by Gary Berton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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Mariam Touba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hawke does quote Paine’s most succinct statement on the subject: The question was put to Paine by the English physician John Walker, “How it was to be accounted for, that he had not taken up the pen to advocate the cause of blacks,” and where Paine’s response was recalled by Walker as, “an unfitter person for such a work could hardly be found. The cause would have suffered in my hands. I could not have treated it with any chance of success; for I could never think of their condition but with feelings of indignation.”

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hawke, p. 37, also citing Clark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mariam Touba

October 2012

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

Quo warranto?

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

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

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

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

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

Paine indignantly retorts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When it shall be said in any country in the world, “My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness” – when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.

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

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

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

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by Gary Berton, with Notes by Dr. Cazenave 

2022 Thomas Paine Symposium Talk

Dr. Noel Cazenave, Professor of Sociology at University of Connecticut, has been researching for a book on Kindness Wars: The History and Political Economy of Human Caring. During his research of Enlightenment thinkers he came to Thomas Paine, and was impressed by his orientation towards the well-being of humanity. He also came across Thomas Jefferson, and immediately formed an opposite opinion, that although he shared a lot of political goals with Paine, he also had no Kindness in his world view. 

I was honored that he contacted me about Paine, and wanted to hear more. We decided we could collaborate on an article about the comparison between the two historical figures who influenced the world on this question of kindness. This is a very brief summary of where we are on this narrow topic.

In examining 21 Enlightenment thinkers, Dr. Cazenave separated them into 3 categories, British Conservatives, Christian Benevolents and Secular Progressives. Both Toms fit into the last. Class plays a major role: Paine from the lower classes, Jefferson from the inherited planter class. 

Paine’s argument for independence was linked to the cause of humanity for justice and equality. “My country is the world; my religion is to do good.” He criticized Rousseau that although Rousseau possessed benevolent sentiments, but “having raised this animation, they do not direct its operation, and leave the mind in love with an object, without describing the means of possessing it.” For Paine, sentiments won’t abolish aristocracy and privilege, or defend the poor, the homeless, the children, and proposed concrete ways of kindness toward humanity which slowly have minimally been addressed if not universally enacted. Even his guaranteed minimal income concept is still a far-off goal, and the economist Thomas Piketty recently outlined the hope of humanity as resting on this concept. Paine called for aggressive political change, and with it a change in thinking. 

But Jefferson is another question. The self- possessed contradiction of Jefferson is almost frightening. Although Franklin probably had more to do with the preamble of the Declaration than Jefferson, the “all men are created equal” gets contradicted by Jefferson in his slavery clause written by a slave-owner, and his clause about savages which shows he didn’t think they were “men”. Relatively few people are aware, however, that Jefferson would become one of that new nation’s earliest and most influential theoreticians of white supremacy, and even fewer people know of the major kindness-theory-related contradictions within the Declaration of Independence, itself. 

In 1807 Jefferson as President told his Secretary of War that if the assimilation of indigenous people don’t conform to the white society, “If we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated.” With America’s indigenous people, like its African slaves, depicted as an existential threat to “white” American colonists, in-group empathy bias was mobilized for a remarkable lack of empathy and kindness for those deemed to be racial outsiders. 

Jefferson was one of this nation’s most influential crafters of racist theory and ideologies. We can see this in his Notes on the State of Virginia; ironically Jefferson introduces his racism theory in a section of the book in which he touts the progressive changes he proposed to the Virginia legislature; including his unsuccessful effort to get it to gradually abolish slavery. Here Jefferson used what he argued was the inferiority of Africans as a race to explain why the Virginia slaves did not seem to benefit from the state’s progressive laws by making significant accomplishments in the arts and sciences. Jefferson’s reliance on genocide as the ultimate solution to his racial fears was evident again when he concluded that “the real distinctions which nature has made,” along with other factors like “white” prejudice and “black” resentment “of the injuries they have sustained,” prevent the two races from living together amicably without “the extermination of the one or the other race.” In making his case, Jefferson’s argument was anything but color-blind, for as he put it “The first difference which strikes us is that of colour.” After wrapping his racist theory in a thin and pretentious veneer of scientific speculation as to the possible origins of “the black of the negro,” Jefferson lays out his aesthetic argument for the importance of “colour, figure, and hair” and other physical differences. After surmising that this inferiority causes African slaves to be less able to achieve in the arts and sciences like painting, sculpture, poetry, even when granted the opportunity to do so, Jefferson concluded “as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” And finally, Jefferson made it clear that this conclusion had implications beyond their ability to make significant contributions in the arts and science, when he surmised that due to that “unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty” both their emancipation and their assimilation were unwise because if they were freed and allowed to remain in America that would risk “staining the blood of his master.” 

In the book by Tyler Stovall, “White Freedom”, Jefferson, like Voltaire, Kant, Hume and other Enlightenment figures, freedom was not meant to be universal, but reserved for rational white men who owned property which he describes as “white freedom”. He concludes not only that “slavery and reason were not so much paradoxical as complementary and mutually reinforcing” but that, indeed, “race and racial difference played a seminal role in the modern concepts of liberty.” 

Enter sociologist Pierre van den Berge: racism didn’t develop despite the commitments to liberty and freedom, it developed because of it. He answered the question of how slavery is justified in a society built on the assumptions that all human beings are created equal while developing racist ideology: people of African descent were not sufficiently human. And Jefferson was the most influential person to promote this duality. The ideal of equality was not only NOT inconsistent with racism, but it enabled, as it does today, the ability to separate the Africans from full humanity. So the ideal of America has an exception, and once created it bleeds into other “not fully white” peoples, and excluding them in varying degrees. You might say that is better than nothing, but in fact, it created a racist system by using fake science to justify inequality. 

Voltaire, Kant, Mill, and Hume, all considered liberals in thought, are also guilty of this dichotomy among classification of human status. Voltaire even invested in the slave trade, even as his thinking evolved more progressively. And Hume identified “Negroes” as a species inferior to whites. 

But this duality, or caste system of ranking humans, is ended by Paine among widely read Enlightenment figures. After writing the first work that was a collaboration with Benjamin Franklin in 1762, Franklin returned to America for a year or two; it was at this time that he changed his views of slavery, and I will surmise it was his close contact with Paine. Paine had declared he would be too emotional to write on abolition of slavery. He did write in private letters against it, and he wrote with Joseph Priestley in favor of the Slave Trade Act in London in 1792. But on his death bed, he couldn’t contain himself and let Jefferson know about the abomination of the existence and tolerance toward slavery anywhere, but particularly in America, who claimed that all men are created equal. The “Slave Letter” as we call it is the strongest, clearest expression against the abomination, with its contradiction to American creed, and it was the first to call for reparations to begin reversing it. Like much of Paine’s work and ideology he was too far ahead of his time, and he still is. Racism from the white supremacists in the intellectual class infected the country, as did the inherited mentality of British colonialism. A sort of free pass to commit atrocities based on the supposition that whites are superior, the others are subhuman. This ideology remains with us today, and is vying once again for complete power in the growing fascist movement in America, and other countries. 

Paine makes his case for the inalienability of human rights through his argument that while civil rights are based on an individual’s membership in society, natural rights are rooted in mere human existence, and that consequently “every civil right grows out of a natural right.” Consistent with this conceptualization of civil rights as natural rights, in stark contrast to Burke’s insistence that it was God who determined one’s social status and people have no right to change it, Paine argued that, indeed, people are entitled to improve their lives and circumstances, however not at the expense of the public. 

And Paine’s “Slave Letter”, called as such because Paine took the identity of a slave in it to channel his emotions, and even make them focused and more powerful. Paine’s kindness toward humanity, especially towards the disenfranchised on many levels, sets him apart in the Enlightenment spectrum of thought in the 18th century, and presents a different philosophy long suppressed in our philosophical political heritage. 

Paine remains the beacon for another path, still not travelled. Despite the friendship established over many years and discussion and correspondence, the two Toms held opposite positions on equality and kindness, on ALL men are created equal, and a path forward towards true equality – the only basis of democracy. Jefferson turned a blind eye, rooted in fake subjective science, while Paine saw humanity as one whole: “The world is my country, my religion is to do good.” In this sense, Kindness in Paine’s writings is the end product of the Enlightenment, waiting for realization.

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By Gary Berton

Little has been written about the political party formed after Paine’s return from the battlefield in January 1777, the Whig Society. The Society, perhaps the first revolutionary party in modern history, took the lead in the politics of the war in 1777 in Philadelphia, then spread to surrounding states, before fading away towards the end of the war.

In a notice in the Pennsylvania Gazette on March 25th, 1777: 

“At a meeting of the WHIG SOCIETY, held at the Philosophical Hall the first of April, 1777, Voted unanimously, That Messrs. Charles W. Peale, James Cannon, David Rittenhouse, Doctor Thomas Young, and Major Thomas Payne [sic], be a Committee of Correspondence for and in behalf of this Society, to correspond with any societies or individuals from whom they may expect to obtain information interesting to our common liberties. Extract from the Minutes, THOMAS YOUNG, Secretary.“ [Young would die on the battlefield shortly afterwards of disease.] 

Another active member was also a leader in the Society – Timothy Matlack. These six men had hundreds of close followers and activists. They led the formation of mass-democratic committees formed outside of Congress to organize and mobilize militia groups and represent the militia privates, investigate hoarding, counter the Tory spies in the population, and defend the war by opposing reconciliation with Britain, and to defend the new Pennsylvania Constitution. These were the same men, along with Benjamin Franklin, who fought and won the pamphlet wars in the spring of 1776 that secured the passage of the Declaration of Independence. Matlack was instrumental in forming the local militias and the defense of Philadelphia, later becoming a leader in government. Cannon was a mathematics professor and helped craft the Pennsylvania Constitution. Peale became the famous American artist, and fought beside Paine in the march across New Jersey in ’76. Rittenhouse was the famous American scientist who worked with Paine on gunpowder production and had written articles for Paine’s Pennsylvania Magazine. And Young was the leader of the Boston Tea Party, and a doctor, hunted by the British there, he fled to Philadelphia to join Paine. 

Led politically by Paine, these six formed the heart of the politics that secured the political strength to win the Revolutionary War. Its primary focus in addition to the above was to defend against the tactics of the Tories who wanted the Pennsylvania Constitution repealed, and against Tory supporters that included “founders” like Rush and Dickinson as supporters of the tactics. That Constitution was the most progressive and democratic probably in history, serving as the model for France’s 1793 Constitution (with Paine on its committee) which was never enacted due to the Reign of Terror. Cannon and Franklin were the main architects previous to the formation of the Society, as several historians pointed to Paine as the originator of its unicameral legislature and democratic structures. 

A reprinting in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on March 20, 1777 of one of the Whig Society’s posters in Philadelphia presents its positions as follows, “Post introduction: The following articles are handing about in this city, and were the first night signed by upwards of fifty, and since then by a considerable number of the friends of liberty: 

Whereas by the steady perseverance many true friends to liberty, and the public welfare, a happy coalition has affected between the different parties equally solicitous for the welfare of their country, the differing an opinion as to some means not essentially necessary for obtaining it, and there is a fair prospect of the restoration of order and the due establishment of civil legal authority, under which the strength of the state may be collected and exerted, and the inhabitants in every state of life be secured in the possession of peace and prosperity. And whereas it appears that there is nevertheless a scheme now forming to overturn all present order and authority, and to deprive us of the advantages of a militia law for our defense, and to throw our public affairs again into confusion, we, as names are underwritten, in order to prevent the irreparable mischiefs, which must ensue, she the enemy’s tour peace succeed, to solemnly engage yourselves to each other, and to the public, that we will most firmly adhere to and abide by the following articles. First, that we will, to the utmost of our abilities, support the just necessary authority of Congress, and the union independence of the American states, against all foreign power and domestic nations whatever.

Secondly, that we will, as far as in us lies, promote peace and good order in the state, and endeavour to bring to justice those who shall attempt to disturb either. Thirdly, that we will not, by force or violence, or by false representations, endeavour either to confirm or overturn a part of the present Constitution, contrary to the general sense of the state, but will refer the proof of every part thereof either to a candid reasoning or a fair experiment. Fourthly, then in the meantime we will, to the utmost of our power, support the civil magistrate in the execution of such wholesome laws as are or shall be enacted by the present assembly. Philadelphia, 18th March 1777.” The Whig Society went on to address Congress to petition it to suppress the activities of the Tory British sympathizers. Gary Burton representations, endeavour either to confirm or overturn a part of the present Constitution, contrary to the general sense of the state, but will refer the proof of every part thereof either to a candid reasoning or a fair experiment. Fourthly, then in the meantime we will, to the utmost of our power, support the civil magistrate in the execution of such wholesome laws as are or shall be enacted by the present assembly. Philadelphia, 18th March 1777.” 

The Whig Society went on to address Congress to petition it to suppress the activities of the Tory British sympathizers. 

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The Beacon #1 September 1, 2021

By Gary Berton

The Thomas Paine National Historical Association was founded in 1884 by political activists and freethinkers. It united the leaders of progressive political groups of the time into one body – socialists, anarchists, ex-abolitionists, activists for women’s voting, health and reproductive rights, labor unionists, free speech advocates against the Comstock Act, and advocates for human rights of all kinds. All of them freethinkers. Our Association continued this activism with people like Leonard Abbott, a leader of the Socialist Party, T.B. Foote and E.B. Wakeman, who ran for office with the People’s Party, several Board members had ties to Emma Goldman, and James Morgan, organizer of NAACP and friend of W.E.B. DuBois. The founders of our Association saw Paine as the symbol of the fights of their day, which remain the fights of today. 

The mission of the Association was to correct the false propaganda that historians used to marginalize, dismiss and mis-characterize Paine’s life, works, and legacy, which persists to this day, as lazy historians just pass on the tropes as established fact. Our Association is embarking on the ultimate realization of our mission to educate the world about Paine this Fall, when we will begin the official collected works of Thomas Paine, with an editorial board of the leading Paine scholars in the world led by our Association. This Building will be the center of that work, here in New Rochelle. 

The importance of Thomas Paine to New Rochelle, the country, and the world can be seen in his final writing as he lay dying in Greenwich Village – it was a letter to President Jefferson and he wrote it under the guise of being A Slave , in order to disguise his authorship from Jefferson (who would have known from his interactions with Paine anyway), but mainly to provide a greater emotional impact. Paine and Jefferson were friends since they sat down together in Philadelphia to create the Declaration of Independence.* This letter written by Paine to Jefferson unleashed the decades of fury Paine harbored against slavery and Jefferson’s hypocrisy. Paine only wrote and organized against it anonymously. No one had been able to identify the author of the letter, until now. It is appropriate that we announce the author here on the celebration of Juneteenth. It was the first call for reparations to slaves as part of the demand for completely annihilating the barbarous practice of slavery and make amends to some degree. 

A challenge was presented by a benefactor of history, Mr. Lapidus, to discover who the author was, and the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies (ITPS) at Iona College took up the challenge after other historians failed to do so. I was part of that team. The letter was written on Nov 30, 1808, and the original can be found in the Jefferson Papers online at the Library of Congress by just entering that date. Why Paine chose that date is unknown, other than he landed in America on Nov. 30 (but in 1774), and late 1781 was the approximate time Jefferson’s “Notes on Virginia” and the peace agreement to end the Revolutionary War occurred. 

When Michael Crowder and I, both of us from ITPS, first read it, we both had the same reaction – this sounds like Paine. It was a strong, perhaps the strongest, denunciation of slavery ever written, culminating in a demand for reparations for all slaves immediately freed going back to 1781, 27 years, and anyone continuing the practice of slavery are “a set of inhuman scoundrels, and ought to be tar’d and feather’d and tyed to the tale end of a dung cart, and horse-whipt throughout the country, from state to state, and forever after banished from human society.” (from the Letter) 

An article for a book from Cornell U Press has been completed and it will be published later this year presenting the proof of authorship. The content points to Paine: he addresses William Duane, editor of the Aurora newspaper and close ally of the Jefferson presidency, and to Jefferson. The letter takes to task Duane’s hollow praise of America while he ignored slavery, and Jefferson’s complacency by ignoring the utter corruption and inhumanity of creating the wealth of America through torture and brutality. The author had intimate knowledge as well as a history with both men. The context of the letter is that the author was disguised, it is not in Paine’s handwriting, and it was sent anonymously pretending to be a slave. The handwriting was that of Paine’s caretaker Mde. Bonneville, whose first language was French, so she misspelled many basic words as you will see. 

The computer text analysis of the letter, developed over 10 years at ITPS, overwhelmingly points to Paine when compared to all the abolitionist writers of the day. This methodology has far outpaced other author attribution software, by increasing accuracy to 90% plus, compared to the standard of 65%. 

Let me read one paragraph from the 24 page letter: Paine is speaking to Jefferson as a slave, the first part refers to the Slavery Clause taken out of the Declaration by Congress without any objection from Jefferson, and knowledge of that Clause was not publicly known, only someone close to the Committee who produced it: 

“What your reasons can be for keeping open that execrable market where MAN shall be bought and sold, which you wrote so warmly against in the year ’76, and condemn’d as a mark of disgrace, of the deepist dye in the Christian king of G. Britain, I cannot conceive. Is a crime of this execrable nature any more criminal in the Christian Crown of Britain, than in the Christian Executive of America? If not, what are your reasons, sir, for suffering us since 30th. Nov. ’81 to be troden under foot & abused in such an inhuman & bruital manner? Are not Our rites as well secured to us by every law of natures God as any man’s in the universe? we think so; therefore, sir, we consider ourselves, intitled to our yearly wages from that very hour, and no man in the government (except a tyrant) can dispute our demand a single moment. And you may depend on this sir, that we shall never be recconciled to this government till we git it, & our freedom with it.—I think sir, you can’t do yourself & your country a greater honour, nor your unfortunate country men a greater piece of justice and mercy, then by freeing your slaves & paying them their yearly wages from ’81 to this day. And then, if any slave-holder in America shall here after refuse or neglect so to do, let him or them be made an example of, and their heads be hung in gibbets for an everlasting monument; & a terror to tyrants & evil doers. O! Thomas, you have had a long nap, and spent a great number of years in ease & plenty, upon our hard earned property, while we have been in the mean time, smarting under the cow-hide and sweating in the fields to raise provision to nurse tyrants to cut our throat and perpetuate our own bonds.” 

Thomas Paine is the benchmark, the inspiration, the guide, the inspirer of the secular democratic trend in world history. His legacy is all around us: in Black Lives Matter, in separation of church and state, in the sanctity of government for, of and by the people, in civil and human rights. 

The bible of these first principles is in the writings and political struggles of Thomas Paine. 

And New Rochelle is the center of this legacy: 

• it is here that the recognition of his services to the Revolution was awarded, 
• here that the first monument to an American Founder was erected, 
• here that the only structure where Paine lived and wrote in America is still standing, 
• here that the headquarters of the Association that corrected the important legacy of Paine sits, 
• here that the resulting Institute for academic work should raise Paine to the level of vast importance, 
• and here that the official Collected Works of Thomas Paine will be produced for the first time.

It is not arcane historical curiosity that we look to Paine, but the inherent values unseen in the world before Paine, that remain today as the values we fight to establish still. His imprint on the movement for real democracy, not democracy in name only, is indelible and foundational, as is his blueprint for a rational society free of superstition. 

* The creation of Paine’s position of authority in the Committee of Five to draft the Declaration is proved by the discovery in 2012 of an early draft with a note from Adams testifying that Paine gave “permission” to have that copy made. See www.thomaspaine.org main page for a link to the article.

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

Before appearing on the lectern I fortunately took the precaution of re-reading Common Sense, and instead of finding myself in the presence of a marble portrait bust I met a man still living in what he knew to be “the undisguised language of historical truth,” leveling a fierce polemic against a corrupt monarchy that with no more than a few changes of name and title, could as easily serve as an indictment of the complacent oligarchy currently parading around Washington in the costumes of a democratic republic. Invariably in favor of a new beginning and a better deal, Paine was speaking to his hope for the rescue of mankind in a voice that hasn’t been heard in American politics for the last forty years, and the old words brought with them the sound of water in a desert:

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

The abundance of Paine’s writing flows from his affectionate and generous spirit. During the twenty years of his engagement in both the American and French revolutions, he counts himself “a friend of the world’s happiness,” believing that the strength of government and the happiness of the governed is the freedom of the common people to mutually and naturally support one another. Republican democracy he conceived as a shared work of the imagination among people of disparate interests, talents and generations and therefore, as the holding of one’s fellow citizens in thoughtful regard not because they are beautiful or rich or famous but because they are one’s fellow citizens. His thinking about the mongrel splendors of democracy echoes that of Plato in The Republic: “like a coat embroidered with every kind of ornament, the city, embroidered with every kind of character, would seem to be the most beautiful.”

The force of Paine’s writing is of a match with his purpose, which is to empower his readers with the confidence to know the value of their own minds. He frames his thought in language plain enough to be understood by everybody in the room, his remarks addressed not only to the learned lawyer and the merchant prince but also to the ship chandler, the master mechanic and the ale-wife. Paine’s writing is revolutionary because it is a democratic means to a democratic end. His learning is not bookish; it is drawn from the wide reaching of his experience as corset-maker, privateer, magistrate, engineer, tax collector, Methodist preacher. Unlike the political theorists employed by our own self-important news media, Paine doesn’t think it the duty of the political writer to keep things running quietly and smoothly. His aim is to arm ordinary individuals with the weapon with which to defend themselves against organized deception and arbitrary power. The intention is explicit in the composition of Common Sense, which is why it excited so welcome a response among readers everywhere in the colonies when it was published in January 1776.

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

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

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

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

But that was long ago and in another county.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So does the writing of Thomas Paine.

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Thomas Paine, an Englishman born in 1739, first became interested in politics when he was living at Lewes in Sussex. Here he joined the Headstrong Club, a society for young men who wished to debate current affairs, politics and poetry. Subsequently he went to work in London where he attended meetings of the Royal Society. Here he had the opportunity of meeting many learned men. This was the beginning of his programme of self-education. In London Paine met specialists in many fields. The one, which intrigued him most, apart from politics, was astronomy, and he drew on his knowledge of this subject many years later when he was writing The Age of Reason. Books on Paine have been published by scholars’ seeking to salvage him from oblivion. However they have either aimed their works at other scholars or have failed to reach a popular audience, beyond the academic community. Politicians and polemicists regularly quote him as one of their own; but they usually invoke him only by pulling a phrase out of his texts for present- minded utilitarian purposes. Such partial references to him offer no sense of the man, and distort him into a convenient icon. But, Paine is too important a leading political philosopher of his day, too significant in his exposition of democratic thought and prophecy into the future, to merit this treatment. This paper will discuss Paine’s involvement in the American and French Revolutions. Though he participated in a wide range of activities related to these events, his most effective contribution was through his writings, Paine’s involvement in the American War of Independence will be considered in two sections, relating to “Common Sense and the Pennsylvania Magazine”, and “the War of Independence against the forces of King George III” together with the Crisis pamphlets. This paper will then set out Thomas Paine’s involvement in the French Revolution, covering his “Reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution”, “Paine’s the Rights of Man”, and the “French National Assembly and Committee to formulate the Declaration of the Rights of Man”, and finally “Thomas Paine’s return to France for the next 10 years.”

At present work is being done both in North America and in England (Gary Berton, past President of the Board of Trustees of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, on the Committee of their Journal and their Research Committee and Audrey Taylor. Assistant Honorary Secretary or the Thomas Paine Society in England), which is aimed at authenticating how much the American Declaration of Independence depended for content and form on Thomas Paine. It is well known that Paine came close to losing the fight to establish democracy within the ruling circles in the American Colonies, because of the wish of John Adams, an American Federalist Congressman, who wanted to have a monarchy in the new United States of America. Paine would never have accepted this, because, to him, democracy was everything.

Paine’s Involvement In The American War Of Independence 

Works arrived from Moscow and were translated from Russian into local languages. Therefore it can be said that Thomas Paine was influential from his lifetime to the present day whenever a country has sought its independence.

This was the first indication of Thomas Paine’s influence after he wrote Common Sense in which he finally recommended a separation from Britain of these Colonies which he named the United States of America. Thomas Paine decided to join the Colonists’ Army following the British Army’s massacre of the British Colonists at Lexington and Concorde. He was then asked to become our equivalent of a war correspondent and then he wrote the American Crisis series. When there was a tremendous shortage of money in America he made a visit to France to ask them for financial help, which Louis XVI was only too willing to make. By the end of the War of Independence the British Colonists were ready to prepare their Declaration of Independence in which they set forth the rules by which their new country would be run, as suggested by Thomas Paine. 

Unfortunately they did not take his advice where slavery was concerned and so had to wait for the outcome of the Civil War before being forced to give slaves their freedom. Paine told the founding fathers that they were unjust in demanding their freedom from Britain when they were not giving freedom to their slaves, who were separated from their families and never paid. 

American War of Independence and the Crisis 

Series Paine enlisted in July 1776 with the ‘flying camp’ , a mobile body of one thousand men forming the militia of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Paine was attached to the Pennsylvania division. He served first as volunteer secretary to General Roberdeau and then at Fort Lee on the western bank of the River Hudson, where he became aide-de-camp to General Nathanael Green, retreating with the Continental Army to its winter base in Brunswick, New Jersey. 

In Modern terms, Paine was asked to be a war correspondent, enlarging on his series of pamphlets called Crisis (December 1776 to December 1783) on the ideas and principles first . sketched in Common Sense, which had crystallized, at least in part, in the Colonists’ bold Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. They began at a genuine moment of crisis for the American troops. In the summer of 1776, the American army had retreated across the Hudson River to New Jersey: Among Americans hatred of the British army ran high: They were as Paine noted, with some sharpness, in many cases not even British, but Prussians, Brunswickers, German dragoons and Indians with scalping knives. There were even Russian soldiers with their typical weapons the knout. 

George Washington, leader of the Colonists’ Army, could only muster five thousand men at the Delaware River, although later they were joined by General Williamson’s group of soldiers and the Philadelphia militia. This was all the Americans who were available to fight the entire force of soldiers led by the British General, Sir William Howe. Washington had been pressed back along the Hudson River, while Howe occupied Manhattan Island, Long Island and Staten Island, and in December, Paine says that Washington wrote sadly: 

“Your imagination can scarce extend to a situation more distressing than upon the speedy enlistment of a new army. If this fails I think the game will be pretty well up, as from disaffection and want of spirit and fortitude, the inhabitants, instead of resistance, are offering submission and taking from General Howe in Jersey.” (Quoted in Paine’s The first Crisis, 23rd December 1776)

The army’s situation as Washington had informed the President of Congress, was extremely bad as many of the troops were so thinly clad as to be unfit for their jobs. It was a bitter, icy winter with Arctic winds penetrating the men’s scanty clothes and with their feet wrapped in rags, owing to the lack of shoes and supplies. In November, Fort Lee had been surprised and Paine with the soldiers of Washington’s Army had retreated in haste, abandoning the boiling kettles and much-needed food baking in the American ovens, to the British. 

To his relief Paine had discovered that he did not lack physical courage. However he discovered a different weakness and wrote of it in one of the earliest issues of Crisis, addressed to Howe. He wrote with typical sympathy of a soldier’s psychological problems: 

“We cannot alter nature, neither ought we to punish the son because the father got him in a cowardly mood. However, I believe most men have more courage than they know of, and that a little at first is enough to begin with. I knew the time when I thought the whistling of a cannon ball would have frightened me almost to death: But I have since tried it and from that I can stand it with as little discomfort, and, I believe, with a much easier conscience than your lordship.” (Ibid)

His sincerity was not in doubt When Paine was at Trenton with the Pennsylvania Navy Board, he urged the men to set fire to the British fleet on the Delaware River, and was restrained with difficulty from personally carrying out the project. In December 1776, alarmed by American defeats and determined to bolster the cause of independence, Paine published the first of 4 his Crisis essays, (Ibid) which built upon the foundation of Common Sense. Washington’s great Christmas victory at Trenton, a notable turning point of the war, was achieved by troops heartened and inspired by this publication. No.1 contains the most quoted passage that Paine ever wrote: 

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny like hell is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” (Ibid)

Refuting British arguments for American surrender, rallying the Americans’ morale and exhorting the Revolutionaries to continue the war, Paine carefully timed his essays and other articles for maximum political effect. The Crisis series proved as popular and successful as Common Sense, although once again he was never paid for these works. Paine’s series provided ample reason for George Washington and other leaders to esteem him and value his writings as essential to the maintenance of the American cause. 

In April 1777 Paine became secretary to the Continental Congress’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, a title that Paine later shortened, misleadingly, to Secretary for Foreign Affairs. As he worked constantly for the Revolution and urged the creation of a truly national knit of government for the fledgling United States of America, Paine allowed himself to be drawn into the factional in-fighting of the Continental Congress. It was here that Paine showed that his sharpness in writing political documents was not matched by equally sharp debating skills, and this soon became evident to his friends and to his enemies as well. 

Thomas Paine’s problem was that he was a seeker of truth, totally unable to’ countenance anything underhand or corrupt. Quite undiplomatically he wrote and published his views about this, using his pen name Common Sense. It seemed to him (and he was later to be proved right when letters belonging to the persons concerned came to light), that some American notables, as well as several foreigners, were seeking to make their profits from the American War of Independence. This involved contributions from the French government to help the American colonists in their war with Britain. 

The factions within Congress lost no time in aligning themselves on opposite sides of the controversy surrounding Silas Deane, who was the agent for the transactions, together with the author Beaumarchais, but Paine seemed to disregard the political situation, looking rather simplistically at the overall affair. As a result he played into the hands of those he criticised, who became his enemies. In 1779 they tried to have him dismissed, but Congress partially 5 exonerated him and refused to dismiss him. Paine angrily resigned from his position. He filed a memorandum with the Pennsylvania legislature, detailing his services to the Revolution, and was duly given a position as a clerk. 

A new American envoy to France, Colonel John Laurens, was asked to negotiate further contributions from France to help the American war effort. As he was a very young man, he was loath to take on such a responsibility alone, so he asked Thomas Paine, a friend of his father, to accompany him as secretary. Paine took with him a copy of Common Sense to give to the French King, where there was no mention of monarchy or aristocracy. Although Paine did not speak or understand French at that time, he and Laurens managed to make themselves understood and Louis XVI was most generous to the American Colonists, who were fighting the enemies of the King Louis, the British. The negotiators were very successful and sent three shiploads of silver and goods back to America. 

Throughout this period Paine continued to write the Crisis essays analysing the events of the war and other pamphlets calling for American unity and governmental reform. The most noteworthy of these was called Public Good, which was published by Paine in 1780, perhaps the bleakest year of the War. In this essay, Paine argued with passion and conviction for the strengthening of the central government, so that the loose confederation of states could truly become one nation. In particular he urged that Virginia cede to the Confederation its claims to western lands, the settlement of which, Paine argued, would help to provide revenue for the United States. In the years following the Revolution and the winning of independence, Paine continued to write essays and pamphlets pleading for a strong national government. It was at this time that Paine met the Marquis de Lafayette„ who was going to remain his lifelong friend. Lafayette came from France to fight with the Colonists against the British. 

(At the end of the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States formed the League of Nations exactly following Paine’s advice but Wilson was not then on good terms with the leaders of Congress, who would not agree to America joining the League. However the United Nations was formed at the end of the Second World War, with its headquarters in New York.) 

Paine’s involvement in the French Revolution 

Reply to Edmund Burke’s ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’

Edmund Burke was a well-known Whig political orator, whose notable characteristic was a love of order. He resisted when, as he thought, sympathisers with the French Revolution wanted to abolish the government 6 He claimed that he loved liberty but only if it was connected to order. He had a distinct veneration for the accumulated wisdom of centuries of experience, and held that liberty should be treated with great caution. He claimed that a political system that had lasted a long time, seemed to him to be an argument that it was fit for a current purpose and should not be changed rashly. With views like this it was inevitable that he would not agree with such a revolution and in fact he threw himself violently into the opposition camp. He could not see the hopeful things emanating from the revolution and he was unable to discriminate between man and motives. His book showed great wisdom and practical insight and led the reaction in England. The book created fame for him within Europe. 

The French Revolution had already begun when Thomas Paine went to live in France as an honorary French citizen and an elected member for the Pas-de- Calais region of France in the new government. His great friends and colleagues were the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought in the American War of Independence, the Marquis de Condorcet and Georges Jacques Danton, a lawyer, orator and leader of the Revolution. Although Paine was unable to speak or write French, he was able to take part in discussions in the government, since one or other of his friends would interpret his speeches and let him know what was happening. Condorcet and Paine were elected to a committee to design a new constitution for France, together with its declaration of the rights of man. 

Through the Marquis de Lafayette who became the leader of the King’s Guard, Paine was able to keep abreast of everything that was happening in Paris. Following the storming of the Bastille and the massacre on the Champs de Mars, there was a lull during which, from time to time, Louis XVI and his Queen made several unsuccessful attempts to leave France: 

During a search of the royal apartments a lead safe was discovered containing… copies of correspondence between the French King and Queen and various crowned heads of other European countries. This was written evidence of treason against the people of France and they were arrested. Paine spoke in the King’s defence saying that while he was against the system of monarchy, he found it hard to speak against the King who had been so generous to the British Colonists in America and without whose aid there might not have been an independent republic so soon. He pleaded for their lives as people and not as royalty. He claimed that all the time they were alive it would preclude relatives trying to rebuild the monarchy and this would postpone a genuine republic being formed in France. Paine was proved to be correct in his prophecy, because France_did not truly become an independent republic until Louis Napoleon DI, his wife and son were granted asylum in Britain by Queen Victoria at the end of the 19th century.  

Paine had promised his friends in France that as soon as Burke’s book was published, he would ensure that a copy went to them for translation into French. However in January 1790 Burke made a speech in the British Parliament relating to his book, which he was to publish in the autumn of that year. His speech was so contrary to all Whig beliefs, as well as to anything, which he had discussed previously with Paine, that the tatter decided to analyse carefully Burke’s speech, and then his writing, when the book was eventually published. The speech’s warning gave Paine a headstart in writing his book, the first part of which was almost finished by the time that Burke’s book was published in November 1790. 

Paine’s book the Rights of Man, was to go down in history not only as a reply to Burke, but as a document of human rights which was to sound the clarion call for Chartism and the Reform Bill of forty years later, and for the universal franchise and social security in our own time. In 1781 Burke had even introduced a Reform Bill, including a proposal to prevent King George ITl from using large amounts of money from the Civil List on corruption, so there was nothing in Burke’s earlier political career to suggest that he would join the King’s Party physically or mentally. 

Paine and Burke had visited France some sixteen years previously but Burke had not visited it again and his book was based on third party information. Paine was receiving updated information about the Revolution from his friend Lafayette, and therefore considered that he was more likely than Burke to know the true facts of the situation in France. Lafayette was put in charge of the National Guard to the King of France, upon his return from America where he had fought the British. There was a popular revulsion in France against the activities of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the clergy, by whom the country was dominated. France was in a financial state bordering on bankruptcy and a parliament of 144 notables had been unable to resolve anything. At that time there appeared to be no intention of removing King Louis XV1 from the throne of France. The States-General had become the National Assembly, consisting of nobles and clergymen who were considerably outnumbered by the Third Estate, comprising lawyers such as Maximilien Robespierre coming from Arras, and intellectuals such as Volney and the astronomer Bailly, as well as a handful of artisans. 

The presence in the movement for reform of leaders such as the Comte de Mirabeau and Lafayette, demonstrated that the group included aristocrats and property-owners, who were certainly not anti-monarchial. Mirabeau was to hold the country together, bridging the gap between the King’s party and the revolutionaries. But the ordinary people of Paris, fearing some mischief from the King, stormed the Bastille. This was the destruction of a symbol of power rather than anything else. 

The Assembly met to arrange for some new regulations to be put in place. They abolished feudal privileges, serfdom and tax privileges. They clipped the wings of the wealthy priesthood, but this largely backfired because the effect rebounded on the poor dergy. There was even to be a democratic election of bishops. 

But the main target of Burke’s rage as set out in his book, was the march of the women of Paris to Versailles in October. Burke painted a lurid picture of a violent, uncontrollable mob storming Versailles and bringing the “mildest of monarchs and the most beautiful of queens”v” back to Paris in a state of fear. They had ruled over a spirited, honourable and cultivated nobility, a respectable clergy and an independent judiciary. (Burke, E.M. author of Reflections of the French Revolution. edited by J G A. Pocock, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989, page 153.) 

Paine challenged Burke point by point in his sober straightforward narrative in the Rights of Man, many of his facts having been obtained directly from Lafayette. Since then Paine’s account has largely been substantiated by contemporary historians. This march was mainly a protest from half-starving housewives. Lafayette followed the march with the National Guard and soon everything was under control. 

The marchers’ demands were presented to the King by Lafayette personally. The King agreed to them all, and was content to return to Paris the following day; but in the morning disaster occurred. One of the King’s bodyguards saw the crowd beginning to stir from sleep and fired on them. This enraged them and they broke into the palace. This relatively sober explanation was carefully ignored by Burke who presented it as a dramatic and very gory scene. 

Paine returned from England in the winter of 1789 to follow the progress of the revolution and to discuss it with his American and French friends in Paris. • Neither the Jacobins or the Girondins had yet acquired any strong leaders and there was still no question of the King losing his throne. Louis XVI had become a constitutional king and, if he had been a clever diplomat, he could easily have preserved the situation. Unfortunately he was surrounded by the courtiers and other sycophants. He was unduly influenced by his wife who was anxious to return to her native Austria. Under these conditions he was quite unable to adapt to the circumstances he now found himself in. 

Lafayette had put before the National Assembly, proposals for a Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen, which gave Paine the title for the book he was writing and would publish. While in Paris Paine had written to Burke to advise him on how well everything was going. 

Paine’s attitude to Burke’s book indicated that Paine feared the possibility of war. He said that he had seen enough of war’s miseries to wish he might never see one again, and hoping some other way might be found to settle differences, which occasionally arise between neighbouring countries. He observed that the state of harmony, which then existed between America and France could have been achieved also between England and France. Counter- revolutionary forces from other countries invaded France and induced a panic which led to the revolution’s temporary collapse. 

Paine’s rational reply to Burke, pleading for human rights for the common people, reached even more readers than Burke’s book in England overseas. But its greatest impact was in reinforcing the views of those already converted, and in convincing the poor who had nothing on which to stake a claim. Yet the Rights of Man did have an effect on the rich and powerful, because it alarmed the Pitt government, which instituted repressive measures and a level of censorship which Britain had not experienced for many years. 

There was a lot of political fighting in America and England at the time of the publication of the Rights of Man, doubtless due in part to the fact that the British government was discussing a trading affiance with the American government.. Perhaps Paine was tactless to have addressed his Rights of Man to the American President, George Washington. 

Paine’s description of the French Revolution, both from his own experience and from the information he received from Lafayette, the Marquis de Condorcet and other French friends, is said by modern historians still to be a valuable historical document. t. At a time when few men were like this, Paine was still able to be impartial in his comments. 

Paine tried at all times to be truthful and unbiased, as exemplified by the fact that he did not minimize the incidental loss of life. He said there was no doubt that it was the crowds of ordinary people who committed the burnings and who carried the heads of the beheaded upon pikes in Paris, but then this was not new to Britons who had seen similarly at the time of the English Civil War. 

The Rights of Man must also be regarded as a blueprint for a new society. Paine contradicted Burke, who claimed that the English Revolution of 1688 had set a pattern of English government ‘for all time’ and that the country could only be governed by the privileged classes and the aristocracy – to both of which groups he had recently himself been elevated. His claim was that only these men had the necessary experience. Paine considered this to be a violation of democratic human rights, and he said once again that the privileges of monarchs and aristocrats could not be inherited. Everyone, according to Paine, had the right to elect their own government, on condition that they did not require it to be imposed on the next generation. Paine’s theme was to stand up for the rights of the living, not of the dead. 10 

At Easter 1791 the French King and Queen tried to leave Paris for their residence at Saint-Cloud under the protection of Lafayette and the National Guard. Everything seemed to be very calm but there had been widespread rumours in Paris, that the royal couple were planning to escape abroad. The crowd found their carriage, and Lafayette, faced with a mutiny by a large section of his Grenadiers, was unable to protect the King and Queen unless they returned to the Tuileries. This caused the King, no doubt on the advice of his Queen, to complain to the Assembly. It was at this point that Lafayette began to feel that the royal family had not told him the truth about their plans and his loyalties became divided. 

One wonders how long it took the usually sharp-witted Paine to realize how Lafayette’s basically republican feelings were in conflict with his care of the royal family. In June the royal family again escaped from the Tuileries and the following morning Lafayette hurried to tell Paine. Paine would have been pleased if the royal family had reached a foreign country; in this event the Revolution could have continued and the King and Queen would not have been killed. Paine recorded that apart from some wild attacks on aristocrats being released from prison, Parisian life continued throughout the revolution period with the theatres, bars and restaurants being lit up and full of people. 

Paine was faithful in his friendships and could not support Marat, whose writings including those in L’ami du Peuple, took every opportunity to demand the downfall of Lafayette. But Paine was also ready to show his Republican principles and actively worked to disseminate them. He wrote and issued a Manifesto, which was translated and signed by a French friend, Achille du Chatelet, who may have made minor alterations to Paine’s text, which he had to sign, as the law required published documents to be signed by a French citizen. There was still little support for a republic and until September 1792, even Marat favoured a very restricted monarchy. 

Madame Roland, who held political discussion groups in her home, thought, like Paine, that it was a misfortune for the royal family to have returned to Paris. As well as sharing Paine’s views she also predicted that Louis would continue to obstruct the Assembly, and would make use of the armies of France’s enemies. In the Societe Republicaine, Paine published an article extending the ideas of the Manifesto and referring to the King as ‘Louis Capet’. He challenged Montesquieu’s theory that republicanism can only occur in small countries, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s view that ‘Liberty diminishes the larger the state becomes’. 

Paine believed that a Constitution for all to read, as being a likely remedy for the French people, as well as it had salved American ills. He said that France could only be called a civic empire when it had its own Constitution conforming to its Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. II 

National Assembly and Committee to formulate the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen

Paine had returned briefly to England and, according to Clio Rickman at whose home he was staying, Achilles Audibert, the French radical, arrived at the house on the 12th September, straight from the French Convention to request Paine’s personal assistance in their deliberations. Audibert came from Calais, which was one of four constituencies, which invited Thomas Paine to represent them in the Nations] Assembly. On 26 August the Assembly had conferred the title of French citizen on a number of distinguished foreign sympathizers including Paine, Wilberforce, Washington and the American poet friend of Paine’s, Joel Barlow. the accompanying invitation read: 

“Your love for humanity, for liberty and equality, the useful works that have issued from your heart and pen in their defence, have determined our choice. It has been hailed with universal and reiterated applause. Come, friend of the people, to swell the number of patriots in an assembly which will decide the destiny of a great people, perhaps of the human race.” 

Thomas Paine returns to France for the next ten years 

This then was the reason for Paine’s return to France, and not – as maintained by many of his critics – his arraignment for seditious libel in England. A thorough study of all Paine’s writings, and a great number of biographies and critical analyses of his works, leads to the conclusion that the Thomas Paine who leaps at you from the written page, would have been divided as to which he wanted more: the opportunity of being physically and actively further involved in the making of the French Republic, or the wonderful opportunity of standing up in court and disputing the charge of seditious libel, from which he would undoubtedly have derived great satisfaction. 

In 1791 on the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, a republican petition had been prepared by Paine against the King’s reinstatement. The excited crowds in the Champ de Mars, lynched two men of whom they were suspicious, and the Mayor of Paris was obliged to call out the National Guard. Lafayette arrived with the Guard to be greeted by a hail of stones. The National Guard fired upon a largely unarmed crowd causing a massacre of some 50 people. 

On 22nd September 1793, the National Convention declared a Republic at which point the newly-named first month, Vendemaire, of Year One began. Paine’s first triumph at the National Assembly was to cross swords with Dutton, newly elected Minister of Justice on a judicial matter. Paine’s inability to speak French was not a problem since he was able to converse with Danton in English. Danton had moved that judges should be chosen from any section of the community, irrespective of legal training or knowledge of the law. However Paine resisted this proposal as being too revolutionary, on the rational and commonsense basis, that justice could only be effectively administered by men of good legal knowledge and training. He further maintained that reforms in the law, where needed, could only be effective if planned as a whole, and not piecemeal. Paine won his point and Danton capitulated. 

The young Maximilien Robespierre took over the Convention in the autumn of 1793 and Paine found they had much in common. Incorruptibility, war and the death penalty were three main areas of agreement. Paine heard with pleasure of Robespierre’s proposal to abolish the death penalty. The liberal moral code of both Paine and Robespierre, included their belief in religion without intermediaries, and Robespierre envisaged replacing the Church by an “Etre Supreme”. There would be celebrations to this personage on the Champ de Mars in Paris for everyone to enjoy. 

Louis XVI was unable to defend himself at his trial, because a quantity of correspondence with the enemies of France had been found in the royal apartments. The object of this correspondence was the enemies’ successful invasion of France and the restoration of the King on the throne as absolute monarch. Paine, the humane idealist who could never forget the help of Louis to the American cause, tried to help him. In a paper read to the Convention on 21 November, he stated the following: 

“I think it necessary that Louis XVI should be tried; not that this advice is suggested by a spirit of vengeance, but because this measure appears to me just, lawful and conformable to sound policy. If Louis is innocent let us put him to prove his innocence; if guilty let the nation determine whether he shall be pardoned or punished.” (Doyle, William, The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press. p.167)

When Louis was found guilty on 17 January 1793, Paine wrote, as a member of the National Assembly, confessing that he was far more ready to condemn the Constituent Assembly, when he thought of the unaccountable folly, which restored the King’s executive power. Paine suggested that the United States of America could become a royal asylum, bearing in mind the amount of help, which Louis XVI gave to the American War of Independence. There, Louis might learn from the constant aspect of public prosperity, that the true system of government consisted in fair and equal representation. Paine submitted the suggestion, remembering the debt of gratitude, which America owed to every Frenchman_ Paine said that he was normally the enemy of monarchy, but he could not forget their human frailties. He reminded the court it had already been proposed by Maximilien Robespierre, that the death penalty should be abolished.  

In his Address to the People of France, Paine was both adulatory and optimistic, ending with the suggestion that they should begin the new era by instructing, rather than taking revenge, and by ensuring a greatness of friendship to welcome the approach of union and success. He was delighted when he was appointed to the Committee for framing a new French Constitution. This Committee originally had been the idea of the Marquis de Condorcet, and it was he who led the discussion while Paine drafted a Declaration for Rights to accompany the Constitution. These documents were adopted after many amendments, on 25 June 1793. 

Paine’s apparent friendship with the American Ambassador, Gouverneur Morris had added to Marat’s dislike of Paine, because Morris was distrusted by the Revolution due to his relationship with the English Court, and the Assembly had finally written to America asking them to replace him. The Assembly was also suspicious of Paine because of the stand he had made for saving the King’s life. Paine had written to Marat, whose suspicions of Paine may have been lulled as a result, so that when Robespierre demanded a more stringent law against foreigners, Paine was one of two foreign deputies, who were accepted. 

Ten months in the Luxembourg Prison and then return to America 

Paine had been warned against attending the Assembly, because Danton was to be arrested, and, as a friend of Danton, possibly Paine would also be arrested. Paine had been advising Barere, in charge of the Committee of Public Safety, on a project for sending commissioners to America in order to obtain American food aid for France during the war with England. Barere feared a massive country-wide famine. At his request Paine wrote long and lucid arguments for Barere to use, and spent a good deal of time taking the matter up with American sea captains whose vessels had been held up in Bordeaux, because the French feared that the English navy would seize them. The captains appealed personally to Paine after their useless application to the American Ambassador, Morris. 

Barere instigated the Reign of Terror, when he presented a report to the Convention on 5 September, which contained the words: “Let us make Terror the order of the Day”. Paine had already published Part 1 of The Age of Reason,  and planned to leave it with the American poet Joel Barlow, if there was a risk of him being arrested. It was also Barere who made the speech leading to Paine’s arrest. He gave some very incredible excuses to Paine, but at least in his Memoires, he told the truth about Paine’s help in saving France from famine. 

When Paine was arrested he found an excuse to visit Joel Barlow’s lodgings with his captors and was able to leave with him Part 1 of The Age of Reason, without his captors’ knowledge. Various reasons have been put forward as to 14 the reason for his imprisonment, but none of them have been confirmed. Paine was able to complete the second part of The Age of Reason despite his poor state of health while in prison. When James Monroe was brought in as the new American Ambassador Paine was at last released. At first Paine was nursed by Mrs Monroe when he was so ill that they feared he would die. Gradually he recovered and moved into the home of Nicholas de Bonneville, who produced a radical newspaper in Paris, and his family. With the coming of Napoleon Bonaparte came an amnesty for all emigres and Paine finally was able to return to America. It has been said that he actually met Napoleon Bonaparte while staying with the de Bonneville family and that Bonaparte had read many of his works and found them ‘most interesting’. However I must say that there is no actual proof of this meeting. 

Paine’s involvement in British and Irish affairs 

Paine had drawn up a detailed topographical plan for the invasion of Britain but this must have been kept with the rest of his manuscripts, which he left for safe keeping with Madame de Bonneville, who gave them to her son. Nicholas de Bonneville was a French Radical friend of Paine and when he knew that Paine was returning to the U.S.A. he asked him to take his wife and three sons to America where de Bonneville thought they would have better lives. However following his death Madame de Bonneville inherited everything belonging to Thomas Paine and his land and house were divided between the two elder de Bonneville boys, who had remained with Paine. His manuscripts were subsequently passed to General de Bonneville and were “accidentally” lost in a fire at the General’s home. 

When Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Theobald Wolfe Tone asked Thomas Paine to obtain French ships and men to invade Ireland the French government was not averse to helping them, but on the advice of an Irish American they did not do so immediately because he recommended waiting until the United Irishmen were more of a cohesive group. It is believed that this Irish American was a Colonel William Tate who later led a French invasion force to Bantry Bay, but on their first attempt they were prevented by violent storms. The very fact that this fleet had been sent encouraged the United Irishmen particularly since the British then used military coercion in Ulster in 1797. The rebellious Irish were mixed Catholics and Protestants and the rebellion was severely squashed. 

The first French-based raiding party after that was due to attack Newcastle where the Legion Franche were to burn the docks and shipping and destroy the coal mines. The second party was to land at Bristol going on to Wales and Liverpool with the Legion Noire. These two groups of soldiers comprised mainly convicts. It was a weak plan based as it was on expecting great military action, but using the poorest quality of troops. Martell° Towers 15 had been built on Bere Island in Bantry Bay and were the forerunners to those later built by the English. 

Britain had been saved because none of the French troops spoke or understood English and only the aristocracy could speak and/or understand French so that there was no rapport between the French and the English. The non-appearance of the British Navy, the one, which Pitt had reassured Parliament in October 17% was the “national defence of this kingdom in case of invasion” did nothing to persuade the ordinary Englishmen that this was a cause for them to join in. After the recapture of [(Biala, Wolfe Tone was captured by a British warship and committed suicide. The utter failure of the Irish invasion did not stop the related diversion raid against Wales. The French arrived at Fishguard in February, for what was to prove to be the last time that Britain was ever invaded. It was not planned to harm the British people but to be the first step in liberating the oppressed poor of the country from the domination of the English ruling classes, thereby alighting the fire of independence and democracy. 

The French had left Brest in Brittany on 18 February and anchored to the north-west of Fishguard. From information received from a captive, they were misled as to the size of the fort’s militia and they sailed out to Carreg Wasted Point, out of reach of the militia’s guns. Meanwhile the French soldiers were looting and setting fire to churches in a manner hardly conducive to encouraging the local people to join in a revolution and rise up against their oppressors. Lord Cawdor on behalf of the British Army demanded Tate’s surrender. 

All of these events led to a run on the Bank of England and it suspended cash payments, but instituted bank notes to the value of El and £2. People were suspicious of these novel notes and many found them hard to use in a commercial way. Things gradually calmed down and normal trade continued. 

With the failure of the French-aided attempts at invasion of the British Isles followed by Admiral Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet in Aboukir Bav in 1798 the immediate threat of further invasions seemed to disappear until Napoleon created himself Emperor when considerable monies were spent on fortifications such as 74 lvlartello towers on the South Coast of England and 40 on the east coast. Each tower had a cannon on top with a one mile range. They cost £3,000 each to build and were to carry 24 soldiers each. 

This was the time of the Royal Military Canal being built from Rye towards London and Birmingham and when Weed on Beck in Northamptonshire was planned to be the emergency capital of Britain in case London were to fall. Chatham was the next fallback position and this time led to the birth of the semaphore system between Chatham and Portsmouth. In 1852 when Louis I6 Napoleon 111 came to power further large sums were spent on fortifications against the French.” 

Paine’s involvement in Russia 

Common Sense reached either St Petersburg in Russia or, more probably, Leipzig, where it had been translated into German. The young Russian Radical, Alexander Radishchev, was studying jurisprudence there at the instigation of Catherine the Great. Several books have been written on the subject of Radishchev: “The First Russian Radical”, by David Marshall Lang while Jesse Clardy wrote another, but the most up to date information has been researched and written by a fellow Russian, !Cara Rukshina, who is presently working in the U.S.A. [n her work she established that Radishchev was familiar with Common Sense from its inclusion in G. Th. Ravnal’s A History of the Two Indies (1780 edition). Until now the question of Paine’s influence on Radishchev has received no scholarly attention, writes Rukshina This was probably due to the fact that when Common Sense  was first published it did not have Paine’s name on it as the author. 

Ravnal described Common  Sense  as the ideological foundation of the French Revolution. However Rukshina claims that Radishchev had an excellent command of English and could have read an original English-language copy when he was at Leipzig University or in the famous multi-lingual library of his employer, the Count Vorontsov. The main difference between Paine’s book and that of Radishchev’s A  Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow is that Radishchev considered the monarch’s death essential and unavoidable while Paine only wanted the position of the monarch to be removed. 

Radishchev’s ideas laid the groundwork for the revolutionary tradition in Russia. Karl Man is said to have had a library containing two copies of each of Thomas Paine’s works and Nikolai Lenin was known to have read Radishchev’s work as well as that of Raynal, and, during his time in London was to have read the rest of Paine’s works in English. Therefore the thinking behind the Russian Revolution of 1917 can be said to have been influenced by Thomas Paine. 

Cuba and South America influenced by Paine 

Copies of Paine’s works had been circulated throughout Argentina, Bolivia and Mexico since 1816, so they had been read and considered by the Castro family and other revolutionary-minded young men for generations before Fidel Castro came on the scene in 1953. In 1955 Castro went to Mexico and teamed up with the Argentine doctor, Che Guevara. 

Fidel Castro had tried several times to overcome the right-wing government of Batista in Cuba and did not succeed until, accompanied by his brother Ratil 17 and Dr Ernesto Che Guevara, they won a rousing victory with the backing of the ordinary people in January 1959. Castro assumed control of Cuba and governed without a formal constitution until 1976. Castro frequently asked for financial aid from the government of the U.S.A. but when this was not forthcoming, he publicly proclaimed his allegiance to Marxism-Leninism on 2 December 1961. Although Castro retained political independence from the Soviet Union, the Cuban economy came to depend on billions of dollars in Soviet aid. 

Che Guevara was a keen follower of Thomas Paine, and Fidel Castro in his defence before the court of Santiago de Cuba in 1953, claimed that “Thomas Paine said that a just man deserves more respect than a crowned rogue”, thereby indicating that he was well aware of Paine’s political writings. 

In Latin America Common Sense and the American Crisis papers were only translated in part, but were used as symbols by leaders of independence movements. In South America no biographical details about Paine were known and his political writings were concentrated. upon Paine was a symbol of toleration and individual human rights. In Argentina a Spanish translation of Common Sense circulated in Buenos Aires during 1816 and inspired heated discussion in the local press. A number of political documents such as the Declaration of Independence and several state constitutions were circulated in translation but only Paine’s major political works attracted comments in the press. 

The works of Paine, which were readily available consisted of parts of Common Sense the Dissertation on First Principles of Government, the Rights of Man, the Dissertations on Government the Affairs of the Bank and Paper Money. The sections from Common Sense include Paine’s famous distinction between government and society, and his demonstration of the superiority of republican over monarchical government. Paine’s forthright method of expression was well received in Buenos Aires. 

It could be argued that Paine’s ideas were foremost in the minds of Central and South American revolutionaries, because they were all reared on the works of Karl Marx and Lenin. It is also possible to argue that wherever revolutions have taken place in the world in modern times, the leaders were also educated in Marxism or Leninism. Either Paine’s works arrived in countries, directly in English, say from America, and were then translated into local languages, or his work was directly translated into Spanish or Portuguese. 

CONCLUSION 

Few men could have led such a fascinating life as Thomas Paine. He saw two momentous revolutions at the end of the 18th century, in America and France and was heavily involved in both of them. He always felt that the only one which was a true Republic was America, though he could easily be accused of prejudice where “America was concerned. Nevertheless by 1802 when Paine left France, the country had an imperial monarchy ruled every bit as tyrannically as that before 1789. Paine had forecast that this would happen and events proved him right By contrast the U.S.A. was, and remains, a genuine republic. 

Paine never claimed that his writings were original; what was original was the way in which he wrote. He used a simple, straightforward style, which was very easy to understand. Paine did not write for the academic audience but for the ordinary people and it can be argued that following the publication of Common Sense followed by the Rights of Man and the tremendous number of copies of each that were sold or borrowed or available in taverns or reading rooms, his words did not reach exactly the people to whom they were addressed. It can be said therefore, that Paine achieved what he set out to do, which was to make the ordinary people understand that they could eventually enjoy the social reforms, which he talked about He did not guarantee when this would happen, nor that it would happen without them being involved in pushing their politicians to take action. 

If taxation was tackled – and he showed how this could be done equitably – there would be sufficient money to carry out all the social reforms, which he had described. His aim in life had been to improve the life of the ordinary people, who had nobody else to speak for them. He considered that if a government was run according to the plans he had suggested, then people would be happy. Paine said that insufficient food, clothing, housing and work was not sufficient to make people happy. 

Without the benefit of modern communications, Paine was able to act as a prophet to two revolutionary bodies: the American fight for independence and the French for liberty, equality and fraternity. Equally he made major contributions to the English evolution towards extended suffrage. His failure to make the American Revolution into an egalitarian movement must have been a bitter blow to him. It was the English, after Paine’s death, who made policies out of his proposals. 

Paine is still a controversial figure, but his ideas have never lost their power or their appeal. To read any of his works today is to read a modern, well written and easily understandable text.

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IS IT REASONABLE to believe that the man wrote ‘all men are created equal” also owned several hundred slaves and considered blacks “inferior to whites in the endowment of mind and body?” 

The first phrase, of course, is from the Declaration of Independence, the second is from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, presumed author of the Declaration. 

That Jefferson owned slaves (so did Washington) does not diminish his stature as one of the great libertarian fathers of the republic. A powerful advocate of the separation of church and state, Jefferson framed the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, an achievement guided by his argument that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry.” To Jefferson, “the care of every man’s soul belongs to himself.’ Refounded the University of Virginia, the first truly non-sectarian college in America. A gifted architect, he also designed the buildings. 

Despite his social position as a wealthy plantation owner, Jefferson persistently held that “nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate that these people (slaves) are to be free. As a master, Jefferson was kind to a fault, and the evidence suggests he was loved by his slaves. 

Yet even one of Jefferson’s most sympathetic biographers, Gilbert Chinard, was distressed by the Virginian’s racial attitude. Chinard wrote, *He was a Puritan in so far as he felt that the American people were a ‘chosen people,’ and Anglo-Saxon.” And Claude G. Bowers, in his book, “The Young Jefferson”, provided a practical reason for Jefferson’s ownership of slaves by contending that it “would have been Quixotic and destructive of his own economic life.’ Considering America’s largely agrarian economy at that time, Bowers was probably right. But with all things weighed, could Jefferson still have actually written a document proclaiming that all men were equal? 

There is strong evidence to suggest he didn’t write the Declaration. 

On June 10, 1776, Jefferson was made chairman of a committee chosen by the Continental Congress to draft the Declaration. Other members of the committee included John Adams, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin and Robert Livingston. The five bickered over who should actually write the text, but the job was finally entrusted to Adams and Jefferson, the former for his fame as a lawyer, the latter for previously writing the preamble to the Virginia constitution. But neither Adams nor Jefferson considered himself capable of writing the document and both wished to shun the responsibility. Adams late recalled their dispute: 

The Committee met, discussed the subject, and then appointed Mr. Jefferson and me to make the draught; I suppose because we were the two highest on the list. The sub-Committee met; Jefferson proposed to me to make the draught. I said I will not.

‘You should do it,’ said Jefferson.

‘Oh,no.’

‘Why will you not?’, asked Jefferson.

‘I will not.’

‘Why?’, insisted Jefferson.

‘Reasons enough’, replied Adams.

‘What can be your reasons?’

‘Reason first, you are a Virginian and Virginia ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason second, I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular.'”

Jefferson finally agreed to compose the manifesto, a job that would have taxed the facilities of even the most seasoned statesman, such less the sensibilities of a 33-year old congressman. 

Aware that the slavery question was singularly the most volatile issue, Jefferson knew that some of the representatives of slave-holding states would veto any proposal to free the blacks. Nevertheless, the document had to be fretted. 

During this crucial period Jefferson was in close touch with Thomas Paine. Earlier that year, Paine had written Common Sense, the stirring pamphlet that pressed for separation from Britain. In his 47 page treatise, Paine had not only directed that a “declaration for Independence’ be drawn up, but had urged Americans to set a day aside “for proclaiming the Charter. Brilliantly conceived, the pamphlet was unmatched in its persuasive power. 

An outspoken enemy of slaver, Paine was also the first to publicly advocate emancipation of the Negro in his Essay on African Slavery in America, published in Phladelphia in March 1775. This work became so popular in such a short time that only a month after its appearance, the first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia. 

Sharing similar ideals, Jefferson and Paine became intimate friends, an alliance that was culminate in 1791 with Jefferson’s endorsement of Paine’s herculean handbook of democracy, Rights of Man. 

Three days after the committee was appointed, Jefferson submitted to Adams, then to Franklin, a rough draft of the Declaration. Corrections, says Bowers, were made ‘mostly in phrasing and in the choice of words.’ Finally, on June 28, the polished document was presented to Congress in Carpenter’s Hall, Philadelphia, for approval. As was expected, objections from the southern delegates, particularly those from Georgia and South Carolina, caused the delegation of the clause:

“He (George III) has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most Sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying Them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death in their Transportation thither…He has prostituted his Negative (veto) for Suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or to restrain an execrable Commerce, determined to keep open a Market where MEN Should be bought and Sold, end that this assemblage of Horrors might Want no Fact of distinguished Die.”

Adams did all he could to defend the clause which could have finally put an end to the slave trade. Jefferson, too, was disappointed and partially blamed “our northern brethren…for though their people had few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others. 

Jefferson removed the clause and sent the edited copy to his fellow delegate from Virginia, Richard Henry Lee, who had originally proposed to Congress that a declaration be drawn up. Lee replied: 

“I thank you much for your favour and its enclosures by the post, and I sincerely wish, as well as for the honour of Congress, as for that of the States, that the Manuscript had not been mangled as it Is.” 

Lee regretted that the Declaration had been “mangled” and Adams felt that “the purpose of the Declaration was to level all distinctions.” 

The mangled Declaration was ratified on July 4. 

Now despite his prudent opposition to slavery and the fact that the Declaration, as we know it, is in Jefferson’s handwriting, there has been doubt that he actually wrote the original draft containing the slavery clause. Morally, Jefferson hated slavery; economically, he depended upon it. In view of the circumstances, could Jefferson have beer so profoundly moved as to write a clause against slavery? And what of the whole stricture of the Declaration? Its literary style? Phraseology? Are they characteristic of Jefferson? 

Historial, Julien P. Boyd was not convinced that Jefferson wrote, most importantly, the original draft of the Declaration. In his scholarly brochure, The Evolution of the Text, published by the Library of Congress in 1943, Boyd said “there is evidence in the Rough Draft itself, the significance of which apparently has been overlooked, pointing to the fact that the Rough Draft was copied by Jefferson from another and earlier document or documents.” Yet Boyd gave no indication as to what “document or documents” Jefferson could have copied from. 

Boyd may not have been aware that a more positive view was set forth in 1892. Biographer Moncure D. Conway, in his two volume , Life of Paine described the events of June 1776: “At this time Paine saw much of Jefferson, and there can be little doubt that the anti-slavery clause struck out of the Declaration was written by Paine, or by someone who held Paine’s anti-slavery essay before him.

Dr. Conway felt that the literary style and sentiments of the deleted slavery clause ‘are nearly the same” as these phrases from Paine’s essay:

“That same desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain is rather lamentable than strange… these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by steeling then, tempting Kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, In order to catch prisoners…Our traders In MEN, an unnatural commodity must know the wickedness of that SLAVE TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts; and such as shun and stifle all these, willful sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden Idol… to go to nations… purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, Is an height of outrage against Humanity and Justice.”

In support of Dr. Conway’s theory, Joseph Lewis, late author and Secretary of the Thomas Paine Foundation, maintained that the use of the word ‘hath” in the Declaration was vital evidence indicating the handiwork of Paine. Lewis argued that the “old English word was not generally used by the people of the American colonies, with the exception of the Quakers.’ Paine was of Quaker origin. 

Lewis pointed out that while the word was used only once in the Declaration, it nevertheless “may be the key which unlocks the secret to many of Thomas Jefferson’s most important papers…. In his ordinary correspondence and his individual State documents, Jefferson does not use the word once, despite the fact that these voluminous writings aggregate more than three million words.” 

Yet, Lewis argues, “In Common Sense alone, a pamphlet of only fifty thousand words, Thomas Paine used the word ‘hath’ at least one hundred and twenty times.

The word ‘hath” appears in this phrase frame the Declaration: ‘and accordingly all experience hath shewn…’ (Lewis also noted that the word shewn as spelled with an “e” in the Declaration, was Paine’s way of writing it. ‘The word is always spelled with an “o” in Jefferson’s writing, and was the prevalent way of spelling the word in the colonies at that time.’)

Prior to Common Sense, Paine also used the word ‘hath’ in one of his provocative calls for Independence. In this work, published in the Pennsylvania Magazine in October, 1775, Paine intimated that the inevitable document of separation should also abolish slavery once and for all: 

”I firmly believe that the Almighty, in compassion to mankind, will curtail the power of Britain. Ever since the discovery of America she hath employed herself in the most horrific of all traffics, that of human flesh, without provocation, and in cold blood ravaged the hapless shores of Africa. When I reflect on these, I hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will separate America from Britain. Call it Independency or what you will if it is the cause of humanity it will go on.”

And later, in Common Sense, Paine coordinated the precents of the Declaration:

“Were a manifesto to be published, and dispatched to foreign courts, setting forth the miseries we have endured, and the peaceful methods which we have Ineffectually used for redress; declaring at the same time that not being able longer to live happily or safely under the cruel disposition, of the British court, we had been driven to the necessity of breaking off all connection with her…such a memorial would produce move good effects to this continent than if a ship were freighted with petitions to Britain.”

To say unequivocally that Thomas Paine wrote the original draft of the Declaration of Independence exceeds the limits of speculation. But one of the first questions a skeptic might ask would be why, if Paine wrote it, he never admitted authorship. 

There are several plausible reasons. 

First, he was not a member of the Continental Congress and therefore had no official authority. 

Second, he was an Englishman. At the time of the Declaration, he had been in America only two years. Hence, he would have been open to suspicion. That is why Paine wrote Common Sense, published only five months before the Declaration, together with numerous prior works, he used pseudonyms. 

Thirdly, he characteristically chose to remain silent on anything that could damage America’s reputation even to the sacrifice of his own literary pride. Loyalty to principle, rather than fame, was later expressed “But as I have ever been dumb on everything which might touch national honour so I mean ever to continue so.” 

It is also relevant to mention that linked with Paine’s impassioned pleas for independence was his clear vision and support for an American republic:

“The mere independence of America, were it to have been modeled after the corrupt system of the English government would not have interested me with the unabated ardor it did. It was to bring forward and establish the representative system of government that was the leading principle with me in all my works during the progress of the revolution.”

On the other hand, Adams and Jefferson, in all their years of association and correspondence, widely differed in ideas on government and avoided discussion of America’s political destiny. In a letter to Jefferson, Adams recalled:

“You and I have never had a serious conversation together that I can recollect concerning the nature of government. The very transient hints that have passed between us have been jocular and superficial, without ever coming to any explanation.”

With the evidence already presented, it is not inconceivable that Paine, with remarkable perception and clearheaded purpose, wrote the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. In view of his irrepressible denunciation of slavery, vigorous literary style and similarity of his anti-slavery essay to the deflated clause, the theory of his authorship is plausible. The spelling and use of the words “hath” and “shewn,” peculiar to Paine throughout his writings, together with his close contact with Jefferson during the sultry months of 1776, further enhance that possibility.

But there is another piece of evidence, perhaps the most enigmatic of all, that adds more to the mystery. It is a puzzling sentence contained in one of Paine’s last letters to Congress. The letter was written in 1808, one year before he died. Paine was impoverished and was desperately trying to obtain a small allowance:

As to my political works, beginning with the pamphlet Common Sense, published in the beginning of January, 1776, which awakened America to a declaration of independence (as the president and vice-president both know), as they were works done from principle, I cannot dishonour that principle by asking any reward for them.”

It is difficult to determine what Paine is bringing to mind. It sounds sarcastic when he says, “as the president and vice-president know” (Thomas Jefferson was president and George Clinton was vice-president). What is it that they know? That he (Paine) wrote the Declaration of Independence? Or that his political works inspired the manifesto to be written? We know of his perpetual silence “on everything which might touch national honor. “Therefore, even In his most destitute state, Paine would never disclose secrets injurious to America’s reputation. 

But as mysterious as the circumstances are, another firebrand of the Revolution, Samuel Adams, was more convinced: “There is as much evidence in favour of Thomas Paine’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence as there is of any other man.” 

What do you think?

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IT IS EXTREMELY difficult for those living today to realize the critical situation which existed in what were then the American colonies of Great Britain before July 4th, 1776. The Colonies were in a ferment regarding the injustices they were suffering under British rule, but it was not until the publication of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, that the people were aroused enough to demand independence. 

The majority of people, among them Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Adams, were ready to suffer the ills of the situation, rather than fly into conflict with the most powerful nation on earth, such a course of action seemed certain to lead to defeat and disaster. 

It was left to one man, who conceived this country as an independent nation, to carry this fight to its ultimate conclusion. It is now generally agreed by reputable historians that it was Paine’s Common Sense which lighted the torch of the American Revolution. 

When the pamphlet was first published, its sale was amazing · perhaps one of the greatest publishing events in history. Thousands upon thousands of copies were sold as they came off the press. How many copies were bought by the people may never actually be known. Certain it is that everybody at that time who could read possessed a copy of the book. It caused the members of the Continental Congress to pass a resolution, declaring that “these Colonies are, and of right, ought to be, free and independent…

Paine’s admonition in Common Sense is worth quoting here. He wrote: “To conclude, however strange it may appear to some, or however unwilling they may be to think so, matters not, but many strong and striking reasons may be given to show that nothing can settle our affairs so expeditiously as an open and determined DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.” Paine also proposed “that a day be solemnly set apart to proclaim the Charter.” It was done as he suggested. That day was July 4, 1776. The greatest day in the history of man’s struggle for freedom. 

And so the members of the Continental Congress voted on the resolution to draft the Declaration as Paine suggested. 

The committee appointed to prepare the document was composed of five men, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingstone, John Adams and Richard Henry Lee, who had introduced the resolution in the Continental Congress. But because of the illness in Lee’s family, which necessitated his return home, Thomas Jefferson was appointed in Lee’s place. 

When the pamphlet Common Sense was published, it received high praise but by no means unanimous acceptance. Its cry for independence provoked bitter and vigorous opposition. Independence was looked upon with horror, and was bitterly denounced. There appeared numerous pamphlets and resolutions opposing independence and seeking some form of redress and reconciliation with Britain. Had it not been for Thomas Paine and his unquenchable desire for a Free and Independent nation, it is quite likely that the United States of America would never have come into existence. 

In order to answer this powerful opposition against independence, Paine resorted to every literary means at his disposal to answer his critics. 

In the first of these pamphlets he signed his name as “The Forester.” When the situation became more intense and the opposition threatened to split the country in half, Paine published the now famous pamphlet entitled, A Dialogue Between the Ghost of General Montgomery, Just Arrived from Elysian Fields, and an American Delegate, in the Wood near Philadelphia. This work appeared in late May or early June 1776, I was so certain that Thomas Paine was the principle character in this mighty struggle and because of my deep familiarity with his philosophy of government and style of writing that I was convinced without a shadow of doubt that Thomas Paine had written the Declaration of Independence, which he had first proposed for the Colonies in his pamphlet Common Sense, that I wrote a book, Thomas Paine, The Author of The Declaration of Independence, to demonstrate it. 

In this book I gathered and detailed overwhelming evidence to prove that the author of Common Sense was also the author of America’s Charter of Freedom. 

It was my contention that Paine had prepared the manifesto for the committee appointed to “draw it up”. Thomas Jefferson was selected by the committee to “prepare” it for an impatient Congress. That Jefferson “mangled” the document, as characterised by R.H. Lee, there is no denying. When I had finished my book, I thought the evidence was so conclusive that I did not think I should discover additional facts to further lend support to my thesis. However, I did. I am happy to have found this additional evidence, which so conclusively and irrefutably proves Paine’s direct connection with the Declaration of Independence, that I am constrained to make it the subject of this special article. 

In The Dialogue, Paine argues, with equal emphasis, as he did in Common Sense, using the dialogue form to answer all questions of those still in doubt as to our separation from the “Mother Country”, and the establishment of a new nation. In order to understand the full significance and importance of this pamphlet, it should be read not only in its entirety, but in connection with and in association with the Declaration of Independence. It must be remembered that Paine resorted many times to this method of the dialogue narrative in expressing himself. 

In the pamphlet, to express his thoughts, Paine uses the ghost of Gen. Montgomery, who died in battle, and a Delegate to the Convention, as characters in these dialogues.

The Delegate, who represents those still in doubt as to what course the Colonies should take, says to Montgomery: 

‘”But suppose the terms you speak of should be just and honourable?” 

And Paine answers through Montgomery. 

“How can you expect these, after the King has proclaimed you rebels……I see no offers from Great Britain but PARDON. The very word is an insult upon our cause….And from whom do these offers come? From a Royal Criminal?” 

Then, again, Paine makes the Delegate speak, expressing the sentiments of many sincere and loyal subjects, as Paine wanted no question, no matter how untenable and insignificant it seemed, unanswered. 

Del. “Will our distance and Charter protect us from the influence of the Crown?” 

Gen. Montgomery. “Your distance will only render your dangers more immanent and your ruin more irretrievable.” 

Del. “Will not a declaration of independence lessen the number of friends and increase the rage of our enemies?” 

Gen. “Your friends, (as you will call them), are too few, too divided, and too interested to help you. 

After asking every possible question and stating every possible object- ion to Independence, Paine answers each and every one with devastating logic, and he concludes with his final peremptory remark, when General Montgomery says: 

“But I forbear to argue any further with you. The decree is finally gone forth; Britain and America are now distinct empires… 

The decree, of course, was the Declaration of Independence. How did Paine know that “the decree is finally gone forth,” unless he, himself, had written it? 

This pamphlet seems to have aroused a more determined opposition, and the Tories threatened a proclamation expressing their loyalty and devotion to the Crown, in a declaration of DEPENDENCE! 

This Declaration of the dissenters of New York did appear shortly thereafter, and it was signed by nearly 500 of the most prominent citizens of that time, which caused the State of New York to hesitate in falling in line in adopting the Resolution of Independence passed by the Continental Congress. 

Philadelphia, the cradle of Liberty, also teemed with vast elements of opposition. The Tories vastly outnumbered the Patriots, and the Quakers put up the breastwork of religion to avoid supporting the fight for Independence, until castigated by Paine, in his Epistle to the Quakers. 

Paine took cognizance of the growing and menacing opposition of a large segment of the population, and sensing the importance of taking advantage of every opportunity to inform the people, wrote a letter in which he used the name “Republicua”, just as he used assumed names to answer the critics of Common Sense. It should always be born in mind that Common Sense was written anonymously. 

This letter was written to supplement Paine’s Dialogue, in which he advanced cogent and persuasive arguments pleading for Independence, and to silence the mounting and dangerous opposition of our intention to govern ourselves. 

It was a last minute and final appeal in favour of Independence and Paine did not mince words in denouncing the opposition. The letter appeared in the June 29, 1776 issue of the Pennsylvania Evening Post and until now has never been attributed to Paine. To me the letter is typical of Paine’s writing and I have no hesitation in ascribing its authorship to him. I quote the letter in full: 

Every moment that I reflect on our affairs, the more am I convinced of the necessity of a formal Declaration of Independence. Reconciliation is thought of now by none but knaves, fools, and madmen; and as we cannot offer terms of peace to Great Britain, until, as other nations have done before us, we agree to call ourselves by some name. I shall rejoice to hear the title of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in order that we may be on a proper footing to negotiate a peace. 

Besides, the condition of those brave fellows who have fallen into the enemies hands as prisoners, and the risk which every man runs, who bears arms either by land or sea in the American cause, makes a declaration of independence absolutely necessary, because no proper cartel for an exchange of prisoners can take place while we remain dependants. It is some degree of comfort to a man, taken prisoner that he belongs to some national power, is the subject of some state that will see after him. Oliver Cromwell would have sent a memorial as powerful as thunder to any king on earth, who dared to use prisoners in the manner which ours have been. What is it that we have done in this matter? Nothing. We were subjects of Great Britain, and must not do these things. Shame on your cowardly souls that do them not! You are not fit to govern. 

Were Britain to make a conquest of America, I would, for my own part, choose rather to be conquered as an independent state than as an acknowledged rebel. Some foreign powers might interpose for us in the first case, but they cannot in the latter, because the law of all nations is against us. Besides, the foreign European powers will not be long neutral, and unless we declare an independence, and send embassies to seek their friendship, Britain will be Beforehand with us; for the moment that she finds that she cannot make a conquest of America by her own strength, she will endeavour to make an European affair of it. Upon the whole we may be benifited by Independence, but we cannot be hurt by it, and every man that is against it is a traitor. 

REPUBLICUS.

I urge you to re-read this letter with scrupulous care and I am confident that you will see, as clearly as I do, not only the unmistakable character of Thomas Paine, but also his inimitable style of writing and his mode of expression. 

This letter was Paine’s last warning. Let me quote a pertinent paragraph: “Some foreign-power might interpose for us in the first case, but they cannot in the latter, because the law of nations is against us.” Now, what is the meaning of this statement? 

The French fleet was standing by to intercede on our behalf as soon as we declared ourselves a nation. To come to the aid of a nation is a different matter from helping a rebellion. One, diplomatically, is permissible; the other, is an act that could provoke war. As Paine so dramatically states, that “the law of nations is against us”. Without a Declaration of Independence, France’s gesture of help would of necessity have brought on a conflict with-England and neither nation was looking for war with each other. 

The French government of the time was anxious, short of war, to vent her animosity upon England, and was willing to aid the Colonies. Paine warned about expecting help without being a nation and stressed the absolute necessity of a formal Declaration of Independence. “Time was of the essence”, and there was not enough of it for another pamphlet, hence the “Republicus” letter. You must become cognizant of these facts, aware of the existing situation, to fully appreciate the situation and understand the reason for Paine’s statement. Only in this light can you obtain a proper understanding of the situation existing almost two centuries ago. Is it any wonder that Paine denounced the opponents of Independence as “knaves and fools”? 

When you consider all the circumstances, you can then understand why the Continental Congress appointed Paine Secretary of Foreign Affairs. 

Is it not strange that if Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, that he was not appointed Secretary of Foreign Affairs? 

We can now fully appreciate why Colonel Laurens, when appointed to go to France to negotiate a loan vitally necessary for Washington’s army, refused to go unless accompanied by Paine, and prompted Laurens to comment that “Paine knows more about diplomacy than I do”. 

In this letter we read, as in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, the name “The United States of America”. To Paine, also, belongs the credit and honour of having given our nation its name. 

If anyone other than Paine had written the letter signed “Republicus”, it is highly unlikely that he would have remained quiet during and after the revolution. Don’t you suppose he would have proudly identified himself as the author of the letter, and claim credit for naming the new Republic, as Paine did in the second number of The Crisis, when he said that the “United States of America” will sound as pompously in the world or in history as the kingdom of Great Britain”? 

The historical importance of this letter by Republicus cannot be overstated. 

What has contributed so much to the failure to recognise this letter as being from the pen of Thomas Paine is the fact that he has been denied his proper place in American history. Every conceivable slander, lie, and false accusation to discredit this great patriot has been heaped upon him. History books have studiously omitted his name and politicians have avoided association with him. Even presidents, who quote his immortal words, do not credit him with the quotations they use.

Nearly all the social legislation and welfare laws of our generation can be traced directly to him. He is the fountainhead of modern social and political philosophy. Why, then, has he been so sadly neglected? He wrote his great book, The Age of Reason, and religious fanatics have never ceased to pour hatred and vituperation upon his innocent head, and yet nearly every modern and enlightened theologian has accepted his basic premises. 

And equally as important as the previous facts just recorded, is a letter which I recently discovered, and which, in my considered opinion, binds and seals the connecting link of Paine’s authorship of the Declaration of Independence. Paine wrote to the Senate of the United States, asking compensation for the expenses he incurred in his trip to Europe with Colonel Laurens, to secure a loan for Washington’s struggling army. 

The war is over and the United States of America is now firmly established. Paine feels shamefully neglected, and, while pleading for a just reimbursement, he makes this significant statement in a letter which was written in January 1809 and addressed to the Honourable Senate of the United States, a few months before his death. In this letter he writes: “As to my political works, beginning with the pamphlet Common Sense, published the beginning of January 1776, which awakened America to a declaration of independence as the president and vice-president both know as they were works (emphasis mine) done from principle, I cannot dishonor that principle by asking any reward for them…” 

Is there any question, in the face of these indisputable facts, that Thomas Paine and Thomas Paine only, wrote the Declaration of Independence, the greatest political document proclaiming the Rights of Man in the history of the human race? 

You might ask, “Why did not Paine sign the Declaration of Independence?” The answer is simple. He was not a member of the Continental Congress, nor an official of the government. 

Perhaps it was that Jefferson so mangled the document that Paine did not press his claim with more vigour, or was it because he did not wish to embarrass the third President of the United States, a close friend to whom Paine owed more than one debt of gratitude.? 

Is it any wonder that John Adams, who was upon the scene and knew the : facts, had to admit that “History will ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine” and that “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain”? 

No matter how you use it, no matter how you spell it, no matter how you pronounce it, Thomas Paine and the Declaration of Independence are synonymous terms. 

I am indebted to Professor Robert Ginsburg, Dept. of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State College, for calling my attention to the letter. The letter is printed in J.H.Hazelton’s book, The Declaration of Independence – Its History, without any attribution or note of the date it appeared in The Pennsylvania Evening Post. 

GEORGE WASHINGTON

Mr. Lewis characterises this letter as “abusive” and untrue. George Washington (he points out) wrote this to Thomas Paine: 

Your presence may remind Congress of your past services to the country; and if it is in my power to impress them, command my best services with freedom, as they will be rendered cheerfully by one who entertains a lively sense of the importance of your works, and who with much pleasure, bribes himself, your sincere friend… 

Mr. Lewis reminds Professor Catlin that Washington was President of the United States and one of the Founding Fathers. “Did a President of the United States ever write you a letter like that?”, Mr. Lewis asks the Professor.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Thomas Jefferson, another President of the United States and one of the Founding Fathers, wrote this to Thomas Paine: 

“…I am in the hopes you will find us returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times. In these it will be your glory to have steadily labored, and with as much effect as any man living. That you may live long to continue your useful labors, and to reap their reward in the thankfulness of nations is my sincere prayer…”

“Did a President of the United States ever write you a letter like that?”, Mr.Lewis asks the Professor. 

JAMES MONROE

James Monroe, again a President of the United States and a Founding Father, wrote this of Thomas Paine: 

The citizens of the United States cannot look back upon the.’ time of their own revolution without recollecting among the names of their most distinguished patriots that of Thomas Paine. Is it necessary for me to tell you how much all your countrymen, I speak of the great mass of people, are interested in your welfare? They have not forgotten the history of their revolution and the difficult scenes through which they passed… You are considered by them as not only having rendered important services in our own Revolution, but as being, on a more extensive scale, a friend of human rights, and a distinguished and able advocate in favor of public liberty. To the welfare of Thomas Paine, the Americans are not, nor can they be, indifferent…” 

Again, Mr. Lewis asks the Professor: “Did a President of the United States ever write you a letter like that?”. 

Next, Mr. Lewis cites the resolution of the Congress of the United States: 

“Resolved: That the early, unsolicited and continued labors of Mr. Thomas Paine, in explaining and enforcing the principles of the late Revolution, by ingenious and timely publications upon the nature of liberty and civil government, have been well received by the citizens of these states, and merit the approbation of Congress…” 

“Did a governmental body ever pass a resolution like that on your behalf?”, Mr. Lewis asks. 

“It is quite obvious”, he goes on, “that you are not wholly acquainted with the history of the American Revolution”. 

He then turns to Professor Catlin’s descriptions of Thomas Paine as the dictionary “deplorable scoundrel” and a “foul-mouthed rogue” definitions are: Scoundrel: “A man without principle, a mean thorough- going rascal, worthless knave…”; and Rogue: “A thoroughly dishonest and unprincipled person; a knave; a trickster…”. Thomas Paine is no longer able to defend himself or to bring action for libel, but, says Mr.Lewis: 

“I am alive and am assuming the role of Thomas Paine’s defender and I am-going to make you put up or shut up” 

“What act or deed did Thomas Paine commit that caused you to call him a deplorable scoundrel and a foul-mouthed rogue?” 

THE CHALLENGE 

Then comes Mr. Lewis’s challenge: 

I now publicly offer you the sum of One Thousand Dollars for one iota of evidence that Thomas Paine was guilty of taking a dishonest dollar. I demand proof of this charge. 

I now publically offer you an additional One Thousand Dollars for an iota of evidence that Thomas Paine ever wrote one line advocating dishonesty or urging anyone to commit a dishonest act. I demand proof of your charges and if you fail to comply with this demand, you shall go down in history as a companion of the detestable James Cheetham, the convicted libeller of Thomas Paine. 

On the back of the Thomas Paine Foundation letterhead there are some quotations from Paine’s writings, says Mr. Lewis. “Was it any of these sentiments that caused you to call Thomas Paine a deplorable scoundrel and a foul-mouthed rogue? It was Paine himself, who said: ‘How easy it is to find abusive words’.” 

“Unless you make a retraction of your utterly outrageous attack upon Thomas Paine, ‘one of the best and most useful men who ever lived’ I shall”, Mr. Lewis tells Professor Catlin, “when I return to London, consult a firm of solicitors for advice as to whether the statement in your letter…”I hope the citizens of Thetford will have the moral courage to blow it up’, is subject to legal prosecution for advocating violence and the destruction of public property”. The words and mode of expression of your letter are not those of a “man who professes to be a member of one of the learned professions”. 

And Mr. Lewis concludes: “Had enough?” 

Apparently Professor Catlin had, for apart from suggesting Fleet Street for the statue he refused to take up the challenge. 

“…. my maternal great-grandfather, Captain Hill, a British soldier of yeoman stock, spluttering patriotism and piety with hallowed fierceness, was fighting radicalism and rebellion in London. The one heirloom my mother bequeathed me-his sword, and many a day when I played about her knees she told me with pride how her grandfather had been sent with a troop to arrest a notable villain and traitor Tom Paine, and how he angrily drove the sword into Paine’s bed when he found that the ruffian had fled. Paine, secretly warned, did in fact fly from London to France in 1791.” (Joseph McCabe Eighty Years a Rebel. Girard, 1947. p.6.)

(Editorial Note). This claim that Paine fled to France to avoid arrest has been questioned. Paine left England to take up his seat in the French Convention and despite the warning received from the artist William Blake about the proposal to arrest and charge him seems to have departed from the country in the normal manner without any undue haste. It seems possible that the departure and the planned arrest coincided by accident thus giving birth to the notion that Paine fled the country.

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