By Joy Masoff

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

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

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

WHO WERE THE BONNEVILLES? 

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

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

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

AS THE CENTURY ENDED 

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

A NEW HOME, A NEW NETWORK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ATLANTICIST PAINE

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

—Theodore Wolfe Tone

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SOCIAL PAINE 

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

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

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

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

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

THE SPIRITUAL PAINE 

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

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

—Thomas Paine

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SCIENTIFIC PAINE 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE LAWS OF THE SEA

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

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

BONAPARTE’S REVENGE 

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ROAD HOME 

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

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

It is that delightsome transport we can feel 

Which painters cannot paint,

nor words reveal, 

Nor any art we know of can conceal. 

Canst thou describe the sunbeams

to the blind, 

Or make him feel a shadow with his mind?⁷²

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

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

THE PATH AHEAD 

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

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

—Thomas Paine 

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

THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF A TWO-PART ESSAY

ENDNOTES

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

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

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

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

TRAGEDY!

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

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

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

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

BLASPHEMY!

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Judah Freed

The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine had “democratic consequences,” said Dr. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, Professor of Modern History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. 

In a February 15 talk at the Paine Memorial Building in New Rochelle, Dr. Carvalho said, “By criticizing the adulterous connection between church and state, by demonstrating the impossibility of the Bible being the word of God, and by proposing the equality of all creatures before God, Paine had devastating effects on the governments using religion to maintain hierarchies and oppression.” 

As a result of Paine, he said, “The question of democracy was at the heart of religious debate at the time.” These same debates continue today. 

Livestreaming on Zoom from the Memorial Building, the program signals growing global reach for the Thomas Paine Historical Association. 

Daniel Carvalho earned a doctorate from the University of São Paulo in 2017. He then served as a professor in the University of Brasília Graduate Program in Ideas. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution (Editora Paco, 2023).

The post Brazilian Scholar Discusses Age of Reason and Democracy appeared first on .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTERVENING PROVIDENCE AND RATIONAL INQUIRY 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROVIDENCE AS FEMALE 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXPLAINING THE INEXPLICABLE 

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

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

ENDNOTES

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

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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.

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The Beacon #5 May 1, 2022

By Gary Berton

Gilbert Vale was an early supporter of Thomas Paine, first in England, then in America in the early 19th century. He was a freethought publisher and writer, and through his work he reached the freethought and progressive segments of the American people, and was able to rally them to raise the money to construct the Paine Monument. He chose to place it near the gravesite of Paine to mark his presence there, and accommodate Paine’s wish. 

Vale was born in London, England, in 1788, died in Brooklyn, New York, August 17, 1866. He was educated to join the clergy, but he abandoned preparation for that profession, got involved in rebellions in England, and came to the United States in 1829, and engaged in teaching, making a specialty of navigation, and in lecturing, publishing, and literary pursuits in New York city and Brooklyn. For several years he edited the Citizen of the World and subsequently The Beacon, a literary and scientific journal, for which this Newsletter honors him. He also was an inventor, and patented a combined terrestrial globe and celestial sphere to facilitate the teaching of astronomy. Vale was a free-thinker, and wrote accordingly. He published Fanaticism, its Source and Influence (New York, 1835), and the Life of Thomas Paine, including his letters to General Washington, which were suppressed in other biographies of Paine back then (1841).

From The Truth Seeker NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 1881 article “Rededication of Paine’s Monument” excerpts:

“On Monday last, Decoration day, a goodly number of the admirers of Thomas Paine, amounting to several hundreds, assembled at the monument erected to his memory near New Rochelle in 1839. The day was lovely and the meeting was in every way most pleasant. The major portion of those who went out from the city took the 10 A.M. train at the New Haven depot, and a pleasant ride of forty minutes brought us to village of New Rochelle, Westchester county. Quite a party were in waiting at the depot with numerous omnibuses and other carriages. These were soon filled, and a procession was formed which turned its face toward the monument, nearly two miles north of the station. Capt. Geo. W. Loyd, mounted on a white horse named Button [the same as one once owned by Thomas Paine], acted as marshal and escorted us to the monument. 

The lot in the center of which the monument stands is some twenty feet square, surrounded by a wall laid in cement and some three or four feet high, with a tree in each corner affording an agreeable shade. The monument is of Westchester marble, of a light color, and is a straight shaft some twelve in hight, including the base and capstone and cornice of Ionic order. It is about three feet square at the base, and tapers to thirty inches or thereabouts next the cap. The whole is profusely lettered on the four sides. 

Several speakers and notables were present, including future leaders of TPNHA like Thaddeus Wakeman, Samuel Putnam, D.M. Bennett, and many others. Mrs. H. Allen gave a brilliant paean:

“It will be seen by the life and writings of Thomas Paine that he was a correct thinker, a ready writer, with a heart free from guile but overflowing with benevolence; firm in purpose and untiring in pursuits, he warmly espoused the cause of liberty and human rights, and he defended his cause with such force of argument and eloquence that he bore down all opposition. With a mind as capacious as the universe, and a perception as quick as thought, he could grasp the most extensive subjects, and discover their most abstruse bearings; he could discover truth, and always espoused her cause, which was one reason why, in debate, he always put his adversary to flight. He erected a monument that will be more durable than brass, and more precious than rubies. When conquering heroes shall be forgotten; when the rich and noble of the earth shall be laid low in the dust; when the proud obelisk and triumphal arch shall molder and decay, there shall live with grateful remembrance in the hearts of his countrymen the name of Thomas Paine.”

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Introduction. 

Putting the world to rights: The presumptuous audacity of Thomas Paine. 

How dared Thomas Paine, a man whose formal education had ended at thirteen (Gilbert Wakefield, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, would call him ‘the greatest ignoramus in nature’), a man who had failed as a skilled craftsman, as a teacher, as a shopkeeper, as a street preacher, as a petty customs official in the Excise, dismissed more than once and a sometime debtor and bankrupt, how dared such a nobody, such a non-achiever even dare to think about the ends and means of government, about the basis of a just society, about the meaning we can give life? Some of the fundamental questions that Paine pondered and tried to answer were: 

Are humans essentially anti-social animals, whose lives are, in the philosopher Hobbes’ words, just ‘nasty, brutish and short’? 

Do we have to be ruled by some absolute, hereditary, hierarchical authority backed by force? 

Is humanity capable of instituting an alternative to war? 

Is Christianity the only true religion? 

Is any religion true? 

But Thomas Paine did not merely articulate such fundamental questions in his secret thoughts, he also talked about them and dared to write about them. Think of his audacity when he, an almost penniless, recently very sick, immigrant Englishman, not long off the boat, started telling the people of North America in print what they should all now do, first in relation to slavery (they should abolish it) and then in relation to Britain. He called on Americans to revolt against his own country, and even called it just ‘Common Sense’ for them to do so. 

Or think how Paine, a few years later, dared to take on Edmund Burke, Burke, the graduate of Trinity College Dublin, former barrister at the Middle Temple, former Private Secretary to the Secretary for Ireland, and then Private Secretary to the Prime Minister and himself an MP. Paine told Burke that his reactionary championing of the ancient regimes of Europe after the fall of the Bastille was wrong. His answer to Burke in Rights of Man was a trumpet call to ‘begin the world anew’: the British should abolish the hereditary principle of monarchy and aristocracy and substitute a just redistribution of wealth through graduated income tax. 

Paine did not engage only Burke but also with many other dominant spirits of his age, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, General Lafayette, Danton, Condorcet, Marat, even Napoleon. In his dedication of the first part of Rights of Man to George Washington, Paine hoped that its principles of freedom would soon become universal. In his Dedication of the second part of his Rights of Man to General Lafayette, he urged the latter to export the French Revolution to the whole world – above all to the despotism of Prussia. 

Finally, in his Age of Reason, Paine took on God Himself and denied the divinity of Christ whom he called simply ‘a virtuous and amiable man’: ‘I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church’. 

Mocked and caricatured in his own day as presumptuous little ‘Tommy Paine’, where on earth did Paine get this unexampled, defiant audacity from? But it was not unexampled. Paine did have exemplars for ‘speaking Truth to Power’. Ultimately, behind Thomas Paine, I suggest, there lies the Epistle of James: the most radical, angry exhortation to social justice in the whole New Testament. Let me remind you: 

…[Be] ye doers of the word, and not hearers only… My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ… with respect of persons. 

If there come into your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come also a poor man in vile raiment and ye have no respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: 

Are ye not then partial in yourselves,… [Ye have despised the poor…[If] ye have respect to persons ye commit sin;… What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, poor…[If] ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin;… What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? And if a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not these things which are needful to the body; what do it profit? Even so faith if it hath not works, is dead … For, as the body without spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also… 

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you… Ye have heaped up treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth’. 

That had been written, perhaps by Jesus’s brother, 1,700 years before Paine’s birth but was available to him of course as a young child and a young man, in the Authorised version of the King James English Bible. The Epistle of James would resonate repeatedly among the early Quakers and in Paine’s own writings. 

Much nearer to Paine, both in place and time, as exemplars, were these early English Quakers – the Quakers of the recent persecution period 1650-1690. Moncure Conway, Paine’s first serious, sympathetic biographer wrote Iliad] there no Quakerism there would have been no Paine.¹ Was he right? 

Part One 

Who were the Quakers? 

Had there been no Civil War, or ‘Revolution’ as Paine himself called it, in England between1642 and 1651 there would have been no Quakerism, which began as a collective movement in 1652. The world had just been ‘turned upside down’ in Britain by that very recent war in which people had been asking – and killing each other over – fundamental questions about how to be a Christian and what kind of society Britain should be. The Parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’ believed they were fighting against royal tyranny and ungodliness; the monarchist Cavaliers believed they were fighting against mob anarchy and against hypocrites out to usurp power under the fig leaf of religion. 

Each side, of course, believed very sincerely that God was on their side. And this English Civil War, called ‘The Great Rebellion’ by the royalist Cavaliers, and ‘The Good Old Cause’ by their Puritan Roundhead opponents, had actually been the English Revolution – culminating in the trial and execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1645 and of King Charles 1 – only very recently, in 1649. The men and women who would be convinced and converted to Quakerism just three years later at the beginning of the 1650s had sympathised with the Puritan, Roundhead side.

Some (though not George Fox), had even fought for Cromwell and Parliament against the king. They saw themselves in the tradition of the Protestant Martyrs burned at the stake under ‘Bloody Mary’ a century earlier – for instance Margaret Fell, ‘the Mother of Quakerism’, born Margaret Askew, was believed by some, mistakenly, to be actually descended from the famous Protestant martyr Anne Askew. During the Civil War they had often called themselves ‘independents’. Once the war had been won by Cromwell’s New Model Army and the Parliamentarians, many of these self- styled ‘Independent’ men and women remained restless ‘Seekers’, looking for spiritual leadership that might help them towards personal and social salvation. They would walk or ride many miles to hear a preacher who, they had heard, was a true man of God. Hence that great assembly of about a thousand or more Westmoreland Seekers at Firbank Fell, above Brigflatts, near Sedbergh, in Whitson, 1652, who heard George Fox tell them: ‘Let your lives speak’. He told them they had no need of a church or parish priest, but that they should all live their Christianity, emulating the earliest ‘primitive’ Christians as a Society of Friends. The ‘Valiant Sixty’ among those who heard Fox, then attempted to do just that, spreading their message of ‘the inner light’ in every man and woman out from the North Down to London, South, West and East – to Norfolk, the county of Thomas Paine. 

Although the Quakers’ creation of new congregations of ‘Friends’ in the 1650s came out of the spiritual turmoil of the Civil War, it was also a reaction against the brutal cruelty of that war. In fact George Fox had been moved to begin preaching a gospel of brotherly love already in 1646, right in the middle of the war. For is any war quite as terrible as the Civil War? – town against town, family against family, father against son, brother against brother, besieged women and children deliberately starved to death, prisoners deliberately mutilated and murdered after they have been promised pardon on surrender – and many other such atrocities – all in the name of ‘King and Country’ or else ‘For God and the People’. These very early Quakers were fired by a defiant, millenarian vision; they too wanted to turn the world upside down – but this time, unlike in the recent Civil War, by wholly non-violent means. Therefore immediately after the Civil War that had not brought about Jerusalem the Quakers preached and practised the alternative to war – non-violent resistance. Margaret Fell, the ‘Mother of Quakerism’ who would later marry Fox, wrote in 1660 to Charles II: 

We who are the people of God called Quakers, who are hated and despised, and everywhere spoken against, as People not fit to live… We are a people that follow after those things that make for Peace, love and Unity… we do bear our Testimony against all strife and wars… Our weapons are not Carnal, but Spiritual.

George Fox, 1661, delivered to Charles II a ‘Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God, called Quakers against all plotters and fighters’. 

The Quaker Francis Howgilt, at his trial in Appleby said: 

It has been a Doctrine always held by us, and a received principle…that Christ’s Kingdom could not be set up with carnal Weapons, nor the Gospel propagated by Force of Arms, nor the Church of God builded by Violence; but the Prince of Peace is manifest among us and we cannot learn War any more, but can love our Enemies, and forgive them that do Evil to us…This is the Truth, and if I had twenty lives, I would engage them all, that the Body of Quakers will never have any Hand in War, or Things of that Nature, that tend to the Hurt of others. 

Following George Fox, the Quakers also opposed slavery and capital punishment. 

But if Quakers were so peaceable, why were they so persecuted in the 1650s, 1660s, 1670s and 1680s? Betrayed by local ‘informers’, arrested just for meeting to worship in silence in one another’s houses, or for refusing to attend their local church, they were heavily fined, imprisoned for months in filthy, stinking, dark holes – often below ground -, publicly stripped and whipped, stoned and even transported as slaves?. Under Charles II (1660- 1685), 13,562 Quakers were arrested and imprisoned; 198 were transported as slaves; at least 338 died in prison as a result of their injuries. It was in this same period that Bunyan the unlicensed Baptist preacher was in Bedford Jail and Richard Baxter, the Presbyterian minister who would not conform to the 39 Articles was tried in his frail and sick old age by the Chief Justice Judge Jeffreys. “What ailed the old stock-cole, unthankful villain, that he would not conform… He hath poisoned the world with his linsey wolsey doctrine”. Judge Jeffreys wanted the old man publicly whipped. But Baxter and Bunyan were individuals who were persecuted; the Quakers were persecuted as a collective body, an alternative, threatening counter- culture, a ‘Society of Friends’ that was a standing criticism of the wider dominant – and unfriendly – social fabric of Great Britain. 

The Reasons for the persecution: 

Quakers were seen as a threat to the given social order into which they had been born because they had many subversive beliefs and practices in addition to their refusal to bear arms. The refused to take their hats off in respect to ‘their betters’ because they were `no respecters of persons (cf. the Epistle of James above). This was not trivial; it was a traditional gesture of popular social protests and enraged ‘the better sort’. When one accused Quaker refused to take his hat off before the magistrate, the judge seized it, burned it and sentenced him to five months’ imprisonment. 

Quakers refused to bow courteously or to use the polite terms of address; for instance they refused to say ‘You’ to their ‘betters’ but called everyone the familiar ‘Thou’, like ‘Du’ in German or ‘Tu’ in French. They refused to . give any of their fellow humans a special title. If they lived under a monarchy, they would not say ‘Your Majesty’ to the King, but just call him ‘King’; they would not say ‘My Lord’ to an aristocrat or ‘Your Honour’ to a Judge, or even refer to anyone as ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady’, ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. Instead, everyone was simply called by their first name and surname and addressed as ‘Friend’ by Quakers – even Cromwell, when Lord Protector of England, was addressed as ‘Friend Oliver’ by Fox. 

Quakers refused to swear any oath in a court of law because Christ had said ‘Swear not at all’. Again, in that same radical Epistle of James, we find : ‘above all things brethren, swear not, either by heaven, neither by the earth, either by any other oath: let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay. The truth was that everyone should speak everywhere and at all time, not merely in the witness box. But how could the non-oath taking Quakers be believed to be loyal citizens owing allegiance, or held capable of keeping any binding contracts, if they refused all oaths? 

Quakers refused to have any parson or minister, believing instead in their own Inner Light, that which is of God in everyone; they refused even to attend Anglican church services, that is ‘the prescribed national worship’, let alone pay their local Anglican parson his ‘tithes’ or church rates, no matter how often and how grossly their own goods were thereupon ‘distrained’, looted; half of their confiscated property being taken by those who had informed against them. Quakers maintained that there should be no paid ‘hireling’ ministers in Britain at all, which did not endear them to the professional clergy. And who knew what sedition, or incitements their meetings in one another’s houses might not be brewing, asked the magistrates? 

Finally, and perhaps worst of all in the eyes of their contemporaries, there even were many women Quakers, who followed their own Inner Light and preached in the streets as public missionaries who, when they were not in prison, travelled indefatigably throughout Britain and even the world, broadcasting the Quaker message of ‘that of God’ existing in every human being, including women. 

Thus 17th century Quakers seemed to be threatening the creation of an alternative, much more egalitarian society, and one that even included the spiritual equality of men and women. Quakers would not conform to church or state. And they were making thousands of converts. Where might it not end if almost everyone turned Quakers? Social Revolution? Already by 1660, i.e. in their first eight years, there had been at least 20,000 converts. In 1653 George Fox wrote: ‘0 ye great men and rich men of earth! Weep and howl for your misery that is coming [quotation from the Epistle of James]…the day of the Lord is appearing… All the loftiness of men must be laid low’. 

Alarmed, the Presbyterian Major-General Skipton, then in charge of London, had said in Parliament already in 1656: ‘[The Quakers’] great growth and increase is too notorious, both in England and Ireland; their principle strike at both ministry and magistracy’. It is not surprising, after all, that peaceable though they were, the Quakers were ruthlessly persecuted in an attempt to extirpate every one of them. How did they respond? They articulated their resistance, and testified to the principle of liberty of conscience. 

Quaker History of the Persecution. 

From the moment that they were persecuted, the late 17th century Quakers chronicled that persecution and their own un-budge-able, non-violent resistance. They wrote and printed pamphlets and letters to one another, above all to Margaret Fell, herself often imprisoned, and appealingly eloquently to the Magistrates, to King or to Parliament. 

In 1660 Richard Hubberthom wrote ‘[If] any magistrate do that which is unrighteous, we must declare against it’. This the Quakers judged the magistrates, and their social ‘superiors’, not the other way round. In 1664, after the Conventicle Act, that sought to banish Quakers to the West Indies, George Whitehead, who has been called possibly the most influential advocate of religious liberty in Britain,² ‘sheaved the judges their duty from the law and Magna Carta’. Every single example of arrest and punishment of Quakers was documented by a local Friend who could write a clear hand, naming both the local Sufferers and the local Persecutors on facing pages of their records.³ 

Thus Quaker solidarity and continuity was achieved through the creation of their own written accounts of individual and collective persecution. And it was upon these many local records, in addition to trial transcripts, that the amazingly comprehensive collective narrative compiled by Joseph Besse was based – The Suffering of the People Call Quakers for the Testimony of a Good Conscience 1650-1689. Thomas Paine was born precisely half way between these dates, in 1737. 

Besse title page: If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you (John). For the oppression of the poor, for the Sighing of the Needy, now I will arise, saith the Lord” (Psalms). 

Besse’s Preface to the Reader:

‘It was an excellent observation… that God is tried in the fire, and acceptable Men in the Furnace of Adversity… Persecution is a severe test upon the Hypocrite and Earthly-minded. ‘When thou passest flub the Waters, I will be with thee..ffsalahr. A Measure of this holy Faith, and a sense of this divine Support; bore up the spirit of the People called Quakers for near 40 years together, to stem the Torrent of Opposition… The Messengers of it were entertained with Scorn and Derision, with Beatings, Buffetings, Stonings, Whippings and Imprisonment, Banishments, and even Death itself’ 

Just to give one vivid example of the persecution of a woman Quaker in Sussex there is the case of Mary Akehurst as summarised by Besse in his volume on Southern England, ch. 34, pp.711-712: 

1659… Mary Akehurst, a religious Woman of Lewis [sic], going into a Steeple-house there, and asking a Question of the Independent Preacher, after his Sermon, was dragg’d out by the people, and afterwards beaten and puncht by her Husband, so that she could not lift her Arms to her Head without Paine. She also suffered much cruel Usage from her said Husband, who bound her Hand and Foot, and grievously abused her, for reproving one of the Priests who had falsely accused her. Her Husband also kept her chained for a Month together, Night and Day. 

Mary Akehurst’s neighbours won her release by pinning a written protest about her treatment on the Church door. She continued to testify to her Quaker convictions, although even after her husband had died, she was punished by the authorities time and again. David Hitchin’s Quakers in Lewes (1984), based on the full account held in the Public Record Office Mary Akehurst’s neighbours won her release by pinning a written protest about her treatment on the Church door. She continued to testify to her Quaker convictions, although even after her husband had died, she was punished by the authorities time and again. David Hitchin’s Quakers in Lewes (1984), based on the full account held in the Public Record Office takes up the story: In 1670 she was distrained of goods worth £29 by false information. She appealed to the next Sessions and the informer, fearing be found a perjurer, fled. Her goods were ordered to be returned. In 

1672 William Penn visited her in Lewes. In 1673 she was reported by an informer priest, William Snatt, for meeting in a private house, fined £8.10 shillings, and her goods were taken worth £16.18 shillings. In 1676 she was fined £10 for meeting in a house in West FirIe. In 1677 she was indicted for nine months’ absence from church. In 1686 (27 years after asking her first question in St. Michael’s church) when old, sick and unable to walk without being held up on either side, she was carried off at midnight by bailiffs to prison. In Besse’s words, op.cit. p.734: 

One of the Bayliffs, being drunk, when he got on Horseback, with many Oaths and Threatenings had set her upon his Horse, and would not suffer her to take Necessaries with her, so that her Friends thought she could not live till she came to the Prison. But the barbarous Bayliff swore, that if she could not hold it to Prison, which was twenty Mlles, he would tie her, and drag her thither at his Horse’s Tail. Being brought to Horsham Jail, she was kept dose Prisoner there about seven Months, and then was removed to London and committed to the King’s Bench. In Oxford… In Cumbria… 

It was men like George Fox, Francis Howgill, Edmund Burroughs, Richard Hubberthom, George Whitehead and Robert Barclay, and women like Margaret Fell, Ann Blaykling, Mary Fisher and Mary Akehurst who were Thomas Paine’s fearlessly radical 17th century forerunners, speaking out for justice and civil liberty, including liberty for (non-violent) non-conformity. 

Part Two 

Paine’s own Quaker Background. 

Paine’s magisterial biographer John Keane stresses that Paine was the child of a mixed marriage – half Anglican, half Quaker and suggests that this must have led to his having a balanced, even detached, view of both orthodox and heterodox Christianity and hence to his championing of toleration. I myself see no reason to think that young Paine felt himself to be equally Anglican and Quaker. He is generally agreed to have been much closer to his Quaker father to whom he was apprenticed at thirteen than he was to his Anglican mother. And he actually recounts in The Age of Reason how shocked and alienated he had been when he was 7 or 8 years old, on hearing his Anglican aunt’s orthodox Anglican religious teaching of Original Sin and redemption through God’s allowing the crucifixion of his own son. Instead, when young Tom Paine attended Quaker meetings in Meeting House Lane, he would have heard Quaker neighbours testifying not to sin or damnation but to their feelings of love and unity and to the working of God’s mercy in their own lives; he would also have absorbed the practical mercy that Thetford Quakers gave out towards the needy, suffering members of their meeting. 

For in Thetford, Quakers collective self-organization had already been established soon after the start of the first Friends’ meetings there.³ 

Through democratic ‘Quaker discipline’ that included ‘elders’ and ‘overseers’ and monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings as well as women’s meetings, taking care of the poor, the sick, the old, the widowed and the orphans had been the Quaker way from the first.⁴ Their path-breaking schemes of providing accommodation, weekly allowances, legacies and gifts of fuel and clothing (we again remember the Epistle of James) gave Paine a lifelong Quaker ‘feeling for the hard condition of others’ as he himself would write in his letter to the town of Lewes later. There would also have been (as there still is) decision-making by consensus – ‘the sense of the Meeting’. Therefore, despite arguments and some defections, and criticism, Quakers managed to practice democratic consultation and to avoid continuous acrimonious splitting into ever smaller groups. Instead, they tolerated different approaches to Truth if sincerely sought, trusting in each Friend’s own moral and reasoned judgement, as he or she followed their ‘Inner Light’. 

We should also note that Quakerism is, and has always been, an outward looking faith. They believed from the first that Quakerism is something to be lived out in the world and this bonded them in shared efforts at humanitarian intervention. For the Quakers have never been short of others’ Sufferings’ that need addressing, the sufferings of slaves, prisoners, the disenfranchised, the starving, refugees, the victims of war and persecution. 

Quakerism already had an influence on Paine’s schooling, between the ages of 7-13. His father said he must not learn Latin because of the books thro’ which that language is taught – think of the semi-divine status claimed for the founding of Rome in the Aeneid or the city or the deity accorded the later Roman emperors or Caesar’s triumph list history in his accounts of his conquest of Gaul. Simon Weil called history ‘believing the murderers at their own word’. 

Did, during this period, young Paine read a copy of Besse’s Sufferings of the Early Quakers in the small Thetford Meeting House library? Or did his father, or a richer Quaker neighbour actually own a copy?⁵ We shall never know, but at the very least there must have been an inextinguishable orally transmitted tradition. As Sylvia Stevens writes in her monograph A Believing People in a Changing World: Quakers in Society in North-east Norfolk, 1690-1800: 

When Friends such as Mary Kirby and Edmund Peckover who were directly descended from a Quaker of the first generation, gave their [oral] ministry, they were doing so as people who linked to the past but spoke a message for the present 18th century Norfolk Quakers acknowledged, shaped and revered their own religious pasts but lived in their own time. 

What would young Thomas Paine have read or been told about the treatment of the Quakers, including his own kin, in Thetford, in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk, before he was born? And how would they have reacted? 

The written history of persecution of Norfolk Quakers, especially Norwich and Thetford (Source: Besse)

1660 the deposition of Samuel Duncombe on the breaking up of a meeting in Norwich: ‘[We suffered their] smiting, punching, cruel mocking… thumping on the Back and Breast without Mercy, dragging some most inhumanly by the Hair of the Head, and spitting in our Faces, abusing both men and women…[They] have taken the Mire out of the Streets and have thrown it at the Friends, some of them holding the Maid of the House whilst others daubed her face with Gore and Dung, so as the skin of her face could hardly be seen.’ 

For that ‘scandalous expression’ Duncombe and the other Quakers were sent to prison. Whereupon Samuel Duncombe wrote again to the Mayor and Aldermen, beginning ‘Friends, Our Oppression is more than we ought always to bear in Silence. And now we are upon the brink of Ruin by the loss of our Goods,… made harbourless in our own houses… And what would you have us do? Do you think we are only wilful and resolve so to be? Do you think these things are pleasing to our own wills as creatures of flesh and blood as you are also, to suffer? You must also expect Judgement – therefore be not high-minded, but fear – for the Lord can quickly blast your Honour and disperse your Riches. We cannot sew Pillows under your armholes, but wish you well as we do ourselves.’

Duncombe later sent a second letter from Norwich prison, beginning not ‘Friends’, this time, but ‘Magistrates!’ And continuing: ‘For complaining of injustice our liberties are taken from us, we are forced to lodge in straw’. 

In February 1665 at the Quarter Sessions held at Norwich Castle, Henry Kettle and Robert Eden both of Thetford, and two others, were convicted of the third offence in meeting together (see Conventicle Act) and were sentenced to be carried thence to Yarmouth, and from that Port to be transported for seven years to Barbados’ (i.e. as slaves). When Kettle returned after seven years, he was again arrested and imprisoned. 

In 1676, William Gamham, Mary Townsend and Robert Spargin of Thetford were distrained of their good worth £2.5 shillings. One Captain Cropley molested them and attempted to disperse their religious meeting by Force of Arms. And when they asked for his commission so to do, he showed them his rapier. And one of them not going at his command, he beat him on the Head with his Stick and kickt him on the Back to the endangering of his Life. 

November 1676, Samuel Dunscombe [again] reported how his house was forcibly entered; ‘officers bringing with them one Tennison and impudent Informer and the common Hangman. They tarried several days and nights in that home and kept Samuel Duncombe’s wife, then big with child, a Prisoner, suffering her to speak to no body and admitting none of the neighbours to come near her. The Goods they took were valued at £42.19 shillings’. 

1678 ‘George Whitehead and Thomas Burr were taken at a meeting in Norwich. Charles Alden, a Vintner and one of the singing Men in the Cathedral, rushed in calling out ‘Here’s Sons of Whores; here’s 500 Sons and Daughters of Whores. The Church Doors stand open but they will be hanged before they will come in there’. sand whilst George Whitehead was speaking, [Alden] cryed out ‘Put down that Puppy Dog! Why do you suffer him to stand there prating?’ 

These Norfolk Quakers were then sent to prison in Norwich Castle and again in 1680 for refusing to take the oath. On his release George Whitehead went straight to Hampton Court to plead with the King on behalf of his fellow-prisoners left 27 steps below ground in Norwich Castle dungeons – ‘They are burying them alive’, he told the King, whom he just addressed as ‘King’, ‘They are poor harmless people, poor Woolcombers, Weavers and Tradesmen, like to be destroyed’. The prisoners were only released two years later. 

1682 Anne Payne was committed to prison for ‘absence from National Worship’ (Many other Paines, or Paynes, in Norfolk suffered the seizure of their goods, and imprisonment). 

1684 saw an ‘excessive Seizure from two Norfolk farmers, John Roe and William Roe, who were fined £240 and had all their cattle, corn and households goods taken by the Sherriff’s Officers in East Dereham. ‘The behaviour of the Officers and Assistants and who made this seizure was very rude. They broke open the Doors, Drawers and Chests and threatened the Servants of the House with Sword and Pistol. To make themselves merry they roasted a pigg and laid so much wood on the Hearth that they set the Chimney on Fire with which, and their Revelling, Cursing and Swearing, they affrighted the wife of the said William Roe to the endangering of her Life; she being then great with child, was delivered before her lime, and the child died a few days later’. 

The persecution continued in Norfolk up to 1690. Such things are not soon forgotten. Whether or not young Thomas Paine, born in 1737, read a copy of Besse, so many were the oral accounts of the persecution period that he must have heard many examples from his father, from his paternal grand- parents and from other Thetford Quakers. It was still living memory and there can be no doubt at all on which side he and his father were on. It would simply not have been possible for him as a sensitive, spirited, indignant child and youth to have been equally pro-Anglican, on the side of the punishing ruling class, and on the side of their victims, the heroes and heroines of Quaker dissent. 

Part Three 

Paine’s writing on Quakers and on Quakerly principles. 

1768-1775: Paine in Lewes. 

Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman, who would become Paine’s closest English friend and first devoted biographer (Paine would write part of the Rights of Man in his London home), first attached himself to Paine as his inspiring mentor when he was a youth in Lewes. ‘Clio’ Rickman was a ‘birthright’ Lewes Quaker on both sides of his family, the Rickmans being the dominant family in the meeting there. They first settled in Lewes around 1700 and were almost certainly related to, if not directly descended from, the Quakers Nicholas Rickman from Arundel who had been pitilessly persecuted in West Sussex decade after decade before 1690. Their common Quaker heritage and knowledge of Quaker persecution history would have been one of the bonds between the radical debating Paine of the Lewes Headstrong Club and his young admiring convert to radicalism, Rickman. ‘Clio’ Rickman himself would be disowned by the Lewes meeting for ‘marrying out’ but eventually died as a Quaker in London and would be buried in the Quaker burial ground in Bunhills Fields. He would publish Paine and give him sanctuary in London, and himself suffer as a publisher for his Paine connection. 

1775-1787 America. 

1775-80 Paine worked with Philadelphia Quakers in the first anti-slavery society in America, founded by the Quaker John Woolman. He wrote his first essay there asking the Americans to ‘discontinue and renounce’ slavery in African Slavery in America. 

1775. In his Thoughts on a Defensive War, he wrote “I am thus far a Quaker, in that I would readily agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket”, i.e. against the troops, including Hessian mercenaries, being employed by the British to put down the American struggle for colonial independence – ‘laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword (Common Sense). 

Therefore, in 1776 in his Appendix to Common Sense, Paine opposed those conservative ‘Tory’, non-resisting Philadelphia Quakers who, in 1776, advocated reconciliation with the British King, Paine accused this group of rich Quakers, who, he said, did not represent all Quakers, of being not really neutral and peacefully above the conflict as they claimed by de facto partisans on King George III’s side, when they argued against resistance. Their very participation in political argument forfeited their claim to be apolitical quietists. They were really on the side of Mammon. Had Paine known of the actual degree of American Quaker economic collaboration with the British then going on behind the scenes, he would have been even more incensed.⁶

It is noteworthy that in the same Appendix Paine proves that he has read some Quaker persecution history in his admiring allusion to ‘the honest soul of [the Quaker Robert] Barclay’ and his quotation from Barclay’s Address to Charles 11, criticising persecution under Charles II, a King who having himself been oppressed ‘hest reason to know how hateful the oppressor is to both God and man’. 

Xmas 1776 The American Crisis – first essay by Paine advocating total resistance even unto death: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls… Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered;…’ show your faith by your works’ (Epistle of James). 

November 1778, 7th Crisis essay, Paine coined the phrase ‘Religion of Humanity’, i.e. humanity is the true religion. My religion is to do good’. 

1788-9 and 1791: England. 

1789 Letter to Kitty Nicholson: 

There is a Quaker favourite of mine at New York, formerly Miss Watson of Philadelphia ; she is now married to Dr. Lawrence and is an acquaintance of Mrs. Oswald; so be kind as to make her a visit for me. You will like her conversation. She has a little of the Quaker primness – but of the pleasing kind about her.

1789 -1790 and 1792-1795: France 

1793 attacked by Marat re clemency for King denounced for being a Quaker and therefore against death penalty.

1794 – 6: Paine on Quakers and Quakerism in The Age of Reason. Conway Introduction. Paine’s ‘Reason’ is only an expansion of the Quakers “inner light’. Paine was a spiritual successor of George Fox. He too had ‘apostolic fervour’. 

Part 1, Ch. 1. The author’s profession of faith. 

‘I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy’. ‘My own mind is my own church’. 

Ch.111. The character of Jesus. 

‘He was a virtuous and amiable man. The morality he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some Greek philosophers many years before, by the Quakers since, and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any. 

Ch. X111 

My father being of the Quaker profession, it was my good fortune to have an exceedingly good moral education, and a tolerable stock of useful learning. Though I went to the grammar school, I did not learn Latin, not only because I had no inclination to learn languages, but because of the objection the Quakers have against the books in which the language is taught. 

And note how his first attempts to think and write about politics and government were determined by the principle in which he had been raised – I.e. Quakerism. 

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true Deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers: but they have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at the conceit that if a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties nor a bird been permitted to sing. 

Part 2, Conclusion to The Age of Reason: 

The only sect that has not persecuted are the Quakers; and the only reason that can be given for it is, that they are rather Deists than Christians. They do not believe much about Jesus Christ, and they call all scriptures a dead letter. 

1797, Letter to Camille Jordan who was anxious to restore Catholic privileges, inc. church bells, in post-revolutionary France. 

The intellectual part of religion is a private affair between every man and his Maker, and which no third party has any right to interfere. The practical part consists in our doing good to each other. But since religion has been made into a trade, the practical part has been made to consist of ceremonies performed by men called priests; true religion has been banished; and such means have been found out to extract money even from the pockets of the poor, instead of contributing to their relief… 

No man ought to make a living by Religion. It is dishonest to do so. Religion is not an act that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another… that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another… 

The only people who, as a professional sect of Christians provide for the poor of their society, are people known by the name of Quakers. These men have no priests. They assemble quietly in their places of meeting, and do not disturb their neighbours with shows and noise of bells… Quakers are equally remarkable for the education of their children. I am a descendent of a family of that profession; my father was a Quaker, and I presume I may be admitted as evidence of what I assert. … Principles of humanity, of sociability, and sound instruction for advancement of society, are the first objects of studies among the Quakers… One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests. 

1803, Letter to Samuel Adams. 

…”the World has been overrun with fables and creeds of human invention, with sectaries of whole nations against all other nations, and sectaries of those sectaries in each of them against each other. Every sectary, except the Quakers, has been a persecutor. Those who fled from persecution were persecuted in their turn. 

1804, Prospect Papers. 

It is an established principle with the Quakers not to shed blood, Re revelation: the O.T. usage ‘the word of the Lord came to such a one – like the expression used by a Quakers, that ‘the spirit moveth him”. 

The Quakers are a people more moral in their conduct than the people of other sectaries, and generally allowed to be so, do not hold the Bible (i.e. the O.T.) to be the word of God. They call it ‘a history of the times’. 

Conclusion 

Paine himself was not a Quaker, because he was not a Christian and the Quakers were Christians, however unorthodox and radical. Nevertheless, his Quaker heritage from his father gave him a birthright example of principled, fundamental criticism of the corrupt, caste-ridden, unjust society into which he was born. 

The persecution history, in particular, of his Quaker forebears transmitted to Paine both by word of mouth and in print in his youth, must, I believe, have been truly inspirational ‘strengthening medicine’ as he in his turn dared to ‘speak truth to power’. There is no foundation for conviction like saeva indignatio. And Paine, like the early Quakers, would also face trial for ‘sedition’, would be exiled by a fearful aristocratic government and would be imprisoned and risk death for his convictions – the latter, ironically, at the hand of revolutionary extremists. 

Paine acknowledged the idea rightness of the Quaker Peace testimony and would only ever see justification in a purely defensive armed struggle. Paine helped start the American Quaker campaign in Philadelphia to abolish slavery and the slave trade. 

Paine remembered the Society of Friends’ organization of care for its weakest members as a template for the possibility of organized social welfare that he would expound in Rights of Man. His allusions to Quakerism and the practice of the Quakers in his writings whether in America„ in France or in England, were overwhelmingly respectful, even at time reverential – ‘I reverence their philanthropy’. 

So far I have implied the influence of Quakerism on Paine was as positive as it was profound. But was it wholly positive? Perhaps we should consider the comment made by the eighty year old portrait painted by James Northcote, himself a political liberal, as reported in Hazlitt’s first Conversation with Northcote, in 1829. 

Nobody can deny that [Paine] was a very fine writer and a very sensible man. 

But he flew in the face of a whole generation; and no wonder that they were too much for him, and that his name became a byword with such multitudes, for no other reason than that he did not care what offence he gave them by contradicting all their most inveterate prejudices. If you insult a room-full of people, you will be kicked out of it. So neither will the world at large be insulted with impunity. If you tell a whole country that they are fools and knaves, they will not return the compliment by crying you up as the peak of wisdom and honesty. Nor will those who come after be very apt to take up your quarrel. It was not so much Paine’s being a republican or an unbeliever, as the manner in which he brought his opinions forward (which showed self-conceit and a want of feeling) that subjected him to obloquy. People did not like the temper of the man. 

The first Quakers had certainly known how to get up the noses of their late 17th century persecutor. They knew they were in the right, that they were ‘the Children of God’ and those who were against them were mere ‘hirelings’ and ‘worldlings’. But they did not thereby endear themselves to their world. As Besse himself said: Nor could it be expected that a Testimony levelled both against the darling Vices of the Laity and the forced maintenance of the Clergy should meet with any other than an unkind reception.⁷ Was Paine too much like those earliest Quakers, forfeiting persuasiveness in the certainty of his own exclusive rightness – and so ‘[meeting] an unkind reception’? 

Twenty years earlier than Hazlitt’s Conversation about him with Northcote, on his deathbed in March,1809, Paine had expressed his last wish: 

“I know not if the Society of people called Quakers, admit a person to be buried in their burying ground, who does not belong to their Society, but if they do, or will admit me, I would prefer being buried there; my father belonged to that profession, and I was partly brought up in it.” 

According to Keane, a local New Jersey Friend, Willett Hicks: 

‘conveyed Paine’s request sympathetically to the local Friends, but it was refused. Hicks reported back that the society felt that Paine’s own friends and sympathizers “might wish to raise a monument to his memory, which being contrary to their rules, would render it inconvenient to them”….Paine sobbed uncontrollably’ …

Notes

1. Conway, Moncure, Life of Thomas Paine…. 1892, vol.1, p. 11. 
2. See Oxford DNB entry on Whitehead, See Public Record Offices for the earliest mss. Quaker archives, listing local ‘Sufferers’ and ‘Perpetrators on facing pages, month by month, year by year, 1652-1690. 
3. Those among the Valiant Sixty’ at Firbank Fell in 1651 who had gone to ‘ publish truth’ in Norwich and Norfolk in 1653-4 pi included Christopher Atkinson from Kendal, Ann Blaylding from Drawell, Richard Hubberthome from Yealand, James Lancaster from Walney, Dorothy Waugh from Preston Patrick and George Whitehead from Orton. 
4. Keane p. 24: they believed their mutual aid enabled them to return in Spirit to the grace of the earliest ‘primitive’ Christians. 
5. Quote intro. to facsimile of Besse re their distribution. 
6. See Conway, vol.1, pp. 78-77. 
7. Besse, Introduction.

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Thomas Paine’s reputation among those who have not read his work — as I had not, before I sat down with Age of Reason not long ago — is as a somewhat scandalous free-thinker. According to A.JAyer, on whose 1988 critical biography Thomas Paine I have relied in preparing this appreciation, “As late as the beginning of this century, Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth president of the United States, chose to refer to Thomas Paine as a ‘filthy little atheist.”‘ Had you asked me, I would have guessed Paine to be an atheist, although omitting the adjectives. The truth is that, although Paine was a ferocious enemy of religion, he was not at all an atheist. 

Introduction 

What you notice first about Age of Reason is Paine’s resonant style. His words have a paradoxical impact because his grammar and vocabulary are so simple. He gets great impact from a series of one-syllable words, as in the well-known phrases “My own mind is my own church,” or “These are the times that try men’s souls.° Some of the most pungent paragraphs of Age of Reason are crafted entirely of words of one and two syllables. 

Was the book all rhetoric, or did it present a reasoned argument? Was it an antique or could it speak to modern readers? I read it carefully; I checked some of Paine’s Biblical assertions; then I wrote this Appreciation in order to come to better terms with the book. 

In the end I found arguments that are sensible and detailed — although put forward in vitriolic, impassioned rhetoric — and behind them an amazingly up- to-date mind, one that could easily adapt to modern cosmology and notions of “emergent” phenomena. Paine the philosopher deserves to be better-known, especially among technologists. 

The Opening 

Theme Age of Reason is in two parts that were originally written and published a year apart. Paine set forth his own creed at the outset of the first part. 

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy.

However, he wastes no time demonstrating why conventional believers find him uncomfortable: 

I do not believe in the creed professed by…the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish. appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. 

These are the two main themes of the two volumes that comprise Age of Reason: A case for Deism, the belief that God can only be apprehended by rational study of the creation; and an energetic, passionate, and reasoned attack on the legitimacy of all organized religions, and in particular on the legitimacy of Christian dogma. 

Attack on Revelation 

Paine wastes no words on attacking the behaviour of churches or religionists. He realizes that an attack on the basis of behaviour, however bad the behaviour might be, is only peripheral and can easily be defended. Are the priests of some church venal? Well, they are only weak humans, and in any event their divinely-ordained rituals are still efficacious. Does some church sanction violence? Well, there are historical or cultural excuses, and in any event, this other church does not, what about it? And so forth. 

Instead, Paine attacks directly the one claim that has to be the anchor of every church’s dogma: that the church does the work of a Deity as revealed by the Deity. 

Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals…Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. 

Paine mentions the Judaical scriptures, the Christian Bible, and the “Turkish” Koran (the Ottoman empire was the chief Islamic power of his day). How he would have relished having the Book of Mormon or Science and Health for further examples! 

Paine takes the axe of his rhetoric directly to this core concept, the very idea of “revelation,” as a message from God to a human. 

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third,… and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us second-hand, either verbally or in writing. 

He expands on this point for a few pages, but the fundamental thrust is home: the only proof that a particular scripture is a divine revelation is the assertion by a series of people that it is. Because all those reporters are human and capable of being deceived (and of deceiving), one has no reason to treat a scripture any differently than any other piece of reportage. Unless, of course, you can find something in the scripture that could not have been composed by the human mind. Paine doesn’t expect you will. For example, the commands claimed by Moses to have been given by God, 

…carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention. 

Revelation, if it happens, is personal and cannot demand the belief of any other than its recipient. But Paine says there are other reasons to distrust scriptures of all kinds. First, it is trivial and demeaning to call simple history “revelation” or “inspired”: 

For if I have done a thing, or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it, or seen it… Revelation, therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth, of which man himself is the actor or the witness; and consequently all the historical and anecdotal parts of the Bible, which is almost the whole of it, is not within the meaning and compass of the word revelation, and, therefore, is not the word of God…When we contemplate the immensity of that Being who directs and governs the incomprehensible WHOLE, of which the utmost ken of human sight can discover but a part, we ought to feel shame at calling such paltry stories the word of God. 

Most important, human language is simply inadequate as a container for anything called divine: 

…we must necessarily affix the idea, not only of unchangeableness, but of the utter impossibility of any change taking place, by any means or accident whatever, in that which we would honour with the name of the word of God; and therefore the word of God cannot exist in any written or human language. 

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translations necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of wilful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the word of God. 

But is not revelation verified by miracles? Of course not, Paine says, and gives three reasons. First, we don’t know the extent of the laws of nature, and second, miracles can be faked. 

As, therefore, we know not the extent to which either nature or art can go, there is no positive criterion to determine what a miracle is, and mankind, in giving credit to appearances, under the idea of there being miracles, are subject to be continually imposed upon. 

But third, report of a miracle is simply ineffective as an inducement to belief; even supposing the miracle occurred, the very report of it invites disbelief: 

If…we see an account given of such a miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is, is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?…it is more difficult to obtain belief to a miracle, than to a principle evidently moral without any miracle. 

This is a restatement of Hume’s maxim on the miraculous, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened.” Hume’s work was published in 1758 and it is hard to imagine Paine would not have known of it. Paine’s prose, as usual, is the more pungent. 

Deism 

If no prophet or scripture can be trusted, what is left? Paine said he believes in a God; where would he read the Deity’s nature? As befits an old revolutionary, his answer is at once radical, egalitarian, and liberating. 

The WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man. 

…The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language…lt is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed.. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the Scripture called the Creation. 

This is the key tenet of Deism, and the point that Paine most wanted to convey. 

At this point, Paine articulates versions of the First Cause and Design arguments for God’s existence. But he does not simply state them; he uses them as a springboard to advocate reason as the tool for religious understanding. He arrives at a conclusion that ought to make him the patron philosopher of every scientist or technologist: 

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. 

In a lengthy argument Paine uses the geometry of the triangle to show that “mechanics,” the practical application of science, is based on universal principles that are discovered, not invented, by man. “It is the structure of the universe that has taught this knowledge to man,” he says. But the same power of reason that enables us to discover and use the creation cannot stomach what is called theology: 

…it is certain that what is called the Christian system of faith…psi irreconcilable, not only to the divine gift of reason that God hath given to man, but to the knowledge that man gains of the power and wisdom of God, by the aid of the sciences and by studying the structure of the universe that God has made. 

It is almost eerie for a modern reader to see that phrase “the structure of the universe” used twice, clearly in the sense we use it, but in a book published in 1794. How delighted Paine would have been, if he could have watched the unfolding of modern cosmology as it discovers ever deeper and stranger aspects of the structure of the universe.

The Writing of Age of Reason 

Paine was a failure at business and marriage when he emigrated to the American colonies. The political ferment of the time awakened him to his true talent, a genius for arguing a cause. He published the pamphlet Common Sense early in 1776, and by the end of the year it had sold 150,000 copies — in a country that had a population of a few million, where all news moved by horse or sad. The pamphlet played a decisive part (says biographer Ayer) in turning public opinion toward secession and away from accommodation with England. During the war Paine published more pamphlets, the first of which begins with the famous sentence, 

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. 

In 1787 Paine returned to England, mainly to promote his design for an iron bridge. In 1790 the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke published a criticism of the French Revolution and a defence of privilege and a stratified society. This inflamed Paine, who immediately wrote and published his greatest work, The Rights of Man, an eloquent and detailed proposal for a democratic state based on universal (male) suffrage, with no unearned privilege and with features such as salaries for legislators, public health care, public education, and old-age pensions, all to be paid for by a graduated income tax. Each of these was a novel idea at the time. 

The Rights of Man was an immediate best-seller, but was also quickly ruled “seditious libel” by the British Government. Paine fled to France just ahead of an order for his arrest. The Crown tried and convicted him in absentia, and he never set foot in England again alive. Printers who sold his book were convicted and sentenced to jail or transportation, but the book continued to sell, ultimately passing 300,000 copies. 

Meanwhile the French welcomed him, made him an honorary citizen, elected him a representative to the National Convention, and appointed him to the committee that was compiling a new constitution. But this was the beginning of the Terror, when anyone not affiliated with the cadre in power was subject to arrest at any time, and dozens were taken from cells to the guillotine every day. Later Paine would write 

The intolerant spirit of Church persecutions had transferred itself into politics; the tribunal styled revolutionary, supplied the place of an inquisition…I saw many of my most intimate friends destroyed, others daily carried to prison, and I had reason to believe, and had also intimations given to me, that the same danger was approaching myself. 

In this feverish climate Paine sat down and wrote that “It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion,” and, continuing through the arguments summarized above, concluded the first part of Age of Reason (only 68 pages) with 

…if ever a universal religion should prevail, it will not be by believing anything new, but in getting rid of redundancies…in the meantime, let every man follow, as he has a right to do, the religion and the worship he prefers.

The day he wrote that, guards came from the revolutionary government to arrest him. They were courteous enough to let Paine detour past the house of a friend and drop off the manuscript on the way to jail. The work was published as a pamphlet white he was in prison. 

There he stayed for eight months, never sure when he might be taken out to have his head removed. The US representative in Pads, Gouvemor Morris, was an enemy of Paine’s, and did nothing to obtain his release, while reporting to the government at home that the Revolutionary Council had refused to release him. 

When Jefferson succeeded Washington as president, he sent a new ambassador, James Monroe (himself later President). Monroe was a Paine supporter, and quickly secured Paine’s release. Paine was very ill, and spent months recuperating in Monroe’s house. But as soon as he could write, he resumed work on the second part of Age of Reason. 

Flaming the Church 

The pamphlet edition of the first part of Age of Reason had already drawn criticism. As was only to be expected, most of the rebuttals were couched in Christian terms. Perhaps this is why, in the longer second part, Paine aims less at defining Deism as a distinct belief, and focuses on the negative task of demolishing Christian doctrine, and in particular on discrediting the Bible as a reliable document. In truth, Deism is such a spartan doctrine, the few pages he spends on it are probably sufficient. Whatever his motive, Paine swings away at the Bible with a fine iconoclastic energy. 

Biographer A. J. Ayer seems to find Paine’s detailed and sarcastic deconstruction of Biblical absurdities to be somehow quaint, barely relevant “At the time that Paine wrote Age of Reason,” he explains, “the view of orthodox Christians was that the Bible was the word of God. For example, in the case of the Old Testament, it was believed that God dictated the books of the Pentateuch to Moses and the book of Samuel to Samuel, and that it was through divine inspiration that Solomon wrote his Proverbs and David his Psalms.” 

Perhaps in the rational cloisters of Oxford, where Ayer writes, such beliefs are today only historical footnotes. And in fact there are no respected biblical scholars today who think that any books of the Bible (apart from some of Paul’s epistles) were written by their eponymous authors. When Paine wrote, there was no such thing as biblical scholarship, in the sense of learned, non- sectarian, non-judgemental scrutiny of the Bible as a text. There was plenty of study of the Bible, but the scholars who undertook it always started with a deeply-held belief in the inerrancy and divine inspiration of the text — reading the Bible only to seek further evidence of its presumed perfection. 

Outside Oxford, this is frequently still the case today. Belief in the literal, word- by-word truth of the Bible is by no means dead in this country. You do not have to go far to find people who can be shocked to the core and deeply angered by an assertion that the Gospel according to Mark might not have been written by a personal companion of Jesus named Mark. And even less- fundamental Christians commonly regard the Bible with a vaguely worshipful attitude, treat it as a sanctified artefact, and think it is at least disrespectful, possibly even blasphemous, to examine its text in any critical way. 

Paine had no such qualms. He says he had not had a Bible at hand while writing the first part of his book. But his critics: 

…will now find that I have furnished myself with a Bible and a Testament; and l can say also that I have found them to be much worse books than I had conceived. If I have erred in anything in the first part of the Age of Reason, it has been in speaking better of some parts of those books than they have deserved. 

With that he sets out to examine the Bible coldly, as a text, and to point out the grosser absurdities, contradictions, and barbarities that he finds littered through it. What is refreshing about Paine’s approach is that he does not simply fulminate; nor does he appeal to science or philosophy. Any such approach would lead only to empty word-wars with the theologians. He adopts a simpler, and more deadly, approach. 

The evidence that I shall produce in this case is from the books themselves, and I shall confine myself to this evidence only. Were I to refer for proof to any of the ancient authors whom the advocates of the Bible call profane authors, they would controvert that authority, as I controvert theirs: I will therefore meet them on their own ground, and oppose them with their own weapon, the Bible. 

The Old Testament 

The first seventy-odd pages that follow are primarily devoted to demolishing the notion that any books of the Old Testament could possibly have been written by Moses or by any other character who is named in them. This is really quite evident, if you only examine the text without preconception. Paine takes the books in turn, exposing in each at least one statement that cannot be true if the book is written by its legendary author. Here are two brief examples to demonstrate his methods. Of Deuteronomy, 

After telling that Moses went to the top of Pisgah… he [the author of Deuteronomy] tells us that Moses died there in the land of Moab, and that he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab; but as there is no antecedent to the pronoun he, there is no knowing who he was that did bury him. If the writer meant that he (God) buried him, how should he (the writer) know it? or why should we (the readers) believe him? since we know not whom the writer was that tells us so, for certainly Moses could not himself tell where he was buried. 

After finishing with the Pentateuch, Paine returns to Genesis to observe verse 36:31 

“And these are the kings that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.” [This passage] could only have been written after the first king began to reign over them; and consequently, that the book of Genesis, so far from having been written by Moses, could not have been written till the time of Saul at least…but the expression, any king, implies more kings than one…and if taken in a general sense, it carries it through all the time of the Jewish monarchy. 

And by the way, 

…this verse that I have quoted, and all the remaining verses of the 36th chapter of Genesis, are word for word in the first chapter of Chronicles, beginning at the 43rd verse. 

As indeed they are. Intrigued, I verified this and some others of Paine’s reports of contradictions and found no mistakes. For example, he later notes 

As one proof, among others I shall produce, to show the disorder In which this pretended word of God, the Bible, has been put together, and the uncertainty of who the authors were, we have only to look at the first three verses of Ezra, 

and the last two in Chronicles; for by what kind of cutting and shuffling has it been that the first three verses in Ezra should be the two last verses in Chronicles, or that the last two in Chronicles should be the first three in Ezra? Given his remarks in the first part of the book on the fallibility of any written text, he relishes finding this and other proofs of just such failings, which show 

the disorder and ignorance in which the Bible has been put together, and that the compilers of it had no authority for what they were doing, nor we any authority for believing what they have done. 

While passing through the Old Testament he reacts to some of the barbarous cruelties it celebrates. 

When we read…that they (the Israelites) came by stealth upon whole nations of people, who…had given them no offence; that they put all those nations to the sword; that they spared neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women, and children; that they left not a soul to breathe — expressions that are repeated over and over again…are we sure all these things are fact? are we sure that the Creator of man commissioned these things to be done? and are we sure that the books that tell us so were written by his authority? 

The New Testament 

After 75 pages of going “through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees,” Paine turns to the New Testament and in particular to the four Gospels. When he wrote, belief was that the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were personal reportage from the pens of four of Jesus’ twelve apostles (a belief not uncommon today in some quarters, as I mentioned). It was this belief that Paine assumed and set out to undermine. He had no difficulty in seeing that 

The disordered state of the history in those four books, the silence of one book on matters related in the other, and the disagreement that is to found among them, implies that they are the production of some unconnected individuals, many years after the things that they pretend to relate, each of whom made his own legend; and not the writings of men living intimately together…in fine, that they have been manufactured, as the books of the Old Testament have been, by other persons than those whose names they bear. 

Today, non fundamentalist scholars think this is exactly the case, but it was by no means the common opinion in the 18th century. (For an accessible, readable analysis of the history and content of the Gospels, see Asimov’s Guide to the New Testament.) Paine opens his treatment of the Gospels by saying 

I lay it down as a position which cannot be controverted, that the agreement of all parts of a story does not prove the story to be true, because the parts may agree and the whole may be false; secondly, that the disagreement of the parts of a story proves the whole cannot be true. The agreement does not prove true, but the disagreement proves falsehood positively. 

This established, he notes the complete disagreement between Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies of Jesus. The first chapter of Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the third chapter of Luke, there is also given a genealogy of Jesus Christ. 

Did those two agree, it would not prove the genealogy to be true…but as they contradict each other in every particular, it proves the falsehood absolutely. 

For the reader’s convenience, Paine sets out a table of the 28 generations cited by Matthew and the 43 given by Luke, so you can easily see that it is “only the two names of David and Joseph that are alike in the two lists.

“Now, if these men…set out with a falsehood between them…in the very commencement of their history…what authority…is there left for believing the strange things they tell us afterward? If they cannot be believed in their account of his natural genealogy, how are we to believe them when they tell us he was the son of God begotten by a ghost, and that an angel announced this in secret to his mother? 

And in a strange inverted prevision of Pascal’s Wager, Paine pleads 

Can any man of serious reflection hazard his future happiness upon the belief of a story naturally impossible…and related by persons already detected of falsehood? Is it not more safe that we stop ourselves at the plain, pure, and unmixed belief of one God, which is Deism, than that we commit ourselves on an ocean of improbable, irrational, indecent and contradictory tales? 

Continuing, he cites the contradictions in even the simplest matters of fact. Mark says the crucifixion was at nine in the morning, John says at noon. Each of the four books cites the written inscription supposed to be put above Christ on the cross, yet no two quote the same words. “We may infer from these circumstances, trivial as they are, that those writers, whoever they were, and in whatever time they lived, were not present at the scene.” Paine has high sarcastic fun with the apocalyptic account in Mark of events at the crucifixion (the veil in the temple rent, darkness, earthquake, graves opening) which is not corroborated by any of the other books. The books contradict each other about the events at the tomb and after. Matthew says that eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain, where they saw the resurrected Jesus. But Luke and John say the disciples were assembled in secret in Jerusalem, and Jesus appeared among them. Mark says Jesus ascended to heaven immediately after the meeting in the room; Luke says Christ led them out as far as Bethany. “Yet this is the evidence,” Paine says earlier, “and these are the books that have been imposed on the world, as being given by Divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God.” 

Immortality

Leaving the Gospels, Paine turns to the epistles of Paul; and this provokes him to discuss his own thoughts on immortality. It most offends Paine that ‘the doctrine he [Paul] sets out to prove by argument is the resurrection of the same body…” 

[But] if I have already died in this body, and am raised again in the same body…it is presumptive evidence that I shall die again…The Personal powers of man are so limited, and his heavy frame so little constructed to extensive enjoyment, that there is nothing to induce us to wish the opinion of Paul to be true. 

In these words I think I can hear the voice of an ill, aging man. But this is also the first place at which Paine is less than careful in his reading of the Bible. Paul explicitly says the resurrected body is not the same tired one (1 Corinthians 15:42-44), and Luke has Jesus address the same point (Luke 20:35-8). 

Is Paine guilty of the debater’s trick of setting up a straw-man argument? No; he turns immediately to his own alternative vision of resurrection. It does not involve bodies at all, and like all Paine’s notions, it is original. Indulge me as I quote at length, as it is so original, and stands out as an oasis of constructive philosophy in a long trek of criticism. 

[The consciousness of existence is the only conceivable idea we can have of another life, and the continuance of that consciousness is immortality. The consciousness of existence, or the knowing that we exist, is not necessarily confined to the same form, nor to the same matter, even in this life. 

We have not in all cases the same form, nor in any case the same matter that composed our bodies twenty or thirty years ago; and yet we are conscious of being the same persons…[W]e know not how much, or rather how little, of our composition it is, and how exquisitely fine that little is, that creates in us this consciousness of existence; and all beyond that is like the pulp of a peach, distinct and separate from the vegetative speck in the kernel. 

Who can say by what exceedingly fine action of fine matter it is that a thought is produced in what we call the mind? and yet that thought when produced, as I now produce the thought I am writing, is capable of becoming immortal, and is the only production of man that has that capacity…[P]rint and reprint a thought a thousand times over, and that with materials of any kind…the thought is eternally and identically the same thought… if, then, the thing produced has in itself a capacity of being immortal, it is more than a token that the power that produced it, which is the self-same thing as the consciousness of existence, can be immortal also; and that as independently of the matter it was first connected with, as the thought is of the printing or writing it first appeared in…it is not more difficult to believe that we shall exist hereafter in a better state and form than at present, than that a worm should become a butterfly, and quit the dunghill for the atmosphere… 

This passage has an astounding modernity. Early in the book, Paine used “the structure of the universe” almost the way a modern cosmologist would use it. Here he comes within a hair of arguing that consciousness is a pattern or arrangement, independent of the medium on which it appears. It’s as if Paine had eavesdropped on a lecture by, say, Douglas Hofstader, 200 years in his future. 

Note, by the way, that Paine is not at all arguing for a “soul” in different words. There are profound differences between the Cartesian soul, a kind of indestructible essence attached to but separate from the body, and a pattern, or Paine’s “consciousness of existence.” A pattern can persist forever, but it cannot exist apart from a medium, and it can be disrupted and erased forever. 

Paine does not follow up his idea in any depth. He does not speculate, for example , on what medium might carry his “consciousness of existence” after the end of his body. 

Deism and Christianity 

Belatedly noting Paul’s remarks on resurrection, Paine devotes some paragraphs of heavy-handed sarcasm to them, and then finally rests his prosecution by summing up the logical bind in which his exposure of its contradictions has placed the Christian scriptures. 

The evidence I have produced to prove them forgeries is extracted from the books themselves, and acts like a two-edged sword, either way. If the evidence be denied, the authenticity of the scriptures is denied with it; for it is scripture evidence; and if the evidence be admitted, the authenticity of the books is disproved. 

In his conclusion, Paine restates the argument against revelation, and reminds the reader of the violence and barbarity recounted so approvingly in the Old Testament. 

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion…the Jews made no converts, they butchered all. 

And Christians can’t claim the loving-kindness of the New Testament exonerates them, since “the ministers preach from both books.” Therefore, 

It is incumbent on every man who reveres the character of the Creator, and who wishes to lessen the catalogue of artificial miseries…to expel all ideas of revealed religion. 

Is there no good in the Bible? Only accidentally, for 

the fragments of morality that are irregularly and thinly scattered in these books…are the natural dictates of the conscience…and are nearly the same in all religions and in all societies. 

In a footnote, Paine notes Salon’s description of the most perfect government, “That where the least injury done to the meanest individual, is considered as an insult on the whole constitution,” as a precept superior to any in the New Testament. Solon, Paine carefully notes, lived about 500 years before Christ. Again he contrasts Deism to conventional religions, and incidentally shows again that he is himself no atheist. 

If we consider the nature of our condition here, we must see that there is no occasion for such a thing as revealed religion. What is it we want to know? Does not the creation, the universe we behold, preach to us the existence of an Almighty Power that governs and regulates the whole? And is not the evidence that this creation holds out to our senses infinitely stronger than anything we can read in a book that any impostor might make and call the word of God? As for morality, the knowledge of it exists in every man’s conscience. 

Yet Paine apparently recognizes that different minds must interpret the open book of Creation differently. Lacking an accepted revelation to supply a mandatory uniformity, there will be doubt But doubt is not a problem, it an absolute necessity, because 

We must know also that the power that called us into being, can, if he please, and when he pleases, call us to account for the manner in which we have lived here; and, therefore, without seeking any other motive for the belief, it is rational to believe that he will, for we know beforehand that he can. The probability or even the possibility of the thing is all that we ought to know; for if we knew it for a fact, we should be the mere slaves of terror; our belief would have no merit, and our best actions no virtue. 

It is the coercive nature of revealed religion, and its absurd complexities as compared to Deism, that makes Christianity “render the heart torpid,” he says. Always the political thinker, he never forgets the political purposes that religion can serve. 

As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests. [and later] It has been the scheme of the Christian church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support. 

In the final paragraphs Paine turns his resonant voice again to the praise of natural science. 

The Bible of the creation is inexhaustible in texts. Every part of science, whether connected with the geometry of the universe, with the systems of animal and vegetable life, or with the properties of inanimate matter, is a text as well for devotion as for philosophy—for gratitude as for human improvement. It will perhaps be said that if such a revolution in the system of religion takes place, every preacher ought to be a philosopher. Most certainly; and every house of devotion is a school of science. 

The Aftermath 

Paine finally returned to the United States in 1802. He was 65, not in good health, and in bad odor with almost everyone. However much he might have intended to promote the purity of Deism, what people remembered (or more commonly, all they heard as sensational gossip) was his attack on Christianity. The distinction between belief in a God, and hatred for the religion through which most people had received their notions of God, was entirely too fine for the average person to grasp or care about. From the moment of publication of Age of Reason Paine was an atheist in popular opinion. 

In addition, he offended powerful figures that might have been his patrons. He blamed ex-President Washington for failing to rescue him from prison; and he published a series of letters strongly attacking the Federalist party for failing to hold to the democratic principles of the American Revolution. 

Thomas Jefferson, now in office as President, still supported him, but other old friends refused to speak to him; and he was denounced from pulpits in many towns. At one point, when he tried to book a ride on a stagecoach, the owner of the line refused to carry him, apparently because one of his stages had once been struck by lightning and he didn’t want to risk it happening again. At the end of this journey, Paine and a friend were run out of Trenton by an angry mob. Friends and disciples turned enemies, either because of his “atheism” or because of personal quarrels. 

Paine died in 1809. It was his wish to be buried in a Quaker cemetery, but the Quakers denied the request. He was first interred on the outskirts of a farm he owned in New Rochelle. In a final bizarre chapter to his life, an admirer, one William Cobbett, had Paine’s corpse dug up and brought to England, where he attempted to raise money for a monument by exhibiting the corpse. This endeavour failed. After Cobbett’s estate was sold, Paine’s body passed through several hands and eventually disappeared. As Paine wrote of Moses, “There is no knowing who he was that did bury him.” 

Perhaps it is just as well. “I here close the subject,” he wrote, 

and I leave the ideas that are suggested in the conclusion of the work, to rest on the mind of the reader; certain as I am, that when opinions are free, either in matters of government or religion, truth will finally and powerfully prevail.

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Gender, Religion And Radicalism In The Long Eighteenth Century by Judith Jennings. Illustrated. 204pp. ISBN 0 7546 5500. £55.00 

This excellent book, sub-titled “The ‘Ingenious Quaker’ and Her Connections”, came my way by chance. I enjoyed reading it. 

It is well presented, and beautifully printed. The scholarship is rigorous. The book itself is easy to handle, and the text well written. It is meticulously indexed. 

Although a Quaker I knew nothing of Mary Morris Knowles, sometimes called Molly Knowles, nor of her patient determination to live her faith so fearlessly and – more or less – without pretension. Her constancy shines through the text; so does her single mindedness in holding to her beliefs and mounting her attack when forced so to do without bitterness even when wrongly accused, and always with considerable fortitude. A certain tenacity emerges, but one devoid, apparently, of jealousy or pettiness. 

Born in 1733 as Mary Morris, Knowles was an accomplished eighteenth century artist and writer who struggled successfully to express her gender within the turbulent ups & downs of George the Third’s feign. That vibrant century with its agricultural and industrial revolutions, the emergence of Wesley and English Methodism, the new sciences, the challenge of slavery, the French and American revolutions, Thomas Paine and other enlightened thinkers, but then the loss of the American colonies – could not have been an easy stage on which a woman might make her case, let alone win it. But Knowles was no ordinary woman. She deliberately cultivated new forms of “polite Quakerism” which stood her in good stead throughout life – not least with non-Quakers. She also knew how to use humour so as to subvert traditional Quakerism. 

Knowles was a “middling” woman by way of social standing. But she emerges under the skilful eye of author Jennings (Kentucky Foundation for Women, USA), as a powerful, determined woman who thought for herself and acted accordingly – regardless of class, wealth, or standing.

Because of their commitment to non-violence, their assumption of equality as between men and women, their rejection of titles and honours including clericalism, Quakers who sought social advancement were mostly excluded from-the recognised norms for making progress — the Crown and its royal court, the Church of England, or the military. Their idiosyncratic faith obliged them to find their own way notwithstanding these closed doors. 

Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many Quakers turned to industry, commerce, or manufacturing for their living. Increasingly, education and science also became an open and creative field of endeavour for many of them. Mainly because of their honesty and plain speaking they performed brilliantly – as the great banking families of Lloyds and Barclays, the manufacturers Carr (biscuits), Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry (chocolates), Clarke of Street (footwear) and many others, demonstrated: Often the entrepreneurs became embarrassingly wealthy as a consequence of their probity and inventiveness. Power came their way, frequently to their inner embarrassment. 

Knowles, doubly handicapped as a woman and a Quaker, found her way through force of personality, diligence, and clarity of thought. In not a few instances she helped to create or shape prevailing social conditions. 

She chose her own husband when most women did not. Dr. Thomas Knowles was an expert in treating fever, although he would die of it in due course. Their marriage was happy and fulfilling. Knowles was also able to count amongst her personal friends many of the leading Quaker bankers, some of the principle manufacturers and educationalists, many writers and poets. Unusually she was destined to be recognised by the King and became a visitor at court, yet without bending before it. 

Her style was to communicate by way of poetry — the heroic couplet more often than not. She travelled widely, enjoyed good health, engaged in music, and a new form of needlework. In the process she developed her radical politics without rancour or bitterness. Moreover, inner serenity and a blend of gender confidence arising from clear religious convictions formed a solid basis for life. By probing these characteristics in the “most minute of particulars” as Ashmole might have observed, Jennings reveals new insights which rarely appear in the lexicon of standard British history. 

Knowles’ life was punctuated by a handful of events or occasions which became her “concerns” — itself a special word in Quaker philosophy. 

From her twenties she helped to pioneer the new art form of “needle painting”. Later Dr. Johnson was to call her art “the subtle pictures which imitate tapestry”. It changed her life for on seeing examples of her work the Queen, in 1771, invited her to embroider a full size portrait of her husband, King George the Third. It was an outstanding success such that it went into the Royal collection where it remains today. The King, mightily pleased, gave her £800 (sterling) for her endeavours — a considerable sum of money in the eighteenth century. Knowles was also made welcome in court as, a century earlier, had been Wm Penn who founded Pennsylvania but whose father had been an Admiral of the Fleet. 

Both “portraits” and “access to the court” must have been problematic for the Quaker needle painter — but once settled in her mind that her independence had not been compromised, Knowles would not.be diverted. She knew that, “Those who tread in Courts tread in slippery places.” Her commitment to political liberty and all that flows from that concept emerges as the constant of her personal morality. Jennings unravels this process with sound analysis. 

In 1776 Knowles met James Boswell and then the formidable Dr. Samuel Johnson over dinner. Others were present including John Wilkes and his supporter Arthur Lee as well as other radical Whigs. Their host was the liberal Quaker Edward Dilly. Typically, Knowles was the only woman present. 

The American colonies were a major subject for debate — but so therefore were religion and liberty — especially women’s liberty on which subject Johnson was decidedly negative, complex and, at times, contradictory. He placed individual liberty lower than social cohesion and so had little sympathy for the American revolutionaries. 

Knowles’ position was the opposite – she abhorred slavery. Being a Quaker she held it self evident that “that there is that of God in every person”. The Quakers were largely responsible for forming the Anti-Slavery Society which continues the work today. 

Her argument with Johnson and Boswell embraced the case of a young Jamaican woman — Jane Harry — who had decided to quit the Church of England and was later to attend Quaker meetings. Eventually Harry was disowned by her adopted family and was looked after by the Knowles. Knowles directly disputed Johnson’s position. She defended the right of the Jamaican to choose her own religion. She also rebuked Johnson for his negative attitude towards Quakers whom he disparagingly classified as “deists”. The dispute thus laid between them was to rumble on for decades. 

From the outset of their many encounters Knowles steadfastly claimed that Boswell took no notes during much of the argument as to her own contribution, nor when they met again to dispute much the same range of subjects. She maintained that Boswell only wrote later in respect of her contribution from memory. She asserted that he had paraphrased her contribution, getting it wrong in the process. When Boswell and Johnson visited her in 1790 so as to read to her Boswell’s narrative of her earlier meetings with Johnson, Knowles declared that “It was not genuine”. It contained too many “fabrications and suppressions”. Subsequently, she published her own account. Boswell refused to recognise its authenticity. 

It is within the interstices of the arguments which continue over the years that Jennings is able to unveil and pin-point aspects of gender, morality, liberty, freedom for colonists, the social limits of toleration (Harry), the meaning of death, of Quakerism and the like, which other historians have tended to ignore — except with passing reference. Knowles’ analysed issues painstakingly. She drew radical confusions consistent with her spiritual beliefs. Henceforth, Knowles would speak and write carefully, but without restraint and largely in contradiction to what the Doctor claimed, or judged. She gave no quarter whatsoever. 

In June 1788, for example, to take but one typical example, Knowles crafted the verse,

‘Tho various tints the human face adorn,

To glorious Liberty Mankind are born:

0, May the hands which rais’d this fav’rite weed (tobacco)

Be Ioos’d in mercy and the slave be freed!’

Here is what Jennings calls “a female expression of the radical commitment to “glorious liberty”. Knowles viewed liberty as the birthright of all. For her, liberty encompassed politics as well as religion, “liberty had become a rational, non-sectarian, universal, human right”, she wrote. We still need to understand that insight two centuries later. She advocated the freeing of all slaves. She practised and extolled the virtues of her Quakerism; she promoted the virtues of liberty and tolerance, especially for women. 

Knowles discussed Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man Part 1 with her close Quaker friend, Anne Seward. She also quoted from Paine’s Age of Reason that the Quaker taste presided at the Creation “what a drab world we should have had.” (1794) Two years earlier Seward & Knowles had discussed Paine’s Rights of Man Part 11 when the former criticised “Paine’s pernicious and impossible system for equal rights.” This radical difference between the two women gave rise to “sharp tension” for Knowles supported the French Revolution and whole- heartedly approved of Mary Wollstonecraft’s, Vindication of the Rights of Women. 

Motherhood and a happy, secure marriage were critical to Knowles’ understanding of life. She secured and held on to lifelong friendships, not least within the Society of Friends, but also well outside that community. Her verse, her wit, and her fearless but consistent honesty, transcended even her feminism. 

The French Revolution as well as lesser issues were dissected, debated and fought over when necessary. She never backed off. Issues included deism, water baptism, wealth, beauty and public fame, all of which featured in her verses, as well as in her discussions with friends and those experts or commentators whom she met. 

At the end Knowles, now a rich woman, carefully arranged for The transfer of 50 — 60 thousand pounds prior to her death to her son, George, by way of a “Deed of Gift”. Prudent to the end, yet despite having practised “polite Quakerliness” all her life, she was finally assailed by doubt as death approached. She died on the morning of 3rd February 1807, aged 73 years. 

The real virtue of this riveting analysis of a highly intelligent woman who could and did match any man or alleged “expert” who came her way is in the light it shines on the way the great issues of the day were meticulously discussed in homes and saloons, in court and coffee houses by otherwise ordinary men and women. Many of the issues she tackled through her verse, the exchange of letters, or by debate remain to be resolved 200 years later. But as a guiding light Knowles, an extraordinary woman, can be trusted and followed.

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Those of a radical persuasion are unlikely to have missed the reference in Richard Dawkins’ new book The God Delusion. Dawkins points to the epithets hurled at ‘poor Tom Paine: Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, archbeast, brute, liar and of course infidel’ in an age when deists were commonly seen as ‘indistinguishable from atheists’.

Although Paine’s views on religion are not yet universally accepted, and perhaps never will be, it is open to question whether my use of the term ‘radical’ remains appropriate. Leaving aside those ‘don’t know’ or who are not interested’, it may be that in Britain today thinking that was once thought of as radical has for the most part become orthodox. Despite pockets of religious fundamentalism we live in a largely secular society. 

Nonetheless, I wonder whether members of the Thomas Paine Society, in focussing upon the historical context of Paine’s life and work and associated memorabilia, are in danger of neglecting the enduring relevance of his core ideas. I am thinking in particular of his mature opinions as set out in The Age of Reason, addressed to his fellow citizens of the United States of America: a nation, paradoxically, that is now home to some of the most entrenched opponents of his views. 

In his approach to religion, I believe that Dawkins can be seen, in every aspect save one, as the lineal descendent of Paine. The exception is that Paine, despite his rejection of religious creeds and denunciation of national institutions of churches as “human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit”, remained firm in his belief in one God and a hope for happiness beyond this life. With that reservation, however, he was comprehensive in his critique of the foundations of every established religion, singling out the Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan traditions. All of them, he argued, pretended some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals, and relied upon books claimed as the revealed word of God. But, Paine protested, revelation, when applied to religion, could only be something communicated immediately from God to man. Anything else is hearsay, or hearsay upon hearsay, that we are not obliged to believe. 

In the present climate of sensitivity surrounding criticism of Islam, it is particularly apt that Paine, as well as laying about the contrivance of the Christian tradition, was forthright in expressing his view of the origin of the Muslim faith: 

When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former [the commandments of Moses]. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it’.

Yet to my mind, Paine did not go far enough. Impeccably fair, he asserted that everyone has a right to their own opinion, however different that opinion might be to one’s own, and that the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. Well my reason tells me that even what is perceived as immediate, firs- hand revelation is not to be trusted. And that if there is no God, then there is no immaculate, divine revelation. Which brings me back to Richard Dawkins.

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A biography can follow a personal life-history as honestly or as deviously as suits its author’s purpose, for biographers may be motivated just as strongly against as in favour of their subject. The justification for a biography is that its subject has achieved enough distinction to excite curiosity about the factors in his life, which induced a situation marking parts in the development of many personal lives, and these can become known only in variable degree, even to close associates. It is not very surprising when a man from a distinguished background makes an impact upon the history of this time (although his background does not diminish his title to credit for his achievements), but it is much more intriguing when a man from an apparently common-place background makes a strong impact. Sons born to monarchs, and sons born to prominent dignitaries may reasonably be expected to make a contribution to contemporary society, but members of the lower orders do not inherit springboards from which to launch themselves. Those of undistinguished birth who do achieve enduring fame, whether or not they drive – or were driven by,- the special circumstances with which posterity subsequently associate them, may therefore fall to be judged by serried ranks of undistinguished peers unwilling to award them adequate credit through reluctance to concede that better results than their own have been attained from similar circumstances. As has long been recognised ‘a prophet is’ never without honour save in. his own country and amongst his own people’. So it has been, in considerable measure for Thomas Paine, the man from the people who remained always a man of the people, notwithstanding that he achieved far greater distinction than did most of his fellows. 

To the resentment of those of similar social standing to himself, who felt – and still feel in their subconscious minds, that his exceptional success underlined their own mediocrity, there must be added the open hostility shown by members of the upper classes who could not bring themselves to recognise that greater intellectual powers could emanate from a man of lower social ranking. To these, any rod was a suitable one with which to belabour the upstart stay-maker turned excise officer, later driven by intellectual hostility into rebellion against the Crown that failed to reciprocate his loyalty. And since Paine was modest about his private life. A circumstance which greatly contrasted with his justified pride in his immensely popular writing — his personal life was an avenue to which his enemies and detractors have turned en masse when seeking to off-set the great unassailable support his writings elicited from the numerous thinkers then emerging from the populace. Within Paine’s little-known private life, there was no important aspect less familiar to the public than the marriages which had been central to his early life in England, and so it was the matrimonial field which was selected as the location for the most virulent attacks upon his personal character. 

Paine’s experience of marriage, that of his parents as well as his own, did greatly influence him, just as it greatly influences the great majority of other Englishmen; and it is therefore appropriate to take another look at all three of these, within the broad context of feminine influence upon him during his formative years; for greater insight into this aspect of his life has slowly accrued to us, and has conferred an ability to make a more fair assessment thereon than Paine has generally received from earlier writers. 

Paine’s parents, Joseph Pain and his wife Frances, came from two very different backgrounds; Joseph was a farmer’s son and a practising Quaker, Frances was daughter to an attorney and a member of the Established Church. Their points of contact are not easily imagined, but were obviously sufficient to allow them to move towards wedlock. They seem to have resolved their religious differences through toleration of each other’s opinions. Frances’s view was allowed to prevail when they decided the mode and location of their marriage, and Joseph’s yielding to her wishes was a reasonable masculine deferment to her natural concerns that their wedding should be recognised by her family and friends; but Joseph’s choice of a bride from outside the Quaker community brought him into disfavour with his own religious confreres, who are thought to have expelled him from formal membership of their Society. However, this would not have debarred Joseph and his family from attendance at Quaker meetings. 

Joseph and Frances were married on June 20, 1734 in the parish church at Euston, just outside Thetford. Joseph was twenty-six on his wending day, and his bride was eleven years older. According to Oldys [George Chalmers], the biographer who found out most about Paine’s family, Frances possessed a sour temper and was an eccentric character, and later commentators have sometimes drawn the conclusion that Joseph contracted an unhappy marriage, but this opinion is probably ill-founded, as is explained below, and there is no positive reason to suppose that the marriage was other than normally stable and happy. Thomas was born after two years of wedlock to a mother aged thirty-nine, and was followed eleven months later by a sister, who did not survive infancy. Understandably, in view of Frances’s age, there were no more children born to the union, which continued without known loss of harmony until Joseph died in 1788 at the age of seventy- eight; Frances survived him by nearly three years, living to the grand old age of more than ninety. 

Joseph Pain probably received a great deal of help from his wife in the course of his business, for Oldys speaks of ‘fitting stays for the ladies of Thetford’. At that time, corsets were worn continually until they were worn out, and they were never cleaned. The fitting of these foundation garments would have called for considerable tact, and a working wife would have been necessary for a small stay maker; certainly, a woman such as Oldys represented Frances to have driven customers away, and the family business would scarcely have survived. George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, and Joseph% constant source of guidance, had expressed Quaker opinion on such matters: ‘There are many things proper for a woman to look after, both in their families and concerning women, which are not so proper for the men; which modesty in women cannot so well speak of before men as they can amongst their own sex’. Undoubtedly, the matrons of Thetford would have addressed themselves more readily to Frances than to Joseph when they needed a new corset. 

Thetford was an old town and the government maintained a constant presence in it, for an excise officer was stationed there. Excise offices were usually located at inns and when Paine was born it was at The Swan, though the following year it was moved to another inn, The Cock. Thomas would have been familiar with the excise presence from his earliest days and Oldys suggested that in his early youth he enquired about the duties of the excise men.

Later in life, when Paine returned to Thetford and applied for an excise appointment, his application would have entailed placing on record a considerable amount of information regarding his personal circumstances, and this would have been fully disclosed to Oldys when the Excise Head Office was instructed to cooperate with him in his privileged researches into Paine’s life and excise experience. Thus it was Paine himself who supplied much of the information drawn on by Oldys for his book, though it was adversely slanted by him, but every biographer of Paine since has turned to his biography for information; but it is not necessary to accept it blindly and without consulting contemporary information from sources Oldys found convenient to ignore. For example, he disclosed that Paine had not been baptised, but he did not make known to the public that this was sufficiently common in excise applicants (in those days) for the Excise Commissioners to have provided for alternative evidence of an applicant’s age to be acceptable for ensuring that it fell within the strictly prescribed limits. Family evidence, such as an entry in a family bible, was the favoured alternative, but all alternative evidence of age was required to be vetted by an investigating supervisor (a senior excise official), who had to reconcile it with visual indications, and have it confirmed by formal declarations before magistrates. When Paine applied to join the excise service his mother would have been visited by a mature official who studied her face and inquired why she was so much older-looking than he had expected, and why there had ‘been variations in the baptismal practices of her children, and he would have demanded legal statements in support of her replies. Such probing into her personal life might have seemed highly impertinent to Frances, and if she gave sharp replies, the investigator would have recorded them as evidence of Paine’s family background, and in due course they would have been made known to Oldys. Such is the likely basis for the adverse comments he made about Frances. 

Paine separated himself from the direct influence of the unusual marriage of his diverse parents when he left Thetford whilst still a young man, having found himself dissatisfied by the hum-drum life of an assistant to his father in the stay making business, and went to sea, but returned to the stay making craft for a while in London, at which stage in life he probably joined the new Christian sect we now know as Wesleyan Methodism, which was then growing within the Established Church. Methodism took root and spread most swiftly within the concentrations of workers who had entered the new industries spawned by the Industrial Revolution; many of them keenly missed the social support they had known in cottage industries now superseded, and they found an answer to their need in Methodism. Much of the credit for the movement’s success is due to the genius of its leader John Wesley, whose novel technique for integrating local groups into an internally- communicating national organisation was soon copied by other movements seeking to integrate workers. 

Well-known features of modern trade-unionism such as the membership card and regular local subscriptions are of Methodist origin. Wesley’s local societies were the fore-runners of local union branches, each guided by a class leader who collected a penny a week from every member. Each society also elected its own officers and took a lively interest in the welfare of every individual member. Membership was formally acknowledged by a ‘ticket which conferred membership nationally as well as locally and thus served as a ‘passport’. It is probable that Paine availed himself of such a Methodist ‘passport’ when he moved from London to Dover in 1758, and there entered into employment with another stay maker, Mr. Grace, a prominent Methodist in the town. Indeed, he may even have heard of the vacancy in Dover through the Methodist grape-vine. 

The Methodist Recorder for August 16, 1906, described Mr. Grace as the Dover class-leader, and that he took Paine to class with him. On one occasion a preacher failed to turn up and Paine was invited to take his place. It is interesting that Grace did not himself take the missing preacher’s place but delegated the job to Paine. Clearly he had decided that Paine was worthy to stand before his fellow Methodists, but it is unlikely that this was solely on his own judgement, for there was another member of his household whose advice would have been highly influential, Miss Grace, his niece, a lady of outwardly meek behaviour, but who was driven by an implacable will. She had already demonstrated her concern to further Methodism by converting her uncle, and she was probably the strongest influence on Paine. She has been frequently misrepresented by Paine biographers as the daughter of Mr. Grace, a precedent maliciously set by Oldys which others have ineptly followed. Oldys also foolishly imputed a romantic attachment between her and Paine, although at the time of his sojourn in Dover she was probably being courted by the first of her two husbands. But she was undoubtedly a strong influence on Paine at the time, and she is long overdue for depiction in his story.

Miss Grace was born about May 1735 and was brought up in Wakefield, where she scandalised her parents by attending a Methodist service in a public house. They thought her insane and threatened to have her confined in an asylum if she attended again, but on reflection decided to send her to live with her uncle in Dover, where Methodism had not quite arrived, but it soon did and Miss Grace attended its first service there held in a cooper’s shop about 1755. Now it was her uncle’s turn to remonstrate with her and he too banned her from attending but she ignored the ban. He then reported the matter to her family in Wakefield which brought her mother to Dover. But this too failed to prevent the girl attending the meetings, and eventually she converted her uncle! 

Paine moved to Sandwich, but the town was in the doldrums and a poor prospect for a stay maker. Oldys states that Paine was ‘not the first who had there used the mysteries of stay-making’, and Mr. Grace would have known the fate of Paine’s predecessors in trade and probably had warned him of the risk he was taking, but also probably hoped that Paine would bring hope to the town with his missionary zeal for Methodism. Oldy records that ‘There is a tradition that in his lodging he collected a congregation to whom he preached as an independent, or as a Methodist…’. 

One of Paine’s most urgent needs was for a local source of raw materials, which would have brought him into contact with Richard Solly, the town’s woollens draper, his visit would also have afforded him an opportunity to make known his evangelical mission and issue invitations to his meetings. Solly’s wife Maria seems to have become interested in the remarkable new-comer, and just as Miss Grace had taken her uncle to a Methodist meeting in Dover, so did Maria Solly bring her maid an orphan named Mary Lambert, who, according to Oldys, was ‘a pretty girl of modest behaviour’. To her the lonely preacher may have seemed a romantic figure. Five months later Paine and Mary married at St. Peter’s Church, Sandwich, one of the witnesses being Maria Solly. 

The marriage did not last long. Paine may have drawn encouragement from his parent’s union, as they had achieved success although initially appearing to have little in common, but his parents were much more mature on their wedding day than 

Mary, aged twenty-one, and Thomas twenty-two, whose parents had both come from the same locality and had got to know each other over a far longer period than Thomas had known Mary, a mere five months. The pair simply had not had enough time together, nor enough leisure in each other’s company to discuss to adequately discuss their ambitions and domestic prospects. For Mary, the sudden transition from a life in service where many decisions would have been taken for her, to a hectic doubly- demanding existence divided between being a working wife to a newly-established stay-maker, and a supportive wife to an enthusiastic evangelical preacher, must have been traumatic. Many years later, in the June 1775 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Paine published his essay, ‘Reflections on Unhappy Marriages’, and his comments therein seem drawn from the disappointment of his youthful first marriage: 

Those that are undone this way are the young, the rash and amorous, whose hearts are ever glowing with desire, whose eyes are ever roaming after beauty, those dote on the first amiable image that chance throws in their way when the flame is once kindled, would risk eternity itself to appease it. But, still like their first parents, they no sooner taste the tempting fruit, but their eyes are opened: the folly of their intemperance becomes visible; shame -succeeds first, then repentance; but sorrow for themselves soon returns to anger with the innocent cause of their unhappiness. Hence flow bitter reproaches, and keen invectives, which end in mutual hatred and contempt. Love abhors clamour, and soon flies away, and happiness finds no entrance when love is gone. Thus for a few hours of dalliance, I will not call it affection, the repose of all their future days are sacrificed, and those who but just before seem’d to live only for each other, now would almost cease to live, that the separation might be eternal. 

Little is known of Paine’s first marriage except that it was short; and the circumstances of its termination have never been reliably ascertained. The couple are said to have furnished a house with the assistance of Mr. Rutter, an upholsterer, who could have been another supplier of materials to Paine in his business; a house in Sandwich has long been regarded as their abode, but this is not an established fact, and a few months after their wedding, the couple moved to Margate, a busier town where Methodism was also making its appearance. And there Paine’s first marriage seems to have come to an end. 

Oldys sought to portray Paine as a cruel husband, disappointed because Mary, who had been merely a lady’s maid, had bought no fortune, but conceding that Maria Sony remained a benefactress. Oldys also recalls a local tradition that Mary died in childbirth, but this is unsubstantiated, although many writers sympathetic to Paine have seized upon it as the reason for the termination of the union. Finally, Oldys suggested that Mary may have left Paine to live out the rest of her life in obscurity, and this is not only plausible, but is the most probable outcome of his ill-advised, short lived first marriage. Little information has ever come to light, although Oldys availed himself of every assistant he could find, including an antiquary living in Sandwich, and various excise officers in Margate and London. He tried very hard to trace Mary, because Paine’s first marriage and its break-up, offered him the most likely prospect of embarrassing Paine though his private life, but he did succeed in capitalising on this opportunity. However, he did succeed in discovering a lot about Mary’s background (probably through trawling the excise network in south-east England), and elicited the fact that her father had once been an excise officer in the vicinity of Sittingboume, consequently, with the assistance of the surviving excise archives, we can discern some features of Mary’s life and experiences before her marriage to Thomas, from which an outline of her world may be attempted. 

Mary Lambert seems to have been of considerable interest in her own right; she was the only known child of James Lambert and his mentally unstable wife, having been born two years after he was dismissed from the excise station of Milton near Sittingboume. James became first a shop-keeper and then a bailiff for the rest of his life. He died in poor circumstances when Mary was only fifteen years old, and her mother died in an asylum about the same time, thus her situation must have been very difficult. Nevertheless, she made a life for herself, although this entailed crossing the county and entering into service in the Solly household, where six years later she appears to have achieved the status of an accepted companion for Mrs. Solly, going with her to church, and enjoying her mistress’s support both at her marriage and afterwards. Why she came to Sandwich is not dear, but there is a link between Sandwich and Sittingboume through trade, for many of the brick houses in Sandwich had been built of Sittingboume bricks; the distance between the two towns was about thirty miles, and heavy consignments of bricks would have floundered in mud on poor roads if they had been conveyed in horse drawn carts, but both tons had access to functioning wharves along the coast and transport by sea would have been convenient and economic for this trade. The greater part of Lambert’s professional life whilst Mary lived with him was as a bailiff, which would have brought him into contact with disputing parties within this established trade, and he would have been called to Sandwich on occasion and to have met some of the established traders there, possibly including the Sollys. We do not know when Mary’s mother entered a mental home, but as Mary approached school-leaving age, her father may have looked out for vacancies in service for young girls in his area of work, and he may have been the agent arranging Mary’s employment by Mrs. Solly, who is a rather shadowy figure of whom we know little. But Maria SoIly was obviously a warm-hearted woman, possibly lacking a daughter of her own, and she seems to have treated Mary more as an adopted daughter than just a maid. 

When Mary tried to settle down with her very busy husband, and friction began to arise in the marriage, it is quite likely that from a background of a quasi-favoured daughter she stood her ground against Thomas, and noisy quarrels became known to their neighbours, which reflected against Paine as both a stay maker and preacher. Mary, indeed, may seriously have fought to make a success of her marriage, but whether she knew it or not the dice were loaded against her, for her husband probably already had in mind a fixed idea of the wife he thought he needed, and believed he had found in Mary, whose modest behaviour would have initially seemed to reflect that of Miss Grace, the talented niece of his previous employer. But if so, such an expectation would have been unfair, as well as ill-judged. Miss Grace had settled into her uncle’s household before Methodism became a growing part of both their lives, and her later style of living was in the established house of a successful man much more mature in outlook than the young preacher Mary married. Had Paine been similar to John Bunyan, and content to develop his religion with the assistance of his wife, Mary’s marriage might have enjoyed better prospects, but Paine was more akin to George Fox, are zealous to pit himself against a world still hostile in many places to Methodism. Mary may have soon lost heart, and Thomas may well have lost patience; the circumstances of unhappy marriages which Paine later described accord very well with what is known of his swift courtship and hasty marriage to Mary, and with the rapidly deteriorating domestic relationships they soon seem to have found themselves in. 

In such stressful circumstances, the not-distant town of Margate where Methodism was also taking hold, may have offered better domestic prospects from stay making, and hence a firmer basis from which Paine could acquire expanding status a..; a preacher, but clearly any such idea did not work out. There is no indication whether Mary developed similar irrationality to that which had brought her mother into mental care, but having once before made a new start in life, Mary could have felt it was time to do so again, and slipped away to another location where Oldys failed to find her. And Paine probably sought her himself after she had gone missing and similarly failed to find her. However, speculative gossip retailed by Oldys that Mary, now pregnant, had gone to a lying in hospital may have been well-founded although it was not confirmed by his subsequent enquiries. But two entries survive in the records for the nearby Parish of St. Lawrence in Thanet which strongly suggest the presence there of Mary after the presumed break-up date of her marriage; the first is of the baptism on December 7, 1760 of: ‘Pain — Sarah, daughter of Thomas and Mary; the second sadly records that Pain’s daughter did not survive infancy, for in a burial entry reading baldly: Sarah, daughter of Thomas and Mary Pain. Clearly someone had been concerned that Sarah’s brief existence should be formally recorded; Mary herself is the obvious suggestion, and since Sarah lived for nine months someone must have taken care of her, presumably within the Parish of St. Lawrence, where Mary gave her birth, and may have seen out her own life also. Nothing is known of any other friends of Mary along the coast, but her father may have had contacts she could avail herself of, through deliveries coastwise of consignments of Sittingboume bricks. And of course Maria Sally may have had friends to whose care Mary and her unborn child could have been recommended; but although Mrs. Sally is reputed to have maintained contact with Mary after her marriage, Mary’s return to the Sally household never seems to have taken place. 

How much Paine ever learned about his daughter and his estranged wife we will probably never know. Sarah would appear to have conceived about six months after the marriage, and Paine was back in Thetford to commence studying for the Excise about the time his daughter died in the Autumn of 1761, according to information supplied by Oldys. Only one piece of evidence as to what actually happened has ever existed, and amongst the scores of Paine biographers it has been held only by Oldys. It is the written declaration of his martial status Paine made in his own hand when he applied to enter the Excise. Oldys seems to have held this document in reserve, presumably to challenge Paine if he could tempt him into public dispute, but it must have been insufficient in itself to clinch a case against Paine in the contemporary climate. Unless Paine’s excise dossier ever comes to light, and this, in the opinion of the present writer, remains a possibility, then the circumstances of the break-up of his first marriage, and its probable effect on his second, will remain forever subjects of speculation. The likelihood is that Mary simply left him, possibly while he was visiting his parents and seeking their advice, and it may have been that when Paine returned to Margate he found her gone, and never ascertained what had actually happened to her. This possibility, which Oldys also postulated, is supported by what we know of his second marriage ten years later in 1771.

Editorial Note

The paper presented above was extracted from notes left by the late George Hindmarch that are now held by the society, having been presented to it by his wife. It was intended to be followed by a study of Paine’s second marriage, as there is a note to that effect at the conclusion of the paper, but there is no manuscript of such a study in the papers we have. 

However, Mr. Hindmarch, who worked as an Excise officer for forty years and took a great interest in its history, wrote about Paine’s work in drawing up a petition for better pay and conditions for excise officers which he set out in his Case of the Officers of Excise (1772-3). Mr. Hindmarch’s study was published in an edition of only one hundred copies in 1998, of which he allowed only a strictly limited number to go, and then only to scholars he felt would acknowledge his work. His book, a paperback of 95 pages was entitled, Thomas Paine: The Case of the King of England and his Officers of Excise, and is a very important though little known study. Anyone seriously interested in Paine’s life and work should read it. The remaining copies of the book have been presented to the society to sell for its funds and copies are available at £3. 50 which includes postage.

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