250 years ago this month, while Paine was speed writing Common Sense, he addressed this critical shortage of gunpowder that threatened to bring the American rebellion to a grinding halt. He and a colleague conducted experiments on how families could make gunpowder from commonly available materials, with his report on the process and the results being printed in newspapers in Pennsylvania and other colonies.

Here is an image of the article that was published at the Pennsylvania Mercury and Universal Advertiser on Friday, November 24, 1775:

Here is a transcript of the article:

Philadelphia November 14, 1775

Experiments made since Friday last by Captain Pryor and Mr. Thomas Pain, for the purpose of fixing some easy, cheap, and expeditious method of making Salt-Petre in private Families, in order to shew the practicability of a plan, proposed by Mr. Pain of forming a Salt-Petre Association for voluntarily supplying the public Magazines with Gun-powder.

FIRST EXPERIMENT

Friday afternoon we sawed an old cask (of little or no value) into two tubs, and bored an hole in the bottom of each near to the side, of about the size of a common cork, and stopt it with a wooden peg; overeach hole, we put a full handful of straw, then filled the tubs with earth, taken from the bottom of the celler, and poured water thereon, filling it up as it sank in, till the water flood about an inch above the earth. This is the same as serting a lye tub.

Second, Saturday morning we drew the liquor off, throwing it up till it run clear, the quantity was about three gallons, which we put into a kettle and boiled to about three quarts.

Third, We took a little wooden keg, bored an hole, as in the former ones, stopt it with a cork, and covered the bottom of the tub with cut straw to about three or four inches, on which we put about the same depth of woodashes, and gently poured thereon the hot liquor, so as not to make holes in the ashes; after letting it stand a few minutes to settle, we drew it off, (throwing it up again till it ran clear) when it ceased running, we put on about a quart of cold water to drive out the lye which the ashes had sucked up.

Fourth, We boiled this second liquor to about a pint and a half then poured it gently off, into a basin, leaving the scum and sediment behind; after it had stood about a quarter of an hour to settle, we again poured it into two earthen soup plates, set them in a cool place till next morning, at which time the sides and bottom of the plates were beautifully covered with crystals of Salt-Petre sprung up like large blades of grass, being in quantity about quarter of a pound.

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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.

The post The Bonnevilles: Thomas Paine’s “Family” Part One:  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 Adrian Tawfik

Thomas Paine in Common Sense wrote, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” He meant it in his words, in his politics, and in his life. Paine believed in Enlightenment ideals about science. Fascinated by new technologies, Paine tried his hand at designing bridges. He’d change the world by connecting it together. 

After his 1774 arrival in Philadelphia, Paine spent time with Benjamin Franklin and scientifically-minded friends. John Morton’s 2014 article “Thomas Paine & Sunderland Bridge,” in England’s Northeast Lore, says Paine “studied mechanical philosophy, electricity, mineralogy, and the use of iron in bridge building.” After the American Revolution, Paine devoted considerable energy to innovative bridge designs, which improved on existing designs. 

Paine wanted to build bridges in the United States. His first attempt at bridge design was a never-built 300-foot wooden arch bridge across the Harlem River from Manhattan to the Bronx. 

When he lived in Bordentown, NJ, Paine in 1786 made three small models of iron bridges, which Paine later described in his 1803 “memoir” to Congress, “On the Construction of Iron Bridges.”

“I took the last mentioned one [model] with me to France in 1787 and presented it to the Academy of Sciences at Paris for their opinion of it… I presented it as a model for a bridge of a single arch of four hundred feet span over the river Schuylkill at Philadelphia.” The Academy adopted his design principle, but only for 100-foot spans. That same year, he sent a model to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society in England, “and soon after went there myself.” 

Paine’s bridge design was being compared to The Iron Bridge in England. The first and the only large bridge made of cast iron, The Iron Bridge was built in Shropshire County by Abraham Darby III, owner of massive West Midlands ironworks. The Iron Bridge opened in 1781, reported Eric Delony in his 2000 Invention & Technology Magazine article, “Tom Paine’s Bridge.” Darby’s Iron Bridge set the standard by which any iron bridge would be judged.

After years studying iron bridge design and seeking funds to build one, Paine decided to build a large-scale model as a proof of concept. Patrick Sweeney in 2017 writes in “Tom Paine’s Bridge” for Republican Socialists UK, that funds couldn’t be raised in America, so Paine returned to England in late 1787 to construct it. 

Paine began building what became the “London Model.” He described it to Congress as more than 100 feet long. The model bridge was built away from heavy traffic in a flat field “at a road junction at the edge of Paddington, north west of London.” 

The model was constructed from cast iron. Paine’ told Congress his main innovation was the bridge arch shape, following the top circumference or arc of a circle. The arch “segment was a circle of four-hundred and ten feet diameter; and until this was done no experiment on a circle of such extensive diameter had ever been made in architecture. 

”Paine’s design improved on the 1781 Iron Bridge, writes Sweeney, by offering flexibility to be as big or small, wide or narrow, high or low, “as required by the geography of the location.” The arch height and shape was not predetermined as a semicircle, then the standard design practice. 

Sweeney says Paine’s solution was “based on his observation of a spider’s web, a form derived directly from nature.

He was keen on the fundamental structures of nature being the basis for our own human efforts at construction.” In essence, Paine wrote, his bridge design was:

“Taking a small section across a circle, called in geometry a cord. The bridge could be based on that cord. The starting point is to draw a large imaginary circle, then draw a cord across a section of the circle that matches the width of the river or gap one wishes to bridge. [The] key point is that the size of the circle can be infinitely varied according to the width of the gap being bridged.” 

Cast iron components for the London Model were manufactured by Thomas Walker at his foundry, then transported by ship to London, says Sweeney. 

Paine won a 1788 British patent for his completed London Model. His application stated, “Nothing in the world is as fine as my bridge, except a woman.” 

Paine lacked the needed funds to build a full-scale bridge. His attention turned to the French Revolution and then his new book, Rights of Man. 

Meanwhile, says Sweeney, the London Model sat rusting in a field and had to be dismantled. Thomas Walker, who built the model, paid off debts by sending the iron north to construct his new bridge across the River Wear in Sunderland, a city in County Durham on the North Sea. Many of Paine’s cast components, likely supporting voussoirs, were used directly in the bridge. The rest of the iron was smelted and recast. 

Walker constructed the Sunderland Bridge with Rowland Burdon, a local Member of Parliament. The bridge opened in 1796 as Britain’s second cast-iron bridge. Walker and Burdon took full credit for the Sunderland Bridge, but Paine is the one who really invented its design and technology. 

Burdon took out his own patent in 1795, reports English historian John Morton in his Northeast Lore article, Durham’s other Member of Parliament, Ralph Milbanke, pleaded with Burdon to give Paine “compensation for the advantages the public may have derived from his ingenious model, from which certainly the outline of the bridge at Sunderland was taken.” 

The Sunderland Bridge at 236 feet was twice as long as The Iron Bridge, becoming the world’s longest single-span bridge at 72 meters, writes Leonardo F. Troyano in Bridge Engineering: A Global Perspective. Paine never saw the Sunderland bridge in his lifetime, Troyano says, and he “did not get any credit for it,” but its appearance clearly was that of Paine’s design. 

Morton quotes a Mr. Phipps, C.E., who wrote a report to 19th century architect Robert Stephenson: 

We must not deny to Paine the credit of conceiving the construction of iron bridges of far larger span than had been made before his time, or of the important examples, both as models and large constructions, which he caused to be made and publicly exhibited. 

Paine explicitly decided not to patent his bridge design in America, says Morton, but “he took care to put the country in possession of the means and of the right of making use of the construction freely.” 

Paine wrote to Congress in 1803, “I have to request that this memoir may be put on the journals of Congress, as evidence hereafter that this new method of constructing bridges originated in America.” 

Paine’s bridge is a metaphor for his life. With no formal education or training as an engineer, he joined a small number of people who contributed advances in technology to begin the Industrial Revolution. Like his political achievements were buried. Paine’s important role in the industrial revolution has been lost. It’s time for that to change.

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It’s tough to choose a favorite quote by Thomas Paine — American Founder, career revolutionary, and perennial skeptic. Pithy sayings and memorable phrases are Paine’s stock-in-trade, from “We have in it in our power to begin the world over again” to “These are the times that try men’s souls” and even “United States of America” – which first appeared, formally capitalized as our country’s name, in Paine’s American Crisis. In fact, Paine is so quotable that he’s even been credited (or blamed) for a number of things he never said or wrote. The Thomas Paine National Historical Association maintains a handy list of these bogus Paine quotations.

Since I began reading his work in 2009, my personal list of valued (and often memorized) Paine quotations has piled up almost on its own, the way books pile up in odd corners of my bedroom. Most of my favorites are drawn from his deist work The Age of Reason (1794-1795), a rationalist and often satirical critique of the Bible and organized religion. The book is filled with beautiful, compact, often proverb-like turns of phrase: “the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light,” “The word of God is the Creation we behold,” and perhaps most famously: “My own mind is my own church.”

Still, if I had to pick one line of Paine’s that struck me on first reading, and that continues to linger for reasons that I can only partially explain, it would be this:

“ … the glide of the smallest fish, in proportion to its bulk, exceeds us in motion almost beyond comparison, and without weariness …”

Yes, that’s Thomas Paine — also in The Age of Reason — here stepping, however briefly, into the role of nature poet. This passage might seem atypical of his work. It carries none of the rhetorical or political punch of his more famous dictums. There is no humor, no sarcasm, no argument to be clinched. It reads like something pulled from the Tao Te Ching, or perhaps from the work of Paine’s friend, the iconic romantic poet William Blake.

Yet this is the line I always return to in thinking about Paine’s life and works. For me, it expresses not only a love of nature, but a deep sense of kinship with and compassion for other living beings.

It also marks the place where the narrative of my own life intersects with Thomas Paine’s.

In the fall of 2009, I was in one of life’s valleys. Two years out from breast cancer treatment, emotionally and physically exhausted, I had begun to realize that my more-than-ten-year marriage was unraveling. The daily care of my seven-year-old autistic son was making me ever more homebound and isolated, and the clock on my still incomplete Ph.D. dissertation was about to expire.

Somehow, I also found myself absorbed in reading The Age of Reason. I consumed it at first in small bites – a page or two each day. For fiction-writing purposes, I told myself. Background to understand the Enlightenment as a time and place. Fodder for the great historical romance I was going to create.

It wasn’t long, however, before my research became an addiction. I found myself reading Paine for the sheer and sometimes perverse joy of it. I loved following the turns of his arguments. I savored his gift for irony, his keen eye for the illogical and absurd. I was fascinated by the way his writer’s voice could shift on a dime — from biting sarcasm to patient pedagogy to pure lyricism — sometimes in the space of a line or two. Thomas Paine became for me the eccentric but lovable friend who sat each day at my kitchen table, cheering me up with rude jokes about religion – about the Bible, heaven, hell, and the devil – all things that I had been taught to regard as deadly serious during my childhood.

One afternoon, as I was coming to the end of the book, Paine — after a series of bitter arguments with the apostle Paul — abruptly dropped his tone of relentless skepticism. As if reductionist logic had finally exhausted even him, he paused in his argument to simply observe. I followed his gaze — and suddenly there it was:

“Every animal in the creation excels us in something. The winged insects, without mentioning doves or eagles, can pass over more space with greater ease in a few minutes than man can in an hour. The glide of the smallest fish, in proportion to its bulk, exceeds us in motion almost beyond comparison, and without weariness. Even the sluggish snail can ascend from the bottom of a dungeon, where man, by the want of that ability, would perish; and a spider can launch itself from the top, as a playful amusement.”

I was reading aloud, as I sometimes do with very old or very complex works (slowing down and hearing the words often helps me to better understand). At that point, and for no good reason, my eyes teared up. My voice broke. I had no idea why.

It was only later that I learned Paine had written this portion of the book while recovering from nearly a year spent in a French prison during the Reign of Terror. He was fifty-seven years old at the time, and while he managed to escape the guillotine, the stress of the ordeal destroyed his health for the remainder of his life.Yet Paine continued to write, almost until the day he died, despite chronic physical pain and frequent bouts of deep depression. It isn’t surprising to find that in The Age of Reason, he expresses the wish for “a better body and a more convenient form.” “The personal powers of man,” he laments, “ … are so limited, and his heavy frame so little constructed to extensive enjoyment …” It’s a rare moment of self-disclosure for a writer who most often defines himself through political rhetoric and the parsing of ideology.

As his biographers have noted, Paine tended to hide his private identity behind the assumed public roles of revolutionary and social critic. The historian Gordon Wood calls him America’s “first public intellectual.”

Accordingly, our culture has remembered him as an ideologue first, whether we see him as the rabble-rouser and maker of revolutions, or the scourge of religious creeds and establishment thought. Such caricatures, fostered in Paine’s own time – often by his enemies – go a long way to explain present-day efforts to make Paine over into a rabid nationalist or reduce him to ideological “bomb thrower.” I recently came across one piece on the internet arguing that Donald Trump, by virtue of making outrageous statements and voicing “anti-establishment” sentiments, was some sort of spiritual heir to Thomas Paine. The same sorts of claims have been made about Democratic insurgent candidate Bernie Sanders. Of course, neither Trump nor Sanders, nor any modern politician — could have written anything approaching Paine’s genius – and certainly not his brief and lyrical observation of the tiny fish.

Much of Paine’s writing, and particularly his descriptions of the natural world, do not fit neatly into the persona of either Paine the Patriot or Paine the Infidel. The detail of the fish gliding through the water is but one example.

In reading Paine at length, I find that he is not, in fact, generally a writer of “screeds.” Certainly, he can be caustic. He is often impassioned, with a tendency to get swept up in the drama and occasionally grand language of his own arguments (a trait that I, as a writer, find completely lovable). Paine can hurl insults with the best: his characterization of Edmund Burke as drama queen in Rights of Man is a witty extended metaphor that goes on for paragraphs. Yet undergirding all these writing choices – and that is what they are: strategic choices — something else is at work.

In our own time, when politicians can sneer at concepts like empathy and community, it comes as a revelation to find that Paine’s work concerns itself deeply with those very things. The “smallest fish” in The Age of Reason – a seemingly insignificant and fleeting life – becomes the occasion for wonder, for gratitude, and for a much bigger sense of longing that goes beyond the self – a wish that life could be kinder and “without weariness” for us all.

It is Paine’s constant identification with the smallest and the least – the poor, the distressed, and the exploited – his refusal to hold the suffering of others at a distance, that often makes his work so compelling. Compassion is the strong undercurrent of his major works, even when his words are full of righteous rage. In Common Sense, Paine characterizes England as an unnatural parent, callous toward her children in the colonies. Defending the principles of the French Revolution in Rights of Man, he rebukes his intellectual rival, Edmund Burke, for failing to bestow “one glance of compassion” on the wretched prisoners of the Bastille or the sufferings of the common people of France. “Is this,” he asks of Burke, “the language of a rational man? Is it the language of a heart feeling as it ought to feel for the rights and happiness of the human race?” In the same work, Paine repeatedly calls forth images of individual human beings brutalized in under oppressive regimes, “whether sold into slavery, or tortured out of existence …”

In Paine’s very first pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, written in 1772, two years before he left England for America, we find moving examples of the writer’s first-hand knowledge of poverty, which in the eighteenth century was everywhere visible. “The rich,” Paine writes, “… may think I have drawn an unnatural portrait; but could they descend to the cold regions of want, the circle of polar poverty, they would find their opinions changing with the climate.”

He also understands that ideology is no cure for suffering:

“He who was never an hungered may argue finely on the subjection of his appetite; and he who never was distressed, may harangue as beautifully on the power of principle. But poverty, like grief, has an incurable deafness, which never hears; the oration loses all its edge; and ‘To be, or not to be’ becomes the only question.”

Throughout The Age of Reason, Paine rages against the cruelties visited upon women, children, and other innocents within the pages of the Bible. There are moments when Paine seems almost beside himself at these horrors committed in the name of god. Indeed, his most telling criticisms of scripture rely not on the parsing of fact and logic (though he gives us plenty of that), but upon the idea that the Bible as narrative – as simple storytelling – is ultimately destructive of human compassion.

“To believe the Bible to be true,” he writes, “we must unbelieve all our belief in the moral justice of god, and to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathizing and benevolent in the heart of man.”

This, for me, is what makes Thomas Paine stand out, as a writer, as a personality – as a human being: his huge and fearless compassion – for suffering children, the poor, the disenfranchised, for the spider and “the smallest fish.” This empathy drives his ideology and breathes life into his words. That feeling is crystalized in the image of the tiny, darting fish. I cannot read Paine’s brief reflection on this least of creatures without also considering the “tender, sympathizing and benevolent” heart that took note of its existence, saw a glimpse of the divine, and raised a pen to share that feeling with readers.

A little more than a century after Paine’s death, freethinker and Civil War Union veteran John Remsberg wrote this of Paine’s works:

“They are full of charity, they glow with patriotism, they are warm with love. Even yet, within their lids methinks I feel the beating of the generous heart of him who penned them….”

It is exactly those qualities of love and generosity that draw me to back Thomas Paine’s writings again and again. It is exactly those qualities that we, as a society, stand in desperate need of now as we consider the future of our nation, as we contemplate the functions of a just, and yes, a compassionate, future world.

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INTRODUCTION 

We are fortunate to live in an era when the name “Tom Paine” is well known to virtually every high school and college student in America, and to a great many more students throughout the English speaking world, and the empire of France, parlayed into a worldwide reading public. Paine was a confidant and advisor to George Washington, Napoleon, and Thomas Jefferson. As the author of well respected books and pamphlets, letters and moral essays, Paine offers generation after generation his fiery eloquence, hammering away at vital issues of the American War for Independence, and then for the issues surrounding France’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary governments. Paine’s biographers, from Thomas Clio Rickman, 1819,1 and Calvin Blanchard, 1885, to the latest biographical work, that is John Keane’s award winning A Political Life” of 1995,3 have captured the basic facts of Paine’s writing life, that is, that he was not wholly a geopolitical writer, not entirely a social philosopher, and not just a highly accomplished author of pamphlets, but that Paine should have been credited with innovations and ingenious applications of wrought iron and cantilevered bridging techniques that are worthy of respect, and professional accreditation by constructors, engineers and architects, from his day to ours. 

TABULATING PAINE’S ARCHITECT-ENGINEER ACHIEVEMENTS 

When surveying Paine’s many non-engineering writings, from among the titles that made him famous, such as Common Sense, The Crisis, his other pamphlets, Rights of Man – Parts 1 & 2, Age of Reason – Parts 1 & 2, and other writings, it is evident that his massive political and philosophical accomplishments have tended to submerge and thus overshadow his work in the world of technology. 

It is unfortunate in the 21st Century that Paine’s technical writing skills have gone unrecognized. Intellectual stimulus was certainly in the air. From 1750. until 1772, L’Encylopedie edited by Denis Diderot with conspicuous help from Voltaire, brought a watershed of technology, 

watershed of technology, intellectual property, manufacturing, crafts and trades into public view. 

We can imagine with what delight Paine would view L’Encyclopedie, rich with engineering knowledge as well as the rational new wealth of philosophy from Voltaire. Here, in these pages, where the focus and emphasis will be on Paine’s scientific technical work –that is his architectural and engineering skill we will sort out and identify how Paine’s technical life was over-laid on the political. If a mental picture of this division of his mental capacity would be helpful, we can imagine the plans of an iron ship, each space compartmentalized and shut off from the others for Paine’s intellectual life, there are whole years where his intense bridging building and metallurgy innovations at the iron works seem to determine the direction of his life. 

Yet in other sealed off compartments, we see more years where the turbulence and mayhem from the American Revolution simply seized the rudder of his life. And then – just when he was back on track with his bridge building and engineering, Paine was again pulled asunder and thrown headlong into that most dangerous compartment of his life, the French Revolution. 

The Paine biographers cited above are generally well aware of his trip to France and England starting in 1787, Paine’s up and down popularity amidst the Revolutionary French, his imprisonment, with his freedom gained through Ben Franklin’s intervention, and at last a safe passage bound for America in 1794. What is not well spelled out and documented are the interim years of Paine’s European Voyage 1787 – 1794, and his later years in the French legislature. By early 1787, Paine had prepared himself exceptionally well for his European Voyage by making three scale model miniature bridges of his iron bridge, over the Schuylkill River, in Philadelphia, to both serve as demonstrations of what his actual bridges would look like. These models were also to file with English and French government agents whom we would today call Patent Officers, along with his applications to be granted copyrights and trade mark patents – where the models would be lawful requirements – to accompany the paperwork for official study and review. In England, the topic of bridges was hot – the stately Blackfriars Bridge had fallen into the Thames, along with two older and lesser bridges. Iron bridging technology was a welcome topic when Paine landed in England. 

The first model bridge Paine exhibited was made in wood, that is mahogany of the finest quality, workmanship and lustre. This is the model left with the French where it was displayed with great admiration and interest at the Louvre for technical assessment, and for public display. The mahogany model was the one chosen to show to the French Academy of Science, where many of the eminent scientific intellectuals of French society had offices. Quoting Calvin Blanchard, 

“This model received the unqualified approbation of the Academy, and it was afterwards adopted by the most scientific men of England.” 

Thanks to Paine, the history of iron bridges can thus be dated to begin in England in 1787. He reserved the other two bridge models for later use, the one in cast iron being next placed with the English authorities for patents and trademarks in London, also in 1787. This model was another mandatory submittal for the patent application process, thus leaving its creator with only one model left, which was made of wrought-iron, connected with blocks of wood shaped and painted to emulate cast-iron blocks. He carried this model about for some time as a talking piece when queried by learned constructors and engineers. The mahogany bridge model at the Louvre was proposed for an arch bridge, with a 400 foot span. In England, Paine contracted for and had built the bridge after his cast iron model, made from five cast-iron arch ribs, each of 110 feet in length, on a site outside London. In 1789, he designed, fabricated and load-tested another bridge trial rib. By 1790, a complete wrought iron and cast iron bridge of Paine’s design of some 36 tons was assembled and on display on Paddington Green, for a period exceeding a year, but with Paine by then stranded in Revolutionary France and committed to a post in the French government, the financing and business management arrangements of his engineering projects went askew, and the wrought iron and iron segments of Paine’s bridge were sold for the benefit of creditors. 

Nonetheless, Paine’s iron achievements at Paddington Green had become the prototype for other iron bridges, the best known of which is the well known Wear Bridge at Sunderland, England in 1796. Bridge architects and engineers are also beholden to Paine for cantilevered bridging techniques, which have been widespread since the 1800’s in England first, then all of Europe and the US. Today, there are several collections of wrought iron and iron bridges that have been named as historic structures after the Paine concepts, the most numerous in England, some in France and Spain, six have been itemized in the USA, and many in Russia by special selection by Czarina Catharina, the former German princess Katharina, called “The Great” for her technical choices and innovations and for her artistic patronages. Last, in the legacy and heritage of Paine’s bridge thinking, typifying cantilevered principles, there is the first iron bridge in America, constructed in 1839 – and still in service – the Dunlap Creek Bridge, Brownsville, Pennsylvania.7 

WE DIGRESS PAINE’S ROOTS IN AMERICA & HIS EDUCATION 

Paine’s bridge story does not simply go to England, then France, then return, a mere exodus back to America. Not unexpectedly, it would be back home in these new United States where Paine would reinvigorate and regain his engineering and planning momentum for iron bridges, but did culminate in his proposals to President Jefferson and the Continental Congress to install iron bridges, along with their accompanying canals and roads – a virtual road map for invigorating a new nation with a vigorous commercial transportation network. In his notes on his 1803 proposals to Congress, he mentions that he had requested without response the prompt return of his iron, and wrought iron models from England for illustrative demonstrations in America. It is generally believed that his mahogany bridge model still resides in the Louvre, in Paris. 

It remains for Paine scholars, probably focused at the Pennsylvania universities, to pursue the whole of Paine’s writing from The Library of Congress, Office of Patent & Trade Mark, Smithsonian Technical and Scientific Museum, Thomas Jefferson Presidential Papers and archives, Ben Franklin papers and archives, British Engineering Society, and the records of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania bridge contracts and construction work centres. Likewise, French scholars of technology may want to sift Paine’s bridge technology work out from his political activities, and using official records, account for marks of Paine’s technical skill sets on the French nation, and its bridges, canals and road networks. 

Other Paine-inspired projects were built in later years after his death in the United States. John Keane, Paine’s excellent biographer, credits Paine with bringing the engineering for cantilevered bridges to the new world. One such example was built at Bordentown, New Jersey in 1820, and served as a model for cantilevered techniques for a century. Paine has been praised for his foresight as “the father of all great structures that now serve human convenience everywhere.” 

A lot of ink has been splashed about with special regard to Paine’s parents, upbringing, family trade, schooling, and expertise in youth without focusing these diverse factors into a harmonic blend of what made up Paine’s intellectual character, his work ethos, and his broad and deep knowledge of the arts and sciences. Mr. Rickman holds that Paine’s attendance at a respectable Latin School was the only formal education he received in England. This may be so, but better Latin schools of the day also had roots and channels to the study of algebra and geometry beyond simple mathematics; and with Latin comes the language masters like Virgil, historians like Seneca, political genius such as Julius Caesar – whose wooden and rope bridge across the Rhine River sparkles among Caesar’s achievements from The Gallic Wars; and then, numerous translations of Vitruvius’s technical text book, De Architectura, were in circulation. Budding mathematicians and bridge builders and architects would have certainly taken Vitruvius to heart in their youth and studied his works throughout life. To think Paine a man of limited intellect, stamina or drive would be to grossly underestimate him. As Blanchard tells us, “During his suspension [of 1764] from [his job as an excise officer] that he repaired to London, where he became a teacher in an academy kept by Mr. Noble of Goodman’s Fields; and during his leisure hours, he applied himself to the study of astronomy and natural philosophy. He availed himself of the advantages which the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson afforded, and made the acquaintance of Dr. Bevis, an able astronomer of the Royal Society.” 

The University of Philadelphia recognized Paine’s technical knowledge with the award of a Master’s Degree in 1787, and he was also admitted to Membership in the Philosophical Society that year, 1787, shortly before he embarked with his bridge models to France and England. By this time, thanks to his editing and writing, he was very popular among the public and quoting Blanchard, “[Paine] enjoyed the esteem and friendship of the most literary, scientific and patriotic men of the age.” 

It is noteworthy that both British and French formal educational institutions made good and sufficient distinguished awards to him as to any learned professor, master, or doctor of arts & sciences in his era. That the British patent office granted him the British patents on his iron bridge by 1789 is a hallmark distinction before all of Britain’s industry and the law, recognising him the legitimate inventor and owner of the technologies described by Paine and modelled by him for the British patent office. 

It would seem that Paine was one of those technocrats whose education never stopped, and that he absorbed a great deal of geopolitical and diplomatic knowledge from his writing and editing of the revolutionary materials for the American war for independence, then embellished his mind and pragmatic skills the upper mathematics and construction sciences, to rank amongst the most skilled engineers of his era, be it London, Paris or Philadelphia. It is ironic that Paine’s skill and determination in engineering, architecture, science and technology, iron mongering, smelting the well hammered bolts and rivets, hot & sweaty, from the grimy anvil was precisely what brought Paine to England and France, not his pamphlets and politics. Here is truly an original genius worthy of the rank and title of professional engineer. 

PAINE’S LETTER TO GEORGE WASHINGTON OF MAY 1st, 1790 

This letter is from London, to Paine’s Commander, Benefactor & Friend, further FROM LONDON A TRANSMITTAL LETTER TO PAINE’S COMMANDER, BENEFACTOR & FRIEND, further, promises the Key to The Bastille to Washington; and important bridge news. An unusual and brief letter of only five paragraphs and a footnote tell us today so much about the relationship between Washington and Paine, what made them compatriots, kindred spirits, and Amici, in revolutionary French terms, that we pause here to read with Washington these words of Paine: 

“Sir: Our very good Friend, the Marquis de la Fayette has entrusted to my care the Key of the Bastille and a drawing handsomely framed, representing the demolition of that detestable prison as a present to your Excellency, of which his [Marquis de la Fayette] letter will particularly inform [you].” [This is the one and the same key had shut up from freedom, and sent to torture and death so many brave revolutionaries and persons of free thought in France for generations. This key, in and of itself is emblematic of the worst elements of kingship, aristocracy, faux aristocracy, and the engines of the police state which whip and flog, hang and guillotine, pull the teeth and nails of the plebiscite, and the fact that Paine has successfully argued for its disposition to be made not only in The New World, but in the American hands of General Washington this is no small miracle. The Louvre or other museums or national galleries in France, Britain would have been worthy repositories, then and now.] The letter continues: 

“I feel myself happy in being the person thro’ whom the Marquis has conveyed this early trophy of the Spoils of Despotism and the first ripe fruits of American principles transported into Europe to his great Master and Patron. He [the Marquis] mentioned to me the present he intended [to] you [that] my heart leaped with Joy – It is something so truly in character that no remarks can illustrate it and is more happily expressive of his remembrance of his American friends than any letter can convey. That the principles of America opened the Bastille is not to be doubted, and therefore the key comes to the right place [that is, to General George Washington.] We are advised that ” Mr. West wishes Mr. Trumbull [the noted British painter) to make a painting of the presentation of the Key to you.” 

Never bashful, having used the first four of the five paragraph epistle of this 1790 letter to describe the gift of the key to the Bastille to Gen. Washington, Paine proceeds in a personal tone, that is news promptly and bluntly delivered, as from one soldier or sailor to another. Paine’s news: 

“I have manufactured a Bridge (a Single arch) of one hundred & ten feet Span, and five feet high from the Cord of the Arch It is now aboard a vessel coming from Yorkshire to London where it is to be erected. It is this only which keeps me [in] Europe…” Fate and the French Revolution would of course change Paine’s plans, yet here in this letter of May the first, 1790, the reader is favoured with the news of the Key to the Bastille, and a tidy progress report on the iron bridge. There were only two persons in Europe or America who had these facts, and one of them was George Washington [Eric Foner p374-5]. 

HIGHLIGHTS OF PAINE’S LENGTHY STAY IN FRANCE: The French Decade, 1792 – 1802 

Paine’s departure from Europe had nothing to do with his scientific and technical pursuits, but on account of his politics, and the harshness of the era. To explain why Paine’s exodus was both hasty and necessary to safeguard his life, a brief sidelight to the French Revolution is needed. 

Parts of Paine’s career are similar to another great pamphleteer, the Englishman, John Milton. It is known by historians of the French Revolution that it was much more violent and bloodier than either The Glorious Revolution in England, leaving Oliver Cromwell’s forces in power; next, then to the new world, the American War of Independence, leaving George Washington’s and Lafayette’s forces in power. The regicide of the British sovereign, King Charles I, traumatized the English people so thoroughly that in the English Restoration, a new king and his royal line were promptly brought back to the throne. It is fortunate for Mr. John Milton, the greatest pamphleteer in English before Paine, that Milton made his anti-royalist statements on the inherent mismanagement and often villainy of the aristocracy, and their courts, in his famous pamphlet, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1648), which boldly supported whatever means were needed to divest a state of its hereditary monarchs, hangers-on, tainted judges and lax royal administrators. Had Milton’s pamphlet appeared a few weeks before the axe man cleaved a royal head from its king, Mr. Milton might have found himself swinging from a handy tree branch, or being disembowelled and roasted alive, at public execution, with other Roundheads who despised the king and brought about his death? Luckily, Milton’s scathing criticism of the English throne came weeks after the regicide, leaving Milton as a commentator, not a perpetrator, nor an instigator. Like Milton, Paine had clean hands where the path of the guillotine lay across France. 

However, our engineering and bridge building friend, Mr. Paine, found himself in a Miltonic milieu because in his pleas [and petitions] to spare the life of the king whom he insisted on identifying as Mr. Louis Capet. “And while conceding the odious waste, maladministration, misuse of office, etc., yet still in Paine’s view, the regent sovereign of France did not merit the death sentence. Here, due to his siding with humanitarian, less reactionary revolutionaries, Paine had made enemies in dangerous times and places. 

Robespierre in that very same year, thought eradicating France’s enemies the best solution, and held that the king of France and vast numbers of his retinue should perish, and so many aristocrats and faux aristocrats alike went then at Robespierre’s order, to the executioners, often tossed headlong into a public square in Paris, there to die by that most French execution device, the guillotine. 

Paine had earlier found himself jailed in Paris in 1793, but was then also was released, through the actions of powerful friends, led by Ben Franklin, and the American president. Now years later, 1799, even when firebrands such as Robespierre and Marat were dead, and different revolutionaries in power, Paine’s name was again put on the list of criminal undesirables. And he was again in great danger of the guillotine. Paine records in his own handwriting shows his wonderment of the events at the Luxembourg prison, Bruges, Belgium, for all of calendar 1799. It was at this prison which French authorities took 160 of 168 prisoners from their cells, and removed all but a few of these individuals to the guillotine in the space of only one night. Paine himself and seven others were spared, without explanation. 

In fact, when finally Paine boarded a ship from the port of Le Harve in 1802, he was just days ahead of a French warrant would have terminated his liberty, and perhaps his life. Also British ships were seen prowling the water around Calais, and said to have British warrants for Paine’s arrest, and transport and imprisonment to England for allegations of treason. 

What, indeed, had provoked the British authorities to pursue Paine across The English Channel? As early as December, 1797, in pamphlets and plans, he advocated a strategy and techniques for invading England. His proposal was sent in Memorandum form to Napoleon, with recommendations to build a French fleet of shallow-bottomed gunboats and flat bottom barges for transport of infantry and cavalry. He continued to advocate the invasion of England through 1798, using the auspices of M. Bonneville, his good friend, publishing in Paris in his friend’s “Bien Informe,” a press for pamphlets and newsletters. In 1798, he befriended the steamship innovator and naval architect Robert Fulton in Paris, while Paine himself was exploring the potentials for iron and steel and steam in ships – again mixing politics with technology. 

By 1798, Paine had also advocated to the French government with copies memos to Napoleon that French forces should go the assistance of Irish uprisings, and advocated overthrow of English rule across the whole of Ireland. In 1799, through “Bien Informe” he advocated open seas and international commerce regulation for all nations. By 1800, his paper Parte Maritime had proposed international regulation and standard rules for excise, safety and administration amongst the nations. He had also filled out his proposal to Napoleon to link the regions of France through its rivers, and estuaries, with new connecting canals and iron bridges. Couple these with Paine’s offense/defense/invasion planning skills, and we have Paine, the military engineer. For his regional linking proposal to Napoleon, he produced as many as four of the iron bridges he envisioned, using models five feet in length. Apparently, even this work was not appreciated, since he was voted out of his elected office in French government by his enemies, and slander undercutting his loyalties were tallied up against him. 

Had this architect-engineer not have exited France in such a speedy manner, the Tom Paine story might have ended in one of the mass graves dug outside of Paris for the decapitated bodies of enemies of the state. 

BRIDGES FOR AMERICA-PAINE’s 1803 PROPOSAL TO CONGRESS AND PRESIDENT JEFFERSON 

Returning to the American shores in 1803, it was some time before Paine devoted himself to technical matters again, but this time distinctive American in nature. 

His massive 1803 proposal plan for America’s bridges, waterways, canals and their collective commercial and military consequences is his great gift to the new nation, presented in proposal form to the Congress and President Jefferson. Recalling that his study of French waterways and bridging, that concept would be a prototype for the American proposal. Paine embarked on scrutinizing innovations and improvements for US bridges and canals, based on existing data and maps. It must be remembered that cartography was often a rough hewn science, and that much of America was poorly mapped, even after Lewis & Clark made their extensive exploration of the new American territories added by The Louisiana Purchase. He did extensive model building in 1803 to support his proposals. 

His techniques for the American proposal seem straightforward in his “The Construction of Iron Bridges, June 13, 1803,” which is quintessential Paine for documenting his American skills and achievements. While writing a nationwide schema for a great nation such as France may seem enough to exhaust many technical folk, Paine began a massive analysis of how best to safeguard, provide patrol boats/revenue cutters, bridges, canals and supporting civil constructions for the most newly acquired waters of America to follow The Louisiana Purchase. From 1803-1807, he did extensive model making and design work. In 1807, he wrote a series of articles articulating how to construct and manage a fleet of gunboats to defend American shores. The model gunboats made for this engineering mock-up were sent to the President in September, 1807. As with his bridge proposal, Mr. Paine used his modelling skills to carve models of armed river craft which the United States would patrol the gigantic new river basins along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, their streams and estuaries, from the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans, to the northernmost rivers coming into America from Canada. He proposed the boats to be light, fast, able to hold troops, effective and economic. His model making skills for boats were well received at the US Patent & Trade Office; and delivered on President Jefferson’s desk were new boat models for the proposal. We are reminded here of Paine’s equally energetic plans for shallow draft gunboats for his proposals to Napoleon for an invasion of England. 

Naturally, where so many well charted rivers that needed bridging, iron bridge technology would bring many advantages, such as prefabrication, transportation by section, ease of assembly by semi-skilled workers, and ease of manufacture at large ironmongers. As with his study of France and concepts for streamlining that nation’s waterways and estuaries with bridges, stream widening, river deepening, and canal building, there was in Paine’s vision, a genuinely speedy and cost effective means for the new republic to safeguard its waterways. He proposed his model patrol ship to be a small, fast and trim military vessel to collect taxes, and assure safety of the waters, monitor smuggling, and control pirates and privateers — a real problem in the Barataria swamp and bayou regions outside New Orleans. 

Paine’s years in the British Excise office immediately jump to mind, that he was a skilful and knowledgeable taxation & duty officer for some years. Paine’s proposals to America, when fulfilled, would have assured that the many cities, towns, villages and settlements would get bountiful commercial river traffic and timely communication of information. 

It seems likely that Paine’s credentials to design and model a prototype small warship for patrols of US waters came from his youth, when having gained a sense of quality materials and good workmanship in the family stay business, he embarked literally into the world of privateering. Aboard the British licensed privateer, named “Terrible,” where the ship’s commander listed himself as “Captain Death,” we can imagine Paine as a young apprentice, perhaps working under the tutelage of the ship’s sail maker, or the carpenter, for the maintenance of the ship. After a brief stay, Paine shipped on board “The King of Prussia,” another privateer of British licensure, where he was most likely in the Able Bodied Seaman (ABS) category, fit for many jobs of seamanship. At the pleadings of his father, Paine left the nautical life on privateers after another brief stay on “King of Prussia.” We must remember that his nautical days were all done by 1759. Serving aboard vessels devoted to privateering seems to have provided Paine with basic ship design ideas for his own models, that is, for fast revenue cutters and nimble patrol corvettes, as he wrote about them some four decades later in his proposals to the Americans. 

The 1803 negotiations with the French for the turn-over of “Louisiana” whatever shape and size that would be, was still a mystery in 1802 – it was a complete surprise to American negotiators when French diplomats made the decision not to withhold or exempt any parishes or locations from one massive sweeping sale. Even today, the size of the lands absorbed into America by the Louisiana Purchase are huge, sweeping from the mouth of the Mississippi up to and across the border with Canada. 

Paine’s engineering skills helped him assimilate proposals for the massive transportation problems that the Louisiana Purchase brought with it. It was fortunate America had one such engineer on hand. Paine wrote a very persuasive letter to Jefferson, urging him to buy the entirety of the Louisiana Territory from France, with the consent of the occupants. Initially, Jefferson was considering buying only New Orleans, and the Florida’s, and in other important correspondence, Paine itemized to Jefferson the constitutional ramifications of assimilating so great a purchase; his correspondence to the president was also fiercely opposed to the Federalist proposal to seize New Orleans by force, which today seems fool-hearty and an invitation to war where there had been only peace. 

Having served in the French legislature as the representative of the great commercial, mercantile city of [le Port de] Calais in France, Paine had a keen eye for the pulse, ebb and flow of waterborne commerce. With an excellent knowledge of how the French government worked, its pitfalls and unusual characteristics. Moreover, he understood that Napoleon’s mandate that The French Law as specified by The Napoleonic Code would be permanent in the new US territories derived from France – which meant not converting the legal system over to the English Common Law, the familiar legal model of the Colonies. This meant that Louisiana would forever observe the Napoleonic Code. There is little doubt that Paine felt imminently well qualified to offer Jefferson and the young republic such advice due to his many years in France, working intimately with the French political administration and legislature councils of that nation which Blanchard calls then “the foremost nation in the world,” as he termed the new and imperial France. In his latter days, Paine was a good friend to France at the tables of American public opinion. 

By the time Paine grew ill and died in 1809, the many decades of theological and political warfare had battered down Paine’s good name. Many in England thought him a rogue, and then there was his hot-tempered, abrasive public letter to George Washington which won him no friends, and other opinion- based epistles – these had cast a shadow over his reputation as an editor, writer, technical man and statesman. His technical skills and achievements in engineering and architecture were lost to all but a few study New Englanders whose stock and trade was in the construction and bridge industry, and some scholars of his written work at large. 

Paine did himself no favours with his barbed epithets on religion, so that various religious revitalization movements brand him still as a heathen, atheist, or mean spirited agnostic – instead of one of the truest Age of Reason practitioners of Deism. When Thomas Edison publicly championed Paine’s reputation in the 1920s, and praised Paine’s whole canon of work, it is likely that engineers and architects at least in America, England and France, heaved a sigh of relief that Paine’s name was again a good one. Thomas Paine, American architect-engineer, innovator, inventor, political scientist, and man of letters had at long last gotten a laurel wreath he so long deserved. 

A BOLD NEW TECHNICAL IMAGE FOR PAINE 

Today a fresh image of Paine, Architect-Engineer, emerges from the technical side of the pantheon of American figures from the 18th Century. Paine deserves a more solemn 

solemn and prominent place for his technical accomplishments than he now holds for his political and ethical works by themselves. 

In Age of Reason neoclassic poses, we see grand and noble figures such as Washington, Voltaire and Franklin, carved by no less than the era’s master sculptor, Houdon. Indeed, we need to identify America’s 21st Century equal of Houdon, to be engaged for a brand new statuary of Paine. 

Today, with fresh emphasis on Paine the engineer, planner, model maker of bridges and ships, iron smith and draughtsman, we owe Mr. Paine a fresh new statuary to celebrate his broad, wide achievements in the crafts and sciences. And perhaps one new statue alone would not do a triumvirate might be needed. 

I suggest that three statues, that is, A Paine Triumvirate, should be created to show Century Paine in all his roles – writer, statesman, and architect-engineer. The first statue would be best set in the District of Columbia amidst the Federal Monuments, where Paine’s plain attire and a simple desk would show a pamphleteer and writer/editor at his work. 

A second sculpture then, in Philadelphia, close to Franklin’s home and the Liberty Bell, would be illustrative. Here, Paine’s wardrobe of a London gentleman’s clothing would best show him at our Constitutional Convention, then on to his elected office, representing Calais in the French legislature. Lastly, proposed as the engineer/architect Paine-a 3rd and final sculpture, which would be best placed in Cambridge/Boston, sited somewhere near the MIT Campus. This statue would remind the bustling crowds of the world of commerce about ordinary things like bridges and common sense. The almost divine smile of reason, I believe, would of necessity grace Paine’s face, where in artisan’s clothes, sitting on the work bench of an engineer or iron worker, Paine would hold a book on his knee with his left hand, and in the right hand and forearm, he would proudly cradle a model of his iron bridge. 

END NOTES 

[1] Thomas Clio Rickman, Life of Thomas Paine, especially, Preface and Chapter 1. However, in Part 2 of Rickman, this biographer confirms Paine’s bridge and model ship making skills; that his bridges were inspired by spider webs; and that his first model for the Paris trip was made from mahogany. 

[2] Complete Works of Thomas Paine, All Political and Theological Writings, preceded by A 

13 

Life of Paine, by Calvin Blanchard: Chicago, B.F. Ford, Clark & Co., 1885, pages 13-25, 26- 63. 

[3] John Keane, A Political Life: Biography of Thomas Paine, esp. Forward and Chapter 1. [4]David J. Brown, Bridges: Three Thousand Years of Defying Gravity, London: Mitchell Beazley/Octopus Publishing Group, 1999, pages 48-50. 

[5] Lithograph, printed by British Institute of Engineering, 1796 – Iron Bridge over the Wear River, Sunderland County at Durham, England. 

[6] Paine, Collected Writings: Literary Classics, NY 1955, Distributed by Putnam Penguin, Notes and Editorial by Eric Foner. Of special notes pages 423-428, iron bridges; pages 842 – 853, other bridge information. 

[7] Calvin Blanchard, Complete Works of Thomas Paine, pages 64-87. 

SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION 

Thomas Edison, The Philosophy of Thomas Paine. Web address 

https://www.positive.atheism.org/hist/paine dsn/htm 

L’Encyclopedie,’ Denis Diderot, Editor, Paris: The Complete Illustrations, 1762-1777, in facsimile edition by Harry N. Abrama, Inc., NY, 1978. Facsimile prepared by and edited by Arnoldo Mondadoir, Editore, Milano, Italia. 

Biographical note on the author: 

Tim Whalen holds the BA and MA degrees in English from the University of Tulsa and is ABD in the Ph.D programme; he has published books on technical and proposal writing ay Pilot Books, ARTECH, Horizon Books, IEEE Press and Management Concepts. He has contributed articles to several journals. 

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In the first part of The Age of Reason, written during the French Revolution and completed we are told only a matter of hours before his arrest, Paine devotes some pages to a general account of astronomy as an introduction to his ideas on Christian theology. It is worth looking at this account in the light of knowledge as it was then and as it is now, and also to consider the sources of Paine’s information. 

He begins with a comment on the ‘plurality of worlds’, an idea from the ancient philosophers gaining acceptance in scientific circles in the eighteenth century by virtue of the work of Halley and Herschell, indicating the vastness of space and the lack of uniqueness in the existence of the earth. 

He then describes the solar system – the sun and its six satellites or worlds, all in annual motion around the sun, some satellites having their own satellites or moons in attendance, each world keeping its own track (the ecliptic) around the sun. Each world spins around itself (rotates on its own axis) and this causes day and night. Most worlds, in their self-rotation, are tilted against their line of movement around the sun (the obliquity of the ecliptic) and Paine quotes the correct figure for earth of 231/2°. It is this tilt that is responsible for the changing seasons and for the variation in the length of day and night over the world and throughout the seasons. Earth makes 365 rotations in one year’s orbit of the sun. 

The six planets are then described with their distances from the sun. These figures are incorrect now but the figures Paine gives for the earth’s distance, 88 million miles, agrees with the eighteenth century figure derived from Kepler’s Laws of about 1620. In 1772 Bode formulated his empirical law of planetary distances giving the measurements more accurately than hitherto, but this information would not have permeated the circles in which Paine moved after his departure for America. 

As proof that it is possible for man to know these distances he cites the fact that for centuries the precise date and time of eclipses and also the passage of a planet like Venus across the face of the sun (a transit) have been calculated and forecast. 

Beyond the solar system, ‘far beyond all power of calculation’ (until Bessel calculated the distance of 61 Cygni in 1838) are the ‘fixed’ stars, and these fixed stars ‘continue always at the same distance from each other, and always in the same place, so does the sun in the centre of the system’. William Herschel communicated to the Royal Society in 1783 that this was not in fact so, and that all stars were moving but at rates indiscernible as yet to man. Paine repeats a current idea that these ‘fixed’ stars and suns probably all have their own planets in attendance upon them. Thus the immensity of space. 

‘All our knowledge of science is derived from the revolutions of those several planets or worlds of which our system is composed make in their circuit round the sun’. He regards this multiplicity as a benefit bestowed by the Creator – otherwise, all that matter in one globe with no revolutionary motion (there are echoes of Newton here) would have deprived our senses and our scientific knowledge, – it is from the sciences that all the mechanical are that contribute so much to our earthly felicity and comfort are derived’. Paine even suggests that the devotional gratitude of man is due to the Creator for this plurality. 

The same opportunities of knowledge are available to the inhabitants of neighbouring planets and to the inhabitants of planets of other suns in the universe. The idea of a society of worlds Paine finds cheerful – a happy contrivance of the almighty for the instruction of mankind. What then of the Christian faith and the ‘solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, with millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should devote all his care to this world and come to die in it? Has every world an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer?’ And so to the rest of The Age of Reason. 

Where did Paine obtain his astronomical information and instruction? It is unlikely he had any books with him, he certainly did not have a bible. Paris, seething with the Revolution, had the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Badly as mayor until his execution in 1793. Condorcet (author of Progress of the Human Spirit) and Lavoisier (the father of modern chemistry) were deeply involved and died in the Revolution. Laplace (‘the French Newton’) and the astronomer Joseph Jerome Lefrangois de Lalande were also in and around Paris at this time. But all these scientists, like Paine, would have been too busy to teach or discuss astronomy. So Paine would have had to recall the lectures and practical demonstrations he attended in London before he went to America. They were given by Benjamin Martin, James Ferguson and Dr. John Bevis. It is worthwhile looking at the careers of these three men, mentioned only by surname early in The Age of Reason, because the facts, derived from the Dictionary of National Biography, afford some light on Paine’s life in London. 

Benjamin Martin (1704-1782). A ploughboy to begin with, he began to teach the ‘three Rs’ at Guildford while studying to become a mathematician, instrument- maker, and general compiler of information! He read Newton’s Opticks (1705) and became an ardent follower of his ideas. He used a £500 legacy to buy instruments and books in order to become an itinerant lecturer. He had over thirty major publications to his name as well as a number of inventions. He perfected the Orrery (not named after its inventor, as Paine states, but after the patron of the copier of the invention!), and used his own version in his lectures. He lived in London at Hadley’s Quadrant in Fleet Street, from 1740 onwards. He died following attempted suicide in 1782. 

James Ferguson (1710-1776). A shepherd-boy in Banffshire at the age of ten. He took up medicine at Edinburgh but gave up to sketch embroidery patterns and then to paint portraits and continue his interest in astronomy. He used the income from his painting to enable him to begin as a teacher and lecturer in London in 1748, where he had arrived five years before. His book, Astronomy explained on Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles (1756), went to at least thirteen editions and was used by William Herschel! for his own study of astronomy. George III called on Ferguson for tuition in mechanics, and he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1763. He became a busy lecturer in and around London, sometime also travelling to Newcastle, Derby, Bath and Bristol for speaking engagements. He occasionally had public disagreements with his wife – even in the middle of lectures! 

Dr. John Bevis (1693-1771). He studied medicine at Oxford and travelled widely in France and Italy before settling in London prior to 1730. Newton’s Opticks was his favourite reading matter, and in 1738 he gave up his practice and moved to Stoke Newington where he built his own observatory. Here, and at Greenwich, assisting Edmund Halley (who died in 1742) he did much astronomical work, and made a unique star-atlas, the Uranographia Brittanica, the plates of which, however, were sequestered in chancery when the printer, John Neale, became bankrupt, and earned a reputation (internationally) as an astronomer. When Nevil Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal following the death of the Rev. Nathaniel Bliss in 1764, Bevis, who had hoped for the appointment himself, returned to his medical practice, setting up at the Temple [London]. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765. But astronomy got him in the end, for, continuing his studies, he was quickly from his telescope one day he fell, sustaining injuries from which he died. It could only have been at this period in his life, at the Temple, as a FRS, that Paine knew him. `As soon as I was able I purchased a pair of globes, and attended the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson, and afterward acquainted with Dr. Bevis of the society called the Royal Society, then living in the Temple, and an excellent astronomer’. 

Moncure Conway in his Life of Paine mentions that [Thomas ‘Clio’] Rickman assigns the period of instruction in astronomy to the year 1767, but that he himself preferred the earlier time of 1757, when Paine would have been twenty years of age. Moreover, he suggests that Paine would have been too poor to afford globes in 1766-7. A study of the lives of his mentors shows clearly that he met Martin and Fergusson fairly certainly at the earlier time, but Dr. Bevis only at the later period, having bought his globes, terrestrial and celestial, ten years previously. On the first occasion he was a staymaker with Mr. Morris of Hanover Street; on his second he was teaching at Mr. Goodman’s and then in Kensington. 

There were some important events taking place in astronomy at this time but they seem to have escaped Paine’s notice. William Herschel discovered the seventh, telescopic , planet in 1781. He wanted to call it ‘George’s Star’, but it is now called Uranus. The scientists in Paris would have known all about this important discovery but one supposes that there would have been no occasion to discuss it with Paine; in any case he did not speak French fluently. There had been transits of Venus across the sun in 1761 and 1769 (the only occasions that century) and Paine mentions them in a footnote to prove how man can know sufficient to predict these and similar events. There must have been occasions of much general public comment – especially when scientists were trying to calculate accurately the distance of the sun from earth at these events. And then in 1789, Herschel made his great forty foot telescope, the envy of astronomers everywhere, indeed, the National Assembly was later to promote a prize for such an undertaking. However, time, scarcity of the necessary metals and shortage of money prevented any such project succeeding in stricken France. 

Thomas Paine had minimal experience at the eyepiece of a telescope and he showed no inclination later in his life to pursue astronomical studies. But in these brief pages of The Age of Reason he shows he has gained a very clear understanding of the solar system from those early days in London.

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Albert DiCanzio

An essay based on the author’s presentation at the First Annual International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies, 19 October 2012 with a few script revisions in year 2020

In the interest of more deeply understanding the phrase “the republic for which it stands” in the pledge of allegiance to this flag, let us explore a tripartite proposition. I refer to this exploration as a proposition because, in the allotted time on our schedule, we can undertake no proof but at most explanation of these conclusions. First, that the United States of America, unlike many if not all other nations, is an invention; by this term I mean: a novel application of design principles embodied in a durable mechanism. Second, that its inventor was that quintessential cosmopolitan Thomas Paine. Third, that it falls to participants and followers of this conference, who care about him, to help shore up his design against the ravages of past neglect and future abuse. In thus honoring Paine and his legacy, I propose that we honor a call to action inherent in that legacy, to fully implement his design of a cultural and political paradigm shift, that is, to complete the still incomplete American Revolution.

Do not imagine that I hold Paine first among scientists to call for a cultural paradigm shift. Galileo had thus preceded Paine, as seen in a story I recounted.(1) By disproving the Ptolemaic cosmology, Galileo gave credibility to notions of geokinesis and of self-directed society,(2) relocating Earth away from the center of planetary motions while laying groundwork for Paine to compensate for lost centrality by placing a self-directed society at the center of a world formerly dominated by monarchic and dynastic rule. By also discovering dynamics, Galileo revolutionized how we harness natural laws of a vast universe in which terrestrials now see their unfavored position offering no ready alternative to getting along with fellow inhabitants of an Earth that Galileo largely proved to be a planet. Just as through his writing, Galileo taught physics to Newton; both men enlightened Thomas Paine, who expanded the Newtonian revolution by treating human behavior on the scale of a nation as a natural phenomenon.

In Rights of Man, part 2, Introduction, we read “What Archimedes said of the mechanical powers may be applied to Reason and Liberty. ‘Had we’, said he, ‘a place to stand upon, we might raise the world.'” More than a change of “persons and measures”, the nascent United States embodied in one nation of free and independent states a change of principles and synthesis of ideas that marked out a position on which to freely apply the lever of reason. We see this in hindsight because, unlike some unrealized or fleeting utopian dream, its design, though imperfect, has stood a test of time, following its encapsulation in durable founding documents. How did that design come about? Paine synthesized Locke’s philosophy with the laws of mechanics of Galilei-Newton into the separation of the colonies as an exercise of natural rights with a Constitution and autogovernance, writing: “The revolution of America presented in politics what was only theory in mechanics.”(3)

In The Life and Works of Thomas Paine(4) one finds Thomas Edison having referred to the totality of Paine’s works as “a crystallization of acute human reasoning” and to his specific work Common Sense as embodying “… Paine’s planning of this great American republic, of which he may very justly be termed the real founder”.

Edison’s two observations confirmed me in the intent to consider this question: How did Paine’s immersion in post-Newtonian scientific thinking cross-fertilize the fiery patriotic writings? A first clue to his rhetorical color and inspiration held firm on an inferential track lies in scientific clarity of thought and language. As we now visit elements of Paine’s story, there may arise additional clues both in the scope of his writings and in that of his inventiveness,(5) including uses of laws concerning energy, momentum, leverage, and even the spiderweb as a model.

In 1775, despite massive British interference in colonial affairs, few leading American colonists favored separation. A year later they declared independence. What had happened in the interim? In January 1776, Paine released Common Sense. Ultimately it sold 120,000 copies, inspired the colonies to independence, and enabled Washington to raise an army. The energy transfer of idea-disclosure, amplified by this factor (i.e., the transition from the first reader to all those that followed), became re-amplified by the Declaration of Rights, Article 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, of which Franklin was an author and principal intellectual architect, and Paine was a source of philosophical influence. Together they formed an intellectual backdrop for the bill of rights, each amplification resulting from leverage on the fulcrum of Paine’s formidable pen. In Rights of Man Paine told us that he applied mechanical principles to the American Revolution. What passion drove him to scientize the social domain?

Aside from the United States, of which he is also arguably the inventor, there were at least six known inventions by Paine, of which he modeled five of these six:

1. A smokeless candle that he sent to Franklin in 1785, along with a description of its operating principle. 2. An automotive carriage with wheels rotating by thrust of exploding gunpowder. In this application of the 3rd law of Galilei-Newtonian mechanics, Paine had put gunpowder to a peaceful use. 3. An improved crane. 4. A turbine to propel a steamboat, un-modeled, yet John Fitch, James Rumsey and Robert Fulton, all of whom were granted U.S. patents relating to the steamboat, recognized Paine as its original inventor. By shrinking the time to traverse distance, the steamboat accelerated the conversion of coastal colonies to a continental commercial powerhouse. 5. A patented method of constructing arches, vaulted roofs and ceilings, derived from Paine’s examination of a spiderweb, and culminating in the iron bridge of 1787-1788. The Sunderland Bridge(6) built at Wearmouth, England in 1796 was designed by Paine with a single cast iron 236-foot-span hingeless arch, an inverted catenary that, like the cycloid advocated earlier by Galileo for bridge construction, yet even more effectively, increased the span without a central support.(7) 6. A machine for planing wood, used in building models of his bridge.

From the invention fortifying a network of bridge components, Paine modeled a robust network topology for a web of associations among freedom-seeking individuals. The American revolution had thus come to model the Newtonian one.

Analogously to Occam’s Razor used in physics to winnow the best competing explanation of natural phenomena, Paine extracted governmental robustness from simplicity and order in nature, a process in which, he wrote, “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle implicit in nature which no art can overturn: that the more simple any thing the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.”(8) Invoking the metaphor of a pulley for checks and balances in essential governmental forms, he wrote: “… for as the greater weight will always carry up the less, and as all the wheels of a machine are put in motion by one, it only remains to know which power in the constitution has the most weight, for that will govern; …” In the Renaissance, Galileo had reached back to ancient Greece, reviving Ionian science from the Dark Ages to create dynamics, groundwork for Newton’s system of the world. By 1776, Newton’s reformulation of Galilean dynamics had blossomed in physics, yet remained unapplied to the social domain until the then-future Paine arrived to apply it.

Paralleling Galileo, Paine turned to that once vibrant era of Athenian democracy to restore and advance autogovernance. The colonies, he explained, will separate and re-form under a declaration of rights, a constitution, and a vacuum of royalty. In 1787, he acknowledged the incompleteness of the American Revolution.(9) Though a second outcome awaited its completion, Paine initially transposed Newtonian momentum to the social domain. Incomplete because it opposed only the most visible slavery, yet this transposition promoted life with liberty and respect for individual property. Inadvertently, 125 years later another inventor elaborated on what Paine had done. The functional relationship of Thomas Paine to Nikola Tesla first came to mind in research of mine aimed at grounding organizational dynamics in the physical dynamics of Galileo.(10)

Tesla, inventor of polyphase alternating current power distribution, in 1900 modeled a human as “a mass urged on by a force”.(11) Human energy he thought measurable by “half the human mass multiplied with the square of a velocity which we are not yet able to compute.”(12) With this non-translatory velocity he associated a human’s “degree of enlightenment.” Laxity of morals, as manifested in organized warfare, was a mass-reducing phenomenon, against which a way to “reduce the force retarding the human mass” would be to eliminate “frictional resistances” such as ignorance. That goal, in turn, called for rational planning whose direction lies “along the resultant of all those efforts” designated as “self-preserving, useful, profitable, or practical”.(13) Under this concept (i.e., Tesla’s concept, my observation) Paine had designed a nation with less friction, and the possibility of rational planning, in an initial condition of autogovernance as a place to stand for launching human achievement. Though Tesla did not elaborate “self-preserving”, Paine proposed that government should assist in providing a secure foundation (i.e., safety from attacks on property) for the pursuit of happiness.(14)

There is more to be observed about the link between Paine and the enlightenment progress of combining science and political structures. I begin a list of the “more to be observed” with axiomatization and postulation. These are institutionalized in science. Their use in politics is illustrated by the phrases “we hold these truths to be self-evident” and “the laws of nature …” and “We the people”. A principle formulated by Paine that I infer to be infrastructural to the Constitutional provision that “We the people” grant and limit the powers of the United States is:

“Mankind are not now to be told they shall not think, or they shall not read; and publications that go no farther than to investigate principles of government, to invite men to reason and to reflect, and to show the errors and excellences of different systems, have a right to appear”.(15)

Such telltale expressions of ideas as self-evident truths, laws of nature, and thinking people, that can be found in documents known to have been influenced, if not also written by Paine in draft form, are marks of an applied scientist and technical innovator.

No less in importance is Paine’s insistence on defining concepts and his habit of defining terms with great care and explanation, the mark of the mathematician that Paine was, and eminently so in the New World. Of a constitution he wrote: “… it will be first necessary to define what is meant by a Constitution. It is not sufficient that we adopt the word; we must fix also a standard signification to it. … A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only the creature of a constitution. The constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of the people constituting its government.” This preamble is followed immediately by his definition of “Constitution”.(16)

Another category of “more” evidence for Paine’s inventorship of the U.S.A. is found in his attempts to encourage an evidence-based discourse, for example, with Edmund Burke, with whom he poignantly disagreed, reacting by issuing Rights of Man. This habit of communication can be compared with a method of controversy found in analysis of Galileo’s dialogues, the first in history (known to me) to aim dialogue at truth-seeking rather than, as in politics or in courtrooms today, at polemicizing toward some pre-conceived conclusion. The Galilean Dialogue on the Two World Systems aims at transforming disagreement into exposure and evaluation of facts and reasoning on both sides of it into common understanding through open-minded, fair-minded, and rational-minded evaluation of that with which one at first may disagree.(17)

In my own professional experience in the development and testing of mathematical models of business products and processes, I observed that the creation of predictive hypotheses and the design of tests that would evaluate them often require mathematical tools that include statistics, combinatorics, curve-fitting, linear programming, Newtonian approximation, decision analysis, flow systems theory, and theory of competitive strategies. For the most part, development of such tools post-dated the life of Paine, yet clearly it was not in a mathematical vacuum that he invented the iron bridge and several other aforementioned novelties. Some such mathematical tools may be used here and there in elements of political practice. They have been and predictably would continue to be useful in the implementation of restoring and completing the American Revolution. This is true for reasons including that optimizing a web of associations among freedom-seeking individuals entails the mathematics and mechanics of network design and implementation.

Finally, a complete list of “more” evidence for Paine’s inventorship of the United States would require a modern explanation of grounding organizational dynamics in post-Newtonian physical dynamics. This is my one of my personal projects which began in [3], about which a great deal more is to be done. That entire important subtopic would exceed my time and space limits here.

As an instance of science starting with first principles, Common Sense first postulated society distinct from government. Paine had proclaimed in Common Sense the need to declare independence; he was known as the foremost writer in the colonies; a Librarian of Congress(18) found Jefferson’s first draft copied from an earlier document; Paine exclaimed “The decree is finally gone forth. Britain and America are now distinct empires”,(19) about the time of the appointment by Congress of a committee to draft the Declaration.

Regardless of the extent to which Paine may have influenced the fundamental documents of the United States of America, a nation whose name and original support are due to him, the friendship and cooperation of Benjamin Franklin with Paine cannot rightly be overlooked. Franklin too was an inventor and, by virtue of discovering the polarity of electricity, one of only three native American discoverers of laws of nature known to me.(20) It is implausible that merely by accident Franklin, having been introduced to Paine by one of the latter’s fellow mathematicians in his native England, understood Paine’s genius as a fellow product of the Newtonian revolution and arranged for him to live and work in England’s colonies. As far as I have been able to determine, the Declaration of Independence may have been as much or more the work of Franklin, Jefferson, and the latter’s committee members as Paine’s, but Paine’s ideas are reflected in it.(21)

As evidence, consider Paine’s leading role in producing a preamble to the French Constitution, The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens adopted by the National Assembly of France(22) and containing these declared rights (DRs) among others that echo the sentiments of Paine expressed in Rights of Man: DR 2: “The end of all Political associations is the Preservation of the Natural and Imprescriptible Rights of Man; and these rights are Liberty, Property, Security, and Resistance of Oppression.” DR 4: “Political Liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not Injure another. The exercise of the Natural Rights of every Man, has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every other Man the Free exercise of the same Rights; and these limits are determinable only by the Law.” DR 5: “The Law ought to Prohibit only actions hurtful to Society. What is not Prohibited by the Law should not be hindered; nor should anyone be compelled to that which the Law does not Require.” DR 12: “A Public force being necessary to give security to the Rights of Men and of Citizens, that force is instituted for the benefit of the Community and not for the particular benefit of the persons to whom it is intrusted.” It is noteworthy that the behavior of many public officials in the United States has not even risen to the height of the bar that Paine raised for France in DR12.

In Paine’s writings I find an internally consistent blend of classical liberalism with what now is called capitalism. His civic philosophy synthesizes property and the flow of rewards to achievers with the idea of social insurance for all. In 1967, the term “capitalism” assumed its modern meaning by being defined simply as “a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned”.(23) An assumption built into this definition is: control of property is never, under no circumstances, separated from ownership. Paine noted; “There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, … such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, … acquired property — the invention of men”,(24) the latter being acquired by contract.

In the commercial arena, Paine opposed intervention by a foreign monarch and domestic interference with the development of robust monetary foundations as exemplied by the Coinage Act of 1792. Paine “was trying to free commercial relations from a type of oligarchy. It developed into capitalism, and the forces aligning against monarchy have their root in a nascent capitalism.”(25)

Independently of that endeavor, Paine was faithful to what would later come to be known as capitalism. Case in point: “In ‘Agrarian Justice,’ he developed the first realistic proposal in the world to abolish systematic poverty: a universal social insurance system comprising old-age pensions and disability support and universal stakeholder grants for young adults, funded by a 10% inheritance tax focused on land.”(26) Lest this be wrongly seen as a redistribution of property, to see otherwise consider Paine’s argument for the proposal. Passing over some of his preliminary argument, I bring you to these two postulations: (1) “[T]he first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period. … (2) “the earth in its natural, uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state, every man would have been born into property.” Ultimately his argument culminates in: “Every proprietor of cultivated lands owes to the community a ground-rent … for the land which he holds”.(27) Here he explains why, given principles (1) and (2), cultivators of large land parcels owe a percentage rent to be collected as a tax. By this argument, Paine demonstrates the absence of expropriation or what might otherwise be seen as anti-capitalistic intent in his “social insurance”.

To complete Paine’s mission, among other actions that can be taken are: 1. … to restore his legacy. History has denied Paine proper gratitude for inventing the United States. Athens, after exiling its great general Themistocles who had saved the country from Persian invaders, and after forcing on its great philosopher Socrates a choice of exile or a cup of hemlock, fell into decline and never recovered. Similarly, the United States, nearly oblivious to its inventor, has been in decline as measured by the Index of Economic Freedom and other metrics. 2. … to hold officials to their oath of office,(28) to remove the slavery of fiat currency inflation, consistently with Paine’s advocacy of the death penalty for those who would move for legal tender laws(29) and to free commerce from the imposition of trade restrictions and taxation without consent of the people. 3. … to develop organizational dynamics. The design (and re-engineering) of a nation is a work of organizational dynamics, not to be confused with what is casually and tenuously called “organizational dynamics” in universities today. Tesla articulated a qualitative concept of directed human motion affected by rational planning and by innovation; his phrase “which we are not yet able to compute” suggested that he thought it could ultimately be quantified. Kurt Lewin aimed at defining a topological space suitable to represent social interaction. Until their successor(s) in organizational dynamics anchor that discipline in Galilean physical dynamics, inadequate theoretical grounding will exist for fortifying the American Revolution. That is an aim of my ongoing current research.(30)

Additionally, patriots can presently support scholarly research on Paine’s legacy by donating to organizations of their choice, such as The Thomas Paine National Historical Association in New Rochelle. This litany is incomplete and enumerates only those fulfilling actions of which I have conceived independently of a forthcoming work which would be far more complete. It is my hope and expectation that Rad Freeman’s work will receive serious attention by scholars.(31)

From those who have raised their voices above their faculties to claim through ignorance of inconvenient facts that our country was founded entirely on oppression, it would be refreshing to hear or read an explanation why they have been so silent about the inventor of the United States having been a consistent foe of slavery, both physical and mental, and an uncompromising promoter of human happiness. Where is the recognition and gratitude for this man Paine who endured severe risks and hardships, devoting his life to the elimination of all forms of oppression in at least two countries and worldwide through his writings?

Dear reader, sursum corda! Is it necessary or prudent to attack a revolution on account of some darkness in its history? A revolution is a human endeavor that embraces some mistakes and some darkness, as when revolving about the sun our planet is eclipsed by the moon. The leading revolutionary of the United States has written: “The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness; and no sooner did the American governments display themselves to the world, than despotism felt a shock and man began to contemplate redress.”(32) For a limited time, an option exists to sustain the shock to despotism. Might we honor the brilliance in the revolution’s history and intent by completing and fulfilling it?

What darkness can anyone find that was in Paine’s blueprint for this country? Can you find any? Gratitude to the inventor means more than words. It means action that would culminate in the application of inventor Thomas Paine’s principles that were provably morally correct. A revolution is not a rebellion; these two are geometrically and consequentially different. From Galileo’s physical demonstrations of the Copernican/Keplerian planetary arrangement, we learn that Earth is a planet that spirals around the sun in an elliptical-helical orbit, climbing against gravity and never leaving that source of light. The spiralling is, in its cycle, a revolution, and the consequence is not only light but also life; a social revolution would climb toward both. By contrast, a rebellion is a destructive social movement that may produce death or removal of persons or organizations, replacing some actors with other actors; its consequences are events of a type that includes coup d’état and/or insurrection. It solves nothing. It is a zig-zag kind of motion not climbing to light but yielding the darkness in continuing loss of liberty.

What is the liberty at which Paine’s revolution has been aimed? In the absence of full development of this subtopic, we can provisionally define liberty as the free exercise of property rights. Because you own your life as a natural right and have a natural right to liberty, no external source is required for these rights. Naturally, you also have a right to what you produce, including your ideas, and the non-intellectual productions of others that you acquire ethically by contract. There is no protection for these rights until there has been a full revolution. The revolution spirals away from any darkness of the founding to embrace the light in Paine’s invention of a nation. The revolution requires construction not destruction.

These are again “times that try men’s souls”, new times and dark times, yet times that have been nurtured by a supreme exemplar of converting inner passions to patriotic action.(33) Can you sense the ongoing presence of Paine in the United States? In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the USA, I personally heard in the U.S. media — and even in advertising — this passage from Paine’s Crisis Papers but without crediting him: “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”. Thomas Paine did not stop at inventing the United States but left us guidance toward completing the invention. Action now to fortify and finish his work can pay down the price of the freedom that he bequeathed us.

Footnotes:

1. Albert DiCanzio, (2), a comprehensive scientific biography of Galileo in the English language.
2. Cf. Manfred Weidhorn, The Person of the Millenium: The Unique Impact of Galileo on World History (iUniverse, 2005). See also DiCanzio, Albert, “Book review of The Person of the Millennium” (Perspectives Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation. 59.2, June 2007), 155.
3. Thomas Paine, (7), 157-158, 160.
4. William M. Van der Weyde, (1) Vol. 1, vii-viii
5. For a more complete in-context discussion of Paine’s inventiveness and the background of his invention of the United States, see this forthcoming book, which I highly recommend to this audience: Rad Freeman, Saving Our Country: by Implementing The American Revolution in Full (as far as I have determined, this author is the first to tie modern economic science to the American Revolution as its completion). However, the responsibility for observing and choosing examples, mentioned here, of these phenomena in Paine’s writing is mine.
6. Henry Grattan Tyrrell, History of Bridge Engineering (University of California Libraries, 1911)
7. “The idea and construction of this arch is taken from the figure of a spider’s circular web, of which it resembles a section, and from a conviction that when nature empowered this insect to make a web she also instructed her in the strongest mechanical method of constructing it.” (Specification of Thomas Paine, (9), Vol. 5, p. 3, as quoted in Rad Freeman, Saving Our Country: by Implementing the American Revolution in Full, forthcoming, Act IV). Here it is noted that Paine had obtained a patent from George Hanover III in 1788 for his method of constructing such span-increasing arches. It was a milestone in bridge technology arriving two centuries after Andrea Palladino’s invention of the truss. (Linton Grinter, Theory of Modern Steel Structures, NY: MacMillan, 1942, 7.)
8. Thomas Paine, (6), 6-8
9. There is no question that Paine regarded the American Revolution as incomplete. “The Revolution can only be said to be complete, when we shall have freed ourselves, no less from the influence of foreign prejudices than from the fetters of foreign power (Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, (in 9, orig. pub. 1791-2, vol. 4, Society for Political Inquiries, p. 312). In addition, Paine enumerated in Rights of Man, part ii, (vol. 5 in Van der Wyde) a litany of unmet conditions for a country to boast of its constitution and its government.
10. Albert G. DiCanzio, (3)
11. Nikola Tesla, (8), 177.
12. Ibid. Emphasis supplied by the present writer.
13. Ibid. 178, 182, 189.
14. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, (4), 64-65.
15. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, (in (9), orig. pub. 1791-2), vol. vi, pp. 226
16. Ibid.
17. I credit and applaud Maurice Finocchiaro for this discovery and revelation about “Two World Systems” and the introduction and definition of the terms “open-minded”, “fair-minded”, and “rational-minded” that I first found on 27 May 2010 in Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Springer, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 280, 2010).
18. Julian Boyd, The Declaration of Independence; the Evolution of the Text (The Library of Congress, 1943).
19. Moncure Daniel Conway, ed., (1) vol. 1, pp. 161, 166.
20. I credit the founders of the Madeira Beach library for placing in the path of my childhood curiosity literature on Paine and (separately) the Declaration of Independence during an otherwise boring summer vacation from school; later, Andrew J. Galambos of the Liberal Institute of Natural Science and Technology who in a personal conversation made me aware of Franklin’s intellectual intimacy with Paine and identified one of those three native-American scientific discoverers (of chemical potential in thermodynamics and foundations of statistical mechanics), Josiah Willard Gibbs. The other two native-American scientific discoverers are Franklin and Adrian Bejan.
21. Cf. Elizabeth Picciani, “A Transcription, History, and Analysis of the Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights and Constitution of 1776”. According to this researcher, there were at least six authors including Franklin, whose role was “more passive” yet whose writing was at least consistent with the philosophical principles that had been expressed by Thomas Paine.
22. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens adopted by the National Assembly of France “is generally attributed to Paine, with whom Condorcet and Pierre Dumont may have collaborated … Much of its political philosophy had appeared in the American Declaration of Independence.” (9), p. 144 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens adopted by the National Assembly of France “is generally attributed to Paine, with whom Condorcet and Pierre Dumont may have collaborated … Much of its political philosophy had appeared in the American Declaration of Independence.” (9), p. 144
23. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1967), 10. Why this definition? It is the simplest available, hence, recalling Occam’s razor and Paine’s above-quoted preference “the more simple any thing the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered”, it would likely have been Paine’s choice.
24. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice.
25. For these insightful words that assisted me in the realization that Paine’s contribution to the embryonic development of capitalism in the USA occurred despite that term having been unknown to Paine, and for his review of certain early drafts of this essay, a review that implies neither his endorsement nor his disendorsement of the finished product, I thank Gary Berton of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association.
26. Elizabeth Anderson, ‘Agrarian Justice’ and the Origins of Social Insurance, oxfordscholarship.com.
27. Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice, op. cit. (10)
28. Paine has written of acts that include violating an oath of office “When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime” in Age of Reason, (NY, Peter Eckler), 6.
29. “But tender laws, of any kind, operate to destroy morality, and to dissolve, by the pretense of law, what ought to be the principle of law to support, reciprocal justice between man and man: and the punishment of a member who should move for such a law ought to be death.” Thomas Paine, “Dissertations on Government; the Affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money” in William M. Van der Weyde, (9) Vol. IV, p. 299.
30. Albert DiCanzio, (3). The phrase “free exercise of natural rights” is attributable to Rad Freeman (5).
31. Rad Freeman, (5).
32. Thomas Paine, (7), 231.
33. Here I refer, of course, to Thomas Paine, the “supreme exemplar”. A more recent call to restoring the nation he intended came from US President Ronald Reagan in these words: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

REFERENCES

1. Conway, Moncure Daniel, ed. The Writings of Thomas Paine (orig. pub. NY: Burt Franklin, 1902)
2. DiCanzio, Albert G., Galileo: His Science and His Significance for the Future of Man (Dover, NH: ADASI, 1996)
3. DiCanzio, Albert G., Organizational Dynamics and Decision Strategy in the Controversy about Galileo Galilei (UMI Proquest, Diss., 2008)
4. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. How Capitalism Saved America (NY, Three Rivers Press, 2004)
5. Freeman, Rad. Saving Our Country: by Implementing the American Revolution in Full, forthcoming.
6. Paine, Thomas, Common Sense (in (9) orig. pub. 1776) vol. ii
7. Paine, Thomas, Rights of Man, (in [9], orig. pub. 1791-2), vol. vi-vii
8. Tesla, Nikola. The Problem of Increasing Human Energy (Whitefish, MN: Kessinger, 1900)
9. Van der Weyde, William M., ed. The Life and Works of Thomas Paine (New Rochelle, NY: Thomas Paine National Historical Assn, 1925)
10. Paine, Thomas, Agrarian Justice (in (9) 1797, orig. pub. 1776) vol. x.

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THOMAS Paine (1737-1809), author, editor, stay maker, excise man, small farmer, inventor, citizen of three countries, military courier, first US Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and pamphleteer for the Enlightenment, not only built diplomatic bridges between countries at a time of conflict, but also forged plans for bridges of iron that would cross the chasm between geography and politics. As the moments of war, post-war reconstruction and currency crisis unfolded, Paine documented and unravelled politics for citizens living in an age of personal uncertainty and helped to erect a symbolic bridge into what he hoped would be an age of common sense and reason. 

Thomas Paine, the man, struggled with the dual tasks of earning a living and creating a body politic. During his lifetime Paine faced jealous political opponents (some half his age) who campaigned to ruin his career and personal life, and who prepared slanderous biographies to be published before and after his death. (Moncure D. Conway (1832-1907), American abolitionist, biographer and researcher of the Paine I manuscripts discusses the biographies of Paine in his volumes, The Lift of Thomas Pals, New York: G. Putnam, vol. 1, 1892, preface, pp. ix – xvi.) Nonetheless, Paine left a legacy as a writer and a proponent of democracy that survived through the widespread support of mechanics and working class people who supported his ingenuity, honesty, and promotion of Enlightenment causes (universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, the demise of superstition, democratic government, the creation of full employment, a welfare system, and a retirement pension scheme). His writings, distributed as pamphlets and letters to the working class of the world, also reached the ears of presidents and reformers. Nineteenth and twentieth century supporters of Paine kept his legacy alive and extended the principles of the Enlightenment so that the bicentenary of Paine’s death on June 8, 1809 will be commemorated around the world this year. 

Thomas Paine’s bridge of diplomacy, both as a practical bridge and as a symbolic bridge between nations and political eras, centred on his proposal for a single span iron bridge braced by strong abutments cast from nature in the design of a spider’s web. The bridge was never completed. His bridge design and his political proposals were however taken up by others in Paine’s three countries of residence (England, the United States and France) and eventually extended around the world. Paine’s political bridge spanned three countries on two continents during a period when countries had sunk themselves under the debt of war. Faced with costly domestic reconstruction, collapsing banks, and currencies dissolving in quicksand, governments are forced to find solutions to failing domestic economies. 

Thomas Paine, the bridge builder, faced his own difficulty of finding governments willing to invest in durable iron bridges to replace the wooden and stone bridges that were being swept away by strong water currents, ice and sand flows – an enduring problem for governments accustomed to short term solutions and temporary construction in an era of war. As a political reformer, Paine also tried to build bridges between regions of the world that had sunk into debt from military expenditure. The idea of political diplomacy for Paine became paramount and inseparable from governments investing in long-term civilian infrastructure projects. For this reason, the author of an early draft 775) of the American Declaration of Independence (1776) including a clause to abolish slavery, the Pennsylvania Constitution in 1776, and revisions to the French Constitution of 1791 became a designer of bridges for civilian use. (Paine’s draft of the 1776 Declaration of independence appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal on 18 October 1775 under the pennamo “Humanitas.” Paine arrived in America from England on 30 November 1774 and secured employment as a writer for the Pennsylvania Journal in 1775-6.)

Paine’s Schuylkill River bridge, designed for its fortitude, easy portability and repair, was to have thirteen columns to commemorate each of the thirteen states in the Union and was subsequently adapted to meet the political needs and practical engineering requirements of the three principal countries involved in the American War of Independence. Paine eventually offered his design to countries in northern Europe as he struggled to find an investor. The War had been an expensive war for all involved. Parliamentary reformers in England estimated that the expense from the English side alone had been £139,521,035 by 1781 and an additional £1,340,000 in compensation payments not including the £4,000 per year in stipends paid to loyalists from 1788. (Charles Bradlaugh, “The Impeachment of the House of Brunswick,” Freeihought Publishing Company 11-amts, London: Fredhought Publishing Company, 1880, p. 45.) The French incurred similar expenses for their part. In the aftermath of the war, Paine predicted the collapse of the international monetary system unless politicians rapidly learned the skills of political diplomacy and economic intervention.

Paine, an English republican, had become a supporter of American Independence and moved to the United States in 1774, one year prior to the War of Independence. He was to personally witness two revolutions in his lifetime – the American War of Independence and the French Revolution – and his contribution to American independence included serving as a government secretary, military courier and clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, in addition to helping build the Bank of North America, a citizens’ subscription bank founded in May 1780 with his own subscription of $500. The Bank became incorporated by Congress and then by the State of Pennsylvania on 1 April 1782. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. T p. 221.) The purpose of the bank was to help fund the wounded war veterans of George Washington’s army, but the bank came under attack when it became too large and was unable to repeal its charter. Paine wrote about the general economic collapse and saved the bank with the distribution of his pamphlet entitled, Dissertations on Government the Affairs of the Bank and Paper Money (1786), in which he pointed out that the greed of the banks had caused them to lend money without proper security and that public claims had been exorbitant. He also pointed out that the debt of the banks was to be passed on to the subscribers who owed 6% interest in perpetuity on their holding while the banks continued to invest their money at 10-12% and speculators received an additional 20-30% on their investments. Paine argued against the creation of a paper currency to see the country through the crisis. Paine was left with personal financial debt as a result of the collapse of the bank and could not pay his own 6% interest in perpetuity and thus embarked on his bridge project in 1785. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol.1, p. 219. John Keane alternatively suggests that Paine Muted to bridges in a “bout of restlessness” following the war (see Keane, p. 267) and Alfred Owen Aldridge suggests Paine emerged from the Bank difficulties a rich man who was freed up by his money to pursue the bridge designs. (see Aldridge, Man (Reason The Life of Thomas Paine, Philadelphia & New York 3.5. Lippincott Company, 1959, p. 108.) This author prefers Conway’s interpretation because Conway investigated the available evidence closer to Paine’s time, and did not rely on George Chalmer’s 1793 biography of Paine.) 

Moncure Daniel Conway, the American abolitionist and biographer of the Paine manuscripts, stated that Paine had been referred to in his day as a “living Declaration of Independence” and had urged Americans to turn their thoughts from war to public efforts of reconstruction. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life Thomas Paine, vol. I, p.245.) Paine was an Enlightenment inventor who had used his scientific knowledge to invent a smokeless candle, wheels for carriages, as well as wood planers and now presented the more ambitious project of an enduring bridge for public use. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, The Cobbett Papers, vol. Q, Appendix A, p. 456.) Paine corresponded with and met Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), as both a politician and an inventor; with John Trumbull (1756-1843), painter of the American Revolutionary War; and Benjamin West (1738-1820), then a court painter for George Ill. 

Paine’s design for a single span iron bridge emerged at the time when iron foundries had started to turn from war production (cannons and cannon balls) in the early 18th century to civilian production (cast iron water mains, water pipes, sewers, fire engines, canals, door hinges and locks, water wheels and garden fences) in the late 18th century. The new technologies of iron ore smelting and iron casting came about as a result of the exhaustion of the tree stock that had fuelled the wars and industry of Europe from the 17th century. New fuel was required to replace the dwindling tree stock and coal used in the refining of iron ore by smelting charcoal became an alternative. 

The first attempt to build a cast iron bridge is generally agreed to have taken place in Lyon, France in 1755. The next is believed to have been the Coalbrookdale Bridge (1777-1779) on the River Severn in England. By 1750 coke smelting had been established in Coalbrookdale, and the Coalbrookdale Company was able to build a bridge with a design by Thomas Farrols Pritchard (1723-1777) completed by Abraham Darby Ill (1750-1791) who worked with the Coalbrookdale Company. A shortage of pig iron meant that iron ore had to be imported from Norway, Spain, Sweden and Russia. There was, however, a plentiful supply of coal from the fossilized remains of the old tree stock of Europe and in America. 

By 1783 and the Treaty of Paris, the best American trees had been cut to build English warships. The domestic use of trees in the United States had been severely restricted during the colonial period and only in the late 18th century were trees even considered for use in major bridge building projects. Oak was considered the wood of choice. (John Keane, Torn Paine: A Political Life, Boston: Little, Brown and Company. 1995, p. 267.) America therefore embarked on a period of wooden bridges at a time when Europe was infatuated with the idea of more durable iron bridges. Thomas Paine, in his designs for an iron bridge in America pointed out that wooden bridges were impractical for a climate of freezing temperatures, ice, sand, silt and mudfiows, and unstable river basins. Pennsylvania seemed a good state in which to erect his first iron bridge for both pragmatic and political reasons since it was a state both rich in coal and the first state to broker independence from Britain. (Moncure D. Conway, Addresses and Reprints, 18504907, Boston and New York: The Riverside Press, 1909, pp. 403-406.) In 1785 Paine had completed his plans for bridges over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, the Harlem River in New York State, the Thames River in London, and the Seine River in Paris. While he waited for acceptance of his designs in one place, he moved on to the next and tried to take with him a bridge of diplomacy while awaiting a practical bridge of peace. 

The success of the Coalbrookdale Bridge in England with its single 100 Y2 foot span over the Severn and a rise of 50 feet bearing 278 tons of cast iron on a thrust principle on strong masonry abutments demonstrated to Paine the success of the cast iron technology for a wide stream bridge with high arches to allow the passage of boats. The Coalbrookdale Bridge had proved that iron could provide a secure material capable of withstanding strong currents on a river basin of clay, rock or chalk. (F.W. Sims (Ed), The Public Works of Great Britain, London: John Weald Architectural Library, 1838, n.p.) Cast and wrought iron bridges proved easy to transport in sections, repairable and highly durable due to the diagonal tension of bow and string suspension and were subsequently initiated all over the world. (Capt. A.H.E. Boileau; Outline of a Series of Lectures on Iron Bridges Delivered at the Calcutta Mechanic’s Institute on 1841, Calcutta: Mechanics’ Institute, 1842, pp. 2-9; Hamilton Weldon Pendred, Iron Bridges of Moderate Span, London: Crosby Lockwood and Co., 1887, pp. I24,140-1.) Paine was just one proponent of iron bridges. When Paine began his iron bridge designs he, like others, knew that the Blackfriars Bridge in London had recently given way and two bridges over the Tyne in Northumberland (one by John Smeaton) had collapsed when the piers gave way in quicksand. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol_ 1, pp. 243, 254.)

Some biographers have credited Paine as the next pioneer of iron bridge design after Coalbrookdale although with the profusion of iron bridge designers in the period this is an unnecessary claim. Moncure Conway made no such claim and pointed out that the most enduring historians have not been concerned with hailing triumphal “firsts.” Conway presented Paine’s bridge design in more modest terms as simply an original iron bridge design, as this was Paine’s own description. Conway searched Paine’s patent of August 28, 1788 registered by Paine for “Constructing Arches, Vaulted Roofs, and Ceilings on principals new and different to anything hitherto practiced.” (John Keane records the patent date as August 26, 1788 in his volume, Tom Paine: A Political Life, p. 276.) Paine proposed the basic design of his bridge as a section of a circle with iron abutments “dividing and combining” like “the quills of birds, bones of animals, reeds, canes, Etc.” where the arch could be composed of any length “joined together by the whole extent of the arch and take the curvature by bending.” The patent was granted in September 1788. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, val. p. 242. For more on Paine’s bridge design see Moncure D. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896, vol. IV, pp. 440-449. See also Paul Collins, -The Arch Revolutionary,” New Scientist, 6.November 2004, pp. 50-51.) Conway pointed out that the 100-foot iron arch designed by Thomas M. Pritchard and erected over the River Severn at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, did not anticipate Paine’s design and that such arguments are not appropriate to the historical assessment of Paine’s contribution to democracy and design. Conway thought it more politically important to point out that Paine remained destitute most of his life despite his political contributions. Had Paine’s proposals for bridges been adopted they would have provided him with an income. As it turned out, Paine’s political opponents attacked his small personal finances and land holdings in the United States leaving him destitute. Paine had to be buried on the small remaining portion of his farm land and then exhumed and transported overseas when the land was sold on because Paine had been unable to secure a grave plot in the local Quaker’s yard. Meeting and knowing people in high places had not advantaged Paine personally. Paine was well aware that he was being ruthlessly exploited. He kept notably quiet in political meetings apart from discussions of corporation, and the tone of his correspondence to Thomas Jefferson and other politicians became droll as he realised governments were not going to invest in his iron bridges. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 243. )

Paine hired John Hall, a mechanic from Leicester who had worked with the Boulton and Watt steam engine manufacturers, with John Wilkinson at the Coalbrookdale Company, and with Samuel Walker of Walkers and Co. in Yorkshire. (John Keane, Toni Paine: A Political Life, p. 268.) Paine and Hall shared an interest in Pennsylvania politics and in Benjamin Franklin’s election as president of the state. Paine belonged to a number of societies including the Society for Political Inquiries that met in Benjamin Franklin’s library. The Society for Political Inquiries had 42 members while Paine was a member including George Washington, James Wilson, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, and George Clymer. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life Thomas Paine,vol.1, p. 225.) Hall assisted Paine with his model for a 400-foot single span iron bridge over the Schuylkill River. Paine completed the design and the mathematical side of the construction while Hall constructed the model to Paine’s specifications. 

Paine and Hall presented two models for the Schuylkill River Bridge to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, and General Morris in New York. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol.1, p. 218.) One model was constructed in wood and the other in cast iron. The Schuylkill River models stood in Franklin’s garden for some time before finally resting in Charles Wilson Peale’s Museum of Natural History in Philadelphia. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 11. p. 318 and Appatcrut A, The Cobbett Papers, p.456.) By the nineteenth century, only one dilapidated model remained in the Peale collection, and no other bridge model was extant. It is believed that the bridge most closely resembling Paine’s was the bridge over the River Wear at Sunderland in the north of England erected in 1796 by Thomas Wilson. While Wilson’s bridge lacked the same web design it did contain circular reinforcements similar to those proposed by Paine and demonstrated that Paine’s bridge could have seen its way into a completed project. The Wear Bridge stood 236 feet in width and 95 feet in height. It was unfortunate for Paine that his bridge designs were not commissioned for he had to move elsewhere in search of work. 

In 1787 Paine returned to England and applied for a bridge patent in that country. Paine proposed a bridge design for the River Thames and approached iron men in the North of England to execute a model settling on Samuel Walker of Walkers and Co. near Sheffield who recommended that it be executed in wrought or cast iron. Paine proposed a bridge of 110 feet and built a model with money he and Peter Whiteside, an American Merchant in London, had raised. The model was built at the Rotherham works in Yorkshire and was erected in June 1790 at Leasing-Green (now Paddington Green). Visitors paid one shilling per person to help raise money for the project. In the meantime Paine went to Paris and proposed a bridge project there but was forced to return to London when Peter Whiteside’s business failed. Whiteside fell £620 in debt for his portion of the bridge and Paine and the American merchants Cleggett and Murdoch had to act as Whiteside’s bail. They paid his debt and as a result Paine lost the money for his aging mother’s stipend. He then recovered the money through visits to his bridge by Sir Edmund Burke, the Duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam of Wentworth House, Lord Lansdowne, Sir George Staunton and Sir Joseph Banks. However, no contracts for the bridge in England were forthcoming. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol.11, pp. 259-277.) Moncure Conway pointed out that while Paine continued to look for financial means in England and France and continued to promote the American cause overseas, “in truth America was silently publishing what they could out of a starving English staymaker.” (Moncure D. Conway, The Life ((Mantas Paine, vol. 1, pp. 244-245.) 

Paine continued to propose the benefits of iron bridges over wooden bridges and to request commissions from governments in France, England, the United States and Northern Europe. (Moncure. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 220.) Moncure Conway wrote of Paine, 

In setting the nation at once to a discussion of the principles of such government, he led it to assume the principles of independence; over the old English piers on their quicksands, which some would rebuild, he threw his republican arch, on which the people passed from shore to shore. He and Franklin did the like in framing the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, by which the chasm of °Toryism” was spanned. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, 1892, vol. I, pp. 224-5) 

The Schuylkill River contract was not secured due to “the imperfect state of iron manufacture in America” according to a letter from Monsieur Chanut, one of Paine’s French contacts. ‘Something of the same kind might be said of the political architecture,” added Conway. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 226.) Instead, the State of Pennsylvania erected a wooden bridge over the Schuylkill River between 1798 and 1805. 

Paine travelled to France with a model of his Schuylkill River Bridge in 1787 that he presented to the French Academy of Sciences in the hope that he would gain the attention of backers there or in Northern Europe. He proposed an arch of 400-500 feet to span the Seine. The French Academy met with Paine and agreed to appoint a committee to report on his bridge. While awaiting the decision Paine entered into correspondence with Thomas Jefferson who was American Minister in Paris at the time. (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 228.) The French Academy returned a cautious response to Paine’s proposal, having examined iron bridge models. They agreed with him on material points and while generally favourable they expressed a preference to one of “our own” which turned out to be a less expensive and less enduring wooden bridge by Migneron de Brocqueville. (Montana D. Conway, Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 229.) The same correspondence from the French Academy expressed an interest in the famous bridge at Schaffhausen built by Grubenmann, a carpenter; the model shown to Paine by Perronet, the King’s architect.° Paine’s bridge was never built. Paine nonetheless continued constructing a diplomatic and political bridge of friendship across the channel and sent his design to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society in England. (Moncure D.Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. I, p. 230.)

Paine’s mother in England was now 91 years old and Paine desperately needed money to support her. While Paine’s bridge efforts had not come to fruition, Paine was granted honorary citizenship in France and elected Deputy for Pas-de-Calais to the National Convention in 1792. It is not known whether his monetary situation improved from the position but it saved him from imprisonment in England for having written The Rights of Man (1791- 2). (Moncure D. Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, vol. 1, p. 230.)

While Paine awaited decisions on his bridge he wrote Denton Emigre, an archaeological treatise on freemasonry and was nominated by the 1792 Convention to revise the 1791 French Constitution. However as the Legislative Assembly progressed and voting began to abolish the monarchy, Paine fell into disfavour for advocating that Louis XVI be tried by jury, followed by imprisonment or exile, rather than executed. Paine opposed the use of the death penalty, which he considered to be the weapon of the monarchy, and was in favour of a democratic peoples’ constitution that supported trial by jury. On 11 December 1792 Louis XVI was placed on trial before the Convention, and was sentenced to death by a political vote of 380 to 310 on 19 January 1793 and executed on 21 January 1793. (Albert Soboul, A Short History of the French Revolution 1789-1799, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977 (originally published as La Revolution Francaise, Presses Univasitaires de France, 1965.) Robespierre and his supporters in the Convention mistook Paine for a Girondist, which he was not. However, Paine was imprisoned for opposing the death penalty on December 25, 1793 and was only released on November 6, 1794 through the diplomatic work of General James Monroe, US Minister to France, who arranged for Paine to be granted American citizenship. While Paine was incarcerated he wrote, The Age of Reason (1794-5). 

In 1873 Gustav Courbet, artist and Minister of Fine Arts under the 1871 Commune explained to the American abolitionist Moncure Conway that he had little time to paint a commission of artworks for the Governor of Ohio since he had been wrongly forced to pay off the debt of the raising of the Vendome column in 1871. (Ellen L. Ramsay, Moncure D. Conway: Rationalism, and the Abolition of Slavery, London: Thomas Paine Society and The Freethought History Research Group, 2007, pp. 37-38.) Paine’s bridge plans were also interrupted by revolutions, imprisonment, economic turmoil, drafts of constitutions, advice to newly formed governments, and the writing of pamphlets including Common Sense (1776), The Age of Reason (1794-5) and The Rights of Man (1791-2). Such was the historical moment that public projects proposed by Enlightenment figures such as Paine only gradually pushed their way onto the world stage in the face of the rocky road of diplomacy and post-war reconstruction that had been temporarily undermined by the canon balls of war. 

Copyright 2008. Ellen R. Ramsay. 

ELLEN L RAMSAY BA, MA, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of art history currently on leave from York University and has published 215 articles on art, culture and politics. She is a member of the Thomas Paine Society in England. 

Selected Sources: 

Paul Collins, The Arch Revolutionary: New Scientist, 6 November 2004, pp. 50- 51. 

Moncure Daniel Conway (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Paine, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896. 

Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1892. 

John Gloag and Derek Bridgwater, A History of Cast iron in Architecture, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1948. 

John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995. 

Thomas Paine. The Construction of Iron Bridges, June 13, 1803, Presented to the Congress of the United States from Bordentown on the Delaware, New Jersey. Reproduced in Thomas Paine, Collected Writings, New York, The Library of America, 1995, p. 422-428. 

Ellen L Ramsay, Moncure D. Conway Rationalism and the Abolition of Slavery, London: Thomas Paine Society and the Freethought Historical Research Group, 2007.

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Although Thomas Paine is best known for his role as a revolutionary, political and social reformer and biblical critic, like many of his circle of friends and acquaintances he had a passionate interest in science, or, as it was then termed, natural philosophy. He cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as a great scientist, although his ideas about the use of iron for the construction of bridges has given him a place in the annals of civil engineering. However, although Paine is best remembered for his political work his interest in science should not be lost sight of, for it certainly influenced arguments he advanced in The Age of Reason. 

It would seem from what Paine wrote that his interest in matters scientific was clearly coupled with a strong belief that whenever possible scientific discoveries should be given a practical application. This is well illustrated from several articles he wrote, or reprinted, after he became editor of The Pennsylvania Journal In fact the first to be published under his own name in America discussed the nature and use of saltpetre, thus combining science and its application (November 22, 1775). 

Paine’s interest in science led to him meeting Benjamin Franklin, with who he became very friendly. The introduction had been arranged by G.L.Scott, a member of the Excise Board who had met Franklin as a result of his own interest in matters scientific.¹ The meeting was to have momentous consequences as it eventually led to Paine’s eventual departure for what were then England’s American colonies; he took with him an introduction from Franklin to his son-in-law, Richard Bache, who lived in Philadelphia. This recommended Paine as a potential clerk, teacher or assistant surveyor, the latter perhaps being indicative of his interest in science. In the event Paine found employment in none of these but became a journalist. 

Thomas Paine was extremely reticent about his personal life, particularly his childhood. We can only guess at the influences upon the young Paine as he grew up in Thetford. Who sparked off his interest in science? We know not, he does not tell us. The fact of all his private papers having been destroyed in a fire does not help us to reconstruct his early years and it is likely that in all probability the gaps will never be filled. However, the few biographical references scattered around his works provide a few tantalising hints. He appears to have been interested in natural history, though to what extent he pursued the subject is unclear as he does not appear to have furthered this side of scientific studies. We find references to the distribution and habitats of insects in the first part of The Age of Reason.² as well as observations on the habits of spiders.³ This certainly implies an interest in natural history, though whether his observations are based on study in the field or simply reading what someone else had written we cannot say. Interest in spiders, though, was never a commonplace study, nor is it now despite the existence of a society devoted to arachnology. So who influenced the young Paine in natural history? It could have been a teacher or even a fellow pupil at Thetford Grammar School, but I suspect the most likely individual was his father, who, in Paine’s own words, possessed ‘a tolerable stock of useful learning’.⁴ As we know of Paine’s early ambition to be ordained as a non-conformist minister,⁵ this might have contributed to a desire on his part to study science, including natural history, as an aid to achieving his ambition, for many clergymen of the time exhibited considerable interest in the latest scientific trends. Unfortunately, Paine’s failure to have studied Greek and Latin became an insurmountable barrier to him becoming a minister of religion, for his Quaker father objected to him studying these languages. Perhaps the real reason was that for his son to have taken up the study of Latin and Greek would have added considerably to the cost of his education, for while Paine senior might have had a reasonably good business he was certainly not wealthy. Thankfully Paine was not destined for ordination and was eventually to discard his youthful attraction to christian supernaturalism.⁶

In The Age of Reason Paine contrasts what he identifies as the evidence for creation and design in nature with the claims for supposed biblical revelation, viewing the former as genuine and the latter as hearsay. A believer in both a god and an afterlife, Paine viewed his deity as impersonal, though he failed to grasp the fact that his argument for the existence of a such an entity could be employed just as well to demonstrate the existence of a whole horde of them. The problem with using science to attack one form of religious belief while using it to support another is that the arguments against the one as often as not apply equally to the other. This is the problem which current besets those who have sought to reconcile evolution with judea-christian creationism and it often astonishes me just how foolish some very distinguished scientists make themselves when attempting to do so. Paine must have found it ironic that some of his more liberal christian critics, most notably bishop Richard Watson, a former professor of chemistry, were quite happy to laud his creationism but deplore his criticism of their cult. Watson, though, was not a biblical literalist and his ‘reply’ to Paine was harshly criticised by the author of many an evangelical pot-boiler, Hannah More, for actually having read The Age of Reason before replying to it. She pointed out to him that she had also replied to Paine but without having read the book she criticised. Just what Watson, a highly intelligent and sophisticated man, thought of this is not recorded. Watson had no dispute with Paine’s belief in the ‘The Word of God’ being ‘the creation we behold`.⁷ Though to Paine, theology was simply ‘the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning (his emphasis) God’.⁸ Theology apart, Watson approvingly refers to Paine’s view of nature as being ‘animated with proper sentiments of piety’ when speaking of the structure of the universe.⁹ 

Long before he went to the American colonies Paine had studied science, primarily astronomy, and, it would appear from hints he drops, what was to become known as geology, not that he uses this term, at classes in London taught by James Ferguson and Benjamin Martin.¹⁰ Martin was an astronomer, lens polisher, instrument maker, collector of geological specimens and an accomplished writer on scientific subjects, being editor and publisher of The General Magazine of Arts and Sciences. He was, in the words of the late Dr. R.G. Daniels, ‘a general compiler of information’.¹¹ A comparison between Paine’s The Pennsylvania Maga- zine and Martin’s General Magazine, suggests the former to have been greatly influenced by the latter’s general approach. James Ferguson was also an astronomer and instrument maker who kept a shop in the Strand where he sold globes and other scientific instruments. Paine records his acquisition of a pair of globes so it just might be that he purchased these from Ferguson.¹² Another individual Paine came into contact with was Dr.Bevis, presumably Dr John Bevis, a medical practitioner, accomplished astronomer and associate of Edward Halley of comet fame who also shared Martin’s interest in collecting geological specimens. He does not appear to have liked light reading for it is recorded that his favourite reading material was Newton’s Opticks.¹³ Paine, too, was a believer in Newtonian concepts which one supposes he picked up long before he met his London teachers, contact with whom would reinforce his Newtonianism. However, it was left to him to apply them to areas which their originator and most of his followers would have hesitated to enter. 

One of Paine’s earliest American essays, written under the name `Atlanticus’, is to be found in The Pennsylvania Magazine’s issue for February, 1775.¹⁴ This is largely geological in content, opening with a reference to the cabinet of fossils belonging to the Philadelphia Library Company. Paine’s use of the word ‘fossils’ can be a bit misleading to modern readers as in the 18th century no distinction was made between organic remains and non-organic geological material. In fact it was not until 1778, three years after Paine’s essay had been published, that JA.de Luc suggested the word geology be used to describe the study of earth history, and even then he was personally reluctant to employ it because nobody else did.¹⁵ According to Paine, the Philadelphia collection consisted of European specimens supplemented by examples of American earth, clay and sand, all with descriptive information and locations. He uses this information as an introduction to a discussion about the potential mineral wealth of the colonies as well as the effects of erosion and distortion of strata. He refers to the difficulties of determining what lies below the surface but being a practical person gives a description of an instrument, a form of boring tool, which could be employed to gain the information.¹⁶ 

In France, Paine met and became friends with C.F. Volney, who had written a book about his travels in Syria which contained much geological data as well as a suggestion on how to forecast the onset of earthquakes. Volney shared Paine’s radicalism, giving expression to his ideas in a book entitled, The Ruins, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires and the Laws of Nature, published in Paris the same year as the first part Rights of Man was published in London. In common with Paine’s book Volney’s essay was destined to be banned in Britain. 

Volney had another thing in common with Paine, he was attacked by Joseph Priestly. He had gone to the United States in 1795 to avoid political persecution in France, and on return to his native country he wrote one of the most important of the early works on American geology, a two volume study entitled Tableau du Climate et du sol des Etats d’Amerique… (Paris, 1803). An English translation was published in London in 1803 (the book was not banned as it was considered to be apolitical). A year later another translation was published in the United States. This contained many notes and observations by the translator, C.B.Brown, which are of great value in themselves.¹⁷ It was while in the United States that Volney found himself under attack from Priestley, ironically another refugee from political tyranny. Priestly hit out at Volney’s Ruins with a book he entitled, Observations on the Progress of Infidelity with Critical Remarks on the Writings of Some Modern Unbelievers and Parliament on the Ruins of M.de Volney. In it he stooped to personal abuse, describing Volney as ‘an ignorant man, and scarcely superior to a Chinese or a Hottentot’, comments of a racial character which do not reflect greatly to the credit of their author. Volney replied to Priestley’s intemperate outburst in a letter published in Philadelphia on March 2, 1797. Priestley’s attack on Volney is not one his biographers have been overly keen to draw attention to.

Another popular interest amongst the 18th century intelligentsia which one might expect Paine to have taken note of was antiquarian studies, hence it need occasion no surprise to find a reference to ancient Egypt in one of his works, Crisis Paper No.5, where he writes of the knowledge the ancient Egyptians possessed about embalming having been lost and hieroglyphics being untranslatable.¹⁸ He penned this comment during the War of Independence so perhaps he was then unaware that while mummies were being imported into Europe in large numbers it was not so much for display in cabinets of curiosities, though many ended up in these, but for grinding down into a drug called mumia vera aegyptiaca,¹⁹ which appears to have been looked upon as a sort of glorified cure-all. This seems to have been the extent of Paine’s interest in archaeology in general and ancient Egypt in particular. 

While Paine has nothing to say about drugs made from mummies he did attempt a contribution to medical science with an essay on yellow fever. This piece, written late in his life, was very well received by the medical profession in both Britain and the United States. Entitled, Of the Cause of the Yellow Fever; And the Means of Preventing it in Places not yet Effected with it, the short essay, which when it first appeared in London in 1806 escaped the blanket ban on Paine’s works and went through several editions. Despite its title it does not actually identify the cause, which had to wait until 1887 when it was found to be transmitted by infected mosquitoes. However, Paine correctly hit upon how the disease had arrived in America even if the actual carrier remained a mystery, for he suggested it had been carried in cargo on ships from the West Indies. Moreover, Paine’s suggestion that increasing the flow of water to clear stagnant bodies of water, in which, unknown to him, the mosquitoes bred, would have dramatically reduced the incidence of the disease, as R.G.Daniels, a doctor, noted.²⁰ He points out that some of Paine’s ideas were similar, if not identical, to those of Sir Patrick Manson, an authority on yellow fever, as expressed in his famous textbook on tropical diseases. 

Paine’s outstanding contribution to science, or, perhaps more accurately, to civil engineering, was his determined promotion of the use of iron in the construction of bridges. Several of his biographers have claimed England’s second iron bridge, erected over the River Wear at Monkswearmouth, to have been based on Paine’s design, but, as S.T.Miller clearly established in his paper on it,²¹ this is not the case, for the method of its construction was to utilise the iron as building blocks, a method which was neither advanced or innovative. Paine’s ideas in contrast have been described as ‘the prototype of the modern steel arch’, by Charles Sneider in his presidential address to the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1905.²²

Paine’s tendency to emphasise the practical aspects of science is well illustrated by his bridge proposals. It is also shown in a letter he wrote to Thomas Jefferson on June 25, 1801. In this he proposed gunpowder as a means to drive an engine. Fortunately Paine does not appear to have attempted to put his speculations on this into practice. He had proposed this idea as he believed that steam engines were too heavy to be used as a form of transport but recognised the need for such a vehicle. Paine was wrong about the potential development of steam engines, but he probably had in mind the great beam engines then used in mines.²³ 

Another idea Paine came up with was considered later to be a practical proposition and went into production. This was his invention of what he claimed to be a smokeless candle, about which he wrote enthusiastically to Benjamin Franklin, who had been a candle maker, and so, Paine presumably thought, better able to recognise the value of his invention. In his biography of Paine, D.F. Hawke wrongly refers to the invention as having exited no commercial interest.²⁴ But he is wrong, for Paine’s smokeless candles were manufactured and sold throughout both Britain and the United States. The late Joseph Lewis possessed examples complete with a label which mentioned Paine as the inventor he had purchased in New York. The late Ernest Smedley of Hucknall, Nottinghamshire, still owned packets of ‘Thomas Paine’s Smokeless Candles’ which he had sold as an out-of-work miner from a marker stall in the 1920s. Whether the candles lived up to Paine’s claims, though, is another matter. According to his design the smoke was supposed to be carried downwards by holes in them to emerge at the base, but when W.E. Woodward had some made to Paine’s specifications he discovered they performed no better than normal candles.²⁵

Astronomy appears to have been of considerable interest to Paine, as readers of his works will be aware. But there is reason to feel his active interest diminished during the Rights of Man controversy for he fails to take note of important discoveries about which he could have commented, particularly as one, a means of more accurately determining the distances he could have used in 1772. He is also silent about William Herschell’s discovery of Uranus in 1781.²⁶ Although he possessed two globes there is no evidence for Paine having owned that most essential of astronomical instruments, a telescope. Paine’s interest in astronomy, then, would seem to have evolved basically into a theoretical approach which was more concerned with the theological and philosophical implications inherent in the subject than an interest in astronomy for its own sake. Of course it could be that when he attended science lectures in either 1767, as Conway claims, or 1757 as Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman, a close personal friend of Paine from his Lewes days, maintained, but which Daniels in his study of Paine’s astronomy leaves open, showing there to be grounds for both dates being acceptable,²⁷ he might have acquired a telescope but omitted to mention the fact. Daniels, though, feels Paine did not have had the money necessary to buy such an instrument. Paine subscribed to the notion of there being many inhabited worlds, this belief was not original to him and he may have first picked it up from reading Emmanuel Swedenborg, however, he was certainly one of the first to argue that scientists had been persecuted because of christianity, writing that had `Newton or Descartes lived three or four hundred years ago and pursued their studies as they did, it is most probable they would not have lived to finish them; and had Franklin drawn lightning from the clouds at the same time, it would have been at the hazard of expiring for it in the flames’.²⁸ Protestant divines had condemned the Roman Catholic sect for persecuting scientists such as Galileo, but they did so from their standpoint of Roman Catholicism being a form of paganism not christianity. Paine did not make the distinction between the two traditions. 

One wonders what Paine would have made of the theory of evolution. He offers no hints of having come across the idea, even though Erasmus Darwin’s controversial poetic work, Zoonomia, with its clear evolutionary message was published in 1794 and had been widely circulated. It may be that presented with the arguments for evolution Paine would have modified or even abandoned his creationism, as Ken Gregg suggests might be the case.²⁹ 

In essence Thomas Paine is perhaps best described in so far as science is concerned as an inspired dabbler, except where his ideas on the use of iron for bridges is concerned. Here he has established himself to have been an outstanding pioneer who clearly appreciated its potentialities. He told his readers that the natural bent of his mind was towards science, but despite this his work took him in other directions. Be this as it may, there is no dispute about science having influenced Paine’s political and religious thinking. One cannot help wondering to what extent Paine would have made a name for himself as a scientist, or scientific writer, had he remained in the new United States rather than returning to Europe after the War of Independence to become involved in further revolutionary politics.

References  

1. Williamson, Audrey. Thomas Paine, His Life, Work and Times. London, 1973.  p.62, while John Keane credits the introduction to James Ferguson (Tom Paine, A  Political Life. Bloomsbury, London, 1995. p.61). Probably both men were involved.  

2. Paine, T. The Age of Reason. in The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine.  Ed. P.S. Foner. Secaucus, 1974. p.500. Hereafter, Paine, Foner edn., which  contains Paine’s major works.  

3. Williamson. ibid. p.63.  

4. Paine, Foner edn. p.496.  

5. For a discussion see G.Hindmarch’s paper, ‘Thomas Paine: The Methodist. 23  Influence’. TPS Bulletin. 6.3.1979. pp.59-78.  

6. Paine refers to himself as a christian in Crisis Paper No.7.  

7. Paine, Foner edn. p.482.  

8. Ibid. p.487.  

9. Watson, R. Two Apologies, One for Christianity…Addressed to Edward Gibbon,  The Other for The Bible in Answer to Thomas Paine. London, 1818. p.379.  

10. Paine, Foner edn. p.946.  

11. Daniels, R.G. ‘Thomas Paine’s Astronomy. TPS Bulletin. 1975. 2.5.pp.29-31.  

12. Paine, Foner edn. p.496.  

13. Daniels. op.cit.  

14. It is reprinted in Moncure Conway’s edition of The Writings of Thomas Paine,  1774-1779. Putnam, 1894. pp.20-25  

15. Edwards, W.N. The Early History of Palaeontology. London, 1967. p.40.  

16. Conway omits the description in his reprint of the essay.  

17. This was republished in New York by Hafner in 1964.  

18. Paine. Foner edn. p.108.  

19. Germer, R. The Secrets of Mummies’. Minerva. 8.1.1997. pp.53-55.  20. Daniels, R.G. ‘Thomas Paine on Yellow Fever’. TPS Bulletin. 1971.2.4.  

21. Miller, S.T. ‘The Second Iron Bridge’. TPS Bulletin. 1996. 2.3.  

22. Williamson. op.cit. p.106.  

23. Conway, M.C. Ed. The Writings of Thomas Paine. Vol.4. pp.438-439. London,  1896.  

24. Hawke, D.F. Paine. NY., 1974. p.163.  

25. Woodward, W.E. America’s Godfather. London, 1945. p.157.  

26. Daniels, R.G. ‘Thomas Paine’s Astronomy’. TPS Bulletin. 2.5.1975.  

27. Daniels. ibid. p.31.  

28. Paine. Foner edn. p.494.  

29. Gregg, K. ‘Thomas Paine and the Rise of Atheism’. The American Rationalist.  31.5.1987.  

The post Thomas Paine’s Interest In Matters Scientific appeared first on .

The rapidly growing importance of the town of Sunderland, by the end of the 18th.  century, is reflected above all in the coal export figures recorded in the Order Books of  the River Wear Commission. The decade 1749-1758 saw the export via the Wear of  1,500,000 chaldrons {Newcastle chaldrons), but by the decade 1789-1798 this total had  risen to 2,900,000 chaldrons, i.e. doubling.  

However, the further development of the town was hampered by the absence of a  bridge across the river at that point. Sunderland was, in fact, divided into the `barary  coast’ of Monkwearmouth on the northern side and Bishopwearmouth and Sunderland  on the southern side. It is more usual in the late 18th century to talk of ‘Sunderland and  the Wearmouths’. The river could only be crossed by ferries (there were two ferries, the  Panns ferry and the very ancient Sunderland ferry which did not end till 1957, and whose  establishment may have been coeval with that of the celebrated Monastery of  Monkwearmouth. It may well be that the only serious mishap ever recorded as befalling  the Sunderland ferry may have added impetus to the drive towards a bridge, for in the  late 18th century, on a Sunday evening, the ferry overturned in mid-stream and twenty-two  people were drowned) and fords higher up the river and the medieval Chester bridge.  Nor was there a decent through road to Newcastle – Sunderland was unkindly regarded as  being on ‘the road to no place’.  

The problem was obvious enough as were the advantages to be gained by local  business from a bridge. In 1790 a committee had been set up to look at the problem of  the local ferry and arrived at the conclusion that a stone bridge should be set up. Yet this  could be no solution since it would require supporting piers, and this would obstruct the  considerable river traffic in coal which underpinned the prosperity of the town.  

An answer to this was offered by Rowland Burdon. Born in 1756, he was the tenth in  descent from Thomas Burdon of Stockton who had flourished in the reign of Edward IV. 

His father prospered as a member of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of Newcastle  and purchased the manor of Castle Eden. Rowland junior succeeded his father in 1786  and was also returned as member of Parliament for the County in 1790 in an election  fought against Sir John Eden and Ralph Milbanke (the father of Lady Byron). Indeed he  represented the County as a moderate Tory in three successive Parliaments between 1790  and 1806 and only retired in the latter years owing to ‘circumstances over which he could  exercise no control’ which made him ‘the victim of misplaced confidence’ (in fact all his  assets were lost in the crash of the bank of Messrs. Surtees and Co. which came in 1803).  But Burdon was no `mere country gentleman’. As well as being an accomplished scholar  and modern linguist he had also studied architecture under Sir John Soane. He was also  directly concerned in the problem of bridging the river because this would continue his  Stockton-Sunderland Turnpike and an extension to Newcastle and South Shields would  follow. In general there is every reason to believe that he was a leading figure in local  commercial circles (`He did not cut a shining figure as an orator, but as a practical man of  business he stood second to none, and as a commercial man he was known and respected  by the wealthier merchants of Tyne, Wear and Tees…’).  

Burdon proposed that an iron bridge should be constructed in a single span, and his  proposal was accepted. The foundation stone was laid on the north side on September 24,  1793 (an inscription on the foundation stone began: ‘At the time when the mad  impetuosity of the French nation eager for what was wrong disturbed the nations of  Europe with iron war, Rowland Burdon Esq., desirous of better things, determined to join  together with an iron bridge the rocky and steep banks of the Wear…’ The work was also  dedicated with the motto Nil Desperandum Auspice Deo, and it is recorded that many years  after the completion of the bridge a non-latinist clergyman was asked to explain it, and  knowing the Paine claim to the design, confidently translated it as, ‘This desperate job was  the work of a Deist’!) and Thomas Wilson Can ingenious native’) was appointed to  construct it. ‘It was opened for the accommodation of the public’ on August 9, 1796, by  Prince William of Gloucester escorted by a procession of local masons (as a precaution,  1000 locally stationed soldiers marched across it first), the `splendid shew…afforded the  highest gratification to… 50000 persons. ‘The `brass’ then retired to the Phoenix Lodge to regale themselves with an excellent cold collation’ while ‘apposite toasts were drunk,  several excellent songs were sung and the day was concluded with true hilarity and  genuine mirth’.  

The occasion was marked by the usual flurry of broadsheets and ballads, of which one  may be singled out for its topicality if nothing else:  

Ye sons of Sunderland with shouts

That rival ocean War,

Hail Burdon and his Iron Boots

Who strides from shore to shore.

Oh may he firm support each leg

Oh much, oh much, we fear

Poor Rowland may outstretch himself

In striding across the Wear.

A Patent quickly issue on

Lost some more bold than he

Should put on larger Iron Boots

And stride across the sea.

And let us pray for speedy peace

Least Frenchmen may come over

And following Burdon’s iron plan

From Calis to strike to Dover.

The bridge consisted of six ribs of 5ft distance apart. There was a superstructure of  planking to provide the base for a McAdam type road. The whole width was 32ft with a  paved footpath on each side, an iron palisade and lamp posts at intervals. The bridge  weighed 900 tons (the first Iron Bridge weighed only 378 tons) of which 260 tons were  iron (only 46 tons of which was wrought). The span was 236ft (an immense advance on  the 100ft of the first Iron Bridge) and it was a segment of a circle about 440ft in diameter.  The whole thing cost £32,414. 19s. 7d., of which Burdon subscribed £30,000 (the first Iron  Bridge cost a mere £6.000). The expense of the bridge was broken down for 1792-7 in a parliamentary return at  the time by Mr. Warn, MP.

The bridge was the subject of considerable praise at the time because of the novelty of  its method of construction, its elegance and its scale (indeed it would seem that it was the  biggest single arch bridge of its day). In 1818, Sir. Brunel, in a report to the bridge  Commission, said, ‘At the first sight of this extraordinary fabric I could not withhold the  tribute of praise which the projectors and promoters of the scheme are so justly entitled  to, for the boldness of the designs, for the magnitude of the enterprise, considering the  time it was suggested’.  

Sir Robert Stephenson described it as ‘a noble and splendid structure which has no  parallel in this or any other country’.  

A complication must now be introduced to a hitherto straight forward story. In 1785,  Thomas Paine had designed an iron bridge to span the Schwylkill river near Philadelphia  without piers because ‘The vast quantities of Ice and melted snow at the breaking up of  the frost in that part of America render it unpractical to erect a Bridge on Piers’. He  intended the bridge to be of 520 tons of iron ‘….to be distributed into thirteen Ribs, in commemoration of the thirteen United States, each Rib to contain forty tons…’

In June 1786 he sent Benjamin Franklin a model bridge made of cast iron bars and produced later an elaborate model that would bear the weight of three men. The State Authorities of Pennsylvania, however, were not interested, nor were the French forthcoming with any practical support, Paine having submitted his scheme to the French Academy of Science in 1787. He also sent a copy of his plan to Sir Joseph Banks at the same time for it to be shown to the Royal Society. 

In 1788 Paine patented his design in London (Specification of Patents No.1667) and decided to go ahead with production himself. He had, in fact, to be satisfied with a sample rib of 88ft (moderating his ambition with ‘a little common sense’) by the brothers Walker of Rotherham (the very same firm which had manufactured Burdon’s bridge). He tested this section for both strain (it withstood a weight of 6 tons of pig iron – twice its own weight) and for the stresses of changes of temperature. In pieces it was as portable as bars of iron, and when it was dismantled was ‘stowed away in a corner of a workshop where it occupied so small a compass as to be hid away among the shavings’.

In June 1789 Paine prevailed on the Walkers to produce a bridge of 110ft span with five ribs to be erected across the Thames, then sold. By May 1790 the parts were cast and shipped, however, Paine’s backer, the American Peter Whiteside, went bankrupt and the bridge was constructed as an exhibition work on Leasing Green, Paddington, with a shilling per head charge to view it. Paine recorded in a letter to Sir George Stainton ‘that it is so much visited and exceedingly admired by the ladies, who, tho’ they may not be so acquainted with mathematical principles are certainly Judges of Taste!’ 

In Britain the reaction to his inflammatory rejoinders to Burke’s Reflection; and the attractions of France, led to Paine’s flight and the bridge was left in the hands of his creditors. 

The two tales now become extricated. According to M.M.Rix, who follows the normal line of development, Rowland Burdon knowing that they ‘were going begging purchased the posts of Paine’s bridge and in 1793 set about adapting them to their new site’. The argument in favour of Paine was continued recently by Tom Corfe, the latest historian of Sunderland (‘they made use of plans…devised by the famous radical Thomas Paine…’), and a recent biographer of Paine, Audrey Williamson, who states, ‘…the materials of Paine’s bridge and most of its principles were used to erect a bridge over the River Wear near Sunderland’. No one has ever argued that Paine came to Sunderland and constructed a bridge, but it is usually claimed that he designed the bridge, or at least his design and the pieces of his bridge were pirated by Rowland Burdon. These claims, however, were opposed, especially by Burdon’s son. In the 19th century and to this day there is a strong tradition in Sunderland that Burton was the victim, that he designed and constructed the bridge and that the credit was stolen by Paine, or stolen for him. 

It does not appear that the evidence for either of these claims has ever been seriously examined. This evidence can be usefully examined in three parts. There is largely hearsay evidence of observers, and there is the evidence of the initial specification of patents. 

Indeed there was considerable contemporary belief that Burdon was the designer as well as the constructor. The Encyclopedia Britannica Supplement of 1803 concluded its entry under ‘Arch’ by commenting on the Wearmouth Bridge, ‘The inventor and architect is Rowland Burdon Esq., one of the representatives of that county in the present Parliament’. Thomas Rowdier, in a paper read before the Royal Society in 1797 remarked:

`Iron bridges have indeed been built in Coalbrookdale and in other places, but they were on the system of wooden arches rather than of stone. A plan for an iron bridge on a new principle was also invented by Mr.Thomas Paine, and exhibited some time ago near Paddington, but any person who examines that plan will perceive that it differs very essentially from the arch at. Wearmouth…’ 

A Minute of the Proceedings of the Commissioners of the Bridge expressed thanks to Burdon, ‘…for his liberality to the public in constructing the bridge upon principles for which he, as inventor, has a patent, without accepting any pecuniary consideration for the patent right’. 

The Gentleman’ s Magazine in 1796 felt that, ‘…it is proper that the public should be informed that R.Burdon Esq., is not only the inventor of the principle on which the bridge was erected, but the patron by whose munificence it has been chiefly carried into execution’. 

Finally, Surtees in his History of Durham says that ‘the use of iron had already been introduced in the construction of the arch at Coalbrookdale, and in the bridges built by Paine, but the novelty and advantage of the plan adopted at Wearmouth on Mr.Burdon’s suggestion consisted in, etc.’ 

Then gradually the name of Paine replaces that of Burdon (although Audrey Williamson points out that as early as 1812 Professor Charles Hutton in his History of Iron Bridges praises Paine’s work). At first the claim is that the material used were those of Paine’s bridge, but by 1858 the Quarterly Review had dropped Burdon’s name out altogether (indeed the Review not only attributes the bridge to Paine, it also attributes it to him in terms of Burdon’s patent speaking of ‘framed iron panels radiating towards the centre in the form of voissoirs’. Other commentators, including Rix, not only give Paine the credit but also go on to describe the bridge using the detailed figures attached to Burdon’s patent, thus implying either that Burdon’s patent was ‘lifted’ from Paine, or, more likely, an ignorance of Burdon’s patent. A small work published by the SPCK on bridges which had also given the credit to Paine was especially irritating to Burdon’s son, `This I regard as the unkindest cut of all. That my father who was an excellent Churchman, should be thus treated by that venerable society, while Paine the infidel, is promoted to the place of honour, is at any rate to the credit of their liberality, so often called in question, though it may be somewhat at the expense of their accuracy of statement…’ 

This process was probably helped, as Burdon’s son claimed, by the fact that after the loss of his fortune Burdon resigned himself thence forth quietly to that retirement which his straightened means had forced upon him. No wonder the public heard little of him afterwards’, and because ‘he was a country gentleman `and that therefore there is great antecedent improbability that one of that class should have hit upon anything remarkable… To escape this difficulty the invention has been tried first on Wilson, then on Grimshaw, the only other parties concerned in the building of the bridge, and, these failing, it has finally been fitted upon Tom Paine. Wilson had been a school master, Paine a staymaker – my father, unfortunately was a country gentleman’. 

This sort of evidence cannot be conclusive because we have no way of knowing on what information these judgements are based. 

Further `circumstantial evidence’ that has been adduced against Paine is that he was not the sort of man who would quietly have submitted to the stealing and exploitation of his own design. Miss Williamson does point out, reasonably, that during the building of the bridge Paine was in the Luxembourg Prison and in no position to be acquainted with  events in Sunderland. On the other hand, Sir Robert Smyth, a banker living in France  and Paine’s friend, did challenge, at the time, the right of Paine to claim compensation,  but although Paine returned to America in 1802 he never pressed his claim.  

It could also be argued, circumstantially, that the Patents Office, even in the  eighteenth century, was unlikely to allow patents for two bridge designs which were  substantially the same.  

Both Paine and Burdon took out patents, the former in 1788 (No.1667), the latter in  1795 (No.2066). Obviously the problem should, in theory, be resolved on examination of  the specifications and, indeed, despite the availability of a number of ‘red herrings’ and  problems of interpretation, this is decisive.  

Burdon’s specifications are very precise. The title itself is a good indication of the  method, Application of Metal Blocks to the Construction of Arches He describes the method of  construction clearly:  

‘…my invention consists in applying iron or other metallic compositions to the  purpose of constructing arches, upon the same principle as stone is now employed,  by a subdivision into blocks easily portable, answering to the keystones of a  common arch, which being brought to bear on each other, gives all the firmness  of the solid stone arch, whilst by the great varieties in the blocks and their  respective distances in their lateral position, the arch becomes infinitely lighter  than that of stone, and, by the the tenacity of the metal, the parts are so intimately  connected that the accurate calculation of the extrados and intrados, so necessary  in stone circles of magnitude is rendered of much less consequence.’  

The cast iron blocks (known in engineering terminology as ‘voussoirs’) were to be of  5ft depth, 4 inch thickness, with a middle arm of 2ft length, and the top and bottom arms  in such proportion as to make each block a segment of a circle. These blocks would then  be fixed by means of malleable iron tie rods to form ribs (in the Sunderland bridge each  rib included 105 blocks). The ribs would be joined and supported laterally by hollow tubes  six feet in length and four inches in diameter.  

Paine’s specification for Constructing Arches, Vaulted Roofs and Ceilings are, on the other  hand, confused to some extent by analogies he uses. ‘The idea and construction of this  arch is taken from the figure of a spiders circular web of which it resembles in section and  from a conviction that when nature empowered this insect to make a web she also  instructed her in the strongest mechanical method of constructing it… Another idea,  taken from nature in the construction of this arch, is that of increasing the strength of  matter by dividing and constructing it and thereby causing it to act over a larger space  than it would occupy in a solid state, as seen in the quills of birds, bones of animals, reeds,  cones…’  

Burdon’s son comments wryly that this language could embrace not only Burdon’s  bridge but also the catenay of the suspension bridge (spiders web) and tubular bridges  (quills of birds, etc.), ‘Yet we presume Mr.Stephenson will not feel much uneasiness lest in  succeeding generations the bridge over the Menai or St. Lawrence be attributed to the  genius of Tom Paine, whilst his own name is struck out of the roll of inventors and  consigned to oblivion (Robert Stephenson did, according to Burdon’s son, write a letter to  Burdon’s brother stating that the two patents were clearly different).  

However, it is clear from further reading that Paine’s concept was different, since he  goes on to say: 

`The curved bars of the arch are composed of pieces of any length joined together  to the whole extent of the arch and take curvature by bending. Those curves, to  any number, height or thickness as the extent of the arch may require, are raised  concentrically one above another and separated, when the extent of the arch  required it, by the imposition of blocks, tubes and pins, and the whole bottled  close and fast together (the direction of the radius is best) through the whole  thickness of the arch, the bolts being made fast by a head pin or screw at each end  of them. This connection forms one arched rib, and the number of ribs to be used  in proportion to the breadth and extent if the arch and those separate ribs are  also combined and braced together by bars passing across all the ribs and made  fast thereto above and below, and as often and wherever the arch, from its extent,  depth and breadth, requires’.  

Further information as to the design is given by Paine in a letter to Sir George  Stanton:  

We soon run up a Centre to turn the arch upon, and begin our erection… The  raising an arch of this construction is different to the method of raising a stone arch. In a  stone arch they begin at the bottom and work upwards meeting at the crown. In this we  begin at the crown by a line perpendicular thereto and worked downward each  way. It differs likewise in another aspect. A stone arch is raised by sections of the Curve,  each stone being so, and this by concentric curves.  

In fact Paine’s project was more appreciative of the potentialities of iron than either  the Coalbrookdale Iron Bridge, based as it was on principles of wood construction, or  Burdon’s bridge, which, it was agreed by all observers, was based on the principles of  stone construction.  

It should be obvious from the above that what Paine was projecting was a modern  girder type bridge, based on the Bailey bridge or `meccano’ lines (otherwise it is difficult  to see how it was so portable). So modern that Charles Schneider said, in his 1905  Presidential Address to the American Society of Civil Engineers, that ‘Paine’s experimen tal bridge became the prototype of the modern steel bridge’.  

It may be of course that Burdon did make use of the materials from Paine’s bridge.  

There is no evidence for this but it was not at all unusual that Burdon should go to the  Walkers since he could easily have been aware of their experience, and it was equally  possible that Paine’s materials should be worked upon with others. However, there the  connection would end – the concepts were different, the spans different, and Paine’s  design would require malleable iron rather than cast iron.  

The obvious conclusion is, then, that Paine did not design the bridge at Sunderland,  that Burdon did not use Paine’s design and that not even did Paine and Burdon work on  the same design at once. Any connection between Paine’s experiments with Burdon’s feat  of engineering was purely coincidental.  

The failure to recognise the contribution of Burdon to the development of Sunderland and the North-East and the expansion of the application of iron, apart from  the production of a beautiful bridge, is made worse in a way by the fact that Burdon’s sole excursions from his enforced retirement after 1803 were directed towards the freeing of  the bridge from tolls which were maintained by those who had acquired his interest in a  lottery held in October 1816 in order to reimburse themselves. On December 27. 1836, he  wrote to the Sunderland Herald ‘The object yet remains to be obtained from seeing the  Monkwearmouth Bridge toll free if the Commissioners will be pleased to look steadily at  the object and by raising money at a lower rate of interest or such other means as may occur to them would endeavour to discharge the claims of those who have by lottery obtained an infamous power over the tolls, it would give me more substantial satisfaction than my memorial that could be raised by means which the public would have the right to consider a misapplication of their funds’. 

He died in 1838, aged 82. Not until 1846 was the toll on foot passengers discontinued and other tolls reduced by 50 per cent. It was announced that a profit of £79,666 had been obtained from the bridge since its opening in 1796, although Burdon’s original concern was not, apparently, with profit. Not until 1885 was the bridge freed from toll completely. By then it had been remodelled by Sir Robert Stephenson (although he used the same ribs) in 1859. In 1929 this structure was replaced by a modern ‘near perfect replica of Newcastle bridge’ and Sunderland lost one of its unique features forever.

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Image above is the front page of the September 9, 1788 letter from Library of Congress

THOMAS PAINE was a pioneer in the use of iron for bridge building. Thomas Jefferson shared his interest and both corresponded on the subject. From a letter from Paine to Jefferson, from London, September 9, 1788: 

The model has the good fortune of pressing in England the reputation which it received from the Academy of Sciences (Paris). It is a favourite hobby horse with all who have seen it, and everyone who has talked with me on the subject advised me to endeavour to obtain a Patient, as it is only by that means that I can secure to myself the direction and management. This is the only step I took in the business. 

Last Wednesday I received a Patent for England, the next day a Patent for Scotland, and I am to have one for Ireland. As I had already the opinion of the scientific judges both in France and England on the model, it was also necessary that I should have that of practical Iron men who must finally be the executors of the work. There are several capital Iron works in this country, the principal of which are those in Shropshire, Yorkshire, and Scotland. The Iron works in Yorkshire belonging to the Walkers near to Sheffield are the most eminent in England in the point of establishment and property. The proprietors are reputed to be worth two hundred thousand pounds and consequently capable of giving energy to any great undertaking. 

A friend of theirs who had seen the model wrote to them on the subject, the two of them came from London last Friday to see it and talk with me on the business. Their opinion is very decided that it can be expected either in wrought or cast Iron, and I am to go down to their works next week to erect an experimental arch. This is the point I am now got to, and until now I had nothing to inform you of. 

If arches can be extended in the proportion the model promises, the construction in certain situations, without regard to cheapness or dearness, will be valuable in all countries. 

Paine replies to a letter from Jefferson on February 16, 1789: 

My intention at the time of writing to you was to construct an experimental arch of 250 feet, but in the first place, the season was too far advanced to work out of doors and an arch of that extent could not be worked within doors, and nextly, there was a prospect of a real Bridge being wanted on the spot 90 feet extent. The person who appeared disposed to erect a bridge is Mr.Foljambe nephew to the late Sir George Saville, and a member of the late Parliament for Yorkshire. He lives about three miles from the works, and the River Don runs in front of his house, over which there is an old ill constructed bridge which he wants to remove. These circumstances determined me to begin an arch 90 feet with an elevation of 5 feet. This extent I could manage within doors by working half the arch at a time. A great part of our time, as you will naturally suppose, was taken up in preparations, but after we began to work we went on rapidly, and that without any mistake, or anything to alter or amend. The foreman of the works is a relation of the proprietors, and excellent mechanic, and who fell into all my ideas with great ease and penetration. I attended at the works till one half the rib, 45 feet, was completed and framed horizontally together and came up to London at the meeting of Parliament on the 4th of December. 

In point of elegance and beauty it far exceeded my expectations and is certainly beyond anything I ever saw. My model and myself had may visitors while I was at the works. This bridge I expect will bring forth something greater, but in the meantime I feel like a bird from it’s nest and wishing most anxiously to return. Therefore, as soon as I can bring anything to bear, I shall dispose of the contract and bid adieu. I can very truly say that my mind is not at home. 

July 13, 1789 letter to Jefferson discussing costs and constructional matters and asking a favour. 

I am to undertake all expense from that time and to complete the expecting. We intend first to exhibit it and afterwards put it up to sale, or dispose of it by private contract, and after paying the expenses of each party the remainder to be equally divided, one half theirs, the other mine. My principle object in this plan is to open the way for a bridge over the Thames. 

I shall now have occasion to draw upon some funds I have in America. I have one thousand dollars stock in the bank at Philadelphia, and two years interest due on it last April. £180 in the hands of General Morris, £40 with Mr.Constable of New York, a house at Bordentown,’ and a farm in New Rochelle. The stock and interest in the bank which Mr.Willing manages for me is the easiest negotiated. I shall be very glad if you can manage this matter for me, by giving credit for two hundred pounds on London, and receiving that amount of Mr.Willing. I am not acquainted with the method of negotiating money matters, but if you can accommodate me in this, and will direct me how the transfer is to be made, I shall be much obliged to you. Please direct to me under cover to Mr.Trumbull. I have some thoughts of coming over to France for two or three weeks, as I shall have little to do here until the bridge is ready for erecting. 

On September 15, 1789, Paine expresses his gratitude to Jefferson: 

When I left Paris I was to return with the model, but I could now bring over a complete Bridge. Though I have a slender opinion of myself for executive business, I think, upon the whole that I have managed this matter tolerably well. With no money to spare for such an undertaking I am sole patentee here, and connected with one of the first and best established houses in the nation. But absent from America, I feel a craving desire to return and I can scarcely forbear weeping at the thoughts of you going and my staying behind. Accept, my dear Sir, my most heartily thanks for your many services and friendship. Remember me with an overflowing affection to my dear America, the people and the place.

I shall be very glad to hear from you when you arrive. 

I remain yours affectionately, 

– THOMAS PAINE

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