Mariam Touba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hawke, p. 37, also citing Clark.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mariam Touba

October 2012

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

By Gary Berton

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

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

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

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

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

Misattribution 

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

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

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

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

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

Paine’s Support for the Abolition of Slavery 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“See Afric’s wretched offspring torn 

From all the human heart holds dear, 

See millions doomed in chains to mourn, 

Unpitied even by a tear. . .” 

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

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

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

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

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

The Petrovic Method²² of Author Attribution 

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the features used: 

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

Learning methods used and abbreviations 

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

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

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

Testing “African Slavery in America” 

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

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

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

Who is Samuel Hopkins? 

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

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

From “A Dialogue”:

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

From “African Slavery”:

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

From “A Dialogue”: 

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

From “African Slavery”:

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

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

From “A Dialogue”:

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

From “African Slavery”:

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

Conclusion 

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

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

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

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

Appendix: Paine’s Antislavery Legacy: Some Additional Considerations 

By Miriam Touba 

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

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

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

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

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

ENDNOTES

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

The post The Author Attribution of “African Slavery in America” appeared first on .

By Gary Berton

Frances Wright has been called the “female Thomas Paine.” In important ways, she was. Fanny Wright was the first American feminist, a radical abolitionist, labor champion, powerful public orator, and one of the first philosophers making a public case for freethought. But it does her a disservice to be seen in terms of someone else’s achievements. Even if it’s the incomparable Thomas Paine. 

Fanny Wright deserves her own standing as an American hero and her own place of honor in American memory. 

Frances Wright was born 1795 in Scotland to radical parents who supported the French Revolution and disseminated Rights of Man. Orphaned by three, she was raised by a progressive aunt in England who schooled her in the Enlightenment ideas of French materialists like Denis Diderot, who believed the world is made up of one substance, matter, which can be studied and understood. 

By age 18, Fanny wrote her first book, the classic freethought treatise, A Few Days in Athens, which supported the ideas of Epicurus, the foundational touchstone for Western freethought and the ideals of free government. Inspired by Democritus, Epicurus asserted all matter is made up of tiny particles, called atoms. Wright finished writing her book in 1813, but it was not published at that time. 

In 1818, she traveled to America and toured the new nation for two years, meeting and exchanging views with many of America’s progressive minds. That experience became Views of Society and Manners in America, the 1821 analysis of U.S. society and government that offered insights well ahead of De Tocqueville’s 1835 Democracy in America. The success of Views enabled Wright to get Athens printed in 1822. 

Society and Manners opened doors for Wright. She was introduced in Europe to Lafayette, who admired the book. After a conversation with the author, he admired Fanny’s talent and worldview, as well. 

Wright accompanied Lafayette on his trip to America in 1824. They developed a platonic yet close relationship that led to her meeting Robert Owen in Indiana and visiting New Harmony, America’s first socialist community. Wright embraced the ideals of socialism. She also embraced the need to end slavery to save the soul of America. After Lafayette returned to Europe, Wright stayed and became an American citizen. 

She launched two projects that would define her for decades to come. With Owen, she started The Free Inquirer, the first freethought newspaper in America, and she began a failed attempt to liberate America’s slaves held as chattel property. 

The Free Inquirer set the standard for future freethought periodicals. It served to unite into one philosophical movement the components of progressivism: women’s liberation (including the right to contraception and sexual freedom), abolition of slavery, labor liberation (including socialism), and free universal education. Wright and Owen both embraced these tenets, which were rooted in the works of Thomas Paine. 

Although Paine did not specifically spell out these movements, his legacy led to the birth of these 19th century forces, evidenced by early annual celebrations of Paine’s birthday held in the centers of these movements, a trend Wright herself helped to create. 

In 1825, Wright helped form a multi-racial community near Memphis on land gained through Lafayette. To justify her plan to educate slaves for freedom. Wright wrote, “A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South.” The experiment was plagued with problems — the cost of transporting slaves from Haiti, a free-love atmosphere stirring personal relationship crises, and mismanagement — all leading to its early demise. 

Frances Wright is most renowned for being the first woman orator in America. at a time when women were not accepted as public speakers. Starting in 1829, cresting 1833 to 1836, she toured the USA, speaking on women’s sexual and educational liberation, the abolition of slavery, socialism and the evils of capitalism. Tying it together, she spoke on freethought and the absurdity of organized religion. 

Drawing thousands to her speeches, She spoke in every major city in America, where “Fanny Wright societies” sprang up as centers for a growing social and political movement. Wright’s success made her the target of an alliance between the clergy and press to oppose her. 

Her movement was stymied by being too far ahead of its time, but it produced activists and laid the intellectual groundwork for the latter half of the 19th century when these movements reached maturity. 

Wright married in 1838, at age 43 bearing one child. She soon divorced and spent her remaining years in Ohio, releasing compilations of her lectures. She remained inactive except for her involvement with women’s health issues. She died at age 57 in 1852 and was buried in Cincinnati.

The post Frances (Fanny) Wright: ‘The Female Thomas Paine’  appeared first on .

By Frances Chiu 

An incorrigible Europhile for much of my youth, I was not terribly interested in Thomas Paine. The fact that Ronald Reagan was an admirer of Paine didn’t help either: Paine must be a conservative, right? But then I realized that to understand William Blake’s revolutionary sentiment, I had to read Rights of Man, Paine’s defense of the French Revolution. 

As I turned the pages of Rights, I was pleasantly surprised. Wait, was he actually what we’d consider a liberal rather than a conservative? Paine challenged hereditary rule and privilege! He proposed welfare — along with progressive taxation, a prototype of Social Security, while sanctioning unions. I was blown away by his prescience, seeing that his words could as easily apply to 1993 as 1792:

When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the workhouse and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government. It would seem, by the exterior appearance of such countries, that all was happiness; but there lies hidden from the eye of common observation, a mass of wretchedness, that has scarcely any other chance, than to expire in poverty or infamy. 

Also appealing to me about Paine was his modern, accessible prose, so different from his 18th-century peers. He presents the most visionary ideas in the least pretentious language — for instance, this passage defending the rights of man: 

Though I mean not to touch upon any sectarian principle of religion, yet it may be worth observing that the genealogy of Christ is traced to Adam. Why then not trace the rights of man to the creation of man? I will answer the question. Because there have been upstart governments, thrusting themselves between, and presumptuously working to unmake man. 

Although the subject of my doctoral dissertation changed once I entered Oxford, I continued to study Paine. I admired him more when I read Age of Reason and articles from the Pennsylvania Magazine. 

In 2004, I gained a more complete picture of Paine as a man from reading John Keane’s biography of him. I almost fell head over heels in love with him. 

I was impressed that he donated all of his proceeds from Common Sense to the Continental Army. I was impressed that he walked from Trenton to Philadelphia one late December night to publish his first American Crisis paper. I was impressed that Paine didn’t just hang out with the wealthiest and most prominent men, but also appreciated the company of ordinary men. I was even more impressed by all his efforts to end slavery in America and his unusually appreciative views of Native Americans (or “Indians” as they were called). 

When I reached the end of the biography, I wept for him. How sad it was that Americans had forgotten his selfless efforts to win American independence and build the new country. How profoundly sad it was that only a mere handful of Americans — six people, including two Black youths — attended his funeral, given the tens of thousands who attended the public funerals of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. 

I became determined to remind other Americans of Paine’s contributions. I figured I would never get a chance to write academically about Paine since my PhD was in English literature, not history or political science, so I decided to teach the first class in the U.S. devoted to Paine and his contemporaries at The New School — 

“The Age of Paine: Religion, Revolution, and Radicalism” Three years later, shortly before Christmas, I organized a symposium there on Paine for the bicentenary of his death. I recall feeling astonished at the overflow crowd. Who would have imagined such a large turnout amid last-minute holiday shopping? 

Then the unimaginable happened: I was invited to submit a book proposal to Routledge on Paine’s Rights of Man, the very work that first made me a “Paineite.” I didn’t think it would ever happen because the majority of my publications had focused on the history of the Gothic novel. 

In writing a Routledge guide, I rediscovered why I admired Paine the way I do. In the wake of the financial crash of 2008, expansion of George W. Bush’s wars from two to seven, the crackdowns on freedom of the press and the right to protest, I realized Paine’s ideas within Rights of Man were quite possibly even more relevant today than when first published in 1792. 

Beyond Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton, Thomas Paine is the “founding father” we need to heed more than ever in these times that try our souls!

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by Gary Berton, with Notes by Dr. Cazenave 

2022 Thomas Paine Symposium Talk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thomas Paine His Life, His Time and The Birth of Modem Nations. Craig Nelson. 398pp, Profile Books, London, 2007, hardback, illustrated, ISBN 1 86197 638 0. £20 

Why, one wonders, has Craig Nelson moved from writing travel books and an account of a wartime American bombing raid on Japan to a biography to a biography of Thomas Paine. It’s not as if there is a shortage of such works, indeed the bibliography lists several from the pioneering writings of Rickman, Cobbett and Conway to more recent books by Aldridge, Ayer and Keane. Nelson’s book adds nothing new to our knowledge of Paine’s life and work but it does contain a massive amount of information and opinion about the Enlightenment era. It is not bedside reading but if you have plenty of time it fully rewards the effort of reading it. 

Some of the facts that Nelson records are inspiring such as American militia charging into battle shouting the famous lines from Common Sense: ‘These are the times that try means’ souls”. Nearly two centuries after it was penned, American veteran opponents of the Vietnam War would call themselves winter soldiers, another quotation from Paine. Paine’s efforts as a propagandist for American independence far outweighed his efforts as an infantryman. 

Other facts are of little interest to political historians, although found the presentation of a chamber pot by Louis XVI to the duchesse Polignac de Sevres illustrated with an engraving of Franklin, who described Paine as his adopted political son and the circulation of pornographic drawings of Marie Antoinette rather amusing. 

Nelson records Paine’s bitter opposition to slavery. Paine wrote in African Slavery in America: “Our traders in men…must know the wickedness of the slave trade, if they attend to reasoning or the dictates of their own hearts…” Five weeks after its publication the first abolitionist organisation in America, the Pennsylvania Society for the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was formed. What humbug is displayed by the British ruling class, Elizabeth Windsor presiding at a ceremony to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade when the British aristocracy and the Anglican Church made a vast fortune out of it, the slaves of the Anglicans were branded with the word “society”. Paine would have supported the Africans such as Nanny of the Maroons (now a national heroine in Jamaica) who revolted against slavery. Slavery was abolished in Pennsylvania in 1780 but millions remained in bondage in the other states. 

Nelson sees Paine very much as a product of the 18th century enlightenment and he contrasts the plebian coffee houses and taverns of America with the aristocratic salons of pre-Revolutionary France. The revolutions of the enlightenment raised an important question which still remains unanswered. Is it inevitable that revolutions aimed at liberating humanity and building a better world always end with the enslavement of the people by new and worse tyrannies? The American and Russian revolutions created so much hope only to end with the rule of corrupt plutocratic oligarchies. 

Paine took a positive view of Native Americans and while secretary to the United States Council of Safety negotiated new treaties with Iroquois leader Last Night. Paine thought that the English government had but half the sense this Indian had. The Iroquois confederation of six tribes was governed by the Great Law of Peace. Many of its ideas would later be found in the American Constitution. By the end of the 19th century the Native Americans had been the victims of legalised robbery and genocide, an impoverished remnant living as second class citizens in their own land. 

Paine was a scientist as well as a revolutionary and Nelson relates how he and Washington experimented with igniting gas bubbles stirred up from the bottom of a muddy river. He tells us that Joseph Priestley, who fled to America to escape the Church and King mob, invented seltzer by capturing the gas released by a Leeds brewery. 

Nelson devotes an entire chapter to The Age of Reason which Paine wrote while imprisoned as a victim of the Terror during the French Revolution and which led to his denunciation as a “dirty little atheist”. Paine made it clear that he believed in one God and hoped for happiness beyond this life. He did not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish, Roman or any other church. Like many advanced Frenchmen and Americans Paine was a deist. While Paine’s religion of doing good was better than that of the established Protestant and Catholic churches as an atheist I find belief in any God irrational and unproven. However in an age of fundamentalist fanaticism and jihad suicide bombings The Age of Reason should be translated into Arabic and Urdu and widely circulated in the Islamic community. But I fear its publishers would suffer a worse fate than the Englishmen who were imprisoned in the 19th century for publishing it. In his later life Paine would become a regular contributor to The Prospect published by the blind Presbyterian turned deist Etihu Palmer. 

Nelson is nothing if not an opinionated writer. He describes Rousseau as an “…expert on parenting who abandoned all of his children; the deist who proclaimed all other deists as infidels.” He describes Jane Austen as writing “a good skewering”. In my view her twee tales could be marketed as a cure for insomnia. 

One subject Nelson doesn’t address is the influence of Freemasonry on the American Revolution. Paine was of too humble an origin to be a mason but Washington He was initiated into the Fredericksburg Lodge in 1752. The Masonic eye in the pyramid symbol appears on Federal Reserve notes. It was said that the execution of Louis Capot was revenge for the execution of the medieval Templar Jacques De Molay. Paine narrowly escaped execution himself, no thanks to his former close friend Washington. 

Sadly Paine, largely rejected and even deprived of a vote by the America he had helped create, spent the last two years of his life as an invalid afflicted by bouts of fever and dropsy. He died on June 8, 1809. He was placed in a mahogany coffin and buried in New Rochelle having been refused a plot in New York’s Quaker cemetery. His tombstone proclaimed: ‘Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, died June 8 1809, aged 74 years.” A year later Cobbett and his son removed the remains to England. When the bankrupt Cobbett died in 1835 they became lost. Some of his writings suffered the same fate. A collection which came into the hands of Benjamin Bonneville was destroyed by fire. 

But Paine’s ideas and influence lived on. Craft weavers in Leeds opposed to the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution 

gathered in a Thomas Paine hall. Welsh radicals met in secret to read his books which they had hidden under rocks. In Sheffield God Save Great Thomas Paine was sung to the tune of the National Anthem. The Chartists lauded him, when his name appeared in George Hamey’s Red Republican it was printed in capitals. Secularists named their children for him. Paine birthday events were widely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. 

In America was an influence on such various persons as the Feminist Susan B Taylor, the Socialist Eugene Debs and the reformist Democrat President Franklin Rossevelt. Abraham Lincoln, the father of the modern Republican Party, was converted to deism by reading The Age of Reason. He wrote a pamphlet extolling Paine’s views which his friends tossed into the stove. Even the bumbling third rate movie actor Ronald Reagan could quote Paine correctly although I suspect Paine would have been with the Black Panthers who led Californian students in chanting: “r** Ronald Reagan.” 

Not one of the golden statues of Paine proposed by Napoleon has ever been constructed. When in the early 1960s a group of Americans commissioned a statue to be constructed by Charles Wheeler and erected in Thetford, local reactionaries opposed this. The chair of the women’s section of the British Legion exploded: “Tom Paine, the philanderer and an unmitigated scamp, is the last man Thetford should honour.” The Tory deputy mayor wanted an inscription about Paine’s conviction for treason be engraved on the base. Happily this move was defeated. Out of this incident the Thomas Paine Society was formed. It exists to this day to promote the legacy of Paine’s revolutionary democracy. But it always needs more active members. 

This is a big book and will require considerable effort to read it. But the effort should prove worthwhile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You should do it,’ said Jefferson.

‘Oh,no.’

‘Why will you not?’, asked Jefferson.

‘I will not.’

‘Why?’, insisted Jefferson.

‘Reasons enough’, replied Adams.

‘What can be your reasons?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mangled Declaration was ratified on July 4. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are several plausible reasons. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

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Published in the Pennsylvania Journal on March 8, 1775, this essay was put into the Paine corpus by Moncure Conway in 1894. Other than Paine’s opposition to slavery, there is no basis to consider this Paine’s work other than Benjamin Rush’s confused letter in 1809 referring to an anti-slavery article by Paine. There are several errors in Rush’s letter due to the 30 year lapse, and his embellishments to actual historic fact put the letter into question on accuracy.

The content of the essay does not hold up: the author uses religious references to oppose slavery, with many christian references (Paine opposed slavery on the basis of natural law). The note sent with the article to the printer is signed “A. B.”, which could refer to either Anthony Benezet or Francis Hopkinson (who used that signature in that period). However testing shows that another abolitionist of the time, and a friend to Benezet, Samuel Hopkins, was the author. He was a Christian preacher in Rhode Island, and must have sent the essay to Benezet to have him insert it in a Philadelphia paper, thus the note by Benezet asking the printer to publish it. As well, compared with other abolitionist tracts by Hopkins, the same religious basis, arguments, and phrases appear in both.

Here is the testing summary: The first several tests produced different author possibilities; this happens when the actual author is not present in the groups selected. So we searched for others, and Hopkins was the decisive winner in every test made with him included. (Note: a consistent 40% by one author against many groups is sufficient indication that that author is the most probable.)

Tests without Hopkins:

Groups of authors without Hopkins result in different authors winning (above); however with Hopkins, the result is always the same:

Tests with Hopkins:

And Hopkins always beats the winners of the not-Hopkins groupings decisively.

More information about why the essay was deattributed can be found in the essay “The Author Attribution of ‘African Slavery in America’” by the President of the Thomas Paine Historical Association Gary Berton.

We have included the text of the original article below for your convenience.

AFRICAN SLAVERY IN AMERICA

TO Americans: That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of justice and humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men (1), and several late publications.

Our traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of that SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts; and such as shun and stifle all these willfully sacrifice conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden idol.

The managers of that trade themselves, and others, testify, that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty, and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors, and bribing them against one another; and that these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural wars excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the managers and supporters of this inhuman trade to answer for to the common Lord of all!

Many of these were not prisoners of war, and redeemed from savage conquerors, as some plead; and they who were such prisoners, the English, who promote the war for that very end, are the guilty authors of their being so; and if they were redeemed, as is alleged, they would owe nothing to the redeemer but what he paid for them.

They show as little reason as conscience who put the matter by with saying-“Men, in some cases, are lawfully made slaves, and why may not these?” So men, in some cases, are lawfully put to death, deprived of their goods, without their consent; may any man, therefore, be treated so, without any conviction of desert? Nor is this plea mended by adding-“They are set forth to us as slaves, and we buy them without farther inquiry, let the sellers see to it.” Such men may as well join with a known band of robbers, buy their ill-got goods, and help on the trade; ignorance is no more pleadable in one case than the other; the sellers plainly own how they obtain them. But none can lawfully buy without evidence that they are not concurring with men-stealers; and as the true owner has a right to reclaim his goods that were stolen, and sold; so the slave, who is proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold.

Most shocking of all is alleging the sacred scriptures to favor this wicked practice. One would have thought none but infidel cavilers would endeavor to make them appear contrary to the plain dictates of natural light, and conscience, in a matter of common justice and humanity; which they cannot be. Such worthy men, as referred to before, judged otherways; Mr. Baxter declared, the slave-traders should be called devils, rather than Christians; and that it is a heinous crime to buy them. But some say, “the practice was permitted to the Jews.” To which may be replied.

1. The example of the Jews, in many things, may not be imitated by us; they had not only orders to cut off several nations altogether, but if they were obliged to war with others, and conquered them, to cut off every male; they were suffered to use polygamy and divorces, and other things utterly unlawful to us under clearer light.
2. The plea is, in a great measure, false; they had no permission to catch and enslave people who never injured them.
3. Such arguments ill become us, since the time of reformation came, under gospel light. All distinctions of nations, and privileges of one above others, are ceased; Christians are taught to account all men their neighbors; and love their neighbors as themselves; and do. to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes. Is the barbarous enslaving our inoffensive neighbors, and treating them like wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with all these divine precepts? Is this doing to them as we would desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us, would we think it just?-One would almost wish they could for once; it might convince more than reason, or the Bible.

As much in vain, perhaps, will they search ancient history for examples of the modern slave-trade. Too many nations enslaved the prisoners they took in war. But to go to nations with whom there is no war, who have no way provoked, without farther design of conquest, purely to catch inoffensive people, like wild beasts, for slaves, is an height of outrage against humanity and justice, that seems left by heathen nations to be practised by pretended Christians. How shameful are all attempts to color and excuse it!

As these people are not convicted of forfeiting freedom, they have still a natural, perfect right to it; and the governments whenever they come should, in justice set them free, and punish those who hold them in slavery.

So monstrous is the making and keeping them slaves at all, abstracted from the barbarous usage they suffer, and the many evils attending the practice; as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents, and from each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incests, and many shocking consequences, for all of which the guilty masters must answer to the final Judge.

If the slavery of the parents be unjust, much more is their children’s; if the parents were justly slaves, yet the children are born free; this is the natural, perfect right of all mankind; they are nothing but a just recompense to those who bring them up: And as much less is commonly spent on them than others, they have a right, in justice, to be proportionably sooner free.

Certainly one may, with as much reason and decency, plead for murder, robbery, lewdness, and barbarity, as for this practice. They are not more contrary to the natural dictates of conscience, and feelings of humanity; nay, they are all comprehended in it.

But the chief design of this paper is not to disprove it, which many have sufficiently done; but to entreat Americans to consider.

1. With that consistency, or decency they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?
2. How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which providence threatens us? We have enslaved multitudes, and shed much innocent blood in doing it; and now are threatened with the same. And while others evils are confessed, and bewailed, why not this especially, and publicly; than which no other vice, if all others, has brought so much guilt on the land?
3. Whether, then, all ought not immediately to discontinue and renounce it, with grief and abhorrence? Should not every society bear testimony against it, and account obstinate persisters in it bad men, enemies to their country, and exclude them from fellowship; as they often do for much lesser faults?
4. The great question may be-What should be done with those who are enslaved already? To turn the old and infirm free, would be injustice and cruelty; they who enjoyed the labors of their better days should keep, and treat them humanely. As to the rest, let prudent men, with the assistance of legislatures, determine what is practicable for masters, and best for them. Perhaps some could give them lands upon reasonable rent, some, employing them in their labor still, might give them some reasonable allowances for it; so as all may have some property, and fruits of their labors at their own disposal, and be encouraged to industry; the family may live together, and enjoy the natural satisfaction of exercising relative affections and duties, with civil protection, and other advantages, like fellow men. Perhaps they might sometime form useful barrier settlements on the frontiers. Thus they may become interested in the public welfare, and assist in promoting it; instead of being dangerous, as now they are, should any enemy promise them a better condition.
5. The past treatment of Africans must naturally fill them with abhorrence of Christians; lead them to think our religion would make them more inhuman savages, if they embraced it; thus the gain of that trade has been pursued in opposition to the Redeemer’s cause, and the happiness of men. Are we not, therefore, bound in duty to him and to them to repair these injuries, as far as possible, by taking some proper measures to instruct, not only the slaves here, but the Africans in their own countries? Primitive Christians labored always to spread their divine religion; and this is equally our duty while there is an heathen nation. But what singular obligations are we under to these injured people!

These are the sentiments of

JUSTICE AND HUMANITY.

Footnote

1. Dr. Ames, Baxter, Durham, Locke, Carmichael, Hutcheson, Montesqieu, and Blackstone, Wallace, etc., etc. Bishop of Gloucester.

PAINE WRITINGS LEGEND

Major Works
American Revolution
American Politics & Government
Essays
English Affairs
French Revolution
Other
Poetry
Religion
Letters
Recently Discovered
Works Removed

1772

Case of the Excise Officers

To Oliver Goldsmith December 21, 1772

1775

The Snowdrop and the Critic

The Magazine in America

A Dialogue between General Wolfe and General Gage

New Anecdotes of Alexander the Great

Useful and Entertaining Hints

The Death of General Wolfe

Reflections on the Life and Death of Lord Clive

An Account of the Burning of Bachelors’ Hall

To Honorable Benjamin Franklin Esqr. March 4th, 1775

African Slavery in America

Cupid and Hymen

Duelling

Reflections on Titles

The Dream Interpreted

Reflections on Unhappy Marriages

Farmer Short’s Dog Porter: A Tale

An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex

Liberty Tree

A Serious Thought

1776

Common Sense

Epistle to Quakers

The Forester’s Letters

Four Letters on Interesting Subjects

Dialogue between the Ghost of General Montgomery and an American Delegate

To Anonymous August 16, 1776

The Crisis I

1777

The Crisis II

Retreat across the Delaware

To the People

The Crisis III

Candid and Critical Remarks on a Letter Signed Ludlow

To Honorable Benjamin Franklin LL.D. June 20th, 1777

To Richard Henry Lee July 1, 1777

To Honorable Benjamin Franklin, LL.D. July 9th, 1777

To William Bingham July 16, 1777

The Crisis IV

To Timothy Matlack Oct. 30, 1777

1778

The Crisis V

To Henry Laurens April 11, 1778

To the Honorable Benjamin Franklin, Esqr. May 16, 1778

To the Honorable Benjamin Franklin May 16, 1778

To Henry Laurens Spring 1778

To his Excellency George Washington June 5th, 1778

The Crisis VI

To Benjamin Franklin October 24, 1778

The Crisis VII

A Serious Address To The People Of Pennsylvania On The Present Situation Of Their Affairs

To Henry Laurens December 15, 1778

The Affair of Silas Deane

1779

To M. Gerard January 2, 1779

To the Honorable Congress of the United States January 6, 1779

To the Congress of the United States January 7, 1779

To the Congress of the United States January 8, 1779

To the Honorable Henry Laurens January 14, 1779

To the Honorable Henry Laurens January 17, 1779

To Major-General Greene January 31, 1779

To his Excellency George Washington January 31, 1779

To Benjamin Franklin March 4, 1779

Response to *Observations on the American Revolution*

To the Honorable Congress of the United States March 30, 1779

To the Honorable Congress of the United States April 3, 1779

To the Honorable Congress of the United States April 21, 1779

To the Hon. John Jay April 23, 1779

To Hon. John Jay May 20, 1779

To the Continental Congress May 25, 1779

To the Honorable Congress of the United States June 17, 1779

Peace and the Newfoundland Fisheries

To the Honorable Henry Laurens September 14, 1779

To his Excellency Joseph Reed, Esq. Sept. 18th, 1779

To the Supreme Executive Council of the State of Pennsylvania September 28th, 1779

To the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania October 11, 1779

To the Printer of the Pennsylvania Packet

1780

The American Philosophical Society

Emancipation of Slaves

The Crisis VIII

To Blair McClenaghan May, 1780

To the Honorable Joseph Reed June 4, 1780

The Crisis IX

To Major-General Nathanael Greene September 9, 1780

The Crisis Extraordinary

To the Honorable Members of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania November 3rd, 1780.

Public Good

1781

To Benjamin Franklin (May) 1781

To Major-General Nathanael Greene January 10, 1781

To James Hutchinson March 11th, 1781

To Benjamin Franklin May 28, 1781

To his Excellency Thomas McKean [August or September, 1781]

To the Honorable Robert Morris, Esqr. September 20, [1781]

To Colonel [John] Laurens October 4, 1781

To Jonathan Williams, Merchant November 26, 1781

To Honorable Robert Morris November 26, 1781

To his Excellency George Washington November 30, 1781

1782

To Honorable Robert Morris, Esq. January 24, 1782

To Robert Morris February 20, 1782

To Honorable Robert Morris, Esq. March 1782

The Crisis X

To his Excellency George Washington March 17th, 1782

To Honorable Robert Morris March 17th, 1782

The Necessity of Taxation

Response to an Accusation of Bribery

The Crisis XI

A Supernumerary Crisis

To Robert Morris September 6, 1782

To his Excellency George Washington September 7, 1782

Epitaph on General Charles Lee

The Crisis XII

To Robert Morris November 20, 1782

Letter to the Abbe Raynal

To Robert Morris December 7, 1782

Six Letters to Rhode Island

1783

To Robert Morris January 23, 1783

The Crisis XIII

To his Excellency Elias Boudinot June 7th, 1783

To Doctor Benjamin Rush June 13th, 1783

To his Excellency Elias Boudinot June 20th, 1783

To W. Wallace Junior June 30th, 1783

To his Excellency George Washington July 22, 1783

The Address of the Citizens of Philadelphia

To his Excellency George Washington September 21, 1783

Hail Great Republic!

To a Committee of the Continental Congress October, 1783

To his Excellency George Washington October 2, 1783

To George Washington October 13, 1783

To Robert Morris October 14, 1783

To James Duane December 3, 1783

A Supernumerary Crisis II

1784

To General Lewis Morris February 16th, 1784

To His Excellency George Washington April 28, 1784

To Honorable General Irwin, Vice-President November 27th, 1784

1785

To the Continental Congress August 13, 1785

To a Committee of Congress September 1785

To Honorable Benjamin Franklin, ESQ., September 23, 1785

To Temple Franklin Sept. 23, 1785

To the Congress of the United States September 27, 1785

To the Congress of the United States September 28, 1785

To Mr. Claypoole (Pennsylvania Packet) December, 1785

To His Excellency Benjamin Franklin December, 31 1785

1786

To Mr Henry Claypoole (Pennsylvania Packet) January, 1786

Dissertations on Government

To a Member of the Pennsylvania Council June, 1786

To His Excellency Benjamin Franklin, Esquire June 6th, 1786

To Daniel Clymer, Esqr. September 1786

On the Affairs of The State

To John Hall September 22, 1786

Attack On Paper Money Laws

To the Honarable Thomas Fitzsimmons November 19th, 1786

To George Clymer, Esquire Nov 19th, 1786

1787

The Society for Political Inquiries

To His Excellency Benjamin Franklin March 31, 1787

To Benjamin Franklin June 22, 1787

To The Royal Academy of Sciences July 21, 1787

To George Clymer August 15, 1787

Prospects on the Rubicon

To the Right Honorable the Marquis of Lansdowne Sept. 21, 1787

To George Clymer, Esquire December 29, 1787

1788

To Thomas Jefferson February 19, 1788

To Thomas Jefferson May, 1788

Specification of Thomas Paine

To Thomas Jefferson September 7, 1788

To Thomas Jefferson September 9, 1788

To Thomas Jefferson September 15, 1788

To Thomas Jefferson December 16, 1788

Some Of The Letters Paine Wrote To Jefferson During 1788–1789 Concerning The Iron Bridge

1789

To Anonymous [1789]

To Thomas Jefferson [1789]

To Kitty Nicholson Few January 6, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson February, 16th, 1789

To Thomas Walker, Esqr. February 26th, 1789

To Benjamin West March 8, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson February 26th, 1789 & March 12, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson April 10, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson May 1789

To Anonymous May 1, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson June 17, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson June 18, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson July 13, [1789]

To Thomas Jefferson September 15, 1789

To Thomas Jefferson September 18, 1789

To George Washington, 16 October 1789

Some Of The Letters Paine Wrote To Jefferson During 1788–1789 Concerning The Iron Bridge

1790

To Benjamin Rush March 16, 1790

To Anonymous April 16, 1790

To His Excellency George Washington May 1790

To His Excellency George Washington May 31, 1790

To William Short June 1, 1790

To William Short June 4, 1790

To William Short June 22, 1790

To William Short June 23 and 25, 1790

To William Short June 28, 1790

To Thomas Jefferson September 28, 1790

1791

Rights of Man Appendix

Rights of Man Part the First

To Messiurs Condorcet, Bonneville, and Lanthenas 1 June, 1791.

To Abbe Sieyes July 8, 1791

To His Excellency George Washington July 21, 1791

Address and Declaration

To William Short November 2, 1791

Thoughts on the Establishment of a Mint in the United States

To John Hall November 25, 1791

1792

Rights of Man Author’s Notes

Rights of Man Part the Second

To Thomas Jefferson February 13, 1792

To George Washington February 13, 1792

To J.S. Jordan February 16, 1792

To the Chairman of the Society for Promoting Constitutional Knowledge

To the English Attorney-General

To the Chairman of the Society for Promoting Constitutional Knowledge (2)

Answer to Four Questions

Letters on the Prosecution of Rights of Man

Letters to Onslow Cranley

To The Sheriff of the County of Sussex

Letter Addressed to the Addressers

Address to the People of France

To Benjamin Mosley October 1, 1792

An Essay for the Use of New Republicans

To the French National Convention October 22, 1792

To the English Attorney General (Archibald MacDonald) November 11, 1792

On the Propriety of Bringing Louis XVI to Trial

To Citizen Le Brun December 4, 1792

1793

Plan of a Declaration

To Citizen Barrere 1793

Observations on the Situation of the Powers

To John King January 3, 1793

Shall Louis XVI be Respited?

To Doctor James O’Fallon February the 17, 1793

To Thomas Jefferson April 20, 1793

To George Jacques Danton May 6, 1793

Citizen of America to Citizens of Europe

To Citizen Barrere September 5, 1793

To Thomas Jefferson October 20, 1793

The Age of Reason — Part I

1794

From the Castle in the Air

To Gouverneur Morris February 24, 1794

Forgetfulness

To the French National Convention August 7, 1794

To James Monroe August 16, 1794

To James Monroe August 18, 1794

To James Monroe August 25, 1794

To James Monroe September 14, 1794

To James Monroe [October 1794]

To James Monroe October 4, 1794

To James Monroe October 13, 1794

To James Monroe October 20, 1794

To James Monroe November 2, 1794

The New Covenant

1795

To James Monroe [1795]

To Samuel Adams March 6, 1795

Dissertation on the First Principles of Government

Observations on Jay’s Treaty

The Constitution of 1795

To Bache August 5, 1795

To James Madison September 24, 1795

The Age of Reason — Part II

To Gilbert Wakefield, A.B. November 19, 1795

To Daniel Isaacs Eaton December 4, 1795

1796

Agrarian Justice

Letters on the Bank

The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance

Letter to George Washington

To a French Minister August 13, 1796

Contentment

To James Monroe August 15, 1796

1797

To M. Tallyrand [September 1797]

To Colonel John Fellows January 20, 1797

To Anonymous March 4, 1797

To Thomas Jefferson April 1, 1797

To James Madison April 27, 1797

Age of Reason Letters

To Thomas Jefferson May 14, 1797

To M. Tallyrand [1797]

Worship and Church Bells

Prosecution of the Age of Reason

The Recall of Monroe

The Eighteenth Fructidor

To Citizen Barras December 29, 1797

1798

To the Council of the Five Hundred January 28, 1798

To Citizen President Spring 1798

1799

Star in the East

To General Brune November, 1799

Notes On Thomas Muir, 1765-1799  

1800

To Citizen Skipwith Spring 1800

To Anonymous July 1800

To Thomas Jefferson October 1, 1800 – No. 1

To Thomas Jefferson October 1, 1800 – No. 2

To Thomas Jefferson October 16, 1800

To Thomas Jefferson October 4, 1800

To Thomas Jefferson October 6, 1800

What is Love?

1801

The Existence of God

To Thomas Jefferson June 9, 1801

On the Means of generating Motion for Mechanical Uses

To Thomas Jefferson June 25, 1801

To Thomas Jefferson November 4, 1801

1802

To Elihu Palmer February 21, 1802, since the Fable of Christ

To Thomas Jefferson March 17, 1802

An Essay on Dream

To Consul Roth July 8, 1802

To Thomas Jefferson November, 1802

To the Citizens of the United States

To Madame Bonneville November 15, 1802

To Thomas Jefferson Dec 25, 1802

1803

Examination of the Prophesies

My Private Thoughts on a Future State

To Samuel Adams January 1, 1803

To the Editor of the National Intelligencer January 1, 1803

To Thomas Jefferson January 12, 1803

From Mr. Paine to Mr. Jefferson

Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff

To Thomas Clio Rickman March 8, 1803

Of Caine And Abel

Of the Old and New Testament

The Construction of Iron Bridges

Lines, Extempore

To James Monroe July, 1803

To Charles W. Peale July 29th, 1803

To John C. Breckenridge Aug. 2, 1803

To Thomas Jefferson August 2, 1803

To James Madison August 6, 1803

To Thomas Jefferson September 23, 1803

To Elisha Babcock 1803-10-10

1804

Prospect Papers

To Citizen Skipwith March 1, 1804

To the People of England on the Invasion of England

To Mr. Hyer March 24, 1804

To Col. John Fellows July 9, 1804

To the people of Connecticut

Remarks on Gouverneur Morris’s Funeral Oration on General Hamilton

Nonsense from New York

To Elisha Babcock 1804-08-27

To the Members of the Society

Of the Sabbath Day in Connecticut

To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana

Connecticut has no Constitution

1805

To Thomas Jefferson January 1, 1805

To Thomas Jefferson January 25, 1805

To Mr. Hulbert of Sheffield March 12, 1805

To Thomas Jefferson April 20, 1805 – No. 2

To Thomas Jefferson April 20, 1805 – No. 1

To John Fellows April 22, 1805

Constitutions, Governments, and Charters

On the Origin of Freemasonry

To Elisha Babcock July 2, 1805

Remarks on English Affairs

To John Fellows July 9, 1805

Another Callender

To John Fellows July 31, 1805

To the Citizens of Pennsylvania on the Proposal for Calling a Convention

To Thomas Jefferson September 30, 1805

1806

To Thomas Jefferson January 30, 1806

To John Inskeep February 10, 1806

To Anonymous March 20, 1806

To William Duane April 23, 1806

The Cause of the Yellow Fever

To Andrew Dean, August 15, 1806

A Challenge to the Federalists

Liberty of the Press

Remarks on the Political and Military Affairs of Europe

Thomas Paine On Yellow Fever 

1807

Of the English Navy

Of Gunboats

Three Letters to Morgan Lewis

To James Madison May 3, 1807

To George Clinton May 4, 1807

To Joel Barlow May 4, 1807

Of the Comparative Powers and Expense of Ships of War

On the Question Will There be War?

Cheethem and his Tory Paper

To James Monroe, December 30, 1807

1808

To the Honorable Senate of the United States, January 21, 1808

To the Honorable Speaker of the House of Representatives, February 28, 1808

To the Honorable Speaker of the House of Representatives, March 7, 1808

To the People of New York

To Thomas Jefferson July 8, 1808

1809

Predestination

The Will of Thomas Paine

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