Paine, Thomas

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PAINE, THOMAS

More than any other writer of the late eighteenth century, Thomas Paine articulated the democratic aspirations of that revolutionary age. His contribution lay less in the originality of his ideas than in his ability to articulate those ideas in a style that resonated with the experiences of ordinary people. Paine's best-selling pamphlets in support of the American and French Revolutions—Common Sense and The Rights of Man—transformed this former stay maker, sailor, and tax collector into an international symbol of democratic radicalism. To his supporters, he was the heroic leader of a popular movement to eradicate artificial privilege and inequality. His many detractors on the other hand—like John Adams, who once referred to him as a "mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a Bitch Wolf"—worried that Paine's scathing attacks on all forms of traditional authority threatened to engulf the Atlantic world in anarchic mob rule. But whether they hated him or loved him, by the 1790s there were few people in the Atlantic basin who had not at least heard of Thomas Paine.

Paine was born and raised in Thetford, about seventy-five miles from London. At the age of twelve he followed his father into the trade of stay making (stays were the whalebone pieces that gave corsets their shape and stiffness). After a short stint as a sailor aboard a privateer, Paine moved to Sandwich in 1758 where he set up his own stay making shop and married Mary Lambert. Mary and their newborn child died in 1760, and for the next eight years Paine held various jobs in the south of England until finally finding steady work in 1768 as an excise officer in Lewes. That town, with its tradition of political radicalism extending back to the 1640s, transformed this disgruntled laborer into an articulate and radicalized activist.

Several strands of British oppositional thought underlay Paine's political vision. First, his Quaker upbringing taught him to distrust orthodox authorities and instead follow his own "inner light." Second, during a short stay in London in his twenties, Paine associated with a group of artisans who, in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin, regularly attended public lectures on scientific topics. At these lectures Paine was introduced to the fundamental Enlightenment tenet that the natural and social worlds operated according to a set of universal laws that any person could discover through the use of their rational faculties. The anti-authoritarian implications of this Newtonian worldview—if reason was universally shared then religious and political leaders had no special access to "the truth"—remained an unchanging feature of Paine's life's work. Finally, thanks to his participation in political debating societies in Lewes and elsewhere, Paine became steeped in Whig opposition thought, which advocated parliamentary reforms to limit the government's power and make it more responsive to the citizenry.

Arriving in Philadelphia only a few months before the battles of Lexington and Concord, Paine encountered a large community of politicized citizens who already spoke his transatlantic language of religious dissent, Enlightenment rationality, and Whig republicanism. After honing his journalistic skills for a year as the editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, Paine wove these ideological threads together to produce the most widely read pamphlet of its day, Common Sense. As an idealistic transplant with few ties to any particular locality, Paine was perfectly situated to articulate a sweeping vision of a unified American state that had a world-historical mission to establish representative government and create the conditions for widespread economic prosperity. With rude swipes at the king, whom he referred to as "the Royal Brute," and inspirational assertions that the colonists had the unprecedented opportunity to "begin the world anew," Paine channeled the inchoate rage and unvoiced aspirations of ordinary Americans into a growing movement for national independence. When Common Sense was published in January of 1776 few Americans had publicly broached the issue of independence. By July of that year, however, the popularity of Paine's pamphlet and the force of its arguments played a major role in pushing a hesitating Continental Congress toward declaring independence. During the war Paine produced, at George Washington's request, a series of Crisis papers that boosted the morale of the Continental Army. At the same time he also worked with a diverse coalition of urban and rural radicals in Pennsylvania to write the Revolution's most democratic state constitution.

In the early years of the war, Paine succeeded because he served multiple constituencies. The leadership class needed his abilities as a publicist, and the Patriot rank-and-file appreciated his support for democratic measures that furthered their political and economic interests. By the 1780s, however, Paine found himself at odds both with many Patriot

leaders and with urban radicals. Paine was unusual in the 1780s in that he endorsed both highly democratic political arrangements and free-market economics. Most supporters of the free market were established leaders who had little interest in democratizing politics, whereas most supporters of democratic politics were skeptical of the free market and advocated price controls and other economic restrictions to protect laborers from the vagaries of the market. Paine's amalgam of democracy and free-market capitalism would eventually become mainstream in the nineteenth century. When he decided to return to England in 1787, however, he left America having alienated a good number of his former allies.

Paine reemerged on the world stage in 1790 when he wrote The Rights of Man to defend the French Revolution against the British statesman Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Paine's pamphlet, the second part of which was issued in 1792, sold an estimated 300,000 copies throughout Europe and America. In the context of America's heated partisan battles of the 1790s, Paine's outspoken support for international revolution made him one of the most controversial figures of the decade. Republicans used his writings to show that any true American patriot should support both the French Revolution and continued democratization at home. The Federalists, especially after Paine's attack on organized religion (The Age of Reason) was published in 1795, argued that the Republicans' association with Paine showed that they were too radical to be trusted with political power. In the summer of 1798, in the midst of the Quasi-War with France and immediately following passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, some Federalists went so far as to claim that Paine was part of an international conspiracy to overthrow all religion, abolish private property, and eliminate national governments. By the time Paine returned to America in 1802, very few Americans would publicly associate themselves with him. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson was viciously criticized for granting Paine passage from France on a navy warship and warmly receiving him at the White House. Paine died in 1809, a poor and publicly reviled man.

His American detractors were right in claiming that Paine had become more radical during his time in Europe, but he was hardly the bloodthirsty, atheistic anarchist they claimed. In 1793, as a member of the French National Assembly, Paine allied himself with a moderate faction and argued against the execution of the king; when the Jacobins took power, they had Paine imprisoned for almost a year. The tract he wrote in jail, The Age of Reason, affirmed his belief "in one God" and his hopes for "happiness beyond this life." So although he was neither an anarchist nor an atheist, Paine's writings of the 1790s did extend his vision of democracy into increasingly radical and uncharted territory. In the second part of The Rights of Man he argued that the government should institute a progressive taxation system (with a top tax rate of 100 percent) to discourage great inequalities of wealth. He also advocated state pensions for poor men and their widows not as a matter "of Charity, but of right." A few years later, in Agrarian Justice, Paine argued that because modern commercial society had created an increasingly "hereditary" class of poor people by robbing them of their right to a portion of the earth, the state had a duty to compensate every citizen for this loss. Most of his contemporaries regarded such ideas as perversions rather than logical extensions of the democratic ideal. But future American radicals would look back to this phase of Paine's career as a source of ideas and inspiration for their own struggles to create a more democratic and egalitarian world.