force of reason itself.

After completing the manuscript in December, he sent copies to Sam Adams and Ben Franklin for their consideration. They liked it and suggested only minor revisions. Rush then introduced Paine to the Philadelphia publisher, Robert Bell, who, sympathetic to its arguments, accepted the (dangerous) commission of printing it. Paine wanted to call his pamphlet Plain Truth, but Rush proposed another title, Common Sense, and Paine listened.

Oon January10, 1776, Common Sense swept onto the American scene and into American consciousness. In just two weeks the first printing sold out. Soon, supply could not keep up with demand. With or without permission, presses around the colonies issued new editions, including one in German for immigrants. During the next few months, 150,000 copies were distributed in America alone (the equivalent today would be 15,000,000 – making it, proportionately, the nation’s greatest bestseller ever). And in very little time translations appeared in Europe.

Paine originally signed his pamphlet “Written by an Englishman.” However, within weeks folks had figured out who that Englishman was. Paine himself relished the attention, but he sought no material rewards. He declined all royalties, insisting that any profits be used to purchase mittens for Washington’s troops.

Paine wrote Common Sense to transform the colonial rebellion into a war for independence. But he did more than that. He called upon Americans to recognize their historical possibilities and historic responsibilities. Harnessing their shared- but, as of yet, unstated thoughts, and expressing them in language bold and clear, he urged them to make a true revolution of their struggles.

He forcefully declared the American cause to be much more than a question of separation from Britain. Announcing that “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” he proclaimed it a campaign against the tyranny of hereditary privileges and for a democratic republic.

Even before he issued the call for independence, Paine dealt with Americans’ surviving emotional attachments to the King and Britain. Against those who reverently praised the benevolence of the English Constitution, he insisted that “it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey.”

Paine revealed the monarchy to be a ridiculous institution whose origins were anything but divinely ordained: “A French bastard [William the Conqueror] landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. — It certainly hath no divinity in it… The plain truth is, that the antiquity of English monarchy will not bear looking into.”

Appealing to Americans’ religious and egalitarian sentiments, he added that “hereditary succession” compounds the evil of monarchy: “For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others for ever.”

He humorously observed that “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” And he charged that “monarchy and succession have laid (not this or that kingdom only) but the [whole] world in blood and ashes.”

Paine utterly rejected the proposition that Britain was America’s “parent country.” He described British conduct as selfish and shameful: “Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families.” If anything “Europe, not England, is the parent country of America,” he contended: “This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe…we claim brotherhood with every European Christian…” Paine then turned to America. He appealed directly to Americans’ economic interests. Yet, in addition to outlining their tremendous commercial prospects, he offered a vision of independence that asked them to see themselves as “Americans.” He wrote so as to compel them to comprehend themselves as a people no longer subject to king and noble but – as was their “natural right” – free and equal before God and “the law” and governing themselves through democratically-elected representatives.

Urging unity, Paine portrayed America, not as thirteen separate entities, but as a nation-state: “Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honour…Our strength is continental not provincial.” In favor of a republican government, he proposed a one-chamber Continental Congress headed by a rotating President. Finally, he surveyed America’s physical and material riches to prove it had the resources to actually accomplish the revolution.

Philosophers have argued about the originality of Paine’s ideas. But one thing is certain: They were radically original in both appeal and consequence. Elite colonial intellectuals had penned many a speech and pamphlet, but they had narrowly addressed themselves to the upper classes.

Paine – artisan by upbringing and intellectual by effort – addressed himself to Americans of all classes. The very style and content of his words entailed a more democratic conception of “the people” than had prevailed up to that time. Paine not only wrote so working people could understand, but also to integrate them into the political nation. Capturing the imagination of artisans and farmers in an unprecedented fashion, Paine recruited them to the cause of independence and encouraged them to restructure the political and social order. He devised a new, more democratic language of politics and way of arguing about politics than ever before had existed.

Praising America’s religious diversity, Paine connected the advance of religious freedom to the cause of independence and the creation of a new polity. America would serve as a model to the world and, welcoming of immigrants, as a refuge:

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the world is over-run with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. -Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

Paine’s vision of a democratic republic was potentially unlimited. This point was well understood, not only by loyalist Tories who desired reconciliation with England and vehemently denounced Common Sense and its author. It was also well understood by elite-minded patriots like John Adams who, while pleased by the call for independence, spoke critically of Paine and his ideas because they feared the popular, radical-democratic aspirations that his pamphlet evoked.

For Paine, the American Revolution possessed world-historical importance:” The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” he wrote. In fact, whereas before this time “revolution” had meant to merely “revolve,” as in an orbit, hereafter it would mean to overthrow an old regime and create a new one.

Weeks passed before anyone in the Continental Congress responded openly to Paine’s arguments. Apparently, delegates did not know what to do. But they created a great commotion in other parts. In Virginia, Edmund Randolph observed that Common Sense “insinuated itself into the hearts of the people”; in Massachusetts, Deacon Palmer noted that “I believe no pages were ever more eagerly read, nor more generally approved. People speak of it in rapturous praise”; and in the field commanding the Continental Army, George Washington reported how Paine’s pamphlet “is working a wonderful change in the minds of many men,” adding that his own reading of it had finally persuaded him of the need to break with Britain.

Reservations persisted. The propertied rich feared the new politics of the working classes, but most figured they would be better trying to lead than resist it. In the spring, colonial assemblies began to issue resolutions calling for independence and instructing their delegates at Philadelphia to follow suit. Finally, in June, Congress appointed a committee headed by Thomas Jefferson to draft an American Declaration of Independence. Paine was not a member of that committee, but all had read his Common Sense. And, on July 4,1776, the United States of America declared its independence. Paine’s contributions to the making of the American Revolution – indeed, to the making of the Age of Revolution and the modern world – had only just begun. He would go on to write the invaluable American Crisis Papers, the radical-democratic Rights of Man, the freethinking Age of Reason, and the social-democratic Agrarian Justice. For good reason he remains a hero, most of all to radicals, socialists, and religious freethinkers.

Paine clearly deserves a most prominent place in American memory. His words led the way in turning our rebellion into a war for independence, and our war for independence in to a revolution. Moreover, he helped to endow the nation’s history with a radical-democratic impulse, one which would encourage not only eighteenth-century workingmen to refashion the nation, but also later generations of American men and women who have found themselves oppressed and marginalized.

Contrary to the ambitions of our own powers that be: The stuggle for liberty, equality and democracy has not ended. I just hope we will continue to honor Paine, not only in our histories, but also in our politics.

The post ‘Common Sense’ and the American Revolution appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Prepared for Delivery to the Thomas Paine National Historical Association and the Thomas Paine Foundation, Philadelphia, Pa, January 26, 2001.

Americans like many other people are lovers of anniversaries, especially when there is a zero or a five at the end of the heralded date (which is maybe why we celebrated the millennium in 2000 rather than 2001). Thomas Paine’s first real splash in the public eye occurred when his Common Sense appeared 225 years ago on January 10, 1776, a date which, we must remember, was nearly six months before Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. In many respects, Paine was ahead of his compatriots in demanding separation from Britain. In any case, it is easy to argue that while many Americans talked among themselves of independence, Paine was the first to write about it in clear, lucid, stirring terms that were immediately accessible to anyone who either read his pamphlet or had it read to them.

Now I have been accused of citing Paine too much to comment on modern social and political problems. Some folks hold that historical figures obviously lived in particular periods, spoke a language that was peculiar to their time and place, and that the role of the historian is to try to figure out the intentions and meaning of their language on their terms, not ours. In other words, they say, you cannot take a person from his historical context, move him into the twenty-first century and expect to have him say reasonable things about our problems and issues. Well, in fact, they are right: I have found what I claim to be “a usable Paine,” as they charge, and will continue to use his wisdom, his observations, and his approach to problem-solving until they are no longer usable.

So what does Common Sense tell us today 225 years after its first appearance in this city-when America’s relationships with Britain were seriously deteriorating? Certainly, we have no such problems with Britain today. Indeed, we have no such problems with any nation. There is no doubt that the United States of America (a term that I still say Paine coined in the second essay in his American Crisis series, despite the arguments by William Safire of the New York Times) is the strongest country in the world from an economic and military perspective.2 What we may not be is the most ethical, and this is the lesson we may first learn from Paine’s work.

First. what is “common sense” and how do we know what it is when we see it (as Potter Stewart said of pornography in 1964)?3 Here’s story that while Paine did not use it. He would have, had he known it. A knight was riding through a forest one day when he came upon an arrow right in the middle of bull’s eye in a tree. Since this was not particularly unusual, he didn’t think much of it, but he became increasingly astounded when he came across several of them. They must have numbered ten or fifteen, and each arrow was perfectly centered in the bull’s eye. At last the knight came upon a young boy with a bow and arrow, and so he asked the lad whether he had been the one who had shot all those arrows. The boy answered, yes, it was he who had done the deed. But how did you learn to do it so well, asked the knight. The boy replied that he used common sense: he simply first shot the arrow into the tree, and then painted the target around it. . . . This is not because he was either lazy or unskilled, but that he just used “common sense.”

If only everything could be so clear.

For Paine, one thing was in fact clear (and a reflection of common sense): he knew that human beings had a “natural love of liberty.”4 And he knew too that people considered “freedom as personal property,” property of which no person could deprive others without violating nature.5 These phrases are Paine’s (though not from Common Sense, but rather from his later writings in 1778 and 1782). The problem for Americans in 1776 was how to capitalize on these two observations, which he drew from common sense? How should (or could) he make them realize that there really was no longer any alternative to separation?

His response was to figure out a way to tell them just that in irrefutable and indeed absolutist terms. He did just that by arguing in ways that immediately grabbed their attention. Fewer words during the revolutionary era are greater than these from his great pamphlet (though I’d argue that maybe some of Jefferson’s in the Declaration come close): “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” and “now is the seed-time of continental union, faith, and honor.”6 His intention was clear: to move America forward toward independence, and to do it now. More often than not, he thought that it took a great man, one actually like himself, Thomas Paine, to stimulate them to act. When this reawakening happened, they exercised “common sense.”

Some commentators have defined common sense as being coequal with a person’s moral powers.7 This interpretation, though essentially correct, is incomplete. Common sense was certainly part of human affections, our innate moral sensibilities. But common sense also included our ability to reason. Now, Paine was no epistemologist. He never set forth a lucid, cogent argument, as for example had Locke or Hume, to determine how the mind operated or how man knew anything at all. But he did have definitive ideas about how people knew how to conduct their lives. They do so through both their affections and their reason-through passion and reason.

Paine was not the first writer to use the phrase common sense as a faculty for understanding, nor was he the first to use it as a corollary to human moral sensibilities. Lord Shaftesbury though clearly an elitist, had, as did the eighteenth-century Scottish Common Sense philosophers, such as Thomas Reid. Although these philosophers’ works were available to him, Paine probably never read Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks (1711) or Reid’s Inquiry (1764). Even so, common sense, as a sensory faculty, a kind of sixth sense, encapsulated his idea of what a natural human being was and ought to be.8 The term was well known and obviously in broad usage at the end of the eighteenth century, including America.

For Shaftesbury, Reid, and Paine, common sense was an all-encompassing faculty of mind and feeling that gave people the power of immediate discernment.9 The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid observed that common sense forced him to “to take my own existence, and the existence of other things upon trust,” and to believe that snow was cold and honey sweet.10 These things were knowable spontaneously when people first encountered them. For the skeptic to deny this phenomenon undermined the true basis of human knowledge.

But how did common sense operate? Although epistemologically vague, Paine used it to express both reason and sensibility.11 Common sense was the means by which the mind understood the way the heart felt about reality. It had nothing to do with abstract reasoning or metaphysical concepts. It was wholly empirical, since it was based only on sensory perceptions. After all, the Americans did not need abstract ideas of freedom to convince them that the British oppressed them. They needed only to listen to the dictates of their common sense. As Paine noted, “common sense will tell us.”12 It will tell us because the powers of the mind and the heart are like lightning bolts of spontaneous discernment. The mind knew and the heart felt that “however our eyes may be dazzled with snow, or our ears deceived by sound; however prejudice may warp our wills, or interest darken our understanding, the simple voice of nature and our reason will say, it is right.”13 To see how this works, it is imperative, in short, to analyze the linguistic and epistemological roots of the expression common sense.

First, common sense by necessity included a person’s ability to reason. As Paine said in The Age of Reason, “the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.”14 As for America’s relationship to England prior to 1776, “it is repugnant to reason. . . to suppose that this continent can longer remain subject to any external power.”15 Indeed, he once declared that the new era of politics in which he lived was “the age of reason.”16 Paine did not say it was “the age of common sense!” And of course, he named one of his books with that very title. Common sense was, therefore, clearly a function of man’s rational capabilities, his ability to reason.

But common sense included affection as well. It did not feel right to men, that relationship with Britain, because it violated their moral sensibilities. All one must do to gauge whether the colonies ought to remain linked to Britain was to judge the relationship by “those feelings and affections which nature justifies.. . . Examine the passions and feelings of mankind,” he said, and judge that relationship by the standards that nature supplied.17 During the war with Britain, as the military situation deteriorated, “what we have to do,” said Paine, “is as clear as light, and the way to do it as straight as a line.”18 This light

• this clarity – was what common sense provided to people. Such clarity, if one could follow one’s true nature, gave them two options.

First, they could achieve positive political and social changes. They would know by both reason and affection, what was right, what was wrong in society and government. Second, common sense was the vehicle for people’s inventiveness. As common sense informed them when and how to make or invent revolutions, by extension it was also the creative spark that moved them to enhance progress. Human inventions improved life for everyone. When Paine was struggling with the design of his iron bridge, he realized he had to moderate his “ambition with a little ‘common sense’ in order to make the necessary modifications.”19 It was a powerful turn of phrase that Paine undoubtedly knew would deeply impress his wide American audience.

Every person, he taught, possessed common sense. The problem was that it became impaired when brute force enslaved the people, when kings and lords (ruffians and their banditti) made their subjects do their will.20 They deprived them of their freedom to choose, and they destroyed or badly compromised their sense of self. When that happened, common sense was distorted. People no longer thought straight (as a line), and nothing was clear (as light). Such force had a numbing effect on their minds and hearts. They might never even feel the pain of that force and might never be aware of it.

This state of affairs violated man’s nature as a creature with the ability to reason. “Men,” said Paine, “have a right to reason for themselves.”21 When kings and their cohorts stole this right from their subjects, these subjects were no longer whole persons. They were slaves, the puppets of others who used them as they saw fit. They lost their sense of self and became objects-indeed, the property-of others. For Paine, human beings universally shared this same nature. How then did he explain that some men like himself were indeed different?

Here Paine used his natural vs. unnatural theme in a linguistically powerful way, convincing his readers, though with an argument less certain to persuade those more philosophically inclined. He defined the characteristics of the thieves of common sense and human freedom by virtually defining them out of humanity itself. These denatured creatures were usurpers, these kings, these aristocrats, their followers, and later the Federalists, too. They were unable to use their natural powers of common sense. Their desire for dominance and violence proscribed them from living a life of reason and moral affection. “A mind habituated to actions of meanness and injustice, commits them without reflection, or with a very partial one,” he told the Abby Raynal just a few years later.22 They relied only on their basest instincts, not common sense, to seek power over others. Thus, base instinct (in this case, seeking power and dominion) opposed common sense (reason and sensibility).

The British government, especially George III (whom he never specifically named in Common Sense because his target was kingship generally and not individual kings), was such a creature. He once noted in regard to the king’s cabinet that a universal human characteristic was the inability to change once intellectual patterns and habits were firmly set. “Once the mind loses the sense of its own dignity,” he said to Raynal, “it loses, likewise, the ability of judging it in another.”23 Several years later, while in France, Paine modified his view when he advocated that Louis XVI’s life be spared. But in 1776, the Americans had no choice.24

The British government had failed to use its collective common sense to deal fairly with the Americans. Such a failure meant that Britain distorted America’s well-being because the British viewed the Americans in Britain’s own image. Addressing Raynal again, Paine wrote that “the American war has thrown Britain into such a variety of absurd situations, that, in arguing from herself she sees not in what conduct national dignity consists in other countries.”25 For the same reason, the British wanted to plunder the Dutch. They figured that the Netherlands would never resist them, only to find themselves eventually at war anyway. Once a nation no longer used common sense, no matter what that nation did, its actions were illogical, wrong, and immoral. Its actions defied, in short, its natural inclination to do good. This was both affectively and rationally true.

Common sense was in part rooted in a person’s affective nature because implanted in him were “unextinguishable feelings” to do good. These feelings, he wrote in Common Sense, “distinguish us from the herd of common animals,” he said. “Otherwise, the social compact would dissolve, and justice be extirpated from the earth, or have only a casual existence.”26 Man’s affections drove him into the social realm in the first place. This was a result of common sense. He lived with his fellows in a cooperative arrangement for the benefit of all.

A social contract existed between men outside the realm of the sovereign and his lords. “There necessarily was a time when government did not exist, and consequently there could exist no governors to form such a compact with.”27 Although Paine did not identify Locke explicitly, his language describing the social contract was Lockean, and he was never loathe giving a Lockean lesson.28 “The fact therefore must be, that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”29 A man was fully conscious of the self in this decision-making so that he consciously came together with his fellows to form society for reasons having to do with his natural affections toward others.

As he wrote of these “unextinguishable feelings” and the historic ideal of the social contract, he knew full well that George III and his ministry did not possess such feelings and never would, nor would they ever fully understand the implications of the contract. They felt no sense of justice because they were in fact different. Common sense informed the Americans that a continued relationship with Britain was doomed. “To talk of friendship with those in whom our reason forbids us to have faith . . . is madness and folly”, i.e., it was against reason and sensibility.30 The people themselves must use their common sense to assert their right to participate in governmental decision-making.

Monarchical government in England had distorted the proper relationship between the people and their government. This distortion arose because common sense was lacking. Kings and lords and people like them were inhuman. He avoided having to clarify why he thought human nature was universal by literally reading them out of the human race. It was a powerful argument to hear, one linguistically encapsulated in a highly didactic, imperative tone, even if it were logically bewildering to read of a human being who lacked human nature. Then again, Paine was not addressing an audience of philosophers, but rather an audience of lower and middle class Americans who, he thought, would respond to this imagery in a way that would convince them to support America’s separation from Britain.

So now, what does all this tell us today? How does Paine’s great pamphlet speak to us in the twenty-first century? The answer is not hard to fathom, and it will lead us directly to the reasons why Philadelphia should honor Thomas Paine. First, let’s look at how he might evaluate the latest folly of the American people, the election of George W. Bush to the presidency of the United States. And we need not look far. Among the many famous lines in Common Sense appears these: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”31 I think we may safely say that while we will not have the worst possible government for the next four years, we will have one that Paine would have absolutely adored because it would have given him such fodder for his literary cannon (and I do mean with the double “n”) to attack for its misaligned policies. And to have a know-nothing president, a man who has probably never read a book much less a newspaper, and who has to rely on advisors to make decisions because his knowledge is so weak is something Paine would have found both amusing and maddening. Here is a president without common sense, without any understanding at all, and who could do only mischief in office.

Even worse is the mixture, or what he would have called the admixture, of politics and religion. John Ashcroft has told his audience at Bob Jones University that Jesus is the king of America. For Paine, this is pure arrogance (and of course absolutely wrong). Even in 1776 when we might say that there was a pinch of faith still ingrained in Paine’s heart, he never argued, like Ashcroft, that Jesus is the king of America. In fact, it was the opposite: “the world may know, that . . . in American THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute government the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”32 Ashcroft, who is to be the top law enforcement officer in the United States, hardly understands this when he proclaims that.Jesus is king of America. In the meantime, in his celebrated interview with the Southern Partisan Quarterly Review, a well-known racist journal (a “sick magazine”, according to Bob Herbert of the New York Times), he proclaimed the fight against slavery as “the perverted agenda” of those who fought to end that horrid practice.33 He wants Americans to pray – privately and in all public institutions, including schools and other government buildings – but when he announces that the attempt to end slavery was “perverted,” how can we possibly believe that he is a man of any faith at all? His attempts to convince us that he didn’t know what Bob Jones University or the Southern Partisan were all about are pretty disingenuous. He is a man without credibility – how could he possibly be otherwise? If he were a man of principle, true principle, he would never have claimed that he would enforce laws that deny those principles. Like his president, he is an opportunist, one of those denatured creatures Paine attacked in Common Sense.

In the meantime, maybe we could say that Paine would favor President Bush’s intentions to cut taxes, even if the vast majority of taxes go to the wealthiest eight percent. As a man of the eighteenth-century as we’ve indicated, he believed that the best government is that government which governs the least, it is but “a necessary evil.” On the other hand, when he outlined in the Rights of Man a full-scale welfare program, including one of the first social security proposals ever set forth, it is clear that he thought there are lots of things a “good” government could do to help its people.34 He also must have known that government had to have the financial wherewithal to handle such major programs and that taxes would have to be levied on Americans. In fact, even those Americans who fought the imperial Britain for independence were not opposed to paying taxes in general – they thought that everyone should pay them, including the aristocracy (and certainly the Penns on their estates in America). Americans regarded taxes as voluntary gifts to the crown – they were not to be imposed by a distant Parliament, but levied on themselves to be sent to London because they, the Americans, wanted to pay them. So when taxes are cut, and they may well be soon, we can be certain that if the Bush administration has anything to do with it, the agencies that will be most hurt will not be defense, but the social programs that cannot stand up to the perils of “compassionate conservatism.”

But should we be doing something about the surplus in terms of paying down the national debt, as the Clinton administration and Gore campaign had proposed? I should think that Paine would have thought that a debt the size of ours (nearing $5 trillion) would easily bankrupt the nation. It has always been a curiosity to many Paine observers that in Common Sense he actually advocated a debt. “Debts we have none,” he wrote, “and whatever we may contract on this account will serve as a glorious memento of our virtue. . . . No nation ought to be without a debt. A national debt is a national bond.”35 But Paine was talking about a new nation – one that needed the massive expenditures to insure that tyranny was not only to die, but would not revive. Thus it was that the debt was to stimulate, as he put it, a national bond: a unity of the people as they paid for their defense, especially, in his view, a navy. America in 2001 is not America in 1776. I suspect he would be horrified to see how the debt has gone way beyond creating national unity and leading to bankruptcy for any other country.

Finally, what would Paine have said about the fact that the United States has become one of the most regulated, if not over regulated, societies in the world? Again, we refer to his observation that government is a necessary evil. When power is concentrated in the hands of the few that, by very definition, is an example of tyranny. To allow, for example, oil companies, the trucking industry, or whatever to do whatever they want because we naively believe that they will always do the right thing is to fall into the trap of denying the reality of human nature. Already the trucking and oil industry has demanded the Bush administration relax, if not terminate, the strict clean air regulations the Clinton administration put in effect last year.36 And who has the president nominated to become the new Secretary of the Interiror, but none other than the chief non-regulator of the environment, Gail Norton, whose years as Attorney General of Colorado saw industry get away with just about anything and everything it desired. There is probably no law enforcement in America, past or present, who sought to undo the Endangered Species Act as much as she did while in Colorado. She would be expected to do as much as a protege of James Watt, who had been her boss at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which sought to give industry a larger, if not complete, say over the disposition of public lands. Like John Ashcroft, however, she promised to enforce the very laws she opposed for so many years. Again, so much for principle.

I could go on and on, but I won’t bore you with what I think you already know, even if you disagree with some of my observations. I will conclude by saying why I think Philadelphia should honor Thomas Paine. Just last October, a new biography of Benjamin Franklin appeared with the title “The First American.”37 I don’t wish to draw anything from Franklin, even if I possibly could, or to insult those among you who [are], as I am, a lover of Ben Franklin. But I have to say that I originally was going to title my Paine biography “the first American.” I decided not to because I thought it had a bit of a racist ring to it in that the native Americans were really the first Americans, although someone argued that they were not Americans since that concept did not exist until the English first arrived on these shores. But just as Philadelphia and Franklin are so uniquely united in the imagination of most people so are Philadelphia and Paine. (And don’t forget that Franklin was born in Boston and went to Philadelphia when he was seventeen.) Philadelphia without Paine is, to me, a hand without fingers: useless and ugly. I hope that the city honors him, and soon. Thanks for having me here tonight, and thanks so much for listening. I’ll be happy to take questions.

Footnotes

1. Many of the ideas in this presentation were first published in Jack Fruchtman Jr., Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), chpt. two.
2. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. II (13 January 1777), in Philip Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1945) ,I:59.
3. For Safire’s position, see William Safire, On Language: Name that Nation, The New York Times Magazine, 5 July 3.
4. Justice Potter Stewart made his famous remark, I know it [pornography] when I see it,” in a concurring opinion in the 1964 case of Jacobellis v. Ohio.
5. Thomas Paine, Letter to the Abbe Raynal (I782), in ibid., II, 258.
6. Thomas Paine, “A Serious Address to the People of Pennsylvania on the Present Situation of Their Affairs,” Pennsylvania Packet (1 December 1778), in ibid., II,286.
7. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976),82, 120.
8. See, for example, Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),103,289,
9. As is well known, Benjamin Rush took credit for suggesting the title of Common Sense for Paine’s pamphlet. Said Rush in his autobiography, “when Mr. Paine had finished his pamphlet, I advised him to shew it to Dr. Franklin, Mr. Rittenhouse, and Saml. Adams, all of whom I knew were decided friends to American independence. I mention these facts to refute a report that Mr. Paine was assisted in composing his pamphlet by one or more of the above gentlemen. They never saw it till it was written, and then only by my advice. I gave it at his request the title of ‘Common Sense.”‘ George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), ll4.
10. Shaftesbury’s elitism, which would have been wholly anathema to Paine, was outlined in Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934),33. For this reason, he receives but a mention here. For a revisionist view, see Michelle Buchanan, “Savages, Noble and Otherwise, and the French Enlightenment,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture,15 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 97-109. See also Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, I67I-1713 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). For a useful, but somewhat dated work, see Alfred Owen Aldridge, Shaftesbury and the Deist Manifesto (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, TransactionsV, ol. 41, Pt. 2, l95l).
11. Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind, ed. Timothy Duggan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970),19.
12. For Rousseau’s notion of common sense, which is quite close to Paine’s, see the passage in Emile, where Rousseau recounted the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” “I am not a great philosopher,” the Vicar said, “and I care little to be one. But I sometimes have good sense, and I always love the truth. . . – Reason is common to us, and we have the same interest in listening to it. If I think well, why would you not think as do I?” “Bon sens” is indeed, for Rousseau here, reason as a universal attribute of men. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, Allan Bloom, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 266 (emphasis added). See the entire “Profession of Faith”, 266-313.
13. Paine, Common Sense, 105.
14. Ibid., 68. When Fliegelman speaks of Paine’s idea of sensibility, he relates it to nature by saying, “it is nature, not reason, that cannot forgive England.” He thus makes clear the conjunction between nature and affection (in common sense), but he does not cite Paine’s last quoted statement in full when Paine himself conjoined nature with both moral affection and reason. See Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims,103.
15. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, in The Complete Writings,I,463.
16. Paine, Common Sense, 89 (emphasis added).
17. Paine, Rights of Man,268.
18. Ibid (emphasis added).
19. See Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973),
20. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. V (21March 1778), in The Complete Writings, I, I25.
21. Thomas Paine to Sir George Staunton, Etq., Spring 1789, in The Complete Writings,II, 1041.
22. Paine used the term banditti when referring to William the Conqueror as that “French bastard landing with an armed banditti . . . is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.” Paine, Common Sense, 78.
23. Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. VII (21 November 1778), in The Complete Writings,I, 143.
24. Paine, Letter to Abbe Raynal, in The Complete Writings,Il, 252.
25. Ibid.,253.
26. Thomas Paine, “Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet,” (16 January l793), in The Complete Writings, II, 551-55; “Should Louis XVI be Respited?” (19 January 1793), in The Complete Writings, II, 556-58 (the latter includes Marat’s interruptions of Paine’s speech). Paine’s impassioned plea for the life of Louis XVI may be attributable to a number of things: Paine’s maturity by 1793, his realization that the French under Louis were quite helpful during the American war against Britain, or perhaps his awareness that the revolution itself was potentially heading toward a negative end.
27. Paine, Letter to Abbe Raynal, in The Complete Writings,II, 253.
28. Common Sense, 99-100.
29. ibid., 92.
30. See Caroline Robbins,”The Lifelong Education of Thomas Paine,1737-1809: Some Reflections of His Acquaintance Among Books,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 127 (June 1983) : l4l-42.
31. Paine, Common Sense, 92.
32. 30 Ibid., 99 (emphasis added).
33. Ibid.,65.
34. Ibid., 98. Emphasis in the original.
35. See the column by Bob Herbert, “Unseemly Alliances,” New York Times, 18 January 2001.
36. The program is to be found in the second part of the Rights of Man (see chpt. five, “Of Ways and Means” in that work).
37. Paine, Common Sense, 10l-02.
38. See Douglas Jehl, “Oil Industry Seeks Softening of Clinton Clean-Air Rules”, in The New York Times,25 January 2001A 20.
39. H. W. Brands, The First American:The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

The post “Common Sense” and its Meaning Today appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

Albert DiCanzio

An essay based on the author’s presentation at the First Annual International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies, 19 October 2012 with a few script revisions in year 2020

In the interest of more deeply understanding the phrase “the republic for which it stands” in the pledge of allegiance to this flag, let us explore a tripartite proposition. I refer to this exploration as a proposition because, in the allotted time on our schedule, we can undertake no proof but at most explanation of these conclusions. First, that the United States of America, unlike many if not all other nations, is an invention; by this term I mean: a novel application of design principles embodied in a durable mechanism. Second, that its inventor was that quintessential cosmopolitan Thomas Paine. Third, that it falls to participants and followers of this conference, who care about him, to help shore up his design against the ravages of past neglect and future abuse. In thus honoring Paine and his legacy, I propose that we honor a call to action inherent in that legacy, to fully implement his design of a cultural and political paradigm shift, that is, to complete the still incomplete American Revolution.

Do not imagine that I hold Paine first among scientists to call for a cultural paradigm shift. Galileo had thus preceded Paine, as seen in a story I recounted.(1) By disproving the Ptolemaic cosmology, Galileo gave credibility to notions of geokinesis and of self-directed society,(2) relocating Earth away from the center of planetary motions while laying groundwork for Paine to compensate for lost centrality by placing a self-directed society at the center of a world formerly dominated by monarchic and dynastic rule. By also discovering dynamics, Galileo revolutionized how we harness natural laws of a vast universe in which terrestrials now see their unfavored position offering no ready alternative to getting along with fellow inhabitants of an Earth that Galileo largely proved to be a planet. Just as through his writing, Galileo taught physics to Newton; both men enlightened Thomas Paine, who expanded the Newtonian revolution by treating human behavior on the scale of a nation as a natural phenomenon.

In Rights of Man, part 2, Introduction, we read “What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers may be applied to Reason and Liberty. ‘Had we’, said he, ‘a place to stand upon, we might raise the world.'” More than a change of “persons and measures”, the nascent United States embodied in one nation of free and independent states a change of principles and synthesis of ideas that marked out a position on which to freely apply the lever of reason. We see this in hindsight because, unlike some unrealized or fleeting utopian dream, its design, though imperfect, has stood a test of time, following its encapsulation in durable founding documents. How did that design come about? Paine synthesized Locke’s philosophy with the laws of mechanics of Galilei-Newton into the separation of the colonies as an exercise of natural rights with a Constitution and autogovernance, writing: “The revolution of America presented in politics what was only theory in mechanics.”(3)

In The Life and Works of Thomas Paine(4) one finds Thomas Edison having referred to the totality of Paine’s works as “a crystallization of acute human reasoning” and to his specific work Common Sense as embodying “… Paine’s planning of this great American republic, of which he may very justly be termed the real founder”.

Edison’s two observations confirmed me in the intent to consider this question: How did Paine’s immersion in post-Newtonian scientific thinking cross-fertilize the fiery patriotic writings? A first clue to his rhetorical color and inspiration held firm on an inferential track lies in scientific clarity of thought and language. As we now visit elements of Paine’s story, there may arise additional clues both in the scope of his writings and in that of his inventiveness,(5) including uses of laws concerning energy, momentum, leverage, and even the spiderweb as a model.

In 1775, despite massive British interference in colonial affairs, few leading American colonists favored separation. A year later they declared independence. What had happened in the interim? In January 1776, Paine released Common Sense. Ultimately it sold 120,000 copies, inspired the colonies to independence, and enabled Washington to raise an army. The energy transfer of idea-disclosure, amplified by this factor (i.e., the transition from the first reader to all those that followed), became re-amplified by the Declaration of Rights, Article 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, of which Franklin was an author and principal intellectual architect, and Paine was a source of philosophical influence. Together they formed an intellectual backdrop for the bill of rights, each amplification resulting from leverage on the fulcrum of Paine’s formidable pen. In Rights of Man Paine told us that he applied mechanical principles to the American Revolution. What passion drove him to scientize the social domain?

Aside from the United States, of which he is also arguably the inventor, there were at least six known inventions by Paine, of which he modeled five of these six:

1. A smokeless candle that he sent to Franklin in 1785, along with a description of its operating principle. 2. An automotive carriage with wheels rotating by thrust of exploding gunpowder. In this application of the 3rd law of Galilei-Newtonian mechanics, Paine had put gunpowder to a peaceful use. 3. An improved crane. 4. A turbine to propel a steamboat, un-modeled, yet John Fitch, James Rumsey and Robert Fulton, all of whom were granted U.S. patents relating to the steamboat, recognized Paine as its original inventor. By shrinking the time to traverse distance, the steamboat accelerated the conversion of coastal colonies to a continental commercial powerhouse. 5. A patented method of constructing arches, vaulted roofs and ceilings, derived from Paine’s examination of a spiderweb, and culminating in the iron bridge of 1787-1788. The Sunderland Bridge(6) built at Wearmouth, England in 1796 was designed by Paine with a single cast iron 236-foot-span hingeless arch, an inverted catenary that, like the cycloid advocated earlier by Galileo for bridge construction, yet even more effectively, increased the span without a central support.(7) 6. A machine for planing wood, used in building models of his bridge.

From the invention fortifying a network of bridge components, Paine modeled a robust network topology for a web of associations among freedom-seeking individuals. The American revolution had thus come to model the Newtonian one.

Analogously to Occam’s Razor used in physics to winnow the best competing explanation of natural phenomena, Paine extracted governmental robustness from simplicity and order in nature, a process in which, he wrote, “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle implicit in nature which no art can overturn: that the more simple any thing the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.”(8) Invoking the metaphor of a pulley for checks and balances in essential governmental forms, he wrote: “… for as the greater weight will always carry up the less, and as all the wheels of a machine are put in motion by one, it only remains to know which power in the constitution has the most weight, for that will govern; …” In the Renaissance, Galileo had reached back to ancient Greece, reviving Ionian science from the Dark Ages to create dynamics, groundwork for Newton’s system of the world. By 1776, Newton’s reformulation of Galilean dynamics had blossomed in physics, yet remained unapplied to the social domain until the then-future Paine arrived to apply it.

Paralleling Galileo, Paine turned to that once vibrant era of Athenian democracy to restore and advance autogovernance. The colonies, he explained, will separate and re-form under a declaration of rights, a constitution, and a vacuum of royalty. In 1787, he acknowledged the incompleteness of the American Revolution.(9) Though a second outcome awaited its completion, Paine initially transposed Newtonian momentum to the social domain. Incomplete because it opposed only the most visible slavery, yet this transposition promoted life with liberty and respect for individual property. Inadvertently, 125 years later another inventor elaborated on what Paine had done. The functional relationship of Thomas Paine to Nikola Tesla first came to mind in research of mine aimed at grounding organizational dynamics in the physical dynamics of Galileo.(10)

Tesla, inventor of polyphase alternating current power distribution, in 1900 modeled a human as “a mass urged on by a force”.(11) Human energy he thought measurable by “half the human mass multiplied with the square of a velocity which we are not yet able to compute.”(12) With this non-translatory velocity he associated a human’s “degree of enlightenment.” Laxity of morals, as manifested in organized warfare, was a mass-reducing phenomenon, against which a way to “reduce the force retarding the human mass” would be to eliminate “frictional resistances” such as ignorance. That goal, in turn, called for rational planning whose direction lies “along the resultant of all those efforts” designated as “self-preserving, useful, profitable, or practical”.(13) Under this concept (i.e., Tesla’s concept, my observation) Paine had designed a nation with less friction, and the possibility of rational planning, in an initial condition of autogovernance as a place to stand for launching human achievement. Though Tesla did not elaborate “self-preserving”, Paine proposed that government should assist in providing a secure foundation (i.e., safety from attacks on property) for the pursuit of happiness.(14)

There is more to be observed about the link between Paine and the enlightenment progress of combining science and political structures. I begin a list of the “more to be observed” with axiomatization and postulation. These are institutionalized in science. Their use in politics is illustrated by the phrases “we hold these truths to be self-evident” and “the laws of nature …” and “We the people”. A principle formulated by Paine that I infer to be infrastructural to the Constitutional provision that “We the people” grant and limit the powers of the United States is:

“Mankind are not now to be told they shall not think, or they shall not read; and publications that go no farther than to investigate principles of government, to invite men to reason and to reflect, and to show the errors and excellences of different systems, have a right to appear”.(15)

Such telltale expressions of ideas as self-evident truths, laws of nature, and thinking people, that can be found in documents known to have been influenced, if not also written by Paine in draft form, are marks of an applied scientist and technical innovator.

No less in importance is Paine’s insistence on defining concepts and his habit of defining terms with great care and explanation, the mark of the mathematician that Paine was, and eminently so in the New World. Of a constitution he wrote: “… it will be first necessary to define what is meant by a Constitution. It is not sufficient that we adopt the word; we must fix also a standard signification to it. … A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting its government.” This preamble is followed immediately by his definition of “Constitution”.(16)

Another category of “more” evidence for Paine’s inventorship of the U.S.A. is found in his attempts to encourage an evidence-based discourse, for example, with Edmund Burke, with whom he poignantly disagreed, reacting by issuing Rights of Man. This habit of communication can be compared with a method of controversy found in analysis of Galileo’s dialogues, the first in history (known to me) to aim dialogue at truth-seeking rather than, as in politics or in courtrooms today, at polemicizing toward some pre-conceived conclusion. The Galilean Dialogue on the Two World Systems aims at transforming disagreement into exposure and evaluation of facts and reasoning on both sides of it into common understanding through open-minded, fair-minded, and rational-minded evaluation of that with which one at first may disagree.(17)

In my own professional experience in the development and testing of mathematical models of business products and processes, I observed that the creation of predictive hypotheses and the design of tests that would evaluate them often require mathematical tools that include statistics, combinatorics, curve-fitting, linear programming, Newtonian approximation, decision analysis, flow systems theory, and theory of competitive strategies. For the most part, development of such tools post-dated the life of Paine, yet clearly it was not in a mathematical vacuum that he invented the iron bridge and several other aforementioned novelties. Some such mathematical tools may be used here and there in elements of political practice. They have been and predictably would continue to be useful in the implementation of restoring and completing the American Revolution. This is true for reasons including that optimizing a web of associations among freedom-seeking individuals entails the mathematics and mechanics of network design and implementation.

Finally, a complete list of “more” evidence for Paine’s inventorship of the United States would require a modern explanation of grounding organizational dynamics in post-Newtonian physical dynamics. This is my one of my personal projects which began in [3], about which a great deal more is to be done. That entire important subtopic would exceed my time and space limits here.

As an instance of science starting with first principles, Common Sense first postulated society distinct from government. Paine had proclaimed in Common Sense the need to declare independence; he was known as the foremost writer in the colonies; a Librarian of Congress(18) found Jefferson’s first draft copied from an earlier document; Paine exclaimed “The decree is finally gone forth. Britain and America are now distinct empires”,(19) about the time of the appointment by Congress of a committee to draft the Declaration.

Regardless of the extent to which Paine may have influenced the fundamental documents of the United States of America, a nation whose name and original support are due to him, the friendship and cooperation of Benjamin Franklin with Paine cannot rightly be overlooked. Franklin too was an inventor and, by virtue of discovering the polarity of electricity, one of only three native American discoverers of laws of nature known to me.(20) It is implausible that merely by accident Franklin, having been introduced to Paine by one of the latter’s fellow mathematicians in his native England, understood Paine’s genius as a fellow product of the Newtonian revolution and arranged for him to live and work in England’s colonies. As far as I have been able to determine, the Declaration of Independence may have been as much or more the work of Franklin, Jefferson, and the latter’s committee members as Paine’s, but Paine’s ideas are reflected in it.(21)

As evidence, consider Paine’s leading role in producing a preamble to the French Constitution, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens adopted by the National Assembly of France(22) and containing these declared rights (DRs) among others that echo the sentiments of Paine expressed in Rights of Man: DR 2: “The end of all Political associations is the Preservation of the Natural and Imprescriptible Rights of Man; and these rights are Liberty, Property, Security, and Resistance of Oppression.” DR 4: “Political Liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not Injure another. The exercise of the Natural Rights of every Man, has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every other Man the Free exercise of the same Rights; and these limits are determinable only by the Law.” DR 5: “The Law ought to Prohibit only actions hurtful to Society. What is not Prohibited by the Law should not be hindered; nor should anyone be compelled to that which the Law does not Require.” DR 12: “A Public force being necessary to give security to the Rights of Men and of Citizens, that force is instituted for the benefit of the Community and not for the particular benefit of the persons to whom it is intrusted.” It is noteworthy that the behavior of many public officials in the United States has not even risen to the height of the bar that Paine raised for France in DR12.

In Paine’s writings I find an internally consistent blend of classical liberalism with what now is called capitalism. His civic philosophy synthesizes property and the flow of rewards to achievers with the idea of social insurance for all. In 1967, the term “capitalism” assumed its modern meaning by being defined simply as “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned”.(23) An assumption built into this definition is: control of property is never, under no circumstances, separated from ownership. Paine noted; “There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, … such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, … acquired property — the invention of men”,(24) the latter being acquired by contract.

In the commercial arena, Paine opposed intervention by a foreign monarch and domestic interference with the development of robust monetary foundations as exemplied by the Coinage Act of 1792. Paine “was trying to free commercial relations from a type of oligarchy. It developed into capitalism, and the forces aligning against monarchy have their root in a nascent capitalism.”(25)

Independently of that endeavor, Paine was faithful to what would later come to be known as capitalism. Case in point: “In ‘Agrarian Justice,’ he developed the first realistic proposal in the world to abolish systematic poverty: a universal social insurance system comprising old-age pensions and disability support and universal stakeholder grants for young adults, funded by a 10% inheritance tax focused on land.”(26) Lest this be wrongly seen as a redistribution of property, to see otherwise consider Paine’s argument for the proposal. Passing over some of his preliminary argument, I bring you to these two postulations: (1) “[T]he first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period. … (2) “the earth in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state, every man would have been born into property.” Ultimately his argument culminates in: “Every proprietor of cultivated lands owes to the community a ground-rent … for the land which he holds”.(27) Here he explains why, given principles (1) and (2), cultivators of large land parcels owe a percentage rent to be collected as a tax. By this argument, Paine demonstrates the absence of expropriation or what might otherwise be seen as anti-capitalistic intent in his “social insurance”.

To complete Paine’s mission, among other actions that can be taken are: 1. … to restore his legacy. History has denied Paine proper gratitude for inventing the United States. Athens, after exiling its great general Themistocles who had saved the country from Persian invaders, and after forcing on its great philosopher Socrates a choice of exile or a cup of hemlock, fell into decline and never recovered. Similarly, the United States, nearly oblivious to its inventor, has been in decline as measured by the Index of Economic Freedom and other metrics. 2. … to hold officials to their oath of office,(28) to remove the slavery of fiat currency inflation, consistently with Paine’s advocacy of the death penalty for those who would move for legal tender laws(29) and to free commerce from the imposition of trade restrictions and taxation without consent of the people. 3. … to develop organizational dynamics. The design (and re-engineering) of a nation is a work of organizational dynamics, not to be confused with what is casually and tenuously called “organizational dynamics” in universities today. Tesla articulated a qualitative concept of directed human motion affected by rational planning and by innovation; his phrase “which we are not yet able to compute” suggested that he thought it could ultimately be quantified. Kurt Lewin aimed at defining a topological space suitable to represent social interaction. Until their successor(s) in organizational dynamics anchor that discipline in Galilean physical dynamics, inadequate theoretical grounding will exist for fortifying the American Revolution. That is an aim of my ongoing current research.(30)

Additionally, patriots can presently support scholarly research on Paine’s legacy by donating to organizations of their choice, such as The Thomas Paine National Historical Association in New Rochelle. This litany is incomplete and enumerates only those fulfilling actions of which I have conceived independently of a forthcoming work which would be far more complete. It is my hope and expectation that Rad Freeman’s work will receive serious attention by scholars.(31)

From those who have raised their voices above their faculties to claim through ignorance of inconvenient facts that our country was founded entirely on oppression, it would be refreshing to hear or read an explanation why they have been so silent about the inventor of the United States having been a consistent foe of slavery, both physical and mental, and an uncompromising promoter of human happiness. Where is the recognition and gratitude for this man Paine who endured severe risks and hardships, devoting his life to the elimination of all forms of oppression in at least two countries and worldwide through his writings?

Dear reader, sursum corda! Is it necessary or prudent to attack a revolution on account of some darkness in its history? A revolution is a human endeavor that embraces some mistakes and some darkness, as when revolving about the sun our planet is eclipsed by the moon. The leading revolutionary of the United States has written: “The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness; and no sooner did the American governments display themselves to the world, than despotism felt a shock and man began to contemplate redress.”(32) For a limited time, an option exists to sustain the shock to despotism. Might we honor the brilliance in the revolution’s history and intent by completing and fulfilling it?

What darkness can anyone find that was in Paine’s blueprint for this country? Can you find any? Gratitude to the inventor means more than words. It means action that would culminate in the application of inventor Thomas Paine’s principles that were provably morally correct. A revolution is not a rebellion; these two are geometrically and consequentially different. From Galileo’s physical demonstrations of the Copernican/Keplerian planetary arrangement, we learn that Earth is a planet that spirals around the sun in an elliptical-helical orbit, climbing against gravity and never leaving that source of light. The spiralling is, in its cycle, a revolution, and the consequence is not only light but also life; a social revolution would climb toward both. By contrast, a rebellion is a destructive social movement that may produce death or removal of persons or organizations, replacing some actors with other actors; its consequences are events of a type that includes coup d’état and/or insurrection. It solves nothing. It is a zig-zag kind of motion not climbing to light but yielding the darkness in continuing loss of liberty.

What is the liberty at which Paine’s revolution has been aimed? In the absence of full development of this subtopic, we can provisionally define liberty as the free exercise of property rights. Because you own your life as a natural right and have a natural right to liberty, no external source is required for these rights. Naturally, you also have a right to what you produce, including your ideas, and the non-intellectual productions of others that you acquire ethically by contract. There is no protection for these rights until there has been a full revolution. The revolution spirals away from any darkness of the founding to embrace the light in Paine’s invention of a nation. The revolution requires construction not destruction.

These are again “times that try men’s souls”, new times and dark times, yet times that have been nurtured by a supreme exemplar of converting inner passions to patriotic action.(33) Can you sense the ongoing presence of Paine in the United States? In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the USA, I personally heard in the U.S. media — and even in advertising — this passage from Paine’s Crisis Papers but without crediting him: “THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman”. Thomas Paine did not stop at inventing the United States but left us guidance toward completing the invention. Action now to fortify and finish his work can pay down the price of the freedom that he bequeathed us.

Footnotes:

1. Albert DiCanzio, (2), a comprehensive scientific biography of Galileo in the English language.
2. Cf. Manfred Weidhorn, The Person of the Millenium: The Unique Impact of Galileo on World History (iUniverse, 2005). See also DiCanzio, Albert, “Book review of The Person of the Millennium” (Perspectives Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation. 59.2, June 2007), 155.
3. Thomas Paine, (7), 157-158, 160.
4. William M. Van der Weyde, (1) Vol. 1, vii-viii
5. For a more complete in-context discussion of Paine’s inventiveness and the background of his invention of the United States, see this forthcoming book, which I highly recommend to this audience: Rad Freeman, Saving Our Country: by Implementing The American Revolution in Full (as far as I have determined, this author is the first to tie modern economic science to the American Revolution as its completion). However, the responsibility for observing and choosing examples, mentioned here, of these phenomena in Paine’s writing is mine.
6. Henry Grattan Tyrrell, History of Bridge Engineering (University of California Libraries, 1911)
7. “The idea and construction of this arch is taken from the figure of a spider’s circular web, of which it resembles a section, and from a conviction that when nature empowered this insect to make a web she also instructed her in the strongest mechanical method of constructing it.” (Specification of Thomas Paine, (9), Vol. 5, p. 3, as quoted in Rad Freeman, Saving Our Country: by Implementing the American Revolution in Full, forthcoming, Act IV). Here it is noted that Paine had obtained a patent from George Hanover III in 1788 for his method of constructing such span-increasing arches. It was a milestone in bridge technology arriving two centuries after Andrea Palladino’s invention of the truss. (Linton Grinter, Theory of Modern Steel Structures, NY: MacMillan, 1942, 7.)
8. Thomas Paine, (6), 6-8
9. There is no question that Paine regarded the American Revolution as incomplete. “The Revolution can only be said to be complete, when we shall have freed ourselves, no less from the influence of foreign prejudices than from the fetters of foreign power (Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, (in 9, orig. pub. 1791-2, vol. 4, Society for Political Inquiries, p. 312). In addition, Paine enumerated in Rights of Man, part ii, (vol. 5 in Van der Wyde) a litany of unmet conditions for a country to boast of its constitution and its government.
10. Albert G. DiCanzio, (3)
11. Nikola Tesla, (8), 177.
12. Ibid. Emphasis supplied by the present writer.
13. Ibid. 178, 182, 189.
14. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, (4), 64-65.
15. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, (in (9), orig. pub. 1791-2), vol. vi, pp. 226
16. Ibid.
17. I credit and applaud Maurice Finocchiaro for this discovery and revelation about “Two World Systems” and the introduction and definition of the terms “open-minded”, “fair-minded”, and “rational-minded” that I first found on 27 May 2010 in Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Springer, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 280, 2010).
18. Julian Boyd, The Declaration of Independence; the Evolution of the Text (The Library of Congress, 1943).
19. Moncure Daniel Conway, ed., (1) vol. 1, pp. 161, 166.
20. I credit the founders of the Madeira Beach library for placing in the path of my childhood curiosity literature on Paine and (separately) the Declaration of Independence during an otherwise boring summer vacation from school; later, Andrew J. Galambos of the Liberal Institute of Natural Science and Technology who in a personal conversation made me aware of Franklin’s intellectual intimacy with Paine and identified one of those three native-American scientific discoverers (of chemical potential in thermodynamics and foundations of statistical mechanics), Josiah Willard Gibbs. The other two native-American scientific discoverers are Franklin and Adrian Bejan.
21. Cf. Elizabeth Picciani, “A Transcription, History, and Analysis of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights and Constitution of 1776”. According to this researcher, there were at least six authors including Franklin, whose role was “more passive” yet whose writing was at least consistent with the philosophical principles that had been expressed by Thomas Paine.
22. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens adopted by the National Assembly of France “is generally attributed to Paine, with whom Condorcet and Pierre Dumont may have collaborated … Much of its political philosophy had appeared in the American Declaration of Independence.” (9), p. 144 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens adopted by the National Assembly of France “is generally attributed to Paine, with whom Condorcet and Pierre Dumont may have collaborated … Much of its political philosophy had appeared in the American Declaration of Independence.” (9), p. 144
23. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1967), 10. Why this definition? It is the simplest available, hence, recalling Occam’s razor and Paine’s above-quoted preference “the more simple any thing the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered”, it would likely have been Paine’s choice.
24. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice.
25. For these insightful words that assisted me in the realization that Paine’s contribution to the embryonic development of capitalism in the USA occurred despite that term having been unknown to Paine, and for his review of certain early drafts of this essay, a review that implies neither his endorsement nor his disendorsement of the finished product, I thank Gary Berton of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association.
26. Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Agrarian Justice’ and the Origins of Social Insurance, oxfordscholarship.com.
27. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, op. cit. (10)
28. Paine has written of acts that include violating an oath of office “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime” in Age of Reason, (NY, Peter Eckler), 6.
29. “But tender laws, of any kind, operate to destroy morality, and to dissolve, by the pretense of law, what ought to be the principle of law to support, reciprocal justice between man and man: and the punishment of a member who should move for such a law ought to be death.” Thomas Paine, “Dissertations on Government; the Affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money” in William M. Van der Weyde, (9) Vol. IV, p. 299.
30. Albert DiCanzio, (3). The phrase “free exercise of natural rights” is attributable to Rad Freeman (5).
31. Rad Freeman, (5).
32. Thomas Paine, (7), 231.
33. Here I refer, of course, to Thomas Paine, the “supreme exemplar”. A more recent call to restoring the nation he intended came from US President Ronald Reagan in these words: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

REFERENCES

1. Conway, Moncure Daniel, ed. The Writings of Thomas Paine (orig. pub. NY: Burt Franklin, 1902)
2. DiCanzio, Albert G., Galileo: His Science and His Significance for the Future of Man (Dover, NH: ADASI, 1996)
3. DiCanzio, Albert G., Organizational Dynamics and Decision Strategy in the Controversy about Galileo Galilei (UMI Proquest, Diss., 2008)
4. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. How Capitalism Saved America (NY, Three Rivers Press, 2004)
5. Freeman, Rad. Saving Our Country: by Implementing the American Revolution in Full, forthcoming.
6. Paine, Thomas, Common Sense (in (9) orig. pub. 1776) vol. ii
7. Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, (in [9], orig. pub. 1791-2), vol. vi-vii
8. Tesla, Nikola. The Problem of Increasing Human Energy (Whitefish, MN: Kessinger, 1900)
9. Van der Weyde, William M., ed. The Life and Works of Thomas Paine (New Rochelle, NY: Thomas Paine National Historical Assn, 1925)
10. Paine, Thomas, Agrarian Justice (in (9) 1797, orig. pub. 1776) vol. x.

The post Applied Science of Thomas Paine appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

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. His thinking about the mongrel splendors of democracy echoes that of Plato in The Republic: “like a coat embroidered with every kind of ornament, the city, embroidered with every kind of character, would seem to be the most beautiful.”

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 thought 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. His learning is not bookish; it is drawn from the wide reaching of his experience as corset-maker, privateer, magistrate, engineer, tax collector, Methodist preacher. 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.

The sale of 150,000 copies within a matter of months furnished Thomas Jefferson with the proof of a national resolve that encouraged him to fit Paine’s reasoning to the writing of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. During the course of the war Paine countered the frequent news of American defeat with the heartening rhetoric of The Crisis Papers that were passed from hand to hand around military campfires at Saratoga and Valley Forge, but the victory at Yorktown brought him little else except the prize of unemployment, his services no longer required by the proprietors of their new-found American estate.

The wealthy and well-educated gentlemen who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to frame the Constitution shared Paine’s distrust of monarchy, but not his faith in the abilities of the common people. From Aristotle the founders borrowed the theorem that all government, no matter what its name or form, incorporates the means by which the privileged few arrange the distribution of law and property for the less fortunate many. Recognizing in themselves the sort of people to whom James Madison assigned “the most wisdom to discern, and the most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society”, they undertook to draft a constitution accepting of the fact that whereas a democratic society puts a premium on equality, a capitalist economy does not. Unlike Magna Carta the Constitution doesn’t contemplate the sharing of the commons inherent in a bountiful wilderness; it provides the means by which men of property can acquire more property, and it was remembered that Paine opposed the holding of slaves and the denying to women the same rights granted to men, a man on too familiar terms with lower orders of society and therefore unfit for the work of dividing up the spoils.

By the end of the 19th century the several 18th century envisionings of a republic (Hamilton’s and Franklin’s as well as those of Jefferson and Paine) had been rolled off-stage by the industrial behemoth that was the glory of the Gilded Age. Mark Twain coined the phrase to represent his further observation that a society consisting of the sum of its vanity and greed “is not a society at all, but a state of war.” In the event that anybody missed Twain’s meaning, President Grover Cleveland in 1887 set forth the rules of engagement while explaining his veto of a bill offering financial aid to the poor — “The lesson should be constantly enforced that the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”

Twenty years later, Arthur Hadley, the President of Yale, further simplified the lesson, “The fundamental division of powers in the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand and property owners on the other. The forces of democracy on the one side…and the forces of property on the other side.” In the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression the forces of democracy mounted the populist rising in the 1890s, the progressive movement in the 1910s, President Teddy Roosevelt’s preservation of the nation’s wilderness and his harassment of the Wall Street trusts—but it was the stock market collapse in 1929 that equipped the strength of the country’s democratic convictions with the power of the law. What Paine had meant by the community of common interest found voice and form in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, also in the fighting of World War II by a citizen army willing and able to perform the acts of public conscience, Paine’s love of liberty carried forward into the 1960s with the sexual revolution, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.

But that was long ago and in another county.

Ronald Reagan’s new Morning in America brought with it in the early 1980s the second coming of a Gilded Age more swinish than the first. Paine had construed democracy as a representative assembly asking as many questions as possible from as many different sorts of people as possible with the thought that all present might learn something from one another. But as the country has continued to divide ever more obviously into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor, the shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country’s equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 5% of the population that now holds 84% of the nation’s wealth and that can be defined as the happy few who run the big corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, write the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the gambling casinos and the sports arenas.

Whether Democrat or Republican, the administrations occupying Washington for the last thirty years Paine would have recognized as royalist in sentiment, imperialist in character, the legislation emerging from Congress, like the rulings handed down by the Supreme Court, granting more freedom for property, less freedom to individuals. The privatizations of the public good accompanied by the letting fall into disrepair nearly all of the infrastructure—roads, water systems, schools, power plants, bridges, hospitals — that provide the citizenry with the foundation of its common enterprise. The domestic legislative measures align with the ambitions of a national security state backed by the guarantee of never-ending foreign war that arms the government with police powers more repressive than those available to the agents of the King George III. The Justice Department reserves the right to tap everybody’s phone, open anybody’s mail, to decide who is, and who is not, a patriot. President Obama enlarges President George W. Bush’s notions of arbitrary and preemptive strike to permit the killing of any American citizen believed to be a terrorist or a friend of terrorists, whenever and however it suits his exalted fancy.

Troubled op-ed columnists sometimes refer to the paradox implicit in the waging of a secret and undeclared war under the banners of a free, open and democratic society. They don’t proceed to what would have been Paine’s further observation that the nation’s foreign policy is cut from the same tyrannical cloth as its domestic economic policy. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the predatory finance engendering the Wall Street collapse in 2008 both enjoyed the full faith and backing of a government that sets itself above the law. I read the newspapers, and I think of what Paine might have had to say:

About powers usurped under the government under the Patriot Act — “Arbitrary power of an encroaching nature, like a beast devouring its natural prey — liberty, law and right.” About the Republican budget proposals — “The greedy hand of power constantly robbing society of the fruits of its labors, inventing alibis for the never-ending collection of taxes.” About the surveillance cameras and the airport security procedures meant to instill in the American people the habit of obedience—”A thousand little rooms of unfreedoms springing up at each castle of despotism whose lines of power crisscross and boss every individual subject, even to the point of corrupting an individual’s language, subjecting them to the designs of despots who treat them as dumb and submissive animals fit only for the herding through the wilderness of turnpike gates.”

The lack of vigorous objection in Congress accords with the monetized spirit of the times, which doesn’t rate politics as a valuable commodity. It is the wisdom of the age that money rules the world, transcends the boundaries of sovereign states, is the true and proper name for liberty. What need of statesmen, much less politicians, when it isn’t really necessary to remember what they say?

To read the writing of Tom Paine is to be reminded that our own contemporary political discourse is for the most part the gift for saying nothing. Forbidden the use of words apt to depress a Q score, or disturb a Gallup poll, this year’s presidential candidates stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. Choreographed along the lines of a Superbowl half-time show, the election campaign is the ritual performance of the legend of democracy—the bursting in air of star-spangled photo ops, the candidates so well contrived that they can be played for jokes, presented as game show contestants, posed as crusader knights setting forth on vision quests, enduring the trials by Klieg lights until on election night they come on last to judgment before the throne of cameras by whom, and for whom, they were produced. Best of all, at least from the point of view of the corporate sponsors spending upwards of $3 billion dollars for the politicians, the press coverage and the balloons, there is no loose talk about the word what is meant by the word, democracy, or how and why it refers to the cherished hope of liberty embodied in the history of a courageous people. The campaigns don’t favor the voters with the respect owed to their standing as valuable citizens participant in the making of such a thing as a common good. They stay on message with the parsing of democracy as the ancient Greek name for the American Express card, picturing the great, good American place as a Florida resort hotel wherein all present receive the privileges and comforts owed to their status as valued customers, invited to convert the acts of citizenship into the arts of shopping, to choose wisely from the fall collection of ornamental talking heads, texting A for yes, B for no. The sales pitch bends down to the electorate with a headwaiter’s condescending smile, deems the body politic incapable of generous impulse, selfless motive or creative thought. How then expect the people to trust a government that invests no trust in them? Why the surprise that over the last thirty years the voting public has been giving ever louder voice to its contempt for any and all politicians, no matter what their color, creed, prior arrest record or sexual affiliation.

As with Congress, so also with the mainstream news media that regard themselves as government factota, enabling and co-dependent. Their point of view is that of the country’s landlords, their practice equivalent to what is known to Wall Street stock market touts as “securitizing the junk.” Explain to us, my general, why the United States must maintain 662 military bases in 38 foreign countries, and we will transmit the message to the American people with a waving of the flag. Instruct us, Mr. Chairman, in the reasons why the banks and the insurance companies produce the paper that Congress doesn’t read but passes into law, and we will show the reasons to be sound. Do not be frightened by our pretending to be scornful or suspicious. Give us this day our daily bread, and we will hide your stupidity and greed in the rose bushes of inside-the-Beltway gossip. We play the game of show, not tell; the words don’t count.

The cable news networks meanwhile package dissent as tabloid entertainment so safely labeled as sound-bite spin that it threatens nobody with the awful prospect of having to learn something that they don’t already know. Comedians on the order of Jon Stewart and Bill Maher offer jokes as consolation prizes for giving up the hope of political or social change. The ever-rising cost of staging the fiction of democracy reflects the ever increasing rarity of the demonstrable fact. The country is being asked to vote in November for television commercials because only in the fanciful time zone of a television commercial can the American democracy still be seen to exist. The change of venue accounts for the current absence of honest or intelligible debate in Congress, also for the subservience of the news media. People trained to the corporate style of thought exchange the right to freely speak for the right to freely purchase. When intended to draw blood instead of laughs, the speaking truth to power is not a good career move. To lend to words the force of deeds is as rare as it is brave, and usually it brings with it misfortunes like those that accompanied Paine throughout the whole of his uneasy life.

Without a market for lines of thought suddenly become both suspect and irrelevant in Philadelphia, Paine in 1787 sailed for Europe, still bent on his great project of political transformation and social change. In England he wrote Rights of Man, the book in which he sought to give programmatic form to his plan for a just society and which, 150 years ahead of its time, anticipates much of the legislation that eventually showed up in the United States under the rubric of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—government welfare payments to the poor, pensions payments to the elderly, public funding of education, reductions in military spending, an estate tax limiting the amount of an inheritance. The book appeared in two volumes, in 1791-92, instantly and immensely popular with readers not only in England but also in America and France. The sale of 500,000 copies ranked it the best-selling book of the entire 18th century and prompted the British government to charge its author with treason and declare him an outlaw.

When Paine crossed the Channel to Calais in the summer of 1792, a rejoicing crowd of newborn citizens accorded him a hero’s welcome. To the makers of the French Revolution The Rights of Man bore the stamp of revelation, and as testimony of their appreciation they promptly elected Paine to the political assembly then at work in Paris on the construction of yet another new republic. He remained in France for the rest of the century, arrested by Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety when the revolution degenerated into the Reign of Terror, writing the second volume of The Age of Reason while in the Luxembourg prison awaiting a summons to the guillotine.

On his eventual return to America in 1802 he was met at the dock in Baltimore with newspaper headlines damning him as a “loathsome reptile,” a “lying, drunken, brutal infidel.” When he died in poverty in 1809, he was memorialized by John Adams as “an insolent blasphemer of things sacred and transcendent. Libeler of all that is good.”

I’m sometimes asked why no voice like Paine’s descends from a computer cloud to rouse the American people to a regaining of their independence. The answer is in the 20th century’s shifting of the means of communication. Our contemporary political discourse is a commodity made for television, the medium defined by the late Marshall McLuhan as “the huge educational enterprise that we call advertising.” McLuhan didn’t mean the education of a competently democratic citizenry, but rather “the gathering and processing of exploitable social data” by “Madison Avenue frogmen of the mind” intent on retrieving the sunken subconscious treasure of human credulity and fear.

Like the music in elevators, our machine-made news comes and goes in a familiar loop — the same footage, the same spokespeople, the same reassuringly empty smiles. What was said last week certain to be said this week, next week and then again six weeks from now, the sequence returning as surely as the sun, demanding little else from the constant viewer except devout observance. The proof of being in the know defined as the making of the correct responses — Nike is a sneaker or a cap, Paris Hilton is not a golf ball, Miller beer is wet, politics is crime. To the degree that information can be commodified, as corporate logo campaign contribution or designer dress, the amassment of wealth and the acquisition of power follows from the labeling of things rather than from the making of them. Never have so many labels come so readily to hand, streaming in the firmament of the blogosphere, posted on the wall behind home plate at Yankee stadium. The achievement has been duly celebrated by the promoters of “innovative delivery strategies” that “broaden our horizons” and “brighten our lives” with quicker access to A-list celebrities and subprime loans.

Maybe I miss the key performance indicators, but I don’t know how a language that’s meant to be disposable enriches anybody’s life. I can understand why words devoid of meaning serve the interests of the corporation and the state, but they don’t “enhance” or “empower” people who would find in their freedom of thought a voice that they can recognize as their own. What Thomas Paine meant by the truth doesn’t emerge from a data bank; nor does it come with a declaration of war or the blessing of Christ; it’s the courage that individuals derive from not running a con game on the unique character and specific temper of their own minds.

The vitality of the American democracy rests on the capacity of its citizens to speak and think without cant, the habit of mind that James Fenimore Cooper in 1838 associated with his definition of the word candor. “By candor,” Cooper said, “we are not to understand a trifling and uncalled expositions of the truth; but a sentiment that proves a conviction of the necessity of speaking truth when speaking at all; a contempt for all designing evasions of our real opinions. In all the general concerns, the public has a right to be treated with candor. Without this manly and truly republican quality…the institutions are converted into a stupendous fraud.”

George Orwell spoke to the same point in his essay, “Politics in the English language,” published in 1946. Social and political change follows from language that induces a change of heart. “The slovenly use of words,” he said, “makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts…if one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”

Oligarchy prefers trifling evasions to real opinions. Advertising isn’t interested in political regeneration. It’s the voice of money talking to money, in the currency that Toni Morrison, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, denominated as “the language that drinks blood, happy to admire its own paralysis, possessed of “no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of narcotic narcissism…dumb, predatory, sentimental, exciting reverence in school children, providing a shelter for despots. Language designed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege.

The vocabulary is limited but long abiding. Aristocrats in ancient Athens didn’t engage in dialogue with slaves, a segment of the population classified by the Aristotle as “speaking tools,” animate but otherwise equivalent to an iPhone app. The sponsors of the Spanish Inquisition ran data-mining operations not unlike the ones conducted by Facebook. So did the content aggregators otherwise known as the NKVD in Soviet Russia, as the Gestapo in Nazi Germany.

I’m content to regard the Internet as the best and brightest machine ever made by man, but nonetheless a machine with a tin ear and a wooden tongue. It is one thing to browse the Internet; it is another thing to write for it. The author doesn’t speak to a fellow human being; he or she addresses an algorithm neither willing nor able to wonder what the words might mean. The search engines scan everything but hear nothing, equip the fear of freedom with more expansive and far-seeing means of surveillance than were available to Tomás de Torquemada or Heinrich Himmler.

The strength of language doesn’t consist in its capacity to pin things down or sort things out. “Word work,” Toni Morrison said in Stockholm, “is sublime because it is generative,” its felicity in its reach toward the ineffable. “We die,” she said, “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Shakespeare shaped the same thought as a sonnet, comparing his beloved to a summer’s day and offering his rhymes as surety on the bond of immortality — “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

So does the writing of Thomas Paine.

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An academic article by Mark A. Lause published in Labor History (1986) that connects Paine’s radical ideas, particularly his critiques of aristocracy and calls for common-sense republicanism, to the emerging working-class consciousness and early labor movements in NYC around the turn of the 19th century, showing how his “infidel” reputation masked deep support for workers’ rights and democratic ideals among artisans and laborers.

Mark A. Lause, The “Unwashed Infidelity”: Thomas Paine and Early New York City Labor History [PDF]

NOTE: COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL

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