Back in 2020, I was asked by the South Coast Rail Partnership (SCRP) if I could create a poster exhibition about Thomas Paine in the four waiting rooms in Lewes Railway Station. I was keen to tell the story of two men, Thomas Paine and General Gage, Britain’s Commander-in-Chief in North America at the outbreak of the American Revolution. Both had strong links to Lewes, Paine residing here from 1768 to 1774 and the family seat of the Gage family at Firle just five miles east of Lewes. Covid struck and froze the work but I recently suggested that we could mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by resurrecting the project.

The posters were hung in late December 2025, this time badged as a TPHA project with my having recently joined its Board. As I hung the posters, public engagement was immediate! People kept asking questions while I hung them! It was very heartening as I had no idea that it would work at all. The challenge was to give enough information without too much detail. Judging from the initial responses I think we got the right balance.

Here are the posters:

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Thomas Paine’s words leap from the written page. How did Paine sound when speaking? Raised in Norfolk, Paine lived in England until age 37 when he sailed to America in 1774. One may assume he spoke with a British accent distinctly different than how English was spoken in the American colonies. That assumption, like other assumptions about Paine, calls for deeper inquiry. Upon inspection, the evidence is that Paine sounded as if he was born in America. 

Despite a general belief among English speakers in Britain that it was Americans who rejected traditional rules for speaking, the contrary is true. This is confirmed in a 2018 article by BBC commentator Christine Ro, “How Americans preserved British English.” 

Contemporary observers expressed surprise at how well English was spoken in America in the late 18th century. A visitor to Philadelphia in the 1760s was startled that “‘the English tongue’” was “‘spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection surpassing any but the polite part of London.’” 

An Englishman visiting during the Revolution observed in his diary that, although “‘the inhabitants of this Country are composed of different Nations and different languages, yet it is very remarkable that they in general speak better English than the English do.’” 

Until the end of the 18th century, English was spoken virtually the same way in England and America, asserts Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman in Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language (Random House, 2009). 

Today’s British accent emerged in the 19th century. As the century progressed, Americans largely retained traditional ways of speaking English while England radically deviated from those linguistic roots. Spoken British English and American English diverged. 

On the cusp of the 19th century, the English began dropping the final “r” sound from words like “mother” and “far” to say “mothah” and “fah.” By the early 1800s, educated Britons were saying “lahf ” and “bahth” and “dahnce” while pronouncing the “h” in “herb.” 

O’Connor and Kellerman report speakers in England began dropping whole syllables. For example, they shortened the word “secretary” to “sec- -tree,” cutting off the next to last syllable. Americans continued to pronounce “secretary” and other words in the traditional way, articulating all syllables, as England had. 

So, when Paine arrived in Philadelphia, speaking the English he’d spoken for 37 years in England, both he and those hearing him may have noticed little difference in their respective accents. We have no record of how Paine heard the speech of Americans, nor how they heard Paine’s speech. We have clues. 

Among the few surviving comments on how Paine spoke English came from the Englishman Abraham Raimbach, upon meeting Paine in Paris in 1802. He observed that Paine was “fluent in speech, of mild and gentle demeanor, clear and distinct in enunciation, and his voice exceedingly soft and agreeable.” 

While recognizing the paucity of evidence for how Paine actually spoke, it’s reasonable to extrapolate. We know that Paine, upon arriving in Philadelphia, rapidly fit into the political and social cultures he found in his new home. Since residents of England and America at that time spoke English in ways that were virtually indistinguishable, the way Paine spoke blended in well with the way Americans spoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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Imagine Thomas Paine as a “raw and adventurous” youth, scurrying up a ship’s rigging in storm-tossed waters, overwhelmed by the booms of two dozen cannons fired in unison, the clouds of choking smoke, and the violent lurches of a shuddering ship. In Age of Reason, Paine recalled the greatest dangers came “not by cannon balls, but by splinters from the inside of the ship that fly in all directions.” 

Perhaps Paine’s worldview took shape in war. Paine biographers often cite his Quaker father and Anglican mother, his small-town upbringing in Thetford, his forced departure from schooling at age 12 to apprentice in staymaking, effectively ending his formal education. Debate persists if he made corset stays or rope stays for ships. Either way, for young Thomas, the purgatory of grueling, tedious handwork weighed on him.

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Ishmael went to sea “to hurtle after adventure and to inspect the self in a personal quest for truth and knowledge.” Young Paine apparently felt that same pull of the sea. 

He first tried fleeing to the sea in 1756 on the privateer Terrible, commanded by Captain William Death. Paine’s father pursued and begged his son not to go. Good thing, for the Terrible sank midway through its voyage with only a handful of survivors. 

Paine’s next escape attempt in 1757 succeeded. He found adventure on the privateer King of Prussia. For more than six months, he pursued prizes from seized French merchant ships, a life-changing event. 

In “Thomas Paine, Privateersman,” historian Alice Berry writes, “most privateersmen, like their piratical counterparts, sailed not for the glory of King and country, but for profit.” All hands shared the bounty. 

Understudied by biographers of Paine’s youthful years is the impact from his six months of shipboard life amid the Seven Years War. At age 19, he faced his first personal encounter with globalism. Paine worked with or fought against multinational ship crews. All profited directly from their oceanic capitalism. 

Privateers had their own sociability. Anthropologist David Graeber in Pirate Enlightenment, describes a “collectivistic ethos” aboard ships of plunder, including privateers. Graeber writes they were “experimenting with new ways of organizing social relations …happening not in the great cities of Europe — still under the control of various Ancien Régimes — but on the margins of the emerging world system, and particularly in the relatively free spaces.” 

As an inexperienced sailor, Paine’s job was to be “able-bodied,” ready to fight when needed. A knowledge sponge, he was eager to learn the ways of the sea. His desire to learn from experience led him later to observe about seamanship lessons, “a few able and social sailors will soon instruct… active landsmen in the common work of a ship.” 

In his later years Paine told his old friend Thomas “Clio” Rickman that he had “seldom passed five minutes… however circumstanced, in which he did not acquire some knowledge.” 

For Paine, as a curious young privateer exposed for the first time to a wide cross-section of humanity and worldviews, life at sea was a kind of higher education in the ways of the world. 

Paine’s early practical education was put to good use two decades later when he wrote Common Sense. He was able to knowledgeably present precise costs for building a navy. He accurately calculated the “charge of building a ship of each rate [type], and furnishing her with masts, yards, sails and rigging, together with a proportion of eight months boatswain’s and carpenter’s sea-stores.” 

In coming years, Paine’s naval experiences filtered into his fiscal analyses like a political crystal ball to see the future. Paine asserted that for the British, “the expense of the navy is greater than the nation can bear.” He backed up his statement with detailed calculations of the interest rates for the navy debts that Britain was incurring.

In addition to advising his colleagues on the construction and operating costs of navies, he addressed matters of naval invention and engineering by writing about deployment of gunboats for invasion and defense, also the rights of neutral vessels in times of war. His reasoning sprang from knowledge and experience. Paine’s youthful months at sea gave him understanding he carried with him for the rest of his life. 

NOTE: 

Essay excerpted from Thomas Paine and the Company He Kept, a doctoral dissertation in progress by Joy Masoff, PhD candidate

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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 Edmund Smith

A curious teenager sifting through my fathers small library, I opened up a cardboard-boxed book by Joseph Lewis, Inspiration and Wisdom from the Writings of Thomas Paine, signed by the author. Contained within were numerous short and longer quotes of Paine’s writings, filled with such clarity, power and sense! I felt drawn back to that book numerous times.

I came to Paine not as an academic, but as a “common man.” My life’s bent was as a naturalist, eventually a science teacher. History was a hobby for light dabbling. Always pulled toward Paine, I once asked a high school social studies department chair what he thought of Paine. He grimaced and said he despised Paine for having sought the execution of King Louis XVI, who had supported the colonies against England. I believed him and assumed I had misread Paine. Soon after, I read the truth about him in France. I was shaken that a respected history teacher could err so badly.

In time, I learned that much of Paine’s “history” is false — he was a drunk, a filthy little atheist. “He had lived long, did some good and much harm.” The true history of Paine’s treatment was worse — spat on when he returned to America, denied service, denounced in newspapers and physically accosted in the streets. Even the Quakers refused him burial privileges. 

Why then did young Lincoln have a copy of Age of Reason and quote from it, causing his concerned friends to hide this fact from public view? Why was Jose Gervasio Artigas so inspired by Paine that he led the revolution that founded Uruguay? How could Robert Ingersoll and Thomas Edison come to write defenses of Paine with passion, eloquence and glowing praise?

I joined the TPNHA hoping to learn more of Paine, to discover if he wasn’t, in fact, optimis hominus. Here I learned of Paine’s anti-slave letter to Jefferson. I wondered, would there have been a Civil War if the founders listened? Would we have a prouder American history? No race massacres? No razing of Black Wall Streets? No Green Book? No impugned Black welfare mothers? No necessity for Black Lives Matter? 

Here in the TPNHA, I learned that wherever Paine went, he profoundly moved the needle of progressive history. His pamphlets and books helped form modern America, England and France, earning immediate translations into other languages. That’s known. Few know about his several weeks’ sojourn in Mystic, Connecticut, with Madame Bonneville’s family. Few know he dove into the creation of the Connecticut state constitution. For me, there is no greater catalytic enzyme to accelerate progressive movements everywhere he journeyed. 

I ponder what were Paine’s other achievements that we know nothing about, partly from many of his papers being lost in a fire, mostly from public rejection of him since Age of Reason was published in America. 

When he wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” what if the world had listened to his views regarding religion? Would Europe’s Christians have engaged so deeply in the Jewish Holocaust? 

Would there have been the Irish “Troubles?” Would Christians, Muslims and Jews still be squabbling over shared holy acres, scattered throughout the Mideast? Would there be war in Gaza and Israel today? 

Why did the world miss its chance for the equitable, sustainable and happier world that Paine envisioned? Why did our ancestors not pay heed? 

Carl Sagan, a Paine admirer, wrote: 

What an astonishing thing a book is. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Thus I hear Thomas Paine speaking to me. He still lives. He still wants the world to listen. 

To achieve the civilization we can still have, if only we listen and take action, have we fairly named ourselves homo sapiens, wise humans? Would a better fit be homo insipiens, senseless, or homo acedians, peevish?

I joined the TPNHA because Paine still lives among us, on bookshelves, yes, but moreso here in The Beacon. There are still statues to be cast, a national monument to be built, national school curriculums to be written, and biographical movies to be made with enough drama without the slightest exaggeration. 

“We — even we here — hold the power and bear the responsibility,” said Lincoln, channeling Paine when trying to save our nation. Do not both speak directly to us at this moment, as our modern American democratic government again teeters?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only everything could be so clear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest works of modern British history, E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. While a celebration of the emergence of collective class consciousness, this magnificent study is not without key personalities and individual inspirational figures, not least Thomas Paine of Thetford, an inveterate pamphleteer and veritable ‘citizen of the world’. 

Paine is the key individual catalyst instigating Thompson’s narrative. It was his great gift for communication his ‘intellectual vernacular prose’ – which broke through the elite and gentlemanly conventions of 18th political debate to render the message of natural rights and rational republicanism accessible to ‘members unlimited’, the strapline of the new Corresponding Societies of the 1790s (whose membership extended to those designated by Edmund Burke, Paine’s protagonist, as the ‘swinish multitude’). A great communicator rather than original thinker, it was citizen Paine who opened up the prospect of a new age of reason in which universal and natural rights (at least for men) would no longer be denied by privilege and the past, by spurious argument premised on dubious history, bogus constitutionalism, invented tradition or inherited superstition. 

Thompson’s interpretation underlined Paine’s importance in what was labelled by historians as the ‘Atlantic-Democratic Revolution’. In the 1960s, my undergraduate days, this exercise in comparative history breaking through the constraints of nation state historiography was as fashionable as Thompson’s history from below. In light of events in Syria which have prompted the US to remember France as its ‘oldest ally’, the Atlantic Democratic Revolution might come back into fashion again. 

Paine traversed the Atlantic world, personifying, as it were, the democratic revolution with its universal message, a motif which informed ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’, the alternative national anthem, as it were, of British republicans. Here, for example, are the first and fourth verses: God save great Thomas Paine, 

God save great Thomas Paine, 

His ‘Rights of Man’ explain 

To every soul. 

He makes the blind to see What dupes and slaves they be, 

And points out liberty, 

From pole to pole. Why should despotic pride Usurp on every side? 

Let us be free: 

Grant Freedom’s arms success, 

And all her efforts bless, 

Plant through the universe 

Liberty’s Tree. 

Having been apprenticed to his father’s trade of corset-making, he tried a number of other occupations (most notably serving as an exciseman in Lewes) before sailing for America in 1774, having recently separated from his second wife. Here he made his name with a pamphlet, Common Sense(1776) which, in advocating complete independence for the American colonies, argued for republicanism as the sole rational means of government the mostly widely distributed pamphlet of the American War of Independence, it has the strongest claim, the Dictionary of National Biography notes, to have made independence seem both desirable and attainable to the wavering colonists. Relishing the freedom of the new world (and its potential for commercial progress) Paine readily cast aside the restrictive and gentlemanly conventions of British politics, not least the exclusive tone of Whig ‘republicanism’, a form of ‘civic humanism’, premised on glorified models of classical antiquity and selective memories of seventeenth century constitutional struggles. Far from democratic, ‘republicanism’ of this order accorded political primacy to independent landowners. Guardians of the constitution, it was their duty to resist imbalance and corruption in the polity through civic virtue, by active participation in political affairs. Paine, however, was altogether more democratic and inclusive. Looking beyond the trivia of piecemeal constitutional renovation, he sought an end to executive tyranny and what we would now call ‘sleaze’ through the ‘virtue’ and common good of representative democratic republican government. Hence his enthusiastic response to the French Revolution, by which time he had returned to England. 

His democratic natural rights republicanism reached its most influential expression in his two-part Rights of Man (1791-2), prompted by the need to refute Edmund Burke’s critical Reflections on the Revolution in France. This was a publication sensation- on the most conservative estimate between 100,000 and 200,000 copies were sold in the first three years after publication. In the frenzied atmosphere of the early 1790s, Paine’s writings rendered a fundamental division between the gentlemanly ‘Friends of the People’ and the plebeian ‘Friends of Liberty’. His insistence on natural – as opposed to historicist or constitutional – rights broke through elite constraints, not least the identification of political rights with property rights. Indeed, his democratic republicanism mediated a genuinely radical value-system, oppositional in all its aspects. In calling for a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution, he sought a decisive break from the conventional ways and means of reformers such as petitioning. Regarded as a highly dangerous figure, he was forced to flee to France to avoid arrest for treason in 1792. Having been accorded honorary French citizenship, he gained election to the French National Convention but ceased to attend after opposing (to some surprise) the execution of Louis XVI and the fall of the Girondins, after which he himself soon fell victim of the Terror. During imprisonment, he began work on his Age of Reason (two parts, 1794-5), an ill- timed deist attack on organized religion. 

Thereafter his fame and fortunes declined. According to most accounts, he died in miserable circumstances in New York in 1809, having spent his last years in America often depressed, drunk and diseased – although some responses to my BBC history piece suggest otherwise. Ken Burchell contacted me from an email address, Paineite@gmail, to inform me that Paine’s financial worth at time of death was in the region of $15,000, that with a consumption of a quart of brandy per week he drank far less than either Washington or Jefferson and that he was no more depressed than any other elderly dying person. The fact is, Mr Burchell insisted, ‘prudish, evangelical, pro-temperance and most of all Federalist writers attacked Paine’s personal character in order to blunt his personal influence … just as they do today’. Paine’s legacy has certainly proved controversial and contested. 

Within my working life as an historian, there has been considerable change. There was a marked decline in his historiographical standing as the radical 1960s receded. By the time of Thatcherite Britain, mainstream historians were dismissing Paine and his autodidact artisan audiences in the Corresponding and radical societies as an insignificant minority, accorded disproportionately tendentious attention by Thompson and other ‘marxisant’ practitioners of ‘history from below’, ideologically predisposed to ignore the beer-swilling, male chauvinist, xenophobic, beer-swilling, flag-waving majority. Furthermore, the historical establishment insisted, ‘Painophobia’ the reaction proved by Paine – proved stronger than the radicalism he excited. Compelled to answer the democratic Jacobin challenge, conservative opponents of reform developed a convincing defence of the existing order: indeed, it was the conservatives who won the unprecedented battle for the popular mind in the 1790s, although here it was conceded that rhetorical strategy and propaganda device took precedence over ideology and intellectual argument. Burke had already set the tone, recapturing the language of nationalism for the conservative cause in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Vindicated by the subsequent course of events in France, Burke’s prescient pronouncements duly confirmed the supremacy of the accumulated wisdom of precedent and prescription over the wild (and un- English) fanaticism of Paineite abstract reason. Two particular aspects of Paine’s un-English fanaticism were seized upon by the conservative spin doctors of the time to telling effect: levelling and infidelism. 

While extolling Paine as a popular communicator, Thompson had also insisted that he provided the programme as well as the language to attract working people to politics. Paine provided the missing link between parliamentary reform and social and economic progress, drawing distressed workers away from spontaneous rioting into organized political agitation. As Thompson saw it, this was the great achievement of Part Two of The Rights of Man, published in February 1792, a volume which confirmed that Paine was much more than a talented populariser of advanced ideas, a megaphone for the enlightenment project against kingcraft, lordcraft and priestcraft. An original thinker far ahead of his time, he sought to redress poverty (seemingly endemic in advanced European societies) through an interventionist programme of welfare redistribution, including old age pensions, marriage allowances and maternity benefits. 

Stopping short of socialism, Paine transformed jurisprudential notions of social obligation the ‘soft’ right to charity into a theory of ‘positive liberty’ the ‘hard’ right to welfare, guaranteed by government and financed by redistributive taxation (a programme expanded in his later pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, 1796). Judged over the long term, Thompson was correct: Paine made a decisive contribution to the politicisation of discontent. At the time, however, it was the misrepresentation of his ideas rather than the inspiration they provided – which mattered more. The charge of ‘levelling’ or economic equality, promptly emerged as the crucial factor in the loyalist triumph over the radicals. Where Burke looked back to gothic feudalism and past glories, loyalist popular propagandists celebrated Britain’s commercial progress, the contemporary wealth of the nation threatened by the spoliation and anarchy of republican egalitarianism. In defending inequality and hierarchy, loyalists stood forward to save Britain from the pre-commercial ‘primitivism’ of natural rights republicanism. 

Paine’s inopportune avowal of deism in his Age of Reason (1794-5) enabled loyalists to add infidelism to the charges of primitivism and levelling. Here the propaganda victory of the loyalists over the godless republican levellers should not be attributed to superior argument but to what sociologists call ‘resource mobilisation’. Where loyalists triumphed was in quantity not quality. Untroubled by the authorities or lack of funds, loyalists deployed every medium and resource to spread the patriotic conservative message in popular and homiletic form among the lower orders, from parish pulpit to national organisation – Reeves Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers was the largest political organisation in the country. Many of the corresponding societies fell victim to this conservative onslaught, given physical form by Church and King mobs. The surviving societies judiciously excised the offending Paineite vocabulary of rational republicanism with its alien and revolutionary stigma. The violence directed against the radicals was recorded in the second verse of ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’: 

Thousands cry ‘Church and King’ 

That well deserve to swing, 

All must allow: 

Birmingham blush for shame, 

Manchester do the same, 

Infamous is your name, Patriots vow. 

While radicals struggled to retain a public presence, loyalists chose to treat the crowds to an increasing number of patriotic demonstrations to celebrate royal anniversaries and victories over the French. The success of these free holidays and licensed street festivals at which effigies of Paine were often burnt – was not without irony, as I noted by way of conclusion in my BBC piece. In confronting Paineite democracy through such popular nationalist participation, loyalists had established what the radicals had failed fully to achieve, the extension of politics to a mass public. As subsequent events were to show, this public expressed its loyalty to the nation, not necessarily to the status quo. Patriotism indeed was soon to acquire a radical inflexion, upholding the rights of the freeborn Englishman. 

After the polarization of political rhetoric in the 1790s, the opening decade of the 19th century was a time of considerable flux and confusion as war, patriotism and reform were all reassessed and redefined. Once Napoleon’s imperial ambitions became apparent, the character of the war effort changed. Having previously opposed the war – an aggressive conflict against a neighbouring country which simply wanted to reform its internal system of government – radicals now came forward as ardent patriots at the head of recruiting and volunteering drives. 

Having redefined their role as guardians of national virtue, radicals began to attract a wide audience as a series of scandals suggested a connection between military incompetence and parliamentary corruption. Disaffected loyalists joined the radicals in condemnation of the depredations of the fiscal-military state. Among such converts were William Cobbett, the most prolific and influential radical journalist of the early 19th century, and Henry Hunt, the Wiltshire gentleman farmer turned radical orator. Defiantly independent, these former loyalists injected a mood of impatience and intransigence, insisting on the right of all to engage in constitutional protest, to attend meetings, sign petitions and demand nothing less than universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the ballot. While refusing to compromise their new radical principles in subservience either to the Whigs or to commercial interests, they studiously avoided adherence to Paineite rational republicanism. 

In typically English pragmatic and eclectic manner, natural rights arguments were subsumed or concealed within a patriotic appeal to history and precedent. Major Cartwright devoted a lifetime of study to uncover hallowed Saxon principles and practices of popular sovereignty, an original purity defiled by the ‘Norman Yoke’. Open and inclusive in procedure and programme, the mass platform which emerged after 1815 amidst the transition from war to peace without plenty, deliberately exploited ambiguities in the law and constitution, drawing upon the emotive rhetoric of popular constitutionalism and ‘people’s history’ in demanding restoration of the people’s rights. Radicals proudly claimed descent from ‘that patriotic band who broke the ruffian arm of arbitrary power, and dyed the field and scaffold with their pure and precious blood, for the liberties of the country’. The appeal to the rights of the freeborn Englishman was perhaps best expressed in poetic form: 

Shall Englishmen o’ercome each foe 

And now at home those rights forgo 

Enjoy’d by none beside? 

Degenerate race! Ah! then in vain 

Your birthrights sacred to maintain 

HAMPDEN and SYDNEY died! 

The great hero of the mass platform and advocate of ‘the cause of truth’, Orator Hunt was hailed in the north of England as ‘the intrepid champion of the people’s rights’. ‘The good old character of an independent country Gentleman was surely there in him’, a correspondent wrote to the Manchester Observer. 

I had almost compared him to an English Baron in the time of Magna Charta, but that Mr Hunt’s motives were so much more praiseworthy: he was not there as they met that worthless King at Runnimede, to advocate the rights of a few, but of all. 

Mobilised by Hunt, those without the political nation stood forward to demand radical reform in open constitutional manner and in Sunday best clothes, relying on the proud and disciplined display of numbers (marshalled by demobilised ex-servicemen) to coerce the otherwise inexorable government ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must. The popular format introduced by Hunt constitutional mass pressure from without for the constitutional democratic rights of all continued to inform radical agitation throughout the age of the Chartists. Radicals – renovators as they were initially called – looked to the mass petitioning platform to reclaim their rights, ignoring Paine’s key tactical prescription of a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution. 

My work on Hunt and the mass platform thus led me to question Thompson’s claims about Paine and his breakthrough language of universal rational republicanism. As my research demonstrated, natural rights republicanism and conventions of the type prescribed by Paine did not feature in early 19th century radicalism. Instead, the crowds rallied to a populist platform of mass petitioning justified by history, the constitution and the rule of law, a potent blend of patriotic and national notions. While querying Thompson on the language of radicalism, I am not seeking to belittle Paine. Like Thompson, I recognise him as a seminal influence in English radicalism, the inspirational figure in the politicization of discontent. As Thompson noted, it was Paine who supplied the missing link, underlining the importance of politics to those enduring economic hardship. Thanks to Paine, spontaneous, backward-looking rioting was steadily replaced by forward-looking political agitation, a great advance which William Cobbett opined, the nation should acknowledge. 

The implacable opponent of ‘Old Corruption’, Cobbett gained much of his political education about The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance from Paine’s critical insights into the operation of the ‘system’ (or ‘the Thing’ as Cobbett himself called it) which produced lucrative profits for political peculators and financial speculators at the expense of an intolerable and demand-stifling tax burden on the poor. To honour his mentor, Cobbett reclaimed Paine’s bones from their American grave and brought them back to England (they have since disappeared). 

Educated by Paine, later by Cobbett, 19th century radicals persisted in explaining inequality and exploitation in political terms even as the industrial revolution continued apace. Just as the war-inflated ‘funding system’ had been built on the base of political monopoly so it was political power that underpinned the capitalist system and denied the worker the right to the whole produce of his labour. The ranks of radical demonology grew throughout the age of the Chartists: alongside fundholders, sinecurists, pensioners and other tax-gorgers, there now sat cotton lords, millocrats (note the significant political terminology) and other capitalists, parasitic middlemen whose privileged and tyrannical position of unequal exchange stemmed from their monopoly of political and legal power. Whether directed against tax- eaters and/or capitalists, the radical demand was always the same: an end to the system which left labour alone unprotected and at the mercy of those who monopolized the state and the law. 

Paine’s influence was thus fundamental, albeit not in the way that we might suppose. There were periodic attempts to impose his rational republican formula in purist form, by those disillusioned by the cyclical pattern of mobilisation and collapse of the mass platform, with its vacillating crowds, blustering orators and populist idioms. One such was Richard Carlile, an incorruptible Paineite ideologue who in the aftermath of Peterloo and the collapse of the post-war mass platform subjected himself to a regime of ideological purification and physical Puritanism with comprehensive counter- cultural rigour. A trenchant critic of the empty bluster and personalized style of Hunt’s ‘charismatic’ leadership, Carlile subsequently displayed the worst faults of an ‘ideological’ leader, provoking innumerable schisms among the votaries with his dictatorial pronouncements on doctrine, so different in tone from the eclectic and undogmatic nature of popular radical argument. He insisted on strict conformity to the infidel-Republican Paineite formulary, the exegesis of which (at different times desist, atheist and spiritualist) he reserved for himself alone. In this intensely sectarian and ideological form, rational republicanism failed to engage with the general gut republicanism — the irreverence, scepticism and anti-authoritarianism — which often ran deep in working-class culture. 

No longer committed to the platform, mass agitation and volatile crowds, Carlile looked to the freedom of the press to promote the ‘march of infidelity’, the progress of scientific materialism against superstition, myth and ignorance, but here he found himself in unwelcome alliance with commercial pornographers and the like. Unlike the pornographers, however, Carlile and his ‘corps’ of supporters were libertarians not libertines. In the sanctity of their ‘temples of reason’, these votaries of Paineite republicanism, ‘zetetics’ as they were called, advocated contraception, female equality and free love, a programme of sexual radicalism articulated in the language of the liberal Enlightenment, of individual freedom and moral responsibility. Infidel, republican and sexual radical, Carlile, the doctrinaire individualist, was also the proselyte of orthodox political economy. His pioneer advocacy of birth control was motivated by Malthusianism as much as by feminism, by his conviction that distress was caused by the people themselves through bad and improvident habits and the ‘excess of their numbers in relation to the supply of labour that can employ them’. ‘You cannot be free, you can find no reform, until you begin it with yourselves… abstain from gin and the gin-shop, from gospel and the gospel-shop, from sin and silly salvation’. By the end of the 1820s Carlile stood widely divorced from popular radicalism, culture and experience, a lone opponent of collective endeavour. Interpreted – or rather misinterpreted in this way, Paine plays no part in the making of the English working class. 

Eschewing ideological schisms and the like, mainstream popular radicals never denied the inspiration provided by ‘immortal’ Thomas Paine, but they ensured that his memory was preserved within a patriotic pantheon in which the universal rights of man were subsumed within the historic and constitutional rights of the freeborn Englishman, the charter of the land. The citizens of the world was honoured as British patriot.

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The country may have celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in spectacular style this year, but is everything really happy and glorious with the monarchy in 21st Century Britain — or is it time for Britain to become a republic? 

A committee member of the Thomas Paine Society UK was asked to join in this live debate in front of a 160 strong at the Brighton Dome Studio Theatre in November 2012. Paul Myles agreed to join in the Question Time style event. There were four panellists, all of whom gave a 5 minute opening and closing statement. The audience joined in either by asking questions or taking part in the snap opinion polls via the electronic voting system. 

The opening theme was : What can we learn from monarchies that have become republics in the past? Does the issue even matter in the modern world? 

The panel of 4 experts included: 

Graham Smith, who heads the campaigning organization Republic , and has been outspoken on issues including Prince Charles’s lobbying of Government departments, and which is calling for an honours system decided by the people; 

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo , historian and royal commentator. One of North America’s leading royal commentators, he is an expert in monarchy, protocol, honours and British traditions, Rafe is the former editor of Burke’s World Orders of Knighthood & Merit. He is a trustee of the Canadian Royal Heritage Trust and a Research Associate at the leading public policy think tank ResPublica; 

Richard Whatmore, Professor of Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought at the University of Sussex, whose interests include the history of democracy, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. 

Paul Myles of the Thomas Paine Society UK, which promotes the revolutionary thinker’s contribution to democracy and freedom; 

Graham Smith opened with a clear republican argument, that the monarchy is an outdated and quirky establishment, which does not add to the nation, not even in tourism terms. 

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo was clearly pro monarchy, and took the familiar pro monarchical argumentative line, stability, 1000 years of history, glorious in the reigns. His later arguments were nuanced, acknowledging the need for some change. 

Richard Whatmore brought gravitas and accuracy to the debate, and argued that the European Union is much more important over the long term than anything the UK may struggle with locally. 

Paul Myles took the position for disestablishment of the Church of England. Paul suggested that this was an achievable aim, and would re-balance our society into a modem state over time. He pointed out that on the world map of secularity the UK was showing as yellow meaning “ambiguous” on this matter. Rafe agreed with Paul that England and Iran were the only two nation states with unelected clergy in their legislative chambers. 

The first vote was 75% in favour of England becoming a republic, this showed the republican leanings of the mostly local audience. In conversation with Graham Smith and Rafe Heydel-Mankoo this was markedly different to many previous debates in the UK where these two regularly lock horns. 

The debate was very lively with a lot of audience participation, the panellist’s cut and thrust was matched by audience intervention and the passion really showed at times, both sides of the debate. Chillingly there was a moment where a young student member of the audience claimed the absolutist monarch from his home country in Africa was good and benevolent for all and he did not understand why we were debating authority. After a comment by Rafe that the polls had never shown such a high rating for the Royal Family in comparison to the leading politicians Myles riposted that that was like comparing the BBC “Eastenders” with “Question time”, that one was emotional and frivolous and the other a serious attempt to deal with the issues of the day. 

One of Rafe’s arguments was the continuity of glorious monarchs in England over a thousand years, this point was efficiently dismissed by Myles and Whatmore pointing out the enforced interruption by Cromwell and by bringing up Thomas Paine’s comment about William the Conqueror being ” a bastard son of a whore”, as the start of that thousand year history. . Whatmore also pointed out the Royal System had placed a crown on more than one ” idiot”. 

The evening went with a real swing, and notwithstanding the heat ended amicably, with the final vote showing no change in the audience position. The feedback from this event, one of a series of topics, was very favourable, perhaps showing that there is an appetite for a debate of this kind. 

The Sussex Salon is a roundtable event where academics, practitioners and commentators share their views on hot topics. The Sussex Salon Series is organised by Dr Ruth Woodfield, a University of Sussex sociologist and Director of Widening Participation for the School of Law, Politics and Sociology.

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Literary Walks In Bath, Eleven Excursions in the Company of Eminent Authors. Andrew Swift & Kirsten Elliott. Bath, Akeman Press, 2012. xii & 320pp. Illustrated. Paperback. ISBN 978-9560989-3-1. £15.00. 

Last year I spent a week on holiday in Bath, a picturesque and historic Somerset city whose roots reach back to pre-Roman times, but achieved national, if not international, fame in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a spa town, the water of which was reputed to be particularly efficacious, a belief that attracted to the city the great and good, and the not so great and good, all anxious to partake of its water, or be seen in the company of the famous in British society. As well as this side of Bath’s story there is its rich literary heritage, and it is this side of the town’s story on which the authors concentrate. 

Both authors are well qualified to write on the town for they have long experience in conducting walking tours of the city, as well as authoring several other books on it, or aspects of it. Reading this book left me wishing that I had it when I stayed in Bath as it would have made my time there much more rewarding. However, this said, what has it to do with Thomas Paine, who, to my knowledge, never visited it? Well while there is nothing in the book that indicates he ever did, what it also brings to the fore in chapter seven, which is entitled, ‘The Rhythm of Tom Paine’s Bones’, are details of the interest in and reaction locally to Paine’s ideas, as is indicated in the chapter’s sub-heading, “Radicalism and Repression in Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror'”. 

What the chapter relates offers is a tour of the places in the city associated with individuals known for their support either for Paine and/or his ideas. It commences with Henry Hunt, who in 1817 is said to have addressed between twelve and twenty thousand people at a gathering in Orange Grove, though the Bath Chronicle put the figure at five hundred, the purpose of the meeting being to agitate for universal suffrage. 

The military, so the authors note, kept a watchful eye on the crowd but did not, as they also point out, act as they did at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester two years later. Others who were to address meetings in the bath included Henry Vincent the Chartist, who also called for universal suffrage. The authors offer an account of the life of Paine that extends over two pages and includes a portrait of him. This leads to a discussion on Paine’s critic Hannah More, who has a commemorative plaque on a building in Great Pulteney Street, where she had lived. Her attacks on Paine’s ideas are covered in reasonable detail, in the course of which the author’s support for Paine becomes evident, although they make the mistake of calling his book Rights of Man, The Rights of Man. They go on to notice the city prison in Grove Street “where many of Paine’s supporters, and others fighting for their rights ended up”. Details are also given of the numerous occasions near Bath where locals hung or burned Paine in effigy, while membership of the Loyal Bath Association which had a membership of seven thousand, although, they note, that many of those who signed up had done so at the behest of their employers and for them not to have done so would have entailed their dismissal and denunciation to the authorities. 

John Thelwall, who had assisted in the formation of the London Corresponding Society is buried in Bath and details are given as to how to find his grave. The chapter, a truly fascinating and informative read, even if you do not visit the city, also offers an explanation for the chapter’s title, it comes from a song, described as “stirring”, by Graham Moore, “The Rhythm of Tom Paine’s Bones”, though they add the thinking behind the song’s title “is a convoluted and bizarre one. They will by citing a tribute by Robert Ingersoll to Paine and the words of Graham Moore that Paine can still provide inspiration for those fighting new threats to the Rights of Man. 

Those interested in radicals and radicalism will also find the previous chapter: ‘Rebels and Romantics, Catharine Macaulay, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley & Percy Bysshe Shelley’, a productive read. Of those in the title the least known is Catharine Macaulay, and the authors devote considerable coverage to this remarkable woman, a republican, supporter of the American colonists in their struggle for independence, who writing to Washington on events in France, in which she referred to “all friends of Liberty on this side of the Atlantic are now rejoicing for an event which in all probability had been accelerated by the American Revolution”. Mary Wollstonecroft wrote of Catharine Macaulay that she had been the woman of the greatest abilities undoubtedly this country had ever produced. 

Literary Walks in Bath is not a dull repetition of the common place, but a scintillating tour of the city’s literary heritage, and in many respects of Britain’s, doing so in eleven detailed chapters. The authors have as well as a detailed knowledge of their city but an in-depth literary knowledge. They write well and are not beyond humorous anecdotes. It’s a wonderful book from which I emerged with a greater increase in my knowledge on aspects of Britain’s literary heritage than I had before I read it. Do I have any criticism, strangely yes. I would have liked an index.

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George Chalmers, Thomas Paine’s first and most hostile biographer, maintained that he ‘commenced public writer in 1771. The electors of New Shoreham had lately shone with such uncommon lustre, as to attract parliamentary notice, and to incur parliamentary disfranchisement. A new election was now to be held, not so much in a new manner, as on new principles. The poets of Lewes were called upon by Rumbold, the candidate of fair pretensions, to furnish an appropriate song. Our author obtained the laurel, with three guineas for his pains.’ Chalmers went on to remark ‘it may then be doubted whether it be strictly true, what he asserted in his news — paper altercations, in 1779, that till the epoch of his Common Sense, he had never published a syllable’. Since no copy of Paine’s election song appears to have survived, however, it seems reasonable to assume that it never was published but was simply sung.¹ 

Chalmers version of the New Shoreham bye — election is also unreliable in other respects. It did not take place in 1771 but on 26 November 1770. Moreover, so far from being consequent upon an alteration of the qualifications for voting in the constituency, it provoked one. The bribery employed in it was so blatant that it could not be disregarded even in an age which turned a blind eye to corruption at the polls. Consequently a parliamentary inquiry was held, which resulted in the number of electors in the borough being increased from about 100 to about 800. Many of those who enjoyed the franchise there had formed a so — called Christian Society, ‘ostensibly for charitable purposes, but really to arrange the sale of the borough’s parliamentary representation’.² The general election held in 1768 had resulted in the return of two members unopposed. The subsequent death of one of them in October 1770, however, necessitated a bye – election to fill the vacant seat. The Christian Society determined on selling their votes to the highest bidder. Initially five candidates stood. One offered to spend £3000 and to order the construction of a ship of 600 tons, an attractive inducement in Shoreham where shipbuilding was a major industry. Thomas Rumbold then made an offer of £34 or £35 for each member of the Society, which they found more appealing and accepted. This overt deal so appalled the returning officer that he announced he would be no party to it. At the polls he refused 76 votes given to Rumbold by members of the Society and returned one of his rivals, John Purling, even though only 37 had voted for him. This led Rumbold to petition parliament objecting to the return of Purling. Though the Commons upheld Rumbold’s claim to have been rightfully returned, the House insisted on an investigation into the proceedings at the election. This uncovered such corrupt practices that ‘it was proposed to disfranchise the borough; this, however, was thought too dangerous a precedent’.³ Instead an Act was passed in 1771 disfranchising 69 named members of the Christian Society and increasing the electorate eightfold. 

Tom Paine was thus involved in one of the most blatantly corrupt elections held under George III. No principle appears to have been at stake in it, even though Rumbold ‘opposed the ministry’.⁴ All three candidates who contested the bye – election were members of the East India Company. Rumbold, the candidate who commissioned electoral propaganda from Paine, and paid him for it, had returned from India in 1769 with a fortune calculated at between £200,000 and £300,000.⁵ He was intent on buying a seat in parliament and found one up for sale in the borough of New Shoreham. Why he also felt the need for an electoral song is hard to explain. That Tom Paine, the future advocate of parliamentary reform, obtained the commission is even harder to square with his reputation for political radicalism on the eve of his departure for America. On the contrary, as Moncure Conway observed of this episode, ‘he appears to have been conventionally patriotic’.⁶ 

Shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia, however, Paine published an essay on ‘the Life and Death of Lord Clive’ which was highly critical of the type of ‘nabob’ whose election campaign he had supported in Shoreham.⁷ Clive’s conduct in India had been investigated by parliament in 1773 and, although he had been exonerated, many felt that his career with the East India Company had been characterised by corruption and extortion. Paine clearly shared this view, for his ‘reflections’ on Clive were far from complimentary. On the contrary, he described India as the ‘loud proclaimer of European cruelties’ and the ‘bloody monument of unnecessary deaths’. He pictured Clive returning home ‘loaded with plunder’, then going back to a country where ‘fear and terror march like pioneers before his camp, murder and rapine accompany it, famine and wretchedness follow in the rear’. Clive, ‘resolved on accumulating an unbounded fortune’, is there ‘the sole lord of their lives and fortunes [and] disposes of either as he pleases’. Although he was acquitted by parliament, ‘some time before his death he became very melancholy — subject to strange imaginations — and was found dead at last’. Paine imagines Clive in the final stages of his life unable to enjoy his wealth, which reminds him of the ways in which it was acquired. Thus port wine appears like blood to him. And in the end he was suspected of taking his own life. 

Clive died on 22 November, just a week before Paine arrived in Philadelphia so he cannot have known of the nabob’s death before he left England. But he would have been aware of the parliamentary enquiry into Clive’s conduct in India, which was held in May 1773. Paine himself was probably in London while it was being held, for he spent much of the time between the fall of 1772 and the spring of 1773 in the capital pursuing the claim of his fellow excisemen to an increase in their salaries. Though his own printed Case of the Officers of Excise was supported by George Lewis Scott, one of the commissioners of the excise, it failed to find favour with the Treasury or the prime minister, Lord North, who rejected the claim in February.⁸ Paine became very disillusioned with politics as a result of this rebuff, and the scales seem to have fallen from his eyes when he heard of the proceedings against Clive. He could even have been thinking of his own reaction when he observed in his ‘Reflections’ on them “Tis the peculiar temper of the English to applaud before they think. Generous of their praise, they frequently bestow it unworthily; but when once the truth arrives, the torrent stops, and rushes back again with the same violence’. At all events, the Clive affair marked a turning point in the political stance of Paine from being the recipient of favours from Rumbold to becoming a major critic of British imperialism.

Endnotes 

1. Francis Oldys [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain (1791), pp. 26 — 7. It has been suggested that a poem, ‘Farmer Shorter’s Dog Porter’; which Paine published in the Pennsylvania Magazine in July 1775, was the song in question. Although it involves a farmer who had voted in the Shoreham election, which shows that Paine was familiar with that event, being subsequent to the polling it cannot have been used for electoral purposes. Francis Oldys [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain (1791), pp. 26 — 7. 
2. The House of Commons 17 — 1790 edited by L. B. Namier and J. Brooke (3 vols, History of Parliament, 1964), i. 397. 
3. T. H. B. Oldfield, An entire and complete history Political and personal of the boroughs of Great Britain (3 vols, 1792), iii, 56. 
4. In 1786 Rumbold topped a list of wealthy nabobs with a fortune estimated at £300,000. Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in eighteenth — century Britain (Cambridge, 2010), p. 13. 
5. Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (2 vols, 1998), i, 24. 
6. The complete works of Thomas Paine edited by Philip Foner (2 vols, 1969), ii, 22 — 27. 
7. George Hindmarch, Thomas Paine: The Case of the King of England and his Officers of Excise (1998). 
8. Foner, ii, 25. Paine documents the essay with quotations from the proceedings of the committee set up to investigate Clive’s activities, which he presumably obtained before he left England.

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