Thomas Paine and Masonry 

By Shai Afsai 

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was one of the most active and prolific radicals of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and perhaps “the first man to practice revolution as a sole reason for being.”¹ He wrote and fought for American independence from England, encouraged the abolition of slavery,² helped shape Pennsylvania’s constitution,³ advocated a restructuring of English government,⁴ argued for elimination of the death penalty,⁵ participated in France’s legislature,⁶ and “laid out the first design of a modern welfare state,”⁷ among other activities.⁸ While he lived, he directly influenced politics in America (perhaps even coining the name “United States”⁹), in England, and in France, and long after his death his writings have continued to be primary documents in the struggle for freedom and human rights worldwide.¹⁰ But what connection, if any, did the famous — and, at times, notorious — author of Common Sense, The Crisis, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason have with the Masonic Order? 

In Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, Professor Jack Fruchtman writes that there is insufficient evidence to answer the question with certainty: “It has long been questioned whether Paine was a member of the Masons. There is no definitive proof either way. There is no specific date known on which he joined nor a specific lodge to which he was attached.”¹¹ Nonetheless, it has been common to ascribe Masonic membership to Paine. This is seen in the tendency of some Grand Lodges, during the 1990s, to publish brochures that placed Paine on the roster of famous Masons.¹² One such example, “The Real Secret of Freemasonry,” an informational brochure put out by the Grand Lodge of Oregon, states: “The pantheon of Masons holds George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, among others.”¹³ Various Masonic Web-sites continue to make similar claims about Paine and Masonry, as well.”¹⁴

In The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions, Bernard Vincent devotes a chapter to “Thomas Paine, the Masonic Order, and the American Revolution,” and explains several aspects of the inclination to consider Paine a Mason: 

While working on my Tom Paine biography, I was intrigued from the outset by the fact that all of a sudden, within just a few weeks or months, and as if by magic, Paine leaped from his obscure humdrum existence in England—where he had worked as a corset-maker and Excise officer—onto the American literary and political stage, there to become, at the age of almost forty, one of the leading lights of the Revolutionary movement. 

How was it that a man who was little short of a failure in his native country became acquainted so rapidly with the most prominent figures in the Colonies, even becoming a friend of theirs in many cases? How can one account for the quickness of his ascent and the suddenness of his glory?

One way of accounting for this, one hypothesis (which has several times been made), is to consider that Paine became a Freemason and that, as such, he enjoyed, first in America, then in England and France, the kindly assistance of certain lodges or of certain individual Masons.¹⁵ 

Vincent rejects this hypothesis, however, due to a lack of corroborative evidence. It is certain that Washington and Franklin were Masons, for example, but there is no equivalent support for such a claim about Paine. 

Assertions of Paine’s Masonic membership also rest on the fact that between 1803 and 1805, after returning to America from England and France, he penned the essay “Origin of Free-Masonry.”¹⁶ For some, Paine’s curiosity about Freemasonry, and his decision to write about it, have been, in and of themselves, sufficient proof that he was a Mason. However, Vincent rejects this line of reasoning as well:

Paine’s interest in Freemasonry was such that toward the end of his life, in 1805, he wrote a lengthy piece entitled An Essay on the Origin of Freemasonry… But this does not prove, any more than any other detail or fact that we know of, that Paine was a Mason. There is indeed no formal trace of his initiation or membership in England, none in America, and none in France. Questioned about Paine’s membership…the United Grand Lodge of England had only this to answer: “In the absence of any record of his initiation, it must, therefore, be assumed he was not a member of the order.”¹⁷ 

Though not necessarily a Mason himself, Paine certainly had several close friends who were members of the Order. For example, while living in France, after fleeing England in order to escape charges of sedition, Paine resided at the home of Nicolas de Bonneville. Samuel Edwards describes Bonneville as lain active Freemason” who “was convinced that the principles and aims of Masonry, if applied to the world’s ailments, would bring peace and prosperity to all nations.”¹⁸ The bond between the two men was quite strong: “From 1797 until 1802, Paine lived with the Bonnevilles in Paris, and Marguerite, Nicolas’ wife, and their sons eventually followed Paine to America.”¹⁹ Fruchtman suggests that during Paine’s time in Paris, Bonneville introduced him to the philosophies of Freemasonry and Theophilanthropism.²⁰ 

William M. Van der Weyde, in The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, also mentions Paine’s Masonic associations, while at the same time emphasizing that these friendships are not evidence he belonged to the fraternity: “Paine was the author of an interesting and highly instructive treatise on the Origin of Freemasonry…but, although many of his circle of friends were undoubtedly members of that order, no conclusive proof has ever been adduced that Paine was a Mason.”²¹ Likewise, Moncure Daniel Conway proposes that “Paine’s intimacy in Paris with Nicolas de Bonneville and Charles Francoise Dupuis, whose writings are replete with masonic speculations, sufficiently explains his interest in the subject” of Freemasonry, even though he himself was probably not a Mason.²² 

Bonneville’s widow published Paine’s “Origin of Free- Masonry” in 1810, after his death, although she chose to omit certain passages in it that could be seen as disparaging to Christianity. Most of these were restored in a later printing, in 1818.²³ Paine’s central premise in “Origin of Free-Masonry” is that the Order “is derived and is the remains of the religion of the ancient Druids; who, like the Magi of Persia and the Priests of Heliopolis in Egypt, were Priests of the Sun.”²⁴ The idea that Masonry derived from the Druids did not begin with Paine, and has been advanced by others after him.²⁵ According to Paine, however, this Druid origin is the true and deepest secret of Masonry, from which extend all the ceremonies and concealment Masons engage in: 

The natural source of secrecy is fear. When any new religion over-runs a former religion, the professors of the new become the persecutors of the old… [Wjhen the Christian religion over-ran the religion of the Druids…the Druids became the subject of persecution. This would naturally and necessarily oblige such of them as remained attached to their original religion to meet in secret, and under the strongest injunctions of secrecy. Their safety depended upon it. A false brother might expose the lives of many of them to destruction; and from the remains of the religion of the Druids, thus preserved, arose the institution which, to avoid the name of Druid, took that of Mason, and practiced under this new name the rites and ceremonies of Druids.²⁶ Commenting on Paine’s “Essay on Freemasonry,” Masonic author Albert G. Mackey quips that Paine “knew, by the way, as little of Masonry as he did of the religion of the Druids.”²⁷ 

Indeed, it is evident from Paine’s essay that he was not very knowledgeable of Freemasonry — although that fact alone does not, of course, prove he was not a Mason when he wrote it. Paine’s general tone, however, shows him to be an outsider trying to assess what is in the Order, rather than a member of it, and that, more than anything else, indicates that he was not a Mason at the time he composed “Origin of Free- Masonry.” For example, after referring to certain statements about Masonry made by the Provincial Grand Master of Kent, Captain George Smith, in the latter’s The Use and Abuse of Free-Masonry (1783), Paine concludes: 

It sometimes happens, as well in writing as in conversation, that a person lets slip an expression that serves to unravel what he intends to conceal, and this is the case with Smith, for in the same chapter he says, “The Druids, when they committed any thing to writing, used the Greek alphabet, and I am bold to assert that the most perfect remains of the Druids’ rites and ceremonies are preserved in the customs and ceremonies of the Masons that are to be found existing among mankind.” “My brethren” says he, “may be able to trace them with greater exactness than I am at liberty to explain to the public.” 

This is a confession from • a Master Mason, without intending it to be so understood by the public, that Masonry is the remains of the religion of the Druids…²⁸ 

These are not the words of a man who is himself a Master Mason, but rather of one who is guessing at what secrets a Master Mason knows and may be inadvertently revealing. Paine, an outsider, mistakes Smith’s personal conjectures for an unintended confession. If he was not a Master Mason at the time he wrote the essay, could Paine have been an Entered Apprentice or a Fellow-Craft? It is difficult to argue that Paine was curious enough about Freemasonry’s origin and philosophy to write seriously about the fraternity, and also to begin the Craft degrees, but that he did not wait until he had concluded them before finishing his essay. It is far more likely that he was not at all a member of the fraternity at the time of its composition, and was writing as a complete outsider. 

In his essay on Thomas Paine in Freemasonry Today, David Harrison speculates: “If Paine did enter into Freemasonry, it would have been during the period of the American Revolution, his life being at the epicentre of the social elite at that time, his closeness to Franklin, Washington, Lafayette and Monroe suggesting that he was undoubtedly aware of their Masonic membership.”²⁹ Paine’s “Origin of Free-Masonry,” however, indicates that despite his closeness to these men, he did not enter into Freemasonry at that time. Years later, around 1803-1805, he was still writing as an outsider. 

Although he may not have been a member, facets of Paine’s thought can be seen to correspond to Masonic principles. In The Age of Reason (of which “Origin of Free- Masonry” may have originally been intended to be a part),³⁰ for example, Paine explains his religious beliefs:

 I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. 

I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.³¹ 

Such statements, which have a Masonic ring to them, prompted Masonic historian Joseph Fort Newton to write of Paine: 

Thomas Paine…though not a Mason, has left us an essay on The Origin of Freemasonry. Few men have ever been more unjustly and cruelly maligned than this great patriot, who was the first to utter the name “United States,” and who, instead of being a sceptic, believed in “the religion in which all men agree” — that is, in God, Duty, and the immortality of the Soul.³² 

Similarly, Vincent concludes in The Transatlantic Republican that while Paine “probably never belonged to any specific fraternity, he nevertheless actively sympathized with the Masonic movement and the philosophy it espoused.”³³ 

Although Voltaire, for example, became a Mason shortly before passing away,³⁴ there is nothing to suggest that Paine became a Mason in the interval between composing “Origin of Free-Masonry” and his death a few years later, in 1809. As he was certainly not a Master Mason when he wrote the essay — and as there is no evidence he joined the fraternity after then — one may conclude, as have Mackey, Newton, and others,³⁵ that Paine was not a Freemason. Still, though the “pantheon of Masons” may not hold Thomas Paine, this influential and controversial man is nonetheless indelibly connected to Freemasonry, if only due to the close friendships he had with some in the fraternity, and to his having written an intriguing essay on its origins.

NOTES

1. Jerome A. Wilson and William F. Ricketson, Thomas Paine (Boston: Twayne Publisher, 1978), p. 163. 
2. Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006), pp. 28-29 and 43-44. 
3. Isaac Kramnick, ed., Common Sense (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 31. 
4. Kramnick, Common Sense, p. 33. 
5. Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, p. 60. 
6. Kramnick, Common Sense, pp. 34-36. 
7. Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, p. 109. See also p. 120. Bernard Vincent devotes a chapter to “Paine’s Agrarian Justice and the Birth of the Welfare State.” See Vincent’s The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 125-135. 
8. Kramnick (Common Sense, p. 28) believes Paine also supported women’s rights. Hitchens, however, disagrees: “he was not a notable advocate of the rights of women” (Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, p. 98). So does Vincent, who considers Paine’s attitude toward women’s suffrage to have been pedestrian: “For once, Paine failed to be a prophet” (The Transatlantic Republican, p. 124). 
9. Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, pp. 8 and 36. Joseph Fort Newton, among others, believed this to be the case. See below, note 32. 
10. Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, pp. 141-142. 
11. Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994), p. 491, note 28. 
12. “Famous Non-Masons,” on the Web-site of Anti-Masonry – Points of View, <http://www.masonicinfo.cornifamousnon.htrn>. 
13. “The Real Secret of Freemasonry,” published by authority of the Trustees of The Grand Lodge of A.F. & A.M. of Oregon (U.S.A.: Still Associates, 1990). 
14. Two such examples: The Key West Masons Web-site, <http://www.kevwestmason.com>, which has a page of famous Masons, among whom Paine is listed, and the Web-site of the Valley of Albany, New York, <http://wwiv.vallevofalbany.aasrmasonrv.us/>, where a quote from the opening lines of The Crisis is attributed to “Bro. Thomas Paine.” 
15. Vincent The Transatlantic Republican, p. 35. 
16. Vincent (The Transatlantic Republican, p, 36) cites 1805 as the year “Origin of Free-Masonry” was written, as does Fruchtman (Thomas Paine; Apostle of Freedom, p. 491, note 29). However, William Van der Weyde places its writing in 1803. See “Chronological Table of Thomas Paine’s Writings,” on the Web-site of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, <htto://www.thomaspaine.orolchron.html>. 
17. Vincent The Transatlantic Republican, p. 36. It may be incorrect to describe “Origin of Free-Masonry,” as Vincent does, as “a lengthy piece.- It is actually less than 5,000 words long. 
18. Samuel Edwards, Rebel! A Biography of Tom Paine (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 227. 
19. Fruchtman, Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, p. 275. 
20. Fruchtman, Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, p. 275 and pp. 379- 380. 
21. William M. Van der Weyde, The Life and Works of Thomas Paine (New York: Thomas Paine National Historical Association, 1925), vol. 1, p. 171. 
22. Moncure Daniel Conway, ed., “Origin of Free-Masonry,” in The Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1967), vol. 4, p. 290, note 1. 
23. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, p. 290, note 1. 
24. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, p. 293. 
25. Albert Gallatin Mackey addresses these ideas In his chapter on “Druidism and Freemasonry” in The History of Freemasonry (New York: The Masonic History Company, 1898), vol. 1, pp. 199-216. See also Andrew Prescott’s lecture on “Druidic Myths and Freemasonry,” on the Web-site of The Centre for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, <htte://freemasonrv.deptsheLac.uldindmohp?lann=081tvoe5mee&level 0=243&level1=387&level2=392&oo=381>. 
26. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, p. 303.
27. Mackey, The History of Freemasonry, vol. ‘1, p. 199. 
28. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, pp. 294-295. 
29. David Harrison, “Thomas Paine, Freemason?,” Freemasonry Today, Issue 46, Autumn 2008, <htto://www.freemasonrvtoday.com1461p11.php>. Arguing the possibility that Paine became a Mason during this time, Harrison continues: “Paine was certainly attracted to clubs and societies throughout his life, such as the White Hart Club which Paine attended when he was an exciseman in Lewes. He was a founding member of the first Anti-Slavery Society in America and he was involved in the society of Theophilanthropists and Philosophical Society…” In contrast, Vincent argues: “A rugged individualist, Paine neither liked collective ceremonies nor secret practices… Both his nature and the lessons of experience made him loathe the idea of regimentation. He never was a declared member of any party or sect or church, and it is highly probable that he never joined the Masonic Order” (The Transatlantic Republican, p. 39). 
30. Conway, The Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. 4, p. 290, note 1. 
31. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (Boston: Josiah P. Mendum, 1852), part 1, p. 6. These sentences are quoted, with slightly different wording, in Hitchens’s Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, p. 126. 
32. Joseph Fort Newton, The Builders: A Story and Study of Masonry (Iowa: The Torch Press, 1916), pp. 225-226, note 3. 
33. Vincent, The Transatlantic Republican, p. 35. 
34. Vincent The Transatlantic Republican, p. 38. 
35. For another example, see Augustus C. L Amold’s Philosophical History of Free-Masonry and Other Secret Societies (New York: Clark, Austen, and Smith, 1854), p. 204, second note. Arnold concludes that Paine was not “a member of the brotherhood.” He reproduces Paine’s entire essay in his Philosophical History, adding his own notes to it, with the aim of, among other things, correcting what he considers to be Paine’s mistaken assertions about the fraternity. See Philosophical History, p. 204, first note. See also the entry on Paine in William R. Denslow’s 10,000 Famous Freemasons, vol. 3: “Although Paine wrote An Essay on the Origin of Freemasonry, he was not a Freemason… Certain writers have made claims that he was a member of various lodges both in America and France.”