The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions (Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies 12)

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The Transatlantic Republican Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions

AMSTERDAM MONOGRAPHS IN AMERICAN STUDIES

12

General Editor Rob Kroes Amerika Instituut University of Amsterdam

The Transatlantic Republican Thomas Paine and the Age of Revolutions

Bernard Vincent

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1614-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in the Netherlands

Acknowledgments Various parts of this book have appeared previously in other versions, as follows: Chapter 1 originally appeared in French as “La stratégie du temps dans Common Sense,” in Autre temps, autre espace: essais sur l’Amérique pré-industrielle, ed. Élise Marienstras and Barbara Karsky (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1986). Chapter 2 originally appeared as “Thomas Paine, Freemasonry and the American Revolution,” in Bulletin of the Thomas Paine Society (UK) 1 (spring 1988). Chapter 3 originally appeared as “Myth and Reality: Americans in Paris during the French Revolution,” in Les Américains et la Révolution française (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1989). Chapter 4 originally appeared as “Thomas Paine and the French Revolution.,” in the Huguenot-Thomas Paine Historical Association Pamphlet (New Rochelle) (summerfall 1989 and winter-spring 1990). Chapter 5 originally appeared in Plantation Society in the Americas 3, no. 2 (1993). Chapter 6 originally appeared as “A National Hero in Transit: The Problem of Thomas Paine's American Citizenship,” in Prospero (Rivista di culture anglogermaniche (Trieste) 2 (1995). Chapter 7 originally appeared in Qwerty (Pau) (October 1995). Chapter 8 originally appeared as “Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice: A Prophecy for our Times,” in Sources (Orléans) 6 (fall 1998). Chapter 9 originally appeared in The Red Badges of Courage: Wars and Conflicts in American Culture, ed. Biancamaria Pisapia, Ugo Rubeo & Anna Scacchi (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1998). Chapter 11 originally appeared in Predecessors: Intellectual Lineages in American Studies, ed.. Rob Kroes (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999). These contributions are hereby reprinted, with minor changes, by permission of the publishers. The author wishes to express special thanks to Rob Kroes for his unremitting support and encouragement, as well as to John Goulet and Marc Niemeyer, who accepted to read the manuscript with a critical eye.

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Contents Introduction Storming the “Bastille of Words”: Tom Paine’s Revolution in Writing

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Part I. Paine, America and France I

The Strategy of Time in Common Sense

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II

Thomas Paine, the Masonic Order, and the American Revolution

35

From Fact to Myth: The Americans in Paris during the French Revolution

65

IV

Paine’s “Share” in the French Revolution

85

V

Thomas Paine, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Rights of Man

97

III

VI

A National of Nowhere: The Problem of Thomas Paine’s American Citizenship

109

Part II. Paine and the Enlightenment VII

Thomas Paine and the Issue of Universal Suffrage

VIII Paine’s Agrarian Justice and the Birth of the Welfare State IX X XI

117 125

A Quaker with a Difference: Tom Paine’s Republican Rhetoric of War and Peace

137

From the Rights of Man to the Rights of God: Thomas Paine’s Ultimate Challenge

143

A Pioneer with a Difference: Thomas Paine and Early ‘American Studies’

155

Bibliography

167

Index

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Introduction Storming the “Bastille of Words”: Tom Paine’s Revolution in Writing Thomas Jefferson considered Thomas Paine (1737-1809) as the only man of letters of his own generation that wrote better than he did. Commenting on Common Sense, he had this remark: “No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and familiarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language. In this he may be compared with Dr. Franklin, and indeed his Common Sense was, for a while, believed to have been written by Dr. Franklin.”1 Franklin himself added: “Others can rule, many can fight, but only Thomas Paine can write for us the English tongue.”2 Yet Paine would not practice art for art’s sake. Everything in him was focused on action, on the possibility of changing the established order of things. He believed in the subversive virtue and historical function of writing. His only purpose as a writer was to help public opinion evolve, convinced as he was that a change in the minds of people would sooner or later result in a transformation of society. Such was, to a large extent, the destiny of his first pamphlet Common Sense, whose outright plea in favor of independence brought about “a wonderful change . . . in the minds of men” (George Washington)3, and was even deemed by General Charles Lee powerful enough, “in concurrence with the transcendent folly and wickedness of the [English] ministry,” to give “the ‘coup-de-grace’ to Great Britain.”4 Similarly, when the French Revolution broke out, Paine viewed the event as the result of what pre-Revolutionary authors had prophetically expressed in their writings. As he put it in Rights of 1

Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, 19031907), 15: 305. 2 Quoted in Bulletin of Thomas Paine Friends 4, no. 3 (August 2003): 3. 3 Jared Sparks, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Boston, 1833-37), 3: 347. 4 Jared Sparks, ed., The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution (Boston, 1829–30), 1: 136.

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The Transatlantic Republican

Man, “the progress of time and circumstances, which men assign to the accomplishment of great changes, is too mechanical [mechanistic] to measure the force of the mind, and rapidity of reflection, by which revolutions are generated.”5 For him, as well as for the Bible or the Christian ‘fabulists’ he so savagely criticized, “in the beginning was the word.” This was true even in the early days of his own life. When he was eight years of age, his pet bird (a crow) died and young Paine wrote an occasional poem—an epitaph—which tells us a lot about his early view of the world: Here lies the body of John Crow, Who once was high but now is low; Ye brother Crows take warning all, For as you rise, so must you fall.6

Already perceptible in, or between, those lines are Paine’s democratic approach to society, his detestation of rapacious aristocrats (like the Graftons who were then reigning supreme over Norfolk and Thetford, where he was born), and his sober ‘commonsensical’ way of expressing his revolutionary views, however disturbing they might be. In his recent—and excellent—biography of Paine, John Keane rightfully explains that “the crow epitaph not only displays traces of the razor-sharp ability to rally human spirit against injustice for which Paine later became world famous. It also prefigures his immense capacity for writing in militant and down-to-earth language.”7 * From a literary point of view, the success of Paine’s books may be attributed to two central causes: the simplicity of the revolutionary doctrines formulated in them, and the simplicity, or directness and accessibility, of the style in which these doctrines were formulated. It must be remembered that in Paine’s time those who wrote books did so to be read by an elite. They had spent years in schools and universities, learning a language which was both a means of 5 Philip S. Foner, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. (New York: The Citadel Press, 1945), 2: 340-41 (henceforward referred to as FO 1 or 2). 6 Thomas Clio Rickman, The Life of Thomas Paine (London, 1819), 34. 7 John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston, London: Little, Brown & Company, 1995), 25.

The Bastille of Words

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communication between members of the same dominant social groups and, because of its sophistication and coded character, a language closed to other social groups. This is precisely what Paine exploded in his works, and this is what made his writing (and writings) revolutionary. When the first part of Rights of Man came out in 1791, many were those in England who, like Isaac Hunt (the father of Leigh Hunt, the poet), feared that Thomas Paine’s “coarse and rustic” style might “seduce his illiterate and unskilled” readers. Hunt saw Paine as a dangerous internationalist—a “Transatlantic Republican”—and likened his rhetoric to “poison.”8 Horace Walpole went even further, asserting that Paine’s way of writing was “so coarse, that you would think he means to degrade the language as much as the government.”9 A man of the people writing for the people (more particularly for the new emerging class of artisans, craftsmen and small shopkeepers), Paine ‘stormed the Bastille of words’ (in which titled aristocrats “immured” themselves)10, inviting the common man to enter the republic of letters and, by doing so, pave the way for the establishment of political republicanism—a form of government based (as he, like Jefferson, saw it) on a well-informed citizenry. Paine was one of the very first plebeian intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment. As such, he firmly believed that the democratization of writing was a prerequisite for the establishment of political democracy. If only in that respect, he was on a different planet than Edmund Burke. His

8 Isaac Hunt, Rights of Englishmen. An antidote to the poison now vending by the Transatlantic Republican Thomas Paine (London, 1791). Quoted in John Keane, Tom Paine, 307. 9 Wilmarth S. Lewis, Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 11: 239. 10 It was apropos of “titles” that Paine, in Rights of Man, first used the ‘Bastille of Words’ metaphor: “It is, properly, from the elevated mind of France that the folly of titles has been abolished. It has outgrown the baby clothes of count and duke, and breeched itself in manhood. France has not levelled, it has exalted. It has put down the dwarf, to set up the man. The insignificance of a senseless word like duke, count or earl has ceased to please. Even those who possessed them have disowned the gibberish, and as they outgrew the rickets, have despised the rattle. “The genuine mind of man, thirsting for its native home, society, contemns the gewgaws that separate him from it. Titles are like circles drawn by the magician's wand, to contract the sphere of man's felicity. He lives immured within the Bastille of a word, and surveys at a distance the envied life of man” (FO 1: 286-87, emphasis mine).

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target, and his weapon, was “common sense,” not the refined and sometimes euphuistic intelligence of the ‘happy few.’ Who, however uneducated, could not understand the following? The duty of man . . . is plain and simple, and consists but of two points. His duty to God, which every man must feel; and with respect to his neighbour, to do as he would be done by.11

This is a common sense remark, quite biblical in its simplicity, but indeed much more subversive than one might think at first. As James Boulton explained in his book on The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke, for Paine “the duty to one’s neighbour should be recognised by all men, by rulers as well as the ruled; Paine’s reader then discovers that the moral injunction has become a means by which rulers are to be assessed and that those who act well according to this principle will be respected, those who do not will be despised”12—i.e. rejected from the universe of reason and ousted from their throne. Innocent and harmless at first sight, common sense was now a revolutionary tool. Paine wanted to be read by all classes of men, and he was. While visiting the British Parliament in 1792, Francisco de Miranda, one of the liberators of Latin America (and a friend of Paine) “noted that copies of the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man, at that time proscribed by the British government, were being sold along with sandwiches in the House of Commons.”13 But similar attitudes were also to be found at the other end of the social spectrum. As J. T. Mathias, a contemporary of Paine, pointed out in 1797, “our peasantry now read the Rights of Man on mountains, and moors, and by the wayside.”14 Paine was indeed well aware that, in his time, some 90% of the population were farmers or lived and worked in a rural environment. Hence, among many other instances, his famous reply to Edmund Burke’s sympathy for the fate of Marie-Antoinette: “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird”15; or the final 11

Rights of Man, Part 1, in FO 1: 275. James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1963), 136 (republished by Greenwood Press in 1975). 13 A. Owen Aldridge, Early American Literature: A Comparatist Approach (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 217n.3. 14 In Boulton, op. cit., 138. 15 Rights of Man, Part 1, in FO 1: 260 12


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‘agricultural’ metaphor (on the inevitability of universal revolution) with which Paine wound up the second part of Rights of Man Though the vegetable sleep will continue longer on some trees and plants than on others, and though some of them may not blossom for two or three years, all will be in leaf in the summer, except those which are rotten. What pace the political summer may keep with the natural, no human foresight can determine. It is, however, not difficult to perceive that the spring is begun.16

Or again this maritime—and highly derisive—metaphor well calculated for people living by the sea: I know a point in America called Point-no-Point; because as you proceed along the shore, gay and flowery as Mr Burke’s language, it continually recedes and presents itself at a distance before you; but when you have got as far as you can go, there is no point at all. Just thus it is with Mr Burke’s three hundred and sixty-six pages.17

Who, in Britain, Ireland or America, could not understand this? No intricate argumentation, no Latin, no Greek like in so many other works, no scholarly or pedantic quotations. Paine used to say: “I scarcely ever quote; the reason is, I always think.”18 In the first of the American Crisis papers (“These are the times that try men’s souls…”), Paine had informed his readers about his method as a political writer: “I dwell not upon the vapours of imagination; I bring reason to your ears and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes.”19 A world apart from the aristocratic literature of the time, this “vulgar” (Boulton’s phrase)20 or “plebeian” way of writing (my phrase) was for the author of Common Sense and Rights of Man a way of testing “the manner in which a work, written in a style of thinking and expression different to what had been customary in England, would be received.”21 The reactions to Rights of Man in Britain were commensurate with the provocation. Paine, wrote Sir Brooke Boothby—a romantic poet and friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—, has “the natural eloquence of a night-cellar [low-class tavern] [and] writes in defiance 16

Ibid., Part 2, in FO 1: 453-54. Ibid., Part 1, in FO 1: 258. 18 Third letter “to Cato” (Rev. William Smith, Anglican Provost of the College of Philadelphia) signed “The Forester”, FO 2: 78. 19 The American Crisis I, in FO 1: 50, 56. 20 Boulton, 134. 21 “Preface” to Rights of Man, Part 2, in FO 1: 348-49. 17

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of grammar, as if syntax were an aristocratical invention.”22 His writing, The Monthly Review added, is “desultory, uncouth, and inelegant . . . His wit is coarse, and sometimes disgraced by wretched puns; and his language, though energetic, is awkward, ungrammatical, and often debased by vulgar phraseology.”23 The most negative assessment came, unsurprisingly, from Edmund Burke himself in a letter to William Smith dated 22 July 1791: He [Paine] is utterly incapable of comprehending his subject. He has not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learnd the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a serious preparation of Study or thinking—for the use of it . . . They indeed who seriously write upon a principle of levelling ought to be answerd by the Magistrate—and not by the Speculatist . . . They who cannot or will not be taught, must be coerced.24

There were nevertheless in Britain a few good minds sufficiently avant-garde to acknowledge that Rights of Man was a demonstration “as clear and simple as the first rule in arithmetic” (Charles Fox, leader of the Whig party).25 One English reader went so far as to say that Rights of Man “is now made as much a standard book in this country as Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim’s Progress.”26 As Olivia Smith has rightly pointed out, Paine’s “experience of revolutionary America provided him with a range of conventions that was foreign to English literature and English concepts of language. This externality was essential to his becoming an author and to his becoming the type of author he became.”27 For Paine, nothing was supposed to go over the heads of ordinary 22 Brooke Boothby, Observations on the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, and on Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man (London, 1792), 106n, 273-74. 23 The Monthly Review (May 1791): 93. 24 Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., ed., Selected Letters of Edmund Burke (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 295-96. William Smith was a young Irish barrister who wanted to dedicate to Burke the second edition of his anti-Paine pamphlet The Rights of Citizens. Being an Examination of Mr Paine’s Principles Touching Government (spring 1791). 25 Boulton, 137-38. 26 Benjamin Vaughan, 30 Nov. 1792, Home Office Papers, 42.22, cited in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 108. 27 Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791-1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 39. This book contains an excellent study of Paine’s innovative prose—in particular Chapter 2, “Rights of Man and its aftermath.”


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people: neither politics, (because it concerned their everyday lives), nor literature, at least political literature (because it was about human experience). Paine’s plebeian approach to writing had three critical advantages: (1) using ordinary language to address issues that Burke tackled from on high, in a lordly manner, was already a way of exposing his opponent to the mocking eyes of the multitude; (2) writing in a clear, simple way, and making key sentences sound like proverbs or “repeatable” stock phrases, amounted to providing the uneducated reader with linguistic weapons that could easily be peddled around and spread; (3) writing in that particular way gave Paine’s prose what was lacking in Burke’s, i.e. an exuberant energy, a kind of solar force that tended to turn the most ill-disposed reader into an admirer, if not a supporter. As a rule, Paine would take his images and metaphors from the reservoir of popular experience. For instance, when he wants to ridicule the “elevation” of thought Burke draws on to impress what he calls the “swinish multitude,”28 Paine skillfully refers to something everybody knew about: the aeronautical experiments of his time (in particular the flight performed in 1785 over the English Channel by Blanchard and Jeffries). Hence his ironical depiction of Burke “mounted in the air like a balloon, to draw the eyes of the multitude from the ground they stand upon.”29 The theater, which was very popular at that time, and therefore present in the minds of the general public, was also an important source of inspiration for Paine’s imagery. He would readily speak of the “puppet show of state and aristocracy” or describe the system of “mixed government” as a “pantomimical contrivance.”30 The theatrical metaphor is always, with him, an aggressive instrument, a way of winning the public over by making them laugh, to the detriment of someone else. Burke also used theatrical metaphors, but he borrowed them from tragedy rather than comedy, inviting the reader not to laugh at radicals, but to view the French revolution as an

28 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 1981), 173. One page further, Burke defines the swinish multitude as “a nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time, poor and sordid barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter” (174). 29 Rights of Man, Part 1, in FO 1: 282. 30 Ibid., 267.

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unsurpassed drama. Paine was, paradoxically, very critical of this kind of rhetoric (when used by Burke): As to the tragic paintings by which Mr Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect.31

Burke was good at that, just as Paine was good at producing laughing effects: so his remark was quite unfair. Paine was less good, though, when he was not himself, and tried, in a mimetic way, to write like Burke and imitate the rhetoric of his time: In the declaratory exordium which prefaces the Declaration of Rights, we see the solemn and majestic spectacle of a nation opening its commission, under the auspices of its Creator, to establish a Government; a scene so new, and so transcendently unequalled by anything in the European world, that the name of a Revolution is diminutive of its character, and it rises into a regeneration of man.32

Had Paine always written in that somewhat verbose and bombastic way, no one would take the trouble to discuss, nor dare to extol, his clarity and efficiency. * In terms of immediate efficiency, Common Sense, not Rights of Man, was Paine’s masterpiece. Denouncing the past behavior of Britain, advocating independence and republicanism or describing in anticipation the glorious future of a liberated America, Paine excelled in the art of propaganda and was quite certainly the ‘great communicator’ of his age. He knew that his readership was socially heterogeneous and that their preoccupations and interests were not necessarily similar, nor necessarily convergent. That was why he tried, with consummate skill, to touch the right chord in each reader or group of readers. What strikes the reader of Common Sense today—as it certainly did when the book came out—is the brilliancy and power of Paine’s pamphleteering. “His writing,” Bernard Bailyn explains, “has an energy and drama and verbal flair that none of the American

31 32

Ibid., 258-59. Ibid., 317.


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pamphleteers had. He brought over a different kind of combative, flamboyant, completely irreverent, even violent, consciousness into the American picture.”33 Compared to him, all other American polemicists were ‘amateurs.’ Although he rejected Britain en bloc, Paine was in fact an heir to the great English tradition of pamphleteering, that of writers like Swift or Defoe—but an heir with a difference. While explicitly appealing to the reason and common sense of those who read his book, Paine knew how to play with human psychology and, a Freudian before Freud, he kept encouraging American colonists to engage in ‘the murder of both the father and the mother’: No man was a warmer wisher for a reconciliation than myself before the fatal nineteenth of April, 1775, but the moment the event of that day was made known I rejected the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England forever and disdained the wretch that, with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE, can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.34

The mother comes next. Because, he says, she is motivated by “interest,” not “attachment,” England should no longer be recognized as the “mother country.” Her selfishness, he goes on to say, is worse than that of wild animals or wild people: “Even brutes do not devour their young nor savages make war upon their families.”35 Such an unnatural parent deserves no gratitude, the era of childish docility and humiliation is closed, “the last cord now is broken”36 (meaning ‘umbilical cord’). By emphasizing America’s ‘maturity,’ by opposing maternal metaphors (inherited from the past) to the metaphors of rupture and adulthood, Paine aimed at nothing but stripping the reader of his old beliefs and making him (or her) able to view the future of America in a new light, without any reference to the antiquated images of childish dependency. To merchants and farmers, Paine spoke the language of economic interest and profit, arguing that independence would keep America away from European conflicts and help the country develop 33 “The Past IS Unpredictable: A Conversation with Bernard Bailyn,” interview by Mary Lou Beatty, Humanities 19, no. 2 (March-April 1998): 7. 34 Common Sense, in FO 1: 25. 35 Ibid., 18, 19. 36 Ibid., 30.

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its commercial relations with the Old World as a whole, instead of restricting it to just the British market. To German, Irish and Swedish immigrants and other citizens of non-British origin, he explained that Europe, not England, was their actual mother country and that America, as an asylum for the victims of universal persecution, was a national melting-pot of a totally different and new nature. To the upholders of reconciliation and to the pacifist members of the Quaker community, whose demotivating influence he dreaded, he enumerated the atrocities and devastations performed by the British occupation forces, playing now on the need for safety of wealthy people, now on the fear of fathers for their families, now on the panic of daughters and wives. Taking his stand on people’s religious feelings and the authority of the Scriptures (in which he did not believe), he used the Bible to condemn monarchy and hereditary succession. Drawing from the philosophy of his time and echoing the birth of the Frontier spirit, he referred to ‘natural law’ in order to show that monarchy was a fraud and to denounce the ‘unnatural’ connection that places a continent under the tutelage of an island. Addressing the business and financial community, whose material support was necessary to the success of the Revolution, he maintained that, by selling Western lands, an independent government could cover the expenses of war and liquidate the national debt without milking the taxpayer. To shipbuilders and their subcontractors, then facing paralysis and unemployment, he announced the creation—after the Revolution—of an American navy and the extension of maritime commerce. To the more radical wing of the population, he proposed the establishment of a democracy based on one popular assembly and a broad suffrage with no tax qualifications. Nobody’s forgotten, nothing’s forgotten: the materialistic and money-oriented inclinations of the population; the deep-seated religiosity of the American people; their combined aspirations to affluence, internal security and external peace; their two-centuries-old sense of autonomy and self-help; the geographic and economic specificity of the continent—indeed all the ingredients that then contributed to the diversified but unified (or unifying) identity of America are to be found in Common Sense. Thanks to that virtuoso performance (close to that of a magician), Paine was able to amplify, beyond whatever could divide his contemporaries, a nascent form of patriotism which, within months, was to galvanize the Revolution and ensure its final success.


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* When compared to the political writers of his time, Thomas Paine may be viewed as a new kind of artist—the modern author—or, as Novalis would have put it, a “harp in the democratic wind” of the history of letters. This, as we have seen, was due to the way he wrote and the peculiar quality of his prose, but if one moves from quality to quantity (the amount of books sold), what one finds is that Paine’s new ‘plebeian’ approach to writing actually won him the admiration of an unprecedented number of readers. And this was true for each of his three major works, Common Sense, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. The fact that these works were all ‘bestsellers’ is remarkable in itself, as a unique historical occurrence, but it is even more important in terms of the impact they had on those who read them. Common Sense was undoubtedly the most widely circulated bestseller in early American history—a literary contribution to the cause of independence which, according to John Keane, proved to be as important “as that of George Washington on the battlefield or Benjamin Franklin on the diplomatic front.”37 On April 8, 1776, Paine reported with pride that in less than four months, although “the book was turned upon the world like an orphan to shift for itself,” at least 120,000 copies had already come off the press.38 Between January and June 1776, 35 editions were published.39 Three years later, Paine claimed that “the number of copies printed and sold in America was not short of 150,000,” adding rightly, but somewhat immodestly, that this was “the greatest sale that any performance had ever had since the use of letters.”40 As far as sales were concerned, Paine was probably not exaggerating, and the figures are astounding: they mean that out of a total population of 2.5 million people (minus 500,000 black slaves, minus a great number of illiterate white people, minus children), at least some 500,000 Americans actually read Common Sense, i.e. practically all American adults then able to read: this was indeed, if one excepts the Bible, the first mass phenomenon in the history of

37

John Keane, Tom Paine, 110-11. Second letter “to Cato” signed “The Forester”, FO 2: 67. Nathalie Caron, Thomas Paine contre l’imposture des prêtres (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 321. 40 Letter to the Honorable Henry Laurens (14 January 1779), FO 2: 1163. 38

39

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literature. In Paine’s America, the circulation of a ‘bestseller’ was between five and six thousand copies. The most famous of them was Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, with 10,000 copies sold every year between 1750 and 1760. The sales of Common Sense brought in a huge amount of money (£1,000 a day at the time of publication just for the city of Philadelphia, where seven editions were released). But Paine had made it a principle not to accept any money for his political and religious writings. Common Sense was no exception: “In order to accommodate that pamphlet to every man’s purchase and to do honor to the cause, I gave up the profits I was justly entitled to.”41 Paine accordingly gave all his royalties away to the Continental army, so that mittens could be bought for the ill-equipped patriots then fighting the British in Quebec. He later had a similar attitude with Rights of Man. Common Sense was also a success in Europe. As early as 1776, translations appeared in Germany, Poland, Denmark and Russia. The pamphlet, noted John Adams, “was received in France and in all Europe with rapture.”42 In August of the same year, Silas Deane, then commercial agent of Congress in Paris, reported to the Committee of Secret Correspondence that Common Sense had been translated in France, and had “a greater run, if possible, here than in America.”43 In Latin America, Paine’s ‘plebeian’ work, although it apparently did not directly reach a vast popular audience, actually contributed, through the comments and critical essays it sparked off, to the further development of pro-independence movements, notably in Venezuela, Mexico and Ecuador—as well as in Brazil, where “five thousand translated copies . . . were introduced clandestinely.”44 Rights of Man, which appeared in England fifteen years after Common Sense, was an equally astounding success. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (November 1790), to which Rights of Man was a response, was itself a bestseller by 18th century

41

Ibid. Lyman H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 2: 351. 43 Francis Wharton, ed., The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), 2: 124. 44 A. Owen Aldridge, Early American Literature, Chap. 8, “Paine and Latin American Independence,” 244. 42


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standards: 12,000 copies were sold within one month; the total circulation for the first year was 19,000, and the book continued to sell well afterwards outside of Britain—in Ireland, the United States, Germany and Italy—the circulation was huge too, and in France some 15,000 copies were sold in only three months.45 But this was nothing compared to the historic circulation figures achieved by Paine’s book. At the time of the publication of Rights of Man, the average size of an edition in Britain was about 1,250 for a novel, 750 for more general works.46 As John Keane points out, “Sir Walter Scott, the most popular novelist a generation after Paine, sold 10,000 copies of Rob Roy in a fortnight,” but Paine’s figures were beyond belief. Part 1 had appeared on February 22, 1791, and by May 50,000 copies had been sold. In all, 26 editions (of the first and second parts) appeared.47 Basing his calculations on information from his publishers, Paine himself, Keane explains, “estimated that in Britain the sales of the complete edition [Part 1 + Part 2] reached ‘between four and five hundred thousand’ copies within ten years of publication, making it the most widely read book of all time, in any language”—with, again, the exception of the Bible.48 Out of the nine or ten million people then living in Britain, four million at most were able to read: this means that one potential reader in ten purchased Rights of Man. But even those figures are misleading because they do not take into account pirated and serialized editions— and there were many. Nor do they include the number of those to whom parts of the book were read and who, openly or secretly, discussed the ideas put forward by Paine. There is no doubt that Rights of Man was circulated and talked about in the literate public, but, Keane goes on to say, the great novelty was that it was also “read aloud and talked about to the illiterate on an unheard-of scale,” i.e. in taverns and radical societies, in much the same way as Common Sense had been in America. Therefore “not only did the book touch virtually the whole of the reading public; it also helped transform the meaning

45 William B. Todd, “The Biographical History of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France,” The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951-52): 100-108. 46 Raymond Williams, “Notes on English Prose,” in Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1980), 69-70. 47 Nathalie Caron, Thomas Paine contre l’imposture des prêtres, 321. 48 John Keane, Tom Paine, 307. (For the total claimed by Paine, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 117).

14


of the public by broadening and deepening its narrow boundaries.”49 As far as Britain and Europe were concerned, Rights of Man was certainly the first political work to reach what we now call the ‘general public.’ Let alone the ideas contained in the book proper, Paine’s ‘quantitative’ performance was in itself an important step toward the democratization of the publishing world. Just as he had done with Common Sense, Paine did not keep a single penny for himself. All the money went to groups of constitutional reformers and other radical societies who, in turn, contributed to the propagation of the book in popular circles. Although The Age of Reason (1794-1795) was written and first published in France, we have no indication that it met with any success locally. No circulation data have been found, and one has every reason to believe that the book went largely unnoticed, if only because the obsessions and preoccupations of the French were then of a political, not of a spiritual, order. In revolutionary France, dechristianization was in full swing, and, since September 1792, “the birth of Christ was no longer the beginning of recorded time”50: the republican calendar, which now replaced the Christian one, was supposed to mark the opening of a totally new—and secular—era. In such a context, the publication of Paine’s “thoughts upon religion”51 could not have occurred at a worse moment. Nor is it irrelevant to point out that, as a critique of the Scriptures, The Age of Reason was in itself of much less interest to Catholics (generally inclined to believe in the infallibility of the Pope) than to Protestants (more prone to place their faith in the infallibility of the Bible). Ignored by the French, the book was extraordinarily successful in Britain and America—and it seems also to have sold well in countries like Germany or Hungary.52 In England, The Age of Reason rapidly became a bestseller, in spite of the government’s decision to prosecute any bookseller that would circulate it. The book had to be printed and sold underground, and this is why we have no reliable figures regarding the actual sales. In the United States, demand was even more frenetic, and there was no censorship, in any form whatsoever. 49

Ibid., 308. Keane, Tom Paine, 392. The opening words of The Age of Reason: “It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion.” 52 Keane, 397. 50 51


15

Eight editions appeared in 1794, seven in 1795, two in 1796. In the year 1797, 100,000 copies were sold in America alone.53 Success, whether in Britain or America, did not mean approval: most readers, including many of Paine’s own friends, were scandalized at the ‘impious,’ disrespectful, iconoclastic audacity of the book. Although Paine’s work had originally been composed to keep the French from “running headlong into atheism,”54 it was immediately referred to, in the English-speaking world, as the “Devil’s Prayer-Book” or “the Bible of Atheism.”55 The Age of Reason was not the first critique of the Biblical text to be published during the Age of Enlightenment, but it was the first one to have been written in such simple and direct language, larded with wit, humor, verve, cheek (with at times a touch of demagoguery), a clever mixture of popular common sense and scientific analysis that could easily be grasped by the mass of ordinary people—those precisely whom the Bible and the established Churches had always endeavored to reach out to and control. As in the case of Rights of Man, it was this, more than anything else, that Paine was never forgiven for, especially in Britain and the United States (where the discreet Deism of leaders like Franklin or Jefferson had never really shocked anyone). And it was this ‘socially dangerous’ rejection of the Bible as “the word of God” that several American ecclesiastical envoys desperately—but vainly— tried to make Paine publicly recant toward the end of his life, including on his death-bed. One can indeed measure the impact of The Age of Reason by the number of ‘replies’ (most of them negative) that were printed in the months and years that followed the publication of Paine’s work. Nathalie Caron has established that 111 such ‘answers to Paine’ actually came out: none in France, one in Germany56—but 110 (almost equally distributed) in Great-Britain and the United States!57 53

Ibid., 396, 399. Paine’s letter to Samuel Adams (1 Jan. 1803), in FO 2: 1436. 55 W . E. Woodward, Tom Paine: America’s Godfather (New York: Dutton, 1945), 254. 56 F. W. Hagen, Vindicae Prophetarum Ebraicorum et Jesu Christi contra Thomam Paine ejusque libelli de vera et fictitia religione Germanicum interpretem (Nuremberg, 1798). 57 Nathalie Caron, Thomas Paine contre l’imposture des prêtres, 272-81, 323-28. Her full list (522-30) includes 69 replies published in the British Isles—with about 50 in England alone—as against 41 published in the United States.) 54

16


The most serious and distinguished of those ‘replies’ was An Apology for the Bible published in 1796 by Richard Watson, Bishop of the Welsh diocese of Llandaff.58 But Paine’s ‘success’ was this time highly counterproductive: instead of adding to his glory, as Common Sense and Rights of Man had done, it eventually ruined his reputation for many decades to come. More than a century after the publication of The Age of Reason, someone like Theodore Roosevelt was still calling Paine a “filthy little atheist,” describing the man as the worst possible sort of infidel, and his anti-religious book as nothing but a “bladder of dirty water” thrown at Christianity.59 * While writing Common Sense, Paine popularized two words which Benjamin Rush had insistently advised him “to avoid by every means as necessary to his safety and that of the public—Independence and Republicanism”60: six months later, the thirteen British colonies of America proclaimed themselves an ‘independent republic.’ In Rights of Man, Paine spoke for the universal character of human rights, insisting that those rights were not only of a political but also of a … social and economic order! In The Age of Reason, he affirmed his deistic faith in “one God, and no more,” condemned all inventors of religious fables, and went so far as to “vindicate the moral justice of God against the calumnies of the Bible.”61 Because of these radical ideas, Paine was either admired, abhorred or feared. But what was most feared by the powers-that-be, in England more than anywhere else, was less the subversive content of Paine’s philosophy than the fact that, instead of being confined to a select set of customary ‘happy few’ readers, his radical books and ‘devilish’ ideas were able to reach and contaminate the masses, and in so doing to undermine a system 58 Paine was still in France when the Bishop of Llandaff’s reply appeared. He immediately began to write a rebuttal, which he intended to publish, once back in the United States, as Part 3 of The Age of Reason. But no American publisher wanted to take the risk, and Paine’s rebuttal was not published until after his death. The text may be found in FO 2: 764-788. 59 Theodore Roosevelt, Gouverneur Morris (New York, 1888), 289. 60 Washington C. Ford, ed., “Letters of William Duane, 1800-1834,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 20 (1906-07), 279. 61 FO 1: 523.


17

based from time immemorial on the ignorance of the people. Those who rejected Common Sense, or banned Rights of Man, or called The Age of Reason “a pamphlet against Jesus Christ,”62 did so because they were able to perceive in Paine’s works what Marshall McLuhan was much later to theorize in Understanding Media (1964): the revolutionary and bewildering idea according to which the medium, beyond a certain degree of success, becomes the message.

62

Letter of Gouverneur Morris to Thomas Jefferson, 21 Jan. 1794, quoted in Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (Folcroft Library Edition, 1974), 202.


PART I PAINE, AMERICA AND FRANCE


I

The Strategy of Time in Common Sense

Occasional works are by nature doomed to oblivion—and nothing is more occasional than a political pamphlet. Among hundreds of documents of this type which preceded or accompanied the American Revolution,1 only Common Sense has managed to escape this fatality, finally to become an imperishable monument. How can this paradox be explained? How was it achieved? Through what stratagems—or strategy? * On January 10, 1776, six months before the Declaration of Independence, a short pamphlet entitled Common Sense appeared in Philadelphia. The work was anonymous, the author unknown. The publication of the pamphlet coincided to the very day with that of the repressive “King’s Speech to Parliament”2 in the local press, and give or take a few days, with the announcement of the embargo decreed by the House of Commons3: America was in an uproar. Common Sense 1 See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), in particular Chapter 1, “The Literature of Revolution”; Maurice W. Cranston, Philosophers and Pamphleteers: Political Theorists of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Howard Zinn, Artists in Times of War (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), particularly Chapter 4, “Pamphleteering In America.” Some 400 political pamphlets were published in the thirteen colonies between 1750 and 1776. 2 The King’s Speech to Parliament, 26 October 1775, was published in Philadelphia on January 10, 1776. It acknowledged the fact that “the rebellious War now levied is become more general, and is manifestly carried on for the Purpose of establishing an independent Empire,” and it solemnly aimed at putting “ a speedy End to these Disorders by the most decisive Exertions.” 3 The Prohibitory Act of 22 December 1775 forbade “all manner of trade and commerce” between England and the rebellious colonies and declared a blockade of the American coast.

22


had been drafted in a few short weeks, published with no or very little publicity; and yet—and this was the first paradox—during the course of the next few weeks or months 120,000 copies or so were sold in America alone, sparking off impassioned debates among people everywhere. From the outset, the chronology, the moment, and the circumstances were clearly the main ingredients of a work in which the action of time was transmuted by some instantaneous alchemy into action upon time. It is impossible to talk about time in Common Sense without instantly mentioning the impact that Common Sense had on time itself. Thomas Paine’s life was unique—and that is the second paradox—in that it began with the crossing of an endless wilderness. Paine disembarked at Philadelphia on November 30, 1774. The man had spent the first thirty-eight years of his existence in Britain, making corsets or occupying some obscure post as an Excise officer. And here we find him, only two years later, covered in glory, with Common Sense the biggest publishing success of the eighteenth century, and himself one of the leading lights of the American Revolution! Such a destiny, such a turnabout of fate, such a “revolution” in this up-to-then perfectly humdrum existence could not but give Paine a peculiar sense of the nature of time and endow Common Sense with an uncommon subversive power amid the surrounding slowness and gravity of things. If time could so radically and swiftly change the life of one man, what could the vagaries and turnabouts of fate not do to the life of a nation? This brings us to the third paradox. Between 1776 and 1783 Paine published in the wake of Common Sense sixteen articles or essays, under the heading The American Crisis. Signed “Common Sense,” these texts, read and acclaimed just as much as the original pamphlet, have the same single objective: to keep time from resuming its former heaviness; to ensure that the revolutionary enthusiasm and fervor continue, come what may, to strip away the cloak of history; to force inexorable time inexorably to change its course, its logic, its nature. Herein lies the fundamental paradox: to turn freedom into destiny, a fleeting moment into history, the present into transcendence; to catch time in the trap of time; to reconcile “kaïros” and Kronos, and be ready to depose Kronos, as Zeus, his own son, once did. Time and space: both are to be found at the heart of Common Sense, shoulder to shoulder in the same cause, bent on achieving the

The Strategy of Time

23

same object, and with geography, when need be, speeding to the aid of history. In Crisis II (13 January 1777), when the American troops were in a critical situation and when time seemed once more to be in the Crown’s favor, Paine, addressing his words to Admiral Richard Howe, brother of the commander-in-chief of the British forces, developed along these lines a spatial strategy based on a war of attrition, and the Fabian tactics dear to Washington, in which space turns out to be a mere auxiliary, or even a particular form or modality, of time: Your advantages turn out to your loss, and show us that it is in our power to ruin you by gifts: like a game of drafts, we can move out of one square to let you come in, in order that we may afterwards take two or three for one; and as we can always keep a double corner for ourselves, we can always prevent a total defeat. You cannot be so insensible as not to see that we have two to one the advantage of you, because we conquer by a drawn game, and you lose by it . . . Were you to garrison the places you might march over, in order to secure their subjection . . . , your army would be like a stream of water running to nothing. By the time you extended from New York to Virginia, you would be reduced to a string of drops not capable of hanging together; while we, by retreating from state to state, like a river turning back upon itself, would acquire strength in the same proportion as you lose it, and in the end be capable of overwhelming you.4

“Like a river turning back upon itself”: this fluid strategy of space is also, in a way, the strategy of time brought into play by Common Sense—with this not inconsiderable difference, however, that time is more complex than space, that it can be interpreted in many different ways, that Paine plays on the diverseness of the concept and bases his strategy precisely on its fundamental polysemy. We shall attempt, therefore, to unravel the skein, to see what subterfuges went hand in hand with such an unwonted use of time, and to understand how Paine managed, once Kronos had been deposed, or at least shaken to the very core, to ensure that a dark and unbending past actually gave way to what he was later to call “the morning of Reason.”5

4

FO 1: 67, 68. Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 230 (afterwards referred to as RM). 5

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1. The Polemic Use of Time Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense at the very moment when Britain’s American colonies were on the verge of going over the brink, when time was in a turmoil, the past struggling for survival, the future uncertain, the present elusive, and when, nonetheless, all the different forms of time seemed to be converging on the same focal point, there to unite and crystallize: at the very spot where a new but hesitant history was about to be born. It was the Americans themselves who in fact were wavering: at the intersection of a maternal past which they still cherished, of an adult and autonomous future, and of a somewhat chaotic present, they were uncertain about which time to commit themselves to, which to abolish or which to summon in. They needed a new voice, speaking with confidence, and perhaps from outside, to tell them, “’TIS TIME 6 TO PART.” Building on this confusion in people’s minds, Paine turned time to his advantage, using it like some polemical weapon, and stretching it out with infinite artistry—and at times artifice—in the direction of that massive collective drift towards American independence. “Common sense” must also be construed as meaning “common direction,” the common arrow of time. Following this arrow will take us from the imaginary past to the imagined future, with the present forming a hiatus between the two—a sort of a-temporal seat of freedom where reason is at liberty to recast history. To define the present as the source of all history implies an allout rejection of the past, and that is indeed what Common Sense is essentially about. But the use Paine makes of this dimension of time is not without contradictions. For instance, not hesitating to cite as proof the very past that he condemns, he looks for inspiration sometimes to mythical time (the state of nature) in order to explain the origin of governments (CS, 66), sometimes to biblical time to describe the beginning of monarchy or hereditary succession (CS, 72-76), and sometimes to historical time to denounce the doubtful origins of the English monarchy (CS, 77-80). All of that was sheer polemics: nothing more nor less than an attempt to counter the upholders of 6 Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1982), 87 (afterwards referred to as CS).


25

custom and tradition on their own ground. Moreover, Paine was well aware that his readers knew the Bible inside out, that none of them had forgotten England’s recent past, and that the ideas of Locke on the origin of political power were familiar to a good many of them. It is not surprising, then, that he made rhetorical use of all these pieces of history which, whether real or imaginary, militated so forcibly in favor of both independence and the republic. But, deep down, the validity of the past is well and truly rejected. The dead, Common Sense contends, have no legitimate claim to govern the living; the present belongs to itself, and forfeits its nature if it consents to be no more than a mechanical and morbid extension of centuries past. In Rights of Man (1791-92) things will be made even clearer. Attacking Edmund Burke and his mystical cult of tradition, Paine will describe the past as being a grave (“the tomb of time” [RM, 190]), a dark night (“the obscure field of antiquity” [RM, 207]), a sepulchre, and a form of tyranny. Whoever establishes a regime and wishes to justify its continuation from one generation to another by calling on the authority of tradition makes of time both a despot and a usurper. Not only does he bequeath to those who come after a polity which is not of their own choosing, but, in addition, he forces them to live under an hereditary form of government which, by definition, the founder himself was not subject to. This is the height of the perversion of time. Hence the necessity for any man capable of reason not to allow himself to be walled up within the “sepulchre of precedents,” where the upholders of tradition, those “ghosts of departed wisdom” (RM, 218, 219), would like to keep him forever. Precedent is not law. There is no such thing as an authority of the past. Time is a monarch or a tyrant only for those who regard it as sacred. Paine’s attachment to the present as the pulse of history, as the historic time of the living, does not prevent him from making incursions—rhetorical or polemical—into the future: a time to come, upon which he simply projects the various potentialities of the present, foreseeing the worst for America if the loyalists get the upper hand (a king motivated by a desire for revenge [CS, 92-93], seizure of power by some foreign adventurer [CS, 98], internecine war between the colonies [CS, 95]); or, on the other hand, describing an America at last independent, “now descending to the scenes of quiet and domestic life . . . to enjoy in her own land and under her own vine the sweet of her

26


labors and the reward of her toil.”7 Here looms a new contradiction: if the past does not command the present, the present, as Paine sees it, certainly has command over the future. Thus, the right he denies his forebears he accords to himself, and along with himself, to a whole generation: in his eyes, proclaiming independence and setting up a republic are irrevocable acts: “’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time by the proceedings now” (CS, 82). In Rights of Man, Paine will get out of this contradiction most elegantly by proposing a type of constitution not fixed or frozen forever, but subject at will to revision by future generations. Nonetheless, the present so vaunted and proclaimed in Common Sense is more than just the present; it is affected by temporal transcendence (“The cause of America is in a large measure the cause of all mankind” [CS, 63]) and it quite clearly carries with it something of a prophetic or even messianic nature: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A similar situation to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand” (CS, 120). Utterly cut off from the past, America finds herself, as it were, outside of time, somewhere before or after history, and there is consequently no gap between the present and what naturally extends and perpetuates it. Rights of Man will go further than Common Sense in this respect. There, in addition to the wiping out of the past, Paine will refer to the utter newness of America, and to the pioneer virginity of a continent set, so to speak, in times prior to time: “The case and circumstances of America present themselves as in the beginning of a world . . . We are brought at once to the point of seeing government begin, as if we had lived in the beginning of time. The real volume, not of history, but of facts, is directly before us, unmutilated by contrivance, or the errors of tradition” (RM, 207). With the past consigned to the shadows, time relieved of its weightiness, the immediate terrain cleared of all obstacles (save the British occupying forces), and with the future like a new book to be written in the present, America is seen, in these ideal circumstances, as a nation free to choose its own destiny with a lack of constraint previously unknown to man in any age or place. Such is, in 7

FO 1: 231 (Crisis XIII).


27

its naïve form and force, the adamic message conveyed by Common Sense. Just like Jefferson, Thomas Paine acknowledged the legitimate right of each generation, and in particular his own, to reconstruct the world and reset the clock of the universe to zero. Time must indeed be magnanimous, since history—American history at any rate—was in great measure to prove them right: independence was achieved and the republic was established.

2. An Ambiguous Concept If in Common Sense Thomas Paine takes liberties with time, if he manhandles the concept and exploits it for purposes of persuasion and for polemic reasons, if he uses time for his own ends just as he does nature, it is because the concept itself suffers from a vagueness which undoubtedly detracts from the intellectual rigor of the pamphlet, but which lends itself admirably to the art of the pamphleteer. The ambiguity of Common Sense with regard to time and the use to which it is put results from the same word being invested with a variety of seemingly irreconcilable meanings, with on the one hand mechanical time and the time of God, and on the other hand the time of Man. How do these complex elements interrelate and how, in the final analysis, can their contradictions be smoothed out? “Time makes more converts than reason” (CS, 63). Time is first of all a teacher, a better teacher than doctrines, theories or writings, including Common Sense (unless, of course, Paine’s pamphlet is to be read as a piece of time). Nature’s great book goes hand in hand with the book of mechanical time, with its successive chapters, numbered pages, inescapable order. The break with Britain is already inscribed in it, recorded, fatum, and no one can wipe clean or tear out a single page: “Like all other truths discovered by necessity, [independence] will appear stronger and stronger every day” (CS, 116). There is, thus, a time of the world, a force of events, a necessary history, a path laid out and signposted, with here and there rivers to cross, as irremeable as the Styx, as decisive as the Rubicon (“The Rubicon is passed” [CS, 119]). That time is irreversible. It dictates our separations, the beginning and the end of eras. Man has no say in the matter: “The period of debate is closed” (CS, 82). You who speak to us of harmony and reconciliation, Paine tells the loyalists, “can ye restore to us the time that is past?” (CS, 99). The teaching force of circumstances

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sooner or later illuminates human reason, and from that moment when man half glimpses a possible advance toward freedom, no power in the world can reverse the order of time, which has suddenly become the order of his conscience. “When once any object has been seen,” Paine was to write in Rights of Man, “it is impossible to put the mind back to the same condition it was in before it saw it . . . it has never been discovered, how to make man unknow his knowledge, or unthink his thoughts” (RM, 140, 141). Doubters must therefore remain silent, or convert. American independence and the establishment of the republic belong to the realm of inevitability. But the doubters could not, any more than the patriots or Paine himself, be satisfied with such an implacable necessity. To place one’s trust in the force of circumstances, or in the perpetuity of the Crown, did not exempt anyone from believing in God and in His capacity to intervene in the affairs of the world. Alongside the time of necessity there appears, then, in Common Sense, another category of time: that of the Almighty, or of Providence, or of Grace. Paine is convinced, and openly admits, “that God governs the world.”8 Comparing various great human events, he asks himself whether the American Revolution “may be called one.”9 Occasionally, providential time may of course be the accomplice of Kronos: Why was the Reformation preceded by the discovery of America if not, in fact, because “the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years”? (CS, 87). But it is also possible for God to intervene against the tide of events, as if to deflect the arrow of time. Thus, for instance, does He induce fiendish General Howe to commit certain strategic errors (in particular in November 1776 during the retreat of the American troops from New Jersey to Pennsylvania); one must assume, Paine then observes, that the agents of Hell “are under some providential control.”10 Whether divine intervention simply accompanies the mechanical course of events, or imperiously forces the hand of destiny by reversing the most desperate situations, it is indeed God, and His grace, who finally rules over the work—here, the revolutionary work—of time.

8 9

FO 1: 54 (Crisis I). Ibid., 232 (Crisis XIII). Ibid., 52 (Crisis I).

10


29

Obviously, the Puritan doctrine of predestination was still present in the age of Enlightenment. In Paine’s case, however, neo-Calvinism was sufficiently tempered, despite the apparent contradiction, to exclude neither reason nor free will: “Throw not the burden of the day upon Providence,” he told the insurgents, but “‘show your faith by your works’.”11 In other words, of all the things that befall men God is only responsible for one half, or perhaps one third, another third having its origin in necessity, and the final third in mankind itself. Necessity and Providence do not impose absolute rigidity upon time; there is some space left for maneuver, some room for flexibility, sufficient leeway for human time to intervene. The independence of the continent is inevitable, but if it is so, Paine points out, it is “as an event which sooner or later must arrive” (CS, 91, emphasis mine). Time, therefore, has an elasticity which allows man to modify, if not the nature, then at least the rhythm of history. Or again, in the same vein, toward the end of 1775: “The present winter is worth an age, if rightly employed, but if lost or neglected the whole continent will partake of the misfortune” (CS, 89). To an occasionally well-disposed God we must respond with something more than resignation and fatalism; both Grace and Necessity need the help of human works if they are to succeed. Man is party to a history which, when all is said and done, is also his own. In Rights of Man, Paine will—once more—go somewhat further, highlighting, in a manner this time more reminiscent of the Age of Enlightenment, the preeminent role played by the intellect in the making of history: “The progress of time and circumstances, which men assign to the accomplishment of great changes, is too mechanical to measure the force of the mind . . . by which revolutions are generated” (RM, 165). This idealistic statement of belief (already quoted in our “Introduction”) means that, by a sort of psychokinetic effect, the mind (here the influence of pre-Revolutionary philosophes) bends, contracts, accelerates, precipitates, in short directs the curve and course of time. Therefore the intellectual dynamic, the magnetism of reason, the strength of the mind are to be recognized, in the same way as God and Necessity, as prime movers of history, as driving forces behind the reality of time. The immediate and powerful influence of Common Sense in the months that followed its 11

Ibid., 55.

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publication seem indeed to corroborate this particular view of things. The force of circumstances, the omnipotence of God, the dynamic impetus of the mind: a miracle is needed to reconcile so many opposites, to bring these scattered arrows of time and history to converge on the same spot. This astounding accomplishment, apparently achieved by Common Sense, we shall call the strategy of coincidence.

3. The Strategy of Coincidence I have never met with a man, either in England or in America, who has not confessed his opinion that a separation between the countries would take place one time or other . . . As all men allow the measure, let us, in order to remove mistakes, take a general survey of things and endeavour, if possible, to find out the very time. But we need not go far; the inquiry ceases at once, for the time has found us. The general concurrence, the glorious union of all things prove the fact. (CS, 100)

One idea obsesses Thomas Paine from the first to the last page of Common Sense—namely, that alongside this multiplicity of times which govern the world, there exists an historical tempo, a rhythm to events, now slow, now spasmodic; an alternation of quiet and hectic phases; miraculous conjunctions, unforeseen and undreamed of encounters; historical marriages where opposites are joined in wedlock, finally producing “the general concurrence, the glorious union of all things.” These fragile parentheses in which the various forms of time suddenly fuse and become one Paine calls “the very time” or “the present opportunity”(CS, 108) or again “seasonable juncture[s]” (CS, 113). When the times of Necessity, Providence and Man coincide in this manner, when they unexpectedly combine, and dispel their irreducible contradictions for a while, then history becomes moment, momentum, movement, mutation. No longer a trinity, the various times, working now as one, can carry out their common task. But in what ways was America favored, during the period 177576, by the particular circumstances then prevailing? Politically, says Paine, in the following way (the prophetic character of which is quite astonishing): It might be difficult, if not impossible, to form the continent into one government half a century hence. The vast variety of interests, occasioned by an increase of trade and population, would create confusion. Colony would be


31

against colony . . . Wherefore the present time is the true time for establishing it. (CS, 108)

And militarily thus: At the conclusion of the last war [1763], we had experience but wanted numbers, and forty or fifty years hence we shall have numbers without experience; wherefore the proper point of time must be some particular point between the two extremes, in which a sufficiency of the former remains and a proper increase of the latter is obtained. And that point of time is the present time. (CS, 116)

Paine did not believe in the cyclical theories of history. He was convinced that history never passes the same way twice and that America’s situation was of the kind “which never happens to a nation but once” (CS, 108). Out of this conviction was to be born his strategy—a strategy based on historical opportunism, and that can be summed up as follows: making the most of coincidence; being able, at the right moment, to synchronize one’s own efforts with the action of circumstances or of Heaven; uniting one’s free will with Necessity and Grace; bringing to earth at the self-same spot the three arrows of time. At such little cost (with its echo of Taoist wisdom) nations are founded, republics set up, new historical eras ushered in. This way of thinking which, with the benefit of hindsight, seems self-evident, was at the time far from being a matter of course. It necessitated, in those days of confusion and painful soul-searching, a lucidity and audacity quite out of the ordinary. But, more than that, it implied, and heralded too, an unprecedented vision of ‘man in the world.’ For the independence advocated by Paine was not simply a break with Britain; it was also, at least in part, a means of severing the links with a history hitherto subject to forces and powers external to man himself. Simultaneously, the wished-for setting-up of an American Republic meant not simply a rejection of the divine right of monarchs, or of the sacred person of the king; it was also, at least in part, a way of denying the divinization or fetishization of history, and of establishing man as an actor, or co-actor, in his own history. This incipient revolution, which the time of men was soon to complete, is what Paine later called, as previously stated, “the morning of Reason.” * To conclude will be an easy task. How can we account for the fact that a 50-page pamphlet by an unknown writer, published if not at the

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author’s expense, then at least without any large-scale publicity, could be reprinted in a multitude of newspapers and gazettes, with pirate copies appearing everywhere, and finally be read by some 500,000 Americans out of a total population of 2,5 million? How is it that such a modest piece of writing, soon to be published and acclaimed throughout Europe, was able to convert to the dual cause of independence and republicanism tens of thousands of American colonists, including a whole section of the political elite, and eventually make such a powerful contribution to that revolution in consciousness which shortly after was to achieve its crowning glory in the Declaration of Independence? What possible explanation can there be for the fascination, still felt in some measure today, which Common Sense then held? None other, it seems, but the magic which from the outset presided over the relationship between time and the pamphlet, endowing it with a peculiar force that is not to be found in any of the other political writings of that age. To sum up: putting aside the tricks and wordplay used for polemic effect, what Paine, at the very right moment, set before the American colonists was a strategy of time perfectly in tune with a circumstance in their history when the confusion of men and events was at its height. Even the best minds were then spinning giddily in the whirlpool of time. No more were present, past, or future in their appointed places. The arrows of time were like compass needles swinging wildly from side to side. Human thought had no points of reference left. The course of events, the ways of Heaven, and the paths of men no longer seemed to have a common direction. The old Puritanism and the Enlightenment were still locked in indecisive combat. History was wavering. The slightest push could tip the balance one way or the other, suddenly and irresistibly carrying everything away in one direction—like a stream once again true to its course, or “like a river turning back upon itself.” That push, in fact, which in one single movement was to gather and marshal all the fragments of time and set American history in motion, was, more than anything else, provided by Common Sense. And the river suddenly turning back upon itself and abruptly changing its course was nothing


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else but what John Adams was soon to call “Independence like a torrent.”12 The fascination that Common Sense held for its readers was that of a piece of writing in direct contact with time, and which, to some extent, was able to master it—a superhuman achievement for the work of a mortal man, an achievement which probably ensured its perpetual glory. It might also be said that the fact that the author was totally unknown, and that the pamphlet was originally published anonymously, added to the mysterious and magical force surrounding it. These strange circumstances no doubt induced many of Paine’s contemporaries to regard Common Sense as one of those disturbing texts which from time to time history has the knack of producing—a Word falling from nowhere, to bring meaning and sense to a world of chaos.

12

John Adams, letter to James Warren, 20 May 1776, Warren-Adams Letters, Being Chiefly a Correspondence Among John Adams, Samuel Adams and James Warren (New York: AMS Press, 1979 [1925]), 1: 249.


II

Thomas Paine, the Masonic Order, and the American Revolution

As it happens, it was through Thomas Paine that I became interested in early American Freemasonry. 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 an Excise officer—onto the American literary-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 had become 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. Some time before he left England in 1774, Paine met Benjamin Franklin in London—Franklin, the founding father of Freemasonry in Pennsylvania, and future Venerable of the famous Lodge of the Nine Sisters in Paris where he was to preside over Voltaire’s initiation on April 7, 1778.1 In his Revolution and Freemasonry, the French historian Bernard Faÿ goes so far as to say that it was Franklin himself who then converted Paine to the Masonic creed.2 However, he does

1 On Franklin as Freemason, see Ronald E. Heaton, Masonic Membership of the Founding Fathers (Silver Spring, MA.: Masonic Service Association, 1974), 18-19. 2 Bernard Faÿ, Revolution and Freemasonry, 1680-1800 (Boston: Little, 1935); La franc-maçonnerie et la révolution intellectuelle du XVIIIesiècle (Paris: Cluny, 1935), 156.

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not give any factual evidence in support of his assertion. The only thing we know for sure is that on September 30, 1774, on the very eve of his departure from London, Paine was given by Franklin a letter of recommendation addressed to his son-in-law, Richard Bache, himself a Mason3 and a wealthy businessman in Philadelphia. It was Bache who guided Paine’s first steps in that city, where he was to live until 1787, and where he met, among many other colonial Masons, John Witherspoon, Frederick Mulhenberg, Benjamin Rush, David Rittenhouse, William and Thomas Bradford—and, some time later, Henry Laurens, the Lee brothers, General Roberdeau, Robert Morris, Nathanael Greene, Joel Barlow, Thomas Jefferson (whose membership is not proven), and of course George Washington.4 And who were to become his friends in revolutionary France? Danton, Condorcet, Lafayette, Sieyès, Brissot, La Rochefoucauld, Duchâtelet, all Masons. And where did he stay after his release from prison in Paris? First with Nicolas de Bonneville and then with James Monroe, both of them well known as Freemasons. 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,5 in which he traces back the birth of Masonry to the ancient rituals of druidism. (This essay was published only after his death.) 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—questioned because non-Masonic scholars cannot have direct access to English Masonic archives—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 that he was not a member of the order.”6 Whether or not he was initiated, it is most unlikely that Paine ever

3

Mentioned as a member of Lodge No. 2 in Norris Stanley Barrett & Julius Sachse, Freemasonry in Pennsylvania, 1727-1907, as shown in the records of Lodge No. 2 (Philadelphia, 1908-1919), 2: 438. 4 Evidence of their membership is to be found either in Heaton or Barrett, or in documents issued by the Library of the Supreme Council, 33° (Washington, D.C.). 5 New York, 1810. 6 Audrey Williamson, Thomas Paine: His Life, Work and Times (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 237.

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became a member of a British lodge, if only because English Freemasonry was at that time closely connected with aristocracy and even with the king or his entourage: thus the Duke of Cumberland, Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge until 1790, was succeeded by the future George IV! In France, although Philippe-Égalité and the future Charles X were also Freemasons, the situation was somewhat different. French lodges (and Paris had no less than 81 lodges) seem to have been socially and politically more open. During the Revolution, the French capital even had an “American Lodge” ( known as “la loge des Américains”) which numbered no less than 143 members—but in whose records Paine’s name never appears. Nor does it appear on any of the lists recently established by Alain Le Bihan regarding the respective memberships of “le Grand Orient” and “la Grande Loge de France.”7 And yet Bernard Faÿ maintains that Paine was a Mason. And so do Dr. Robinet in his Danton émigré,8 and Franck Alengry in his biography of Concorcet,9 and Brissot himself alluding in his Memoirs to his “friend Bonneville and Thomas Payne . . . who pride themselves on possessing every single secret of the Order.”10 But Brissot’s remark is no proof: studying the secrets of Freemasonry, or even “possessing” them or some of them, does not necessarily imply that one is a member (I am not a member). In much the same way, Ignace Guillotin, the humanitarian inventor of the guillotine, recorded in his diary that he “attended Lodge in company with Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Paine from the American states.”11 But this again is no proof, for there were, and there still are today, two types of Masonic meetings: some open to non-members and others “tiled” (i.e. with the tiler, or warden,

7

Alain Le Bihan, Francs-maçons parisiens du Grand Orient de France (fin du XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1966); Loges et chapitres du Grand Orient et de la Grande Loge (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1967). 8 Dr. Robinet, Danton émigré (Paris, 1887), 8. 9 Frank Alengry, Condorcet, guide de la Révolution française (Paris, 1904), 19. 10 J.-P. Brissot de Warville, Mémoires relatifs à la Révolution française (Paris, 1830), 1: 218. “Mon ami Bonneville et Thomas Payne . . . qui se piquent de posséder tous les secrets de l’Ordre.” 11 The quote from Guillotin’s diary is to be found in a “special file on Thomas Paine” at the Library of the Supreme Council, 33° (Washington, D.C.). In spite of intense research, I have been unable to find the original document.

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standing outside the outer door to keep off “cowans” [uninitiated people], eavesdroppers and other unauthorized persons). More convincing perhaps is the testimony provided by R. Le Forestier in his famous book on the Bavarian Illuminati, a subversive secret society founded in 1776 at Ingoldstadt by an enlightened and ambitious eccentric called Adam Weishaupt. Le Forestier writes that in 1794 (at a time when Thomas Paine was a member of the Convention in Paris), Count Lehrbach, imperial ambassador in Munich, sent to Vienna a list of illustrious Illuminati containing, among others, the names of “the Duke of Orléans, Necker, La Fayette, Barnave, Brissot, La Rochefoucauld, Mirabeau, Payne, Fauchet, for France.”12 This is indeed an official document, but it is not the record of a specific Masonic lodge, and besides one could actually belong to the Illuminati without necessarily being a Mason. So, again, we are left with no satisfactory evidence. My investigations in the United States have not been more successful. The name “Thomas Paine” does appear on several Masonic rosters of the Revolutionary period (in Boston, Albany and Providence), but there is no evidence whatsoever that the man thus listed was the historic figure. Similarly, local records do mention the creation in 1792 of a “Paine’s Lodge No. 27” at Amenia, N.Y., but at the time it was not uncommon for lodges to take the name of such and such famous man who had never been initiated. In 1809, when Paine died, the Grand Lodges of both Louisiana and Georgia honored his memory with solemn orations, while the Grand Lodge of South Carolina organized a mourning procession in the streets. But who was actually honored in these celebrations: the hypothetical Freemason? Or the apostle of Reason? Or the champion of the rights of man? One cannot say with any certainty. If we are to understand Paine’s intellectual itinerary, it is quite enough to know that, though he probably never belonged to any specific fraternity, he nevertheless actively sympathized with the Masonic movement and the philosophy it espoused. Masonic thought had much in common with his own deistic outlook and his own cult of reason, and it was part of the great intellectual swirl of the age of Enlightenment wherefrom he derived most of his creeds as a

12 R. Le Forestier, Les Illuminés de Bavière et la franc-maçonnerie allemande (Paris, 1915), 654.

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rationalist. Therefore it was into ideas rather than into rituals that Franklin initiated his protégé, inasmuch as he initiated him into anything. Paine’s psychology is here more convincing than material evidence. A rugged individualist, Paine neither liked collective ceremonies nor secret practices; he dreamed, instead, of an open form of democracy, of a see-through republic with a public life as transparent as a palace of glass. 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. “My own mind is my own church”: no words could describe better than this key sentence of The Age of Reason a man who could at best become a ‘fellow-traveler,’ as we say today, but whose real vocation was to espouse causes, not structures. Why then bother, some might rightfully ask, about Paine’s relationship with an organization to which in all probability he never belonged? Well, just as penicillin was serendipitously invented by a scientist who was in fact looking for something else, so studying Paine in that context, i.e. against the background of Masonic organization and militancy, inevitably led me to widen the scope of my research— and of my inconclusive findings—to the role of Freemasonry in the American revolution at large. The paradox is that, although I did not find much about Paine in terms of positive data, I discovered quite a number of interesting things about the larger issue that had hitherto been unjustly neglected. Let me then lift here at least one tiny corner of the veil. * While non-Masonic historians have, with very few exceptions, tended to overlook the underground role of lodges in the American Revolution,13 the great majority of Masonic scholars have on the 13 In the Harvard Guide to American History (1974 edition), not a single page, not even a single entry deals with early Freemasonry. A Guide to the Study of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1960; suppl. 1976) has one entry on Freemasonry out of a total of 9,430. In Ronald M. Gephart’s more recent bibliography of the Revolution (Revolutionary America, 1763-1789. A Bibliography, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1984)), Freemasonry is allotted 1/4 page out of 1,671, and 6 entries out of a total of 14,810. As regards standard historians

40


contrary been prone to overrate their real impact. This neglect on the part of traditional historians may be ascribed to either skepticism, academic routine, or to some legitimate distrust of occult activities; but an important reason for their wariness probably lies in the fact that in such a field secondary as well as primary sources must be handled with particular care. Consider, for instance, the Declaration of Independence and its 56 signers: how many of them have been identified as Masons? The answer varies considerably from one enumerator to another. William Grimshaw gives a list of 51 Masonic signers, as only against 8 in Henry Coil’s Encyclopedia. William Boyden suggests 29; Ronald Heaton 9; Philip Roth 20; and the George Washington Masonic National Memorial Library 30.14 Which of these are we to believe? And how can such differences be accounted for? The main problem lies in fact with primary sources, whose unreliability has been, and still is, a frequent cause of error. The early lodges and Provincial Grand Lodges were careless about the keeping of records and minutes. Early Masonic records were not always wellwritten or, if written at all, were not always carefully preserved. In Colonial days many lodges functioned for a short time only, leaving no trace whatsoever of their transient existence. And during the War of Independence there were many so-called “Army Lodges,” which conferred degrees, but kept no records or destroyed them for lack of a safe and permanent place to store them in. Over the years a fair amount of Masonic records were destroyed as a result of warfare, or were lost by fire,15 or discarded by heedless holders through ignorance of their value, or disposed of to prevent disclosure. Also, in the

of the United States or of the American Revolution, they rarely make more than casual allusions to the Masonic Order—a few scattered lines for the sake of local color. A few recent publications have tried to throw some light on this neglected dimension of early American history: Neil L. York, “Freemasons and the American Revolution,” The Historian 55 (1993): 315-30; Allen E. Roberts, Freemasonry in American History (Richmond: Macoy, 1985); Stephen C. Bullock, “The Revolutionary Transformation of American Freemasonry, 1752-1792,” William and Mary Quarterly 37 (1990): 347-69. 14 These authors are listed in the bibliography. 15 A good instance of this was the burning of the Masonic Hall in Philadelphia (standing on the north side of Chestnut Street) on March 8, 1818. Although part of the records of the Provincial Grand Lodge were destroyed, many of the old papers were saved, and taken to the house of the Grand Secretary, George A. Baker, Jr.

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eighteenth century, it was quite customary to treat the initiation16 of a candidate as merely the impartation of secrets, without making him a member of any specific lodge or even entitling him to membership until voted in by some lodge, on payment of the necessary fee. Besides, prior to the establishment of Grand Lodges, it was not infrequent for a prominent Masonic figure to make some illustrious member of his entourage a Mason without further ceremony, i.e. without any tangible trace left. As we shall see later, confusion was also caused at the time by the fact that in the thirteen Colonies there were two separate Masonic systems which often operated as rivals, or at least as competitors. This makes the early history of American Masonry even more difficult to decipher, at least until 1813, when the two rival Grand Lodges finally merged, in England as well as in America. On the whole, what characterizes the surviving vestiges of Masonic life in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is that they are, more often than not, ‘gappy’ or fragmentary or confused or all three. Finding relevant Masonic documents is, then, hardly an easy task. Interpreting them may prove to be a risky venture, as is evidenced by the following anecdote. In his fairly reliable listing of “10,000 famous Freemasons,”17 William Denslow surprisingly identifies James Madison as a Mason, on the basis of a letter sent to him on February 11, 1795 by John Francis Mercer, Governor of Maryland.18 The passage quoted by Denslow reads: “I have had no opportunity of congratulating you on becoming a Free Mason, a very ancient and honorable fraternity.” If this was no proof, I thought to myself, what could be? Some time later, however, I was able to read Mercer’s letter in its entirety, and found to my astonishment that his hint at Masonry was a mere joke, a play on words, a metaphor; that in fact Mercer was congratulating Madison on his recent marriage; that the “fair prophetess who has converted you to the true faith” was no other than 16

“The basic system of Masonry, the ‘Blue Lodge,’ contained three degrees of membership: a new member was ‘initiated’ to become an entered Apprentice, ‘passed’ to become Fellow Craftsman, and ‘raised’ to the Master’s degree” (Dorothy Ann Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789-1835 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977]). 17 William R. Denslow, 10,000 Famous Freemasons, 4 vols. (Richmond: Macoy, 1957-1961). 18 Mercer’s letter to Madison has recently been published as part of Volume XV of The Papers of James Madison (University of Virginia, 1985).

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his wife, Dolley Payne Todd; and that the initiation into Masonry to which Mercer referred was nothing but an initiation into the bonds and mysteries of married life. Although an obvious source of error, this Masonic metaphor is nevertheless interesting and significant in that it shows how important Freemasonry was in the mental world of eighteenth-century Americans. The final scales about Madison fell from my eyes when I discovered that in 1832 he himself had denied the rumors which were then being spread about his membership: “I never was a Mason,” he wrote to Stephen Bates,19 thus refuting allegations which then, the anti-Masonic crusade being in full swing, might have hurt his political reputation. * Prior to the Revolutionary period, Freemasonry existed in the Colonies only in an embryonic form. One of the earliest American Masonic manuscripts dates back to 167720; but it was only around 1730 that Freemasonry actually became established in British America. In 1734 Benjamin Franklin printed Anderson’s Constitutions originally published in London in 1723: James Anderson was the Grand Master of the First Grand Lodge of England, a central Masonic organization which had resulted from the unification, in 1717, of the “Four Old Lodges” then operating in the London area. Under that First Grand Lodge, also known as the Premier Grand Lodge of the World, began an era of Masonic expansion within the British Empire and beyond. Patronized by royalty, the Craft (i.e. the Masonic Fraternity) spread rapidly throughout Great Britain and the American Colonies. In imitation of their English brethren, the Masons of Ireland and Scotland founded, in 1725 and 1736 respectively, Grand Lodges of their own. The First Grand Lodge of England developed a pronounced aristocratic and elitist tendency, recruiting most of its members among gentlemen of culture and substance, selecting its grand officers from a limited privileged class, and denying admission to Irish workers

19 On Madison’s letter to Stephen Bates, and on the debatable date of the letter, see Ronald E. Heaton, Masonic Membership of the Founding Fathers (Silver Spring, Md.: Masonic Service Association, 1974), 141-43. 20 “Carlson ms.” in Massachusetts. Mentioned in Hugo Tatsch, Freemasonry in the Thirteen Colonies (New York: Macoy, 1929), 20.

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residing in London. The official reason was that they were affiliated with the Grand Lodge of Ireland, but the real motive was that socially they did not belong in the same league. Under the leadership of Lawrence Dermott, who soon allied himself with the Grand Lodge of Scotland, these rejected Masons formed their own lodges, declaring themselves to be “Antient Masons,” i.e. faithful to the old tradition of Operative Lodges, while the Grand Lodge of England was opprobriously called “Modern,” because of its new selective approach to fraternity. This breach had far-reaching consequences in the history of the American Colonies.21 Because they recruited from every walk of life, the lodges of “Antients” were more democratic in substance and tended to attract budding republicans, whereas most conservativeminded colonists would naturally join “Modern” lodges, openly patronized by provincial governors and leading notables.22 Hierarchically, the Moderns were utterly dependent on England (through Provincial Grand Masters), while the Antients were connected with the Grand Lodges of either Ireland or Scotland, whose statutes were much less constraining and more respectful of local autonomy—a circumstance which probably favored, among the Colonial “Antients,” the development of a more independent turn of mind. Such was the case in Boston for instance, with St John’s Lodge (Moderns) founded by Henry Price in 1733, and St Andrew’s Lodge (Antients) organized at the Green Dragon Tavern in 1752, a lodge chiefly composed of merchants, seafaring men, artisans and mechanics. The Green Dragon Tavern, which was also the meeting place of the Sons of Liberty and of the North End Caucus (“a band of stalwart, daring and fearless mechanics”)23 was described as “a nest of 21

For a detailed description of the schism between Antients and Moderns, see Sidney Morse, Freemasonry in the American revolution, Volume III of The Little Masonic Library (Kingsport, Tenn.: Southern Publishers, Inc., 1946), 226-30. 22 S. Morse, Freemasonry in the American revolution, 243. 23 Ibid., 252. St Andrew’s Lodge purchased the Green Dragon Tavern in 1764 and changed its name to “Freemason’s Hall,” by which name it was known until 1818 when the lodge moved to the Exchange Coffee House. On the whole, the social picture of Freemasonry during the Revolution was, it seems, more complex than the one described by Henry Wilson Coil: “It is probable that most Freemasons in the Colonies were for the Revolution, not because they were Freemasons, but rather because they were of the less wealthy class. Many of the prominent Freemasons were well off and were Tories” (Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia [New York, 1961], 525).

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sedition” by the royal governor of Massachusetts and as the “Headquarters of the Revolution” by Daniel Webster.24 Yet it would be wrong to say that all Antients were to become patriots while all Moderns remained loyal to the Crown, even if such was the dominant trend. Lodges, whatever their allegiance, were all affected by political dissension and some of them were so divided that they had to cease functioning.25 Another reason why lodges were often obliged to suspend operation was the regular absence of their members, many of whom were fighting on the battlefields. Therefore, early American Freemasonry can be split into two distinct periods: (1) Colonial times, when urban lodges played a leading role; (2) the Revolutionary war, when traveling Army Lodges took over and became central to the Masonic movement. Curiously, it was only during the decade preceding the Revolution, and during the Revolution itself, that American Freemasonry thrived and grew in a spectacular way. Was there a relation of cause and effect between these two phenomena? That is precisely the question which this chapter will try to answer. * Here then are some figures and a selection of events, some wellknown, some less known, but the bulk of which is fairly impressive: – Prior to the Revolution, there were more than 100 stationary lodges in the Colonies and upward of 50 traveling military lodges. During the Revolution about 25 additional military lodges were created (10 in the Continental Army and 15 in the British ranks, in addition to the 50 Army Lodges that had come to America along with the British troops). The 24 Colonial lodges of New England doubled in number during the war. The Middle Colonies had 32 lodges before 1775, and 47 at the end of hostilities, while Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas could boast some 30 Colonial lodges thanks to which “Masonic light” could be spread in the South. The city of Boston had 6 lodges prior to the Revolution, and 10 lodges had been established in Philadelphia when the first Continental Congress met in 1774 (4 “Modern,” 5 “Antient,” plus one Scotch lodge). The Masonic 24 25

S. Morse, 242. See Lipson, Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 51n.15a.

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population of Philadelphia and vicinity at that time is estimated to have been upward of 1,000, i.e. about 3% of the total population, as against 2.5% in Boston.26 It has also been calculated that in 1790 the United States numbered a total of about 3,000 Freemasons for a total population of 4 million, i.e. almost 1%.27 Three particular lodges played a prominent role in the American Revolution: St Andrew’s Lodge (Antients) in Boston, with Joseph Warren, John Hancock and Paul Revere as leading figures; Lodge No. 2 (Antients) in Philadelphia, whose roster included no less than 16 colonels and read, says Sidney Morse, “almost like a muster roll of the Continental Army.”28 The third one was the American Union Lodge, a rallying point created in Connecticut in 1776 for Masons serving in the Army, and empowered to operate all over the Continent.29 – Freemasons were present and active in the very first stages of the rebellion. It was James Otis, a member of St John’s Lodge in Boston, who in 1761 first took the now familiar view that taxation without representation was tyranny. In 1772, the burning of the Gaspee was organized and led by Abraham Whipple of St John’s Lodge in Providence.30 That very same year, James Otis, Joseph Warren, John Hancock and Samuel Adams launched the first Committee of Correspondence, which soon spread to other Colonies and, to use Sidney Morse’s words, “transformed the towns, from a rope of sand, to a strong cord.”31 The leaders of these Committees, out of which the Continental Congress itself was to grow, were most often Freemasons, as is shown by the records. And, according to the archives of St Andrew’s Lodge as well as to the published 26 Herman Nickerson, “Masonic Lodges in the American Revolutionary Period,” The New Age (August 1975): 9; and Marie-Cécile Révauger, “La franc-maçonnerie dans la Révolution américaine: rites et idéologie,” in Idéologies dans le monde anglosaxon, ed. Pierre Morere (Grenoble: Centre de Recherches d’Etudes Anglophones, 1985), 220. 27 Most of the above figures and data are in S. Morse, 228, 229, 241, 258, 269, 271, 285, 288, 298, 301, 309. They can be nothing but an approximation, especially as membership in several lodges was a current practice at the time. 28 S. Morse, 288. 29 E. G. Storer, The Records of Freemasonry in Connecticut (New Haven, 1859), 15-16. 30 S. Morse, 250. On James Otis as a Mason, see Philip A. Roth, Masonry in the Formation of Our Government, 1761-1799 (Milwaukee, WI.: Masonic Service Bureau, 1927), 16-18. 31 S. Morse, 250.

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proceedings of St John’s, there is much reason to believe that the Boston Tea Party was headed and carried out by Bostonian Freemasons, although only nine of them actually took part in the attack on the tea vessels (7 from St Andrew’s, 2 from St John’s).32 The fact that the chief ringleader, Samuel Adams, was probably not a Mason, but only a ‘fellow-traveler,’ did not deter Paul Revere from declaring the very next day: “The Tea Party was as dignified a Masonic event as the laying of a cornerstone, as indeed in very truth it was.”33 – I have already mentioned the high proportion of Masonic signers of the Declaration of Independence. According to the best available sources, between one third and two thirds of the 39 signers of the Constitution were also Masons. In that connection, an original way of looking at the Constitutional Convention would be to view it as a meeting to a large extent organized according to Masonic rules, i.e. behind closed doors, with the proceedings held in secret, and George Washington himself elected to the chair, let alone certain similarities between the historic Federal document and Anderson’s Constitutions. Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is that many, if not most, of the leading figures of the Revolution belonged to the Craft. For some, like Jefferson, Samuel and John Adams, Madison, Hamilton and his (future) dueling partner Aaron Burr, Masonic membership has never been established with certainty. But for many others, some of whom held high positions within the Masonic Order,34 32 Lodge of St Andrew Bicentennial Memorial, 1756-1956 (Boston: A Publication of the Lodge, 1963), 21-23; and Proceedings in Masonry: St John’s Grand Lodge, 1733-1792 (Boston: Grand Lodge of Mass., 1895). 33 Hugo Tatsch, “Freemasons and the Boston Tea Party,” The Empire State Mason (December 1973): 7. 34 George Washington was made a Mason at Fredericksburg, Va., in 1752; he was Charter Master of Alexandria Lodge No. 39 when he acceded to the U.S. Presidency in 1789; on September 18, 1793, he laid the cornerstone (a Masonic rite) of the National Capitol in Washington; on May 13, 1783, at the very end of the War, he had been elected first president of the Order of Cincinnati, a veteran officers’ association based on the social principles of Freemasonry. Benjamin Franklin was a Past Grand Master of Pennsylvania (elected 1734); he was appointed Provincial Grand Master in 1749 and, according to tradition, laid the cornerstone of Independence Hall in 1734. Joseph Warren was Provincial Grand Master of Massachusetts and Master of St Andrew’s Lodge whose Junior Warden was Paul Revere, afterwards Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. (After the death of Warren, whose body had been mangled by the British victors of Bunker Hill, it was Revere who identified the body

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membership is fully documented and cannot be denied. Such was, in addition to those already cited, the case of: George Washington, Peyton and Edmund Randolph, Henry Laurens, John Dickinson, Robert R. Livingston, John Paul Jones, Robert Treat Paine, Roger Sherman, William Hooper, John Marshall and, in all likelihood, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Richard Henry Lee, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, David Rittenhouse, etc.35 – Of the 75 General Officers of the Continental Army, at least 33, and possibly 40 more, were Masons.36 According to Lafayette, Washington was always reluctant to appoint a general that was not a member of the Fraternity. And when he heard that Benedict Arnold had betrayed the American cause, he turned to Henry Knox and Lafayette, both of them Masons, and said in words that have become famous, “Whom can we trust now?” Montgomery, Greene, Sullivan, Wayne, Clinton, Parsons, De Kalb and Mercer, all were brethren of the Mystic Tie, as also were Ethan Allen, the Ticonderoga hero, and George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Northwest. Quite unsurprisingly, the main protagonists at Yorktown were all Masons: Washington, de Grasse, Rochambeau, d’Estaing, Lincoln, Knox, Hamilton (?), Lafayette—and Cornwallis himself!37 – Not all Masons, or Masonic leaders, were Patriots. There were some Loyalist lodges, and Masonry as a whole was not left untouched by Toryism. British occupation, in places like New York or

by a tooth which he himself had recently filled with gold). Peyton Randolph was Provincial Grand Master of Virginia and the highest Masonic officer present at Carpenter’s Hall when the delegates to the first Continental Congress elected him to the chair. 35 For documented membership of these names, see Heaton, Masonic Membership of the Founding Fathers. Robert R. Livingston, whom Heaton does not mention, ended up his Masonic career as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New York. David Rittenhouse is identified as a Mason in N. S. Barrett & J. F. Sachse, Freemasonry in Pennsylvania, 1727-1907, as shown in the Records of Lodge No. 2 (Philadelphia, 1908-1919), 2: 85. 36 Heaton identifies 33 generals of the Continental Army as indisputable Masons, and about 40 as “possible.” 37 Masonic membership of French officers in America is to be found in Gilbert Bodinier, Dictionnaire des officiers de I’armée royale qui ont combattu aux ÉtatsUnis pendant la Guerre d’Indépendance (Vincennes: Services historiques de I’Armée de Terre, 1982). As regards Hamilton and Burr, they are described by Sidney Morse on the outbreak of hostilities as “two young New Yorkers, both of whom later became Freemasons” (S. Morse, 275).

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Philadelphia, threw local Masonic affairs into confusion. For instance, the Provincial Grand Master of New York, John Johnson, who was a notorious Loyalist, escaped to Canada and from there stirred up Indian uprisings in the Mohawk Valley. He was assisted by Joseph Brant, the famous Indian chief converted to both Anglicanism and Masonry. In Philadelphia, where the Loyalist party was quite strong, the Junior Warden and Secretary of Lodge No. 3 (Antients) went over to the British, while William Allen, Provincial Grand Master of Pennsylvania, sought the protection of Lord Howe and tried to raise a regiment for the British army. In the South, there was Egerton Leigh, Provincial Grand Master of South Carolina, who also put himself under British protection.38 It seems nevertheless that in most cases political dissension within the lodges, or between lodges, did not prevent Masons of all persuasions from remaining on speaking, or even brotherly, terms, presumably in the name of their common principles.39 Rather than going on with facts, I will now try to account for this profusion of data and its historical significance. That Freemasonry was real is beyond doubt. The central question is: How real and how specific was its role in the American Revolution? * Dorothy Ann Lipson’s Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut offers an accurate analysis of the many reasons why enlightened Americans were at the time so attracted to the Craft. Masonry, she argues, tended to reconcile the growing diversity of religions with the emergence of universal values based on Reason and Science; and it did so by providing a “pseudo-religion” or “surrogate religion,” a kind of secularized Deism, with rituals, myths, symbols, esoteric knowledge, and initiation as a substitute for baptism. For members of a growing empire (whether British or American), the humanistic idea of a “global fraternity” or “secular catholicity,” i.e. the idea of Masonry turning men into citizens of the world, was also a relevant concept. So too was, for the then rising classes largely represented in the

38

See S. Morse, 276, 280, 288, 289, and Coil’s Masonic Encyclopedia, 525. On the “influence of fraternal feelings . . . even amidst the passions of war,” see S. Morse, 289. 39

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Fraternity, the Masonic model of internal “meritocracy” based on superior personal achievement: disconnected from the real social structure, Masonic merit and its rewards certainly appeared to many as a desirable, and so to speak republican, substitute for hereditary status and ascribed social roles (we shall come back to this later). Yet Masons were not levelers, and one should not overemphasize their taste for equality. Theirs was a qualified sort of egalitarianism, and, once out of the lodge, every member was to some degree expected to return to his station. As Edmund Burke, himself a Freemason, was soon to say, “all men have equal rights, but not to equal things.”40 The last attraction of Masonry as underlined by Lipson was a change in collective attitudes which contrasted sharply, especially in New England, with the surrounding “Puritanical strictness,” and whose main components were: fraternity among members, the practice of friendship and conviviality, a recourse to songs and repeated drinking toasts, which contravened blue laws and were criticized by temperance reformers, some going so far as to speak of “bacchanalian revels.” Although taverns were generally selected as meeting places, “Masonic lodges were not primarily drinking clubs, but they did celebrate the joys and pleasures of festivity and friendship”; in so doing, Masons set up barriers, enclaves of harmony, against a cruel world, and ushered in a new form of sociability.41 (I shall return to this later as well). The reality of revolution is so complex that it would be an error to study Freemasonry as an isolated agent of change. Masonic lodges were part of a larger intellectual, institutional, and international phenomenon. They contributed no, or very few, original ideas to the age of Enlightenment whose ready-made philosophy catered to all their needs. It would be of little use, then, to analyze the Masonic discourse of the time because, as we shall see, the Masonic structures and the way they worked were in that instance the message: it was through rites and social behavior that Masonic ideology was actually produced.42 From an institutional point of view, lodges were one particular form amid a proliferation of clubs, salons, literary circles, 40 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Pelican Classics, 1981), 150. 41 Lipson, 37-41, 74, 120-121, 260, 263. 42 On this particular point, see Marie-Cécile Révauger, “La franc-maçonnerie”, 237-38.

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reading associations, learned societies, and scientific or philosophical academies—what Augustin Cochin called “les sociétés de pensée”43: Franklin’s “Junto,” or the Philosophical Society, or the first AntiSlavery Association in Philadelphia are well-known instances of these. In terms of social change, some of these active groups were more significant than others, and R. R. Palmer was, I think, mistaken when he suggested that “reading clubs . . . were more important than Freemasonry as nurseries of pro-Revolutionary feeling.”44 At the time, instilling new attitudes was probably more subversive than propagating theories and doctrines. Palmer makes a good point, though, when he explains that the network of Masonry created across the Atlantic “an international and interclass sense of fellowship among men fired by ideas of liberty, progress, and reform.”45 The Masonic ties between France and America were particularly strong, and the fact that Washington and most American leaders were Masons should not be ignored or underestimated. On his arrival in Paris in 1777, one of the first things Franklin did to popularize the Revolution was to join the Lodge of the Nine Sisters; and, with perhaps the exception of Jefferson and Silas Deane, all of the American negotiators in Paris were Masons, as were most of their French counterparts. As MarieCécile Révauger has very nicely put it, common membership in the Craft worked, among these Republicans and Royalists of two different countries, as a kind of political “Esperanto,”46 a higher language also understood and spoken in England by such illustrious Masons as Burke or Chatham or Wilkes.47 But the Masonic “International” was at the very most an intellectual network, a shared language, a common mold; it was by no means the instrument of some willful conspiracy. Historically, the plot theory was formulated after the event, at the very end of the 1790s, and was nothing but an unsupported piece of counter-revolutionary polemic. The doctrine of an underground machination against “the 43

Augustin Cochin, Les sociétés de pensée et la démocratie (Paris, 1921). R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 2: 53. 45 Ibid., 1: 245. 46 Révauger, “La franc-maçonnerie”, 238. 47 Both Burke and Wilkes were members of Jerusalem Lodge No. 44 in London. Tradition has it that Wilkes was initiated into Masonry by Burke himself. See Révauger, “Franc-maçonnerie”, 235. On Pitt, earl of Chatham, see Roth, Masonry in the Formation of Our Government, 24. 44

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Throne and the Altar” was originally put forward by Barruel in France and John Robison in Britain.48 Robison’s ideas were peddled in America by leading figures of the New England Congregationalist establishment like Jedidiah Morse, minister at Charlestown, David Tappan, professor of divinity at Harvard, and Timothy Dwight, president of Yale.49 Not only were Masons accused of subverting social order and religion, but it was also proclaimed that they were manipulated by infiltrated agents, and that their own conspiracy was in fact secretly engineered by the international Order of the Bavarian Illuminati.50 That Order was founded in 1776 at Ingolstadt by an enlightened and ambitious eccentric called Adam Weishaupt. Weishaupt had first been tempted by Masonry, but he had found the initiation fee too high and the level of secrecy too low. His sect was originally designed as a means of combating Jesuit influence in academe, but he soon turned it into an organization aimed at promoting his own utopian dreams of social regeneration. The most convenient way of achieving this was to penetrate secretly the Masonic Craft which he had failed to join: “The Illuminati,” J. M. Roberts writes, “were the first society to use for political subversion the machinery of secret Organization offered by freemasonry.” The result, he concludes, was that “the grip of the new order on Masonic lodges grew steadily.”51 Barruel puts the blame on 48

Abbé Barruel, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, 4 vols. (London, 1797-1798); John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (Edinburgh, 1797; New York, 1798). 49 Jedidiah Morse, A Sermon, Delivered at the North Church . . . May 9th, 1798 (Boston, 1798); David Tappan, A Discourse delivered in the Chapel of Harvard College, June 17, 1798 (Boston, 1798); Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis (New Haven, 1798) and The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy (New Haven, 1798). On their anti-Masonic activity, see Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York: The Columbia University Press, 1918), especially Chapter 4: “The Illuminati Agitation in New England”; see also Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 140, 204. 50 On the Bavarian Illuminati, see R. Le Forestier, Les Illuminés de Bavière (Paris, 1914); J. M. Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies (New York: Scribner, 1972). As regards the influence of the sect in America, see Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. 51 Roberts, The Mythology of the Secret Societies, 124. Barruel describes that grip as follows: “Under the name of Illuminés, a band of Conspirators had coalesced with the Encyclopedists and Masons, far more dangerous in their tenets, more artful in their

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the French minister to the United States, Adet, for the introduction of the Order into North America; but lyricism is all he has to offer by way of evidence: “As the plague flies on the wings of the wind, so do their triumphant legions infect America.”52 In New England the campaign launched by Morse and his fellow ministers was soon amplified by the press, with in particular the Massachusetts Mercury serving as an echo chamber. Thomas Paine was one of Morse’s favorite targets, his widely-circulated pamphlets being viewed as “part of the general plan to accomplish universal demoralization.”53 Theodore Dwight, brother to Timothy, aimed even higher: “If I were to make proselytes to illuminatism in the United States,” he wrote on Independence Day 1798, “I should in the first place apply to Thomas Jefferson, Albert Gallatin, and their political associates.”54 These indirect political attacks sounded like rearguard actions, but at the same time, with the myth of Masonic conspiracy serving as a pretext, they actually foreshadowed, and paved the way for, the anti-Masonic witch-hunt of the early 1830s. * Just as the autonomous status of “Antient” lodges favored the contemplation of Independence among American colonists, so the ritual functioning of Masonic fraternities, both Antient and Modern, helped to promote the ideal of a republican and democratic system throughout the Continent. When one considers Freemasonry during the Revolutionary period, the difficult thing is to weigh the active, conscious, militant part it played, against its more seminal role in favor of independence, human rights, or the republic—a role and an influence that extended far beyond the bounds of the Craft itself and which, in spite of its diffuseness, or perhaps thanks to it, was an important factor in ideological and political transformation. Whether the political commitment of a Patriot should be ascribed to his being a plots, and more extensive in their plans of devastation.” Quoted in Stauffer, 223n. 52 Quoted in Stauffer, 226. Pierre-Auguste Adet (1763-1832?) was appointed Minister to the United States in 1795. 53 J. Morse, 24 (quoted in Stauffer, 234). Thomas Paine is described, together with Brissot, Lafayette, Mirabeau and others, as a member of the Illuminati in an official Austrian diplomatic document cited in Le Forestier, 654. As regards Freemasonry, Paine’s membership has never been established. 54 Theodore Dwight, An Oration spoken at Hartford, in the State of Connecticut, on the Anniversary of American Independence, July 4th, 1798 (Hartford, 1798), 30.

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Mason or to some other cause can hardly ever be proved. But what effect it had on an American to “attend lodge” and model his behavior on its rituals is something that can more easily be grasped and measured. In all lodges, whatever their affiliation, an extensive though orderly and ritualized liberty of expression and discussion was the rule—much on the model of the British Parliament—together with a common practice of tolerance and open-mindedness. What American Masonry actually contributed to the Revolutionary movement was first and foremost an image of its own functioning, with its local chapters operating as discreet schools of liberalism, as republics in miniature, as living laboratories of democratic and egalitarian values, as the palpable prefiguration of a new era. Belonging to a lodge was in itself a form of dissent, since the lodge worked, both in vitro and in vivo, as a social utopia experimented with against a background of universal tyranny. As we have already suggested, what most characterized Masonic lodges was that they generated a new kind of sociability. While attending lodge, colonial Masons normally divested themselves of their social differences so as to appear, if only for a limited time, on an equal footing with their brethren. An artificial form of equality was thus pitted against the social hierarchies of the outside world, with its oppressive pattern of age-old subordination. To be a Mason was to usher in “a world turned upside down” and, as François Furet has pointed out in his illuminating comments on Cochin, a Masonic lodge was, as a société de pensée, “characterized, for each of its members, by nothing else but its relation to ideas, thereby heralding the functioning of democracy.”55 If Masonry was important in the American Revolution, it was not as the instrument of a mythical plot, but because, Furet goes on to say, it embodied more than anything else “the chemistry of the new power, with the social becoming political, and opinion turned into action.”56 By and large, Masons tended to belong to social groups that were not miles apart, so that their abstract equality within lodges was not too difficult to achieve; but what mattered politically and ideologically was the ritual itself as the living sign of a better world for all. And since 1% of all Americans belonged

55 56

François Furet, Penser la Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 272. Ibid., 291.

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to the Craft, it may be inferred that the Revolutionary impact of Masonry was by no means insignificant. Although they debated new and sometimes subversive ideas, Masonic lodges were not regarded as dangerous institutions, and no authority at the time ever thought of banning them. What went then unnoticed was that Masons were, so to say, political mutants, with their lodges working in the dark as unseen vehicles of social change. Thomas Paine was not wrong in emphasizing the role of pre-revolutionary ideas and “the force of the mind . . . by which revolutions are generated,”57 but he may have missed the central point, which is to know how these ideas worked their way into society and were gradually established there as new dynamic forms of social practice. * American Freemasonry was in many ways similar to its European counterparts, but it had features of its own that should not be overlooked. Before the Revolution, colonial lodges of “Antients” operated as a ferment of anti-British feeling. During the War they became factors of national unity. Whether traveling or stationary, Sidney Morse explains, they “drew together in the bonds of unity . . . the leading citizens of scores of colonial towns and villages; inculcated the doctrine of brotherhood . . . exemplified a form of democratic self-government; taught parliamentary procedure; established mutual confidence; and thus afforded a training school in which were developed a majority of the leaders of the patriot cause.”58 There was an interplay of influences between the Order and the Nation: while Freemasonry helped unify the fighting Colonies by means of its uniform rituals, or through what Lipson calls its “supranationalism,”59 the Fraternity was simultaneously Americanized by a Revolution which aimed at nothing short of a separation from England. “Americanized,” says Lipson, “but not nationalized,”60 although two serious moves were made in that direction: one at Morristown in December 1779, when George Washington was asked by his brethren in arms to form an American Grand Lodge and to assume its leadership—but the idea was regarded as premature by the 57

Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (Pelican Classics, 1969), 165. S. Morse, 221-22. 59 Lipson, 47. 60 Ibid. 58

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Masons of Massachusetts and finally rejected; a second attempt was made in 1780, which proved equally ineffectual.61 The American Craft of the time was also original—especially when contrasted with French Masonry—in that it never defined itself as, and never was, anti-religious. Henry May has shown that Enlightenment figures in America were much less committed to rationalism and free-thinking, much less cut off from religious traditions than their European counterparts.62 A parallel distinction should be made with regard to Masonry: religious tolerance, not to say ecumenical attitudes, was a striking feature of American lodges, although Deism, with its view of God as the great architect of the universe,63 fitted more neatly into the spiritual pattern of Masonry. One had to be a believer to become a Mason, and the Bible, Lipson remarks, “was a conspicuous part of the equipment of a lodge and was used in all the rituals.”64 In America, no Mason, however committed to republican ideas, ever dreamed of establishing a Civil Constitution of the Clergy, not to mention the enthronement of a Supreme Being as a substitute for the Christian God! The anti-religious excesses of the French Revolution had, to say the least, a cooling effect on many a sympathizing Mason in America, and, to begin with, on George Washington himself. During the whole revolutionary period, American lodges also worked as centers of social integration for immigrants newly-arrived from Europe, for foreign soldiers serving in the Continental Army, and later on for French expatriates hounded out of their country by the Terror. Aliens were readily admitted into American lodges, and several foreign lodges came into being during the War. The first French lodge known as “la loge de l’Amitié” was created in Boston as early as 1779. It soon got into trouble, however, as a result of financial misappropriations and, some time after, because its Right Worshipful Master was deservedly accused of bigamy. For native-born 61

See Lipson, 60-61 and S. Morse, 296-97. The accounts they give of the Morristown attempt at unifying American lodges are somewhat different. 62 Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 63 See S. E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1972), 366-68. In his Constitutions, James Anderson expresses the view that Masons are obliged only “in that natural religion in which all men agree.” 64 Lipson, 124

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Americans, Masonic lodges seem in many cases to have served as places of transit from social life to patriotic or political action. This may well have been the case for Washington, initiated as a mere landsurveyor at the early age of 20, and for Franklin as well, who was made a Mason when he was 25.65 The history of early American Freemasonry is, lastly, characterized by the emergence of a Black Fraternity called “Prince Hall Freemasonry,” after the name of its founder. On May 6, 1775, the day following the Boston Massacre, an Irish Army Lodge of the British occupying forces initiated a black man (possibly an ex-slave) known as Prince Hall and about fifteen of his black associates into Freemasonry. It is from that particular date that the Negro Craft of the Prince Hall Affiliation claims to have grown and to have ultimately established Negro Grand Lodges in nearly all of the American states.66 During his lifetime, Prince Hall applied to several white Grand Lodges for recognition, but only in 1787 did his Boston “African Lodge,” as it was called, receive a warrant from the First Grand Lodge of England. The larger Prince Hall Grand Lodge was founded as an autonomous entity in 1791. Ever since then, not a single American state Grand Lodge, with the short-lived exception of Massachusetts in 1947, has recognized Prince Hall Masonry. Even today, with its 5,000 lodges and 300,000 members, the American Negro Craft is still looked upon as “spurious, irregular, and clandestine”67 by all its Caucasian counterparts, including Massachusetts—a situation, Joseph A. Walkes commented in 1981, which is “intolerable, un-Masonic and unAmerican.”68 Prince Hall Freemasonry had no direct impact on the Revolution, but it was ironically during the Revolution, and in its context, that racial discrimination became a bone of contention between men whose raison d’être, as either white or black Masons, was brotherhood. Equally ironical, however, is the fact that black Masons, the

65

See Heaton, 18 and 74. The early developments of black Freemasonry are accurately related in Joseph A. Walkes, Jr., A Prince Hall Masonic Quiz Book (Ames, Iowa Research Lodge No. 2., 1981). See also Cécile Révauger, Noirs et francs-maçons (Paris: EDIMAF, 2004). 67 Thomas J. Harkins, Symbolic Freemasonry Among the Negroes of America: An Answer to their Claims of Legitimacy and Regularity (Asheville, N.C.: Grand Lodge of North Carolina, n.d.), 29. 68 Walkes, A Prince Hall Masonic Quiz Book, 108 66

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moment they were chartered, exerted on their own colored brethren a form of social racism which is almost as unacceptable as that to which they themselves were subjected. In his lucid book on black Freemasonry, William Muraskin writes: Since its American founding in 1775 as a branch of worldwide Freemasonry, the Prince Hall Order has served as one of the bulwarks of the black middle class. It has worked to separate its members, both socially and psychologically, from the black masses. It has done so by encouraging its adherents to believe that they occupy an exceptional position in the black group, that they represent the finest of their race and possess outstanding abilities as leaders . . . To allow non-bourgeois men to enter would destroy the Order’s ability to serve as a badly needed model for the race, weaken the resolve of the membership to maintain their life style. and destroy the Order’s potency as a class-defining institution.69

* Had not the impact of Freemasonry on the American Revolution been real, if only in the back of people’s minds, one would be at a loss to understand the violent reactions and passions it aroused. The plot theories brandished by Morse, Tappan and Dwight, the books written, the sermons delivered, were all misdirected in that there was no Masonic conspiracy, but they were responding to something whose reality was unquestioned and is evidenced in many ways. Some thirty years later, the anti-Masonic hysteria of the late 1820’s, a thorough account of which would exceed the scope of this study, was not a reaction to imaginary dangers: as Lynn Dumenil recently recalled, the idea that Masonry challenged democratic and Christian values was widely-accepted at the time, and it rested on some real facts: (1) “the power of Masons to subvert the law for their own benefit” (in the William Morgan affair)70; (2) their actual or alleged elitism “in an age 69 William Alan Muraskin, Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Masonry in America (Berkeley: University or California Press, 1975), 260 70 The Anti-Masonic party was in fact an American political organization that rose after the ‘abduction’ and disappearance in New York state in 1826 of William Morgan. A former Mason, Morgan had written a book purporting to reveal Masonic secrets. The Masons were said, without proof, to have murdered him, and in reaction local organizations arose to refuse support to Masons for public office. Anti-Masonry spread from New York to neighboring states and influenced many local and state elections. At Baltimore, in 1831, the Anti-Masons held the first national nominating convention of any party and issued the first written party platform—innovations followed by the older parties. The vote for their presidential candidate, William Wirt,

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whose watchword was ‘the common man’”; and (3) their latitudinarian approach to spiritual matters in the context of the “second Great Awakening.”71 In 1973, Wilson McWilliams, author of The Idea of Fraternity in America, argued that the anti-Masonic crusade had had a short career because the Masonic Order did not then appear as “a plausible enemy and was at best an unlikely cause of America’s troubles.”72 It may in effect be claimed that the attacks on Masonry came too late: as long as it was part and parcel of colonial society, as long as it surfed, as it were, over the Revolutionary wave, or even guided it, the Order was not seriously challenged; problems emerged when it shrank back into a separate brotherhood, seemingly cut off from the larger fraternity of the new nation. The anti-Masonic movement was on the wane by 1832, but antiMasonic feelings persisted much longer. For several decades they hampered the expansion of the Craft, and they may be held responsible to a significant degree for the old reluctance of Masonic lodges to cooperate with historians, as well as for the reluctance of historians to work on Freemasonry: a situation both outlandish and outdated which ought soon to disappear (and has already begun to), now that more likely scapegoats are at hand.

mostly hurt Henry Clay. 71 Lynn Dumenil, Freemasonry and American Culture, 1880-1930 (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1984), 5-6. See also David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Ronald Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) and The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790-1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 72 Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 255.

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Selected Bibliography 1 General works and documents 2 Colonial and Revolutionary America 3 State studies 4 Masonry and the Atlantic Revolution 5 Illuminati – Occultism 6 Freemasonry among Colored Americans 7 Anti-Masonry

1. General Works and Documents: Anderson, James. The Constitutions of the Free Masons, Containing the History, Charges, Regulations, etc. of that Most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity. London, 1723. Coil, Henry Wilson. Masonic Encyclopaedia. New York: Macoy, 1961. ——. Freemasonry Through Six Centuries, 2 vols. Fulton, Mo.: The Missouri Lodge of Research, 1967-68. Denslow, William R. 10,000 Famous Freemasons, 4 vols. Richmond: Macoy, 195761. Gould, Robert Fiske. The History of Freemasonry Throughout the World, 3 vols. London, 1882-87. Hamill, John. The Craft: A History of English Freemasonry. London: Crucible, 1986. Ladret, Albert. Le grand siècle de la franc-maçonnerie. Paris: Dervy-Livres, 1976. Ligou, Daniel. Dictionnaire universel de la franc-maçonnerie. Paris: Éditions du Prisme, 1974. ——. Dictionnaire de la franc-maçonnerie. Paris: PUF, 1987. Mackey, Albert G. Encyclopedia of Freemasonry New York: Macoy, 1966. Mackey, Albert G. & William R. Singleton Clegg. The History of Freemasonry, 7 vols. New York, 1898-1906. McWilliams, Wilson Carey. The Idea of Fraternity in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Roberts, Allen E. Freemasonry in American History. Richmond: Macoy, 1986. Stillson, Henry Leonard. History of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons and Concordant Orders. Boston, 1910. Waite, Arthur Robert. A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, London, 1921 (rev. ed., New York, 1970).

2. Colonial and Revolutionary America: Boyden, William L. Masonic Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Signers. Washington, D.C., 1927. Brown, William Moseley. George Washington, Freemason. Richmond: Garrett & Massie, 1952. Bullock, Steven C. “The Ancient and Honorable Society: Freemasonry in America, 1730-1830.” Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1986. ——. Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the

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American Social Order, 1730-1840. Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1998. Callahan, Charles H. Washington, the Man and the Mason. Washington, D.C., 1913. Case, James R. Freemasons at the First Inauguration of George Washington, April 30th 1789. Silver Spring, Md.: The Masonic Service Association, 1973. Hayden, Sidney. Washington and His Masonic Compeers. New York, 1867. Heaton, Ronald E. Masonic Membership of the Founding Fathers. Silver Spring, Md.: The Masonic Service Association, 1974. Jaynes, Herbert. “The Boston Tea Party, Dec.16, 1773.” The Empire State Mason (Dec.1973): 13. Johnson, Melvin M. Freemasonry in America prior to 1750. Cambridge, Mass., 1916. [Republished as Beginnings of Freemasonry in America (Kila, Mt.: Kessinger, 1999)]. ——. The Beginnings of Freemasonry in America. New York: George H. Doran, 1924. Knight, Sir C. Weston Dash. “The Boston Tea Party, a Masonic Event?” Knight Templar (Dec. 1982): 19-21. Lawson, Alexander R. “A Masonic History of the War of the American Revolution.” The Sojourner (Sept. 1941): 7-10. Mansfield, Hobbs. “The Contribution of Freemasonry and Freemasons to the Success of the American Revolution.” Masonic Outlook (Sept. 1925): 1-5 and 27. Milroy, W. J. “Freemasonry and the Revolution.” The New Age (Jan. 1938): 23-25. Morse, Sidney. Freemasonry in the American Revolution. Washington, D.C.: The Masonic Service Association, 1924; reprint, Kila, Mt.: Kessinger, 1992. Newton, Joseph Fort. The Builders: A Story and a Study of Masonry. Cedar Rapids, Ia., 1916. Nickerson, Herman. “Masonic Lodges in the American Revolutionary Period.” The New Age, (Aug. 1975): 9-13. Peters, Madison C. The Masons as Makers of America: The True Story of the American Revolution. Brooklyn, N.Y., 1822. Révauger, Marie-Cécile. “Le franc-maçon citoyen du monde, genèse de la Révolution américaine.” Franc-maçonnerie et Lumières au seuil de la Révolution française. Paris: IDERM, 1985, 131-41. ——. “La franc-maçonnerie dans la Révolution américaine: rites et idéologie.” In Idéologies dans le monde anglo-saxon, ed. Pierre Morere, 213-42. Grenoble: Centre de Recherches d’Études Anglophones, 1985, ——. “La franc-maçonnerie en Grande-Bretagne et dans l’Amérique révolutionnaire, 1717-1813.” Thèse de doctorat d’État, Université de Bordeaux III, 1987. ——. Le fait maçonnique au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Edimaf, 1996. ——. La querelle des ‘Anciens’ et des ‘Modernes’: le premier siècle de la francmaçonnerie anglaise. Paris: Edimaf, 1999. Roth, Philip A. Masonry in the Formation of Our Government, 1761-1799. Milwaukee, Wis.: Masonic Service Bureau, 1927. Tatsch, Hugo. Freemasonry in the Thirteen Colonies. New York: Macoy, 1929. ——. The Facts about George Washington as a Freemason. 2d ed. New York, 1931. ——. “Freemasons and the Boston Tea Party.” The Empire State Mason (Dec. 1973): 5-7.

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Tudhope, George V. Freemasonry Came to America with Captain John Smith in 1607. Pomeroy, Wa.: Health Research, 1993. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage,1993.

3. State studies: Barratt, Norris Stanley & Julius F. Sachse. Freemasonry in Pennsylvania, 1727-1907, as shown in the Records of Lodge No. 2. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1908-1919. Clark, George B. Genealogy of Masonic Grand Lodges of the United States. Washington, D.C.: Masonic Service Association, 1939. Haywood, H. L. Well-Springs of American Freemasonry: A Historian Looks at our Forty-Nine Grand Lodges. Silver Springs, Md.: Masonic Service Association, 1953. Heaton, Ronald E. & James R. Case, eds. The Lodge at Fredericksburg: A Digest of the Early Records. Silver Spring, Md.: Masonic Service Association, 1981. Huss, Wayne A. The Master Builders: A History of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania. Vol.I. 1731-1973. Philadelphia: Grand Lodge F. & A.M. of Pennsylvania, 1986. Kidd, George Eldridge. Early Masonry in Williamsburg. Richmond: The Dietz Press, 1957. Lipson, Dorothy Ann. Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789-1835. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Lang, Ossian. History of Freemasonry in the State of New York. New York, 1922. Lodge of St. Andrew Bicentennial Memorial, 1756-1956. Boston: Publication of the Lodge, 1963. McCalla, Clifford P. Early Newspaper Accounts of Freemasonry in Pennsylvania, Ireland and Scotland, 1730-1750, by Dr. Benjamin Franklin. Philadelphia, 1886. Proceedings in Masonry: St. John’s Grand Lodge, 1769-1792. Boston: Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, 1895. Proceedings of the Lodge of St. Andrew. Boston: Boston Masonic Library, n.d.

4. Masonry and the Atlantic Revolution: Aghulon, Maurice. Le cercle dans la France bourgeoise: 1810-1848. Paris: Armand Colin, 1977. Barruel, Augustin. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme, 4 vols. London, 1797-98. Cochin, Augustin. Les sociétés de pensée et la démocratie. Paris, 1921; new ed. 1978 as L’esprit du jacobinisme. ——. La Révolution et la libre pensée. Paris, 1924; new ed. 1979. Dupanloup, Félix. A Study of Freemasonry. London, 1875. Eckert, E. E. La franc-maçonnerie dans sa véritable signification. Liège, 1854. Evans, Henry R. “France and the American Revolution.” The Master Mason (Oct. 1926): 846. Faucher, Jean-André. Les francs-maçons et le pouvoir de la Révolution à nos jours. Paris: Perrin, 1986.

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Faÿ, Bernard. La franc-maçonnerie et la révolution intellectuelle du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: La librairie française, 1961. Fosdick, Lucian J. “The French in Freemasonry,” in The French Blood in America. Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1906. Furet, François. Penser la Révolution française. Gallimard, Paris, 1978. Gaume, Jean. La Révolution. Recherches historiques sur l’origine et la préparation du mal depuis la Renaissance jusqu’à nos jours. Paris, 1860. Gautrelet, François Xavier. La franc-maçonnerie et la Révolution. Lyon, 1872. Halévi, Ran. Les loges maçonniques dans la France de l’Ancien Régime: aux origines de la sociabilité démocratique. Paris: Armand Colin, 1984. ——. “Les francs-maçons et la Révolution.” L’Histoire (Dec. 1984): 74-77. Hello, H. L’action maçonnique au XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 1905. Institut d’Etudes et de Recherches Maçonniques (IDERM). Franc-maçonnerie et Lumières au seuil de la Révolution française. Paris: IDERM, 1985. Jacob, Margaret C. The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans. London: Allen & Unwin, 1981. Jeannot, Victor. De l’influence de la franc-maçonnerie sur la Révolution française. Angers, 1884. Lamarque, Pierre. Les francs-maçons aux Etats-Généraux de 1789 et à l’Assemblée nationale. Paris: Edimaf, 1981. Le Bihan, Alain. Francs-maçons parisiens du Grand Orient de France (fin du XVIIIe siècle). Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1966. ——. Loges et chapitres du Grand Orient et de la Grande Loge. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1967. ——. Francs-maçons et ateliers parisiens de la Grande Loge de France (17601795). Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1973. Luquet, G. H. La franc-maçonnerie et l’État en France au XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 1963. Martin, Gaston. La franc-maçonnerie française et la préparation de la Révolution. Paris, 1926. Mornet, Daniel. Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution française, 1715-1787. Paris: Armand Colin, 1933 (357-87). Mounier, J. J. De l’influence attribuée aux Philosophes, aux francs-maçons et aux illuminés sur la Révolution de France. Tübingen, 1801. Palmer, R. R. The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950. Passim. Priouret, Roger. La franc-maçonnerie sous les lys. Paris: Grasset, 1953. Proyart, Abbé. Louis XVI détrôné avant d’être roi, ou Tableau des causes nécessitantes de la Révolution française. Hambourg, 1800. See, H. “La franc-maçonnerie et les origines de la Révolution française.” Grande Revue (April 1927). Webster, Nestor. World Revolution. The Plot Against Civilization. London, 1921. ——. Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. London, 1924.

5. Illuminati – Occultism: Le Forestier, R. Les Illuminés de Bavière. Paris, 1914; new ed. Genève, 1974. ——. L’occultisme et la franc-maçonnerie écossaise. Paris, 1928.

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——. La franc-maçonnerie templière et occultiste aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Paris et Louvain, 1970. Ogden, J. C. A View of New England Illuminati. Philadelphie, 1794. Roberts, J. M. The Mythology of the Secret Societies. New York: Scribner, 1972. Stauffer, Vernon. New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. New York: Columbia University Press, 1918.

6. Freemasonry among Colored Americans: Clark, Alexander G. History of Prince Hall Freemasonry (1775-1945). Des Moines: United Grand Lodge of Iowa, F & A. M., 1947. Cooper, Aldridge B. Footprints of Prince Hall Masonry in New Jersey. New York: Henry Emmerson, 1957. Davis, Harry E. A History of Freemasonry Among Negroes in America. Cleveland: United Supreme Council, Northern Jurisdiction, 1946. Denslow, William R. Freemasonry and the American Indian. n.p., 1956. Crawford, George W. Prince Hall and His Followers. New York: The Crisis, 1914. Grimshaw, William H. Official History of Freemasonry Among the Colored People in North America. New York, 1903; new ed. New York Universities Press, 1969; and Books for Libraries Press, 1971. Harkins, Thomas J. Symbolic Freemasonry Among the Negroes of America: An Answer to their Claims of Legitimacy and Regularity, Grand Lodge of North Carolina. Asheville, N.C. n.d. Hayden, Lewis. Masonry Among Colored Men in Massachusetts, 1871. Muraskin, William Alan. Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Révauger, Cécile. Noirs et francs-maçons. Paris: Edimaf, 2004. Upton, William H. Prince Hall’s Letter Book. Transactions of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, XIII, London, 1900. ——. Light on a Dark Subject. Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, 1902. ——. Negro Masonry. Being a Critical Examination of Objections to the Legitimacy of the Masonry Existing among the Negroes of America, M.W.P.H.G.L. of Mass., Massachusetts, 1902; new ed. New York: American Masonic Service Press, 1975. Voorhis, Harold V. B. Negro Masonry in the United States. New York: Henry Emmerson, 1940. Walkes, Joseph A. Black Square and Compass: 200 Years of Prince Hall Freemasonry. Richmond: Macoy, 1979. ——. A Prince Hall Masonic Quiz Book. Research Lodge No. 2, Ames, Ia. 1981. Wesley, Charles H. The History of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge . . . of the State of Ohio, 1849-1960. Wilberforce, Ohio: Central State College Press, 1961. ——. Prince Hall: Life and Legagy. Washington, D.C.: The United Supreme Council, 1977. Williams, Loretta J. Black Freemasonry and Middle-Class Realities. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1980. Williamson, Harry A. History of Freemasonry Among American Negroes,. New York, 1874. ——. The Prince Hall Primer, New York, n.p., n.d.

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7 Anti-Masonry: Cummings, William L. A Bibliography of Antimasonry. New York, 1963. Davis, David Brion, ed. The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971. Formisano, Ronald P. The Birth of Mass Political Parties, Michigan, 1827-1861. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971 (especially 60-71). ——. The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790-1840. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Lemaire, Jacques. Les origines françaises de l’antimaçonnisme (1744-1797). Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1985. Lipson, Dorothy Ann Freemasonry in Federalist Connecticut, 1789-1835. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977 (especially 267-340). McCarthy, Charles. The Antimasonic Party: A Study of Political Antimasonry in the United States, 1827-1840. Washington, D.C., 1903. ——. “The Antimasonic Party.” American Historical Association Annual Report for the Year 1902, I, 1903. Morgan, William. Light on Masonry, a collection of all the most important documents on all subjects of speculative Freemasonry, Utica, N.Y., 1829 (this book led to the abduction and disappearance of Morgan and sparked off the anti-Masonic reaction that followed). Palmer, John C. Morgan and Antimasonry. Volume 7 de The Little Masonic Library. Kingsport, Tenn.: Southern Publishers, Inc., 1946. Vaughn, William Preston. The Antimasonic Party in the United States, 1826-1843. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983.

III

From Fact to Myth: The Americans in Paris during the French Revolution

Though not specifically focused on Paine, this chapter may serve to better understand the political, cultural and cosmopolitan setting in which Paine— English by birth, French by decree, but American by adoption— moved and acted in the capital of France during the first (pro-American) phase of the French Revolution.

When the French Revolution broke out, the population of Paris already included a number of foreigners. “Nationalism” had not yet emerged and “cosmopolitanism” was the norm. In this respect, the Revolution merely perpetuated a tradition inherited from the monarchical period, intensifying it however in the initial wave of heady enthusiasm, then stifling it during the somber days of the Terror. It was therefore quite in order that a Swiss banker (Clavière) should succeed another Swiss banker (Necker) as head of the government’s finances. There was one considerable difference however: under the kings the cosmopolitanism in question was based on the then legendary hospitality of the French, the powerful intellectual appeal of Paris, and the transnational nature of the great family of European princes. After 1789, France opened her doors and offered herself as a motherland for all, as an example to humanity of the universal principles of the Revolution. This innovation cannot be better illustrated than by Anacharsis Cloots, a francophile Prussian and radical democrat, appearing on June 19, 1790 before the Constituent Assembly and requesting that the “Fête de la Fédération” be “not only a celebration for the French but also for the human race.”1 This eccentric character from across the Rhine, who saw Paris 1

Albert Mathiez, La Révolution et les étrangers (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre,

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as the “county seat of the globe” and was soon to pronounce that his “soul [was] sans-culotte” was surrounded as he spoke by a motley troop of Englishmen, Prussians, Spaniards, Italians, Swiss, Arabs, Indians and Chaldeans, as well as people from Brabant, Liège and Avignon. Having won his case, Cloots then took a seat with his friends on the benches of the Champ-de-Mars “in his capacity as ambassador of the human race.” The following day he wrote: “The ministers of tyrants were watching us with jealousy and nervousness in their eyes.”2 The Americans, the principal (and eventually only) allies of France were given special consideration under the circumstances; they, for instance, were allowed to march under their own flag. Both in reality and in the hearts of the French, they stood out from the rest. Yvon Bizardel, who studied their presence in Paris during this period, discovered that over 200 Americans “had resided [in the capital] between 1789 and 1799.”3 This number did not take into account tourists or other short-term visitors; it included only Americans who had left some evidence or trace of their stay, and thus, only persons whose visits were so remarkable or long enough as to appear in the printed documents of the time. These citizens of the New World were not just concentrated in Paris. They were also numerous and active in the major French ports. Bizardel found, for example, that there had been over 200 Americans in Bordeaux for the celebrations of the recapturing of Toulon in December 1793. Why were there so many Americans in Paris, and who were they? In 1789, the intelligentsia of what was often called the civilized world was attracted more than ever to France. Added to the desire to be in Paris, traditionally the capital of fine taste and minds, was an enormous sympathy with the new France and an eagerness to see the “land of liberty” in all its ebullience. Many therefore traveled far, and despite the obstacle of the ocean, Americans were not to be left behind. Besides diplomats and special envoys sent by Congress, there were a number of intellectuals flocking to Paris to see first-hand the theories of the great “philosophes” and “encyclopedists” being put into practice, or to witness the initial steps of a revolution which, to 1918), 52. 2 Ibid., 53, 54. 3 Yvon Bizardel, les Américains à Paris pendant la Révolution (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1972), 8.

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some extent, was the daughter of their own. There were also officers like John Skey Eustace or Eleazar Oswald, who came with the intention of offering the Revolution the experience they had acquired during the War of Independence. In terms of numbers, the artists and writers (John Trumbull, Patience and Joseph Wright, John Vanderlyn, Joel Barlow, Philip Mazzei, etc.) vied for first place with the diplomats and the scientists. The latter group did not hesitate, despite the cost and difficulty of the journey, to come and present their inventions before the Academy of Sciences, of which Condorcet, La Rochefoucauld and many other daring minds were members: Thomas Paine, for his part, was to submit an original plan for a metal bridge4 and James Rumsey a steam system designed to replace draft horses.5 Americans from well-off families, making the grand tour of Europe, were all too happy to find themselves by chance in the middle of an historic event. Paris also welcomed a few eccentric adventurers, such as William Langborn and John Ledyard: their plan was to cross Europe on foot, and both intended to reach St Petersburg, one by the Lapland route, the other by way of Dantzig.6 True enclaves of Americanism existed within Paris, such as the “House of Boston” or the “House of Foreigners” on rue Vivienne, or the “Hôtel White” (soon to be renamed “Hôtel de Philadelphie”) located near the Place des Victoires. Visitors from across the Atlantic were readily invited to the tables of numerous wealthy “Americanophiles,” and the American dinners in Lafayette’s mansion were among the best attended in Paris. The Masonic lodges gave a warm reception to their foreign “brothers” (or “brethren”), and Paris even had an “American Lodge” 143 members strong.7 In all these places, ideas and information were exchanged—not to mention state and “boudoir” secrets in which English spies, well represented in these anglophone circles, took special delight. In the midst of this very diverse American colony, merchants and

4

Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine ou la religion de la liberté (Paris: Aubier, 1987), 155-172. 5 Bizardel, Les Américains à Paris, 17. 6 Ibid., 18-19. 7 See Alain Le Bihan, Francs-maçons parisiens du Grand Orient de France (fin du XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1966); and Francs-maçons et ateliers parisiens de la Grande Loge de France, 1760-1795 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1973).

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businessmen held a special position due to their number as well as to their role. These were often veterans of the War of Independence who took advantage of their earlier military and/or Masonic contacts to monopolize markets and pocket contracts. These businessmen believed in the future prosperity of France and therefore in the eventual development of cross-Atlantic trading. Moreover, many felt a moral obligation to supply the basic needs of a friendly country handicapped by bad harvests and commercially cut off from the rest of Europe. And many dreamed of seeing France replace England as the privileged economic partner of republican America. In this sub-group, which gravitated around Lafayette and more generally around the “Americanophile” Girondins, idealistic motivations (republic, liberty, progress) and mercantilist motivations counterbalanced—and somehow fed—one another. Inevitably, there were profiteers and shady transactions, like the Scioto affair in which the poet-cumspeculator Joel Barlow lost a large part of his too flattering reputation.8 There were also those Americans who wished to acquire national assets at low cost or through the lottery: thus the Château des Ternes, the Hôtel de Créqui, the Hôtel de Maillebois (the last residence of Saint-Simon) and the mansion of the Marchioness of Brunoy became respectively the property of Richard Codman, Edward Church and Mark Leavenworth.9 Virtuous or corrupt, the Americans in Paris were practically the only foreigners never to be overly worried, even when the Terror was approaching, even in the Spring of 1793 when the Revolution began to change in character and to shrink back into unhealthy nationalism, treating non-nationals as scapegoats. The explanation for this privileged status is simple: both politically and economically, France continued to need republican America. Among all the Americans present in Paris, the only ones who did have problems with the “Comités de Surveillance” were those, like Thomas Griffith, William Haskins or Major Jackson, who were taken for

8 For further information on the Scioto affair, see Jean Bouchary, Les compagnies financières à Paris à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1942); J. J. Belote, The Scioto Speculation (Cincinnati, 1907); and the warning issued by Franklin to Frenchmen sorely tempted by the American adventure: Avis à ceux qui voudraient aller en Amérique (Passy, 1784). Also Jocelyne Moreau-Zanelli, Gallipolis: Histoire d’un mirage américain au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). 9 Bizardel, 278-79.


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English spies,10 or people like Thomas Paine whose American nationality was contested.11 Young William Henry Vernon, the elegant—perhaps too elegant—offspring of a rich Newport merchant, whilst walking with a friend in a Paris street, was once the victim of an outbreak of popular anger, and owed his life to the magic word uttered in extremis by his companion: “A-mé-ri-cain”!12 History has retained but a few great names from this mass of characters: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, James Monroe. This list seems obvious to us today, yet it is more than a little paradoxical. When the Revolution broke out, Jefferson was still in Paris where he had been the official representative of his country for the past five years: Lafayette did consult him over the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but he was called back to Philadelphia and left France on October 8, 1789, not to be involved in subsequent events except at a distance. It was his private secretary, William Short, who filled the gap until the nomination (much later) of Gouverneur Morris to this post in 1792. Although Morris was already present in Paris in 1789, he only remained in the post for two short years and eventually left revolutionary France at the end of the summer of 1794. James Monroe, who succeeded him, also stayed in the capital for a mere two years. As for Thomas Paine, he only moved to Paris in September 1792: he had just been made a French citizen and elected to the Convention, but, arrested in December 1793, he was incarcerated in the Luxembourg prison for almost a year. Admiral John Paul Jones also spent two years in the French capital: this legendary character had come from Russia in the middle of 1790, and he died in his residence on the rue de Tournon in August 1792. While Bizardel describes Jones as the most popular of the Americans in Paris, it was the personality of Benjamin Franklin which, without question, dominated all of the others. Franklin, however, was by far the most absent of them all: he left France in 1785 and died in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790. It was he, though, despite or due to his absence, who best embodied America in the eyes of the French and continued after his departure, and even after his death, to exert the greatest influence on French public

10 11 12

Ibid., 231-32. Vincent, Thomas Paine, 285-87; Keane, Tom Paine, 400-402. Bizardel, 80.

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consciousness. This being so, one can only wonder about the image of “the American” as seen by the French, and its relation to tangible reality; quite obviously, the Parisians of the time had a vision of the American which had little to do with the examples—or samples—they had before them. The reality of these Americans was infinitely less important, it seems, than their mythical representation. Let us look at this point in some more detail. * Nothing illustrates this French tendency better than the veritable cult which developed around Franklin.13 When he arrived in Paris in 1776, he already had a flattering reputation and personified a country which, in the true sense of the word, was a country of dreams. The French knew practically nothing of the real English America. The numerous accounts published in the second half of the 18th century were written second- or third-hand and they readily replaced critical appraisal and accuracy with imagination: Paine rightly blamed Abbé Raynal for having written about a country in which he had never set foot.14 Between 1760 and 1775, it was precisely Raynal—along with Buffon, de Pauw and others—who propagated the idea of a natural “degeneracy” of the American settlers, supposedly due to the composition of the soil and the particularly harsh climatic conditions.15 This myth crumbled during the War of Independence when several important Americans appeared on the Paris scene who conformed more closely to the concept of the “new man” described by Crèvecoeur than to that of the subhuman depicted by Raynal and his followers. Franklin’s humor quickly put paid to the anti-American legend: one day when he had Raynal to dinner at his home in Passy, 13 See in particular James A. Leith, “Le culte de Franklin avant et pendant la Révolution française,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française (1976): 543-71. Also (although much less rigorous) Susan Mary Alsop, Yankees at the Court: The First Americans in Paris (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982). 14 Vincent, Thomas Paine, 139-143. See also Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 43. 15 Abbé Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Amsterdam, 1772); Buffon, Histoire naturelle (Paris, 1761), 9: 103-104, 111, 114, 125; Corneille De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (Berlin, 1768).


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he invited all his American and French guests to rise from the table and compare each other: it turned out that the Americans were much taller and sturdier than the French group. As regards Raynal himself, Franklin declared that he was no more imposing than a “mere shrimp.”16 Franklin represented much more than just his government or himself in Paris. If he stood for the New World better than any other American, it was because he was a kind of one-man band of Americanism and also because he was, without a doubt, the ‘great communicator’ of his time. A scientist, well-known inventor, rural economist, educator, legislator, patriot and subtle politician, he had the makings of a legendary hero. He incarnated the political, moral and scientific values of the age of Enlightenment; his name was associated with the Pennsylvania constitution and everybody knew the part he had played in Philadelphia in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. He wore his coonskin cap even at Versailles, and the simplicity of his garb and manners made him a sort of new Diogenes. Poor Richard’s Almanac, published in Paris in 1777, price 4 sous, spread the new principles of civic duty and common morality at all levels of society. He was known for his experiments on lightning conductivity and in 1772 was triumphantly elected to the French Academy of Sciences. It was Turgot who had the honor of merging the daring man of science and the bold republican into one phrase, which itself was to become legendary: “Eripuit coelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis” (he snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants).17 Franklin’s glory was earned. But it was also gained through the way his image was portrayed by the various media of his time. As early as 1773, a two-volume translation of his works was published in Paris, and a host of newspaper articles were written about him. So many portraits were painted of him that he claimed to be tired of posing for them. He was included as a symbol in allegories: thus Fragonard represented him diverting the thunderbolt and ordering Mars to overthrow Tyranny. But, aside from paintings, Franklin was also depicted in a series of drawings, prints, statues (most often busts), 16

458.

17

606.

Quoted by Jefferson in Works of Jefferson, ed. W. C. Ford (New York, 1904), 3: See Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (New York: The Viking Press, 1938),

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monuments, miniatures, etc., that were exhibited in the Louvre at the time of the annual Salons. The image of Franklin found its way into the simplest households through more commonplace and popular objects, such as “figurines, wax statues, small plaques, bronze medallions , tobacco and candy boxes, coffee cups, pendants, rings and even on cloth.”18 Franklin’s portrait was to be found in a great many houses, and French people revered him like a household deity. He was so popular that Anacharsis Cloots went so far as to suggest that he had coined the famous phrase “Ça ira.”19 He was praised everywhere and was invited to the most fashionable salons; Masonic lodges fought for his attendance, and he was celebrated in all forms of literature: encyclopedia articles, historical monographs, satirical dialogs, and allegorical tales and poems. The verses of Mme d’Houdetot describe him as an “Apostle of Liberty”20; others compared him to Solon or Nestor, and Nogaret did not hesitate to make him into a real god.21 His death in 1790 marked the pinnacle of his popularity: the Assembly ordered three days of mourning, and the Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters of which he had been the “Venerable” and which was frequented by the finest minds of the time, paid homage to him in a grandiose ceremony. For the occasion, Boizot had made a sculpture of the hero at the base of which appeared this testimonial: “The life of Franklin is a hymn to divinity.”22 The cult of Franklin, as already noted, survived both his departure from France and, later, his departure from the world. It was, so to speak, the presence of his absence that was used to turn him into a symbol of wise reason, austere virtue, and republican zeal. At the height of the Revolution, Franklin continued to appear in almanacs and readers. His name was mentioned in popular songs. He was still represented in portraits, often in the company of Rousseau and Voltaire. His bust was carried in revolutionary celebrations. Streets and public squares were named after him, and after Robespierre was brought down, a new edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac was recommended as a primary school textbook.23 The cult was so long18

Leith, “Le culte de Franklin,” 557. Chronique de Paris, 4 May 1792, 499. 20 Leith, 558. 21 Félix Nogaret, “À M. Franklin,” Almanach littéraire (1784): 264. 22 Tribut de la société nationale des Neuf Sœurs (14 October 1790): 288-291. 23 16 pluviôse an III. Archives nationales, F17 1331B, dossier 6, No. 167. 19


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lived that, in 1864, Georges de Cadoudal could write: “Even today Franklin remains a demigod . . . a model of all human virtues, classic simplicity, good faith and candor.”24 For French people and particularly Parisians, Franklin thus represented a mythical and legendary America, both perfect and almost divine in its perfection. The presence of Franklin, and thereafter the memory of his presence, served the revolutionary function of authenticating the American dream in the minds of those who, on the banks of the Seine, were dreaming of a more egalitarian and fraternal France. It was not merely by chance that he was taken for a Quaker and that his character was often adapted for the stage during the Revolution: through the image of the good Quaker and that of the ‘Américain de théâtre,’ i.e. the typical American as portrayed in the theater, the Revolution tried to arm itself with a particular image of the New World which, though failing to match reality, fitted its own oneiric needs. Let us now look in more detail at these two aspects of the Américain de rêve. * The American Quaker occupies a prime position in the imagery of the French Revolution. Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734) marked the beginning of the legend of the “good Quaker,” which was so subtly analyzed by Edith Philips.25 Voltaire was certainly critical of certain eccentricities peculiar to the Friends (those precisely which were later to meet with such success in France), and, while he paid tribute to William Penn as the restorer of a “Golden Age” that was unique of its kind, he nevertheless went on to say that Penn made the Quakers “respectable in Europe, if men can respect virtue in such ridiculous guise.”26 But what he says of Pennsylvania’s inhabitants bears all the characteristics of a dream. He praised their simplicity by comparing it to that of the first Christians; he admired their preference for morality over theology, and lauded a blessed land where equality, religious tolerance and civil peace prevailed. In 1755, in his Essai sur les Mœurs, Voltaire returned to the subject and embellished again this idyllic picture of a community and land free of intolerance, clergy and misery. Having never been to Philadelphia, Voltaire, like Montesquieu and most of those who admired the Friends, spoke about something of 24

Georges de Cadoudal, Les Serviteurs des hommes (Paris, 1864), 24.

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which he had no direct knowledge; the truth of it was that he found in the Quaker community what he projected into it, a dreamed-up example of what he himself advocated for France. Thanks to Voltaire, a legend immediately took root which could not be eradicated, even when first-hand observers revealed a harsher reality, or when the Quaker ideal clashed with the brutal demands of the Revolution. At the end of the Ancien Régime, Pennsylvania appeared to many as a beacon: it was the homeland of Quakerism; it had the most democratic constitution of the time; it had abolished slavery (Brissot remembered this when he founded the “Société des Amis des Noirs”)27; it had welcomed Thomas Paine, himself the son of a Quaker, and Benjamin Franklin was one of its native sons. As we have seen, when Franklin first arrived in Paris, he was taken for a Quaker, which he was not; but given the reputation of that sect in France, it is not surprising he never denied the allegation. He had indeed all the supposed characteristics of a Quaker: simplicity, civic virtue, sound pacifism—and his head was almost always covered with his legendary fur cap, a symbol of the natural life and of the rejection of artifice. As Franklin was on his way back to the New World, Parisians saw other Quakers—whalers from Nantucket—arrive in the capital. Financially ruined along with other New England fishermen by the War of Independence and its subsequent economic repercussions, these “Nantuckois,” as they were called, took refuge at Dunkirk in 1785 and soon monopolized the fish oil market. Under the leadership of Jean de Marsillac, a French gentleman-Quaker and author of a biography of William Penn, they came to Paris as a delegation at the beginning of the Revolution. Received with great pomp and ceremony at the Assembly, though not wearing “cockades,” they made requests which all ran counter to the revolutionary requirements of the day: they asked for freedom of religion, refused to carry arms, to celebrate victories or to place flags in their windows on patriotic public holidays; they also wanted to be exempted from “oaths imposed by the constitutional law.”28 It would seem that everything was permitted, 25 Edith Philips, The Good Quaker in French Legend (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1932). 26 Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Garnier, 1879), 22: 91. 27 Philips, The Good Quaker, 134-35. 28 Bizardel, 90.


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almost as of right, to these peculiar representatives of the New World: not only were they given a polite hearing, but nothing they asked for was refused. Such leniency gives an indication of what they symbolized for the French and of the importance that was attached to these symbols. Besides frugality, pacifism, tolerance and mutual aid, they used the familiar “thee and thou” form of address with everyone, and there is good ground to believe that the “tu” form adopted during the French Revolution, and first advocated by the Mercure National on December 14, 1790, had its source in this custom of the Quakers.29 When the King officially recognized the Friends (in 1787),30 Quakerism was already fashionable and the interest or craze it aroused was to be lasting. Several Parisian newspapers—the Patriote français, the Mercure national and the Bouche de fer, as well as the Feuille villageoise—spread about the mythical image of the “good Quaker.” Abbé Fauchet and Nicolas de Bonneville (both members of the “Cercle social”) took turns in this role, as did Brissot and Abbé Grégoire. The latter, in his capacity as bishop of Blois, endeavored in 1792-93 to help certain Quakers buy Chambord castle and found there a model farming community.31 In 1791, the National Assembly discussed the penal code, and at the heart of the debate was the humanitarian spirit with which the American Quakers had dealt with the problem of prisons and punishments for crimes.32 Those who condoned the new egalitarianism often referred to the evangelical fraternity of the Quakers, and the “Theophilanthropists” saw in the Quakers’ worship of Nature and the Supreme Being the seed of a new universal religion based on Reason. At the very moment when the Revolution was asserting itself against the Church, Quakerism provided living proof that it was possible to reconcile revolution and faith, republican virtue and the need for transcendence. What indeed could be more commendable than a system of belief “free of vain images and puerile ceremonies”33—without fables, clergy and oaths, and so conformable to the requirements of common sense and to the development of equality. Supporting Quakerism was therefore, for French revolutionaries, a convenient way both to fight the Catholic 29

See Philips, 157-58. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 139-40. 32 Ibid., 161-62. 33 La Feuille villageoise, 17 Feb. 1791. 30 31

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Church without lapsing into irreligiousness, and to tie together two mystic opposites: the mysticism of religion (here reduced to a kind of morality) and revolutionary mysticism. This politico-ethico-religious “projection” onto a mostly fictitious Quaker was far from being approved by all of the participants in the Revolution. The refusal to carry arms did not sit well in a besieged country; therefore, the legendary pacifism of the Friends was favorably received only by the most moderate of the Girondins. In February 1791, Mirabeau was quick to warn the delegation of Nantuckois that “the defense of one’s neighbor can also be a religious duty!”34 During the trial of Louis XVI, Marat himself challenged what he viewed as Thomas Paine’s reprehensible leniency in these terms: “I maintain that Thomas Paine may not vote on this matter; being a Quaker, his religious principles conflict with the death sentence.”35 A certain disillusionment even began to appear in the writings of contemporary travelers who, this time, had gone to judge for themselves first-hand the supposed saintliness of the Quakers. After a visit to the United States in the summer of 1791, Ferdinand Bayard revealed to the French that they had false notions about the Friends and had been duped by Crèvecœur’s inventions, by Brissot’s naïvety (hadn’t Brissot criticized Chastellux in 1786 for his insufficient adulation of the sect!36) and by all those who had wrongly “portrayed the Quakers as models or pure spirits opposed to worldly goods.”37 The same year, Chateaubriand visited Philadelphia with his mind “full of Raynal’s ideas,” but, once in the city of Penn, all he found was a mix of luxury (very unevenly distributed), frivolity, easy virtue and immoral dealings.38 In 1795, Abbé Bonnet also observed the situation first-hand, after having for years, like many others, relied on Raynal’s accounts: the Quakers that he encountered no longer evidenced the purity of the founders, and only their dress distinguished them from the rest of the population. “Under this

34

le Journal de Paris, 10 Feb. 1791. Vincent, Thomas Paine, 261. 36 Brissot, Examen critique des voyages de M. le marquis de Chastellux (London, 1786) [in reply to Chastellux, Voyage de M. le chevalier de Chastellux en Amérique (Paris, 1785)]. 37 Ferdinand Bayard, Voyage dans l’intérieur des Etats-Unis pendant l’été de 1791 (Paris, Year VI) Introduction: x. 38 Chateaubriand, Voyage en Amérique (Paris, 1815). 35


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costume,” he wrote, “there are no more honest men than under any other . . . They are just ordinary men.”39 He did not go as far as Marsillac who, on his return from Philadelphia in 1798, disowned overnight twenty years of Quaker belief and worship.40 All those who traveled to the United States during the Revolution—except for Crèvecoeur later in his Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie (1801)— saw their dreams shatter when they came into contact with reality. They then devoted themselves to demythologizing the legendary Quaker, who had become so dear and undoubtedly so important to the French. But to no avail. Realistic, or at least more qualified accounts, failed to erase the popular image of the good Quaker, an image that subtly merged the two main utopian ideals of the era—that of a pure republic and that of a purified religion. The unreal continued to prevail over reality throughout the Revolution, and in fact it was on the Parisian stage, through the “Américain de théâtre” and the magic of performance, that the unreal manifested itself in its most visible and mythical form: the theatrical representation. * Before the War of Independence and the French Revolution, the only American character portrayed on the Parisian stage was the Indian. As the Ancien Régime came to an end, he was gradually replaced by the “new man” described in idyllic terms by Crèvecœur.41 In the first half of the 18th century, plays representing the “noble savage” inspired the philosophes; in the second half of the century, such plays served more to illustrate their theories. In the 18th century, there were roughly 50 comedies and 20 tragedies that had an oriental backdrop and depicted Turks, Persians, Chinese and Hindus. Plays having to do with American Indians were less common, and they fulfilled a different function. As Gilbert Chinard has remarked, the Orientals were depicted in the theater (and elsewhere) as civilized beings, not savages, and the very act of putting them in a French 39

Cité dans Philips, 143 et 144. Philips, 140-42; and Bernard Faÿ, L’esprit révolutionnaire en France et aux Etats-Unis à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1925), 304-05. 41 St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1783). 40

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setting made them “likely to be parisianized”; the Hurons and the Iroquois, however, remained true to type even when transplanted.42 Indeed, it was not until the 18th century that the American savage arrived on the French stage to criticize a society to which he, in contrast to the Persian of Montesquieu, was unable to adjust. It was somewhere between 1720 and 1730 that the Parisian public took an interest in the antisocial Indian and his exotic wisdom. These plays, with their anarchistic utopianism and moral freedom (“Indian love”), responded to the spirit of the times and complemented it. The work which best illustrates this type of play—one which was more ‘philosophical’ and less frivolous than Rameau’s Indes galantes (1735)—was l’Arlequin sauvage by Delisle de la Drevetière, which was staged at the Théâtre des Italiens in 1721, at the same time that Les Lettres persanes and the first translation of Robinson Crusoe were published in France. Arlequin is a savage whom Lélio, a young captain, has brought back from America to amuse his mistress. Chinard emphasizes the fact that the Indian immediately criticizes French society “by contrasting it, not as Usbeck did at around the same time, to another form of society, but to the happy and complete freedom of the New World.”43 Arlequin, both astonished that human beings “need laws to be good” and scandalized by the “monstrous inequalities” that prevailed in France, ends up imploring Lélio: “All I want is to be a free man. Take me back to where you took me from, so that I may forget in my forests that the world is made up of rich and poor.”44 Arlette, the maid, succumbing to the temptations of “Indian love,” follows Arlequin back to his desert. This all served to underline the superiority of “savage” love and of Nature over civilization. Rousseau knew of and liked this play, one of the boldest of his century, in which the author put on stage, in a non-theoretical way, many of the themes that were later to be found in the Discourse on Inequality and the Social Contract. Other plays, such as Alzire by Voltaire (1736) and Fernand Cortez by Piron (1744) tried to go against current fashion, but Voltaire’s efforts to defend civilized man against the savage, or Christianity against barbarism, were in vain, as was Piron’s attempt to 42

Gilbert Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1913), 223. 43 Ibid., 226. 44 Quoted in Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique, 230.


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represent Hernando Cortés as a heroic peddler of civilization. Parisian audiences did not tolerate having their dreams destroyed in this way, and the good savage triumphantly lived on. In the second half of the century, his presence was felt more than ever in Paris theaters, where he embodied and spread abroad the new ideas of the age. The most famous of the “Indian plays” of the period was undoubtedly La Jeune Indienne by Chamfort (1764). In this play, a young officer is saved from cannibals by a squaw and becomes her lover; but the young man is already engaged to the daughter of a Quaker! In this case, fashion dictated the denouement, with the squaw finally prevailing over the values of the civilized world—and the good Quaker going as far as to provide his daughter’s rival with a dowry! In comparison with this pleasant little comedy of manners, other productions of the time (mostly tragedies) were mere thesis plays. Some of them—like Hirza ou les Illinois by Sauvigny (1767)—extolled unreservedly the beneficial effects of living in the wilds, while others—like Manco Capac by Le Blanc (1763)—presented the civilized savage as a more reasonable prospect, better suited to the Age of Enlightenment. In that play is to be found the phonetically unforgettable line: “Of this crime do you consider Manco Capac capable?”! (“Crois-tu de ce forfait Manco Capac capable?”) But with the American Revolution quickly followed by the French, the Indian soon disappeared from the stage to be replaced by an equally mythical character: the regenerated man of the New World, the unmaker of kings, the herald of the republican millenium. This ‘new man’ personified “virtue regained,” and incarnated a twofold notion of liberty—that of independence and that of the “natural,” “inalienable” or “sacred” rights of humanity. Thus, between 1783 and 1789, works celebrating Franco-American brotherhood flourished, in particular several stage adaptations of Charles de Mayer’s novel Asgill,45 as well as other comedies depicting the love affair between a French officer and a winsome American lady.46 But after the storming of the Bastille, the focus of interest changed and it was principally through the character of the Quaker and the legendary figure of Franklin that the three major theaters (l’Opéra, la Comédie-Française, and le Théâtre des Italiens) together with the small acting companies

45 46

See Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 141. For instance, J. C. Gorgy, Les Torts apparents, ou la famille américaine (1787).

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which were then multiplying in Paris, presented the virtue and liberty of the New World. The comedy Allons, ça va, ou le quaker en France by Beffroi de Reigny (1793) is the best example illustrating this change. In Chamfort’s previously mentioned play, the figure of the Quaker, portrayed for the very first time on a French stage, was that of a true individual identified by his name (Mowbray), his family and his character. But he was included mainly for local color and his personal morality, with no overtones of a political message. Reigny’s treatment of the Quaker was totally different. His Quaker no longer had a name or character of his own; he was the prototype of the perfect citizen, incarnating abstractedly, so to speak, public-spiritedness and the principles of republicanism. He was exhibited as a mere instrument of propaganda and the author had him express only dominant popular opinions and thus serve the Revolutionary cause: Reigny’s Quaker had left behind him an America where money was starting to corrupt everything and where, as he confides, “luxury perverts our success.”47 The character was distorted to such an extent that this unfortunate representative of the Friends finally appeared as a militarist and a warlover! In this example, the idealization of the Quaker went hand in hand with the intentional deformation of his message. A few years later, during the Directory, the “Quaker de théâtre” ceased to be fashionable, as did virtue and idealism. No longer fitting the requirements of the time, he disappeared forever from the French stage. The case of Franklin calls for similar reflections. If he appeared in certain plays or inspired certain scenes during the Revolution, this was never in his lifetime—and never as a living character. Nothing was seen but a shadow, and nothing heard but a mere voice from beyond the grave. Joseph Aude, in Le Journalisme des ombres (1790) placed him in Charon’s boat and had him say to Voltaire (who had departed from this world twelve years before): “I have seen equality, the bane of the great, / Spread its deep roots throughout the universe.” The sage of Philadelphia never appeared except in the company of the dead—the philosophers of Antiquity, the emancipators of the human race, or the great thinkers and orators of the 18th century, such as Rousseau, Voltaire or Mirabeau. In Dejaure’s play, L’Ombre de 47

Beffroy de Reigny, Allons, ça va, ou le quaker en France (Paris, 1793), 24.


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Mirabeau (1791), Franklin welcomed Mirabeau into the world of afterlife and placed a “civic” wreath on his head. When he was not at Plato’s, Solon’s or Lycurgus’ side, he would find his way into allegories of “Time” or “Glory,” as in La France régénérée by Chaussard (1791). In Desfontaines’ comedy, L’Imprimeur ou la fête de Franklin (1791), he was represented merely by a bust and by a testament to liberty which filtered through in the words and songs of the characters. When the Revolution was over, Franklin reappeared on the stage in La Mort de Robespierre by Sérieys (1800), but his voice was then used to tell the French how far astray they had gone in the conduct of their revolutionary adventure. Kenneth McKee, who has written the only in-depth article about the “Américain de théâtre” of the period and to whom these lines owe a great deal,48 seems to have made a serious error in interpreting the phenomenon. At any rate, his ideas contradict themselves in several places. “The Revolution,” he says, “served to introduce the real American [emphasis mine] to the French theater, especially through the character and philosophy of Benjamin Franklin.”49 No, it was not the real American that was represented in Paris theaters by the Quaker or Franklin or even George Washington (in a successful play by Sauvigny50): these were myths or symbols. The legendary Quaker, to whom every virtue was attributed and whose Philadelphia prototype was never to be discovered by genuine travelers, was mythical. Mythical as well was the ethereal and allegorical Franklin whom no one ever perceived otherwise than through a voice or an image. How could these be true characters when they only served to convey a message or sway public opinion? The period called for idealized images and symbols, mirrors reflecting not the American reality, but its own (French) aspirations and fantasies. An account of the play about Washington by Sauvigny in the Journal de Paris of July 13, 1791 reported seeing—and this was highly significant—“beneath the veil of the American Revolution, the picture of a more modern

48 Kenneth N. McKee, “The Popularity of the ‘American’ on the French Stage during the Revolution,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 83 (Sept. 1940): 479-91. 49 Ibid., 479. 50 Billardon de Sauvigny, Vashington [sic] ou la liberté du Nouveau Monde (1791).

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revolution” (meaning the French one) and “a meeting of Congress which resembles a session at the National Assembly.”51 Abandoning the idea of the true American, McKee suddenly claims that the American, on and off-stage, was for the French but a pure symbol—that of “the person who breaks the fetters of monarchical domination”52; but this symbolical American, he adds (shrewdly this time), was “blessed with all the qualities that the French [found] admirable.”53 In other words, what the “Américain de théâtre,” and more generally the American citizen, symbolized, at least for the Parisians of the time, was not so much an imagined America as a France dreaming itself away and dying to see its own reflection in the warped image of the model nation. At the close of the Revolution, the “Américain de théâtre”—and this is also very revealing—became again a mere individual whose national traits were no longer significant. In Bella (1795) or in La Famille américaine by Bouilly (1796), his Americanness was now accessory to the plot. He had ceased to be useful as a myth or as a symbol. * All in all, we can say that the Americans who most influenced the French Revolution were not those who resided in France, and in particular in Paris, for the longest time.54 On the contrary, it would seem that their influence was inversely proportional to their actual presence. Neither the nature of their characters nor their basic Americanness can explain the infatuation or fascination they aroused. Whether absent from the scene (like Jefferson), dead (like Franklin), or seemingly fallen from another planet (like the Quakers), it was their lack of reality which, lending itself so well to the illusions of the theater, had the most real impact on France—a France in need of

51

Journal de Paris, 13 July 1791, supplement: 80. McKee, “The Popularity of the ‘American’”: 487. 53 Ibid., 479. 54 Paine might be regarded as an exception, but he was not exactly an American; and, although he continued to live in Paris after his release from prison (he sailed back to the United States only until 1802), he was no longer to play any important role there and, while present in the capital, was virtually absent from the French political scene. 52


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fantasy and anxious to idealize the only model then at hand to create its own history. Durand Echeverria rightly speaks of the American “dream” or “mirage” as a psychological necessity for the French in revolt. In resorting to an idealized representation of America, they could project their “aspirations upon a scene which was both accommodating and distant enough to blur the inconsistencies and contradictions.”55 But it is less the idealization that counts here than the projection, less the embellished image of a legendary America than the “Frenchification” of that image for the sake of the cause. The Revolution did more than just “naturalize” the new America by adopting some of her ideas or by bestowing the title of French citizen on several of her heroes (Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Paine, Barlow); it also “naturalized” the mythical image of the New World, and taking advantage of its vagueness, modified it so as to find in it an idealized image of itself. This then was the main function of American exoticism: to supply French revolutionaries with a reassuring reflection of their own audacity.

55

Echeverria, 140.


IV

Paine’s “Share” in the French Revolution

“A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose”1: when Paine sent off these famous words to George Washington on October 16, 1789, his “share” in the French Revolution had in fact not yet begun. Throughout the summer of 1789, Paine remained in England where, as appears from his correspondence, he was much less concerned by French politics and what was going on in Paris than by the impending construction of his revolutionary iron bridge over the Thames—what he humorously called his “pontifical” works. He did not ‘rush’ to Paris until November, and stayed there until next March, when he left again for Britain where his bridge was about to be completed. By then a few essential things had occurred in France: the opening of the States General, the birth of the National Assembly, the Oath of the Tennis-Court, the appointment of Lafayette as commander of the National Guard, the storming of the Bastille, the night of August 4 and the abolition of privileges, the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the march of women to Versailles and the agitated return of the King to Paris. But very little blood had as yet been spilled, and Paine was utterly confident in the successful outcome of the Revolution: “With respect to the French Revolution,” he wrote to (probably) Benjamin Rush on March 16, 1790, “be assured that every thing is going on right. Little inconveniences, the necessary consequences of pulling down and building up, may arise; but even these are much less than ought to have been expected.”2 I shall not attempt here to recount in detail what many others— and myself—have already narrated in a variety of essays and biographies. It is now known to many that English-born Paine arrived 1 2

RM, 9. FO 2: 1285.

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in America in 1774 when he was 38, that he became famous due to the publication of Common Sense in 1776, that he was the first American to mention in print the idea of a “declaration of Independence,” that he served in the Continental army under General Greene, that he negotiated, on behalf of Congress, a peace treaty with Indian tribes at Easton, Pa., that he was the first official in charge of American diplomacy (as secretary of the Congressional Committee of Foreign Affairs), that as secretary of the Pennsylvania Assembly he then wrote (in March 1778) the preamble of a bill for the gradual abolition of slavery, that he defended the universal dimension of the American Revolution against the belittling interpretations of the Abbé Raynal, that he upheld the supremacy of the Union over the States in Public Good (1780), and lastly that he went to France in early 1781, together with John Laurens, and brought back to America the promise of enough money and weapons to defeat the British army at Yorktown. Paine’s revolutionary achievements in France are not as well known. His most spectacular and perhaps most positive action was of an intellectual order: the publication, in early 1791, of Rights of Man, in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. The Burke/Paine controversy stands, even today, as the most important political and ideological debate over the French Revolution to have taken place during the Revolution itself. Burke’s book was a frontal attack on the pretensions of the French to create a completely new polity. This, as he saw it (and he was in this respect quite a visionary), was an historical error that could only turn into tragedy and end up in military dictatorship. The shaky ‘reason’ of individuals being by definition unable to establish stable institutions, only the collective wisdom incarnated by some national ‘tradition’—the wisdom of the dead—was, in his eyes, capable of leading the living. The present was not so much a break with the past as a continuation of it, the perpetuation of proven formulae, an immovable tribute to the inspired generation of those who had forever shown the way. It would have been difficult to express ideas more contradictory to the convictions of Thomas Paine. The world, Paine retorted in Rights of Man, belongs to those who live in it, and the rights of men, be it in England or anywhere else, are the rights of the living, not those of the dead. It is the light of individual reason, as a reflection of God’s own reason, and not the obscurity of the past, that must preside over the organization of society, and it belongs to every generation, if it so desires (an idea also shared by Jefferson), to endow itself with

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new institutions suited to its wishes, its rights or its ideas. Conceived in the image of God, Paine went on to say, men were born equal in rights and free to exercise these rights, i.e. free to think, to express themselves, to imagine, and to unite as equal citizens to change what must be changed and to reshape the world in their own fashion. Viewing the French Revolution as a prolongation or an offshoot of the American upheaval, he found it, in this respect, quite exemplary and above criticism. It should be mentioned as a kind of footnote that, at the time he was writing Rights of Man, the French Revolution had not yet begun to devour its children and to violate the fundamental rights it had just proclaimed. In December 1792, Paine was banished from England for “high treason,” and further distribution of his book was prohibited. But, even before the verdict was announced, Paine had left his native island as a result of circumstances which tell us a lot about his tremendous popularity among French people at the time. In August, while he was still in England, the National Assembly in Paris made him a French citizen (together with 17 other distinguished foreigners)3; and a few days later, even though he had not presented his candidacy and knew nothing about what was brewing in his favor across the Channel, he was elected deputy of the Convention in four different departments, all of them rural areas. He finally chose to represent Calais, where he arrived on September 13 and was given a colorful and enthusiastic reception. The republic was proclaimed a few weeks after, and, as the new regime needed new structures, Paine was elected, along with Sieyès, Barère, Danton, Condorcet, Brissot and three others, to the “Committee of the Nine” in order to draft the Constitution of Year I. It was at this juncture that the trial of Louis XVI took place, a crucial event in which Paine was to play, or could have played (had he spoken French, which he never did), a decisive role. Against the mood of the times, he expended great efforts and risked his reputation (which was then at its peak) to try and save the head of a deposed prince who was now referred to as Louis Capet or the “one-time King.” During the 3 In a letter written to James Monroe from the Luxembourg prison on September 10, 1794, Paine asserts that he was the originator of that measure: “The idea of conferring honor of citizenship upon foreigners, who had distinguished themselves in propagating the principles of liberty and humanity, . . . was first proposed by me to Lafayette, at the commencement of the French Revolution” (FO 2: 1345).

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trial, Paine spoke (through an interpreter) longer than any other Conventionnel, and his line of argument was simple: (1) Louis XVI has helped the American colonies to break from England (the hereditary foe of the French) and to become a republic: his death might offend the only country that remained a firm ally of France, the United States; (2) it was royalty itself that ought to disappear, and not the person of this or that king; (3) to give Louis XVI the aura of a martyr would reinforce the coalition of European monarchies against France and make the pursuit of the Revolution even more difficult, if not impossible; (4) therefore, Paine concluded, the only proper and realistic measure consisted in keeping the king hostage until the external conflicts were over, and then exiling him and his family to the United States, where the one-time monarch would harmlessly end his days under the enlightening umbrella of American democracy. The immediate beheading of Louis Capet was passed by a majority of one vote (as was to be the case, a century later, for the reestablishment of the Republic). While the consequences of the vote were quite unpleasant for the King himself, they were also disagreeable to Thomas Paine, though to a lesser degree. Having become a suspect, like so many others at the time, he was soon a victim of the Terror and found himself imprisoned at the Luxembourg Palace (today’s Senate), together with Danton, Fabre d’Églantine (inventor of the revolutionary calendar), Anacharsis Cloots, Camille Desmoulins, Hérault de Séchelles, and so many others. Oddly enough, he was arrested as an Englishman, although he had recently been banished from his native land and was no longer a subject of His Majesty (a word which Paine spelled “Madjesty”!). He remained there nearly a year, and miraculously escaped the guillotine: the executioners’ custom was to mark a cross in chalk on the doors of those who were to be beheaded the next morning. When they drew the cross on Paine’s door, it was open, and the cross was marked on the inside, which, once the door was closed, made it invisible. Since good things never happen one at a time, a few days later Robespierre (who, in fact, had probably delayed Paine’s execution so as not to alienate American public opinion) was brought down and the Terror came to an end. The people of Paris danced again in the streets, and the political prisoners—the few who were still alive—were released. Paine was, however, one of the last ones to be freed. During his long imprisonment, neither Gouverneur Morris (the U.S. Minister in Paris) nor President George Washington (although a close and sincere


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friend) had lifted a finger to obtain the release of their fellow countryman. It must be kept in mind at this point that the Terror had dampened Franco-American relations—to say the least—and that Washington, like Morris, had already begun to make sheep’s eyes at England, a country which they certainly regarded as much better company, in spite of past conflicts, than revolutionary France. Paine was never to forget their neglect towards him and never pardoned them for what he considered a betrayal of the Franco-American axis, an axis established at the time of the War of Independence, and which he viewed as indestructible. Hence, two years later (1796), his celebrated Letter to George Washington, which aroused a storm in America, especially among the Federalists. Not only did Paine accuse the President of political duplicity, and the former commander of the Continental Army of unequaled military incompetence, but he ended his diatribe with these terrible words: And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.4

Bitter and disappointed, Paine retreated from active politics. Even before his imprisonment, he had started to commit to paper his own ideas concerning religion. After his release, he completed his two-volume work, entitled The Age of Reason, in the house of James Monroe, the new American Minister in Paris. Monroe had obtained his liberation by simply claiming him “as an American”—something which, for obscure and probably shameful reasons, Gouverneur Morris had never thought fit to do. A Deist, and convinced that in the Age of Enlightenment no religious fable could stand examination by an enlightened mind, Paine predicted in his book that, if religions did not divest themselves of the superstitions which prevent people from growing into adulthood, then it would be the end of religious faith, and atheism would invade the civilized world. He explained that the worst enemy of true religion was the Bible itself, together with the extraordinary web of lies, or fairy tales, it contains. As already stated in the Introduction, his aim, or mission, was thus very simple: to

4

Ibid., 723.

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“vindicate the moral justice of God against the calumnies of the Bible.”5 Needless to say that Paine was misunderstood and that no one or practically no one believed his explanations concerning the necessity to fight atheism not by denouncing the Devil, but the Bible itself, universally regarded as the Word of God! Although it was first published in Paris, The Age of Reason caused little stir in France: those who might have criticized the book were in exile or hiding in the provinces, and most of Paine’s potential supporters were either in jail or going in hundreds to the scaffold. But in both England and America, where the Scriptures were central to religious belief, the sacrilegious pamphlet scandalized people and earned Paine unremitting hatred, including from men who had been his friends (with the notable exception of Thomas Jefferson). In Britain, those who had already banished the author decided to ban his “Bible of Atheism”: until the mid-1830’s, any printer or bookseller that dared put it into circulation was sure to be tried and jailed for years, and many were. In the United States, where, as we have seen, dozens of “replies” to The Age of Reason were published, preachers thundered forth against Paine, whom they depicted as an Antichrist or a specter of Evil, while others called him an “impious buffoon,” an “obscene old sinner” or a “loathsome reptile.”6 No longer interested in national political concerns, Paine, who now lived in the house of his own printer (Nicolas de Bonneville), turned his thoughts to international issues and the organization of world peace. In 1800, he published Maritime Compact, an astonishing document written “to compel the English government to acknowledge the rights of neutral commerce, and that free ships make free goods.”7 Distributed to all foreign ministers then resident in Paris, the pamphlet was more generally designed to render war impossible by threatening belligerent nations with total commercial boycott on the part of neutral countries peacefully leagued into an “Unarmed Association of Nations.”8 The idea was that such a boycott would immediately ruin the aggressor’s economy by cutting it off from the rest of the world, 5 Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, ed. Philip Foner (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974), 109. 6 David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 353, 354. 7 FO 2: 946. 8 Ibid., 941.


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and thus render warfare counter-productive. The Association would have its own flag “composed of the same colors as compose the rainbow”9 and a presidency by rotation. * Moving beyond the foregoing data and anecdotes, I will now emphasize one particular aspect of Paine’s revolutionary commitment or “career” which has, to date, been largely overlooked, to wit that, while he had been almost completely in tune with the American Revolution, he found himself, in many respects, ‘out of phase’ with the French one. Strangely enough, though, the starting point had been quite similar in both cases. When Paine published Common Sense and recommended independence together with the establishment of an American republic, he was ahead both of his time and of his fellow countrymen: not only were very few—if any—Americans in favor of independence, but before Common Sense, Pauline Maier asserts, there was to be found in America “no notorious apology for republicanism as a system.”10 In much the same way, Paine created, along with Condorcet, Brissot, Duchâtelet and Bonneville, the very first “Republican Society” of the French Revolution and, in late June 1791, right after the King’s return from Varennes, drafted with his own pen the first “republican proclamation” ever posted on the walls of Paris. His placard read, among other things: [The king’s] flight is equivalent to abdication; for, in abandoning his throne, he has abandoned his office . . . Never again can the nation trust a ruler who has proved derelict to his duties; has broken his oath, entered into a secret conspiracy to escape from his post . . . made his way to a frontier full of traitors and deserters, and then intrigued for his return at the head of an army that would enable him to act as a tyrant . . . The facts show that, if he is not a hypocrite or traitor, he must be a madman or an imbecile, and, in any case, entirely unfitted to discharge the function confided to him by the people.11

And Paine wrote these lines at a time when practically no one among the French revolutionaries contemplated the establishment of a regular 9

Ibid., 944. Pauline Maier, “The Beginnings of American Republicanism, 1765-1776,” in The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1972), 100. 11 “A Republican Manifesto,” FO 2: 517-18. 10

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republic—almost all of them, including Robespierre, then favoring the English model of a ‘mixed government.’ But in this case too, public opinion was prompt to undergo the change of mind advocated by Paine and his handful of republican associates. Apart from this well-timed move, it seems that nothing of what Paine did in France until his return to America in 1802 was really in keeping with what was going on. He never quite realized that the two revolutions he took part in, although they invoked similar principles, did not have much in common. Contrary to France, the American colonies had had no feudalism to reject, no high clergy to get rid of, no local nobility to dislodge, and the King of England was an ocean away from them, as also were all of their potential European enemies. The controversy with Edmund Burke was essentially a debate between English thinkers rather than a dialog with the French, whose minds were focused not on analyzing, but on making the revolution. Paine defended the one-time King by appealing to the wise realism and to the moral sense of Jacobins and Sans-Culottes who were day after day losing their heads (not just metaphorically) and experiencing the irrational fascination of death. In a country where the political heritage was basically anti-liberal, Paine, in fact, approached the French upheaval in a spirit of foundation (the American way) rather than as a proper European revolutionist alien to the British tradition of political liberalism and ready to throw overboard all rule of law.12 In revolutionary France, Paine was to quite a large extent a man from another planet—the, so to speak, Anglo-Saxon planet. Although he was a permanent resident in Paris for some 10 years, he was never able to speak or understand French. He never addressed the members of the Convention otherwise than through an interpreter. The only French people he would actually consort with were those who could speak English. He spent most of his free time in the company of English or American nationals, frequenting the Parisian haunts of 12

This is, quite typically, what Paine wrote on the subject in 1795: “Had a constitution been established two years ago (as ought to have been done), the violences that have since desolated France and injured the character of the Revolution, would, in my opinion, have been prevented. The nation would then have had a bond of union, and every individual would have known the line of conduct he was to follow. But, instead of this, a revolutionary government, a thing without either principle or authority, was substituted in its place; virtue and crime depended upon accident; and that which was patriotism one day became treason the next” (Dissertation on First Principles of Government, FO 2: 587-88).


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Anglo-American tourists or residents, and always ready to enjoy a protracted and ‘wet’ evening in the anglophone atmosphere of the “Café irlandais.” And, whereas Common Sense had accelerated the popular drift toward independence, The Age of Reason, an impassioned plea in favor of Deism, was written and published “off beat,” as it were, and against the revolutionary tide—at a moment when all forms of religion were regarded as suspect. Paine, this time, did not try to speed up the course of events but (in vain) to slow it down. Too Anglo-Saxon, too much of a constitution-minded legalist and too much of a believer to feel at home among the Parisian rebels, Paine also thought too much in terms of ‘universal’ truths or principles to be able to grasp the specificity of the French situation. His share in the American Revolution had been a success almost all along the line. His role in the French Revolution sounds somewhat like a wasted opportunity and leaves the historian unsatisfied—as it obviously did him. * How can one account then for the fact that, after the Terror and his release from prison, Paine continued so long (8 more years) in a country in which he did not feel politically at home any more? He was still very active, to be sure, writing such important essays as Agrarian Justice, a kind of socialist manifesto (see Chapter 8 of this volume), or Dissertation on First Principles of Government, a pamphlet arguing that “the moral principle of revolutions [was] to instruct, not to destroy,”13 or giving edifying talks at the newly organized Society of Theophilanthropists. But he had now ceased to play any role in a revolution which, as he viewed it, had fallen short of its promises. A few months before his return to America, he told one of his friends, the young English publicist Henry Redhead Yorke, that France was “not a country for an honest man to live in; they do not understand anything at all of the principles of free government, and the best way is to leave them to themselves.” Yorke then expressed his surprise at such despondency and insisted that much might still be done for the Republic: “Republic!,” Paine exclaimed, “do you call this a republic? Why, they are worse off than the slaves of Constantinople; for there, they expect to be bashaws in heaven by submitting to be slaves below, 13

FO 2: 587.

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but here they believe neither in heaven nor hell, and yet are slaves by choice. I know of no Republic in the world except America, which is the only country for such men as you and I . . . I have done with Europe, and its slavish politics.”14 Several factors seem to have delayed his departure from France. Some have to do with reality, others with dreams. During the last decade of the century, the war between France and England was still going on, and Paine, it will be remembered, was an outlaw in his native country. Had he tried to cross the ocean, he would have risked being arrested by the English—who searched all neutral ships—and being returned to London, there to be hanged or at least jailed for years. Aware of this, Thomas Jefferson, who had just become President, wrote to Paine (this was in March 1801), inviting him to return to the United States aboard a war vessel, the Maryland. Excerpts of that letter were published in several American newspapers, and the Federalists immediately howled and screamed against Jefferson’s friendship with Paine—the blasphemous author of The Age of Reason, the insulter of George Washington, the stateless peddler of French anarchism. The hubbub was such that Paine had to give up the idea of travelling on the proposed vessel, and it was not until a year later, when a truce was signed at Amiens between England and France, that Paine could at last safely board a merchant ship and “bid adieu to restless and wretched Europe.”15 But Paine’s protracted stay in France was probably also due to some secret ambition, which he nourished for years, of playing some political role in England. The idea that British monarchy would be a perpetual cause of warfare and international insecurity became such an obsession with Paine that in 1796 he started contriving and planning a naval invasion of England, with Bonaparte at the controls and himself serving as counselor. “The intention of the expedition,” he then wrote, “was to give the people of England an opportunity of forming a government for themselves, and thereby bring about peace.”16 It happens that in the course of my research on Paine I stumbled upon something which is to be found in none of the previous Tom Paine biographies: a classified report written in French by some secret agent 14

Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (New York: Putnam, 1909), 301-02. 15 “Letter to Consul Roth, July 8, 1802,” FO 2: 1429. 16 “To the People of England on the Invasion of England,” FO 2: 680.


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then working in Paris for the English government. Dated “January 1798,” the document explains that the French Directoire had drawn up a list of five British personalities who were to form the English “Directory” once the invasion was accomplished. And Paine was in the number, together with John Horne Tooke, William Sharp, John Thelwall and the marquis of Lansdowne!17 This scheme, this dream, the prospect of having a share in one more revolution may, at least in part, account for Paine’s reluctant acceptance to stay in France and, so to speak, do some “extra time” on the French side of the English Channel. * I will conclude with a few questions which all go in the same direction: why was Paine forgotten for such a long time and in so many countries? How is it that his name and the role he played in the birth of our modern democracies are hardly mentioned in history books and textbooks? Why is there such a glaring discrepancy between his glory then and his oblivion now? One reason, I think, is that Paine, not unlike Paul Goodman in the 20th century, was an unclassifiable character, and this tends to disturb the established, comfortable order of our mental categories. He was not a politician (he lacked the patience, the diplomacy, the sense of compromise); nor was he a theoretician (contrary to Hobbes or Locke or Bentham, he never wrote ‘treatises’ of any kind); nor was he either a ‘writer,’ in the English eighteenth-century sense of the word (he had not read much, did not write in the convoluted style then in fashion, and rarely quoted ancient writers for the sake of embellishment). Moreover he had no indisputable nationality: he was English by birth but had been outlawed and banished from his native country; he was made a French citizen but this was largely an ‘honorary’ gesture; he was American by adoption but, after his return to the United States in 1802, was deprived of the right to vote on the pretense that he had been jailed by the French “as an Englishman”! (On this particular point, see Chapter 6.) The result today is that none of these three countries actually claims Paine as a local figure or national hero. He belongs nowhere; nor is he part of any patrimony.

17 Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue presented at Dropmore (London, 1894), 4: 70.

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And, to top it all off, he wrote unforgivable books: Rights of Man earned him perpetual exile from his homeland, and The Age of Reason two centuries of pious hatred and neglect throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. Few political writers have indeed paid a higher price for their independence of mind than Thomas Paine. The tide, however, began to turn a few decades ago, when on the 18th of May 1962 Paine’s bust was placed in the New York University “Hall of Fame,” beside those of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin. After two hundred years or so spent in the ‘hall of infamy,’ it was only justice that such a choice—and act of redress—be made (although several attempts were necessary!).

V

Thomas Paine, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Rights of Man

The role played by Thomas Paine with regard to the Louisiana Purchase has generally been either minimized or overlooked. A mere mention of his name, along with perhaps a couple of quotations, is all that one will usually find under the pen of either European or American historians. And yet it would take almost a book to describe in some detail the part he actually played in this territorial revolution. One reason for such a lack of scholarly attention is the fact that Paine was not involved in the transaction as either a politician or a decisionmaker. He stood in the background all along, acting sometimes openly as a pamphleteer, at other times more discreetly as an unofficial counselor to Thomas Jefferson and other Republican personalities such as John Breckenridge1 or James Monroe. I shall not here attempt to recount the whole story. I will instead focus on four central issues: Paine’s role in the initial move towards the Purchase; the way in which he tried to set American public opinion against certain Federalist warmongers; his practical advice on how to settle the newly-acquired territories; and his moral insistence on respect for American democratic values and universal human rights in the colonizing process. * In December 1802, when the affair of the Louisiana Purchase began, Paine was in an awkward situation, to say the least. He had recently returned to the United States after an absence of 15 years, there to discover that he had lost most of his one-time friends and was being violently inveighed against by Federalist newspapers (some describing him as a “loathsome reptile,” others as an “impious buffoon” or as an “obscene old sinner”).2 Few Americans had forgiven him for the 1

A Senator from Kentucky, who was very active in the Louisiana affair, and was later (in 1805) to be appointed Attorney General in the Cabinet of President Jefferson. 2 See David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper, 1974), 353, 354, 365.

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publication of The Age of Reason and for the writing of his both famous and “infamous” open letter to George Washington in which he depicted the President as a military cipher (who had lost most of his battles) and an unworthy friend who had not lifted a finger to get him out of jail during the French Terror.3 Only Jefferson and a handful of Republicans remained on friendly terms with the “enfant terrible” of the age of revolutions. And only through Jefferson, or in his shadow, or under his wing, could Paine, as we shall see, still exert some intellectual and political influence in American affairs. He was to strike back at the Federalist faction in a series of eight letters “To the Citizens of the United States,” appearing mostly in the National Intelligencer and reprinted by sympathetic editors throughout the country where they were widely read and became the subject of heated discussions. When Paine arrived in Washington in November 1802, he took up his quarters at Lovell’s hotel where, as a Federalist reported, “he dines at the public table and, as a show, is as profitable to Lovell as an Ourang Outang, for many strangers who come to the city feel a curiosity to see the creature. They go to Lovell’s and call for the show.”4 It was nevertheless in that hotel that Paine first became involved in the Mississippi question. Word had crossed the Atlantic that Spain had ceded the Louisiana Territory to France. At about the same time (October 1802), the Mississippi and the American “deposit” at New Orleans had been closed to American traffic, provoking the rage of the Westerners (now half a million people— mainly in Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio). Wishing to embarrass Jefferson whose pacifism made them bristle, Federalists in Congress called for a declaration of war against Spain. But Jefferson was more infuriated by the French, whom he suspected of playing an active part behind the scenes: “The day that France takes New Orleans,” he said, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”5 But things turned out differently. On the suggestion of one Michael Leib, a Republican congressman to whom he had confided his views at the hotel, Paine sent Jefferson a letter explaining that, 3

See excerpt in Chapter 4. W. P. and J. P. Cutler, Life and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler (Cincinnati, 1888), 2: 119. 5 Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Harper, 1953), 132. 4

The Louisiana Purchase

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instead of resorting to war, the Government should “begin by making a proposal to France to repurchase the cession made to her by Spain . . . provided it be with the consent of the people of Louisiana, or a majority thereof.” Knowing that Bonaparte was in a desperate financial plight (“The French treasury is not only empty, but the government has consumed by anticipation a great part of the next year’s revenue”), Paine argued that “a monied proposal [would] be attended to.”6 Paine was an intellectual pioneer (who defined himself as a “farmer of thoughts”)7 and he had often appeared as a kind of political prophet. Not only, for instance, had he been the first American to mention the idea of a “declaration of independence,” but he had also been the first to denounce the sacredness of the King of England; the first to put forward a legislative project for the gradual abolition of slavery; the first—or one of the first (as early as 1782, in his Letter to the Abbé Raynal)8— to advocate national and international copyright; the first to propose the election of “a Continental convention for the purpose of forming a Continental constitution”9; the first (in 1783) to suggest the establishment of “a general government over the Union”10; the first to contemplate the creation of a European Confederacy (including England, France and the Netherlands and based on a “general dismantling of all the navies in Europe”)11; the first to plead for international arbitration and to conceive the idea of an “Unarmed Association of Nations” (with Paul I, emperor of Russia, as its first possible president)12; the first also (in 1790) to carry the American flag in a foreign procession; the first in revolutionary France to create a republican club, to launch a republican journal, and to publish a republican manifesto; and finally the first to write a scathing criticism of Christianity and the Bible (The Age of Reason), not with a view to

6

FO 2: 1432. “Letter to Henry Laurens” (printemps 1778), FO 2: 1143. 8 Ibid, 213n.70. In 1777, Beaumarchais stole a march on Paine by creating in Paris the “General Statutes of Drama.” 9 Ibid., 332. In Common Sense, Paine used the phrase “Continental Charter.” 10 Quoted in Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine (Philadelphia & New York: Lippincott, 1959), 99. See also FO 2: 692, note 2. 11 Paine, Rights of Man (Pelican Classics, 1982), 289. 12 FO 2: 941, 946. For more details on Paine’s proposals regarding international peace, see Chapter 9 in the second part of this volume. 7

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promoting atheism but, paradoxically, in order to prevent its expansion. At the end of 1802, it seems that the idea of purchasing Louisiana had not yet occurred to anyone, at least as a serious and feasible alternative. During the spring, several contradictory rumors had reached the United States, to the effect that Bonaparte was considering the sale of Louisiana to the American government. In April, the Kentucky Palladium confirmed that “a negotiation [was] going on,” but in September the same paper regretfully announced that “we have no prospect that Louisiana will ever belong to the Union.”13 When he sent off his letter to Jefferson, Paine most certainly thought of himself as the originator of this historic operation: “The idea,” he confessed, “occurred to me without knowing it had occurred to another person.”14 But, the next morning, he met Jefferson, who told him, much to his surprise, that “measures were already taken in that business.”15 In actual fact, Jefferson’s plan for Louisiana was much more limited than Paine’s daring proposal: Robert R. Livingston, then the U.S. Minister to France, had been instructed to try to buy the island on which New Orleans was located, not the entire Louisiana Territory. It was Paine’s bolder plan which eventually prevailed, not because Jefferson had changed his mind, but precisely because Paine’s prophecy was accurate: the coffers of the French state were empty and Bonaparte needed cash to finance his wars, especially in view of the impending resumption of hostilities between France and England. Through the sale of Louisiana, the visionary French First Consul also wanted to make Britain’s distant future more complicated: “This territorial extension forever strengthens the power of the United States; I have just given England a maritime rival which sooner or later will humble her pride.”16 Meanwhile, those whom Paine dubbed “war-whoop” politicians17 were unrelenting in their attacks on Jefferson’s policy. Aaron Burr published inflammatory articles, urging the immediate capture of New 13 Arthur Preston Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 1795-1803 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962), 237. 14 FO 2: 1462. 15 Ibid. 16 François Barbé-Marbois, Histoire de la Louisiane et de la cession de cette colonie par la France aux États-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale (Paris, 1829), 335. 17 FO 2: 934.


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Orleans. And Gouverneur Morris, the arch-enemy of Paine (who was soon to denounce his “incurable folly”),18 caused a sensation with the publication of two pamphlets (An Address to the Government on the Cession of Louisiana and Monroe’s Embassy),19 in which he insisted that Louisiana had to be seized at once, otherwise the opportunity would be lost forever. Paine counter-attacked in March 1803 by writing his sixth Letter to the Citizens of the United States, stigmatizing the inconsistency and immorality of the Federalists. He branded them as an “Opposition without a cause,”20 who had called for a war merely to secure the Mississippi for the United States, and who now railed against the President because he had obtained by peaceful means a much larger territory than the one they themselves had dreamed of. Paine obviously took a mischievous delight in exposing the contradictions of the “Feds” and in delivering Gouverneur Morris the finishing blow (it will be remembered that the latter had lost a leg in a carriage accident): That New Orleans could be taken required no stretch of policy to plan, nor spirit of enterprise to effect. It was like marching behind a man to knock him down: and the dastardly slyness of such an attack would have stained the fame of the United States. Where there is no danger cowards are bold . . . Even Gouverneur, on such a march, dare have shown a leg.21

Paine also defended Jefferson’s positions and advised him in the constitutional controversy over the annexation of Louisiana. He was, according to Dumas Malone, “one of the few correspondents of Jefferson to tackle the constitutional question.”22 A two-third majority being required for the adoption of a treaty by the Senate, and the Federalists being “disposed to throw a stumbling block in the way [by] construing [the Purchase] into a Treaty and rejecting it by a minority,”23 Paine argued that the cession of Louisiana was a mere “sale and purchase” which entailed “on the parties [no] future reciprocal responsibility,”24 and that therefore it was not a treaty, but

18

Ibid, 962. See Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 223, 233. 20 FO 2: 932. 21 Ibid, 934. 22 Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President, First Term, 1801-1805 (Boston, 1970), 320-21. 23 FO 2: 1442. 24 Ibid., 1443. 19

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“one of those cases with which the Constitution has nothing to do, and which can be judged only by the circumstances of the times.”25 But the agreement eventually was called a “treaty,” and Jefferson had to submit it to the Senate, particularly as it contained a provision stating that Louisiana was to be “incorporated into the Union” and its inhabitants made American citizens. This was a political decision which fell within the constitutional competence of Congress, and of no other branch of government. What in fact interested Paine at that point was not so much parliamentary tactics as the “American” future of the newly acquired territory. On August 2, 1803, he sent Jefferson the first of a series of important letters on “the mode of beginning government in the ceded country.”26 Knowing that the inhabitants of Louisiana had no experience in democratic ways, Paine even planned to visit New Orleans and offer them his services: “They are a new people,” he told Breckenridge, “and unacquainted with the principles of representative government and I think I could do some good among them.”27 To Jefferson he suggested that the best way of starting things would be for Congress to establish a “Government provisoire” for a few years, until the population was sufficiently “in train to elect their State government.”28 Paine recommended an attitude of “prudence and justice” in such matters. With the Northwest Ordinance in mind, he suggested subdividing Louisiana into several future states, so as to counter the dangerous wish of certain local inhabitants to govern “Louisiana in the lump.” He also explained, however, that no such state ought to be actually created until the number of American immigrants in any part of the territory equaled that of the French inhabitants: “To do it now,” he insisted, “would be sending the American settlers into exile.”29 He even proposed giving up the very name of “Louisiana,” in imitation of revolutionary France where the creation of departments had consigned to oblivion the names of the larger royal provinces. Although he maintained that the Louisianians had not been forced to adopt American citizenship (“we have neither

25

Ibid., 1447. Ibid., 1441. Ibid., 1445. 28 Ibid., 1441. 29 Ibid., 1457. 26 27


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conquered them, nor bought them, but formed a Union with them”),30 it is quite clear that one of Paine’s (and Jefferson’s) main concerns was how to colonize and Americanize this territorial godsend. “The present Inhabitants and their descendants,” Paine wrote to Breckenridge, “will be a majority for some time, but new emigrations from the old states and from Europe, and intermarriages, will soon change the first face of things, and it is necessary to have this in mind when the first measures shall be taken.”31 Congress, Paine thought, should take action to empower the President “to devise and employ means for bringing cultivators to Louisiana from any of the European countries,” and Congress should also appoint an “agent” in New Orleans so as to keep immigration under control.32 Suiting as it were the action to the word, Paine informed Jefferson that he had “thousands and tens of thousands” of British friends “in all ranks of life,” some of them rich, whom he might persuade to settle in the new country.33 He added that, had he not been 68 years of age, he would have gladly volunteered as a recruiting agent: “Were I twenty years younger, and my name and reputation as well known in European countries as it is now, I would contract for a quantity of land in Louisiana and go to Europe and bring over settlers.”34 But immigration on a large scale would remain difficult and perhaps impossible, Paine pointed out, so long as settlers did not “know beforehand the government and the laws they [were] to be under.” Hence his insistence that Congress should frame a provisional “form of government for them to continue until they arrived at a state of population proper for constitutional government.”35 Immigration was not only a matter of quantity. Paine considered that it was equally important to pay attention to the quality of those who were to come and settle (all future Americans) and, if necessary, to separate the wheat from the chaff: “The people from the Eastern States are the best settlers of a new country, and of people from abroad the German peasantry are the best. The Irish in general are generous and dissolute. The Scotch turn their attention to traffic, and 30

Ibid., 1446. Ibid. 32 Ibid., 1461. 33 Ibid., 1441. 34 Ibid., 1459. 35 Ibid., 1457. 31

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the English to manufactures. These people are more fitted to live in cities than to be cultivators of new lands.”36 Louisiana was in need of “a useful industrious set of citizens,”37 not of troublemakers or illadapted laborers. The ideal settler was therefore the German redemptioner, “indented for a term of years”38 and then apt to set up his own farm or business—as had so successfully been the case earlier in Pennsylvania (Paine estimated that some 10,000 such immigrants could be brought in every year). Attracting indentured servants to Louisiana seemed to Paine a much better solution than importing slaves. As a man brought up in the Quaker faith, he regarded as utterly immoral the prospect of “bringing poor Negroes to work the lands in a state of slavery and wretchedness.” But he also rejected this for demographic, economic and political reasons. “Besides the immorality of it,” he told Jefferson, “[this would be] the certain way of preventing population.” And this in turn would prevent revenue: “I question,” he went on to say, “if the revenue arising from ten Negroes in the consumption of imported articles is equal to that of one white citizen. In the articles of dress and of the table it is almost impossible to make a comparison.” Last but not least, redemptioners would be preferable to slaves merely because “they would grow to be citizens,”39 which blacks would never do, unless there was general emancipation. But this was not yet part of the American political agenda. For Paine, the order of the day was the rapid importation of German redemptioners so as to turn the French inhabitants into a minority. And the sooner, said Paine, the better: “for they [the French] give symptoms of being a troublesome set.” Paine had lived in Paris long enough to know what he was talking about. He had learned the hard way that the French were too fickle, too unstable, and insufficiently versed in democratic ways, to be relied on for any great length of time: “There will be no end to [their] claims . . . if you once begin to make a distinction in their favor between them and the American settlers. They must all be governed by the same law as of Congress till there are a sufficient number of American settlers to be

36

Ibid. Ibid., 1461. 38 Ibid., 1457. 39 Ibid., 1458. 37


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trusted with constitutional powers.”40 In other words, the democratic future of Louisiana was too serious a matter to be entrusted to the bunglers of the French Revolution. If the French could not be trusted, it was, Paine argued, because the Cession of Louisiana was a great American acquisition which would rapidly become “an encumbrance on the Union,” were the settlers “to be under a French jurisdiction . . . It will never answer to make French Louisiana the legislators of the new settlers.”41 Action had to be taken (1) to acclimatize French Catholicism to American mores, and (2) to substitute English for French as the dominant language in Louisiana. Paine half-jokingly suggested that the French settlers should be given the “right of electing their Church Ministers” so as to free them from the external authority of the Pope. This, he added, would “serve to hold the priests in a style of good behavior, and also to give the people an idea of elective rights.”42 Louisiana being now part of the Union, the same rules regarding religion should prevail there as in the rest of the country, and there was no reason why Louisiana Catholics should receive special treatment. Even their habit of organizing “exterior ceremonies (such as processions and celebrations)” ought to be prohibited if only to prevent quarrels and scuffles between the old settlers and the new. The Yankees, Paine warned, “will not move out of the road for a little wooden Jesus stuck on a stick and carried in procession, nor kneel in the dirt to a wooden Virgin Mary”!43 To complete his plan of action, Paine proposed deFrenchifying Louisiana through intensive schooling. “The present prevailing language,” he told Jefferson, “is French and Spanish, but it will be necessary to establish schools to teach English as the laws ought to be in the language of the Union.”44 It should be noted here that, in the field of politics, Americanization was not long in coming: as early as December 20, 1803, the United States set up a “legislative Council” made up of 6 French-speaking members and 7 Americans. One year later, the proportion was changed to 5 French-speaking members and 8 Americans. Just as he had sent a series of letters to “the Citizens of the 40

Ibid., 1462. Ibid., 1456-57. Ibid., 1441. 43 Ibid., 1446. 44 Ibid., 1441. 41 42

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United States,” on September 22, 1804 Paine decided to publish an address “to the French Inhabitants of Louisiana.” A few months after the official announcement of the Purchase, the French inhabitants of Louisiana had sent a memorial to Congress (“a memorial of our rights,” as they put it) demanding immediate admission to equal Statehood and the right to continue the importation of Negro slaves. Paine’s reply to the memorialists has all the trappings of a patronizing lecture in civics and on human rights. It is nonetheless beautifully written and was deemed so effective by John Randolph of Roanoke that he urged upon Albert Gallatin “the printing of . . . thousands of copies of Tom Paine’s answer” to be distributed to the people of Louisiana “by as many thousand troops,” in either English, Spanish or French.45 The document was indeed convincingly written: You see what mischief ensued in France by the possession of power before they understood principles. They earned liberty in words, but not in fact. The writer of this was in France through the whole of the Revolution, and knows the truth of what he speaks; . . . You are arriving at freedom by the easiest means that any people ever enjoyed it; without contest, without expense, and even without any connivance of your own. And you already so far mistake principles, that under the name of rights you ask for powers; power to import and enslave Africans; and to govern a territory that we have purchased . . . Dare you put up a petition to heaven for such a power, without fearing to be struck from the earth by its justice? Why, then, do you ask it of man against man? Do you want to renew in Louisiana the horrors of Domingo?46

As early as 1791, in a letter to William Short (pro tem U.S. Minister in Paris), Paine had expressed his sympathy for the black rebels of Santo Domingo. He knew that they had risen up against the local whites who refused to recognize the civil and political rights granted to some of them by the French National Assembly. “Distressing accounts” had reached Paris of what was going on across the Ocean: “It is,” Paine had remarked, “the natural consequence of Slavery and must be expected everywhere.”47 From then on, he openly sided with Toussaint-Louverture and was regarded by the Bonapartists as an inspirer of the Santo Domingo insurgents. In January 1805, three months after his address “to the French Inhabitants of Louisiana,” 45

Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (New York: Putnam, 1909), 2: 339. 46 FO 2: 964-68 passim. 47 Ibid., 1321.


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Paine wrote again to Jefferson about the conflict which was now opposing France and the newly-proclaimed Republic of Haiti. He wanted to persuade the President to have the United States serve as a mediator between the two parties. Such an intercession, he said, “would be beneficial to all the parties, and give us a great commercial and political standing, not only with the present people of Domingo but with the West Indies generally.”48 Here again we have a perfect example of how Paine was able to combine idealism and practical action, a deep attachment to universal principles and a keen sense of what American interests were about. * Paine’s influence (that of Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason) had been most felt, to begin with, in Europe and in the Northern and Middle States of the U.S. With the Louisiana affair, his influence spread to the Western Territory and to the South. A few decades later, as Alfred Owen Aldridge has pointed out, it went even farther south, reaching Latin-America where it “certainly made a significant contribution to the development and final success” of various independence movements, particularly in Venezuela, Argentina and Chile.49 Influential in North America, Europe, Louisiana, Latin America, to be sure, Thomas Paine, the “farmer of thoughts,” did deserve the title which he readily and immodestly applied to himself—that of “citizen of the world”—for so he was.

48

Ibid., 1454. Alfred Owen Aldridge, Early American Literature: A Comparatist Approach (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 215-260. 49


VI

A National of Nowhere: The Problem of Thomas Paine’s American Citizenship A freeman, Cato, is a stranger nowhere—a slave, everywhere. Thomas Paine, “To Cato,” 8 April 17761

In November 1802, when he landed in Baltimore, Paine (aged 65) was in an uncomfortable situation, to say the least. After an absence of fifteen years, he soon found out that he had lost most of his one-time friends and was being violently inveighed against by the Federalist press. As we saw in the previous chapter, few Americans had forgiven him for the publication of The Age of Reason, let alone his insulting open letter to George Washington. Four years later, in November 1806, Paine went to the polls in New Rochelle, where he now lived, to vote for members of Congress and state assemblies. The supervisor of the election was a man named Elisha Ward, whose father and brothers, according to Paine, had “joined the British in the war.” Paine’s account of his own disenfranchisement is contained in two letters (one to Madison, the other to George Clinton)2 sent from New York in early May 1807: I tendered my tickets separately distinguishing which was which, as is the custom; each of which Ward refused, saying to me “You are not an American Citizen . . . Our minister at Paris, Gouverneur Morris, would not reclaim you as an American Citizen when you were imprisoned in The Luxembourg at Paris, and General Washington refused to do it” . . . Upon my telling him that the two cases he stated were falsehoods . . . he got up, and calling for a constable, said to me, “I will commit you to prison.” He chose, however, to sit down and go no farther with it . . . I accordingly commenced a prosecution against him last fall and the court will sit the 20th of this May.3

1

FO 2: 69. George Clinton, former governor of New York, was then Vice-President of the United States. 3 FO 2: 1486-87. 2

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In preparation for the trial, Paine undertook to gather evidence, collecting affidavits from those who could testify to his citizenship: Clinton, Madison, Barlow. To Vice-President George Clinton he wrote: “As it is a new generation that has risen up since the declaration of independence . . . I wish you would write a letter . . . stating . . . the effects which the work Common Sense . . . had upon the country.”4 Paine was not a “Founding Father” in the sense that he had neither been a signer of the Declaration of Independence, nor of the U.S. Constitution; but, as the author of Common Sense, he had admittedly been one of the political and ideological co-founders of the American Republic and, if only on that account, could not be denied the title of “American Citizen”: this, at least, was the kind of official recognition—and reminder—Paine wanted to get from Clinton. As current Secretary of State, James Madison had in his office James Monroe’s report to the then Secretary of State, Edmund Randolph, claiming Paine as an American Citizen when he was in jail in Paris. This is what Paine asked him to do (It must be remembered that Gouverneur Morris, here very critically mentioned by Paine, was a strange character strangely appointed by George Washington as U.S. Minister to France. Morris was a staunch conservative, hostile to the French Revolution, hostile to Paine, and secretly favorable to a radical shift in American diplomacy, i.e. to the reinstatement of Britain— instead of France—as the main partner and ally of the United States): When Mr. Monroe came Minister from the United States to the French Government, I was still imprisoned in the Luxembourg . . . As soon as Mr. Monroe could make his own standing good, which required time on account of the ill conduct of his predecessor Gouverneur Morris, he reclaimed me as an American citizen, for the case was, I was excluded from the Convention as a foreigner and imprisoned as a foreigner. I was liberated immediately after Mr. Monroe’s reclamation. Mr. Monroe wrote an official account of this to the secretary of state, Mr. Randolph . . . In Mr. Randolph’s official answer to Mr. Monroe’s letter, he says . . .: “The President [George Washington] approves what you have done in the case of Mr. Paine..” . . I will be obliged to you for an attested copy of Mr. Monroe’s letter and also of Mr. Randolph’s official answer. . .

4

May 4, 1807, FO 2: 1489-90.

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As to Gouverneur Morris, the fact is, that he did reclaim me on my application to him as Minister, but his reclamation of me did me no good.5

In reality, it is not quite the case that Gouverneur Morris reclaimed Paine as an American. Morris’s letter to Deforgues, the French minister of Foreign Affairs (Feb. 14, 1794), reads: “Thomas Paine has just applied to me to claim him as a Citizen of the United States.” But at no point in the rest of the letter does Morris actually claim him as such, insisting, on the contrary, that Paine “was born in England”—not a very supportive remark under the circumstances! 6 Paine finally sent a letter to his old friend Joel Barlow, still in Paris, who had also interceded for him at the time: “I have prosecuted the Board of Inspectors for disenfranchising me. You and other Americans in Paris went in a body to the Convention to reclaim me, and I want a certificate from you, properly attested, of this fact” (a fact which actually took place on January 20, 1794).7 The political truth of the matter is complex but pretty clear: born in England, Paine had first been a British subject; at the age of 38, he had left Britain for America, had become a resident there, then a citizen of the newly independent states, and had twice taken the oath of abjuration to the British crown and sworn personal allegiance to the United States, “once as a citizen of the State of Pennsylvania in 1776; and again before Congress . . . when I was appointed Secretary in the office of Foreign Affairs in 1777.”8 The oath established by Congress (January 16, 1777) for all officers of the continental service and for all holding civil office in Congress was as follows: I [in this case Thomas Paine] do acknowledge the Thirteen United States of America . . . to be free, independent and sovereign states, and declare that the people thereof owe no allegiance or obedience to George the Third, King of Great Britain; and I renounce, refuse, and abjure any allegiance or obedience to him; and I do swear that I will to the utmost of my power support, maintain and defend the said United States against the said King George, etc.9

Paine was then made an honorary citizen of the French Republic (in 5

May 3, 1807. FO 2: 1486-87. See Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine, 300. 7 May 4, 1807. FO 2: 1488-89. Barlow’s letter to the Court is currently owned by Mr. Richard Maass, Hamson (N.Y.). 8 Letter to James Monroe, September 10, 1794, FO 2: 1353. 9 Frank George Franklin, The Legislative History of Naturalization in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1969 [Chicago, 1906]), 2. 6

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August 1792) and was elected to the Convention (in September); but in December 1793 he was dismissed from that assembly, arrested and jailed “as a foreigner,” that is as an Englishman—the irony being that he was no longer English at the time. The publication of Rights of Man had recently caused him to be tried in absentia at the Guildhall in London, to be banished from Britain, and therefore deprived of his original national identity—a kind of civil death. It could be argued that, having spent so many years (15 in all) away from the United States, Paine could rightfully be considered as an alien or at least as a non-citizen. But in 1807 there existed no legislation taking this kind of absence into account. Only in 1808—maybe as a consequence of the Tom Paine affair—did the Federalists try to get the U.S. Congress to enact a law stipulating that “if any citizen shall expatriate himself, he shall, ipso facto, be deemed an alien, and ever after be incapable of becoming a citizen.”10 It would take a whole book to analyze all the political and legal aspects of this strange affair. Although I am well aware that the political context, i.e. the tension between Jeffersonians and Federalists, probably played a more important role than the sheer rigor of the law itself (let alone the fact that, as a child, Gouverneur Morris had attended school in the Huguenot settlement of New Rochelle, and therefore probably knew the Ward family personally ...),11 I will restrict myself here to analyzing some of the purely formal reasons why Paine finally lost his suit and therefore never recovered his American citizenship.12 Madame Bonneville, wife of the French revolutionary printer Nicolas Bonneville, lived for many years on Paine’s farm in New Rochelle (this farm, incidentally, was the confiscated property of a former Loyalist, one Frederick Devoe, and had been given to Paine by the New York legislature in 1784, in recognition of his great “patriotic” services). In the notes she left, Mme Bonneville, to whom Paine bequeathed most of his estate, gives interesting information 10

Ibid., 116. This detail is mentioned in Mark M. Boatner III, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (New York: David MacKay, 1976), 737. 12 My main source here will be a short but well-documented pamphlet written by Thomas D. Scoble, Jr. and published in 1946 by the Thomas Paine National Historical Association in New Rochelle (Thomas Paine’s Citizenship Record, hereafter referred to as ‘Scoble’). 11

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about the trial: This case was pleaded, before the Supreme Court of New York by Mr. Riker, then Attorney General [meaning, in fact, District Attorney], and, though Paine lost his case, I as his legatee did not lose the having to pay for it. It is, however, an undoubted fact, that Mr. Paine was an American Citizen.13

In his letter to George Clinton, Paine refers to Riker, and to a “Court and Jury,” probably that of the First District (then including New York and Westchester counties), but does not mention the New York Supreme Court—which was then but a mere court of first instance. No public record of Paine’s action has been found, either in New York City or in Westchester County, and most of the papers left by Riker after his death were accidentally destroyed.14 According to Thomas Scoble, a New Rochelle attorney who investigated the matter in 1946, there may be a technical explanation to this mystery: “The requests of Paine to Clinton, Madison and Joel Barlow, to furnish him with letters for his use on the prosecution of Ward would indicate that the actual proceeding was a motion, based on documentary evidence, rather than a jury trial with witnesses and cross examinations.”15 A motion (i.e. an application to a court for a ruling to relieve the applicant from some injustice) was usually not preserved or recorded as part of court reporting. Although one is tempted to ascribe Paine’s defeat to political reasons, it is quite likely that the negative attitude of the court, whichever court it was, was simply dictated by technical defects in legal pleading. In his reply to Paine (May 12, 1807), George Clinton seems to have sensed the problem, expressing doubts “whether the Court will admit it to be read as evidence.”16 As Scoble explains: From every known rule of evidence prevailing then and now, such letters (which Paine indicated would constitute his case) would not be admitted in evidence. The reason is abundantly clear. The writers of those letters were alive at the time of the trial. In order to give fair opportunity to the opposition to test the truth or accuracy of the statements in the letters, in simple fairness, the writers should have first been sworn to tell the truth, then testify to matters of which they actually had personal knowledge, and then submit to all the tests which the cross-examining lawyer has at his command to break down 13

448.

14

Moncure Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (New York: Putnam, 1909), 2:

On this accident, see Conway, op. cit., 383. Scoble, 29. 16 Conway, op. cit., 381. 15

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such testimony. Such has always been the strict rule in our courts and it properly prevails today. Accordingly, if Paine’s attorney tried to present his case merely on letters and affidavits, the presiding judge quite rightfully may have excluded them from evidence and dismissed Paine’s complaint, without passing on its merits, for failure to present proper proof. This action would not be a judicial determination that Paine was wrong in his contentions, or Ward right. The merits of the issue simply would not receive judicial consideration, much less determination. The decision would constitute no precedent or court ruling on Paine’s citizenship.17

* The net result of this nonsuit was that Paine, who had so ardently contributed to the establishment of republicanism in America, spent the last two years of his life (he died in June 1809) without any formal citizenship or voting rights. As early as 1778, Paine had defined himself as a cosmopolitan: “My attachment is to all the world, and not to any particular part.”18 But unlike those who shared or had shared this kind of sentiment (Hume, Voltaire, Condorcet, Gibbon or even Burke),19 Paine was not only a philosophical cosmopolitan; he was an activist of universal citizenship—neither an abstract citizen of the world nor the citizen of an abstract world. He was prepared to become a real citizen of any country where universal rights were at stake or imperiled: “Where liberty is, there is my country,” Franklin once reportedly told him; “Where liberty is not, there is mine,” Paine allegedly replied. That was why he had come to America; that was why he had then gone to France; that was why he had dreamed of establishing a British republic. And now he was in America again, but this time a citizen of nowhere, a man without a country, a voter forbidden to vote, a disenfranchised Founding Father. He soon after died, but his bones were stolen from the grave by William Cobbett, taken back to England, sold, dispersed, never to be found again.

17

Scoble 30. FO 1: 146. 19 See Ian Dyck, “Local Attachments, National Identities and World Citizenship in the Thought of Thomas Paine,” in History Workshop Journal 35, 1993: 117-135; and, more generally, Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). 18

PART II PAINE AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT


VII

Thomas Paine and the Issue of Universal Suffrage

When I first thought of writing on this subject, my conviction was that Paine had moved, over the years, from a narrow conception of franchise (in 1776) to full manhood, if not universal, suffrage when the French Revolution began. I was wrong. When one compares what Paine wrote in Common Sense to his 1795 speech at the French Convention, one finds practically no evolution. The philosophy is the same; there is simply more clarity and precision in his approach to the problem. Paine’s views certainly evolved with regard to the system of representation, as he became more and more wary of the “precipitancy”1 accompanying unicameralism; but paradoxically (though not strangely), he stuck to his original guns concerning franchise, simply because the issue was a matter of principle linked to a doctrine of natural rights from which he never departed, whatever the time, country, or circumstances. Regarding his attitude to suffrage, one should nevertheless distinguish between two periods: the American period, during which he contributed to the Republican debate as a mere pamphleteer, or occasionally as an intellectual adviser of those in high places; and the French period, during which he was an elected legislator, a constitution-maker, i.e. one who could not be content with vague, albeit generous, ideas, but had to go into more detail and address the issue of suffrage in both ideological and practical terms. * In Common Sense, the problem of popular representation is referred to in two different but essential passages. In the opening pages, it is first 1

Word used in various texts, e.g. in “Constitutional Reform” (1805), FO 2: 993.

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described as a natural necessity for any increasing community that can no longer be ruled through town meetings or general assemblies. This, Paine explains, “will point out the convenience of their consenting to leave the legislative part to be managed by a select number chosen from the whole body, who are supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those have who appointed them.”2 The formulation here is still hazy, and Paine says nothing about who is going to be “the select number chosen from the whole body,” nor does he say anything about the common “concerns at stake” between the elected and the electors—although he insists on “the propriety of having elections often,” so that the elected may “never form to themselves an interest separate from the electors.”3 Paine’s second allusion to suffrage in Common Sense is linked to his proposal of convening a “continental conference” for the purpose of framing “a Continental Charter or Charter of the United Colonies.” In addition to “a committee of twenty-six members of Congress” plus an equivalent number of delegates from provincial assemblies, Paine suggests that “five representatives of the people at large [be] chosen in each province . . . by as many qualified voters as shall think proper to attend from all parts of the province for that purpose.”4 Nothing is said about the mode of “choosing,” nor about the “qualifications” of those who will “think it proper to attend.” It seems to me that at this point Paine was trapped in an epistemological contradiction: the business of the continental conference being, among other things, to “fix . . . the number and manner of choosing members of Congress” in the future, how could one pre-determine the manner of choosing constitutional delegates without begging the question—or putting the cart before the horse? Paine never quite extricated himself from this vicious circle. The Forester’s Letters (April-May 1776) were at attempt at clarification, though not a very successful one. “In republican governments,” Paine writes in his third letter (“to Cato”), “the leaders of the people are removable by vote,” adding that the best “bulwark of natural rights” is a political system patterned on the tradition of “trial by juries.” Here, says Paine, “the power of kings is shut out. No royal negative can enter this court. The jury, which is here supreme, is a

2 3 4

CS, 67 (emphasis mine). Ibid. Ibid., 96, 97 (emphasis mine).

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Republic, a body of judges chosen from among the people.” But Paine does not enlighten us about how to define “the people” and “choose” their leaders. He often refers to the people as “the public,” which is just as vague, and he sometimes identifies voter with freeman, a fairly ambiguous term. “On the part of the public,” he writes in the first Forester Letter, “it is more consistent with freemen to appoint their rulers than to have them born.”5 Apart from the question of knowing whether to “appoint” and to “choose” mean the same thing (and what exactly do they mean?), Paine’s mention of freemen as being those who choose points to a somewhat restrictive conception of suffrage on his part, at least if we trust John Toland’s definition of the word: “By freeman, I understand men of property, or persons that are able to live of themselves; and those who cannot subsist in this independence I call servants.”6 We are quite far here from universal suffrage; but, as we shall see, Paine’s doctrine of property was far more sophisticated and egalitarian than that of Toland. More enlightening was Paine’s attitude toward the electoral system adopted in Pennsylvania at the very outset of the American Revolution. Although he did not participate in the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention and took no part in the drafting of the Constitution itself, he nevertheless approved of its (relatively) radical approach to suffrage. In his “Serious Address to the People of Pennsylvania” (December 1778), Paine eloquently supported a constitution that he called “the Bible of the State,”7 and which had extended the vote to all white males over twenty-one who had lived in the state one year and paid taxes of any kind. Although this was still what the French call a système censitaire (i.e. a voting system based on tax liability), property qualifications for both voting and officeholding had been abolished; and Paine, for the first time, spelled out his views on the subject of property-and-franchise, insisting that suffrage was a matter of natural equal rights, not property: Property alone cannot defend a country against invading enemies. Houses and lands cannot fight; sheep and oxen cannot be taught the musket; therefore the defence must be personal, and that which equally unites all must be something

5

Ibid., 78, 79, 80. In H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1977), 89. 7 Paul P. Selsam, The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776; A Study in Revolutionary Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), 208. 6

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equally the property of all, viz. an equal share of freedom, independent of the varieties of wealth . . . The man who today proposes to regulate freedom by fortune, being rich himself, little thinks what may be his own state before he dies, and that of his children after his death.8

Paine’s remarks on the injustice of property qualifications were not just leveled at Pennsylvanians, but concerned the whole continent: “I speak this to the honor of America,” and his final motto had a universal ring to it: “Leave Freedom free.”9 In a retrospective article published in 1805 (again, a Letter to the Citizens of Pennsylvania—and the very last pamphlet of his life), Paine argued that, though imperfect, the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 “had many good points,” and that, in sharp contrast to it, the new conservative Constitution adopted in 1790 was not “conformable to the Declaration of Independence [because it made] artificial distinctions among men in the right of suffrage,”10 meaning distinctions based on property. Some further clarification came, in 1786, with the publication of Dissertation on Government; the Affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money. What Paine clarified was not so much the concept of people (vaguely and metaphorically defined as “the fountain of power”) as that of nation and sovereignty. Regarding the people, whose natural right it was to choose “a select number of persons, periodically . . . who act as representatives and in behalf of the whole,” Paine referred his readers, in a footnote, to Article VII of the Declaration of Rights “prefixed” to the Pennsylvania Constitution, and which reads: “All free men having a sufficient evident common interest with, and attachment to, the community, have a right to elect officers, or to be elected into office.”11 Although women, blacks, jobless citizens and other idle or dependent persons were left out, this was indeed the most daring definition of manhood suffrage ever formulated and put into practice. More explicit, and even more central to our topic, was Paine’s definition of the nation as a disparate or non-unified seat of sovereign power, i.e. as the reverse of an army: A nation is composed of distinct, unconnected individuals, following various 8

FO 2, 288, 289 . Ibid., 289. 10 Ibid., 993, 1001. 11 Ibid., 369, 372, 373. 9

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trades, employments and pursuits; continually meeting, crossing, uniting, opposing and separating from each other, as accident, interest and circumstance shall direct.12

* When Paine left America and became an active participant in the French Revolution, he soon found out that much of the debate on universal suffrage revolved around the various ways in which the “nation” was perceived. He persistently sided with those (mostly Girondins) who viewed it as an addition of individual sovereign wills rather than as a transcendent collective body to be ruled like a regiment. At every stage in the controversy Paine had something to say—and, this time, precise proposals to make. During the French Constitutional debates of 1791, only 5 deputies came down in favor of universal suffrage. A distinction was made between passive citizens (the people at large) and active citizens (those fit for voting, or being voted for). The distinction was based on a doctrinal differentiation between “franchise-as-a-right” (l’électoratdroit) and “franchise-as-a-function” (l’électorat-fonction).13 The former was (theoretically) to be exercised by all individual members of the community on the ground of their natural inherent sovereignty; the latter on behalf of the transcendent Nation by those, limited in number, considered fit or qualified for the function. The so-called qualification was in fact based on tax liability. To be an active citizen, one had to pay a direct annual tax equal to at least 3 days of work (whatever that meant!). Although the Constitution of 1791 was a far cry from manhood suffrage, it created a body of 4.3 million active citizens for a total population of 24 million. Thus, one French person out of six was permitted to vote—not in their own names though, but in the name of some superior national entity that was more than the addition of its parts. Paine, recently elected to the Convention, took up his pen and exposed the imperfections of a system that fell short of being really republican, or at least was not in phase with his own adamic philosophy of natural God-given rights. In his Letter Addressed to the Addressers (written late in the summer of 1792), he contended that 12

Ibid., 371. On this controversy, see Julien Laferrière, Manuel de droit constitutionnel (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1947), 66 ff. 13

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“the custom of attaching rights . . . to inanimate matter [like places of residence, real estate, etc.], instead of to the person, [was] too absurd to make any part of a rational argument.”14 And not only did he attach the civic rights of man to the individual person, but he also made a subtle distinction between two forms of property—a distinction which tended to invalidate all voting qualifications, including that provided for in the French system of the time: As every man in the nation, of the age of twenty-one years, pays taxes, either out of the property he possesses, or out of the product of his labor, which is property to him . . . so has everyone the same equal right to vote, and no one part of the nation, nor any individual, has a right to dispute the right of another.15

Every worker or laborer being therefore possessed of the right of vote, the only qualification Paine was ready to accept was that of age, “because the qualification is such, as nothing but dying before the time can take away,” and because, in the case of a legal age requirement, “the equality of rights . . . as a principle, is recognized in the act of regulating the exercise.”16 Then Paine, who served on a special committee (“Comité des Neuf”) appointed to draw up a new Constitution (Constitution of Year I), began to work with Condorcet on a daily basis, paving the way for a system based on full manhood suffrage. The plan, drafted in January 1793, provided that the national sovereignty “reside[d] essentially in the entire people” and that “each citizen ha[d] an equal right to concur in its exercise.”17 Later taken up by the Montagnards, the Girondin project established direct universal suffrage. The right to vote was no longer subject to any property or pecuniary condition, and the electorate even included people on relief or people in domestic service—not to mention foreign residents, now part of the Nation: a triumph for the doctrine of franchise-as-a-right! But then came the Terror. Jailed for almost a year, Paine was released in December 1794, and almost immediately reinstated in his seat at the Convention. It did not take him long to realize that his colleagues—all of them survivors of the Terror—had no intention of 14

FO 2: 505. Ibid. (emphasis mine). Ibid. 17 Ibid., 560 (Plan of a Declaration of the Natural, Civil and Political Rights of Man). 15 16

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returning to the good old days of universal suffrage. Instead, they began to think of, and frame, a new Constitution (the Constitution of Year III) that would re-establish property or tax-liability qualifications for voting, thus going back to the safer doctrine of franchise-as-afunction. Before he finally withdrew from politics, Paine gave only one speech at the Convention, and that one speech (on July 7, 1795) was a diatribe—very coldly received—against those who were planning to “deprive half the people in [the] nation of their rights as citizens” by restricting franchise to those citizens who were able to pay “any direct contribution whatsoever.”18 A few days before, Paine had sent to his fellow deputies copies of his Dissertation on First Principles of Government, in which he— more clearly than ever—presented the case for universal suffrage: The right of voting . . . is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another . . . If . . . we depart from the principle of equal rights . . . where are we to stop? . . . By what principle are we to find out the point to stop at, that shall discriminate between men of the same country, part of whom shall be free, and the rest not?19

This criticism, repeated a few months later in Agrarian Justice,20 did not deter Paine’s colleagues from adopting the villainous Constitution (on August 23), nor from adding to it two even more villainous decrees: one compelling voters to re-elect two thirds of the outgoing deputies; the other stipulating that, if this minimum was not reached, the said deputies would be reappointed despite the election results. Obviously Paine’s influence over the Convention was no longer what it used to be! * Sickened by so many betrayals of the Republican ideals, Paine finally returned to the United States (in 1802)—and, there, as we have seen, was excluded from suffrage. For the first time in his life, he found himself in the uncomfortable predicament of having some of his civil rights denied, a predicament so familiar to black people and women. As a sincere abolitionist, he was certainly not averse to the prospect of 18 19 20

Ibid., 590. Ibid., 579, 583. FO 1: 607.

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black males being some day granted the right to vote. After all, he was the one who, as early as 1776, had prophetically warned his fellowAmericans: “Forget not the hapless African.”21 But, unlike Mary Wollstonecraft, Paine never went so far as to advocate franchise for women. Not a word, in all his writings, about the New Jersey law of July 2, 1776, giving the right to vote to female citizens—and no comment of his when this very right was taken back from them in 1807! And not a word either against the then prevalent idea that women were mere dependents and had “no wills of their own”22 and therefore could not vote. For once, Paine failed to be a prophet. To his “Forget not the hapless African” he might, and should, have added (like Abigail Adams, in March 1776, in a famous letter to her husband, John Adams): Remember the Ladies . . . If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.23

She was right (although one may wonder whether she was worried about the blacks): liberty, like suffrage, is either universal—or is nothing at all

21

“To Cato,” FO 2: 82. In Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 179. 23 L. H. Butterfield, M. Friedlander and M. J. Kline, eds., The Book of Abigail and John. Selected Letters of the Adams Family (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 121. 22

VIII

Paine’s Agrarian Justice and the Birth of the Welfare State

Described by some as “the real father of Social Security,”1 Paine wrote Agrarian Justice during the winter of 1795-96,2 while convalescing in the house of the U.S. Minister James Monroe, after his release from the Luxembourg prison where he had spent almost a year. But the piece was published only in the spring of 1797. Paine was then living in an apartment (on today’s rue de l’Odéon) lent to him by his friend Nicolas de Bonneville, publisher and founder of the famous Cercle Social where many revolutionary ideas had been discussed—and printed—before the Terror. Agrarian Justice appeared in Paris first, then in London, a few days before the publisher, Thomas Williams, was arrested and jailed. Just as the pamphlet was about to be published, Paine decided to return to America. He left Paris for Le Havre, where he remained from mid-March till mid-May, waiting for a safe boat to take him home—but only to find out that the ocean was more than ever under British control, and that he just could not go. His departure from Paris had been so hasty that Paine, unable to supervise the translation of Agrarian Justice into French, had entrusted a friend with the task. Back in Paris in the latter part of May, “he found that the pamphlet had done well enough to warrant a further printing, and this gave him the excuse to write a preface.”3 Paine wrote Agrarian Justice at a time when the issue of land and landed property was at center stage in France, as a practical result of the abolition of tithes, and as a social consequence of the sale of the “national estate” (“biens nationaux”) confiscated from the clergy.4 It

1 Whitfield J. Bell, The Bust of Thomas Paine (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974—printed for The Friends of the Library), 16. 2 See “Author’s English Preface” to Agrarian Justice, FO 1: 609. 3 David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 328. 4 On June 5 1793, the Convention also resolved that all common property (“biens

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has been estimated that 40% of the land thus redistributed was acquired by the peasantry. The rest was bought by rural bourgeois or surviving aristocrats.5 France had, to a relatively large extent, become of nation of land-owners. The question of representative democracy and the problem of land-taxation appeared in a new light, and raised new social issues that Paine now wanted to address differently from what he had done a few years before in the second part of Rights of Man. In 1797, the Terror was over, but war was going on between France and England—with England, as Paine said, “supporting the despotism of Austria and the Bourbons against the liberties of France.”6 In his preface to the English edition, Paine explains that he would have preferred the pamphlet to appear later, when “the present war” was over, but that he had resolved to publish it now in response to a sermon delivered by Richard Watson, bishop of Llandaff—a sermon entitled “The Wisdom and Goodness of God, in having made both rich and poor.” “It is wrong,” Paine wrote, “to say God made rich and poor; He only made male and female; and he gave them the earth for their inheritance.”7 This, as we shall see, was to be the startingpoint of his Biblical case for a welfare system. Another aspect of the context in which Paine wrote and then published Agrarian Justice has to do with the French Constitution of Year III, adopted by referendum in September 1795. Paine had been one of the drafters of the Girondin constitutional project of 1793, and he probably thought of himself as an indirect originator of the new constitution. He, therefore, unsurprisingly called it “the best organised system the human mind has yet produced.”8 But, in his view, the Constitution of Year III had one important flaw: suffrage, instead of being equal, was now based on property qualification, i.e. the payment of a direct land or personal property tax. The consequence of this was that unpropertied citizens were purely and simply excluded from the

communaux”)—with the exception of woods, buildings and public tracks—could be shared among local citizens if one third of them asked for the sharing. 5 See Bruno Brunoit, Les grandes dates de la Révolution française (Paris: Larousse, 1989), 125; and Albert Soboul, La Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 209. 6 Agrarian Justice, FO 1: 609. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid,. 607.

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republican principle of political participation and representation. This defect, Paine argued, was at the origin of Babeuf’s conspiracy.9 Babeuf and his fellow-conspirators, he wrote, were right to protest since a basic human right was at stake, but instead of “constitut[ing] themselves personally into a Directory, which is formally destructive of election and representation,” and is even worse than the flaw they condemned, they should have suggested a peaceful, constitutional rectification of the clause in question. “Had Babeuf and his accomplices taken into consideration the condition of France under the Constitution, and compared it with what it was under the tragical revolutionary government, and during the execrable Reign of Terror, the rapidity of the alteration must have appeared to them very striking and astonishing. Famine has been replaced by abundance, and by the well-founded hope of a near and increasing prosperity.”10 For Paine, who thus openly supported the “Directoire” and the new assemblies, it did not make political sense to try and overthrow a regime which was much better than the previous ones, and rested on a good amendable constitution. His object therefore, in Agrarian Justice, was precisely to propose “to the legislature and the Executive Directory of the French Republic,”11 to which the piece is inscribed, a constitutional amendment dissociating property (an acquired right) from the expression of individual sovereignty (a natural birthright of man, however propertyless he may be). The tragic end of Gracchus Babeuf, who was arrested, tried and finally guillotined in May 1797, certainly encouraged Paine to publish his thoughts on the subject, but it also compelled him to be somewhat cautious in questioning the dominant bourgeois system. In that respect, the exact title of Paine’s pamphlet must be kept in mind: Agrarian Justice opposed to Agrarian Law, and to Agrarian Monopoly.12 Like Mably and Montesquieu who had propagated the idea, the French Convention believed that the “agrarian laws” of 9

Gracchus Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of the Equals” (1796) was one of several plots that aimed at overthrowing the Directorate. Babeuf and his friends were arrested, but Babeuf used the trial as an opportunity to denounce the decline of the Revolution and to restate his vision of a communist egalitarianism. He was sentenced to death, and executed the following year. 10 Ibid., 608. 11 Ibid., 606. 12 Title of the French edition: La Justice Agraire opposée à la Loi Agraire, et aux privilèges agraires.

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Roman times aimed at dispossessing rich land-owners, or at limiting land property, whereas in fact Roman legislators intended only to give the poor, i.e. the plebeians, a more substantial share of the cake (the cake being territories taken from the enemy, turned into state property ... and usually grabbed by patricians). The Convention therefore passed a law (17 March 1793), condemning to death any person proposing the adoption of an “agrarian law.” Paine’s apparent circumspection (compared to Babeuf’s audacity), and his insistence on Agrarian Justice as opposed to Agrarian Law, is quite easy to understand in that light. But Paine did not need a threat of this kind to believe that a mass dispossession of the propertied, and the establishment of a communist system based on collective ownership à la Babeuf, would not be a sound remedy. Like most Enlightenment thinkers, he was an admirer of Adam Smith and believed in economic liberalism, but his belief was inseparable from the idea that some kind of compensation should be granted by the community to those who were victimized by the system of property accumulation, i.e. deprived of their natural, Godgiven right to possess the earth. This compensation was the price to pay for social peace (together with the restoration of suffrage, as a natural right, to the landless). * With regard not to the context but to the text itself, the best approach, as I see it, and as Gregory Claeys saw it in an excellent book on Paine’s political thought (to which I am very much indebted here),13 consists in comparing Agrarian Justice with Paine’s welfare proposals in the second part of Rights of Man. Such a comparison will highlight the merits of Agrarian Justice in terms of its contribution to modern utopian thought, and as a source of inspiration and reflection for the “Basic Income” theme as it is now called and discussed by various groups of economists and political scientists.14 13 Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social Justice and Political Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 14 Among the most active of these groups are: B.I.E.N. (Basic Income European Network), A.I.R.E (Association pour l’Instauration d’un Revenu d’Existence) and M.A.U.S.S (Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales). For a precise definition of “Basic Income,” see Philippe Van Parijs, ed., Arguing for Basic Income (London: Verso, 1992): “A basic income is an income unconditionally paid to all on

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In Agrarian Justice, Paine’s arguments for redistributing property were quite unlike anything he had previously suggested, and can be seen as considerably more radical than the plan proposed in Rights of Man, a plan based on various allowances—for the poor, the widows, the unemployed, the aged, the education of children, etc.—to be financed through existing taxes and the institution of a plan of progressive taxation on land.15 A new proposition, not of an historical but of a religious nature, was that “the earth, in its natural, uncultivated state was . . . the common property of the human race,” man being viewed as a “joint life proprietor” of both the “soil” and “all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.”16 By virtue of this new right, every landed proprietor owed the community a “ground-rent,”17 as Paine called it, i.e. a kind of democratic tithe—not for God or the Church this time, but for man.18 This meant that not effort or industry, but land itself was the original source of wealth. Writing this was more than saying—as historians might do, or as was evidenced by the Indians of North America insistently mentioned by Paine in his pamphlet—that the earth had once been “common property.” What was central here was the religious argument about “the original bequest of the whole earth to all by God at the Creation.”19 Strangely enough, Paine based his case on the Biblical account of the Creation (Genesis), in which he did not really believe, as all readers of The Age of Reason will remember. In his either sincere or rhetorical view, however, the earth was not given to man for him to cultivate, but as a garden, where he could hunt and pick fruit. Cultivation was a human invention, which gradually gave rise to culture and civilization, and resulted in the an individual basis, without means test or work requirement. In other words, it is a form of minimum income guarantee that differs from those that now exist in various European countries by virtue of the fact that it is paid: 1. to individuals rather than households; 2. irrespective of any income from other sources; and 3. without requiring any present or past work performance, or the willingness to accept a job if offered” (p. 1). 15 See Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine, 223-227. 16 FO I, 611. 17 Ibid. 18 The phrase “Not for God, but for man” is Moncure Daniel Conway’s in his Life of Thomas Paine (New York: Putnam, 1909 [1892]), 2: 257. 19 Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social Justice and Political Thought, 200.

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current state of things, in which a landed monopoly had dispossessed at least half the population from the soil. Hence the cultural necessity of a compensation—and the practical measures proposed by Paine, which aimed at bringing “a revolution in the state of civilization.”20 In practical terms, this meant the establishment of a special tax on inherited property, and the creation of a national fund, out of which every man or woman reaching the age of twenty-one would receive a sum of fifteen pounds sterling (enough for a couple to “begin the world,” and “buy a cow, and implements to cultivate a few acres of land,” instead of being “burdens upon society”),21 while every person aged fifty, whether “rich or poor,” would receive a minimum subsistence allowance of ten pounds a year for the rest of his or her life. Parallel to his religious argument, and probably in order to counterbalance it by means of a more secular approach, Paine introduced a new concept, a kind of positive or dynamic “principle of progress,” to use Claeys’ phrase,22 which Paine summarizes as follows: “No person ought to be in a worse condition when born under what is called a state of civilization, than he would have been had he been born in a state of nature.” Therefore, when such was the case— like, for instance, in his own day, when the poor were worse off than the Indians—, a compensation had to be provided for “by subtracting from property a portion equal in value to the natural inheritance it has absorbed.”23 This more secular argument had the advantage of taking into account what the Biblical narrative ignored, that is the gradual increase in standards of living: it meant that in proportion as their wealth increased, more money would be taken from the rich and go into the fund supporting the poor. Affluence would thus be profitable to all, with private property continuing, almost intact, as the cornerstone of the economic system. But there was another side to the coin of progress. As Claeys puts it, “the great novel claim of Agrarian Justice,” different from his earlier optimistic views on the development of commerce, “was that poverty not only resulted from but also increased with civilisation.”24 20

FO I, 621. Ibid., 618. Claeys, 201. 23 FO I, 613. 24 Claeys, 199. 21 22

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Therefore something had to be done if civilization was to remain livable for the poor and was still to be based on the principle 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.”25 If left to itself, and to the “laissez-faire” principle, civilization ironically tended to drift toward new forms of barbarity, a paradox confirmed at the time by the development of industrial cities in both Europe and America. This negative drift justified Paine’s proposed compensation, which, in turn, was made possible by the positive dimension of progress: the neoliberal circle was thus complete. Even more secular, and perhaps more revolutionary, was Paine’s next argument, suggesting that “personal property is the effect of society . . . All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes . . . a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.”26 This notion of a social debt simply meant that all property (financial speculation, for instance, or wealth derived from manufacturing), and not only land, could be taxed or otherwise redistributed for the common good. This claim of justice for the wage-earner could not be vindicated in terms of the Biblical argument and was too loosely covered by the principle of progress. Paine therefore grounded it on the proto-Marxist realization that “the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produces it”—the consequence being “that the working hand perishes in old age,” while “the employer abounds in affluence.”27 An economic debt was thus added to the cultural and social necessities of a compensation. But in his practical measures Paine did not propose to tax personal property: this would have had revolutionary implications that could not be envisaged by his contemporaries—let alone by himself. The economic argument nevertheless added secular weight to his rhetoric. This, Claeys concludes, was “a step of immense importance in the history of ideas of public welfare.”28 25

FO I, 610. Ibid., 620. Ibid. 28 Claeys, 205. “Paine’s efforts represent an important transitional stage in the radical secularization of natural law arguments . . . Paine’s was a middle position 26

27

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In Paine’s time, most people believed that unpropertied workers should be excluded from the right to vote if only because, being dependent on their masters, they were not free to think on their own and make autonomous choices. As John Keane recently put it: “Paine stood this old argument on its head. Instead of denying the franchise to those who currently depend politically on the rich, the dependents should be granted monetary independence. That universal guarantee of a right to a basic citizen’s income would then require—contrary to the spirit of the new 1795 constitution—a universal franchise.” 29 Paine’s protest against the institution of a property qualification in the French Constitution and his proposal of a universal basic income are thus closely connected in Agrarian Justice, although critics have often described them as a sign of intellectual inconsistency. * Due to circumstances (the war, “Pitt’s Terror” in England, the aftermath of the Terror in France, the political anticlimax that followed it), the impact of Agrarian Justice at the time of its publication seems to have been negligible. Paine himself had predicted that, at least in his native country, the reaction of the dominant class to his Basic Income proposal would be highly negative: “I know that the possessors of [overgrown] property in England, though they would eventually be benefited by the protection of nine-tenths of it, will exclaim against the plan”30—the irony being that this plan would in fact be less costly, annually, for English taxpayers than the war against France which they currently had to support. The wealthy, Paine argued, ought to be less blind in the defense of their own interests; they should realize that “it is only in a system of justice that the possessor can contemplate security.”31 Social justice as the natural companion and safeguard of economic between the Spenceans and others who unabashedly appealed to divine intention in support of positive community of goods, and the Owenite socialists of the early 1820s and later, who, both more historicist and more consistent in their deism, rejected completely appeals to the state of nature and founded property rights entirely upon labour, and community of goods upon its economic and moral advantages rather than its divine origins” (206). 29 John Keane, Tom Paine, 427. 30 FO I, 619. 31 Ibid., 621.

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liberalism: this is what Paine’s “social-democratic” profession of faith was all about. There were a few unrelenting enthusiasts, like William Blake, who, after reading Agrarian Justice, ranked Paine with Jesus Christ as “a worker of miracles.”32 But on the whole Paine was now preaching in the wilderness. As far as popular reactions are concerned, very little is known, except that “several cheap editions appeared in Manchester and elsewhere [and that] segments of Agrarian Justice were reprinted by exiled radicals in America . . . with a full edition appearing in Albany and another in Philadelphia in 1797.”33 Intellectually, the most important response to Agrarian Justice was Thomas Spence’s The Rights of Infants (London, 1797), although its circulation and actual impact were quite negligible. Spence, a Newcastle schoolmaster and later London printer, who had been arrested for selling Rights of Man, called Paine’s proposed compensation based on 10% of land values a “poor, beggarly stipend,” and saw no reason why landowners should keep the remaining 90%, since most improvements brought to their property were carried out by the “labouring class.”34 At a later stage, the direct or indirect influence of Agrarian Justice can be traced in the works or practical experiments of Louis Blanc, Robert Owen and other 19th-century socialist utopians or, as Philippe Van Parijs has pointed out, in the writings of Herbert Spencer, Henry George, Léon Walras or more recently Hillel Steiner.35 Also, in his Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française published at the turn of the century, Jean Jaurès repeatedly refers to Paine’s “social fecundity” as he found it in Rights of Man, and discusses his welfare “plan of legislation” at length,36 but no mention is made of Agrarian Justice, an omission which is quite baffling and difficult to account for. In my view, it was Edward Bellamy—with his Looking

32

David V. Erdman, Blake, Prophet Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 277. 33 Claeys, 207. 34 Ibid., 207. 35 Philippe Van Parijs, “Competing Justifications of Basic Income,” in Philippe Van Parijs, op. cit., 12. 36 Jean Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1971 [1901-1904]), 4: 422.

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Backward, a best-selling science-fiction novel first published in 1888—who was closest to Paine’s pamphlet, although he never mentions it either and, unlike Paine, grounds his Basic Income proposal on a work requirement. Central to his famous utopia was the right of any man to subsistence, a right which, Bellamy writes, “depends on the fact that he is a man, and not on the amount of wealth and strength he may have, as long as he does his best.”37 In exchange for their “maintenance at the nation’s table,”38 workers were required to perform a “period of industrial service [of] twenty-four years, beginning at . . . twenty-one and terminating at forty-five.”39 After that period, people could at leisure “devote [themselves] to the higher exercise of [their] faculties, the intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life.”40 In more recent times, Paul Goodman, a declared admirer of Paine and a friend of Ivan Illich, also tried to connect the subsistence economy with the general economy. In Communitas (1947), a highly stimulating book written with his brother Percival, he suggested as the only way to get out of the “system”—a system where, “unless every kind of goods is produced and sold, it is also impossible to produce bread”41—a division of the economy into two sectors: a communist, state-run sector (10% of the total production) where elementary subsistence goods and services would be provided for, and a capitalist sector (90%) for the production of convenience, comfort and luxury goods. The subsistence goods would be produced by “universally conscripted labor, run as a state monopoly like the post office or the army,”42 each man serving “in the national economy for six or seven years of his life.” This plan, when proposed (right after World War II), sounded as “military” in its inspiration, and almost as coercive, as the one proposed by Edward Bellamy, but Goodman forcefully argued that it was in fact less coercive “than the situation most people are used to” in modern life.43 I don’t think Thomas Paine would have 37

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (New York: The New American Library, 1960 [1888]), 98. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 58. 40 Ibid., 136. 41 Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas (New York: Vintage Books, 1960 [1947]), 188-89. 42 Ibid., 192. 43 Ibid., 198.

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agreed with either of these plans. His idea, his “beautifully, disarmingly simple idea,”44 of a Basic Income deserves more serious, more down-to-earth consideration. The age of structural unemployment in which we are living today may be the right time for a full recognition—at last—of Paine’s merits as a prophet and proponent of the “Basic Income” concept. This concept may indeed sound more relevant than ever in the face of an economic system which is obviously going wild and can increasingly dispense with the services of mankind. In this distracted world, the most appropriate response might, once again, be that of ... “common sense.”

44

Philippe Van Parijs, op. cit., 3.


IX

A Quaker with a Difference: Tom Paine’s Republican Rhetoric of War and Peace

That Thomas Paine was a pioneer, a prophet, a visionary is something that cannot reasonably be denied. It seems however that he has been much less celebrated as a prophet of peace than as a proponent of American Independence or an advocate of human rights or a denouncer of revealed religions. Popular imagery often represents him with a gun in his hands, writing bellicose exhortations by the light of some campfire (which he actually did), and the fact is that he is less frequently depicted as a pacifist than as a warmonger or at least as a Quaker armed to the teeth. In part, this blurred image is, I think, precisely due to his strange relationship with the Society of Friends. All those familiar with the life of Thomas Paine know that his father was a Quaker. Although he never formally belonged to the Society, Paine was deeply influenced by his father’s creed and, as a rule, he had more faith in dialogue and persuasion than in violent confrontation. But, for all that, he was too much of a realist ever to subscribe to the naïve or hypocritical ideas of those who in the name of non-violence always tend to collaborate with the powers-that-be, however despotic, or in times of war to side with the winning camp or, even worse, with the invader. Much like Gandhi, Paine would have preferred violence to submission and, had he lived in our time, he would have been strongly averse to unilateral disarmament. Although a lover of peace, he was no pacifist in the strict sense of the word, persuaded as he was that liberty could not be defended by good feelings alone. As he saw it, peace was not something that could be proclaimed by the victim, but something, rather, that had to be collectively and rationally organized, structured, discussed, struggled for—even if this meant occasionally and provisionally resorting to defensive force. During the war of Independence, what he blamed the Philadelphia Quakers for was

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precisely the duplicity with which they brandished their principles in order, in fact, to leave a clear field for the troops of His Britannic Majesty, whom he then dubbed the “Honorable plunderer of his country” or the “Right Honorable murderer of mankind.”1 A few weeks after the Battle of Lexington, he launched his first attack on the Quakers, saying: “I am thus far a Quaker, that I would gladly agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation; but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket and thank heaven he has put it in my power.”2 This passage is well-known; less known but perhaps more precise and penetrating is the following one, taken from the same article (July 1775): “The supposed quietude of a good man allures the ruffian . . . The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but . . . horrid mischief would ensue were one half of the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong.”3 Although he was later to dream of a military invasion of England, it is clear that, for Paine, only defensive wars were justifiable, and in his eyes such was the case of the American War: “The period of debate is closed . . .; the appeal [to arms] was the choice of the king, and the continent has accepted the challenge.”4 Hence his sarcastic remarks about the treacherous Society of Friends, whom he depicted as “antiquated virgins . . . mistaking [their] wrinkles for dimples”5 and who, “with the word ‘peace, peace,’ continually on their lips,” are so fond of supporting a government “which is never better pleased than when at war”!6 Paine could bite; but the Friends had a good memory and never forgave him, even on his deathbed. One of Paine’s most important contributions to international peace was his Maritime Compact published in Paris (as Pacte maritime) in the summer of 1800. Written “to compel the English government to acknowledge the rights of neutral commerce, and that

1

“Reflections on Titles,” FO 2: 33. “Thoughts on Defensive War,” FO 2: 53. 3 Ibid. 4 Common Sense, FO 1: 17. 5 American Crisis III, FO 1: 94. 6 Ibid., 93. 2

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free ships make free goods,”7 this astonishing document, distributed to all foreign ministers then resident in Paris, was more generally designed to render war impossible by threatening belligerent nations with total commercial boycott on the part of neutral countries peacefully leagued into an “Unarmed Association of Nations.”8 The idea was that such a boycott would immediately ruin the aggressor’s economy by cutting it off from the rest of the world, and thus render warfare counterproductive. The Association would have its own flag “composed of the same colors as compose the rainbow”9 and a presidency by rotation, “the first president to be the executive power of the most northerly nation.”10 In fact, Paine had in mind Paul I, Emperor of Russia, as the first possible president: “Had it not been for the untimely death of Paul,” he later contended, “a Law of Nations, founded on the authority of nations . . . would have been proclaimed.”11 This idea, and ideal, were not new for Paine. Eighteen years before, in his famous Letter to the Abbé Raynal (1782), he had already expressed similar views and summarized the whole issue with eloquence: “The sea is the world’s highway; and he who arrogates a prerogative over it transgresses the right [to the freedom of the ocean], and justly brings on himself the chastisement of nations.”12 It was precisely in the same work—a reply to the Abbé’s Observations on the Revolution in America—that, as an American historian has put it, he “actually ceased to think in nationalistic terms and became a practical internationalist.”13 ‘Practical’ is perhaps not the right word, in the sense that Paine’s utopian proposals were well ahead of his time and clearly overrated the degree of wisdom actually reached by his contemporaries. The novelties formulated in his Letter are wellknown: the establishment of international free trade, the organization of peace on a world-wide basis, a concerted limitation of armaments and a federation of nations. Paine saw commerce as a convivial 7

Maritime Compact, FO 2: 946. Ibid., 941. 9 Ibid., 944. 10 Ibid., 945. 11 Ibid., 946. 12 Letter to the Abbé Raynal, FO 2: 262. 13 See D. Abel, “The Significance of the Letter to the Abbé Raynal in the Progress of Thomas Paine’s Thought,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LXVI (April 1942): 176-90. 8

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competition and as a means of international rapprochement. Hence his belief in the pacifying virtues of trade: “Commerce,” he wrote, “though in itself a moral nullity, has had a considerable influence in tempering the human mind.”14 He also believed that, through the exemplary union of its thirteen states and its alliance with France, Spain and the Netherlands, revolutionary America was in fact “opening a new system of extended civilization”15 and a new era during which the league of nations would at long last put an end to international violence and anarchy. Also less known, or less noticed, is the way in which Paine first insisted on the possibility of a peaceful entente between states with different political regimes, and then moved on to a conception of international progress that was much less ecumenical. When he wrote his Letter to the Abbé Raynal, Paine thought that nations could associate with each other in the name of peace and establish between themselves international rules independently of the nature of their several political regimes: “Forms of government,” he insisted, “have nothing to do with treaties.”16 He had therefore no objection to a republic entering into an alliance with a monarchical country: “So long as each performs its part, we have no more right or business to know how the one or the other conducts its domestic affairs.”17 Although this may sound like Realpolitik, Paine’s attitude was that of an idealist: “It is best mankind should mix,” he went on to say, “and it is by a free communication, without regard to domestic matters, that friendship is to be extended and prejudice destroyed all over the world”18—prejudice which he so beautifully defined as “the spider of the mind.”19 But the most interesting argument here, and the most original, was Paine’s presentation of the concert of nations as a kind of international republic where each member, regardless of its size or of the nature of its government, could have a say, and act as an equal partner, in the preparation of peace agreements. That all countries, “be

14

Letter to the Abbé Raynal, FO 2: 241. Ibid., 256. 16 Ibid., 244. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 245. 19 Ibid., 242. 15

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their forms what they may, are relatively republics with each other,” such was, he explained, “the first and true principle of alliance.”20 Ten years later he had learned much and changed his mind in many ways. In the second part of Rights of Man (1792) he takes up again, and expands, the utopian themes outlined one decade before in his reply to Raynal, advocating this time: (1) a sort of Alliance for Progress in the form of a European Confederacy including England, France and Holland—not unlike the “European Republic” envisioned by Rousseau21; (2) a gradual but “general dismantling of all the navies in Europe”; and (3) a joint pressure of the United States and Confederated Europe in order to obtain from Spain “the independence of South America and the opening [of] those countries . . . to the general commerce of the world.”22 But Paine was now convinced that his dreams had no chance of coming true so long as England remained allergic to democratic and republican principles, so long as it remained a court government “enveloped in intrigue and mystery,”23 equally unable to cater for the actual needs of its people and to peacefully cooperate with such countries as had cast off the yoke of tyranny. He was confident that the establishment of a democratic system in Britain would powerfully contribute to the spread of republicanism throughout the world and to international peace. The idea that British monarchy would be a perpetual cause of warfare became such an obsession with Paine that in 1796 he started contriving and planning a naval invasion of England, thus betraying his own previous attachment to the doctrine of defensive war. But, as he himself put it, it was still for the cause of peace that he was acting that way: “The intention of the expedition [with Bonaparte at the controls] was to give the people of England an opportunity of forming a government for themselves, and thereby bring about peace.”24 Behind his dreams of naval conquest lay the deeply-rooted creed that Britain’s external violence was nothing but a projection of its own internal system based on social injustice, and that no lasting peace would be achieved in Europe while England remained the stronghold of hereditary inequality. More generally, Paine considered that the 20

Ibid., 244. See the third Forester’s Letter, FO 2: 79. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 289. 23 Ibid., 288. 24 “To the People of England on the Invasion of England,” FO 2: 680.

21

22

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establishment of social peace in each and every civilized country was a prerequisite for a better understanding amongst the nations of the world. Hence his insistence, in Rights of Man, on the necessity of developing social as well as political rights, so as to diminish economic frustrations, bring men closer to one another, increase the amount of fraternity in the world and diminish aggressive drives. For Paine, proposing “plans for the education of helpless infancy, and the comfortable support of the aged and distressed”25 was not only a just policy; it was also part of an active strategy of peace based on the idea that non-belligerence between nations does rest, to a not inconsiderable degree, on the establishment of social non-violence between the citizens of each national community. Like all prophets, Paine was, so to speak, a ‘delayed-action realist’—someone who had a clear view of the future at a time when so many minds were befuddled. He was not just the visionary of a more peaceful future. He was an actor, a militant and, if I may put it so, a “soldier of peace.” He did not see world peace as merely a godsend resulting from chance or Providence, but as the reward of a long, patient, difficult struggle. In other words, he was the reverse of a fatalist: “Man,” he once wrote, “must be the privy councillor of fate, or something is not right.”26

25 26

“Letter addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation,” FO 2: 488. Letter to the Abbé Raynal, FO 2: 238.

X

From the Rights of Man to the Rights of God: Paine’s Ultimate Challenge Who art thou, presumptuous Paul, that puttest thyself in God’s place? Thomas Paine (1809)1

In a letter addressed to Thomas Erskine,2 who had defended Paine in 1792 in the suit against Rights of Man and was, in 1797, prosecuting Thomas Williams, a London publisher accused—“on the charge of blasphemy”—with printing The Age of Reason (Williams was finally sentenced to three years in prison), Paine wrote these luminous lines which can be read as a summary of all his works, or used as a guide to understand better their internal dynamics, i.e. the way in which Paine’s successive challenges were, though different in scope, all of a kind: 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.3

Starting from this quotation, I will try to show how Thomas Paine, throughout his life-long career as a defender of natural rights, actually “rose” from the local to the universal, and then from the universal to the divine, without ever changing his stand as both a rationalist and a Deist. From his first challenge to his last, he remained persistently committed to the same sacred cause, whether this cause was, say, the religion of America, or later the religion of human rights, or, later still, the public affirmation of his deistic belief “in one God, and no more.” From beginning to end, and on both continents, his was

1

895. 2 3

Thomas Paine, “Predestination: Remarks on Romans, IX, 18-21” (1809), FO 2: In fact a pamphlet published in Paris in September 1797. FO 2: 728.

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above all a spiritual adventure, and not a political or literary one, as has so often been contended. * When in 1793 Paine started writing the first part of The Age of Reason, he had already been, in two historic circumstances, “the man through whom scandal does come” (Matthew, 18, 7). Profoundly, almost physically averse to political imposture and usurpation, he had dedicated his first book, Common Sense, to a denunciation of British colonialism in North America and, as a result, had been regarded, in London as well as among American Loyalists, as a traitor to the King (whom he had dubbed “the Pharaoh of England” or “the High Honorable murderer of mankind”) and as a traitor to his native country which he had left only two years before. In 1791-92, Paine went one step further: with Rights of Man, he launched forth into a direct attack on the fraud of monarchical regimes and so profoundly shocked aristocratic England that he was finally tried “for high treason” and forever banished from Britain. Greeted as a hero in Paris, made a French citizen, and elected to the Convention by four different departments, our unmaker of kings provoked one more scandal by paradoxically pleading against the beheading of a monarch, Louis XVI. As he saw it, the French revolution would be a mere farce if it proved to be, in its acts, as cruel and bloodthirsty as the former despotism. Paine paid dearly (almost a year in prison) for his moral commitment to the scandal of truth, and only a miracle kept him from the guillotine. With The Age of Reason (1794-95), Paine aimed even higher: the problem, this time, was not to liberate America from the colonial bond or to liberalize England and its government or to humanize the French Revolution, but to storm heaven itself or at least to attack all established churches, all forms of so-called “revealed” religion—that supreme trickery which seemed to extend its boundless empire to the whole world, and even beyond. A defender of the rights of American colonialists, then a defender of the rights of man, Paine ended up as a defender of the rights of God; but one should not be misled by this moral and spiritual escalation, nor taken in by Paine’s apparently growing concern with religious issues. There was no discontinuity in his approach to society and the world, even though, from one book to another, religious references became less and less rhetorical, more visibly sincere, more and more central to his thought. Faith, and the inalienable rights of

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God, seem to have been, from his Quaker days at Thetford to the woeful year spent in the Luxembourg prison, at the core of his experience as both a man and a writer. * If one considers all the literature dedicated to Common Sense over more than two centuries, one cannot fail to see that the religious dimension of Paine’s first pamphlet has gone practically unnoticed. And yet it is there, throughout, from the first to the last page of a book which, above all else, was an act of faith. Most critics have contented themselves with a few well-founded commonsensical remarks about Paine’s rhetorical and insincere use of biblical references and chronology, for instance when describing the ungodly origin of monarchy or hereditary succession (“The will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings . . . Monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins of the Jews, for which a curse in reserve is denounced against them,” etc., etc.) (CS, 72-73). True, even as early as 1776, Paine most probably did not believe a word of the Bible and was profoundly distrustful of established churches, including the Christian denomination. Here is, for example, what he wrote retrospectively on the subject at the beginning of The Age of Reason: Soon after I had published the pamphlet Common Sense, in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state . . . had so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.4

It is therefore unquestionable that the biblical references with which Common Sense is pervaded were essentially a means artfully resorted to to win over an audience of believers and church-goers for whom the Bible (which they knew inside out) was, in most cases, all the culture they had. But this should not blind us to other passages in 4

FO 1: 465.

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Common Sense which can in no way be identified as mere rhetoric, but do evince an authentic creed, a genuine religious approach to reality. Paine’s pamphlet is suffused with a feeling of historic transcendence (“The cause of America is in a large measure the cause of all mankind”) (CS, 63), and it quite clearly carries with it something of a prophetic or even messianic—not to say adamic—nature: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand” (CS, 120). While men and necessity play a role of their own in history, Paine had in mind another category of time: that of the Almighty, or of Providence, or of Grace. In Crisis 1 (which was a continuation of Common Sense), he openly admitted “that God governs the world.”5 What we said about this in Chapter 2 might usefully be repeated at this point: Why [in Paine’s view] was the Reformation preceded by the discovery of America if not, in fact, because “the Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in future years”?6 But it is also possible for God to intervene against the tide of events, as if to deflect the arrow of time. Thus, for instance, does He induce fiendish General Howe to commit certain strategic errors (in particular in November 1776 during the retreat of the American troops from New Jersey to Pennsylvania); one must assume, Paine then observes, that the agents of Hell “are under some providential control.”7 Whether divine intervention simply accompanies the mechanical course of events, or imperiously forces the hand of destiny by reversing the most desperate situations, it is indeed God and His grace who finally rule over the work—here, the revolutionary work—of time . . . In Paine’s case, however, neo-Calvinism was sufficiently tempered, despite the apparent contradiction, to exclude neither reason nor free will: “Throw not the burden of the day upon Providence,” he told the insurgents, but “‘show your faith by your works’.”8

There is therefore little doubt that the fascination which Common Sense—an anonymous work written by a totally unknown author— immediately held for masses of people in America was, at least in part, linked to its religious overtones and its mysterious messianic force.

5

FO 1: 54. CS, 87. 7 Ibid., 52 (Crisis I). 8 Ibid., 55. 6


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* It may not be exaggerated to describe Rights of Man, written some fifteen years after Common Sense, as a religious book—a book in which human rights and the prerogatives of God are closely connected, and the Bible no longer treated as a fraud, but defined, so far at least as Genesis is concerned, as the source-book of all our “natural” liberties. All rhetoric is now discarded: faith, genuine faith, is at the core of a philosophy of rights in which everything is directly related to the Divinity. In Rights of Man, Paine challenges Burke on his own ground and turns his central doctrine of precedents back on him, arguing that the origin of human rights is not to be found in this or that period of history, but in some absolute past, in a time prior to time in which God and Man were one, or at least undistinguishable: The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is, that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all . . . But if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker . . .We are now at the origin of man, and at the origin of his rights . . . The fact is, that portions of antiquity, by proving everything, establish nothing. It is authority against authority all the way, till we come to the divine origin of the rights of man at the creation [emphasis mine]. Here our inquiries find a resting-place, and our reason finds a home.9

In this crucial and beautifully written passage, Paine obviously sides with the Creator, who made man “in his own image,” against the pretensions of those who dared interpose their puny selves and paltry gesticulations between the day of the Creation and the present time and have impudently presented themselves as the actual initiators or bestowers or inventors of human rights. Paine’s defense of the rights of God as the creator of mankind is openly based on “the Mosaic account of the creation” which, “whether taken as divine authority, or merely historical,” highlights the indisputable “unity or equality of man.”10 The usurpers he had in mind when writing this were those who always tend to forget that “the genealogy of Christ is traced to

9

RM, 87-88 Ibid., 88.

10

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Adam,” and who believe that there are providential men, providential kings, providential generations, providential or ‘glorious’ revolutionists who can legitimately take the place of God and make their fellow-men in their own images, dictating to posterity—until the end of time—what they should do, what they should think, how they should be governed. If so many people refuse to “trace the rights of man to the creation of man,” if they fail to acknowledge that “every child born into the world must be considered as deriving his existence from God,” if they are unable to admit that “the world is as new to [any newborn child] as it was to the first man that existed,” and that “his natural right in it is of the same kind,” it is, Paine argues, “because there have been upstart governments, thrusting themselves between, and presumptuously working to un-make man,”11 i.e. to deprive him of his most divine attributes while dispossessing God Himself of His monopoly as shaper of the human mind. Paine’s insistence on what he calls “the illuminating and divine principle of the equal rights of man (for it has its origin from the Maker of man),” and his idea that “the equality of man, so far from being a modern doctrine, is the oldest upon record,” aim at discrediting Burke’s conservative recourse to “prescription” or collective wisdom or “wisdom without reflection” (Burke’s own phrase), as an artful way of negating the timelessness and adamic nature of human rights. In whatever country or age, Paine contends, each man is the depositary of Providence; and the same is true of every single generation viewed as a body of individuals. If, for Paine, the individual wisdom of the living was intrinsically superior to the collective wisdom of the dead, it was precisely because man’s reason (“the choicest gift of God to man”)12 was originally made, manufactured and molded in the very image of God’s reason. And to deny this was, in Paine’s view, to be a rejecter of God as the Maker of Man and the Creator of all things. In other words, Mr. Burke, Mr. Guelph,13 King John, William of Normandy, William of Orange, George III, etc., the so-called founders or protectors of “English liberties” (a British and abridged version of the rights of man) were all 11

Ibid. FO 1: 482 (The Age of Reason, Part I; in the rest of the chapter, The Age of Reason will be referred to as AR). 13 An amused and cruel allusion to the founder of the House of Hanover, from which the ‘imported’ Kings of England were originally descended. 12


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infidels, usurpers, profaners of the original divinity of man, deniers of the almightiness of their own God. Not only, Paine goes on to say, must our governors abstain from usurping the power of God, but they should not be so arrogant as to lay down rules for the Divinity to follow. “Were a Bill brought into any parliament, entitled ‘An act to tolerate or grant liberty to the Almighty to receive the worship of a Jew or a Turk,’ or ‘to prohibit the Almighty from receiving it,’ all men would startle, and call it blasphemy. There would be an uproar.” The rights of God are, by definition, even more inalienable than the adamic rights of man, and the violation of the former cannot but bring about the abolition of the latter. Hence Thomas Paine’s admonishment to the impostors of all ages, countries and descriptions: “Who, then, art thou, vain dust and ashes! by whatever name thou art called, whether a King, a Bishop, a Church or a State, a Parliament, or anything else, that obtrudest thine insignificance between the soul of man and its Maker?”14 In the conflict between the Creation and human history, it is clear that Paine made common cause with God. Establishing the rights of man by means of a “revolution”—which, incidentally, he and his enlightened friends also called “regeneration”—was, in his eyes, tantamount to reinstating God in his own transcendental rights. Republicanism, i.e. the adamic and revolutionary return to natural or native human rights, was for Paine, if I may put it thus, a practical way of reconciling heaven and earth, true religion and true politics. * Although it was, and is still, regarded as blasphemous, The Age of Reason is, throughout, a book on blasphemy. In that respect, Common Sense and Rights of Man had simply paved the way for this ultimate plea entirely devoted to the defense of God—and to a merciless attack on those who endeavor to substitute themselves for the Divinity in the minds of men. In his letter to Erskine, Paine some time later gave a very precise definition of what he meant by “blasphemy”: A book called the Bible has been voted by men [an allusion to the councils of Nicaea and Laodicea],15 and decreed by human laws, to be the Word of God, 14

RM, 108. These two councils, Paine wrote in Examination of the Prophecies, “were held three hundred and fifty years after the time Christ is said to have lived; and the books 15

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and the disbelief of this is called blasphemy. But if the Bible be not the Word of God, it is the laws and the execution of them that is blasphemy, and not the disbelief.16

Paine did not reject the possibility of ‘revelation’ in religious matters, but revelation, as he saw it, was necessarily a direct transaction between God and some particular individual. From the moment the person who had received the revelation turned to other people to tell them about his or her experience, this was no longer a revelation (at least for the listeners), but a mere second-hand narrative or testimony. And this was precisely, Paine contended, what the Bible was entirely grounded upon, from the first line to the last: unverifiable pieces of evidence, narratives based on hearsay, tales and fables expressed in various ancient languages, when in fact, Paine added, “the Word of God cannot [by definition] exist in any written or human language” (AR, 477). Paine, just as he had previously done with Burke, attacked the usurpers of the Word of God on their own ground, and with their own weapon, resolutely setting out to expose their trickery and “to show that the Bible is spurious, and thus, by taking away the foundation, to overthrow at once the whole structure of superstition raised thereon” (AR, 554). But in his eyes, the Bible was not only an unreliable collection of factual contradictions, chronological impossibilities and human (i.e. erroneous) artifacts; it was also a jumble “of the most unexampled atrocities” (AR, 528), a “history of assassinations, treachery and wars” (AR, 539) and therefore an immoral piece of writing, in addition to its being a “lying book” (AR, 569). Paine consequently assigned to himself a double task: first, to reinstate the truth of God’s Word in its original natural rights, by debunking the claims of all Bible-forgers and Scripture-makers; and, second, to “vindicate the moral justice of God against the calumnies of the Bible” (AR, 523). In this battle for truth and morality, Paine, obviously, did not mince his words, stigmatizing in a most caustic way the blasphemous and impious attitude of those who had so long and so shamelessly imposed upon mankind, and put the name of God in the service of their own cause or interests. The Old Testament (but how could God that now compose the New Testament were then voted for by yeas and nays, as we now vote a law. A great many that were offered had a majority of nays, and were rejected. This is the way the New Testament came into being” (FO 2: 850). 16 FO 2: 729.


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have two testaments, two wills? he exclaimed) Paine described as “a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty?” (AR, 529). To the priests of every description, who felt “no interest in the honor of [their] Creator,” he bluntly said: Is it because you are “sunk in the cruelty of superstition” that you can listen to the “horrid tales” of the Bible and “hear them with callous indifference?” (AR, 537). And Paine was just as severe about the New Testament—that “romantic book of schoolboy’s eloquence” based on “the monstrous idea of a Son of God begotten by a ghost on the body of a virgin” (AR, 553), and which he saw as a mere impious collage of “fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty ” (AR, 582-83, emphasis mine). It follows that the real blasphemers are not those that people imagine; the real blasphemers are those who project their own wickedness onto the Creator, and make him in their own detestable image, so as to frighten masses of men into superstitious obedience. From that point of view, Christianity was, for Paine, the reverse of a genuine system of faith: “It appears to me,” he said, “as a species of Atheism—a sort of religious denial of God” (AR, 486). It would be difficult to speak in plainer terms. But Paine was not simply critical. He had something to propose—an alternative to the “dangerous heresies” and “impious frauds” he denounced (AR, 597), a system of faith which, because it was not man-made, could not easily be diverted, distorted or corrupted by human impostors. His system he called “the pure and moral religion of Deism” (AR, 537), the only religion which, according to him, “has not been invented” (AR, 600) and is not an insult to God. Paine’s profession of faith was simple (some would say simplistic): “Yes,” he exclaimed, “there is a word of God; there is a revelation. The word of God is the creation we behold” (AR, 482)—a creation that is there, for all to see, for all to understand, because it “speaketh a universal language” (AR, 483).17 Just as, in Rights of Man, Paine had retraced the fountain of fundamental human rights to the condition of Adam in the Garden, so, in The Age of 17

Paine’s view is here close to Voltaire’s (“There can be no clock without a clockmaker’). In The Age of Reason, Paine resorts to an image which is almost a replica of Voltaire’s: “When we see a watch, we have as positive evidence of the existence of a watchmaker, as if we saw him” (FO 2: 798).

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Reason, he once again turned to the very moment of the Making of Man in order to discover the origin of true religion: “If ever a universal religion should prevail,” he predicts, “it will not be by believing anything new, but in getting rid of redundancies, and believing as man believed at first. Adam, if ever there was such a man, was created a Deist” (AR, 512, emphasis mine). Deism was the fashion with Enlightenment intellectuals and, as total atheism was generally bad form in eighteenth-century society, even among freethinkers, Deism often served as a mask in social life. Because it was the lowest common denominator of all creeds, it elegantly reconciled the public obligation of displaying some outward expression of faith with the positivist demands of Reason. But, with Paine, Deism had nothing to do with fashion or social convenience. This particular creed had always dwelt in the back of his adamic mind: it had sprung from his Quaker education; it had gained strength from the study of Newtonian science, and it later formed the moral substratum of all his political, social and religious ideas. Paine refused to believe in the Trinity, which he regarded as a vestige of pagan polytheism and which, he thought, reduced the Almighty to being a mere dying mortal in the person of Jesus Christ or a homing pigeon in that of the Holy Ghost. Paine’s disrespect for the so-called ‘sacred’ texts seems to have remained unparalleled. But such was his creed— based on the idea that Deism was the only true and natural religion; the only system of faith capable of uniting mankind instead of dividing it; the only one that was not bound to bathe the world in blood and that might safely be told to children; the only one also that was actually respectful of the rights of God, amongst which are: the right, for the Almighty, not to be conceived in the image of man; the right to be protected from all those, sincere or insincere, well- or illintentioned, who spend their lives trying to out-God God; the right not to be made a trade or a business of; the right not to be exploited to immoral ends or to be used as a means of scaring people into submission. * The thing that Paine most sharply criticized in revealed religions was that they implied a renunciation of reason; they even condemned science, and held it “irreligious to study and contemplate the structure of the universe that God had made” (AR, 495). Conceived in that way,


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religion could only be “an insult to the Creator and an injury to human reason.”18 As we have seen, reason (which he sometimes spelled with a capital R) was regarded by Paine as “the choicest gift of God to man.” In his last written piece (“Predestination,” 1809), he even spoke of “the divine reason that God has given to man.”19 It is therefore legitimate to think that Reason was Paine’s real and only God, as is so glaringly suggested by the most famous (or, for some people, infamous) quotation from The Age of Reason: “My own mind is my own church” (AR, 464). Contrary to Blaise Pascal, who recommended that people should turn themselves into half-wits if they wanted to meet the Divinity and have faith, Paine insisted that “it is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God” (AR, 484). The “age of Reason” and “the age of God” were, for him, one and the same thing. His life-long effort as a writer, his spiritual ascension from Common Sense to Rights of Man to The Age of Reason, was a continuous attempt at reconciling nature and progress, religion and science, reason and faith, the divine powers of the creature and the almightiness of the Creator. In the opening pages of The Age of Reason, Paine, who was aware that his book would scandalize most of his readers, if not all of them, wrote: “I know that this bold investigation will alarm many, but it would be paying too great a compliment to their credulity to forbear it on that account; the times and the subject demand it to be done” (AR, 472). Thus Paine, who was himself very tolerant in religious matters and refused to “condemn those who believe otherwise” (AR, 464), courteously apologized to his public for the occasional brutality of his discourse, but in no way did he solicit their leniency. The price that he had to pay for his “bold investigation” is well known: two centuries of irrational disdain and hateful oblivion.

18 19

Examination of the Prophecies (1807), FO 2: 871. FO 2: 897 (emphasis mine).


XI

A Pioneer with a Difference: Thomas Paine and Early ‘American Studies’ Based on a lecture given in 1999 at the University of Amsterdam, as part of a conference organized by Professor Rob Kroes on “Predecessors: Intellectual Lineages in American Studies.”

When did all begin? Where did it all come from? As former chairman of the French Association for American Studies, I was presumably expected—and even expected myself—at this conference, to say something, if not everything, about how and when, and through whose decisive action, the self-contained subject or area known as “American Studies” appeared and developed in my country: how, in the early phase of that development, the decline of the British Empire and the emergence of the United States as a dominant power continued to be viewed by French ‘Anglicists’ as a peripheral phenomenon that could in no way dislodge English Studies from their academic dominance; how, after World War II, “the United States” nevertheless became the only subject studied, as far as “English” went, during the final year of all French secondary schools; how at university level the interests of students also shifted from Great Britain to the United States, creating a need for specialized teachers as well as for new books with new contents; how a few daring colleagues supported by Sim Copans, director of the Institute of American Studies in Paris, seceded from the French British Studies Association (SAES, Société des anglicistes de l'enseignement supérieur), in which they felt—and actually were—marginalized, when not looked upon as eccentric or stray scholars; how they declared themselves independent, held their first general meeting in 1967 (with only a few dozen founding members attending), drafted their own constitution, and started flying on their own wings—as “AFEA, Association Française d’Études Américaines”—, then growing year after year in number (with nowadays a membership of more than 600), launching

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their own journal in April 1976 (Revue Française d’Études Américaines), becoming an active member of the European Association for American Studies, etc., etc. Instead of that (the story being now pretty well known, and probably similar to that of many other European countries), I have chosen to go back in time to the very origin of our ‘discipline’ (American Studies), if only because, historically, France was directly and repeatedly involved in it—at least through the four founding figures whose relative merits in this matter I will try to examine. Three of them were French—Crèvecoeur, Raynal and Tocqueville— the fourth one, Thomas Paine, was English, American … and French. My main point here will be that, for a variety of reasons, it was Paine who, perhaps more than the other three, was the real originator of that specific area of learning and teaching which all ‘Americanists’ now identify with. * Thomas Paine has been wittily but rightfully described as “a champion of freedom in three worlds—the Old, the New, and the Next.”1 But he was above all a pioneer and a precursor. In Common Sense, for instance, Paine was the first to advocate the establishment of an independent and republican state. But six years later, in his dispute with Raynal,2 he was also the first to delineate, in political terms and from an international perspective, the uniqueness of the ongoing American experience—the first, so to speak, to define American identity “live.” As an active contributor to the Revolution and birth of the United States, not only was Paine able to go further than the preRevolutionary observations, however accurate, of Crèvecoeur and other European travelers,3 but, as an actor-commentator-adviser working in the field, he achieved more, in practical terms, and did more for the advent of a specific area of intellectual investigation

1

Julian P. Boyd, quoting Richard Gimbel, in Whitfield J. Bell, The Bust of Thomas Paine (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974—printed for The Friends of the Library), “Foreword,” 3. 2 Letter to the Abbé Raynal, on the Affairs of North America (Philadelphia, 1782). 3 On European travelers in the U.S., see, among many other works: Thomas D. Clark, “The Great Visitation of American Democracy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (June 1957): 3-28; Peter Marshall, “Travelers and the Colonial Scene,” British Association for American Studies Bulletin, New Series 7 (Dec. 1963): 5-28.

Early American Studies

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dedicated to the United States, than did the post-Revolutionary reflections of Tocqueville, however innovative they were from a political science point of view. Crèvecoeur was aware, to use his own well-known phrase, of the “newness” of American colonial society, but he was horrified at the prospect of its disintegration, and refused to take sides when the necessity of independence and national self-assertion appeared. His Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782—but actually written between 1769 and 1778—have been justly described as a “requiem for the new nation as it [came] into being.”4 Two recent biographers have even depicted Crèvecoeur as a “Janus, looking toward the future and America when in France, and turned toward the past and [monarchical] France when in America.”5 In a longunpublished text written during the Revolution (“The Man of Sorrow”), Crèvecoeur, naturalized as a British subject as early as 1765, realized that he could not accept the Americanness of his own American status if that meant ceasing to be British. In his famous Letter entitled “What is an American?,” he had, some time before, expressed his conviction that “a new man” was emerging in the New World. But, in “The Man of Sorrow,” confronted as he was with the violence and disruption of the Revolution, he made it clear that the ‘new democratic man’ ushered in by the “civil war” (as he called it) was not something he could intellectually and politically accept: The rage of civil discord hath advanced among us with an astonishing rapidity; every opinion is changed, every prejudice is subverted; every ancient principle is annihilated; every mode of organisation which linked us before as men and as citizens are now altered, new ones are introduced; and who can tell whether we shall be gainers by the exchange.6

Not only does he here reject every single change, every single departure from the status quo, but he seems unable to grasp the radical ‘newness’ of what was going on: You know from History the consequences of such wars; in every country, it 4 Susan Manning, “Introduction,” in Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ”The World’s Classics,” 1997), viii. 5 Gay W. Allen and Roger Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur: The Life of an American Farmer (New York: Viking, 1987), 214. 6 Dennis D. Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English left unpublished by Crèvecoeur (Athens, Ga: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), 325-26.

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has been a field pregnant with the most poisonous weeds, recriminations, hatred, rapidly swelling to a higher degree of malice and implacability.7

In other words, when the idyllic newness of American colonial society turned into actual political innovation, Crèvecoeur (just as Raynal,8 as we shall now see) failed to understand the historical originality and universal meaning of the American insurrection. * In August-September 1782, almost a year after the battle of Yorktown, Thomas Paine published a long pamphlet (a one-hundred-page manuscript) entitled Letter to the Abbé Raynal, on the Affairs of North America: In which the Mistakes in the Abbé’s Account of the Revolution of America are Corrected and Cleared Up. This letter, John Keane writes, “was among the most eloquent, tightly argued, and insightful of Paine’s essays . . . certainly the longest.”9 Paine himself attached so much value to this document that he subsequently often introduced himself as the author of “Common Sense and the Letter to the Abbé Raynal.” Beyond its intrinsic interest, this rigorous piece of writing marked a turning-point in Paine’s political thinking—a transition from his early insular view of America to an international conception of human society. As an American historian has put it (a quote already referred to), he “actually ceased to think in nationalistic terms and became a practical internationalist”10—more utopian, one should say, than practical. His times, indeed, were not ripe for the radical prophecies contained in the Letter—which included the establishment of international free trade, the organization of peace on a world-wide basis, a concerted limitation of armaments and a federation of nations—but Paine’s singular merit was that of a visionary who was able to raise himself and his thought above the narrow configurations of his age. Paine’s Letter was a reply to Raynal’s famous book (Tableau et révolutions des colonies anglaises de l’Amérique septentrionale) 7

Ibid. (emphasis mine). To whom, incidentally, Crèvecoeur’s Letters were dedicated. 9 John Keane, Tom Paine, 230. 10 See D. Abel, “The Significance of the Letter to the Abbé Raynal in the Progress of Thomas Paine’s Thought,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography LXVI (April 1942): 176-90. 8


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published in Paris in 1781. Yet the text to which Paine refers is that of an English translation based on a pirated version of the French book. (An occasion for Paine to advocate—some time after Beaumarchais— a universal legislation for the protection of intellectual property.)11 The translation (as well as a pirated version of the original)12 appeared in London some six months before the authorized edition. A reprint of that translation, entitled Observations on the Revolution in America, was soon after published in Philadelphia and other American cities. Paine read a copy he had borrowed from Robert Morris. His reply was published ... at the author’s expense. Fifty copies were sent to George Washington “for the use of the army”13; Paine received in return a very warm letter of thanks. He also sent fifty copies to Robert R. Livingston and Robert Morris, asking them to propagate his pamphlet wherever they could in the West Indies and Europe, more particularly in Britain and France.14 Refuting Raynal’s book had three different objects: (1) preserving the image of Revolutionary America by dramatically picking out Raynal’s factual errors and erroneous interpretations; (2)

11

Letter to the Abbé Raynal: “The state of literature in America must one day become a subject of legislative consideration . . . When peace shall give time and opportunity for study, the country will deprive itself of the honor and service of letters and the improvement of science, unless sufficient laws are made to prevent depredations on literary property . . . A man’s opinions, whether written or in thought, are his own” (FO 2: 213n, 214). On Beaumatchais’s earlier initiative, see Chapter 5, note 8. 12 “Révolution de l’Amérique par M. l’abbé Raynal, Lockyer Davis, Londres, 1781).” 13 Keane, Tom Paine, 232. 14 “Unsurprisingly,” John Keane writes, Paine’s “pro-American Letter to the Abbé Raynal was greeted respectfully in America. A half-dollar second edition soon appeared in Philadelphia, and a cheaper edition was reprinted by Benjamin Edes and Sons in Boston . . . Robert Morris sent copies of the ‘excellent Pamphlet’ to contacts such as Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, Maryland’s superintendent of revenue, while Charles Thomson, secretary of Congress, was forwarded thirteen dozen ‘to be sent as occasion might offer to the several governments’ . . . The international reception of the pamphlet was boosted by Paine’s distribution of free copies. He admitted at the time to giving away nearly five hundred copies . . . Paine’s hopes were bolstered by news that reprints of the pamphlet were soon to appear in London and Dublin and that it was receiving excellent reviews in France, where two translations were published during 1783. ‘I have lately travelled much,’ reported an American touring that country, ‘and find him everywhere. His letter to the Abbé Raynal has sealed his fame’” (John Keane, Tom Paine, 232-33).

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seizing the opportunity to fulfill, at least in part, his old dream of writing a short analytic history of the American Revolution; (3) enhancing his own literary fame in Europe. From that point of view, he was fully satisfied, if only because the publication of his Letter in England coincided with the opening of the peace negotiations with rebellious America and, therefore, received locally quite of lot of attention. In October 1783, Paine publicly rejoiced in the “reception and success which [the Letter] has met with in England, and the new light which . . . ha[s] been thrown on the affairs of America by that publication.”15 He had, moreover, been well-advised to send, or to ask certain friends to send, copies of his pamphlet to Paris. Four translations were immediately printed there, which proved to be as successful with the general public as with the Court. La Luzerne, then French minister to the U.S., wrote Paine an official letter which expressed the satisfaction of France—and enclosed a gift of fifty guineas intended to cover part of the original printing costs.16 Paine’s letter to the Abbé could be described as a “defense and illustration” of the universal dimension of the American Revolution against the belittling interpretations of Raynal. But Paine, who was a good rhetorician, begins his ‘lecture in American studies’ by paying a somewhat overdone tribute to Raynal as a writer—yet immediately adding that, although the Abbé is a master of style and language, he seems not to pay equal attention to the office of an historian. His facts are coldly and carelessly stated. They neither inform the reader nor interest him. Many of them are erroneous, and most of them are defective and obscure. It is undoubtedly both an ornament and a useful addition to history, to accompany it with maxims and reflections . . . but it is absolutely necessary that the root from whence they spring, or the foundation on which they are raised, should be well attended to, which in this work is not.17

The “root,” the “foundation,” the very origin and nature of the facts and events reported: we are at the heart of the controversy over what the emerging new nation was all about. This initial observation being made, Paine then undertakes to demolish an argument which, as he saw it, rested on various false data, this resulting in part from the fact that Raynal—like so many 15 16 17

FO 2: 1232-33. See Keane, Tom Paine, 580n.64. FO 2: 221-22.


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alleged ‘travelers’ of his time, or so-called ‘observers’ of the New World—had never set foot in America, and consequently did not really know what he was writing about. Hence the regrettable fact that “in the course of his work, [he] has, in some instances, extolled without a reason, and wounded without a cause.”18 But the three main points to which Paine applies both his verve and criticism have to do with the causes of the War of Independence, the historic significance of the Franco-American alliance, and the character—local or universal, banal or exceptional—of the American Revolution. For Raynal, what characterized the anti-British rebellion was the triviality of the causes by which it had been brought about. On the eve of the Revolution, he argued, colonial America did not suffer from any of the evils that traditionally justify popular upheavals: None of those energetic causes, which have produced so many revolutions upon the globe, existed in North America. Neither religion nor laws had there been outraged. The blood of martyrs or patriots had not there streamed from scaffolds. Morals had not there been insulted. Manners, customs, habits, no object dear to nations, had there been the sport of ridicule. Arbitrary power had not there torn any inhabitant from the arms of his family and friends, to drag him to a dreary dungeon [no doubt an allusion to the French ‘lettres de cachet’]. Public order had not been there inverted. The principles of administration had not been changed there; and the maxims of government had there always remained the same.19

Since minor causes can sometimes produce major consequences, a mere trifle might then be sufficient to set off the whole process, and, in fact, Raynal argued, “ the whole question was reduced to the knowing whether the mother country had, or had not, a right to lay, directly or indirectly, a slight tax upon the colonies.”20 Paine’s reply concerning the objective causes of the rebellion denied by Raynal was the following: “They did not exist in 1763, and they all existed before 1776,”21 and therefore the insurrection did have a political and moral foundation. Its real cause was to be sought not in the far-from-glorious rejection of a tax on sugar or tea, but in the tyrannical power of the British Parliament and its Declaratory Act of 1766 which asserted the right of the Commons “to bind America in all 18 19

27.

20 21

Ibid., 215. Abbé Raynal, The Revolution in America (London: Lockyer Davis, 1781), 126FO 2: 216. Ibid.

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cases whatsoever.”22 The American colonies thereby found themselves “not only in the lowest, but in the basest state of vassalage,”23 and the abuses and usurpations which subsequently punctuated their history were nothing but modalities of that most intolerable act. Thus, Paine concludes, “the whole question with America, in the opening of the dispute, was, shall we be bound in all cases whatsoever by the British Parliament, or shall we not?”—a Parliament, he goes on to say, which, “with respect to America was not septennial but perpetual.”24 The causes of the Revolution were profound and could not be described as mere whims or fits of temper. Yet detecting and criticizing Raynal’s factual errors was not enough.25 Paine felt the need to go one step further and expose the shortcomings of the Abbé’s “philosophical reflection”26 as well as the inadequacies of his vision of history as applied to the circumstances of America. No, he argues, not only is it not true that the American Revolution was generated by trivial disputes or mediocre claims, but it is futile to measure it by the yardstick of ordinary rebellions, or “to look for precedents among the revolutions of former ages.”27 The American insurrection, as Paine saw it, was unique in human history, and the values it carried—“the value and quality of liberty, the nature of government [of republican government, that is], and the dignity of

22

Ibid., 217. Ibid. 24 Ibid., 218. 25 It must in all fairness be added here that Raynal was far from being entirely negative about the future of the United States as a great nation. In his Revolution in America, he admitted that “this part of the new world cannot fail of becoming one of the most flourishing countries upon the globe. Nay, it has been even supposed, that there is cause to fear lest Europe should one day find her masters in her children” (174). But, in his comments on the ongoing Revolution, he seemed to have much less confidence in the American population than in the country itself: “No sooner would the liberty of this vast continent be established, than it would become the asylum of all the offscouring amongst us, of men of intriguing, seditious spirits, blasted characters, or ruined fortunes.” (169) Raynal was quite aware that his criticisms were going against the tide, but he refused to give in to fashion: “Let us dare to stem the torrent of public opinion, and that of public enthusiasm” (174). In the conclusion of his book, he was nevertheless ‘a good sport’ with the American people, wishing them well, although not without some qualification: “May your duration, if it possible, equal the duration of the world” (181). If it is possible ... 26 FO 2: 235. 27 Ibid., 220. 23


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man”28—were both national and universal values which concerned mankind as a whole as well as each individual citizen or community. No, the upheaval of Americans was not a parochial event brought about by their being allergic to taxes or by their love of tea; it was an unprecedented political revolution, a profound disruption that affected our way of being in the world: Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution more extraordinary than the political revolution of the country. We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used. We can look back on our own prejudices, as if they had been the prejudices of other people.29

The main asset of revolutionary America, its exceptional character, its peculiar genius, all of this stemmed from the fact that it possessed precisely what Great Britain and the Old World did not have: “an expanded mind—a heart which embraces the universe.”30 Written with “the ardor of a universal citizen,” the Letter ends with a flamboyant call—both political and philosophical—on behalf of “an extension of civilization.”31 When mankind was “in a state of barbarism,”32 Paine explains, “there were as many nations as persons,” but, driven by necessity, men got together and formed distinct societies and nations. The trouble is that they then went no further, and that therefore “the cycle of civilization is yet incomplete.” The great lesson, therefore, that mankind must draw from the American revolutionary experience—from the internal union of its thirteen states and the external alliance established with Spain, the Netherlands, and above all France (“an alliance not formed for the mere purpose of a day, but on just and generous grounds, and with equal and mutual advantages . . . an alliance not of courts only, but of countries”)33— yes, the great lesson was that a new era had begun, based on “the extension of the mind and the cordiality of the world”34: an era, Paine argued with both naïve fervor and prophetic foresight, which would see civilization move one step further toward its accomplishment, and 28

Ibid., 219. Ibid., 243. 30 Ibid., 255. 31 Ibid., 242 32 Ibid., 240. 33 Ibid., 244. 34 Ibid., 243. 29

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a society of nations at long last emerge and form an international cordon sanitaire against warfare. * Unlike Crèvecoeur and Paine, Tocqueville visited the United States after the event.35 His purpose was not to participate in the making of an object (“America”) that already existed, but to observe the functioning of the new nation, not so much for its own sake as with a view to compare it with other emerging (or potential) democratic systems and, on that basis, to depict “the general traits of democratic societies.”36 In that sense, he was the inventor of a new approach to history, a new way of drawing from the American “laboratory” he observed general lessons that might elsewhere serve as a source of reflection and inspiration. A witness of the American system at work, an actor on the French political scene, an aristocrat infatuated with both real and ‘virtual’ democracy, Tocqueville can certainly be seen as a sociologist studying the present or an historian-philosopher analyzing the past, but his main concern was with what would happen next. He thought about the past or present in terms of his own conception of a better society for the generations to come; instead of becoming engrossed in the American present, he, in his own words, chose “to consider the whole future.”37 John Stuart Mill was certainly right when he said that Tocqueville had “opened up a new era in the scientific study of 35 In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont—both of them judges at the Versailles court of justice—received permission to travel to the U.S. for the purpose of studying the U.S. prison system. They were also intrigued with the notion of American democracy and eager to see the country. So Tocqueville, then only 25, and Beaumont, 28, spent nine months traveling throughout the U.S. in search of America’s ‘essence.’ They ventured as far west as Michigan where guides led them through the unspoiled wilderness. They headed south to New Orleans, risking their lives to travel during the worst winter in years. But the majority of their time was spent in Boston, New York and Philadelphia; they were warmly received by the elite and had little difficulty arranging meetings with some of the most prominent and influential American intellectuals of the early 19th century. For a full and detailed account, see, among other biographies, John Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 36 Letter to John Stuart Mill, quoted in De la démocratie en Amérique: les grands thèmes, ed. J.- P Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 12. 37 Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence (New York: Harper, 1988), 20.


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politics,”38 and it is only fair that Tocqueville be regarded as the forefather and founder, if not of sociology, at least of modern political science; but he was not as instrumental as Paine in the early historical recognition of an American ‘specificity’ and in the marking out of a radically new field of intellectual investigation worthy of being studied for its own sake. In that sense, Paine was an ‘Americanist,’ as were, to a lesser degree, Crèvecoeur and Raynal; and Tocqueville was not. He was the student of a more general subject, and America was only a ‘pretext’ or a convenient ‘teaching (or rather learning) aid’:

Or:

No novelty in the United Sates struck me more vividly during my stay than the equality of condition . . . The more I studied American society, the more clearly I saw equality of condition as the creative element from which each particular fact derived . . . Later, when I came to consider our own side of the Atlantic, I thought I could detect something analogous to what I had noticed in the New World. I saw an equality of condition which, though it had not there reached the extreme limit found in the United States, was daily drawing closer thereto; and that same democracy which prevailed over the societies of America seemed to me to be advancing rapidly toward power in Europe. It was at that moment that I conceived the idea of this book.39 Wherever one looks, one finds the same revolution taking place throughout the Christian world.40

Or:

I admit that I saw in America more than America; it was the shape of democracy itself which I sought . . . to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom.41

Or again:

America was my framework, démocratie was the subject.42

These words clearly indicate what Tocqueville was and what he was not; what he was concerned with (the future of democracy in the Western world) and what he was not primarily interested in (the United States). Contrary to Paine or Crèvecoeur, he was not a ‘foreign observer in residence,’ but instead a traveler visiting the New World 38

12.

39

Quoted in J.-P. Mayer, ed., De la démocratie en Amérique: les grands thèmes,

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 19. 42 Letter to John Stuart Mill, quoted in John Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville in America, 748. 40 41

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in search of background material for his work on “democracy” and contemplating his own political philosophy in the promising mirror of American society. * To some extent, the four authors I have compared—Crèvecoeur, Paine, Raynal and Tocqueville—were all ‘predecessors’ in the sense that they all studied America long before we did or before ‘American Studies’ even existed as a recognized academic subject. But it seems to me that, through Common Sense and his Letter to the Abbé Raynal, only Thomas Paine stands out as a real pioneer or founder of what we now call ‘American Studies.’ Thanks to his ground-breaking pamphlet, not only did Paine suddenly rise to his new status—that of a citizen of the world—but also to the status of an ‘Americanist’ trained in the field rather than in the intellectual salons of Europe. By the same token, America rose, through him, to the status of an object for serious study and exchange between intellectuals from various cultural backgrounds. As teachers or researchers in the field of American studies, we are certainly indebted to Crèvecoeur, Raynal, Tocqueville and a few others, but we are all the children of Thomas Paine; and, in that respect, I suggest that a statue of gold be erected—not in every city of the universe, as Bonaparte once suggested43—but in each and every American Studies department of the world.

43 “A statue of gold should be erected to you in every city in the universe”: this is what Bonaparte is reported to have said to Paine during an unexpected visit to his small apartment on rue de l’Odéon (then rue de l’Ancienne Comédie) in the fall of 1797. See W. E. Woodward, Tom Paine: America’s Godfather, 1737-1809 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1946), 301.

Bibliography I. Collected Works of Thomas Paine1 Conway, Moncure D. The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols. New York: Putnam, 1894-1896 [reprints: New York: AMS Press, 1967; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969]. Foner, Eric. Thomas Paine: Collected Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995. Foner, Philip S. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. New York: Citadel Press: 1945. Reprint, New York: Freethought Press Assoc., 1954. Foot, Michael and Isaac Kramnick. The Thomas Paine Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Van der Weyde, William M. Life and Works of Thomas Paine, 10 vols. New Rochelle: Thomas Paine National Historical Association, 1925.

II. Biographical Books or Essays Aldridge, Alfred Owen. Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine. New York, Lippincott, 1959. Ayer, A. J. Thomas Paine. London: Secker & Warburg, 1988. Brinton, Crane. “Thomas Paine.” Dictionary of American Biography, vol. XIV, 159-66. Chalmers, George (Francis Oldys). Life of Thomas Pain: The Author of Rights of Men [sic], with a Defence of His Writings. London, 1791. —. Life of Thomas Pain, the Author of the Seditious Writings, entitled Rights of Man. London: 1793. Cheetham, James. The Life of Thomas Paine. New York: 1809. Reprint, Scholars Facsimiles & Reprints, 1989. Conway, Moncure D. The Life of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. New York: Putnam, 1892. Translated into French by Félix Rabbe as Thomas Paine (1737-1809) et la Révolution dans les deux mondes. Paris: Plon, 1900 (contains facts and documents not to be found in the original).

1

Paine’s three main works are separately available in the following editions: Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982); Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 (also: ed. Gregory Claeys. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992); The Age of Reason, ed. Philip S. Foner. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974. No (complete) British edition of The Age of Reason is currently available; The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) contains only Part 1. Most of Paine’s works can be accessed on the Web, in particular at: http://www.thomaspaine.org/contents.html

168


Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Fruchtman, Jack. Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994. Hawke, David Freeman. Paine. New York: Harper, 1974; Norton: 1992. Joulin, Malou. Le temps de Thomas Paine. Bruxelles: Complexe, 2004. Keane, John. Tom Paine: A Political Life. Boston, New York, Toronto, London: Little, Brown & Co, 1995. Lessay, Jean. L’Américain de la Convention: Thomas Paine. Paris: Perrin, 1987. Oldys, Francis. See Chalmers, George. Powell, David. Tom Paine: The Greatest Exile. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Rabbe, Félix. See Conway, Moncure D. Rickman, Thomas. Clio, Life of Thomas Paine. London, 1819. Sherwin, Thomas. Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine. London, 1819. Smith, Frank. Thomas Paine, Liberator. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1938. Stephen, Leslie. “Thomas Paine.” Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XLIII, 69-79. Vale, Gilbert. The Life of Thomas Paine. New York: 1841. Vincent, Bernard. Thomas Paine ou la religion de la liberté. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1987. Williamson, Audrey. Thomas Paine, His Life, Work and Times. London: Allen & Unwin, 1973. Wilson, Jerome D. and William F. Ricketson. Thomas Paine. New York: Twayne, 1978. Woodward, William E. Tom Paine: America’s Godfather. London: Secker & Warburg, 1946.

III. Critical Studies Abel, Darrel. “The Significance of the ‘Letter to the Abbé Raynal’ in the Progress of Thomas Paine’s Thought.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 66 (April 1942): 176-90. Aldridge, Alfred Owen. Thomas Paine’s American Ideology. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984. —. “La signification historique, diplomatique et littéraire de la lettre adressée à l’abbé Raynal par Thomas Paine.” Études anglaises 8 (1955): 223-32. —. “The Influence of Thomas Paine in the United States, England, France, Germany, and South America.” In Werner P. Friedrich, ed., Comparative Literature: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, 2 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959, 2: 369-83. —. “Thomas Paine in Latin America.” Early American Literature 3 (winter 19681969): 139-47. —. “Thomas Paine’s Plan for a Descent on England.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 14 (January 1957): 74-84. Berthold, S. M. Thomas Paine: America’s First Liberal. Boston: Meador, 1938. Caron, Nathalie. Thomas Paine contre l’imposture des prêtres. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998.

Bibliography

169

Claeys, Gregory. Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Copeland, Thomas W. “Burke, Paine and Jefferson.” In Our Eminent Friend Edmund Burke: Six Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949, 146-89. Davidson, Edward H. and William J. Scheick. Paine, Scripture, and Authority: “The Age of Reason “as Religious and Political Idea. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1994. Dorfman, Joseph. “The Economic Philosophy of Thomas Paine.” Political Science Quarterly 53 (1938): 372-86. Dyck, Ian. Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Falk, Robert P. “Thomas Paine and the Attitude of the Quakers to the American Revolution.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 63 (1939): 302-10. Fennessy, R. R. Burke, Paine and the Rights of Man: A Difference in Political Opinion. The Hague: Martuus Nijhoff, 1963. Fruchtman, Jack. Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Gimbel, Richard. Thomas Paine: A Bibliographical Checklist of “Common Sense” with an Account of its Publication. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. Kaminski, John P., ed. Citizen Paine: Thomas Paine’s Thoughts on Man, Government, Society and Religion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Kantin Georges, ed. Thomas Paine, citoyen du monde. Paris: Créaphys, 1990. King, Arnold Kinsey. “Thomas Paine in America, 1774-1787.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1951. Kramnick, Isaac. “Tom Paine: Radical Democrat.” Democracy 1 (January 1981): 12738. Le Moal, Paul. “La doctrine de Thomas Paine. Genèse – Evolution et expression d’une pensée.” Thèse d’Etat (Ph.D. diss.), Université de Paris, 1971. Meng, John J. “The Constitutional Theories of Thomas Paine.” Review of Politics 8 (1946): 283-306. Palmer, Robert R. “Tom Paine, Victim of the Rights of Man.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 66 (1942): 161-75. Pütz, Manfred and Jon-K Adams. A Concordance to Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense “and “The American Crisis.” New York: Garland, 1989. Sykes, Norman. “Thomas Paine.” In F. J. C. Hearnshaw, ed., The Social and Political Ideas of the Revolutionary Era. London: Harrap, 1931, 100-40. Thompson, Ann. “Thomas Paine and the United Irishmen.” Études irlandaises 16 (June 1991): 109-19. Vincent, Bernard. “La stratégie du temps dans Common Sense.” In Autre temps, autre espace: essais sur l’Amérique pré-industrielle, ed. Élise Marienstras and Barbara Karsky. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1986. —. “Thomas Paine, Freemasonry and the American Revolution.” Bulletin of the Thomas Paine Society 1 (spring 1988): 3-18. —. “Cinq inédits de Thomas Paine.” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 40 (April 1989):213-35. —. “Thomas Paine and the French Revolution.” Huguenot-Thomas Paine Historical Association “Pamphlet” (summer-fall 1989 and winter-spring 1990).

170


—. “Thomas Paine: quelles révolutions pour demain.” In Thomas Paine, citoyen du monde, ed. G. Kantin. Paris: Créaphys, 1990, 81-87. (English version: “Thomas Paine: What Revolutions for Tomorrow?” – same pages.) —. “Thomas Paine, républicain de l’univers.” In Le Siècle de l’avènement républicain, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf. Paris: Gallimard, 1992, 101-26. —. “Thomas Paine, the Louisiana Purchase and the Rights of Man.” Plantation Society 3, no. 2 (1993): 63-72 (French version in Thomas Paine ou la République sans frontières. See below). —. “Thomas Paine: les ambiguïtés de la référence américaine.” In Révolution et République: l’exception française, ed. Michel Vovelle. Paris: Kimé, 1994, 99108. —. “A National Hero in Transit: The Problem of Thomas Paine’s American Citizenship.” Prospero (Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche) 2 (1995): 56-62. —. “Thomas Paine and the Issue of Universal Suffrage.” Qwerty (October 1995): 397-400. —. “Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice: A Prophecy for our Times.” Sources 6 (fall 1998): 143-52. —. “A Pioneer with a Difference: Thomas Paine and Early American Studies.” In Predecessors: Intellectual Lineages in American Studies, ed. Rob Kroes. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1999, 236-65. —. Vincent, Bernard, ed. Thomas Paine ou la République sans frontières. Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1993. [Ann Thomson, “Thomas Christie, Paine et la Révolution française”; Alain Ruiz, “Pour Paine contre ‘Burke et Cie’: un héraut allemand des Droits de l'Homme, Karl Friedrich Cramer”; Jean-Paul de Lagrave, “Thomas Paine et les Condorcet”; Sophie Wahnich, “Identité et altérité: Thomas Paine dans la Révolution française”; Yannick Bosc, “Thomas Paine et les Constitutions de 1793 et 1795: critique de la république formelle”; B. Vincent, “Les Américains à Paris sous la Révolution: mythes et réalités”; Denis Lacorne, “À propos d’un crime de lèse-révolution: la Lettre à l'abbé Raynal de Thomas Paine (1782)”; Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, “Modernité de la république: Paine, Jefferson et l’impact de la Révolution française en Amérique”; B. Vincent, “Thomas Paine et la ‘républicanisation’ de la Louisiane”; John Keane, “Démocratie républicaine, nation, nationalisme: repenser les Droits de l’Homme de Thomas Paine”; Florence Gauthier, “Paine et le républicanisme cosmopolitique”; Marcel Dorigny, “Un autre cosmopolitisme: Nicolas de Bonneville et le Cercle social”; B. Vincent, “Le républicanisme comme instrument de paix.”] Whale, John C. “Literal and Symbolic Representation: Burke, Paine, and the French Revolution.” History of Ruropean Ideas 16 (January 1993): 343-49. Wilson, David A. Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988. Wöll, Walter. Thomas Paine: Motives for Rebellion. European University Studies Series XIV, Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature, vol. 248, (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1992).

IV. On Paine’s Language and Style Boulton, James T. The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke. London:

Bibliography

171

Routledge & K. Paul, 1963. Republished in 1975 by Greenwood Press. Furniss, Tom. “Rhetoric in Revolution: The Role of Language in Paine’s Critique of Burke.” In Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Selden. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language, 1799-1819. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Woodcock, Bruce. “Writing the Revolution: Aspects of Thomas Paine’s Prose.” Prose Studies 15 (August 1992): 171-186.

V. Fictionalized Accounts Elias, Jacob T., Young Thomas Paine. New York: Xlibris Corporation, 2000. Fast, Howard, Citizen Tom Paine. New York: The Modern Library, 1943.

VI. Theater Foster, Paul, Tom Paine: A Play in Two Parts. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Foxall, Vince, Tom Paine Live. Performed in London at the Islington “Red Lion Theatre,” Sept. 24 – Oct. 12, 1985. Lewis, Joseph, The Tragic Patriot: A Drama of Historical Significance in Five Acts and Twenty-Five Scenes. New York: The Freethought Press, 1954.


Index Adams, Abigail, 124 Adams, John, 12, 39, 46, 124 Adams, Samuel, 45, 46 Adet, Pierre-Auguste, 52 Aldridge, Alfred Owen, 107 Alengry, Franck, 37 Allen, Ethan, 47 Allen,William, 48 Anderson, James, 42, 55n.63 Arnold, Benedict, 47 Association Française d’Études Américaines (AFEA), 155 Aude, Joseph, 80 Babeuf, Gracchus, 127-28 Bache, Richard, 36 Bailyn, Bernard, 8 Barère (de Vieuzac), Bertrand, 87 Barlow, Joel, 36, 67, 68, 83, 110, 111, 113 Barnave, Antoine, 38 Barruel, Abbé, 51 Bates, Stephen, 42 Bayard, Ferdinand, 76 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 99n.8, 159 Beaumont, Gustave de, 164n.35 Bellamy, Edward, 133, 134 Bentham, Jeremy, 95 Bishop of Llandaff. See Watson, Richard Bizardel, Yvon, 66, 69 Blake, William, 133 Blanc, Louis, 133 Blanchard, Jean-Pierre, 7 Boizot, Louis-Simon, 72 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 94, 99-100, 141, 166 Bonnet, Abbé, 76

Bonneville, Marguerite de, 112 Bonneville, Nicolas de, 36, 37, 75, 90, 91, 112, 125 Boothby, Brooke, 5 Bouilly, Jean Nicolas, 82 Boulton, James, 4, 5 Boyden, William, 40 Bradford, Thomas, 36 Bradford, William, 36 Brant, Joseph, 48 Breckenridge, John, 97, 102 Brissot (de Warville), 36, 37, 38, 52n.53, 74, 75, 76, 87, 91 Brunoy, Marquise de, 68 Buffon, Comte de, 70 Burke, Edmund, 3, 4-8, 12, 25, 49, 50, 86, 92, 114, 147-48, 150 Burr, Aaron, 46, 47n.37 Cadoudal, Georges de, 73 Capet, Louis. See Louis XVI Caron, Nathalie, 15 “Cato”. See Smith, William, Reverend Cercle Social, 125 Chamfort, Sébastien-Roch-Nicolas, 79 Charles X, 37 Chastellux, Marquis de, 76 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 76 Chatham, Earl of. See Pitt, William, Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste, 81 Chinard, Gilbert, 77 Church, Edward, 68 Claeys, Gregory, 118, 130, 131 Clark, George Rogers, 47 Clavière, Étienne, 65 Clay, Henry, 58n.70 Clinton, George, 47, 109, 110, 113

174


Cloots, Anacharsis, 65, 66, 72, 88 Cobbett, William, 114 Cochin, Augustin, 50, 53 Codman, Richard, 68 Coil, Henry Wilson, 40, 43n.23 Condorcet, Marquis de, 36, 67, 87, 91, 111, 122 Copans, Sim, 155 Cornwallis, Charles (general), 47 Cortés, Hernando, 79 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 70, 77, 156-58 Cumberland, Duke of, 37 Danton, Georges-Jacques, 36, 37, 87, 88 Deane, Silas,12, 50 Declaratory Act (1766), 161 Defoe, Daniel, 9 Deforgues, François, Louis, Michel, Chemin, 111 Dejaure, Jean-Élie, 80 De Kalb, Johann, 47 Delisle de la Drevetière, LouisFrançois, 78 Denslow, William, 41 Dermott, Lawrence, 43 Desfontaines, Pierre-François, 81 Desmoulins, Camille, 88 Devoe, Frederick, 112 Dickinson, John, 47 Duchâtelet, Achille, 36, 91 Dumenil, Lynn, 57 Dwight, Theodore, 52, 57 Dwight, Timothy, 51, 52 Echeverria, Durand, 83 Edes, Benjamin, and Sons, 159n.14 Erskine, Thomas, 143, 149 Estaing, Admiral d’, 47 Eustace, John Skey, 67 Fabre d’Églantine, Philippe, 88 Fauchet, Abbé, 38, 75 Faÿ, Bernard, 35, 37 Fox, Charles, 6 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 71 Franklin, Benjamin, 1, 11, 12, 15, 35,

36, 39, 42, 46n.34, 50, 56, 69, 7074, 79, 80, 81, 82, 96, 114 Freud, Sigmund, 9 Furet, François, 53 Gallatin, Albert, 52, 106 Gandhi, Mahatma, 137 George III, 148 George IV, 37 George, Henry, 1133 Gibbon, Edward, 114 Goodman, Paul, 134 Goodman, Percival, 134 Grafton, Dukes of, 2 Grasse, Admiral de, 47 Greene, Nathanael, 36, 47, 86 Grégoire, Abbé, 75 Griffith, Thomas, 68 Grimshaw, William, 40 Guillotin, Ignace, 37 Hall, Prince, 56-57 Hamilton, Alexander, 46, 47, 83 Hancock, John, 45 Haskins, William, 68 Heaton, Ronald, 40, 47n.35, 47n.36 Henry, Patrick, 47 Hérault de Séchelles, Marie Jean, 88 Hobbes, Thomas, 95 Hooper, William, 47 Houdetot, Mme d’, 72 Howe, William (general), 28, 146 Howe, Lord Richard (admiral), 23, 48 Hume, David, 114 Hunt, Isaac, 3 Hunt, Leigh, 3 Illich, Ivan, 134 Jackson, Major William, 68 Jaurès, Jean, 133 Jay, John, 47 Jefferson, Thomas, 1, 3, 15, 27, 36, 37, 46, 50, 52, 69, 82, 86, 90, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105 Jeffries, John, 7 Jenifer, Daniel of St. Thomas,

Index

157n.14 Johnson, John, 48 Jones, John Paul, 47 Keane, John, 2, 11, 13, 132, 158, 159n.14 King John, 148 “King’s Speech in Parliament,” 21 Knox, Henry, 47 Kroes, Rob, 155 La Luzerne, Chevalier de, 160 La Rochefoucauld, Duc de, 36, 38, 67 Lafayette, Marquis de, 36, 38, 47, 52n.53, 67, 68, 69, 85 Langborn, William, 67 Lansdowne, Marquis of, 95 Laurens, John, 86 Laurens, Henry, 36, 47 Le Bihan, Alain, 37 Le Blanc du Guillet, Antoine, 79 Le Forestier, R., 38 Leavenworth, Mark, 68 Ledyard, John, 67 Lee brothers (Arthur and Francis Lightfoot), 36 Lee, Charles (general), 1 Lee, Richard Henry, 47 Lehrbach, Count, 38 Leib, Michael, 98 Leigh, Egerton, 48 Lincoln, Benjamin, 47 Lipson, Dorothy Ann, 48, 49, 54, 55 Livingston, Robert R., 447, 100, 159 Locke, John, 95 Louis XVI, 76, 87-88, 144 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 127 Madison, James, 41, 42, 46, 83, 109, 110, 113 Maier, Pauline, 91 Malone, Dumas, 101 Marat, Jean-Paul, 76 Marie-Antoinette, 4 Marshall, John, 47 Marsillac, Jean de, 74, 77 Mathias, J. T., 4

175

May, Henry, 55 Mayer, Charles de, 79 Mazzei, Philip, 67 McKee, Kenneth, 81, 82 McLuhan, Marshall, 17 McWilliams, Wilson, 58 Mercer, Hugh, 47 Mercer, John Francis, 41 Mill, John Stuart, 145n.42, 164n.36, 164 Mirabeau, Comte de, 38, 52n.53, 76, 80 Miranda, Francisco de, 4 Monroe, James, 36, 69, 89, 97, 101, 110, 125 Montesquieu, Baron de La Brède et de, 77, 78, 127 Montgomery, Richard, 47 Morgan, William, 57 Morris, Gouverneur, 69, 88, 89, 101, 109-11, 112 Morris, Robert, 36, 47, 159 Morse, Jedidiah, 51, 52, 54, 57 Morse, Sidney, 45, 47n.37 “Mr. Guelph,” 148 Mulhenberg, Frederick, 36 Muraskin, William, 57 Necker, Jacques, 38, 65 Nogaret, Félix, 72 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 11 Orléans, Duc d’, 38 Oswald, Eleazar, 67 Otis, James, 45 Owen, Robert, 133 Paine, Robert Treat, 47 Paine, Thomas: revolutionary style, 117; first poem, 2; the Bastille of words, 3; imagery, 4-5, 6-10; circulation of CS, 11-12; of RM, 12-13; of AR, 14-15; reception of RM in Britain, 5-6; success of TP’s books in Europe, 12, 14, 107; in Latin America, 12, 107; royalties given away, 12, 14; “replies” to

176


AR, 15-16; strategic timing of CS, 21-33; TP corset-maker, 22, 35; TP Excise Officer, 22, 35; the three forms of time in CS, 27-30, 31; on the necessity of a “Continental Charter,” 99n.9, 118; TP and Freemasonry, 35-39; Illuminati, 38, 51, 52; TP’s bridge on the Thames, 67, 85; made a French citizen, 69, 83, 87, 95, 111, 144; elected deputy of the Convention, 87; drafts (with Condorcet) the Constitution of Year 1, 87, 122; speaks for Louis XVI, 87-88; jailed in the Luxembourg prison, 36, 69, 82, 87n.3, 88, 89, 93, 109, 110, 125, 144, 145; escapes the guillotine, 88, 144; criticizes George Washington, 89; completes AR in James Monroe’s house, 89; writes Maritime Compact, 80, 138; out of phase with French Revolution, 91-93; unable to speak French, 87; works with the Theophilanthropists, 93; criticizes the French Revolution, 93-94; invited by Jefferson to return to America, 94; unsuccessfully tries to return to America (1797), 125; plans (with Bonaparte) an invasion of England, 94, 138, 141; mentioned as a future member of the “English Directory”, 95; criticizes the Constitution of Year III, 123, 126; against Babeuf’s communism, 127-28; advocates taxation on land, 129-30, 131; proposes various allowances, 130; and the creation of a national fund, 130; impact of Agrarian Justice, 132-35; returns to America (1802), 97, 123; on the Louisiana Purchase, 97-107; TP as “farmer of thoughts” and prophet, 26, 30, 99, 107, 124, 135, 137; advocates international copyright, 99, 159; problem of his citizenship, 109-14; criticizes Gouverneur Morris, 101, 110; TP disenfranchised, 109-12; citizen of

the world, 1107, 114, 166; placed in the Hall of Fame, 96; on and for universal suffrage, 117-24; against property qualifications, 119-20; on “the people,” 120; on the “nation,” 120-21; on property, 122, 129-32; on the vote of Black people, 124; on the vote of women, 124; TP and Quakerism, 10, 74, 76, 104, 13738, 145, 152; not a pacifist, 137, 138; advocates an Unarmed Association of Nations, 90, 139; a concerted limitation of armaments, 139; a federation of nations, 139, 158; a European Confederacy, 99; criticism of the Bible, 14, 15, 14951; of revealed religions, 125, 132, 140; quotes the Bible for rhetorical purposes, 10, 145-46; TP and Deism, 15, 16, 38, 89, 93, 143, 151-52; Genesis as source of human rights, 147-48; Adamism, 27, 121, 146, 148, 149, 151-52; condemnation of the ‘usurpers of the Word of God,’ 150-52; TP’s faith in reason, 4, 5, 9, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 31, 38, 143, 152; tolerant of all other creeds, 153; TP compared to Crèvecoeur, 157-58; to Raynal, 158-64; to Tocqueville, 164-66. Main works cited : Address “To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana,” 106 Agrarian Justice, 93, 123, 125-35 An Essay on the Origin of Freemasonry, 36 “A Serious Address to the People of Pennsylvania,” 119 Common Sense, 1, 5, 8-12, 14, 16, 17, 21-33, 86, 91, 93, 99n.9, 107, 110, 117-18 Dissertation on First Principles of Government, 92n.12, 93, 123 Dissertation on Government; the affairs of the Bank; and Paper Money, 120 “Epitaph” for a pet crow, 2

Index

Examination of the Prophecies, 149n.15 Forester’s Letters, 118, 119 Letter Addressed to the Addressers,121-22 Letter to George Washington, 89, 90, 109 Letter to the Abbé Raynal, 99, 139, 140, 158-64, 158, 160, 166 Letter to the Citizens of Pennsylvania, 120 Letters to the Citizens of the United States, 101 Maritime Compact, 90-91, 138-39 “Predestination,” 143n.1, 153 Public Good, 86 Rights of Man, 1-2, 3, 4-6, 8, 11, 1214, 15, 16, 17, 25, 26, 28, 29,86, 87, 96, 107, 112, 126, 128, 129, 133, 141, 142, 143, 147-49, 151, 153 The Age of Reason, 11, 14-16, 17, 39, 89-90, 93, 94, 96, 98, 99, 107, 109, 129, 143, 144, 145, 149-53 The American Crisis, 5, 22, 23, 146 Palmer, R. R., 50 Parsons, Samuel, 47 Pascal, Blaise, 153 Paul I (Emperor of Russia), 99, 139 Pauw, Cornelius de, 70 Penn, William, 73, 74, 76 Philippe-Égalité, 37 Philips, Edith, 73 Piron, Alexis, 78 Pitt, William, 50, 132 Price, Henry, 43 Quakers and Quakerism, 10, 73-77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 104, 137, 138, 145, 152 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 78 Randolph, Edmund, 47, 110 Randolph, John, 106 Randolph, Peyton, 47n.34, 47 Raynal, Abbé, 70, 71, 76, 86, 99, 139, 140, 141, 156, 158-64

177

Reigny, Beffroi de, 80 Révauger, Marie-Cécile, 50 Revere, Paul, 45, 46n.34 Revue Française d’Études Américaines, 156 Riker (attorney), 113 Rittenhouse, David, 36, 47 Roberdeau, General, 36 Roberts, J. M., 51 Robespierre, Maximilien, 72, 81, 88, 92 Robinet, Dr., 37 Robison, John, 51 Rochambeau, General, 47 Roosevelt, Theodore, 16 Roth, Philip A., 40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 72, 78, 80, 141 Rumsey, James, 67 Rush, Benjamin, 16, 36, 47, 85 Saint-Simon, Comte de, 68 Sauvigny, Guillaume de Berthier de, 79, 81 Scoble, Thomas, 112n.13, 113 Scott, Walter, 13 Sérieys, Antoine, 81 Sharp, William, 95 Sherman, Roger, 47 Short, William, 69, 106 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph, 36 Smith, Adam, 128 Smith, Olivia, 6 Smith, William (Reverend), 6 Spence, Thomas, 133 Spencer, Herbert, 133 Steiner, Hillel, 133 Sullivan, John, 47 Swift, Jonathan, 9 Tappan, David, 51, 57 Thelwall, John, 95 Thomson, Charles, 159n.14 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 156, 157, 164-66 Todd, Dolley Payne, 42 Toland, John, 119 Tooke, Horne, 95

178


Toussaint-Louverture, 106 Trumbull, John, 67 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 71 Van Parijs, Philippe, 133 Vanderlyn, John, 67 Vernon, William Henry, 69 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 35, 72, 73, 74, 78, 80, 114, 151n.17 Walkes, Joseph, 56 Walpole, Horace, 3 Walras, Léon, 133 Ward, Elisha, 109 Warren, Joseph, 45, 46n.34 Washington, George, 1, 11, 23, 36, 40, 46, 47, 50, 54, 55, 56, 81, 83, 85, 88, 89, 94, 96, 98, 109, 110, 159 Watson, Richard, 16, 126 Wayne, Anthony, 47 Webster, Daniel, 44 Weishaupt, Adam, 38, 51 Whipple, Abraham, 45 Wilkes, John, 50 William of Normandy, 148 William of Orange, 148 Williams, Thomas, 125, 143 Wirt, William, 57n.70 Witherspoon, John, 36, 47 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 124 Wright, Joseph, 67 Wright, Patience, 67 Yorke, Henry Redhead, 93

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