By Terry Liddle
Thomas Paine His Life, His Time and The Birth of Modem Nations. Craig Nelson. 398pp, Profile Books, London, 2007, hardback, illustrated, ISBN 1 86197 638 0. £20
Why, one wonders, has Craig Nelson moved from writing travel books and an account of a wartime American bombing raid on Japan to a biography to a biography of Thomas Paine. It’s not as if there is a shortage of such works, indeed the bibliography lists several from the pioneering writings of Rickman, Cobbett and Conway to more recent books by Aldridge, Ayer and Keane. Nelson’s book adds nothing new to our knowledge of Paine’s life and work but it does contain a massive amount of information and opinion about the Enlightenment era. It is not bedside reading but if you have plenty of time it fully rewards the effort of reading it.
Some of the facts that Nelson records are inspiring such as American militia charging into battle shouting the famous lines from Common Sense: ‘These are the times that try means’ souls”. Nearly two centuries after it was penned, American veteran opponents of the Vietnam War would call themselves winter soldiers, another quotation from Paine. Paine’s efforts as a propagandist for American independence far outweighed his efforts as an infantryman.
Other facts are of little interest to political historians, although found the presentation of a chamber pot by Louis XVI to the duchesse Polignac de Sevres illustrated with an engraving of Franklin, who described Paine as his adopted political son and the circulation of pornographic drawings of Marie Antoinette rather amusing.
Nelson records Paine’s bitter opposition to slavery. Paine wrote in African Slavery in America: “Our traders in men…must know the wickedness of the slave trade, if they attend to reasoning or the dictates of their own hearts…” Five weeks after its publication the first abolitionist organisation in America, the Pennsylvania Society for the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was formed. What humbug is displayed by the British ruling class, Elizabeth Windsor presiding at a ceremony to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade when the British aristocracy and the Anglican Church made a vast fortune out of it, the slaves of the Anglicans were branded with the word “society”. Paine would have supported the Africans such as Nanny of the Maroons (now a national heroine in Jamaica) who revolted against slavery. Slavery was abolished in Pennsylvania in 1780 but millions remained in bondage in the other states.
Nelson sees Paine very much as a product of the 18th century enlightenment and he contrasts the plebian coffee houses and taverns of America with the aristocratic salons of pre-Revolutionary France. The revolutions of the enlightenment raised an important question which still remains unanswered. Is it inevitable that revolutions aimed at liberating humanity and building a better world always end with the enslavement of the people by new and worse tyrannies? The American and Russian revolutions created so much hope only to end with the rule of corrupt plutocratic oligarchies.
Paine took a positive view of Native Americans and while secretary to the United States Council of Safety negotiated new treaties with Iroquois leader Last Night. Paine thought that the English government had but half the sense this Indian had. The Iroquois confederation of six tribes was governed by the Great Law of Peace. Many of its ideas would later be found in the American Constitution. By the end of the 19th century the Native Americans had been the victims of legalised robbery and genocide, an impoverished remnant living as second class citizens in their own land.
Paine was a scientist as well as a revolutionary and Nelson relates how he and Washington experimented with igniting gas bubbles stirred up from the bottom of a muddy river. He tells us that Joseph Priestley, who fled to America to escape the Church and King mob, invented seltzer by capturing the gas released by a Leeds brewery.
Nelson devotes an entire chapter to The Age of Reason which Paine wrote while imprisoned as a victim of the Terror during the French Revolution and which led to his denunciation as a “dirty little atheist”. Paine made it clear that he believed in one God and hoped for happiness beyond this life. He did not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish, Roman or any other church. Like many advanced Frenchmen and Americans Paine was a deist. While Paine’s religion of doing good was better than that of the established Protestant and Catholic churches as an atheist I find belief in any God irrational and unproven. However in an age of fundamentalist fanaticism and jihad suicide bombings The Age of Reason should be translated into Arabic and Urdu and widely circulated in the Islamic community. But I fear its publishers would suffer a worse fate than the Englishmen who were imprisoned in the 19th century for publishing it. In his later life Paine would become a regular contributor to The Prospect published by the blind Presbyterian turned deist Etihu Palmer.
Nelson is nothing if not an opinionated writer. He describes Rousseau as an “…expert on parenting who abandoned all of his children; the deist who proclaimed all other deists as infidels.” He describes Jane Austen as writing “a good skewering”. In my view her twee tales could be marketed as a cure for insomnia.
One subject Nelson doesn’t address is the influence of Freemasonry on the American Revolution. Paine was of too humble an origin to be a mason but Washington He was initiated into the Fredericksburg Lodge in 1752. The Masonic eye in the pyramid symbol appears on Federal Reserve notes. It was said that the execution of Louis Capot was revenge for the execution of the medieval Templar Jacques De Molay. Paine narrowly escaped execution himself, no thanks to his former close friend Washington.
Sadly Paine, largely rejected and even deprived of a vote by the America he had helped create, spent the last two years of his life as an invalid afflicted by bouts of fever and dropsy. He died on June 8, 1809. He was placed in a mahogany coffin and buried in New Rochelle having been refused a plot in New York’s Quaker cemetery. His tombstone proclaimed: ‘Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, died June 8 1809, aged 74 years.” A year later Cobbett and his son removed the remains to England. When the bankrupt Cobbett died in 1835 they became lost. Some of his writings suffered the same fate. A collection which came into the hands of Benjamin Bonneville was destroyed by fire.
But Paine’s ideas and influence lived on. Craft weavers in Leeds opposed to the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution
gathered in a Thomas Paine hall. Welsh radicals met in secret to read his books which they had hidden under rocks. In Sheffield God Save Great Thomas Paine was sung to the tune of the National Anthem. The Chartists lauded him, when his name appeared in George Hamey’s Red Republican it was printed in capitals. Secularists named their children for him. Paine birthday events were widely popular on both sides of the Atlantic.
In America was an influence on such various persons as the Feminist Susan B Taylor, the Socialist Eugene Debs and the reformist Democrat President Franklin Rossevelt. Abraham Lincoln, the father of the modern Republican Party, was converted to deism by reading The Age of Reason. He wrote a pamphlet extolling Paine’s views which his friends tossed into the stove. Even the bumbling third rate movie actor Ronald Reagan could quote Paine correctly although I suspect Paine would have been with the Black Panthers who led Californian students in chanting: “r** Ronald Reagan.”
Not one of the golden statues of Paine proposed by Napoleon has ever been constructed. When in the early 1960s a group of Americans commissioned a statue to be constructed by Charles Wheeler and erected in Thetford, local reactionaries opposed this. The chair of the women’s section of the British Legion exploded: “Tom Paine, the philanderer and an unmitigated scamp, is the last man Thetford should honour.” The Tory deputy mayor wanted an inscription about Paine’s conviction for treason be engraved on the base. Happily this move was defeated. Out of this incident the Thomas Paine Society was formed. It exists to this day to promote the legacy of Paine’s revolutionary democracy. But it always needs more active members.
This is a big book and will require considerable effort to read it. But the effort should prove worthwhile.