When Thomas Paine is commemorated, he is most often remembered in a fixed place and time, and as the author of Common Sense. With this 47-page pamphlet, written in plain language, Paine helped shift the opinion of most of the inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies, contributing to the emergence of a new political entity: “the free and independent states of America,” as he famously wrote. (Eric Foner, “Common Sense Addressed to the Inhabitants of
America,” Thomas Paine Complete Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), 54.) This gesture of remembrance is not false. But it is incomplete and raises a few central questions. What does it mean to commemorate a text that was written not to be preserved, but to be activated? How do we recall a voice whose power lies precisely in its circulation, its instability, its capacity to pass from body to body, rather than in its fixation as an object or an authorial figure? And more broadly, what kind of political thinking do we produce when we freeze such texts into monuments, instead of allowing them to continue operating as devices of collective reasoning?

Paine was monumentalized, for instance, in the exhibition “One Life: Thomas Paine, The Radical Founding Father,” held at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from August to November 2009. As the museum stated on its website at the time, “The One Life Gallery within the museum is devoted to the exploration of the life of one individual.” The framing was explicit: one life, one trajectory, one figure to be understood, enclosed, and presented. Paine’s pamphlets appeared behind glass, carefully displayed, protected and isolated from touch.

This is, of course, how museums operate. But vitrines do more than preserve objects: they also decide how those objects are allowed to survive. Under glass, Common Sense—the text that made Paine famous far beyond the borders of North America—is transformed into a founding artifact.

It becomes a relic of political clarity, a text that would have “spoken for itself” once and for all, in 1776. The pamphlet no longer circulates; it rests. It no longer acts; it testifies.

Still, Common Sense was never meant to settle. Paine wrote a text designed to move. He chose plain, easily accessible language not out of stylistic modesty, but because such a language could travel. Common Sense was meant to be passed from hand to hand, read aloud in taverns, discussed in public, repeated without losing its force.

Common Sense is a practice: a practice of reading, of speaking, and of reasoning together. Its effectiveness does not lie only in what it says, but in what it asks the reader to do. This is where my own practice of “research-creation” (in French-speaking universities) or “research by practice” meets Paine’s gesture. As Louis Claude Paquin defines it, research-creation includes “all research processes and approaches that promote creation and aim to produce new aesthetic, theoretical, methodological, epistemological or technical knowledge.” (Louis-Claude Paquin, “Méthodologie de la recherche-création”)

Common Sense is precisely such a process because it is not simply a text we inherit. It is an active demand placed on those who read it. Some are unable to read Paine—not because they lack intelligence, but because Paine requires a very particular disposition of mind: a willingness to suspend habit, to enter a scene, and to allow one’s own reasoning to be put to work.

THE VISCERAL PAINE

This is where my reflection begins. Not with Paine as an author, but with the phenomenology of his reader. Common Sense demands participation. It does not instruct the reader from above; it places them inside a scene and asks them to feel their way through.

This is where imagination enters the political field, not as fantasy, but as a mode of access. Paine knows that distance dulls judgment—that injustice, when it happens elsewhere, remains abstract. So, Common Sense begins by attacking geographical and emotional detachment. Imagination is not an escape from reality; it is the very means by which reality becomes intolerable. As Paine writes:

It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow; the evil is not sufficiently brought to their doors to make them feel the precariousness with which all American property is possessed. But let our imaginations transport us for a few moments to Boston; that seat of wretchedness will teach us wisdom, and instruct us for ever to renounce a power in whom we can have no trust. (Foner, Collected Writings, 26)

What Paine does here is crucial. He does not argue first. He transports by displacing the reader. He performs a forced relocation of perception. Boston is not introduced as information, but as an experiential threshold. And then the scene tightens:

The inhabitants of that unfortunate city, who but a few months ago were in ease and affluence, have now no other alternative than to stay and starve, or turn and beg. (Foner, Collected Writings, 26)

The choice is not ideological; it is physiological. Stay and starve. Leave and beg. No neutral position remains. Paine continues:

Endangered by the fire of their friends if they continue within the city, and plundered by the soldiery if they leave it. (Foner, Collected Writings, 26)

Here, imagination does not merely visualize; it activates something closer to what we might now call interoception—an awareness of the body’s internal signals. (Franck Luerweg, “Sentir son corps de l’intérieur,” Cerveau & Psycho, 2022/9 N° 147, (2022), 74-78. CAIRN.INFO.) The reader is not asked to sympathize from afar, but to feel the pressure of domination in the body. Hunger. Fear. Exposure. Constraint. The political becomes visceral. This is also why reading Common Sense defies neutrality. What matters is that the reader accepts the experience Paine constructs. The text works only if the reader consents to be affected. In this sense, Common Sense is not written to be interpreted, but to be acted upon. Execution here should be understood literally. The text has a performative force and sets in motion a sequence of operations. First, it destabilizes distance. Then it saturates perception. Only then does reasoning unfold. Logic, for instance, as we’ve seen with this quote about Boston, follows sensation, not the other way around.

This is why Common Sense travels so well across contexts, voices, and centuries. Through interoception, Common Sense allows us to connect to the inhabitants of any unfortunate city or territory. This brings us to a crucial shift: Paine’s voice is never entirely his own. Although Common Sense bears his name, the text constantly dissolves the figure of the author. The “I” retreats. The voice opens. The reader is repeatedly addressed as a thinking agent, not as a follower. Paine writes in such a way that his words always seem on the verge of being spoken by someone else. This is why the pamphlet circulated orally; why it moved through taverns, assemblies, and private homes; why it was read aloud by people who did not consider themselves intellectuals. The text does not require mastery; it bestows it.

In this sense, Paine can be understood as a protosystem rather than a sovereign author. (Sovereign authorship defines a deep understanding of who the
author’s audience is.) By calling Paine a “proto-system,” I mean that he goes beyond merely expressing ideas; he constructs a technical and cognitive arrangement that enables others to think and act politically. Common Sense works less as a finished argument than as an interface: it does not transmit knowledge from author to reader, it produces political competence in the act of reading itself.

In Bernard Stiegler’s terms, quoted by French philosopher Anne Alombert, such a text functions as a technical milieu rather than a message. (Anne Alombert, Penser avec Bernard Stiegler (Paris, PUF, 2025) 220, 222.) Writing is not neutral; it exteriorizes memory, judgment, and imagination, shaping how individuals and collectives come to think. Common Sense operates precisely at this level: it distributes cognition, externalizes judgment, and transforms reading into a collective operation. The reader is not positioned as an interpreter of meaning, but as an agent activated by a device that organizes attention, imagination, and decision. The voice of Common Sense is therefore not singular but distributed. What speaks is not a man, but a system of intelligibility set in motion. The reader is not positioned as an interpreter of meaning, but as an agent activated by a device that organizes attention, imagination, and decision.

Seen from this angle, Common Sense anticipates something uncannily contemporary; a mode of writing that separates intention from effect; a text whose power lies not in what the author meant, but in what the text enables others to do. This is precisely where the connection with contemporary reflections on algorithmic writing begins to appear. Not because Paine was a machine, of course, but because he understood something essential. Authorship can be strategically diluted in order to amplify impact.

Common Sense is a text that does not settle but circulates; that does not preach from above but activates readers from within; that does not command assent but invites participation. We have come to understand Paine not simply as an author who speaks, but as an operator who sets inference in motion. This insight may be deepened by connecting it to a theoretical framework that, at first glance, might seem far from Paine’s world: the contemporary debate on authorship in the age of artificial intelligence.

Expanding this meditation on Common Sense with German scholar Hannes Bajohr’s article “Writing at a Distance: Notes on Authorship and Artificial Intelligence” may seem unconventional, yet it illuminates an essential structure in Common Sense: Paine indeed writes as a proto-system, not as a sovereign subject. (Hannes Bajohr, “Writing at a Distance: Notes on Authorship and Artificial Intelligence.” German Studies Review 47.2 (2024), 315-337. In political theory, a sovereign subject describes an anti-government person or group who share common beliefs.)

According to Bajohr, the advent of large language models (Chat GPT, for instance) challenges longstanding assumptions about what writing is, and who or what can be said to “author” a text. As these models become increasingly capable of producing writing that is, in some cases, indistinguishable from humanwritten text, the very notion of where writing comes from and who wrote it comes into question. The boundary between human and machine agents producing text becomes blurred, and with it, the traditional author’s function becomes unstable. For Bajohr, this crisis is not simply about machines “being authors.” Instead, it opens a space where authorship itself is distributed, where a text can no longer be neatly mapped onto a single individual’s intention. He proposes the idea of distributed authorship, a concept that recognizes a network of actors (human and nonhuman) participating in text production, while acknowledging that this network both extends and challenges classical concepts of authorship. As Paine wrote in the introduction of Common Sense:

Who the Author of this Publication is, is wholly unnecessary to the Public, as the Object for Attention is the Doctrine itself, not the Man. (Pierre Bayard, Demain est écrit (Minuit, Paradoxe, Paris 2005))

This vehicle of thought as a distributed authorship helps us see Common Sense not merely as the product of one revolutionary subject, but as a system of effects, operations, and activations that exceed the author’s intention. Paine’s pamphlet refutes the romantic ideal of the solitary genius. Its life has never resided in the person of Paine, but in the circulation of effects it triggers. It is easier, in this light, to see Paine not as a singular voice but as a proto-system: a text designed to distribute agency rather than concentrate it.

Bajohr’s paper introduces another concept useful here: causal authorship, which measures the distance between agent and text. In the context of writing with artificial agents, this distance can be vast: the human programmer, the model’s training data, and the user’s prompt all contribute to the final output. Yet even in that highly mediated context, authorship is not eliminated but decentered: shared among multiple influences. Similarly, Common Sense was designed to be read, heard, performed, repeated, simplified, and recomposed.

Paine’s role was not to author meaning as an intention sealed behind his signature, but to construct a textual environment where meaning could be generated by the reader. The result: Common Sense became something like an early analog of a distributed text whose influence and effect did not remain within the limits of its original publication, but propagated through countless acts of reading, rewriting, speaking, and quoting.

In the future imagined by Bajohr and already emerging in everyday acts of reading, the first question might be not “Who wrote this?” but “What does this text do to me, to us?” In this light, Paine’s pamphlet becomes less a singular expression and more a textual apparatus: an early form of distributed authorship before computers, algorithms, or language models existed. To frame it differently: rather than writing a pamphlet that would be “owned” by him as an author, Paine wrote a generative device—a piece of writing whose power did not reside within its origin but in its capacity to generate action, judgment, and collective reasoning across a population.

If Paine’s voice was never meant to be fixed, why should we exhibit him as if it were? The challenge of a future-oriented exhibition is not to preserve Paine, but to let him continue. Yet this future is not merely hypothetical. Following French Literature Professor Pierre Bayard’s reflections in Demain est Écrit , where the future is understood as operating retroactively on the present, such a future may already have taken place.

Imagine a gallery where Common Sense is not displayed behind glass, but performed, circulated, and interacted with. Where visitors are invited not to observe, but to participate by reading, responding, debating, and improvising the text in real time. In such a configuration, Paine is no longer a relic. He becomes a living interface, a proto-system of distributed thought. Visitors act as co-producers of the experience; the text’s energy circulates, echoes, and multiplies. Each reading becomes a node in a network of cognition, a point where political imagination is exercised and extended.

As Bayard suggests, the future can function as an interpretative operator, reorganizing the meaning of past events. Paine survives not as an icon, but as an active, distributed force still capable of moving, still capable of performing revolution.

The post Ink, Imagination and Algorithm: Returning to Common Sense appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Joy Masoff

ABSTRACT: The intellectual and political sides of Paine have had their time in the spotlight. More scholarly attention needs to focus on Paine, the person, his connections, and his networks. Few publications have examined Paine’s intimate inner circles, and almost nothing has been written about Paine as a devoted confidante, much less as a family man. Underexamined in the entire Paine corpus is the story of Paine’s role as a surrogate father and grandfather during the long denouement of the Revolution in France and the years he spent living with Nicolas and Marguerite Brazier Bonneville and their four young boys. Paine’s deep relationship with the Bonnevilles lasted for more than 15 years. This essay studies Paine’s time with the Bonnevilles in Paris during the six years he lived with them, from 1797 to 1802, as Napoleon Bonaparte began his ascent to power and U.S.-France relationships floundered.

The impressive Théâtre-Français, affectionately called La Maison de Molière in honor of the French literary icon, is the world’s oldest established national theatre. In the late 1790s, the homes surrounding it were relatively new, and the residents relatively prosperous. The Left Bank was beginning to acquire its reputation as a bohemian and artistic mecca. The street directly north of the theater square was called the Rue de Theatre Français, and it was here that Nicolas Bonneville’s Imprimerie de l’Cercle Social occupied part of the ground floor at No. 4: here that Thomas Paine’s knock on the door, one April day, changed the trajectory of his life. 

This new period in Paine’s life was transformative. In addition to fretting about the state of the world, he assumed a new role: godfather, surrogate grandfather, and family man. His absorption into family life adds a nuanced dimensionality to our knowledge of Paine. The Bonneville family was unique among Paine’s circles because their roles in his life were unique. Family became a part of Paine’s persona through their shared experiences of the revolution as ongoing unrest unfolded across Europe: through years of disruption and uprooting, and even the simple struggles of daily household existence. Several historians have dubbed Paine a “loner,” and missed this important connection. Paine’s inner circles were broader than mere political or pontifical associations, and far more than simply springboards for epistolary exchanges or impassioned editorializing. Friends and family changed Paine’s future.

WHO WERE THE BONNEVILLES? 

Paine first met Nicolas Bonneville in the early, heady days of the French Revolution, after he faced sedition charges in England and arrived to take his seat as the delegate from Calais at the 1792 National Convention. Paine had already formed several firm friendships with friends of the Bonnevilles who were members of the Girondins—especially the Condorcets, the Brissots, and the Rolands.¹ With these contacts came entry into several new networks, including L’Cercle Social, the benignly-named, initially-secretive organization that played an aggressive role in the Revolution as it unfolded. Paine’s induction into the Cercle, helmed by Nicolas Bonneville and the Catholic cleric, Claude Fauchet, firmly inserted him into the heart of French revolutionary activism. 

Bonneville (1760-1828) was a writer, utopianist, activist, publisher, and editor of four newspapers, each aimed at a different demographic. He was part of a rarified coterie of political, philosophical, and theosophical thinkers of the time, and some historians regard him as a founder of the “modern revolutionary tradition.”² His wife, Marguerite Brazier (1767-1846) was a proto-feminist and Cercle Social activist. The Bonnevilles were in the thick of Girondin politics until the rise of the Committee of Public Safety, which unleashed the Terror and led to the executions of many Girondist leaders. Paine was incarcerated, allegedly for being British, and almost died, abandoned by the U.S. Minister to France at the time, Gouverneur Morris.³ After Paine’s release from his imprisonment and long recovery, he came to live with the Bonnevilles, not sure how long he would remain. His years with the family humanized Paine, revealing a different dimension of a complicated man. The constant exchange of ideas between Bonneville and Paine— two utopianists separated by age and temperament— offers glimpses of the intergenerational inspirations that flowed in both directions and steadied Paine through this period of his life. These connections enabled the political Paine, the spiritual Paine, the scientific Paine, and the social Paine to flower in new ways. Imbued with a sense of safety that came from the warmth of his new living arrangements, Paine could focus on the many ideas crowding his thoughts.

Meeting Paine as a family man, in conjunction with his search for relevancy in the wake of the failure of France’s 1793 Constitutional Convention and his difficult imprisonment, discloses a scantily examined chapter in his life. Paine’s stay with the Bonnevilles lasted for six years, from 1797 to 1802, when Paine was finally able to return to the United States after Jefferson was elected president. Paine wrote several forceful pamphlets, and he certainly remained engaged in furthering of his cause for universal republicanism. Paine wrote tirelessly, constantly, and frequently defensively, particularly as Age of Reason continued to create blowback. Significantly, Paine was deeply invested in the triangulated political machinations of the United States, Britain, and France, as well as Bonaparte’s continued thrust into, and annexation of, regions across much of Europe. Paine’s output was largely reactive, rather than accretive. He was not building on radical new ideas, as he had with Agrarian Justice, but instead attempting to dismantle existing ones that conflicted with his own. 

AS THE CENTURY ENDED 

Despite the Enlightenment mantra that we are all created equal, societies are not, and their responses are unpredictable. Causality, complexity, and contingency all played roles in the events leading up to the Western Hemisphere’s revolutions and in the crumbling of their possibilities in France in the years that followed the Terror. The last five years of the eighteenth century saw tremendous turmoil in both the Atlantic world and the halls of governance in America. The Genêt Affair and the Jay Treaty had worsened Franco-American relations, and several events in the United States impacted Paine’s world: John Adams’s ascension to the U.S. Presidency; 1797’s XYZ Affair; and a declaration of what became known as the Quasi-War with France.⁴ It was during this period in America that Federalist hegemony in opposition to Democratic-Republican agrarianism exploded—both in the halls of Congress and across the Atlantic world— as slave revolts in the Caribbean, Napoleon’s incursions deeper across Europe, and diplomatic failures pushed the Western Hemisphere deeper into unrest. 

A NEW HOME, A NEW NETWORK

The Bonneville-Paine connection was forged at the beginning of the Revolution, during the many socio-political gatherings of the post-Bastille, pre-Terror years. In addition to sharing common notions of freedom and an unflaggingly optimistic belief in a better future, Nicolas Bonneville’s fluency in English allowed Paine to speak “in a more familiar and friendly manner than to any other persons of the society.”⁵ On the April day that Marguerite Brazier Bonneville welcomed Paine into her home, she expected him to stay for a fortnight. Instead, he stayed on and off for six years. Many years later, in collaboration with Paine acolyte William Cobbett, Madame Bonneville recalled the statesman’s arrival and the many years spent under her roof.⁶ Her memoirs offer a fascinating picture of Paine’s time between James Monroe’s departure from Paris in 1797 and Paine’s final farewell to France in 1802. 

It fell upon Madame Bonneville—with a newborn in her arms when Paine arrived—to look after her new houseguest. Two other boys scampered around the house: Louis, aged seven, and little Nicolas, just three-and-a-half. 8 Paine loved the children, especially the new baby, named Benjamin in honor of Ben Franklin. He nicknamed the infant “Bebia,” an endearment that stuck through late childhood. A little over a year after Paine’s arrival, a fourth boy, Thomas Paine Bonneville, added to the bustle of an already hectic household and became Paine’s godson. But who was Madame Bonneville? 

Love and marriage did not necessarily go together in pre-revolutionary France, or, for that matter, in much of Western Europe. Marriage often dragged the heavy baggage of laws of inheritance, dowries, dotage, and paternity behind it. For families with any wealth, it involved elaborate financial documents with multiple pages of fiscal foreplay—more business arrangements than bonds of love: a mariage de convenance. Worse still, it could involve conjugal cruelty and forced unions. Within the Catholic Church, there was no escaping an unhappy, or worse, a brutal marriage. In Suzanne Desan’s The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, the author quotes the Comte d’Antraigue’s 1789 description of Old Regime marriage, not as a sacrament, but as “a sacrifice, a sacrilege.”⁹ 

During the revolutionary period, vigorous debates were held on how best to reform the conjugal system. Within the context of these discussions that we can best understand the union Marguerite Brazier entered into with Nicolas Bonneville and the life they began to create together. As a result, with the Enlightenment came newfound matrimonial freedom and a new framework that, to this day, informs the marital laws of many Western nations. 

When Lyonnaise-born Marguerite Brazier— the now-orphaned daughter of an activist maître pâtissier—met Nicolas Bonneville, he had not yet found his true calling. He was alternately hyperfocused or unfocused, with a kind of intellectual attention deficit disorder that kept him veering from one passion to another. Was he a philosophe? A poet? A political theologian? A journalist, politician, linguist, historian? No matter the label, he assuredly believed that he had earned the right to call himself a full-fledged member of the Republic of Letters—as well as a citizen of Paris, which had anointed itself as the cultural capital of the world. 

Meeting Marguerite sparked something new in Nicolas. If he were to be a husband, then the notion of matrimony demanded some of his scattershot attention. In 1792, he finally gathered all his thoughts on marriage—both personal and civic—and published Le Nouveau Code Conjugal.¹⁰ His ability to speak definitively on the subject owed much to his union with Marguerite. As a dyed-in-the-wool idealist, he would not have written this were his marriage a sham. The slender volume is at times frustratingly arcane, particularly in its theoretical discussions of a return to the monarchy. Should any new king only be permitted to marry a Frenchwoman?

In Le Nouveau Code Conjugal, traditional church vows were replaced with a more free-spirited pledge. “I declare, as a free man and good citizen, that I take _________as my friend and my wife.” The woman would reply “ as a free woman and good citizen, I take_________as my friend and my husband.” Friends and lovers: By combining ideals of citizenship with love and friendship, the Bonnevilles saw the culmination of a utopian ideal.

At the time, both believed that a civil union was an act of patriotism and Nicolas argued that religious marriages could only take place if the couple were first bound in a civil marriage—an oddly prescient idea that is the norm in America, where the statement “by the powers vested in me by the State of ________takes place at the end of most wedding ceremonies no matter how religious. But as radical as this ideology was, the union of Marguerite and Nicolas, proved as enduring as any marriage bound by ecclesiastical promises. As Paine settled into his rooms, he read reports of a new monarchist revival brewing, as Royalists emerged from their hiding places, eager to take advantage of the nation’s continued economic struggles to foment a new rebellion and a return to monarchical rule. This troubled Paine, so he sharpened his quill and began writing for Bonneville’s newspaper, Le Bien Informé.

Living with the Bonnevilles offered a healing atmosphere for Paine: the warm and boisterous embrace of family was something he had never experienced before. Bonneville quickly became the son Paine had never had, and Marguerite Brazier, his surrogate daughter-in-law. Every morning, Paine would sleep late, devour the local newspapers, and then seek out his genial host, journals in hand, to “chat upon the topiks [sic] of the day.”¹¹ He wrote editorials for Le Bien Informé, and often found himself in the company of two of Bonneville’s great friends, Louis-Sebastien Mercier and Jean-Charles Nodier both book lovers and brilliant creative writers. 

Mercier was a prolific playwright and one of the earliest writers of science fiction. He, like Paine, had served at the Convention, aligned with the Girondins, and also ended up in prison during the Terror, while Nodier, almost 40 years younger than Paine, represented a new generation of thought.¹² He was a writer of contes fantastiques—tales of vampires and of the romantic monsters that were a hallmark of Gothic literature.¹³ Nonetheless, both Mercier and Nodier were political creatures. They spent a great deal of time with the Bonnevilles, exposing Paine to writers who were part of a burgeoning “romantic” movement in the arts that was sweeping across Europe. 

Romanticism brought a way of seeing a new and rapidly changing world. Feeling was more important than thought, and introspection more important than exposition.¹⁴ The Romantics argued that human behavior was governed by passion, not reason, and we are left to wonder what Paine thought about this.

Bonneville’s newspaper, Le Bien Informé, was a work of serious journalism and was widely read in Paris. It covered politics, society, and literary events along with stock market and weather reports. In addition, Bonneville’s post-Terror printing establishment, Imprimerie de Cercle Social, offered a second journal: Vieux Tribune et sa Bouche de Fer, which was Bonneville’s philosophical playpen for his own idealistic visions, many of which read like mystical fever dreams. Bonneville also translated and published several of Paine’s political tracts, including Compacte Maritime—one of Paine’s last polemical pamphlets. 14 Paine’s association with Bonneville’s imprimerie and specifically Le Bien Informé gave him a platform, a voice, a degree of relevance, and, perhaps misguidedly, a sense of power—a bully pulpit from which he could preach about his ongoing obsession with the end of the British monarchy. Four significant areas occupied Paine as he ricocheted from politics to ombudsmanship to religion to science, and back again, often in the same day.

THE ATLANTICIST PAINE

I have been introduced to the famous Thomas Paine, and like him very well. He’s being vain beyond all belief, but he has reason to be vain, and for my part, I forgive him. He has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and Europe, and I believe him to be conscientiously an honest man. He converses extremely well; and I find him wittier in discourse than in his writings where his humor is clumsy enough.¹⁵

—Theodore Wolfe Tone

Theobold Wolfe Tone was an Irish revolutionary and a Paine admirer. Together with James Napper Tandy, in 1791, the two Irishmen founded the Society of United Irishmen, with the organization’s goal of “the abolition of bigotry in religion and policies, and the equal distribution of the Rights of Man through all Sects and Denominations of Irishmen.”¹⁶ Paine was an ardent advocate of Irish independence and worked actively for their cause throughout the entirety of his years in France, beginning in the early days of France’s revolution. He wrote several articles in Le Bien Informé lauding the United Irishmen and their leaders, and frequently socialized with both Tone and Tandy, who had come to Paris to rouse French support for their cause.¹⁷ 

Le Bien Informé frequently reported on Paine’s interactions with both men, as well as his associations with Scots agitator Thomas Muir.¹⁸ Paine believed that a corrupt British government was the greatest threat to peace at the time. It became an obsession for Paine, to the point where Great Britain, not Bonaparte’s increasing power grabs, were foremost on his mind. Irish independence was simply part and parcel of Paine’s grander view, and, to his thinking, the logical next steps after France’s victories in Belgium and the creation of a French alliance with the Dutch in 1795.¹⁹ This allowed Paine to foment a fever-dream of his own: an invasion of Great Britain.²⁰ 

Both Paine and Bonneville had a shared flaw: what historian Thomas Walker called their relentlessly “exhilarating optimism.”²¹ Paine’s democratizing international liberalism dominated his activities at this point, yet it is a study in contradictions. He had a deep disdain for war-prone authoritarianism, yet conversely, a belief that military interventions were an acceptable price to pay for progress.²² But in Paine’s envisioned military, the incursions were won by small liberating armies—rather than large-scale invasions—and directed toward nations and states eagerly expressing a desire to transition from a monarchy to a republic. 

Paine began authoring a series of articles for Le Bien Informé, urging an invasion of England.²³ Returning to mathematical analysis as a weapon, he calculated everything from the military force needed to successfully effect an invasion to the cost of building a thousand gunboats. One month later, Paine penned a letter to the Directoire’s Council of Five Hundred, followed by a piece that appeared in Le Bien Informé the next day. In it, Paine championed an intervention entirely funded by contributions from fellow French Republicans. Paine proudly put his money where his mouth was, writing, “My economy permits me to make a small patriotic donation. I send a hundred livres, and with it all the wishes of my heart for the success of the descent, and a voluntary offer of any service I can render to promote it.”²⁴

Throughout this push for invasion, Paine maintained polite relations with Bonaparte, who visited the Rue de Théâtre Français and even dined with the Bonnevilles. Who better to bring down Great Britain’s monarchy than the French general who was wreaking such havoc on Europe? Their initial meetings were cordial, and Paine, a sponge for praise, told his friend Joel Barlow that Bonaparte confessed to sleeping with a copy of Rights of Man by his bed. Many years later, Madame Bonneville remarked that Paine “was not satisfied without admirers of his success,” and at that point, Bonaparte indeed was. That admiration did not last. By 1802, according to a friend of Paine’s, whenever Paine and Bonaparte found themselves together at political gatherings, they would not speak. They simply glared at one another.²⁵ 

Paine had been obsessively devising a British invasion plan, and shared it in a long and detailed letter to James Monroe written in 1797. He praised the efficiency of small, swift gunboats—“a vessel that can elude ships of war, for its object is not to fight but to elude and disembark”—to be deployed across the North Sea under the proper wind conditions to sneak down the British coast to launch an attack.²⁶ Reading the minute details of Paine’s plan, the imaginary envisioning of an almost Viking-like offensive, and the swift crumbling of British monarchist resistance, seems nearly as dreamlike as Bonneville’s romanticist ramblings in Vieux Tribune et sa Bouche de Fer. An abortive attempt to liberate Ireland in August 1798, ended in disappointment one month later after a very short-lived Irish Republic.²⁷ Curiously enough, although specifically warning against authoritarianism in government and condemning the restoration of special privileges based on wealth or caste, Paine at first felt little alarm at the rise to power of Napoleon. For Paine, the greatest of all enemies to the French people, internal or external, was the corrupt and autocratic British government. With his eye on Great Britain, he may have overlooked the potential threat posed by Napoleon to France, so focused was he on the problem of delivering a military defeat to his sworn foe. 

THE SOCIAL PAINE 

The house at No. 4 became Paine’s sanctuary, offering him a metaphorical “throne:”a place to hold court with some of the most influential scientists, politicians, warriors, and philosophers of the age. One role that Paine loved playing was ombudsman: the man with “connections.” He was always busily introducing a needy individual to the right person who could offer help. There was an “innocent Englishwoman trapped in France with a five-year-old child, longing to get home, who Paine assisted.”²⁸ Paine connected Bonneville with a banker he knew to help prepare an loan application for Madame Bonneville to become the proprietress of a lottery office.²⁹ In a remarkable two-column bilingual letter written by Paine and Bonneville, on shared pieces of paper, the men submitted a two-language petition to free Charles Este—the son-in-law of Paine’s close friend Robert Smith—who had been imprisoned.³⁰

Paine even wrote to General Brune—a close friend of Bonneville’s and a key leader with part of Napoleon’s multi-placed strike forces—to say “I congratulate you, my dear and brave general, on your happy and glorious success in Holland,“ and then, still obsessed with the trampling of the British fleet, suggested that the Batavians would need to raise a new navy.³¹ “I have a friend, an American, who has been bred up to sea from his infancy, and is very desirous of serving under Admiral Dewinter. He is in the prime of life, brave, and a complete seaman.”³² Paine also maintained his lifeline to Fulwar Skipwith throughout his years with the Bonnevilles, facilitating help for the inventor Robert Fulton and many others. 

Madame Bonneville, busy with proofreading and child-rearing, was assigned the role of “concierge” and charged with either allowing the visitors who flocked to her door to see Paine, or offering up “polite prevarications” as she put it, when she told them he was not in.³³ 

Paine’s visitors included Tadeusz Kosciuszko, hero of the American Revolution, and Henry Redhead Yorke, a young British friend of Paine’s, who survived Madame Bonneville’s intense scrutiny the first time he came to visit. Yorke was an illegitimate Creole born to a British slave-owning plantation overseer in Barbuda and a free black Antiguan mother. At age six, his father brought him to England to be educated, bestowed a private income upon him, and saw to it that the lad went on to Cambridge, where he studied law. His Caribbean roots and mixed parentage placed Yorke in a position of liminality, and throughout his life, he never quite knew where his feet might best be planted.³⁵

Sociable evenings capped off Paine’s days. He frequently visited with the Barlows and their houseguest, Robert Fulton, or dined with the Smiths. Other nights, Paine would walk over to an Irish coffeehouse on Condé Street. There, a drink in hand, he would hobnob with expatriate Irish, English, and Americans to take the pulse of politics in the U.S. and England.³⁶ Constant exposure to people of many nationalities and all ages kept the cosmopolitan Paine energized and engaged even though he had no official role. 

THE SPIRITUAL PAINE 

The blowback from Christian church adherents to Age of Reason, Part the Second, was vitriolic. Nonetheless, Paine stayed the course, tirelessly defending his beliefs to whoever took him to task about them. Having gained his higher education in the company of learned people in his post-privateering London days, he found himself craving the company of likeminded deists, so Paine joined a relatively new society that began welcoming members in January of 1797. It was a lovely 20-minute walk from the Bonneville’s, past the glorious Saint Chapelle, and across the Seine to gatherings of the Society of the Theophilanthropists. Their dogma was simple: “les Theophilantropes croient a l’existence de Dieu, et a l’immortalite de l’ame,” which translates to “The Theophilanthropists believe in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.”³⁷ Rather than being an apostate, as he was constantly accused, the opposite was true. Paine’s faith was pure and deeply felt, as evidenced in a part of the speech he gave to the group.

The Universe is the bible of a true Theophilanthropist. It is there that he reads of God. It is there that the proofs of his existence are to be sought and to be found. As to written or printed books, by whatever name they are called, they are the works of man’s hands, and carry no evidence in themselves that God is the author of any of them. It must be in something that man could not make that we must seek evidence for our belief, and that something is the universe, the true Bible, — the inimitable work of God. 38

—Thomas Paine

The dismantling of the Christian Church by the Committee of Public Safety had left holes in the hearts of many French citizens. Throughout 1797, Paine wrote a series of letters defending his thoughts while challenging his critics to examine their own claims of personal godliness. In a pamphlet entitled Worship and Church Bells, Paine wrote to Camille Jordan, a royalist member of the Council of Five Hundred, and reminded him, “It is a want of feeling to talk of priests and bells while so many infants are perishing in the hospitals, and aged and infirm poor in the streets, from the want of necessaries.”³⁹ 

Paine’s hackles were continually raised by the clinging rigidity of some of his colleagues to existing religious traditions. It is sometimes hard to tell which he was more determined to achieve: the spread of democracy or the global embrace of a new religion of humility and humanity. 

In Prosecution of the Age of Reason, a pamphlet that Paine published in Paris in September of 1797, he confronted Thomas Erskine, a lawyer who had once defended Paine in absentia at his trial for publishing Rights of Man, and who now, five years later, had taken a Burkean path, and chose to prosecute Thomas Williams, Paine’s British publisher of Age of Reason, Part the Second.⁴⁰ Williams was found guilty and sentenced to a three-year prison term. “Of all the tyrannies that afflict mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst. Every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts a stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity,” wrote Paine.⁴¹

Bonneville and Paine shared another powerful spiritual bond. Both were intrigued by Freemasonry, but only as an abstraction. Despite allegations of initiation, no records of a single lodge in England, France, or the United States bear either Paine or Bonneville’s name, but both had seriously investigated the practice.⁴² In 1788, before Paine and Bonneville became close, Bonneville had written Les Jesuites Écossoise chassés de la Maçonnerie.⁴³ In it, Bonneville dealt with a conspiracy theory that alleged that the Jesuits infiltrated Masonic lodges and had done the same thing to the medieval Templars. 

The famed historian of the Revolution, Albert Mathiez, described the original gatherings of the Cercle Social as an offshoot of Masonic ideology, writing, “Bonneville, the smoky and bold spirit, [was] the Grand Chief.”⁴⁴ Paine continued to march to his own spiritual drum and began amassing notes for his own study of Freemasonry.⁴⁵

At the same time, Bonneville grew increasingly obsessed by the Bavarian Illuminati, who championed universal brotherhood and the pursuit of global peace through benevolent spirituality. Compassionate globalism was Bonneville’s guiding vision, which he expressed with a romantic’s passion-tinged pen. Paine shared his sentiments but wrote more clinically and scientifically. In L’Esprit des Religions, Bonneville had also championed the creation of a “united universal association” to settle global imbroglios, which he called “the supreme court of nations.”⁴⁶ Paine had adopted that idea and included it in Agrarian Justice—both men envisioning what would one day become the United Nations. The two men, living under the same roof, working together at Le Bien Informé, socializing at a favorite café on the Rue de Marais, discussing literature and philosophy with other forward thinkers, and sharing in the antics of the Bonneville’s little boys, filled a deep ache in Paine’s soul.⁴⁷

THE SCIENTIFIC PAINE 

Politics, religion, and Paine’s occasional ombudsmanship were not enough. As he balanced a full plate of intellectual and social challenges, there was one cherished place of escape for him. When he left America for France in 1787, he created and carried models of his iron bridge. Now, almost 10 years later, living with the Bonnevilles, he had the time to focus on more than party politics and insurrections. Paine resumed his obsession with his arched iron bridge and transformed Bonneville’s study into what he began to call his “work-shop.”⁴⁹ Adding to the din of crying babies, the thrum of the presses on the first floor, and the shrieks of rambunctious children running through the hallways, came the hammering of mallet against metal late into the night. Paine had returned once more to the world of physics and the parameters of engineering: the certainty that came with the laws of nature. 

One of the reasons Paine slept late most mornings was that he stayed up late into the night. Madame Bonneville recalled, “He employed part of his time, while at our house, in bringing this model to high perfection…This was most pleasant amusement for him.”⁵⁰ The blows of a sledgehammer were now added to the soundtrack of the Bonneville home, but the good-natured Bonnevilles accepted the eccentricities of their guest. 

Paine especially welcomed the company of fellow scientists. A frequent visitor to Paine’s workshop was Robert Fulton, one of the masterminds of the steamboat. As a 12-year-old growing up in Pennsylvania, Fulton had met Paine’s Revolutionary wartime friend William Henry, the munitions-maker who had built a giant testing lab to explore steam power. Putting engineering aside in favor of art, Fulton began his career as a portraitist but found himself increasingly distracted by the lure of invention.

He began by improving the functioning of devices to cut marble, dig ditches, and twist rope, but like Paine, he was fascinated by river crossings and experimented with devising a method to make prefabricated iron bridges.⁵¹ He grew interested in the construction of canals, particularly a design with no locks, which initially led to his journey to France. There, he forged a friendship with Paine and his great friends, the Barlows. 

Joel Barlow also shared Paine and Fulton’s fascination with the mechanical arts and took the younger man in as a full-time, long-term guest, whom he affectionately called “Toot.” Together, one of their favorite topics was the notion of submarines, so Fulton submitted a radical plan to the Directoire. He eventually offered a self-funded submarine that he named Nautilus for the purpose of attacking British warships using what he called “torpedoes.”⁵² His reward for any successes would be a bounty for each ship destroyed, based on the number of guns on board. Over the next few years, it is likely that Paine, Barlow, and Fulton talked about Fulton’s submarine, which was eventually built and proved operational. It was during these gatherings that Fulton became a political disciple of Paine’s, adopting a kindred ideology, believing that with France’s help, Britain’s monarchical government would eventually be overthrown. 

During his years with the Bonnevilles, Paine worked diligently on plans for an improved crane and a machine to more efficiently plane wood, which he then used in building newer iterations of his bridge model. In 1801, writing from Paris to his friend, now president, Thomas Jefferson, Paine evoked the third law of Galilei-Newtonian mechanics, describing a self-propelled automotive carriage with wheels that were propelled by small bursts of exploding gunpowder.⁵³ His rapture at the ability to affect motion controllable by man rather than nature, i.e. wind and running water, was intoxicating. Paine saw the limitations of a steam engine as “impracticable, because…the weight of the apparatus necessary to produce Steam is greater than the power of the Steam to remove that weight, and consequently that the Steam engine cannot move itself.”⁵⁴

Paine thought outside the box with an iteration of a combustion engine. “When a stream of water strikes on a water wheel it puts it in motion and continues it. Suppose the water removed and that discharges of gunpowder were made on the periphery of the wheel where the water strikes would they not produce the same effect?”⁵⁵ How glorious, Paine thought, that an agent of death could be a pathway to a better future. He likened it to a poison that suddenly had the potential to cure instead of kill. 

With the end of the one-term presidency of John Adams in 1800 and the ascension of Thomas Jefferson, Paine’s old friend Robert R. Livingston was named the seventh U.S. Minister to France. He arrived in Paris in December of 1801 and called on Paine several times. Madame Bonneville remembered that “One morning we had him at breakfast, [Charles] Dupuis, the author of the Origin of Worship, being of the party; and Mr. Livingston, when he got up to go away, said to Mr. Paine, smiling, “Make your Will; leave the mechanics, the iron bridge, the wheels, etc. to America, and your religion to France.”⁵⁶ 

THE LAWS OF THE SEA

Paine and Bonneville both shared visions of a global peace and a universal brotherhood. Both men had written about it: Paine in Agrarian Justice and Bonneville, five years earlier, in L’Esprit de Religions. Paine was still impacted by his long-ago privateering experiences, still obsessed by oceanic inter-dependencies, and still angered by the Jay Treaty, so he gathered several articles and letters he had penned and put them together into a new pamphlet, Compact Maritime, which Bonneville translated into French and printed in 1800.⁵⁷ An English version emerged the following year.⁵⁸ The first part, “Dissertation on the Law of Nations,” was a condemnation of treaties, which “besides being partial things, are in many instances contradictory to each other.”⁵⁹ Paine applauded the Armed Neutrality pact, earlier proposed by Russia and signed by most of the maritime commercial nations of Europe stating, “neutral ships make neutral property,” but Tsar Paul’s death precluded its enactment. Why, Paine wondered, if this step could be taken, were there no international laws when it came to the seas? 

Bonneville was a philologist. He loved words, loved analyzing them, loved dissecting them down to their ancient roots. Paine had absorbed this habit and proceeded to autopsy the word “contraband” in the first part of Compact Maritime. If the Western world’s economy was driven by commerce, nations could not simply define contraband as they saw fit. The word in itself was meaningless. This was Paine’s first common sense stepping-stone to calling for the creation of international maritime protocols. Part II, “On the Jacobinism of the English at Sea,” was directed toward neutral nations. It was a call to action—a demand that nations assert their “rights of commerce and the liberty of the seas.”⁶⁰ Paine pointed to the fact that Britain’s power came from its commerce and not from land resources, “hence, upon external circumstances not in her power to command.”⁶¹ That made the nation vulnerable in his estimation. Part III spelled out Paine’s 10- part proposal for an international trade agreement, based on oceanic safe spaces. If all the neutral nations of Europe, together with the United States of America, entered into an association to suspend all commerce with any belligerent power that molested any ship belonging to the association, England would either lose her commerce or be forced to consent to the freedom of the seas. Commerce, Paine pointed out, was England’s Achilles Heel. Paine’s time with the Romantics led him to pen a very flowery, Bonneville-like conclusion. “…we see France like the burning bush, not only unconsumed, but erecting her head and smiling above the flames. She throws coalitions to atoms with the strength of thunder—Combat and victory are to her synonymous.”⁶² 

BONAPARTE’S REVENGE 

Combat and victory were also words synonymous with Napoleon Bonaparte’s incursions across Europe and into Africa. His meteoric rise from a Corsican expat to military wunderkind came to some degree through a series of fortuitous patronages. He had identified with the Robespierrists during the revolution, but somehow survived the taint of that association to catch the eye of Paul Barras, President of the Directoire, in 1795. During France’s protracted wars, Bonaparte’s ongoing military successes made him a hero. 

During Paine’s time living with the Bonnevilles in France, Bonaparte made several visits to No. 4 Rue de Theatre Français and made a favorable impression on both Paine and Bonneville as Paine tried to convince the General that a full-throttled invasion of Britain was achievable. There were three meetings arranged with the Irish Republicans and Bonaparte, in which Bonneville served as a translator, but little came of the efforts.⁶³ Bonaparte instead turned his attentions to Egypt, and Ireland was forgotten. 

The seventeenth of Fructidor (September 3, 1797) was a landmark day in France. A coup d’état backed by military force, purged royalist and counter-revolutionary elements from the government, and gave emergency powers to the members of the Directoire. In response, Paine began penning a pamphlet, To the People of France and the French Armies, analyzing the progress of the Republic, and acknowledging that the crisis was a result of the “darksome manoeuvres of a faction.”⁶⁴ He cited historical precedent for martial law to avoid bloodshed and to restore tranquility, perhaps as much to calm his readers as himself. In 1799, after a string of military victories, Bonaparte declared himself the First Consul of France, which led to a fast-growing disenchantment on the part of both Paine and Bonneville. Napoleonic France was a betrayal of the democratic values that so many had sacrificed their lives to obtain. 

Bonneville had been growing increasingly critical of the government through his editorializing in Le Bien Informé, and one day he went too far. He skewered the frequently silent Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyés, one of the members of the Directory, after Sieyés went to Prussia on a state visit, writing, “If there were organized in Berlin a club of mutes, [he] should be named president, the dean of silent men.”⁶⁵ The order came down to cease publishing, but Paine—always anxious to insert himself in the defense of the oppressed, wrote to the Directory and assured them that Bonneville was “honest” and “uncorrupted…a very industrious man—a good father, and a good friend.”⁶⁶ Paine’s appeal worked, but only temporarily. Bonaparte was also monitoring Bonneville (and by extension Paine) as a potential enemy of the government.” 

Soon after the Coup of 18 Brumaire—the day Bonaparte declared himself First Consul of the French First Republic—Bonneville likened Napoleon to Oliver Cromwell—a brutal autocrat who had orchestrated a genocide in Ireland over religious freedoms in 1649. In response, his presses were confiscated, and Bonneville was soon taken away and imprisoned. He would be silenced for several years.⁶⁷

Paine had the good sense to leave town, head for Dieppe on the coast, and then on to Bruges to stay with Joseph Van Huele, a former inmate at the Luxembourg, who had cared for Paine during his almost fatal illness.68 Paine described Van Huele as his “particular friend” in recognition of the terrifying bond they shared after Joseph’s brother, Jean-Othon Van Huele, was hurled from a top-floor window, as Paine and the Belgian watched in horror.⁶⁹ 

THE ROAD HOME 

Paine had made his disaffection with Washington well known after his liberation from the Luxembourg, and it had cost him dearly. His opinion of John Adams was even worse (and certainly there was nothing but overt contempt in Adams’ opinion of Paine). Not holding back, Paine dubbed Washington and Adams, “Terrorists of the New World.”69 So when news finally reached France of Jefferson’s ascent to the U.S. presidency, he rejoiced, knowing he would be able to return to the place he called his true home.⁷⁰ In March of 1801, Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office as president. A year earlier, the Treaty of Mortefontaine was signed, ending the Quasi-War, which gave Paine the opportunity to arrange for a safe journey across the Atlantic. Jefferson tried to send an official U.S. ship to carry Paine home, but Federalist opposition in the press created too much of a stir. 

Finally, a ship was found courtesy of a Connecticut sea captain that Paine was friends with and a departure date set: September 2, 1802. A few days before Paine was due to leave, he dined with the Smiths one last time, and after a festive evening, he remarked that he had nothing to detain him in France; “for that he was neither in love, debt, nor difficulty.”⁷¹ During his lengthy imprisonment, Lady Charlotte Smith had exchanged poetry with Paine, he writing from “The Castle in the Air,” and she replying from her “Little Corner of the World.” She fixed her gaze on him and remarked that it was ungallant to say such a thing in the company of women. In reply, Paine jotted off one final ditty to his cherished friend, called “What is Love?” In its first stanza, he wrote:

It is that delightsome transport we can feel 

Which painters cannot paint,

nor words reveal, 

Nor any art we know of can conceal. 

Canst thou describe the sunbeams

to the blind, 

Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?⁷²

But what of Madame Bonneville? Paine had often talked of the family coming to America, but the choice to leave France was not so easy for Madame Bonneville. She was left with four young boys and no means of support other than the charity of her husband’s father in provincial Evreux. Should she stay in France, or take advantage of Paine’s offer to care for her sons until her husband might be freed? Many years earlier, she had chosen dislocation, leaving her native Lyon and her siblings when she was barely 18 to travel to Paris in search of adventure. But Lyon was a few hundred kilometers away, not across an ocean. A decision had to be made. Choosing to protect her husband’s future reputation, she evasively recalled in her later memoir, “Some affairs of great consequence made it impracticable for Mr. Bonneville to quit France…it was resolved, soon after the departure of Mr. Paine for America, that I should go thither with my children, relying fully on the good offices of Mr. Paine, whose conduct in America justified that reliance.”⁷³ 

On September 2, 1802, with his stalwart friend Thomas “Clio” Rickman by his side to wave farewell as he sailed away, the men arrived at Havre-de-Grâce. Two British friends, Francis Burdett and William Bosville, bestowed a £500 gift upon Paine to help him settle in when he finally arrived in America.⁷⁴ It was not until October 30 that he finally sailed into Baltimore harbor after a treacherous crossing. He had been away from his adopted country for 15 years. He was 63 years old and worn by age, maltreatment, and disappointment—heartsick over the continuing sparring of warring political parties in America—tired of what he saw as the Federalists’factionalism, and the failures of some of the Atlantic revolutions. Still, as it has been said, “hope is optimism with a broken heart.” So Paine, always the eternal optimist, dug deep, believing that he still had the power to effect change. 

THE PATH AHEAD 

At the same time that Paine arrived in America, there were enormous changes afoot across the great swath of New France—the vast tracts of land that lay to the west of the Mississippi River.⁷⁵ In October 1802, Spain’s King Charles IV signed a decree transferring the territory to France, while Spanish agents in New Orleans, acting on orders from the Spanish court, revoked U.S. access to the port’s warehouses. New Orleans was well on its way to becoming one of the busiest slave markets in America by then. Paine had thoughts on the topic and wrote to Jefferson two months after he arrived back in America from France.

Spain has ceded Louisiana to france and france has excluded Americans from N. Orleans and the Navigation of the Mississippi – the people of the western territory have complained of it to their government, and the governt. is of consequence involved and interested in the affair. The question then is, What is the best step to be taken first.⁷⁶

—Thomas Paine 

Perhaps he could convince Jefferson to offer to purchase all the Louisiana Territory for the United States: not just the Port of New Orleans. He believed he understood the mindset of the French government in a unique way. Perhaps there was even an official role for him. Paine was not finished: There was still work to be done.

THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF A TWO-PART ESSAY

ENDNOTES

1. The group that Brissot, Roland, and Condorcet belonged to, were known as the Girondins, because many of them were from Bordeaux in an area known as the Gironde. They were politically moderate with a specifically nationalistic viewpoint. Their opposition were often called the Montagnards, who had earned that somewhat sarcastic name—the Mountain—because they sat in the higher rows of the chamber where the Assembly met. The Montagnard’s interests were more focused on Paris and more radical. 
2. See Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, The Girondins, and the French Revolution, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 
3. Morris disliked Paine, and was happy to have him locked away. The recall of Morris in 1704, and his replacement with James Monroe saved Paine.
4. The Directory needed money to continue funding Bonaparte’s European incursions, and many French politicos were angry that John Jay allied with Britain in 1794, especially since The U.S. still owed France repayments for loans from the War of Independence. In 1796, France issues an order allowing for the seizure of American merchant ships. 
5. The Cobbet Papers in Moncure Daniel Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, Vol. 2, Appendix A. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 429-460 
6. William Cobbett was an Englishman who went from hating Paine, to becoming an ardent admirer. After Paine’s death, Cobbett and Madame Bonneville began collaborating on a homage to Paine and there are many manuscript notes prepared by Madame Bonneville in which she shares her memories. These were eventually included in “The Cobbett Papers” that were added to Conway’s Life of Thomas Paine. 
7. Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, Vol 2, 443. 
8. A fire at the Paris city archives destroyed all records of births, deaths and marriages. None of the boys were baptized in the Catholic Church so no records exist there. Benjamin Louis Eulalie (Bebia) was born April 14, 1797, and little Nicolas was born on December 5, 1793. These are the only two officially verified birthdates because we know Benjamin’s birthdate from his application to attend West Point when he was a teenager and Nicolas—who had been too frail to travel to America—from his death certificate when he was 15. Louis and Thomas’s ages (but not dates of birth) were cited on the ship’s manifest when Madame Bonneville sought refuge in America in 1802.
9. Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15. Desan writes, “if the state was now to be rooted in a contract freely chosen by the people, then marriage too, should rest on the free choice and contract of individuals.” 
10. Nicolas Bonneville, Le Nouveau Code Conjugal: Etabli sur les bases de la Constitution, et d’après les principes et les considérations de la loi, (Paris: L’impremier du Cercle Social, 1792).
11. Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, Vol 2, 443. 
12. Louis-Sebastien Mercier (1740-1814) was a venerated playwright and his science-fiction novel, L’An 2440 was groundbreaking. Jean-Charles Nodier (1780-1844) was a book-lover from a young age. A librarian, he was also an ardent Romanticist and eventually gained fame for his Gothic novels. 
13. Maurice Cranstoun, The Romantic Movement, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,1994), 11. 
14. Paine had fleshed out these ideas in a series of letters to Thomas Jefferson prior to the pamphlet’s publication 
15. Theobold Wolfe Tone, The Autobiography of Theobold Wolf Tone, Vol II, (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893), 189.Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) was a cofounder of the United Irishmen, and an officer in the French army under General Hoche, who led an assault on the Irish Coast in 1796 which failed due to bad weather. A second attempt in October 1798 also ended badly, with Tone captured and imprisoned. He killed himself rather than being hanged.
16. Nancy Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798.(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), 24. 
17. James Napper Tandy (1739-1803) was also a co-founder of the United Irishmen and a friend of Thomas Paine’s, living in Paris at the time Paine was articulating an invasion plan of attack against Britain. 
18. See Ann Thomson, “Thomas Paine and the United Irishmen,” Persee: Études irlandaises, no.16-1, (1991), 109-119. 
19. A revolt in the Netherlands between 1794-1795 led to the birth of the Batavian Republic as a “satellite” republic under French auspices. For enemies of Great Britain, that belief was that the alliance, which had created a long stretch of coastline, as far south as the Pyrenees, would offer control of shipping, banking, and other resources through the combined fleets of two maritime powers against British trade and sea power. 
20. Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Thomas Paine’s Plan for a Descent on England.” The William and Mary Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1957), 74–84. Through France’s alliance with the Netherlands, the French now had a large stretch of coastline on the North Sea from which to launch a possible invasion. The formation of the Batavian Republic in 1795 took place when the Dutch Stadtholder was overthrown and a French “sister state” was established. 
21. Thomas Walker, “The Forgotten Prophet: Tom Paine’s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly, 44 no.1 (2000), 166. 
22. Walker, “The Forgotten Prophet,” 51 
23. Le Bien Informé, Paris, Frimaire, and 25 Frimaire, An VI (December 14, 1797. Biblitoteque National de France
24. Le Bien Informé, January 28, 1798. 
25. Henry Redhead Yorke: Letters from France, in 1802, (Volume 2, London: H.D. Symonds, 1804), 339. 
26. Thomas Paine to James Monroe, “Observations on the Construction and Operation of Navies with a Plan for an Invasion of England and the Final Overthrow of the English Government,” 1797. Library of Congress. 
27. About 1,000 French soldiers, under the leadership of General Humbert staged a successful landing in County Mayo on August 22. There were three attempted invasions that summer, but none were successful. 
28. Thomas Paine to Citizen Peyel, 9 Ventoise, An 3. BNF 
29. On October 26, 1797, Nicolas Bonneville wrote to banker Jean-Frédéric Perregaux, a friend of Paine’s, to borrow money to purchase, with government authorization, a lottery office that would be operated by “the mother of his children.“ Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris. 
30. Thomas Paine/Nicolas Bonneville to Senator Garat, 7 Nivoise, An 9, (December 27, 1800), Iona College/ Thomas Paine Archives.
31. Thomas Paine to General Brune, November 1799. TPHA 
32. Thomas Paine to General Brune, November 1799. TPHA 
33. Paine to Brune, November 1799. 
34. The Cobbett Papers in Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, Vol. II, 443. 
35. For more on Yorke, see Amanda Goodrich, Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical: Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World (1772-1813), (London: Routledge, 2019.) He met Paine in late 1792 as a presenter for the Society for Constitutional Information to the National Convention, where he mixed with the British expatriate community, and witnessed the revolution first hand. 
36. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 438. 
37. Thomas Paine, Religious Year of the Theophilanthropists: or Adorers of God and Friends of Man, 2nd edition, John Walker, trans. (London: Darton and Harvey, 1797; For more, see Henri Gregoire’s “Histoire des Sectes,” tom. I., livre 2
38. Thomas Paine, A Discourse Delivered by Thomas Paine, at the Society of the Theophilanthropists, at Paris, 1798. 
39. Thomas Paine to Camille Jordan, “Worship and Church Bells,” 1797. TPHA. 
40. Thomas Paine, A Letter to Mr. Erskine, September 1797. TPHA 
41. Thomas Paine, A Letter to Mr. Erskine, September 1797. TPHA
42. Many historians assert that Bonneville was a Mason, but he was not. Bonneville offered a debt of gratitude to the “very dear and very respectable” Loge de la Réunion des Etrangers, but never joined. 
43. Nicolas Bonneville, Les Jesuites Écossoise chassés de la Maçonnerie, et Leur Poignard Brisé par les Maçons, (Paris: Orient de Londres, 1788.) Bonneville fascinated by the Bavarian Illuminati, and wrote L’Esprit de Religion in response to that movement. 
44. Isabelle Bourdin, Les Sociétés Populaire a Paris Pedant La Révolution (Paris, 1910), 159, quoting Albert Mathiez, Le Club des Cordeliers pendant the la crise de Varennes et la massacre du Champs de Mars.(Geneva:Slatkine, 1975). 
45. After his death, Madame Bonneville edited out some of Paine’s more pointed anti-Catholic sentiments and had printed, On the Origin of Freemasonry, (New York: Elliot and Crissy, 1810.)
46. Nicolas Bonneville, L’Esprit de Religions, (Paris: Imprimerie de le Cercle Social,1793), 159-160 
47. Paine grew up as an only child after his sister died in infancy. His first wife, Mary Lambert, died in childbirth, and he separated from his second wife, Elizabeth Ollive, having never consumated the marriage. 
48. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 445.
49. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 445.
50. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 445.
51. Alan Rems, “Man of War,” Naval History, Volume 25, No. 4, July 2011. https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history magazine/2011/july/man-war 
52. Rems, “Man of War.” 
53. Cobbett wrote, “A machine for planing boards was his next invention, which machine he had executed partly by one blacksmith and partly by another. The machine being put together by him, he placed it on the floor, and with it planed boards to any number that he required, to make some models of wheels. Mr. Bonneville has two of these wheels now. There is a specification of the wheels, given by Mr. Paine himself. This specification, together with a drawing of the model, made by Mr. Fulton, were deposited at Washington, in February 1811; and the other documents necessary to obtain a patent as an invention of Thomas Paine, for the benefit of Madam Bonneville.” 
54. Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, “On the Means of Generating Motion for Mechanical Uses,” 1801, LOC
55. Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, “On the Means of Generating Motion for Mechanical Uses,” 1801, LOC
56. The Cobbett Papers in Conway, 456. Dupuis’s work was a study of comparative religions based on the thesis that argued that all religions have a common origin, which can be traced back to the worship of the sun, moon, and stars. 
57. Thomas Paine, Pacte Maritime adresséaux nations neutres par un neuter, (Paris: Imprimerie–Librairie du Cercle Social, 1800). 
58. Thomas Paine, Compact Maritime, (City of Washington: Samuel Harrison Smith, 1801). 
59. Paine, Pacte Maritime, 4 
60. Paine, Pacte Maritime,11 
61. Paine, Compact Maritime, 24. The Fourth part of Paine’s work was a sarcastic analysis of the decisions of the judge of the English Admiralty
62. Paine, Compact Maritime, 24. The Fourth part of Paine’s work was a sarcastic analysis of the decisions of the judge of the English Admiralty
63. A petition from Bonneville to Napoleon reveals that he served as an interpreter during three meetings of General Bonaparte in 1797 with the United Irish chief. Arch. nat. F7 4286 dos.16. 
64. Thomas Paine, To the People of France and the French Armies, TPHA. (In Foner, Complete Writings, 2.605). 
65. Le Bien Informé September 17, 1798 66F7/8083/1196, Archives Nationale, Paris 
66. Le Bien Informé September 17, 1798 66F7/8083/1196, Archives Nationale, Paris 
67. Bonneville was imprisoned for having hidden Augustin Barruel in his home, under the guise of hiring him as a copyeditor. But Barruel had described Bonneville as an “impudent continuator of the nefarious job undertaken by Voltaire and his acolytes,” in Augustin Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Fauche, 1803), 2:275–301.
68. “De filosoof Thomas Paine en zijn Brugse vriend Joseph Van Huele,” Bruge die Scone 4 (1993). 
69. Thomas Paine, “To the Citizens of the United States” (Letter III), 29 November 1802, in Complete Writings, 2:918, 920; “To the Citizens of the United States” (Letter VI), 12 March 1803. 
70. Beginning in October 1800, Paine wrote a series of letters, that culminated with his essay, Compact Maritime. In March, 1801, Jefferson offered Paine transportation on a U.S. ship, but Paine learned that his old friend, Robert Livingston, would be Jefferson’s minister to France, so decided to wait for Livingston’s arrival, hoping that he might be offered an official government role. 
71. The Cobbet Papers, 446 
72. Thomas Paine to Mrs. Robert Smith, “What is Love,”1800. TPHA 
73. The Cobbet Papers, 446-447
74. Mark Philp, Thomas Paine: Very Interesting People, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 80. Burdett (1770-1844) was an English reformist politician who championed universal male suffrage. Bosville (1745-1813) was an extremely wealthy eccentric. He fought against the Americans during the War of Independence but left the battle impressed with the republican ethos. He was an ardent Whig and a very close friend of Paine’s friend John Horne Tooke. He and Burdett frequently socialized together. 
75. These territories were originally the dominion of France, but in 1762, after the signing of the Treaty of Fontainbleau the Francophile citizens of the region learned that they were now subjects of Spain. The entire Mississippi River Valley passed from Louis XV to his Spanish cousin Charles III as part of a secret pact at the end of the Seven-Years War, but this political sleight-of-hand changed little for the residents. French was still the Lingua Franca of the region. 
76. Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, December 25, 1802, Library of Congress.

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“In blasphemy and gross infidelity,” said the Centinel newspaper, Elihu Palmer “‘surpassed The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine and all other deist and atheist books.” Elihu Palmer (1764 1806) was a little-known freethinker who, even after losing his vision, remained active in the intellectual debates of his time. Palmer emerged as one of the leading exponents of deism in the First American Republic. Drawing upon thinkers such as Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Jefferson, Palmer developed his philosophy by engaging with key currents of Enlightenment thought in North America, including Isaac Ledyard’s materialism, Thomas Paine’s deism, and John Stewart’s vitalism. For Palmer, true morality was rooted in an interconnected system encompassing all living matter. His ideas were widely disseminated through his principal work, published in 1801 and expanded in 1802, in which he proposed replacing religious dogma with ethics based on justice and benevolence. 

Born in 1764 into a family of farmers in Connecticut, Palmer chose a public life after the end of the war in 1783, enrolling at Dartmouth College with the goal of pursuing the ministry or law. In 1787, he began his career as a preacher. At the First Presbyterian Church in Newtown, Long Island, an observer noted that he often set aside discussions of sin and instead urged his listeners to spend the day in innocent joys. Indeed, a year after beginning his ministry, he rejected Calvinist principles and became the “archetype of the radical and democratic deist.”

Soon after, he took a position at a Presbyterian church in Newtown, Long Island, where he met the physician Isaac Ledyard, who introduced him to the idea of eternal, living matter, questioning the existence of God as a transcendent entity. In 1792, he joined Philadelphia’s Society of Deist Natural Philosophers, which included Franklin and Jefferson, where he publicly denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, attracting the attention of clergy and generating tensions between religious traditionalism and new rationalist currents. When preaching to Baptists, he became frustrated with his audience’s reactions, as they expected nothing more than confirmations of their own doctrines. In the Federal Gazette, he wrote that opinions should not be subject to the whims of the masses—they should stand or fall solely by their coherence and truth.

TRAGEDY!

In August 1793, Palmer faced personal tragedy: a yellow fever outbreak on Water Street killed his wife, and he, treated by Dr. Benjamin Rush, was left blind. His enemies interpreted this misfortune as divine retribution for his heresies. Palmer then left his children to be raised by relatives in Connecticut and became an eloquent and tireless advocate of deism and vitalism. He became known for his sermons at the Deistical Society of New York and the Society of Theophilanthropists in Philadelphia.

In 1794, Palmer was profoundly influenced by Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. He proclaimed Paine “one of the first and best writers of all time, and probably the most important man ever to exist on the face of the earth.” In Philadelphia, he resided in the home of radical poet Philip Freneau and became involved in the dissemination of the first deist newspaper in the Americas, The Temple of Reason, created and edited by Irish immigrant Denis Driscol. Between 1803 and 1805, he maintained his own weekly newspaper, Prospect; or, View of the Moral World. Due to his physical condition, Palmer wrote with the assistance of freethinker Mary Powel, whom he later married. Additionally, Palmer met John Stewart, who introduced the idea of sensitive atoms—particles that recorded sensations and composed the universe. This notion was incorporated into Palmer’s thought, reinforcing his vision of eternal and interconnected matter.

In 1801, he published his principal work, Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery among the Human Species, in New York. The second and third editions, identical, were published in 1802 and 1806. Historian Kerry S. Walters, a professor at Gettysburg College and a leading scholar of deist thought, republished the third edition in 1990 with an introduction.

Like Paine in The Age of Reason, Palmer saw Creation as the true word of God, in contrast to revelations and miracles. Alongside this, he described a conception of creation that was heterodox even among deists: for him, a divine force engendered the world solely from matter. This supreme force, therefore, resided in matter itself—it was not necessarily sentient in the way humans conceived it, nor did it require worship. Nothing existed above or below matter—God’s laws were perfect, and believing in miracles would be an offense to the Creator. Recognizing this force, Palmer argued, would lead to a sense of universal benevolence embracing all things, inspiring the abolition of slavery, war, and all forms of oppression. Politics and religion were deeply intertwined—deism, for Palmer, was an eminently ethical-political force.

BLASPHEMY!

In the early 19th century, Palmer’s writings, like those of Paine, became targets of criticism. His political enemies used his ideas to create scandals, linking him to Jefferson in an effort to discredit the president. In March 1806, Palmer returned to Philadelphia for a final series of lectures but died on the 31st of that month at the age of 41 due to lung inflammation. His work, Principles of Nature, left an important legacy, promoting a philosophy based on reason, individual responsibility, and the pursuit of a morality that benefited society as a whole. Palmer believed that understanding the material condition shared by all things would foster an ethics of compassion, transforming human behavior and, consequently, the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aponte, Ryan Nicholas. Dharma of the Founders: Buddhism within the Philosophies of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Elihu Palmer. Georgetown Georgetown University, 2012.

Carvalho, Daniel Gomes de. O pensamento radical de Thomas Paine (1793-1797): artífice e obra da Revolução Francesa. 2017. Tese (Doutorado em História Social) – Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2017. doi:10.11606/T.8.2018.tde-12062018-135137.

Fischer, Kirsten. American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Fischer, Kirsten. “Elihu Palmer’s Radical Religion in the Early Republic.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3, (Jul. 2016), pp. 501-530.

May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Minardi, Margot. “American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation” by Kirsten Fischer (Review).” Journal of the Early Republic 41, no. 4 (2021): 694–97. doi:10.1353/jer.2021.0095.
Walters, Kerry S. The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1992. doi:10.1353/book.94120.

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By Daniel Gomes de Carvalho

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the specificity of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795) in the context of the relations between liberalism and democracy in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The objective is to explain how Paine—as an English revolutionary and an actor, witness, and interpreter of the Age of Revolutions—developed a democratic vision during the period of the Convention initiated on 9 Thermidor (1794-1795) that distanced him from both Jacobin formulations and practices, and from legislations and speeches by Thermidorian deputies. To this end, we will also investigate other texts and letters by the author, and demonstrate his profound changes in relation to previous texts, such as Common Sense and Rights of Man. With this in mind, this text intends to open new perspectives regarding Paine’s work and its place in the history of political thought.¹

“The pomp of courts and pride of kings 

I prize above all earthly things; 

I love my country; the king 

Above all men his praise I sing:

The royal banners are displayed, 

And may success the standard aid. 

I fain would banish far from hence, 

The Rights of Man and Common Sense; 

Confusion to his odious reign,

That foe to princes, Thomas Paine! 

Defeat and ruin seize the cause 

Of France, its liberties and laws”.² 

– Arthur O’Connell

Written and published in July 1795, the Dissertation on the First Principles of Government was the culmination of Thomas Paine’s (1737–1809) democratic theory, in which he advocates for universal (“non-census,” though still restricted to men) suffrage and criticizes its absence in the Thermidorian French Constitution, the third of the revolutionary period, enacted that same year. 

At this point, Paine was a prominent figure in the Atlantic world through various writings, especially Common Sense (1776), the main pamphlet of the American Revolution, and Rights of Man (1791), a defense of the French Revolution against Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. 

No foreigner took part in the French Revolution as decisively and for such a prolonged period as Paine. Elected deputy for Pas-de-Calais, he was imprisoned by the Jacobin government in December 1793, along with deputy Anacharsis Cloots (of Prussian origin and Dutch descent), both under the justification of being foreigners. With the help of the American ambassador and future U.S. president James Monroe, Paine was released in November 1794. The unspoken reason for his imprisonment was his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI (although he was a republican, Paine was against the death penalty and advocated for the exile of the Bourbon king) and his closeness to Brissot and the Girondins. 

After being released from prison and once again serving as a deputy, Paine distanced himself from the former Girondins (many of whom were now Thermidorians) by advocating for universal suffrage. Paine’s opposition to them was not new: it is worth noting his defense of the Republic in 1790, even before Robespierre. However, such criticism eased during the Jacobin period—resisting the Terror and the de-Christianization movement became paramount. Once the Jacobins were overthrown, the divide between Paine and the Thermidorians gained momentum, a decisive factor in his return to the United States in September 1802. 

BEGINNINGS 

Paine had first sailed to North America in 1775 with a political stance that was unclear, which we could describe as leveling (a reference to the Levellers during the English Civil War of 1642–1649) and censitary, whereby only those with leisure and financial autonomy could vote.⁴ 4 In 1778, Paine wrote: 

Likewise all servants in families; because their interest is in their master, and depending upon him in sickness and in health, and voluntarily withdrawing from taxation and public service of all kinds, they stand detached by choice from the common floor. 

In that same letter, Paine, judging by Foner’s complete works, used the word democracy and democratical for the first time. At this point, however, he still viewed democracy in the pejorative sense commonly held, i.e., as a degenerate form of government: “Such a State will not only become impoverished, but defenceless, a temptation to its neighbors, and a sure prize to an invader.”⁵ This use, in the context of the debate over the independence of the 13 colonies, was intended to defend a constitutional government. 

In the context of the French Revolution, Paine began to condemn property qualifications for voting. In Rights of Man (1791), a response to Edmund Burke’s text, Paine argued that voting should be as universal as taxation, a radical proposal in the English context, where nearly all adult men paid some form of indirect tax. Only in 1795, in the Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, did he openly defend universal suffrage. For this reason, Moncure Conway, who wrote the first well-founded biography of the author, stated that few pamphlets by Paine deserve more study.⁷ 

By the way, Rights of Man represented the second time—again, according to Foner’s complete works—that Paine used the words democracy and democratical, but this time in a positive sense: now, the notion of “democracy” was equivalent to a desirable, equal, representative government, one that was taking shape in the United States and France. The Dissertation, in turn, was the third and final time that the author used the term in his texts; in this case, although the idea of democracy is bolder, the word’s use is more restrained (it appears only twice in the text), as the author prefers the term “representative government” to refer to male universal suffrage, equality before the law, checks and balances, and human rights (between the two texts, there were Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, which, as we will see, likely explains the different uses and notions). 

The terms “liberal” and “illiberal” appear much more frequently in Paine’s works (“liberalism,” in turn, is a term from the 19th century, as will be discussed). In most of Paine’s writings, the term appears in its common sense, referring to generosity (“my intentions were liberal, they were friendly.”⁸ Paine also described friendliness (the terms liberality and liberal sentiments are also frequent), or a specific type of education (such as liberal arts and sciences). 

However, as we will see below, according to some recent studies, the term “liberal” underwent transformations in 18th-century Anglo-Scottish enlightenment thought. Paine’s works seem to follow this movement. The term began to appear in his works in a compound form—such as liberal ground, liberal cast, and liberal thinking—and was related to forms of noninterference and non-oppression.⁹ For example, in a letter to George Washington, Paine stated that trade between North America and France was founded on “most liberal principles, and calculated to give the greatest encouragement to the infant commerce of America.”¹⁰ Another letter of Paine’s, concerning the Constitution of Pennsylvania, expresses this transformation of the term well, as here the word liberal can be understood as “generosity,” but at the same time as “non-interference” and “non-oppression”:

It is the nature of freedom to be free… Freedom is the associate of innocence, not the companion of suspicion. She only requires to be cherished, not to be caged, and to be beloved, is, to her, to be protected. Her residence is in the undistinguished multitude of rich and poor, and a partisan to neither is the patroness of all (…) To engross her is to affront her, for, liberal herself, she must be liberally dealt with.¹¹

Having made these preliminary observations, it is important to note that Dissertation on the First Principles of Government has never received the attention it deserves from historians. This absence is particularly evident among classic Paine scholars. Foner merely emphasized that the pamphlet addresses the issue of suffrage. Aldridge merely noted that he wrote the pamphlet in light of the “new constitution.”¹² Vincent only highlighted Paine’s defense of bicameralism.¹³ Paine biographers John Keane and Craig Nelson simply stated that Paine defended universal suffrage.¹⁴ Mark Philp and Gregory Claeys, the two historians who have best studied Paine’s thought, were brief: the former surprisingly qualifies it as “a summary of Rights of Man (1791).”¹⁵ The latter merely notes its limited reception. Modesto Florenzano pointed out the pivotal place of the text in the discussion about liberalism and democracy; however, his study, as it is more concerned with other aspects of Paine’s life and work, did not focus on an in-depth analysis of this pamphlet.¹⁶ 

Currently, the English revolutionary has received a substantial amount of study, both for his role as an Atlantic revolutionary and for his position neither strictly Jacobin nor exactly Girondin. However, the Dissertation remains secondary in the most recent studies on the author. Mario Feit cites the text only three times to address the relationship between time and rights in Paine.¹⁷ J.C.D. Clark claims that it “has little to say about France.”¹⁸ Thus, Dissertation, a “milestone in Paine’s career,” has never received the attention it deserves.¹⁹ However, in addition to filling an important gap, its analysis will reveal significant shifts in relation to Paine’s more well-known texts Common Sense and Rights of Man, and, as a result, will showcase facets of the author that have been little discussed, which may strengthen Paine’s place as a political thinker and, contrary to what Clark stated, an interpreter of the French Revolution.

To fulfill this purpose, this text will be structured in three parts: first, we will examine the publication of Dissertation within its context; second, we will analyze its fundamental ideas; and finally, the pamphlet will be considered within the political/philosophical debates of its time. The text, like all of Paine’s political works, is deeply intertwined with the revolutionary axis of London-Paris-Philadelphia, and can only be understood within these dialogues (although it also holds importance in other spaces such as Ireland and the Netherlands). 

THE THERMIDORIAN LIBERALISM 

Paine began writing Dissertation with the Dutch Republic in mind. However, after the fall of the Jacobin government on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor), the text was directed at the Thermidorian National Convention, as it discussed the Constitution of Year III. The Thermidorian Convention, which followed the Jacobin government, lasted fifteen months, until October 1795, when it gave way to the Directory. The day after 9 Thermidor, the deputies opposed the old slogan, “Terror on the agenda,” with a new counter-slogan, “Justice on the agenda!”²⁰ There was a new rallying cry, “restore social order in place of the chaos of revolutions.”²¹ Therefore, it was a government that sought to end the Revolution and justified itself negatively: neither Terror nor monarchy. 

The new declaration of rights replaced “men are born free and equal” with “equality consists in the law being the same for all,” just as the right to property, which had not been defined in 1789, was specified: “property is the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s goods, income, the fruits of one’s labor, and industry.”²² While still considering the Caribbean world, the Convention maintained the abolition of slavery and guaranteed citizenship to Haitians.

After the occupation of the Convention by representatives of the sections linked to the sansculottes, demanding bread and freedom, the Assembly appointed, in April 1795, an eleven-member commission to draft a new Constitution. The report was delivered on June 23. A well-known speech by the reporter Boissy d’Anglais is illustrative:

We must be governed by the best men; and these are the most educated and the most interested in maintaining the law. However, with few exceptions, such men can only be found among the holders of property who, consequently, are tied to their country, the laws that protect their property, and the social peace that preserves them. A country governed by men of property is an authentically civil society; a country where men without property govern is in a state of nature.²³

On June 6, 1795, Paine, alarmed by the direction the Convention was taking, wrote to Deputy Thibaudeau emphasizing that reverting to a censitary system would justify new rebellions: “How could we imagine that recruits willing to die for the cause of equality tomorrow would agree to sacrifice their lives for a government that had stripped them of their fundamental natural rights?”²⁴ Paine then published the pamphlet Dissertation on First Principles of Government on July 4, 1795. Three days later, for the first time since the fall of the Jacobins and the last time in his life, Paine took the floor at the Convention. The brief speech at the French National Convention is transcribed in The Constitution of 1795.

[the] Constitution which has been presented to you is not consistent with the grand object of the Revolution, nor congenial to the sentiments of the individuals who accomplished it…The first article, for instance, of the political state of citizens (v. Title ii. of the Constitution), says: ‘Every man born and resident in France, who, being twenty-one Years of age, has inscribed his name on the civic register of his canton, and who has lived afterwards one year on the territory of the Republic, and who pays any direct contribution whatever, real or personal, is a French citizen.’ 

I might here ask, if those only who come under the above description are to be considered as citizens, what designation do you mean to give the rest of the people ? I allude to that portion of the people on whom the principal part of the labor falls, and on whom the weight of indirect taxation will in the event chiefly press. In the structure of the social fabric this class of people are infinitely superior to that privileged order whose only qualification is their wealth or territorial possessions. For what is trade without merchants? What is land without cultivation? And what is the produce of the land without manufactures?²⁵

One of the more opportunistic traits of this Constitution was the “two-thirds decree,” which aimed to prevent monarchists (encouraged by the self-proclaimed Louis XVIII) from forming a majority in the assembly: in the first elections, two-thirds of the future deputies had to be chosen from among the convention members whose mandates were about to expire. Despite the fall of the Jacobins, the “logic of public salvation” remained, according to which the Revolution should be defended, even at the cost of transgressing its principles.²⁶ By the way, two important leaders, the former supporters of the Jacobin government, Tallien and Billayd-Varenne, openly spoke of maintaining terror against traitors.²⁷ 

On October 26, the Convention dissolved itself and, according to Sieyés’s proposal for the new Constitution, was replaced by the Council of Five Hundred (tasked with drafting laws) and the Council of Ancients (tasked with voting on them, being half as numerous, with members having to be over forty years old). The executive power (the five members of the Directory) was elected by the two branches of the legislature: unlike the other two revolutionary constitutions, bicameralism was established here, under strong American influence.²⁸ The Directory would dismiss local administration members without appeal, direct diplomacy, and could issue orders for arrests; in these respects, the Consulate was not a rupture but an intensification of the previous government.²⁹ In October, the election of the Directory took place; Paine, who never ran again, became an ordinary citizen.

That said, it is essential to acknowledge that, during the Thermidorian period, a version of French liberalism emerged, which we will call Thermidorian liberalism.³⁰ This version consisted of the idea that it was impossible to reconcile the participation of the population in the political process (democratic principles) with the protection of individual rights and liberties (liberal principles) in the post-Jacobin context. Therefore, in his speech of July 20, 1795, Sieyès criticized “the unlimited sovereignty that the Montagnards had attributed to the people, based on the model of the sovereignty of the king in the Old Regime”—he refers, incidentally, to the Jacobin regime as ré-totale, in contrast to ré-publique.³¹ It is clear that the tension between individual freedoms and democracy—frequently associated with the 1820s— was already present in the Thermidorian Convention. 

With these considerations in mind, it is possible to highlight the problem that is at the heart of this text, which is to explain how Paine, a Thermidorian deputy openly anti-Jacobin and concerned with individual liberties and the limits of the state, positioned himself at this moment. 

DISSERTATION ON THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT 

The pamphlet Dissertation on the First Principles of Government presents a clear and well-structured argument, aiming to introduce the author’s most radical point: private property cannot be a natural right that overrides others and, therefore, should not be used as a criterion for voting rights. The pamphlet is divided into five parts: in the first, Paine expresses his belief in the centrality of politics; in the second, he presents three arguments against hereditary governments, discussing his conceptions of nation, social contract, and popular sovereignty; in the third, he addresses representative government, emphasizing the irrationality of property-based voting; in the fourth, he defends bicameralism (a significant shift from his ideas in Common Sense and a departure from the antifederalists ), explains the role of the executive power and the rotation of power, and reaffirms the importance of education; finally, he concludes with a defense of tolerance.³² 

Paine begins by stating that there is no “subject more interesting to every man than the subjects of government. His security, be he rich or poor, and in a great measure his prosperity, are connected therewith.”³³ His goal, therefore, is to study and perfect what he calls the “science of government,” which, of all things, is the least mysterious and the easiest to understand.³⁴ From there, he moves away from classical subdivisions and proposes that: 

The primary divisions are but two: First, government by election and representation. Secondly, government by hereditary succession. 

(…) As to that equivocal thing called mixed government, such as the late Government of Holland, and the present Government of England, it does not make an exception to the general rule, because the parts separately considered are either representative or hereditary.³⁵

The revolutions spreading across Europe are, ultimately, “a conflict between the representative system founded on the rights of the people, and the hereditary system founded in usurpation.”³⁶ Thus, aristocracy, oligarchy, and monarchy are distinct expressions of the same hereditary system, which must be rejected. Paine also rejects “simple democracy” (direct democracy), considering it impractical: “the only system of government consistent with principle, where simple democracy is impracticable, is the representative system.”³⁷ 

Paine was a key figure in the Thirteen Colonies, transforming republicanism from an ethical ideal and “way of life,” as it was seen in the mid-1700s, into a practicable and desirable political regime.³⁸ At this point, he reaffirms his well-known departure from part of the 18th-century republican language by conceiving the English government not as mixed and balanced, but as aristocratic: “It is certain,” Paine wrote to Condorcet, “that certain places, such as Holland, Bern, Genoa, Venice, etc., which are called republics, do not deserve such a designation (…) for they are in a condition of absolute servitude to aristocracy.”³⁹ 

Thus, Paine proceeds to discuss hereditary governments: “there is not a problem in Euclid more mathematically true than that hereditary government has not a right to exist.”⁴⁰ He then lists three arguments against hereditary rule, all of a temporal nature: the first concerns the succession of governments; the second, their origins; and the third, the eternity of rights. 

Hereditary government is contrary to reason because, by its nature, it is susceptible to falling into the hands of a minor or a fool.⁴¹ If the uncertainty of succession speaks against hereditary governments, the same can be said about their origins: hereditary government cannot begin because no man or family is above others. “If it had no right to begin,” Paine says, “it had no right to continue,” for:

The right which any man or any family had to set itself up at first to govern a nation, and to establish itself hereditarily, was no other than the right which Robespierre had to do the same thing in France. If he had none, they had none. If they had any, he had as much; for it is impossible to discover superiority of right in any family, by virtue of which hereditary government could begin. The Capets, the Guelphs, the Robespierres, the Marats, are all on the same standing as to the question of right. It belongs exclusively to none.⁴²

In this regard, Robespierre’s power resembles the despotism of the Old Regime more than democracy. Unlike many liberals of the early 19th century, Paine did not see Jacobinism as an inherent danger to the egalitarian impulse of democracy, nor did he conceive liberty as an aristocratic stronghold, but precisely the opposite. 

Hereditary government is also inconsistent in considering the relationship between time and rights: even if a government began illegitimately, would its usurpation become a right through the authority of time? The answer is negative in both directions: the present generations have no duty to submit to the men of the past (as he had already stated in Rights of Man), nor do they have the right to subjugate future generations. Rights are timeless and meta-historical and, therefore, universal in time and space: “Time with respect to principles is an eternal now: it has no operation upon them: it changes nothing of their nature and qualities.”⁴³ It is up to the living to make politics, so the injustice that began a thousand years ago is as unjust as if it began today; and the right that originates today is as just as if it had been sanctioned a thousand years ago.

The notion that time does not create any form of right, reason, or authority is what definitively separates Paine from the ideas of Burke and those known as British conservatives. The historian Anthony Quinton describes, British conservatism in the 18th and 19th centuries as aiming to preserve the historical arrangement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, which encompassed three doctrines: the belief that political wisdom is historical and collective, residing in time (traditionalism); the belief that society is a whole, not just the sum of its parts (organicism); and the distrust of theory when applied to public life (political skepticism).⁴⁴ 

For Paine, on the other hand, any nation that enacts an irrevocable law or tradition would be betraying, at once, the right of every minor in the nation and the rights of future generations: “The rights of minors are as sacred as the rights of the aged.”⁴⁵ Thus, since minors and future generations are bearers of rights, any law that violates these groups is illegitimate. Legal authority (that is, the power to elect representatives and formulate laws), for Paine, rests on the consent of living men over 21 years of age; however, groups deprived of legal authority are not deprived of rights: “A nation, though continually existing, is continually in a state of renewal and succession. It is never stationary. Every day produces new births, carries minors forward to maturity, and old persons from the stage.⁴⁶ In this ever running flood of generations there is no part superior in authority to another.”⁴⁷ 

Thus, if it is evident that when a family establishes itself in power, we have a form of unquestionable despotism, it would be equally despotic when a nation consents to establish a regime with hereditary powers. The principle of consent as a source of legitimacy is taken to its ultimate consequences and extended to minors and those yet to be born: If the current generation, or any other, is willing to be enslaved, that does not diminish the right of the next generation to be free. 

For Paine, including minors and future generations in the concept of the people and, consequently, protecting them by law, would prevent democracy from turning into tyranny; and, therefore, in Paine, “the subject of democracy must be understood as a subject that is both juridical (the people of citizenvoters) and historical (the nation that binds the memory and promise of a shared future).”48 However, democracy is historical precisely because it encompasses timeless human values and rights—the commitment to future generations and freedom from past generations is due to this unbreakable bond that would unite the living and the dead, which, contrary to what Burke and conservatives think, is not historical. 

That said, democracy in Paine is a prolonged exercise of commitment, often tacit. It is not, therefore, a plebiscitary democracy in the sense of consulting the people on all decisions, or a “permanent revolution,” in the sense of a clean slate of political organization and a total reformulation of institutions, laws, and customs with each generation; but, as he stated in Rights of Man, the idea that “A law not repealed continues in force, not because it cannot be repealed, but because it is not repealed; and the non-repealing passes for consent.”⁴⁹ Therefore, Himmelfarb seems to exaggerate when she says that: “The political revolution called for in Rights of Man was a genuine revolution that required the abolition of all the heritage of the past (..,) and inaugurated a kind of ‘permanent revolution’in which each generation would create its own laws and institutions.”⁵⁰

However, it is important to note that, in the text, the author does not envision the possibility of granting women the right to vote, whose exclusion is not even discussed. In contrast to hereditary government, in representative government (in Rights of Man, he had already observed that direct democracy would only be feasible in small territories), there is no problem of origins, as it is not anchored in conquest or usurpation, but in natural rights: “Man is himself the origin and the evidence of the right. It appertains to him in right of his existence, and his person is the title deed.”⁵¹ 

Property-based voting, therefore, would produce a new kind of aristocracy, as a despotism installed within representative government. Private property, when used to strip others of their rights, becomes a privilege and becomes illegitimate:

“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.”⁵²

If, in nature, “all men are equal in rights, but they are not equal in power,” the institution of civil society aims at an “equalization of powers that shall be parallel to, and a guarantee of, the equality of rights.”⁵³ While nature and civil society are spaces of inequality, political society is the space of equality; thus, democracy, inseparable from the idea of rights, guarantees a field of negotiation and compromise, creating the possibility of defending the poor against the rich and everyone against the state.

The inequality of rights is created by a maneuver of one part of the community to deprive the other part of its rights. Every time an article of a Constitution or a law is created in which the right to elect or be elected belongs exclusively to people who own property, whether small or large, it is a maneuver by those who possess such property to exclude those who do not: “it is dangerous and impolitic, sometimes ridiculous, and always unjust to make property the criterion of the right of voting.”⁵⁴ 

Subjugating the freedom to vote to property relegates the right to choose representatives to irrelevance. Hence the absurdity of subordinating the freedom to vote to property, which, in the end, ties the right to things or animals:

“When a broodmare shall fortunately produce a foal or a mule that, by being worth the sum in question, shall convey to its owner the right of voting, or by its death take it from him, in whom does the origin of such a right exist? Is it in the man, or in the mule? When we consider how many ways property may be acquired without merit, and lost without crime, we ought to spurn the idea of making it a criterion of rights.”⁵⁵

Property-based suffrage, moreover, can link voting to crime, since, as the author reminds us, it is possible to acquire income through theft; in this sense, a crime could create rights. Furthermore, since, in a democracy, one can only lose their rights through a crime, the exclusion of the right to vote would create a “stigma” on those who do not own property, as if they were delinquents: Wealth is not proof of moral character, nor is poverty proof of its absence. “On the contrary, wealth is often the presumptive evidence of dishonesty; and poverty the negative evidence of innocence.”⁵⁶

The worst kind of government, Paine argues, is one in which deliberations and decisions are subject to the passion of a single individual. When the legislature is concentrated in one body, it resembles such an individual. Therefore, representation should be divided into two elected bodies, separated by lot. Such separation of powers did not actually occur in England, as the House of Lords, lacking representativeness, relates to the legislative power as a “member of the human body and an ulcerated wen.”⁵⁷ 

The executive and judicial powers, on the other hand, would both exercise a mechanical function: “The former [the legislative] corresponds to the intellectual faculties of the human mind which reasons and determines what shall be done; the second [the executive and judicial], to the mechanical powers of the human body that puts that determination into practise.”⁵⁸ Magistrates, thus, are mere delegates, “for it is impossible to conceive the idea of two sovereignties, a sovereignty to will and a sovereignty to act.”⁵⁹ Nevertheless, the defense of the separation of powers remains intact to the unity of sovereignty. 

Similarly, Paine continues, power should never be left in the hands of someone for too long, as the “inconveniences that may be supposed to accompany frequent changes are less to be feared than the danger that arises from long continuance.”⁶⁰ 

It is precisely these checks and balances that faded during the Jacobin period. Paine, then, distinguishes the methods used “to defeat despotism” and the procedures “to be employed after the defeat of despotism,” which are the “means to preserve liberty.”⁶¹ 

In the first case, necessity predominates, calling for insurrection and violence, since, in a despotic regime, legal means for change are barred. In the second case, respect, pacifism, and debate predominate, so that: “Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced [of the importance of rights have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.”⁶² 

Therefore, the government following a revolution should not be a revolutionary government. By revolutionary government, Paine means—and this is the heart of his interpretation of Jacobinism—a regime that maintains the use of the means that were necessary to overthrow the previous regime:

“Had a constitution been established two years ago (as ought to have been done), the violences that have since desolated France and injured the character of the Revolution, would, in my opinion, have been prevented. The nation would then have had a bond of union, and Every individual would have known the line of conduct he was to follow. But, instead of this, a revolutionary government, a thing without either principle or authority, was substituted in its place; virtue and crime depended upon accident; and that which was patriotism one day became treason the next (…) But in the absence of a constitution, men look entirely to party; and instead of principle governing party party governs principle.⁶³

In summary, Paine aligns himself with the predominant concern of the Thermidorian deputies, namely, to “end the Revolution.” However, the Thermidorians, by removing the right to vote from the population, resemble the Jacobins in despotism and end up justifying new rebellions. In a way, although Paine rejects, as we have seen, British conservatism and the Thermidorian anti-democratic perspective, he does not fail to aspire to a kind of liberal-democratic status quo that institutionalizes revolutionary measures and ideas, abolishing the revolutionary government and leaving no other path for change but legal means. Thus, he concludes his pamphlet with one of his most expressive phrases:

“An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”⁶⁴

However, a note is in order: democracy, to Paine, will be incomplete if we think only of its political dimension. Its religious and social dimensions remain. At the time of the Dissertation, Paine wrote, in 1793, The Age of Reason, in which he presented revealed religions as anti-democratic, as they reinforced the authority of institutions and excluded the illiterate (who could not read the Scriptures) and those who had no opportunity to come into contact with the true religion from Truth and Salvation. Thus, deism would be the truly democratic religion, equally accessible to all human beings, regardless of where they were born or their level of education. In this text, Paine also discussed the importance of religions protecting animals other than humans. In 1797, he published Agrarian Justice, in which he argued that democracy would only be realized when everyone had minimum social conditions of existence and basic opportunities guaranteed—hence his idea of a state-guaranteed income for all citizens from a fund constituted by a universal tax on inheritances (at a rate of ten percent), a reform proposal that should serve as an alternative to the Agrarian Law. A treatment of these other dimensions of democracy in Paine will be done on another occasion. It is noteworthy, however, that Paine is far from reducing the democratic ideal to voting or mere political institutional mechanisms. 

In the meantime, a question arises: does Paine’s discourse, by defining itself as democratic, align in any way with the Robespierrist projects? There are several convergences between Paine and Robespierre: both converge in their critique of the Agrarian Law and in their defense of some form of Progressive Tax. The most glaring divergences between Paine and Robespierre occur, in this sense, in the political field. It should be noted that the Jacobin group did not have a ready-made program, as is sometimes assumed (moreover, there were no political parties as we understand them today), but an ideology always modified by revolutionary circumstances and which can only be qualified based on its speeches and practices. The same happened, by the way, with Robespierre himself, who oscillated in his defense of direct democracy (1789-1792), representative government (from the end of 1792), the importance of primary assemblies (changes of opinion are verified in September 1792), and the Constitution of 1791.⁶⁵ 

In this sense, we refer here to Robespierre during the months he was part of the collegium of the Committee of Public Safety. At first glance, Robespierre agreed with Paine, stating that property-based voting would create a new aristocracy, that of “the rich.”⁶⁶ However, although the Jacobin Constitution guaranteed universal suffrage, it did not put it into practice, as he stated in February 1794, it is necessary to “end the war of liberty against tyranny.”⁶⁷ To understand such measures, Robespierre said, one only needed to “consult the circumstances,” a thesis reproduced both by the Jacobins and by part of historiography in the 19th and 20th centuries.⁶⁸

Robespierre then accused those who called themselves moderates of being traitors (seen by him, in fact, as “moderantists”), for they desired a revolution “subordinated to pre-existing norms.”⁶⁹ Similarly, although Robespierre philosophically opposed the death penalty, he emphasized that a revolutionary government would require extreme measures: “The government owes the good citizens all national protection; to the enemies of the people, it owes nothing but death.”⁷⁰ Therefore, the opposition to the idea of a revolutionary government, as seen in the analysis of the Dissertation, is the crux of the disagreement between Paine and Robespierre—the tension “necessity/liberty,” capable of turning democracy into despotism, is rejected by the English thinker.⁷¹ 

It should be noted that, while Paine distances himself from the “thesis of circumstances” (usually associated with Marxist or Jacobin historiography), he also does not align with the notion, defended by a certain “liberal” historiography, that the terror was a logical conclusion of the Revolution, as suggested by Furet and Ozouf, or that violence was “the driving force” of the revolutionary process.⁷² The place of the Dissertation in the early interpretations of Jacobinism, therefore, lies in the reading of the terror as a deviation from the Revolution and a reminiscence of the despotism of the Old Regime (I hope that, thus, it is demonstrated that Paine’s text, contrary to what Clark pointed out, has something to tell us about the French Revolution). 

A DEMOCRATIC LIBERALISM 

In this sense, the moderate stance and the “preexisting norms” referred to by Robespierre touch precisely on what can be seen, from a certain perspective, as the liberal character of Paine’s thought—a key element that separates the positions of the two protagonists.

The earliest uses of the word liberal in reference to the ideas embodied in the revolutions of 1776- 1848 — no longer in relation to a specific education or vague idea of amicability (Simpkin, Weiner and Proffitt, 1989) — date back to early 19th century Spain. In the context of the Cádiz Constitution, the liberales referred to those opposed to representative government and the Constitution as serviles (servants). For example, in the magazine El Español, in 1811, Blanco White referred to the constitutionalists as liberales in reference to the impact of the French Revolution on Europe. In a letter to Jovellanos in 1809, the French general Sebastiani referred to “vuestras ideas liberales” (your liberal ideas) in speaking of the ideas of tolerance and equality that should lead the Spanish to ally with Napoleon against the Spanish monarchy.⁷³ In 1813, in the Diario Militar, Politico y Mercantil de Tarragona, we find the first known use of the word liberalismo: “if liberalism is (…) to desacralize a people, I detest being a liberal.”⁷⁴ 

That being said, it should be noted that in the realm of political ideas, the emergence of a specific denomination may not be understood exactly as an act of foundation, but as a gain in awareness (which is also a form of producing new meanings and possibilities for thought) regarding a situation that already possesses some degree of crystallization. In the case of liberalism, this crystallization process in the decades preceding 1820 is well-documented, as recent studies show. However, it is equally true that, in the absence of such a denomination, there is a risk of seeing in what has been established earlier a degree of coherence that might not actually exist.⁷⁵

In this sense—and considering the enormous variety of liberalisms throughout history—rather than thinking of liberalism as a doctrine, it seems more appropriate to see it as a field, or a vast space of thought with some identifiable degree of kinship, within which there is room for the creation and proposal of the most varied positions. As a space of thought, liberalism has limits, which defines the objective existence of this field and at the same time distances us from overly essentialist, dogmatic, or normative positions. 

Starting from these premises, we support the possibility of agreeing on the existence of a classical liberal language in the second half of the 18th century, prior to the actual emergence of the term liberalism, but which would share degrees of kinship with 19th century ideas. The elements and limits of this language would include, namely, the defense of natural rights, contractarianism, opposition to traditional privileges and corporate monopolies, the idea of a state of nature, and the defense of checks and balances against the excesses of the state and society. 

It is important to note, however, that such elements are often scattered (after all, it is only the emergence of the word liberalism that would attempt to create some unity and coherence) and do not appear uncontested in any one author. Likewise, they are sensitive to other discourses, especially republican ones. 

That said, to what extent is it plausible to say that classical liberalism is democratic? In other words, how did authors of the time deal with the issue of limiting and distributing power at the same time? 

The word democracy in the 18th century was rarely used in a favorable sense. Marquis d’Argenson (1694- 1757), in his Considérations sur le gouvernement de la France (1764), was one of the first to use it referring to political equality and rights (thus favored by the monarchy), rather than self-government. However, the terms Démocrat and Aristocrate did not appear in France and America before the revolutions—its first uses date back to the Dutch Revolution (1784-1787) and the Belgian Revolution (1789-1791). 

Throughout the Age of Revolutions, the term gained greater circulation, being associated with equal rights, popular government, or the primacy of local assemblies. For instance, Barnave referred to an “era of democratic revolutions” to characterize the period in which he lived. The uses indicate a fundamental transformation: in addition to being a form of government (democracy), the term also referred to agency (democrat), adjectivation (democratic), and actions (democratize). Thus, democracy meant both a form of government and a practice aimed at greater equality. 

Indeed, the three most frequent and favorable uses of the word democracy during the period were made by Robespierre (which, by the way, would later be a key reason for the word having a negative connotation in the following decades), by the bishop of Imola and future Pope Pius VII, and, of course, by Thomas Paine. The first time Paine explicitly used the term was, as seen, in the second half of Rights of Man, where he referred to democracy as a form, as well as a public principle of government, advocating for representation as a means of its realization. 

Nevertheless, at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, the field we call classical liberalism and democratic language in both Europe and North America were mismatched. The dominant position excluded from voting workers, salaried individuals, beggars, as well as women and children, as they were assumed to depend on the will of others. Property was understood by many as the means to link self-interest with societal interest, thereby ensuring access to political power.⁷⁶ Even in the 17th century, Locke, a highly influential author for this generation, believed that non-property owners lacked “full interest” in the benefit of society and should, therefore, be excluded from voting.⁷⁷ Jefferson, although reflecting critically on land and inheritance, viewed the condition for the existence of democracy as a society in which everyone was economically independent; like the Federalists Jay, Madison, and Hamilton, he linked voting to property.⁷⁸ Burke believed that society could not be governed by an “abstract principle” like popular voting.⁷⁹ Madame de Stäel, who attacked the Dissertation defended a more limited suffrage than that of the 1795 Constitution.⁸⁰ Benjamin Constant argued that “only property grants men the capacity to exercise democratic rights.”⁸¹ After the French Revolution, the so-called doctrinaire liberals concerned with the “tyranny of the majority” argued, as Tocqueville would later, for the need for firm dams against the democratic flood. 

Macpherson argued that the utilitarians Bentham and James Mill, the father of Stuart Mill, were the first democratic liberals. However, Bentham, in 1817, said that certain exclusions should be made, at least for a certain time and for the purposes of gradual experimentation.⁸² James Mill, in turn, argued that it would be prudent to exclude women, men under 40, and the poorer classes from voting. Stuart Mill, a proponent of women’s suffrage in Parliament, excluded from the franchise those who did not pay taxes, lived off charity, and argued that the more enlightened should have the right to plural voting.⁸³ 

A more recent historiography of liberalism brings new light to Paine’s work. In Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction, Michael Freeden reaffirms that until the 19th century, liberalism and democracy were disconnected for two correlated reasons: fear of the “tyranny of the majority” and the “ignorance of the people” (themes that were addressed by Paine).⁸⁴ In addition, three recent handbooks on the history of liberalism bear mention. First is Edmund Fawcett’s Liberalism.⁸⁴ Fawcett’s text does not reference Paine’s work, but James Traub’s What Was Liberalism briefly mentions Paine as someone who endorsed the revolutionary violence of the crowd.⁸⁵ After this characterization, Traub credits Madison with a view closer to ours on liberalism for considering the solution to the tyranny of the majority within, and not outside, democracy.⁸⁶ 

However, Madison’s democracy, as shown, was less inclusive in social and political terms than Paine’s. In The Federalist (No. 10, 1787), the Virginian, contrary to Paine, made an effort to dissociate republic and democracy: “democracies have always been the scene of disturbances and controversies, have proven incapable of ensuring personal security or property rights, and in general, have been as brief in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”⁸⁷ Finally, Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism refers to Paine in the chapter discussing the relationships between liberalism and the French Revolution.⁸⁸ The author makes an observation, which we believe is correct about Paine, arguing that, for him, the problem was not whether an individual or group was liberal, but whether the fundamental principles of a nation were. This observation is based on the distinction between “people” and “principles” made in Rights of Man, in his debate with Edmund Burke. 

Thus, it is possible to affirm that Thomas Paine was one of the first to present the formula of democratic liberalism, advocating a specific notion of equality and a broader suffrage than was common at the time, while still maintaining the foundation of natural rights, contract theory, free trade, and checks and balances. This combination, as seen, can only be understood in light of the history of the French Revolution and sets him apart from many of the positions that were overlooked by historians.

In Paine, the remedy for the ills of democracy and the protection of individual liberties does not lie in limited suffrage or repression, but in the refinement of democracy, understood as a limit to authoritarianism and greater political participation, coupled with a broader enlightenment of the population. The way to avoid the tyranny of the majority is not through restricting the vote, but by incorporating the lesser groups and future generations into the notion of the people, thus expanding the notion of popular sovereignty. The richness of these discussions in which Paine’s thought is embedded is, finally, symptomatic of the great laboratory of political experiments and ideas that constituted the Age of Revolutions. 

CONCLUSION 

The Dissertation is a seminal text in understanding the changes in Paine’s thought throughout the French Revolution and enlightening in regard to the problems and debates raised during the Thermidorian period, which became fundamental in the first half of the 19th century. The little attention the text has received from Paine is unfortunate. The text thus expresses two lesser-known facets of Paine: on one hand, his concern with the excesses of central power and the possibilities of a majority dictatorship, contrary to what was emphasized in most of his earlier texts; on the other hand, an openly democratic stance, which, although underlying texts such as Rights of Man, takes its most expressive form in this pamphlet—therefore, at once, a more democratic Paine, but also concerned with the potential excesses of such democracy, a rather distinct image from the Paine of Common Sense, who supported unicameralism and was hesitant about universal suffrage. The formulation of property undoubtedly as a right, but as a right less important than life or liberty, lies at the heart of his insubordination against inequalities. These changes, as attempted to be shown, are strongly linked to the Jacobin phenomenon itself and the practices of the Thermidorian government, which reveals the relevance of Paine studies for understanding the period.

Nevertheless, it is clear that Paine had his own contradictions. What, for some, is an ideological inconsistency and, for others, true political realism (since the enemies did not act within the rules of the democratic game and had international connections), he supported the coup of 18 Fructidor of Year IV, September 4, 1797, when the Directory annulled the March elections that had given the realists a majority. The Fructidor coup reinforced an authoritarian path that culminated in the 18 Brumaire coup of 1799. Although he rejected Robespierre’s “principle of circumstances” and “the logic of Public Salvation,” Paine did not, therefore, refrain from using the same tactic. In any case, Paine never denied the need for revolutionary violence, as expressed in his well-known break with the Quakers in 1776—only that, in the Jacobin period, he did not see such a need. The author also encouraged the Directory to invade Great Britain and, along with Bonaparte, devised a detailed plan for the French troops’ entry into the island and launched the idea of a vast popular subscription to finance the operation.⁸⁹ 

Moreover, the ^Dissertation occupies a fundamental place in the history of liberal thought, as I have attempted to show. I believe that today, the liberal field faces three primary challenges, namely: how to prevent inequality, in its most acute forms, from being harmful to life and liberty without resorting to authoritarian solutions? How to ensure that the purported universalism of liberty and human rights coexists with the contradictory diversity of thoughts, beliefs, and forms of existence? How, without resorting to some form of elitist dirigisme, to prevent men, by their own disposition, from renouncing democracy in favor of dictatorial regimes? The discussions about these issues can be enriched if Paine’s perspectives are considered.

1. This paper was originally published in 2021 in the Revista de História of University of São Paulo (USP) under the title “Thomas Paine e a Revolução Francesa: Entre o Liberalismo e a Democracia (1794-1795).” The generosity of the Revista de História in allowing the publication of this text in English is greatly appreciated. 
2. This poem was distributed by the Irishman Arthur O’Connell in 1798. Apparently, it was a rebuttal to Thomas Paine. However, if the first verse of the first stanza is interwoven with the first verse of the second stanza, as well as the second, the third, and so on, the result would be a subversive pamphlet, which was O’Connell’s real objective. Paine was an honorary member of the Society of United Irishmen, which advocated for parliamentary reform (Hitchens, 2007).
4. On the leveling position, see Crawford Brough Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973, and more recently, Taylor; Tapsell, 2013. 
5. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, I, (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), 287. 
6. Foner, The Complete Writings, 277 
7. Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 161-162. 
8. Foner, The Complete Writings, 1238
9. Foner, The Complete Writings, 61, 127, 237. 
10. Foner, The Complete Writings, 715. 
11. Foner, The Complete Writings, 284. 
12. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine, (New York: J. P. Lippincott Company, 1959). 225. 
13. Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine: O Revolucionário da Liberdade. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1989. 
14. John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life. London: Bloomsbury, 1995; and Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Birth of Modern Nations, (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006
15. Philp, Mark. Paine. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 21; and Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought, (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 
16. Modesto Florenzano, Começar o mundo de novo: Thomas Paine e outros estudos. Tese (livre-docência:Universidade de São Paulo, 1999). 
17. J.C.D. Clark, Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) 359-362. 
18. Modesto Florenzano, Começar o mundo de novo: Thomas Paine e outros estudos. Tese (livre-docência:Universidade de São Paulo, 1999). 
19. Carine Lounissi, Thomas Paine and the French Revolution. (Cham: Springer, 2018), 235
20. Bronislaw Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur, (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 421. 
21. Albert Soboul, A Revolução Francesa. (São Paulo: Difel, 2003), 108. 
22. Jean-Clément Martin, La Revolución Francesa: Una Nueva Historia. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2019), 447. 
23. Jeremy Popkin, A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution,(London: Hachette UK, 2019), 448. 21 Foner, II, pg. 968. 
24. Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine: O Revolucionário da Liberdade. (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1989), 258.
25. Foner, The Complete Writings, 590. 
26. François Furet, e Mona Ozouf, eds. Dicionário Crítico da Revolução Francesa. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988), 50. 
27. Richard Bienvenu, The Ninth of Thermidor: The Fall of Robespierre. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 
28. Nora citation is missing, 1988. 
29. Soubel, A Revolução Francesa.
30. Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur, 429. 
31. Popkin, A New World Begins, 420, 450. 
32. It is important to remember that, at the time of the publication of Common Sense, John Adams stated that Paine’s pamphlet was “o democratical, without any restraint or even an Attempt at any Equilibrium or Counterpoise, that it must produce confusion and every Evil Work” (Bailyn, 2003, p. 262). During the French Revolution, in a text likely written in 1791, Paine wrote an interesting and little-known pamphlet, organized around questions and answers, called Answer to Four Questions on the Legislative and Executive Powers. The first of the four questions (which by itself is representative of the urgency of the issue) concerns the possible abuses of the executive and legislative powers. Paine is then emphatic in stating that, “If the legislative and executive powers be regarded as springing from the same source, the nation, and as having as their object the nation’s weal by such a distribution of its authority, it will be difficult to foresee any contingency in which one power could derive advantage from overbalancing the other” (Foner, 1945, p. 522). Therefore, there is an important shift in Paine’s thinking, which occurs in light of the Jacobin practices, namely, the greater importance of checks and balances in political structures. 
33. Foner, The Complete Writings, 571. 
34. Foner, The Complete Writings, 571. 
35. Foner, The Complete Writings, 571-572
36. Foner, The Complete Writings, 572. 
37. Foner, The Complete Writings, 584. 
38. Franco Venturi, Utopia e reforma no Iluminismo. (São Paulo: Edusc, 2003). 
39. Jonathan Israel, A Revolução das Luzes: O Iluminismo Radical e as Origens Intelectuais da Democracia Moderna. São Paulo: Edipro, 2013. 
40. Foner, The Complete Writings, 572-573. 
41. Foner, The Complete Writings, 573. 
42. Foner, The Complete Writings, 574. 
43. Foner, The Complete Writings, 574.
44. Anthony Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott. (London: Faber, 1978). 
45. Foner, The Complete Writings, 574. 
46. Foner, The Complete Writings, 575. 
47. Foner, The Complete Writings, 575. 
48. Pierre Rosanvallon, El momento Guizot: el liberalismo doctrinario entre la Restauración y la Revolución de 1848/Le moment Guizot, (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2015), 90. 
49. Foner, The Complete Writings, 254 
50. Gertrude Himmelfarb, La Idea de Pobreza: Inglaterra a Principios de la Era Industrial, (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), 116.
51. Foner, The Complete Writings, 577. 
52. Foner, The Complete Writings, 577. 
53. Foner, The Complete Writings, 583. 
54. Foner, The Complete Writings, 579 
55. Foner, The Complete Writings, 579 
56. Foner, The Complete Writings, 579
57. Foner, The Complete Writings, 586. 
58. Foner, The Complete Writings, 586. 
59. Foner, The Complete Writings, 586. 
60. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587 
61. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587 
62. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587 
63. Foner, The Complete Writings, 587-588
64. Foner, The Complete Writings, 588. 
65. Furet, François, e Mona Ozouf, eds. Dicionário Crítico da Revolução Francesa. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988), 320. 
66. Žižek, Slavoj. Robespierre: Virtude e Terror. (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Zahar, 2007), 53. 
67. Žižek, Robespierre, 144. 
68. Žižek, Robespierre, 146
69. Žižek, Robespierre, 12. 
70. Žižek, Robespierre, 12. 
71. Ruy Fausto, “Em torno da pré-história intelectual do totalitarismo igualitarista.” Lua Nova, no. 75 (2008): 143–98. 
72. Schama, Simon. Cidadãos: Uma Crônica da Revolução Francesa. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989)689. 
73. Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, Obras Completas, Vol 1, (Madrid: Atlas, 1963), 590-591. 
74. Vicente Lloréns, “Sobre la aparición de liberal.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 12, no. 1 (1958): 53–58. 
75. Daniel Klein showed how, in English the word “liberal” underwent a dual transformation in the second half of the 18th century: both quantitative, as the word began to appear more frequently after 1760; and qualitative, as it started to appear in compound forms (“liberal policy,” “liberal views,” and “liberal ideas.” It was associated with the idea of free action, free trade, and non-intervention. The change was not drastic, and as seen in Paine’s work, the term displays clear polysemy. For example, Dugald Stewart, in the 1790s, presented Adam Smith as a representative of the liberal system and as someone who thought of “freedom of trade” as distinct from “political freedom” (the latter, for him, being typical of the French Revolution). See Rothschild, 2003; Klein, 2014; and the text by Robertson in Clark, 2003
76. Rothschild, Emma. Sentimentos econômicos: Adam Smith, Condorcet, e o iluminismo. (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2003.) 
77. Crawford Brough Macpherson, A Teoria Política do Individualismo Possessivo: De Hobbes até Locke. (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1979).
78. Arendt, Hannah. Da Revolução. (Brasília: Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1988). 
79. Burke, Edmund. Reflexões sobre a Revolução na França. (São Paulo: Edipro, 2014), 36. 
80. Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, Des circonstances actuelles et autres essais politiques sous la Révolution. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2009). 
81. Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements. (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 113. 
82. Macpherson, A Teoria Política do Individualismo Possessivo, 40. 
83. John Stuart Mill, Considerações Sobre o Governo Representativo. (Brasília: Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 1981). 
84. Michael Freedon, Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 84 Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 
85. James Traub, What Was Liberalism?: The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea. (New York: Basic Books, 2019), 18. 
86. Traub, What Was Liberalism,? 23. 
87. Modesto Florenzano, Começar o mundo de novo: Thomas Paine e outros estudos. (Tese livre-docência:Universidade de São Paulo, 1999), 10. 
88. Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 47.
89. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, O pensamento radical de Thomas Paine (1793-1797): artífice e obra da Revolução Francesa. Tese de doutorado, Universidade de São Paulo, 2017. https://doi.org/10.11606/T.8.2018.tde-12062018-135137. Acesso em 15 de fevereiro de 2020.

The post Thomas Paine and the French Revolution appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

By Gary Berton

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

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

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

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

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

Misattribution 

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

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

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

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

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

Paine’s Support for the Abolition of Slavery 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“See Afric’s wretched offspring torn 

From all the human heart holds dear, 

See millions doomed in chains to mourn, 

Unpitied even by a tear. . .” 

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

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

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

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

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

The Petrovic Method²² of Author Attribution 

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the features used: 

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

Learning methods used and abbreviations 

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

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

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

Testing “African Slavery in America” 

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

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

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

Who is Samuel Hopkins? 

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

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

From “A Dialogue”:

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

From “African Slavery”:

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

From “A Dialogue”: 

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

From “African Slavery”:

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

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

From “A Dialogue”:

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

From “African Slavery”:

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

Conclusion 

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

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

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

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

Appendix: Paine’s Antislavery Legacy: Some Additional Considerations 

By Miriam Touba 

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

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

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

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

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

ENDNOTES

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

The post The Author Attribution of “African Slavery in America” appeared first on Thomas Paine Historical Association.

The dedication of Thomas Paine to rational thought and inquiry was unparalleled amongst the Founders.¹ His commitment to a strictly rational regimen was particularly notable, and fraught, on the religious front.² 

In Paine’s view, organized religions marketed unreliable hearsay piled on hearsay as “revelations” that are, by definition, based on faith rather than evidence.³ Carefully observing nature, he rejected nearly everything propounded by organized religions as antithetical to rational analysis, retaining from Biblical accounts only what was discernable through observation.⁴ 

Restricting his mental diet to reason did not make him an atheist. To the contrary, Paine concluded that “reason can discover” the “existence of God.” Articulating his thought process, Paine first observed that nothing can make itself. He then noted that many things do exist such that those things were undeniably made. Articulating his thought process, Paine first observed that nothing can make itself. He then noted that many things do exist and, therefore, were undeniably made. Rounding out that syllogism, Paine reasoned that there must be “a power superior to all those things, and that power is God.”⁵ 

Related declarations are more difficult to square with his allegiance to reason. Paine expressed absolute confidence that “Providence” actively intervened to protect not just America but Paine himself. By contrast to his express articulation of why, logically, existence of a Deity comported with reason, his surviving writings disclose no hint of a rationale for believing in an intervening Providence.⁶ More puzzling, when he referenced gender regarding Providence, he identified Providence as female, never as male. Like his expressed belief in an intervening Providence, those identifications appear in his writings as unexplained givens.⁷ 

Two separate but intertwined mysteries are implicated. How could Paine reconcile a belief in an intervening Providence with his dedication to rational inquiry? Why did Paine, uniquely among the Founders and other contemporaries, identify Providence as female? That both mysteries ultimately resist resolution should not surprise Paine aficionados given how much is unknowable regarding Paine, primarily due to an 1830s fire that consumed many of his papers.⁸ What may surprise is that, on the unknowable subject of Providence, Paine conveyed definitive conclusions with utter confidence and calmness and without any explanations, rational or otherwise. 

Paine vigorously pursued rational inquiry as far as it would take him—farther than some contemporaries preferred—insisting that societal systems incapable of withstanding rational inquiry should be abandoned. But remarks about the limits of human capabilities and his persistent optimism in the face of frequent adversity suggest that, when faced with the inexplicable, Paine was neither frustrated nor sought to flog the inexplicable into submission.⁹ 

John Keats contended that creativity in people “of Achievement” is opened to new and fruitful frontiers by embracing “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”¹⁰ Paine knew nothing about Keats, having died in 1809 when Keats was only thirteen. But conceivably Paine, despite or even because of his dedication to reason, would have appreciated this concept of “Negative Capability” developed by Keats in 1817.¹¹ 

The boundary between the rational and the inexplicable is individual for each human and shifts over time and societal developments with no bright line demarking that boundary. With Keats applying his deeply probing mind to poetical expression, for example, while Paine applied his to clear and rational thinking and writing, they would have encountered dramatically differing locations. But when they each individually faced what they respectively deemed the inexplicable, it is conceivable that their responses may have paralleled. 

Did Paine refrain, in those circumstances, from “irritable reaching after fact & reason”— with irritable being the key word— and, encouraging his sense of wonder to flourish, allow deeper and unexpected insights to come his way?¹² If so, Paine may well have experienced, as Keats expressed elsewhere, “‘the intense pleasure of not knowing’” on those occasions when Paine’s pursuit of rational inquiry left significant questions unanswered and unknowable.¹³ Exploring the two mysteries posed here may provide keys to appreciating the complicated force that was Thomas Paine and, more generally, the limitations of rational inquiry and contemplation of the inexplicable that each human must address within their own mind. 

INTERVENING PROVIDENCE AND RATIONAL INQUIRY 

In America during the Revolutionary Era, belief in an intervening Providence was nearly universal.¹⁴ Contemporaries belonging to Calvinist sects, like Samuel Adams, John Jay and John Witherspoon, were certain that Providence as a manifestation of the male God intervening regularly in human affairs in ways that comported with Biblical texts, which were literally the Word of God.¹⁵ Deist Founders filtered their beliefs in an intervening Providence through rational inquiry.¹⁶ Because Paine was more obsessively dedicated to reason than other Deist Founders, his belief in an intervening Providence is notable.¹⁷ His assumption that Providence directly intervened to protect him personally was most explicitly expressed when, after returning to America, he lambasted Federalists for attacking him. He questioned why they didn’t also attack Providence for having protected Paine “in all his dangers, patronized him in all his undertaking, encouraged him in all his ways, and rewarded him at last by bringing him in safety and in health to the Promised Land.”¹⁸ 

Terrific satire and intentionally over-the-top. But could Paine reason his way to a belief that a supernatural force directly intervened to protect him, as an individual, from harm? Paine firmly rejected the concept of guardian angels, expressly criticizing Quaker pacifists in 1775 by declaring that “we live not in a world of angels” and that we cannot “expect to be defended by miracles.”¹⁹ His Age of Reason more thoroughly eviscerated the concept of miracles.²⁰ Yet he believed in an intervening Providence. Is the answer that Paine was, as George Bernard Shaw said of Joan of Arc, a visionary who was “mentally excessive”?²¹ 

Reconciling Paine’s references to Providence with his overarching commitment to reason would be easier if one accepted the view of an unsympathetic commentator that Paine employed mere rhetorical flourishes insincerely manufactured to persuade readers by exploiting their religious beliefs.²² That commentator’s theory falls apart when one recognizes that he restricted analysis to Paine’s early American writings, ignoring Paine having repeatedly invoked Providence from 1775 through 1803 and even doing so on an occasion when manipulative motives made no sense—a private letter to Franklin.²³ Aldridge, more convincingly, cited Paine’s invocation of an intervening Providence in that letter to Franklin as evidence Paine had “a firm belief in the doctrine of special providence.”²⁴ Paine’s surviving writings confirm that he was sincere in invoking an intervening Providence. 

Teasing out explanations for the apparent disparity in Paine’s thinking between an unyielding devotion to reason and a belief in an intervening supernatural force was furthered through Matthew Stewart’s superb book Nature’s God. Although Stewart did not expressly address Paine’s views on Providence, he carefully studied views of the Deist Founders in contrast to earlier religious beliefs in England and the colonies and observed that the very idea of Providence was transformed by the Deists.²⁵

Some contemporaries of Paine, for example, took the Bible literally and believed that Providence caused many events contrary to laws of nature, such as the Biblical stories of the Sun standing still in the sky for a full day or the Red Sea parting. For example, that “the Bible was divinely revealed and that its miracles were valid were accepted by Samuel Adams “without question.”²⁶ By contrast, for “the deists, a miracle by definition constituted an infraction of the regular and predictable operations of physical reality.”²⁷ 

Deists generally viewed Providence as causing only events that, while improbable, fully complied with the laws of nature.²⁸ Washington attributed his survival from multiple bullets hitting his coat to the intervention of Providence.²⁹ Improbable but feasible under the laws of nature. Paine attributed his survival during the Jacobin reign to an intervening Providence.³⁰ Improbable but well within the laws of nature. The intervention of Providence, viewed in this way, comports closely with Giordano Bruno’s view that Providence does not override “the operation of nature” and can instead “be explained in terms of natural laws.”³¹ 

Deists were, by nature, individualist and unconfined by a fixed set of creeds mandated by a hierarchical church structure. As a result, their beliefs regarding God and Providence varied. Franklin straddled the fence between Deism and other belief systems and remained governed, due to his Puritan upbringing, by assumptions that God was infinitely powerful and infinitely good.³² Those assumptions directed his reasoning towards a conclusion that God’s Providence must sometimes act in ways contrary to the laws of nature.³³ Otherwise, Franklin reasoned, God would be either impotent or willing to countenance demonstrably evil actions—results inconsistent with God being infinitely powerful and infinitely good.³⁴ 

Recall that Paine, by contrast, deduced the existence of God from a logical supposition that God was whatever first created things.³⁵ Unconstrained by assumptions that troubled Franklin, Paine was freed to view Providence as a force that acted in ways fully compliant with the laws of nature.³⁶ But is belief in an intervening Providence ultimately just belief rather than a result of reasoned examination of actual occurrences? Paine may have responded that human abilities to ferret out explanations for actions of God and Providence are severely restricted. 

In 1782, Paine asserted that “no human wisdom could foresee” the purposes of expectation that rational inquiry in the future would push further than he could, at that time, into probing that “secret.” Eleven years later, Paine concluded that “the power and wisdom” that God “has manifested in the structure of the Creation that I behold is to me incomprehensible,” and “even this manifestation, great as it is, is probably but a small display of that immensity of power and wisdom by which millions of other worlds, to me invisible by their distance, were created and continue to exist.”³⁸ 

Some observers accused Paine of thinking too well of himself and his abilities. Remarks by Paine that fed those types of accusations should be balanced against the humility and calm wonder he displayed when observing nature and the universe. Conceivably, and consistent with the later musings by Keats, his belief in an intervening Providence constituted an effort to appreciate and marvel at the “incomprehensible” while remaining otherwise unflinchingly dedicated to rational inquiry. 

What effect did Paine’s belief in an intervening Providence have on his overall philosophy and his political and social views? Gregory Claeys argued that Paine’s “social theory owed much to his belief in Providence, which underpinned, for example, the optimistic elements of his theory of commerce.”³⁹ Would a Paine who lacked beliefs in an intervening Providence have penned theories substantially different from those he promulgated? Would he have lacked the optimism and confidence to propound and push the radical and uncompromising views that continue to resonate? If Paine, after exhaustive efforts to tease out everything reason had to offer in his lifetime, experienced “the intense pleasure of not knowing” that Keats praised as a font of human creativity and achievement, that may have reignited fires within his mind even as nighttime candles flickered in his darkening writing rooms. 

PROVIDENCE AS FEMALE 

The first mystery ultimately remains unresolved. Exploring the second mystery will similarly leave open questions but will, hopefully, provide insight into Paine. Drilling down into what Paine said about Providence, we discover a startlingly unique conviction. Every time Paine referenced gender for the Deity, he identified the Deity as male.⁴⁰ But every time he referenced gender for Providence—in 1777, 1778, 1782, 1792 and 1802—he identified Providence as female.⁴¹

Where did that perspective come from? While in England, Paine was exposed to Quakers, Anglicans and Methodists. Each sect generally viewed Providence as a manifestation of a male God.⁴² Contemporaries such as Rev. Joseph Priestley and Rev. Richard Price had conveyed the view of Providence as a manifestation of a male God in writings published before Paine emigrated to America.⁴³ References to Providence in Political Disquisitions by James Burgh, which Paine cited several times in Common Sense, nowhere hint at Providence having a female gender.⁴⁴ French influences may be excluded for many reasons, including the Catholicism of France and Paine’s anti-Papist views, but it suffices that Paine publicly identified Providence as female at least three times before first travelling to France in 1780.⁴⁵ 

One Paine biographer, after noting Paine’s identification of Providence as female in Rights of Man, observed, with understatement, that “few references to Providence in this period characterized it as female.”⁴⁶ Few indeed. One must reach back to Imperial Rome to find general beliefs in Providence being female. Unconnected dots invite speculation that Paine may have absorbed a belief in a female Providence from contemporary discussions of that Roman source. In ancient Rome, “Providentia” was viewed as a female “divine personification of the ability to foresee and make provision.”⁴⁷ Macrobius, a Roman author who wrote about paganism about 400 CE, declared that “providence was personified as a proper goddess in her own right.”⁴⁸ 

“In the late Republic PROVIDENTIA was that foresight which…helped to secure the continued and peaceful existence of the state, preserving it against external or internal dangers.”⁴⁹ Refraining from learning Latin in Thetford Grammar School, Paine said, “did not prevent” him “from being acquainted with the subjects of all the Latin books used in the school.”⁵⁰ Reference to “Latin books” is sparse in his writings, although that is unsurprising for an author known for minimalistic citations to other authors. What “Latin books” was he exposed to before first identifying Providence as female that may have influenced him? In several writings that preceded his first identification of Providence as female in Crisis No. 3, published on April 19, 1777, Paine displayed considerable familiarity with Roman times and ways.⁵¹ Later references suggest far deeper absorption by Paine of ancient Roman authors, and books about ancient Rome, than is generally assumed.⁵² With that in mind, Paine may have consumed either an unabridged 1747 or 1755 edition of Polymetis by Joseph Spence, or a 1765 abridged version, most likely sometime after returning from his privateering adventures in 1757.⁵³

The unabridged editions of Polymetis contain detailed discussions about the Imperial Roman belief in female Providence and illustrations of “Providentia” as displayed on Roman coins.⁵⁴ Paine had multiple opportunities prior to first identifying Providence as female in 1777 to be exposed to Spence’s discussions of a female Providence. Benjamin Martin subscribed to the unabridged 1747 edition of Polymetis and Paine later attended his astronomy lectures and became a friend, so Paine could have borrowed a copy from Martin.⁵⁵ Alternately, though the purchase price was likely far beyond Paine’s budget, he could have perused a copy of an unabridged edition through the lending libraries then taking hold in London.⁵⁶ Alternately, Paine could have read a far less expensive abridgment published in 1765 that, like the unabridged version, contained detailed discussions about a female Providence, though with far less content and no “Providentia” illustrations.⁵⁷ 

Assume, however, that Paine was not exposed to any of those editions before emigrating in 1774. He still had opportunities, before first identifying Providence as female in April 1777, to have consumed an unabridged edition of Polymetis. The 1775 catalogue of the Library Company of Philadelphia listed the 1755 unabridged edition amongst its holdings.⁵⁸ Polymetis was sufficiently available in America that Jefferson, in a July 1776 letter, accurately expected that “some library in Philadelphia” would have Spence’s Polymetis.⁵⁹ 

Paine rarely mentioned books he had read and sometimes claimed not to have read books that scholars conclude he must have consumed.⁶⁰ That Polymetisis unmentioned in his writings, particularly since he never attempted to explain his beliefs regarding Providence, is unsurprising. Unabridged editions of Polymetis were filled with citations to Macrobius and Cicero and contained images of the transparently female figure of Providentia as displayed on Roman coins.⁶¹ Even the abridged version published in 1765 would have conveyed the essence, noting that “among the “MORAL DEITIES” in Rome, “PRUDENCE (or GOOD SENSE) was received very early as a goddess,…the affairs of human life are by her regulated as they ought to be” and “She is called also Providentia but when they used it for divine providence, the usual inscription on medals is, PROVIDENTIA DEORUM,” while a different name is used for human prudence.⁶² 

Spence, in Polymetis, conveyed critiques of classically based educational methods that were remarkably like critiques that Paine articulated later.⁶³ Spence took “aim in the Polymetis at the classical scholarship of his day, which he” found “obscure and pedantic, and generally unhelpful in explicating the texts themselves” and “also question[ed] the need for a classical education grounded in a thorough study of Latin and Greek, which he consider[ed] an unnecessary preparation for most professions.”⁶⁴ Paine was similarly critical of classical scholarship for its own sake as opposed for purposedriven uses.⁶⁵ Cursory glances through Polymetistelegraph that the intellectual sponge that Paine was in his twenties after returning from privateering adventures would have thrilled at its content. With Paine’s fascination regarding astronomy, Paine may have found Macrobius interesting because he authored a text “that transmitted classical astronomical knowledge to medieval Latin Europe” by commenting on a work of Cicero that Macrobius included in his work.⁶⁶ 

The 1755 unabridged edition and the 1765 abridgement were extensively advertised in London papers that Paine likely read.⁶⁷ As noted earlier, a copy of the 1755 edition of Polymetis was available in Philadelphia, at the Library Company founded by Franklin, after he arrived in Philadelphia in November 1774 and before April 1777.⁶⁸ The Library Company was open to the public well before Paine emigrated and with Paine’s bibliophilia being a quality about which we have little doubt, it is fair to assume he spent many hours there.⁶⁹ While other books published in England before Paine emigrated noted the Roman belief that Providence was female, their references were so slight and obscure that they are a far less likely source for Paine’s belief.⁷⁰ If his belief is derived from a book, Polymetisis the prime candidate. 

May we connect these disparate dots to create a coherent constellation, in Roman style, displaying the origin of Paine’s belief in a female Providence? Tempting as that may be, evidentiary gaps preclude, for now, a definitive conclusion. But sifting the soil of Paine’s contemporaries during the Revolutionary Era as an alternative source is sufficiently unpromising to return us, by deductive reasoning, to Polymetis.

Many Deist Founders, when referencing gender at all, identified God as male and Providence as either male or a manifestation of a male God.⁷¹ When Paine referenced gender regarding God, he similarly identified God as male and never as female.⁷² Paine was unique among his American contemporaries in identifying Providence as female.⁷³ 

John Adams referenced Providence with some frequency, usually with no gender reference. On occasions when Adams referenced gender, he identified Providence as genderless three times and as male twelve times, never suggesting that Providence was female.⁷⁴ Jefferson referenced Providence more infrequently also without usually referencing gender. Of the occasions when Jefferson referenced gender, he identified Providence as genderless twice, as male six times and, like Adams, never suggested a female gender.⁷⁵ Washington referenced an intervening Providence with extraordinary frequency, usually without identifying gender beyond implying a male gender by equating God with Providence.⁷⁶ Of the occasions when Washington expressly referenced gender for Providence, eighteen identified Providence as genderless (“it” or “its”).⁷⁷ Nine identified Providence as male (“he” or “his”).⁷⁸ Curiously, Washington twice deviated from his general practices by identifying Providence as female in 1777 and 1783.⁷⁹ 

No surviving information sheds light on those two deviations from Washington’s general practices. Paine’s identifications were an unlikely influence.⁸⁰ Conceivably, Washington was exposed to Polymetis since George Wythe—a sufficiently close friend that Washington “settled into” Whyte’s home for a while— apparently had a copy in his personal library.⁸¹ But, with Washington having only used female pronouns for Providence twice among the many occasions that he expressed or implied a gender, could they merely have been slips of the pen? What is certain is that Paine, who was extraordinarily careful with his word choices, consistently and repeatedly Providence as female, even emphasizing “her” on one occasion.⁸² 

A possible explanation is that Paine’s unique perspective among the Founders about the differing genders of God and Providence is unattributable to any, so why did he develop that perspective without any outside influence? Did his identification of Providence as female reflect the respect he had for women as equal human beings?⁸³ There is sparse evidence that Paine’s relatively egalitarian views towards women, while remarkably modern for the time, would have sufficiently evolved by April 1777 to have inspired that initial identification of Providence as female.⁸⁴ More broadly, it seems inconceivable, that Paine would have refrained from his general practice of expressly articulating thought processes that were uniquely his regarding his identification of Providence as female if he had developed that concept entirely on his own.uniquely his regarding his identification of Providence as female if he had developed that concept entirely on his own. 

Deductive reasoning and circumstantial evidence suggest that the most likely influence was reports of ancient Roman beliefs as relayed in one or more sources available to him before, and after, he emigrated. For now, Polymetis seems the most likely inspiration for Paine identifying Providence as female. 

Did his identification of God as male and Providence as female indicate that, unlike other Deist Founders, Paine perceived Providence as an entity separate from God? That has intriguing implications but, given limited evidence, cannot proceed beyond the question being posed.⁸⁵ The only Paine biographer who noted Paine’s practice of identifying Providence as female and God as male reported that it troubled him for quite a while.⁸⁶ Unfortunately, his conclusions were unhelpful, declaring, with evidence-free confidence, that “Paine envisioned Providence as an all-encompassing, nurturing she-goddess of nature” and that “Paine’s Providence was the First Cause, the giver of all life,” and “created the universe,…”⁸⁷ Paine’s writings directly belie those conclusions, with that very biographer repeatedly noting that Paine instead stated that the Creator was a male God and, indeed, was the “sole” Creator.⁸⁸ 

Since Paine also consistently identified Nature as female when referencing gender regarding Nature, did he equate Providence with Nature?⁸⁹ His separate expressions of gratitude to both “nature and providence” suggest that he did not equate them, particularly with Paine generally minimizing redundancy in his writings.⁹⁰ More telling, he did not view Nature as actively intervening in human affairs like Providence. Instead, he viewed the laws of Nature as imposing limits on human affairs and on Providence. 

As with many aspects of Paine, the only clues are disclosed through his surviving writings, which offer tantalizing hints that will likely remain perennially unresolved. Ultimately, we cannot know why he identified God as male and Providence as female. We are, regarding his reasoning, consigned to the “intense pleasure of not knowing.” 

EXPLAINING THE INEXPLICABLE 

Ultimately, what humans—unlike other species so far as we know—perennially confront is how to explain the inexplicable. For humans, that results in concepts like God and Providence. How did Paine— the Man of Reason dedicated in his bone marrow to rational thought—explain the inexplicable? Paine struggled to develop the best answers he could given the limitations of what was rationally detectable in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. Recognizing how little could then be explained through reason and the vastness of what was inexplicable, his enlistment of and reliance on Providence is understandable. 

Did he consider his belief in an intervening Providence grounded on reason? He never either said that it was and articulated any rationale in his surviving writings. He may instead have explored the issues as deeply as rational inquiry carried him and then, in proto-Keats fashion, have embraced the unknowable that he labeled “Providence” while refraining from “irritable reaching for fact and reason.” That we, in the 21st Century, may reach different conclusions through reason does not mean that Paine was less dedicated to reason. Then, and today, firm devotees of reason rather than revelation necessarily marvel daily at inexplicable events and at the intricacies presented by Nature that are well beyond the capacities of humans to explain.

ENDNOTES

1. Jack P. Greene, “Paine, America, and the ‘Modernization’ of Political Consciousness, 93, Political Science Quarterly 73-92 (Spring, 1978), 76- 81 (Paine frequently advocated for people to insist on being governed by rationalsystems and was himself devoted to rational thinking). The biography title best capturing Paine may be Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott & Co., 1959). 
2. E.g., John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1995), 500- 503. 
3. Thomas Paine, Age of Reason [1793], The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. P. Foner (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), 1:463-514; Age of Reason: Part Second [1795], Paine Writings, 1:514-604. 
4. Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:463- 514; Age of Reason: Part Second [1795], Paine Writings, 1:514-604. Religious views expressed in Age of Reason were “based entirely on the observation of nature and reasoning from it.” Aldridge, Man of Reason, 231. “Paine applied tests of reason to scripture,” and “rejected almost everything,” with the “notable exception [of] creation, because he could actually see the results of it”—using “his own rational teststo question every event in the Bible.” Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature, (Baltimore: MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 159 & 160. Paine identified within the Bible a few exceptions grounded on actual observations of “creation” and, therefore, consistent with rational inquiry. Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:484-486. 
5. Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:486. This logic, compelling in the late 18th Century, was drawn in question by Darwin but only genuinely challenged with the advent of modern physics. Full disclosure calls for noting that, applying the limited knowledge gleaned through the present day, your author views beliefs in a Deity and an intervening Providence to be precluded by rational inquiry while fully respecting Paine’s ability to rationally reach different conclusions using knowledge available while he lived. As indicated elsewhere, the boundary between rational inquiry and the inexplicable is individual and shifts with time and societal changes. 
6. Paine proffered a rationale for his belief in a Deity. Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:486. But on none of the occasions that he expressed belief in Providence as an intervening force did he ever broach reasons for that belief. “Crisis No. 1” [1776], Paine Writings, 1:55; “Crisis No. 3” [1777], Paine Writings, 1:75; id, Paine Writings, 1:87; “Crisis No. 5” [1777], Paine Writings, 1:120; “Crisis No. 6” [1778], Paine Writings, 1:131; “Crisis No. 8” [1780] Paine Writings, 1:160: “Crisis No. 9 [1780], Paine Writings, 1:166: “The Crisis Extraordinary” [1780], Paine Writings, 1:185-186, “Crisis No. 10” [1782], Paine Writings, 1:193; id, Paine Writings, 1:193-194; “Crisis No. 13” [1783], Paine Writings, 1:235; Rights of Man, Part the Second [1792], Paine Writings, 1:366; “An Act for Incorporating the American Philosophical Society, held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge” [1780], Paine Writings, 2:39; Letter No. 3 on Peace and Newfoundland Fisheries, [1778], Paine Writings, 2:202; Public Good [1780], Paine Writings, 2:305; “To the Sheriff of the County of Sussex [1792] Paine Writings, 2:464; “Addressto the People of France” [1792], Paine Writings, 2:539; id, Paine Writings, 2:540; “Letter to the Citizens of the United States,” November 15, 1802, Paine Writings, 2:909; “Letter to the Citizens of the United States,” December 29, 1802, Paine Writings, 2:920; “Letter to the Citizens of the United States,” February 2, 1803, Paine Writings, 2:931; March 4, 1775 letter to Franklin, Paine Writings, 2:1130; “To the Chairman of the Society for Promoting Constitutional Knowledge [1792], Paine Writings, 2:1325-1326. Ironically, hissole mention of Providence in Age of Reason wasto dismiss “Christian mythology” that believed in a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses. Age of Reason [1794], Paine Writings, 1:498). De-attributed works are excluded from consideration. Thomas Paine National Historical Association, “Works Removed from the Paine Canon,” https://thomaspaine.org/writings. html#works-removed-from-the-paine-canon last accessed 6/20/2024. 
7. “Crisis No. 3” [1777], Paine Writings, 1:75 (“… embarrass Providence in her good designs”); id, Paine Writings, 1:87 (“…Providence, who best knows how to time her misfortunes as well as her immediate favors, chose this to be the time, and who dare dispute it?”); “Crisis No. 6” [1778], Paine Writings, 1:131 (“To the interposition of Providence, and her blessings on our endeavours, …are we indebted …”); “Crisis No. 10” [1782], Paine Writings, 1:193 (“…providence, for seven yearstogether, has put [the King] out of her protection,…” (italicsin original)); id, Paine Writings, 1:193-194 (“Untainted with ambition, and a stranger to revenge, [America’s] progress hath been marked by providence, and she, in every stage of the conflict, has blest [America] with success”); Rights of Man, Part the Second [1792], Paine Writings, 1:366 (“Such a mode of reasoning … finally amounts to an accusation upon Providence, asifshe had left to man no other choice with respect to government than between two evils,…”); “Letter to the Citizens of the United States,” December 29, 1802, Paine Writings, 2:920 (“They have not yet accused Providence of Infidelity. Yet according to their outrageous piety,she must be as bad as Thomas Paine;she has protected him in all his dangers,…” (italicsin original)). 
8. Conway, observing that “among these papers burned in St. Louis were the two volumes of Paine’s autobiography and correspondence seen by Redman Yorke in 1802,” characterized the loss as a true “catastrophe.” Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (New York: G. P. Putnam’s & Sons, 1908), 1:xx-xxi. 
9. For examples of those remarks,see “Crisis No. 10” [1782], Paine Writings, 1:193 and Age of Reason, Paine Writings, 1:486. 
10. During a walk in 1817, “several things dovetailed” for Keats into his developing the concept of “Negative Capability,” the ability to comfortably be “in uncertainty.” December 22, 1817, letter from John Keatsto George & Thomas Keats, The Poetical Works and Other Writings of John Keats(London: Reeves & Turner, 1883), 3:99, italicsin original. Keats perceived that, for writers “of Achievement” to embrace rather than battle the unexplainable is a criticalspark to human creativity and inventiveness. One biographer observed that it was “precisely the ability to hold contrary truthsin creative tension which Keatssaw asthe essential quality” possessed by writers “of Achievement.” John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge, England: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1987), 51. Paine’s ability to hold contrary truths in creative tension may be at the heart of the two mysteries we explore here. 
11. December 22, 1817, letter from Keats, Poetical Works, 48. 
12. December 22, 1817, letter from Keats, Poetical Works, 48. 
13. Robert Giddings, John Keats (Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1968), 173; John Keats, “Notes on Milton’s Paradise Lost,” Poetical Works, 3:24 (“What creates the intense pleasure of not knowing? A sense of independence, of power, from the fancy’s creating a world of its own by the sense of probabilities.”) 
14. John F. Berens, Providence and Patriotism in Early America, 1640-1815 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 81-111. 
15. E.g., Samuel Adams, “Resolution of the Continental Congress,” The Writings of Samuel Adams, ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1907), 3:414-416; February 28, 1797 letter from John Jay to Rev. Jedediah Morse, The Correspondence and Papers of John Jay, ed. Henry P. Johnson (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893), 4:225 (“except the Bible there is not a true history in the world”); John Witherspoon, “A Practical Treatise on Regeneration,” The Works of The Rev. John Witherspoon (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1802), 1:93-265, John Witherspoon, “The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men,” The Works of The Rev. John Witherspoon (Philadelphia: William W. Woodward, 1802), 3:17-46; Jeffry H. Morrison, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 20-21, 90-91. “Sam Adams and John Jay…were orthodox, even conservative Christians, while Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine were deists.” Berens, Providence and Patriotism in Early America, 1640-1815, 107. 
16. See “ADAMS, John,” Joseph McCabe, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (London: Watts and Co., 1920), 7-8 (1920); “ALLEN, Colonel Ethan, Biographical Dictionary, 16; “FRANKLIN, Benjamin,” Biographical Dictionary, 267; “JEFFERSON, Thomas,” Biographical Dictionary, 387- 388; “LAFAYETTE, the Marquis M. J. P. R. Y. G. M. de,” Biographical Dictionary, 412-413; “MADISON, James,” Biographical Dictionary, 471-472; “MORRIS, Gouverneur,” Biographical Dictionary, 929-930; “PAINE, Thomas,” Biographical Dictionary, 577-578; WASHINGTON, George,” Biographical Dictionary, 870-872. A “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence” wasinvoked in the Declaration of Independence. “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/foundingdocs/declaration-transcript. The dominant belief among Foundersin an intervening Providence is expressed in the “Eye of Providence” displayed on all one-dollar bills and on the Great Seal of America. Leonard Wilson, The Coat of Arms, Crest and Great Seal of the United States of America: The Emblem of the Independent Sovereignty of the Nation (San Diego, CA: Leonard Wilson, 1928), pp. 28-29; U. S. Department of State, The Great Seal of the United States(Washington D.C.: Office of Media Services, Bureau of Public Affairs, U.S. Department of State, 1976). Superficially, beliefs of Deist Foundersin an intervening Providence seem to differ from those of prior Deists. Giordano Bruno, executed in 1600, created a central tenet of Deism when he “rejected the idea that Providence intervenes in the operation of nature” and that what “are called miracles can be explained in terms of natural laws.” Edward L. Ericson, The Free Mind Through the Ages(New York: F. Unger Publications, 1985), 56. As noted later, the beliefs of the Deist Founders, interrogated more deeply,suggests a heritage deriving from Bruno.
17. One commentator opined that “[n]obody believed more deeply than radical deists in an allwise Providence.” Henry F. May, Ideas, Faiths, and Feelings: Essays on American Intellectual and Religious History, 1952-1982 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 141. May’s opinion is debatable, particularly when compared to contemporarieslike Rev. John Witherspoon, but, even if true, would beg the question of why “radical deists” held such beliefs. 
18. “Letter to the Citizens of the United States,” December 29, 1802, Paine Writings, 2:920. In 1804, Paine contributed numerous articlesto Elihu Palmer’s Prospect magazine. “Prospect Papers” [1804], Paine Writings, 2:789-830. The religious arguments of Paine and Palmer—who was a substantially deeper thinker regarding religious issues—mostly coordinated but may have clashed regarding the existence of an intervening Providence. Kirsten Fischer, American Freethinkers: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 174-221; Kerry S. Walters, American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 244-277 (discussing Palmer); G. Adolf Koch, Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1933), 51- 73 (same); Herbert M. Morais, Deism in Eighteenth Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 128-138. Intriguingly, Paine’slast known reference to an intervening Providence was in February 1803 (see n7 supra) before he first published in Palmer’s Prospect. Whether that is coincidence or influenced by Palmer must remain in the realm of speculation. 
19. Thomas Paine, “Thoughts on Defensive War” [1775], The Pennsylvania Magazine or the American Monthly Museum for July 1775 (Philadelphia, July 1775), 313-314; The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. M. Conway (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1894), 1:55 (attribution to Paine). 
20. Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:505- 511; Age of Reason, Part the Second [1796], Paine Writings, 1:520 & 1:587. 
21. Bernard Shaw, Preface, Saint Joan, A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2001), 13-14. 
22. Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7-8 (assuming, based on Paine’s assault on Christianity in Age of Reason, that, in Common Sense and the Crisis series, Paine’s “public piety diverged from” his “private convictions” and that he cynically “adopted providential language precisely because” he realized “that many Americans accepted its premises”). 
23. Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 7-8, 89-90, 95, 105, 148, 152, 155- 157, 169, 171 (noting only Paine’sreferencesto an intervening Providence in Common Sense and the Crisis series and not Paine’s later references). See n6 supra (noting eleven references by Paine to an intervening Providence in writings other than Common Sense and the Crisis series including a reference as late as 1803). 
24. Aldridge, Man of Reason, 53. See also Aldridge, Man of Reason, 276 (citing 1802 invocation). 
25. Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Revolution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 190-192. 
26. Morais, Deism in Eighteenth Century America, 97. 
27. Walters, American Deists, 29. 
28. Stewart, Nature’s God, 190-192. John Fea, by contrast, opined that being a Deist and believing in an intervening Providence are entirely incompatible. John Fea, “Deism and Providence,” Current, August 19, 2011, https://currentpub.com/ 2011/08/19/deism-and-providence/ 
29. June 12, 1754, letter to Robert Dinwiddie, Washington Writings, 1:76; July 18, 1755, letter to John Augustine Washington, Washington Writings 1:152. See Stewart, Nature’s God, 190-192. 
30. “Letter to the Citizens of the United States,” December 29, 1802, Writings of Paine, 2:920. 
31. Ericson, The Free Mind Through the Ages, 56. 
32. Benjamin Franklin, “A Lecture on the Providence of God in the Governance of the World,” The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin, ed. John Bigelow (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1888), 7:489-497. 
33. Benjamin Franklin, “A Lecture on the Providence of God,” 7:489-497. 
34. Benjamin Franklin, “A Lecture on the Providence of God,” 7:489-497. 
35. Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:486. 
36. Examining those occasions when Paine cited an intervening Providence, each implicates a situation that comports with the laws of nature, even if improbable. See citations at n6 supra. 
37. “Crisis No. 10” [1782], Paine Writings, 1:193. 
38. Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:486. See Stewart, Nature’s God, 190. 
39. Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 204-206 (Paine “extended his notion of Providence unreasonably far”) 
40. References to God as “He” “he” “His” “his” “Him” “him” “Himself” “himself” “Father” “father’s”: “Crisis No. I” [1776], Paine Writings, 1:50- 51; Rights of Man-Part the First [1791], Paine Writings, 1:452; Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:478; id, Paine Writings, 1:483; id, Paine Writings, 1:486; id, Paine Writings, 1:487; id, Paine Writings, 1:493; id, Paine Writings, 1:497; id, Paine Writings, 1:506; id, Paine Writings, 1:510; id, Paine Writings, 1:512; Age of Reason-Part the Second [1795], Paine Writings, 1:523; id, Paine Writings, 1:529; id, Paine Writings, 1:583; id, Paine Writings, 1:584; id, Paine Writings, 1:595; id, Paine Writings, 1:601; id, Paine Writings, 1:602; Agrarian Justice [1797], Paine Writings, 1:609; Epistle to Quakers[1776], Paine Writings, 2:58; “The Forester II,” [1776], id., Paine Writings, 2:79; “A Serious Addressto the People of Pennsylvania on the Present Situation of their Affairs” [1778], Paine Writings, 2:295; “Answer to Four Questions on the Legislative and Executive Powers” [1791], Paine Writings, 2:525; “A Letter to the Hon, Thomas Erskine” [1797], Paine Writings, 2:729; id, Paine Writings, 2:733; id, Paine Writings, 2:738; id, Paine Writings, 2:744; “The Existence of God” [1797], Paine Writings, 2:749; id, Paine Writings, 2:750; Paine Writings, 2:754; “Extractsfrom a Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff” [1796-1802], Paine Writings, 2:776; id, Paine Writings, 2:785; id, Paine Writings, 2:786-787; “Remarks on R. Hall’s Sermon” [1804], Paine Writings, 2:790; “Of the Word ‘Religion,’ and Other Words of Uncertain Signification” [1804], Paine Writings, 2:792; id, Paine Writings, 2:793; “Of the Religion of Deism Compared with the Christian Religion, and the Superiority of the Former over the Latter” [1804], Paine Writings, 2:797; id, Paine Writings, 2:798; id, Paine Writings, 2:800; id, Paine Writings, 2:802; “Of the Sabbath Day in Connecticut” [1804], Paine Writings, 2:804; id, Paine Writings, 2:805; “Of the Old and the New Testament” [1804], Paine Writings, 2:806; “To John Mason” [1804], Paine Writings, 2:813; id, Paine Writings, 2:814; id, Paine Writings, 2:815; “On Deism, and the Writings of Thomas Paine” [1804], Paine Writings, 2:816; id, Paine Writings, 2:817; “Biblical Blasphemy” [1804], Paine Writings, 2:824; “Examination of the Prophecies” [1807], Paine Writings, 2:876; id, Paine Writings, 2:886; id, Paine Writings, 2:887; id, Paine Writings,, 2:888; id, Paine Writings, 2:889; id, Paine Writings, 2:890; id, Paine Writings, 2:891; “My Private Thoughts on a Future State,” Paine Writings, 2:892; id, Paine Writings, 2:893;“Predestination: Remarks on RomansIX, 18- 21” [1809], Paine Writings, 2:896. 
41. See citations in n7 supra. 
42. Daniel Gittens, Remarks on the Tenets and Principles of the Quakers as Contained in the Theses Theologica of Robert Barclay (London: J. Betterman, 1758), xii, xviii, 100, 149, 150, 157, 206 & 312 (Quaker views) William Craig Brownlee, A Careful and Free Inquiry into the True Nature and Tendency of the Religious Principles of the Society of Friends, Commonly Called Quakers (Philadelphia: John Mortimer, 1924), 107, 108, 110, 135, 149, 158, 161, 177, 184, 212, 268, (Quaker viewsin 18th century); Quaker anecdotes, ed. Richard Pike (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 2nd ed. 1881), 24, 206-207, 230, 266-267, 272 & 300 (same); Alfred Plummer, The Church of England in the Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1910), 97, 157, 218 (Anglican views in 18th century); A New History of Methodism, eds. Townsend, Workman, & Eayrs (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909), 1:28- 29, 1:35, 1:66, 1:229, 1:448, 2:36, 2:45, 2:230, 2:287, 2:289 (Methodist views in 18th century). 
43. Priestley and Price routinely, in writings published before Paine emigrated, referenced the “Providence of God” or “Divine Providence” and never hinted at a female gender for Providence. E.g., Richard Price, “Dissertation I on Providence,” Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar & T. Cadell, 1767), 3- 194; Joseph Priestley, No Man Liveth to Himself: A Sermon Preached Before and Assembly of Dissenting Ministers (Warrington, 1764), viii, 19 & 33. 
44. A. Owen Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1984), 52-53 & 80 (Paine’s citation to Burgh’s book in Common Sense); J. Burgh, Political Disquisitions: An Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses. Illustrated By, And Established Upon Facts and Remarks, Extracted from a Variety of Authors, Ancient and Modern, (London: Edward & Charles Dilly, 1774) 1:486, 3:85, 3:91, 3:121, 3:162, 3:183, 3:205, 3:257 (references to Providence). 
45. “Crisis No. 3” [1777], Paine Writings, 1:75; “Crisis No. 3” [1777], Paine Writings, 1:87; “Crisis No. 6” [1778], Paine Writings, 1:131. Paine’s belief in a female Providence certainly did not derive, for example, from any Catholic belief in an intervening Virgin Mary. Even Protestants in France firmly rejected Mary cults(e.g., David Garrioch, “Religious Identities and the Meaning of Things in EighteenthCentury Paris,” 3, French History and Civilization 17- 25, (2009), 22) and Paine was unquestionably anti-Papist (e.g., Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology, 63). 
46. Fruchtman, Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature, 188, n27. 
47. “Providentia,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org wiki/Providentia#cite_note1, citing J. Rufus Fears, “The Cult of Virtues and Roman Imperial Ideology,” Aufstieg und Niedergang (1981), 886. See “Providentia,” Encyclopedia Mythica,https://pantheon.org/articles/p/ providentia.html#google_vignette. 
48. Theodorus P. van Baaren, “ProvidenceTheology,” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com /topic/Providence-theology. 
49. Martin Percival Charlesworth, “Providentia and Aeternitas,” 29, The Harvard Theological Review 107-132 (April 1936), 109. 
50. Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:496. 
51. See n7 supra. “Thoughts on Defensive War” [July 1775], Paine Writings, 2:54 (the “Romans held the world in slavery, and were themselvesthe slaves of their emperors”); Forester’s Letter No. 1 [April 3, 1776], Paine Writings, 2:61 (addressing a contemporary opponent using the pseudonym Cato by stating that the “fate of the Roman Cato is before his eyes”); “A Dialogue Between the Ghost of General Montgomery Just Arrived from the Elysian Fields; and an American Delegate, in a Wood Near Philadelphia” [May 1776], Paine Writings, 2:92 (listing “Grecian and Roman heroes” by name); “Retreat Acrossthe Delaware” [January 29, 1777], Paine Writings, 2: 95 (“the names of Fabius”— a Roman hero —“and Washington will run parallel through eternity”). Aldridge identified many occasionsthat Paine referenced classical authors or figuresfavorably or unfavorably. A. Owen Aldridge, “Thomas Paine and the Classics,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 370-380 (Summer, 1968), 370-373. 
52. “Crisis No. 5 [1778], Paine Writings, 123-124 (extended discussion of Rome and Greece); Age of Reason [1793], Paine Writings, 1:491-492 (same). In 1795, Paine expressly listed the “works of genius” by Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, and others “as works of genius,” also mentioning Herotodus, Tacitus and Josephus. Age of Reason: Part the Second [1795], Paine Writings, 1:520. Later in life, Paine expressed admiration for Cicero at considerable length because he advocated rational thought. “Examination of the Prophecies of the New Testament…” [1807], Paine Writings, 2:882-886; Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States(Detroit, MI: Wayne University Press, 1984), 105-106; Aldridge, “Thomas Paine and the Classics,” 371-372. 
53. Keane, Paine, 41-44. 
54. Joseph Spence, Polymetis, or, An Enquiry Concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists(London: R. & J. Dodsley, 2nd Edition with Corrections by the Author, 1755), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t25b8jp2 x, 138, 150-151 (Roman belief in female Providence; Joseph Spence, Polymetis, or, An Enquiry Concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets, and the Remains of the Antient Artists, (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1st Edition, 1747), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.3901505709 9940, 138, 150-51, 161 (same). Those discussionsin Polymetis were partly supported by a citation to Cicero for the proposition “Providentia deorum mundus administrator.” (Italics added.) The 1747 and 1755 unabridged editions were available in the late 1750s when Paine, living off privateering profits, frequented London bookshops, likely borrowed library booksfor a small fee, and attended astronomy lectures by Benjamin Martin. Keane, Paine, 41-44; Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations(New York: Viking, 2006), 22, (Martin as friend). 
55. Joseph Spence, Polymetis, 1st Ed., https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp. 39015057099940, x. 
56. In 1760, an unabridged edition was advertised for “2l. 12s. 6d.” The Public Advertiser” (London, August 6, 1760), 4). Keane, Paine, 41-44. See Eleanor Lochrie, A Study of Lending Libraries in EighteenthCentury Britain, University Of Strathclyde (Thesis, September 2015), https://local.cis.strath.ac. uk/wp/extras/msctheses/papers/strath_cis_publicati on_2684.pdf. 
57. Joseph Spence, A Guide to Classical Learning, or, Polymetis Abridged (London: R. Horsfeld, 1765), https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.fl1e34. 153-154, text & note c (same). The abridgementsold for three shillings. The Public Advertiser (London, February 22, 1766), 4), far less than the unabridged version (e.g., The Public Advertiser (London, August 6, 1760), 4). 
58. Library Company of Philadelphia, The Second Part of the Catalogue of Books, of the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Robert Aitken, 1775), 55 (listing the 1755 edition of Spence’s Polymetis as No. 292 in its holdings). The Library Company wasfounded several decades earlier by Paine’sfriend, Benjamin Franklin. Austin K. Gray, Benjamin Franklin’s Library: A Short Account of the Library Company of Philadelphia 1731-1931 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937), 7-17. “Members could borrow booksfreely and without charge” and nonmembers could read books within the library and even borrow books. “At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin”: A Brief History of the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: York Graphic Services, 1995), 14. 
59. July 20, 1776, letter from Jefferson to John Page, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/ 01-01-02-0189 
60. E.g., Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American ideology, 95-122. 
61. References to Cicero: Spence, Polymetis, 2nd ed., title page quote, iii, 8-13, 15, 16, 21, 23, 29, 31, 38, 40-41, 46-47, 49-50, 57-58, 68-69, 92, 95, 103- 104, 114, 134-135, 137-140, 143-144, 150, 164, 166, 168, 172, 174, 179-180, 182, 188, 190, 193, 195-196, 207-209, 214, 220, 225, 258, 266-267, 272, 279, 287 & 316. Referencesto Macrobius: Spence, Polymetis, 2nd ed., v, 17, 20, 26, 51, 58-59. 64, 116, 174, 193, 196-198, 288 & 315. Images of Providentia: Spence, Polymetis, 1st ed., # 229, https://hdl.handle.net /2027/mdp.39015057099940?urlappend=%3Bseq=2 29%3Bownerid=113489623-228; Spence, Polymetis, 2nd ed., #225, https://hdl.handle.net /2027/gri.ark:/13960/t25b8jp2x?urlappend=%3Bseq =225. 
62. Spence, A Guide to Classical Learning, 153-154, text & note c. 
63. Maiora, “Classical Almanac: Joseph Spence,” EcBlogue: A Classics Blog, https://classicsblogging. wordpress.com/2009/04/28/classical-almanacjoseph-spence/ Compare Aldridge, “Thomas Paine and the Classics,”, 370-380. 
64. Maiora, “Classical Almanac: Joseph Spence,” EcBlogue: A Classics Blog. 
65. Aldridge, “Thomas Paine and the Classics,”370- 380. 
66. Latura, “Milky Way Vicissitudes: Macrobius to Galileo,” 18 Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 319-325 (2018), DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1477993, 320, 322 & 324. 
67. A combined total of 67 advertisements appeared for those two versions in The Public Advertiser in London from August 3, 1758 to December 29, 1772. Search for Polymetisin London County newspapers from 1700 to 1774, Newspapers.com, https://www.newspapers.com /search/?query=polymetis&p_province=gb eng&p_county=greater%20london&dr_year=1700- 1774&sort=paper-date-asc 
68. In 1775, the holdings of the Library Company included a copy of the 1755 edition of Polymetis. See n7 supra. Paine arrived in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774. Frank Smith, “The Date of Thomas Paine’s First Arrival in America,” 3, American Literature 317- 318. (November 1931). Paine’s first known identification of Providence asfemale wasin April 1777. “Crisis No. 3” [April 19, 1777], Paine Writings, 1:75 & 1:87. 
69. See n55 supra. 
70. E.g., Edward Herbert, The Antient Religion of the Gentiles, and Causes of their Errors Consider’d (London: John Nutt, 1705), 95-96 (Romans, “by her, mean Divine Providence…”). 
71. Franklin regularly referenced Providence as a manifestation of God, rarely referenced gender regarding Providence, and never identified Providence as a manifestation of God, rarely referenced gender regarding Providence, and never identified Providence asfemale. Benjamin Franklin, The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. A. Smyth (New York: The Macmillan Co. 1905 to 1907), 1:221- 439, 2:1-470, 3:1-483, 4:1-471, 5:1-555, 6:1-477, 7:1-440, 8:1-651, 9:1-703 & 10:1-510. See Walters, American Deists, 53-55 & 74-75 (Franklin); Walters, American Deists, 122-124 (Jefferson); Walters, American Deists, 143, 146 & 148-155 (Ethan Allen). See nn58-62 infra. 
72. See n30 supra. 
73. See n7 supra. 
74. When Adams referenced gender regarding Providence, he sometimes identified Providence as being genderless(“it” “its”): John Adams, Diary Entry of March 9, 1774, Diary, The Works of John Adams, ed. C. Adams(Boston: Charles C. Little & James Brown, 1851), 3:110; Discourses on Davila; A Series of Papers on Political History by an American Citizen, Adams Works, 6:396; “To the Young Men of the City of New York,” Adams Works, 9:198; May 22, 1821, letter to David Sewall, Adams Works, 10:399. More often, when he referenced gender, Adamsidentified Providence as male (His” “his”): Diary Entry of March 2, 1756, Diary, Adams Works, 2:8; Diary Entry of June 14, 1756, Adams Works, 2:22; Diary Entry of October 24, 1756, Adams Works, 2:221; Diary Entry of June 9, 1771, Adams Works, 2:274; Works on Government, Adams Works, 4:220; id, Adams Works, 4:413; “Inaugural Speech to Both Houses of Congress, 4 March 1797,” Adams Works, 9:111; Adams, “Speech to Both Houses of Congress, 8 December 1798,” Adams Works, 9:128; Adams, “Speech to Both Houses of Congress 3 December 1799,” Adams Works, 9:128; December 26, 1806 letter to J.B. Varnum, Adams Works, 9:607; October 4, 1813, letter from Adamsto Jefferson, Adams Works, 10:75; April 5, 1815 letter to Richard Rush, Adams Works, 10:159. No surviving documents reflect Adams identifying Providence as female. 
75. Jefferson sometimes identified Providence as genderless(“it” “its”): March 4, 1801 Inaugural Address, The Writings of ThomasJefferson, ed. A. Bergh (Washington D.C.: The ThomasJefferson Memorial Association, 1903), 3:320; May 31, 1802 letter to Thomas Law, Jefferson Writings, 19:130. Other times, he identified Providence as male (“his” “His” “he” “Him”): March 4, 1804 Inaugural Address, Jefferson Writings, 3:383; December 5, 1805 Fifth Annual Message to Congress, Jefferson Writings, 3:384; October 12, 1786, letter to Mrs. Cosway, Jefferson Writings, 5:444; February 14, 1807, letter to the Two Branches of the Legislature of Massachusetts, Jefferson Writings, 16:287; March 28, 1809, letter to Stephen Cross, Jefferson Writings, 16:352. Jefferson ambiguously referenced Providence by “their” without indicating any particular gender. Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Jefferson Writings, 2:242. No surviving documents reflect Jefferson identifying Providence as female. 
76. Washington’s first recorded reference to an intervening Providence was in 1754. June 12, 1754, letter to Robert Dinwiddie, The Writings of George Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931), 1:76. The next year, he credited “the miraculous care of Providence” for protecting him from harm “beyond all human expectation.” July 18, 1755, letter to John Augustine Washington, Washington Writings, 1:152. 
77. April 25, 1773, letter to Burwell Bassett, Washington Writings, 3:133; May 31, 1776, letter to John Augustine Washington, Washington Writings, 5:93; March 1, 1778, letter to Bryan Fairfax, Washington Writings, 11:3; May 30, 1778, letter to Landon Carter, Washington Writings, 11:492; October 18, 1780, letter to Joseph Reed, Washington Writings, 20:213; March 9, 1781, letter to William Gordon, Washington Writings, 21:332; June 5, 1782, letter to Chevalier de la Luzerne, Washington Writings, 24:314; June 30, 1782, lettersto the Ministers, Elders, and Deacons of the Reformed Dutch Church of Schenectady, Washington Writings, 24:391; August 1, 1786, letter to Chevalier de la Luzerne, Washington Writings, 28:501; September 25, 1794, Proclamation, Washington Writings, 33:508; March 30, 1796, letter to Elizabeth Parke Custis Washington, Washington Writings, 35:1; March 30, 1796, letter to Tobias Lear, Washington Writings, 35:5; June 8, 1796, letter to Henry Knox, Washington Writings, 35:85; October 12, 1796, letter to the Inhabitants of Shepard Town and its Vicinity, Washington Writings, 35:242; March 2, 1797, letter to Henry Knox, Washington Writings, 35:409; March 3, 1797, letter to Jonathan Trumbull, Washington Writings, 35:412; August 15, 1798, letter to Reverend Jonathan Boucher, Washington Writings, 36:413-414; November 22, 1799, letter to Benjamin Goodhue, Washington Writings, 37:436. 
78. July 20, 1776, letter to Colonel Adam Stephen, Washington Writings, 5:313; April 23, 1777, letter to Brigadier General Samuel Holden Parsons, Washington Writings, 7:456; November 30, 1777, General Order, Washington Writings, 10:123; April 12, 1778, General Order, Washington Writings, 11:252; August 20, 1778, letter to Thomas Nelson, Washington Writings, 12:343; April 28, 1788, letter to L’Enfant, Washington Writings, 29:481; October 3, 1789, Thanksgiving Proclamation, Washington Writings, 30:427; July 28, 1791, letter to Lafayette, Washington Writings, 31:324; Jun 10, 1792, letter to Marquis de La Fayette, Washington Writings, 32:54. 
79. November 8, 1777, letter to Thomas Nelson, Washington Writings, 10:28 (“We must endeavour to deserve better of Providence, and, I am persuaded,she will smile upon us”); October 12, 1783, letter to Chevalier de Chastellux, Washington Writings, 27:190 (“…with the goodness of that Providence which has dealt her favour to us with so profuse a hand”). 
80. Paine was an unlikely influence on Washington, who first identified Providence as female over six months after Paine had done so. November 8, 1777, letter to Thomas Nelson, Washington Writings, 10:28; “Crisis No. 3” [April 19, 1777], Paine Writings, 1:75 & 1:87. Though Paine and Washington interacted personally shortly before the November 8, 1777, letter, including an extended conversation over breakfast after the Battle of Germantown in early October, no record suggeststhat topic was mentioned. May 16, 1778, letter to Franklin, Paine Writings, 2:1145- 1147; Keane, Paine, 160. Washington’s second identification was a year and half after Paine identified Providence as female in human right to suffrage” and that “women have rights because they are human, not because they are weaker, poorer, or more vulnerable than men”). mythology” (Age of Reason [1794], Paine Writings, 1:498). Hisidentification of Providence asfemale and God as male does not mean that he viewed Providence as a Goddess much less a separate one. “Crisis No. 10.” October 12, 1783, letter to Chevalier de Chastellux, Washington Writings, 27:190; “Crisis No. 10” [March 5, 1782], Paine Writings, 1:193-194. Personal contact in the weeks before October 12, 1783 was precluded by Paine, due to scarlet fever, delaying his visit to Washington’s Rocky Hill estate. Hawke, Paine, 140-142; October 13, 1783, letter to Washington, Paine Writings, 2:1243. 
81. Washington “settled into” Whyte’s home in September 1781. Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010), 410-411. Wythe reportedly had a copy of Polymetis. “Polymetis,” Wythepedia, William and Mary Law Library, https://lawlibrary.wm.edu/ wythepedia/index.php/Polymetis. 
82. See n7 supra. 
83. E.g., Botting, “Thomas Paine amidst the Early Feminists,” The Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, eds. I. Shapiro & J. Calvert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 633 & 643-644 (observing that Paine, in his 1797 Agrarian Justice, made “a creative argument for women’s 
84. While there are many signals of Paine’s egalitarian attitudes towards women in the 1790s, there are far fewer before April 1777. Paine is no longer deemed the author of “An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex” that appeared in Pennsylvania Magazine in 1775. https://thomaspaine.org/works/works-removedfrom-the-paine-canon/an-occasional-letter-on-thefemale-sex.html 
85. Some conclude that Paine was a Pantheist rather than Deist or had pantheistic tendencies. Fruchtman, Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature, 3-4, 52-53; Zaidi, “Rediscovering Thomas Paine and the Sacred Text of Nature,” Left Curve, No. 35 (2011), 138-141, https://www.academia.edu/2327425/Rediscovering_Thomas_Paine_and_the_S acred_Text_of_Nature. Taking Paine at his own word, however, he believed “in one God, and no more” (Age of Reason, Paine Writings, 1:464) and criticized what he viewed as the pantheism of “Christian mythology,” Age of Reason (1794], Paine Writings, 1:498). His identification of Providence as female and God as male does not mean that he viewed Providence as a Goddess much less a separate one. 
86. Jack Fruchtman, Jr., The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 178, n15, (after thinking long on Paine identifying Providence as female and God as male, concluding that “at the least he viewed Providence as an immanent divine element, as part of all of nature (or Nature, in deist terms), whereas his vision of God was as creator of the universe, or First Cause”).“Crisis No. 10.” October 12, 1783, letter to Chevalier de Chastellux, Washington Writings, 27:190; “Crisis No. 10” [March 5, 1782], Paine Writings, 1:193-194. Personal contact in the weeks before October 12, 1783 was precluded by Paine, due to scarlet fever, delaying his visit to Washington’s Rocky Hill estate. Hawke, Paine, 140- 142; October 13, 1783, letter to Washington, Paine Writings, 2:1243. 
87. Fruchtman, Political Philosophy of Paine, 37-38. 88 Fruchtman, Political Philosophy of Paine, 2, 24, 26, 28, 54, 56, 
88. (“Paine’s deeply held faith in God as the sole creator…” (italics added), 135 and 178, n15. 
89. Of the many times Paine referenced gender regarding Nature, he identified Nature as genderless once. “The Existence of God: A Discourse at the Society of Theophilanthropists, Paris” [1796], Paine Writings, 2:252. Otherwise, he identified Nature asfemale—not as male or genderless. Common Sense [1776], Paine Writings, 1:13 (“she”); id, Writings of Paine, 1:23; id, Paine Writings, 1:30; id, Paine Writings, 1:34; id, Paine Writings, 1:40); “Crisis No. 6” [1778], Paine Writings, 1:131; “Crisis No. 8” [1780], Paine Writings, 1:160; Rights of Man, Part the First [1791], Paine Writings, 1:260; Paine Writings, 1:321; Rights of Man, Part the Second [1792], Paine Writings, 1:357; Paine Writings, 1:365; id, Paine Writings, 1:367; Paine Writings, 1:371; id. at p. 400; Age of Reason [1795], Paine Writings, 1:509; id, Paine Writings, 1:529; Forester Letter III [1776], Paine Writings, 1:79; Second Letter on Peace and the Newfoundland Fisheries[July 14, 1779], Paine Writings, 1:198; Third Letter on Peace and the Newfoundland Fisheries[July 21, 1779], Paine Writings, 1:201; Dissertations on Government [1786], Paine Writings, 1:411; “Answer to Four Questions,” Paine Writings, 1:525; Paine Writings, 1:527; Prospects on the Rubicon [1787], Paine Writings, 1:631; Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance [1796], Paine Writings, 1:666; Specification of Thomas Paine, A.D. 1788, No. 1667, Constructing Arches, Vaulted Roofs, and Ceiling [1788], Paine Writings, 1:1032; Spring of 1789 letter from Paine to Sir George Staunton, Bart., Paine Writings, 1:1045; June 25, 1801 Letter from Paine to Jefferson [1801], Paine Writings, 1:1048. 
90. “Crisis No. 13” [1783], Paine Writings, 1:235.

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