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Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine, (b. January 29, 1737,
Thetford, Norfolk, England—d. June 8,
1809, New York, N.Y., U.S.),
English-American writer and political
pamphleteer whose “Common Sense” and
“Crisis” papers were important
influences on the American Revolution.
Other works that contributed to his
reputation as one of the greatest
political propagandists in history were
Rights of Man, a defense of the French
Revolution and of republican principles;
and The Age of Reason, an exposition of
the place of religion in society.
Life in
England and America
Paine was born of a Quaker father and an
Anglican mother. His formal education
was meagre, just enough to enable him to
master reading, writing, and arithmetic.
At 13 he began work with his father as a
corset maker and then tried various
other occupations unsuccessfully,
finally becoming an officer of the
excise. His duties were to hunt for
smugglers and collect the excise taxes
on liquor and tobacco. The pay was
insufficient to cover living costs, but
he used part of his earnings to purchase
books and scientific apparatus.
Paine’s
life in England was marked by repeated
failures. He had two brief marriages. He
was unsuccessful or unhappy in every job
he tried. He was dismissed from the
excise office after he published a
strong argument in 1772 for a raise in
pay as the only way to end corruption in
the service. Just when his situation
appeared hopeless, he met Benjamin
Franklin in London, who advised him to
seek his fortune in America and gave him
letters of introduction.
Paine
arrived in Philadelphia on Nov. 30,
1774. His first regular employment was
helping to edit the Pennsylvania
Magazine. In addition Paine published
numerous articles and some poetry,
anonymously or under pseudonyms. One
such article was “African Slavery in
America,” a scathing denunciation of the
African slave trade, which he signed
“Justice and Humanity.”
Paine
had arrived in America when the conflict
between the colonists and England was
reaching its height. After blood was
spilled at the Battle of Lexington and
Concord, April 19, 1775, Paine argued
that the cause of America should not be
just a revolt against taxation but a
demand for independence. He put this
idea into “Common Sense,” which came off
the press on Jan. 10, 1776. The 50-page
pamphlet sold more than 500,000 copies
within a few months. More than any other
single publication, “Common Sense” paved
the way for the Declaration of
Independence, unanimously ratified July
4, 1776.
During
the war that followed, Paine served as
volunteer aide-de-camp to General
Nathanael Greene. His great contribution
to the patriot cause was the 16 “Crisis”
papers issued between 1776 and 1783,
each one signed “Common Sense.” “The
American Crisis. Number I,” published on
Dec. 19, 1776, when George Washington’s
army was on the verge of disintegration,
opened with the flaming words: “These
are the times that try men’s souls.”
Washington ordered the pamphlet read to
all the troops at Valley Forge.
In 1777
Congress appointed Paine secretary to
the Committee for Foreign Affairs. He
held the post until early in 1779, when
he became involved in a controversy with
Silas Deane, a member of the Continental
Congress, whom Paine accused of seeking
to profit personally from French aid to
the United States. But in revealing
Deane’s machinations, Paine was forced
to quote from secret documents to which
he had access as secretary of the
Committee for Foreign Affairs. As a
result, despite the truth of his
accusations, he was forced to resign his
post.
Paine’s
desperate need of employment was
relieved when he was appointed clerk of
the General Assembly of Pennsylvania on
Nov. 2, 1779. In this capacity he had
frequent opportunity to observe that
American troops were at the end of their
patience because of lack of pay and
scarcity of supplies. Paine took $500
from his salary and started a
subscription for the relief of the
soldiers. In 1781, pursuing the same
goal, he accompanied John Laurens to
France. The money, clothing, and
ammunition they brought back with them
were important to the final success of
the Revolution. Paine also appealed to
the separate states to cooperate for the
well-being of the entire nation. In
“Public Good” (1780) he included a call
for a national convention to remedy the
ineffectual Articles of Confederation
and establish a strong central
government under “a continental
constitution.”
At the
end of the American Revolution, Paine
again found himself poverty-stricken.
His patriotic writings had sold by the
hundreds of thousands, but he had
refused to accept any profits in order
that cheap editions might be widely
circulated. In a petition to Congress
endorsed by Washington, he pleaded for
financial assistance. It was buried by
Paine’s opponents in Congress, but
Pennsylvania gave him £500 and New York
a farm in New Rochelle. Here Paine
devoted his time to inventions,
concentrating on an iron bridge without
piers and a smokeless candle.
In Europe: “Rights of Man”
In April 1787 Paine left for Europe to
promote his plan to build a single-arch
bridge across the wide Schuylkill River
near Philadelphia. But in England he was
soon diverted from his engineering
project. In December 1789 he published
anonymously a warning against the
attempt of Prime Minister William Pitt
to involve England in a war with France
over Holland, reminding the British
people that war had “but one thing
certain and that is increase of taxes.”
But it was the French Revolution that
now filled Paine’s thoughts. He was
enraged by Edmund Burke’s attack on the
uprising of the French people in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France,
and, though Paine admired Burke’s stand
in favour of the American Revolution, he
rushed into print with his celebrated
answer, Rights of Man (March 13, 1791).
The book immediately created a
sensation. At least eight editions were
published in 1791, and the work was
quickly reprinted in the U.S., where it
was widely distributed by the
Jeffersonian societies. When Burke
replied, Paine came back with Rights of
Man, Part II, published on Feb. 17,
1792.
What
began as a defense of the French
Revolution evolved into an analysis of
the basic reasons for discontent in
European society and a remedy for the
evils of arbitrary government, poverty,
illiteracy, unemployment, and war. Paine
spoke out effectively in favour of
republicanism as against monarchy and
went on to outline a plan for popular
education, relief of the poor, pensions
for aged people, and public works for
the unemployed, all to be financed by
the levying of a progressive income tax.
To the ruling class Paine’s proposals
spelled “bloody revolution,” and the
government ordered the book banned and
the publisher jailed. Paine himself was
indicted for treason, and an order went
out for his arrest. But he was en route
to France, having been elected to a seat
in the National Convention, before the
order for his arrest could be delivered.
Paine was tried in absentia, found
guilty of seditious libel, and declared
an outlaw, and Rights of Man was ordered
permanently suppressed.
In
France Paine hailed the abolition of the
monarchy but deplored the terror against
the royalists and fought unsuccessfully
to save the life of King Louis XVI,
favouring banishment rather than
execution. He was to pay for his efforts
to save the King’s life when the
radicals under Robespierre took power.
Paine was imprisoned from Dec. 28, 1793,
to Nov. 4, 1794, when, with the fall of
Robespierre, he was released and, though
seriously ill, readmitted to the
National Convention.
While
in prison, the first part of Paine’s Age
of Reason was published (1794), and it
was followed by Part II after his
release (1796). Although Paine made it
clear that he believed in a Supreme
Being and as a deist opposed only
organized religion, the work won him a
reputation as an atheist among the
orthodox. The publication of his last
great pamphlet, “Agrarian Justice”
(1797), with its attack on inequalities
in property ownership, added to his many
enemies in establishment circles.
Paine
remained in France until Sept. 1, 1802,
when he sailed for the United States. He
quickly discovered that his services to
the country had been all but forgotten
and that he was widely regarded only as
the world’s greatest infidel. Despite
his poverty and his physical condition,
worsened by occasional drunkenness,
Paine continued his attacks on privilege
and religious superstitions. He died in
New York City in 1809 and was buried in
New Rochelle on the farm given to him by
the state of New York as a reward for
his Revolutionary writings. Ten years
later, William Cobbett, the political
journalist, exhumed the bones and took
them to England, where he hoped to give
Paine a funeral worthy of his great
contributions to humanity. But the plan
misfired, and the bones were lost, never
to be recovered.
Assessment
At Paine’s death most U.S. newspapers
reprinted the obituary notice from the
New York Citizen, which read in part:
“He had lived long, did some good and
much harm.” This remained the verdict of
history for more than a century
following his death, but in recent years
the tide has turned: on Jan. 30, 1937,
The Times of London referred to him as
“the English Voltaire,” and on May 18,
1952, Paine’s bust was placed in the New
York University Hall of Fame.
Philip S. Foner
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THE AGE OF REASON
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Type of work: Theological study
Author: Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
First published: Part I, 1794; Part II, 1796
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Thomas Paine earned lasting fame as one of history's most powerful
and persuasive writers. Born in England as the son of an artisan,
largely self-educated, he wrote robust, plain, emotionally intense
English that crystallized thought and galvanized into action the common
people of America, Great Britain, and France. Paine, a young English
immigrant sponsored by Benjamin Franklin, became beloved in his adopted
country after he wrote Common Sense (1776), an impelling force in
persuading Americans to break their remaining ties with England. His
Crisis papers, written during the American Revolution, buoyed American
spirits, and his The Rights of Man (1791-1792), pleading for natural
rights and republican principles, won for him admirers throughout the
Western world.
Paine placed before the common people the Enlightenment ideas of
intellectual circles. He possessed an uncanny ability to translate the
abstractions of the well-educated elite into living ideas that moved the
masses. He believed that just as Sir Isaac Newton revealed the natural
laws governing the universe, he and others could use reason to uncover
the natural rights of individuals, republican principles in politics, or
the laws of the marketplace.
While millions of people responded positively to Paine's early writings
calling for independence and individual liberty, The Age of Reason made
him a hated and reviled figure. The once-beloved advocate of humane and
gentle treatment of all God's creatures was now presented as a drunkard
and moral degenerate—a "filthy little atheist," in the words of Theodore
Roosevelt, almost a century after Paine's death.
Although thousands of ministers denounced Paine as an atheist, he
clearly stated on the first page of The Age of Reason that "I believe in
one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life." He
described his moral principles, those taught by many religious figures:
"I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties
consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our
fellow-creatures happy."
Paine wrote The Age of Reason in 1793 in Paris during the French
Revolution, which he had promoted and defended. Deeply troubled by the
cruel excesses of a minority of revolutionaries, expecting arrest any
day, he had seen reason overthrown and monarchy replaced with new
despots. Similarly, in religion he saw the spread of atheism as a
by-product of attacks on the established church. The Age of Reason was a
blow against institutionalized religion on the one hand and an antidote
to what Paine regarded as the poison of atheism on the other. As his
fellow revolutionaries executed the French king and abolished the
established church, Paine cautioned them not to dethrone reason, "lest
in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government and
false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity and of the
theology that is true."
Paine outraged many former admirers not because he rejected God, which
he did not do, but because he attacked the Christian church: "I do not
believe in the creed professed ... by any church that I know of. My own
mind is my own church." Anticipating Karl Marx, Paine wrote: "All
national institutions of churches . . . appear to me no other than human
inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power
and profit." Government officials propped up the church for the benefit
of greedy priests, and in return the church lent legitimacy to
government, Paine said. He understood the danger of excess as the
church-state edifice toppled, but he believed that reason would free
humanity from the despotism of the clerics and protect it from the abyss
of amoral anarchism.
Before Paine could present a theology appropriate to an age of reason,
he had to strip away the false doctrine of Christianity. All existing
religions claimed to be based on revelations from gods, but Paine argued
that revelations could only occur between God and those to whom he
directly revealed himself. After that, revelations, in the unlikely
event that they had occurred, became mere hearsay and had been distorted
to protect the position of the clerics.
The Bible was composed of hearsay, not revelation, Paine argued; using
what would later be called biblical criticism, he found that many of the
Old Testament stories were mere reworkings of ancient pagan tales. God's
victory over Satan and the latter's confinement in the pit of fire
reminded him of the tale of Jupiter's defeating a giant and confining
him under Mount Etna, where he still belches fire. Christian
mythologists did not settle the Satan problem so easily, Paine asserted:
. . . they could not do without him; and after being at the trouble
of making him, they bribed him to stay. They promised him all the Jews,
all the Turks by anticipation, nine-tenths of the world beside, and
Mahomet into the bargain.
Christian mythologists deified Satan, Paine charged, even forcing God to
capitulate to him by surrendering His Son on the cross.
The Old Testament degraded God by having Him order His people to engage
in treachery, murder, and genocide, Paine wrote. It was full of confused
chronology and fragments of non-Jewish writing. The books ascribed to
Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and others could not have been written by them.
That which was not absurd was an obscene history of wickedness. The Book
of Job was interesting but was not Hebrew in origin; some of the Psalms
properly exalted God but were not superior to other such writings before
or since; the bits of wisdom in the Proverbs were not any wiser than
those of Ben Franklin.
Paine then turned to the New Testament. It was not as full of brutality
and blood as the Old Testament, but it was even more absurd, he
believed. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not
revelations but anecdotal hearsay written by unknown figures long after
the events they described. The biblical story of Jesus, a modest and
humane man whose message was distorted by church mythologists, was an
absurdity. The story of his birth was an obscene tale of the violation
of a virgin by a ghost. Jesus' death, God dying on a cross, was even
more ridiculous: "His historians, having brought him into the world in a
supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same
manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground."
Jesus was a good man, a reformer and revolutionist, who was killed
because he posed a threat to greedy priests and power-hungry Romans.
Subsequently, the church built myths about him to support and justify a
priestly religion of pomp and revenue. It created a false concept of
redemption to obscure the fact that all humans at all times occupy the
same relation to God, needing no mediation by churches or ministers. The
doctrine of redemption served the clerics by turning humans into
outcasts living in a dunghill and needing the church to regain the
kingdom. The Bible, books of hearsay written centuries after the events
they described, was shaped to fit the needs of the church. Church
leaders settled by majority vote what would make up the Bible. If the
vote had been different, Paine said, then Christian belief would be
different.
Reason taught a very clear lesson to Paine. All human languages were
ambiguous, easily miscopied, or even forged. The word of God would never
have been revealed in a human language, a changeable and varying
vehicle. The word of God would be revealed in a way that could never be
changed or distorted or misunderstood, and it would be revealed to all
people in every generation.
"The Word of God IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which
no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh
universally to man." In God's creation of the earth and all the
universe, we see His wisdom, power, munificence, and mercy, Paine said.
The absurdities and creations of the Bible paled beside the workings of
the universe in which God placed humanity. The Bible was so inferior to
the glory and power of God revealed in His creation that the church had
to suppress philosophy and science that would reveal the true theology
revealed in the creation. Christianity so offended reason that in order
to survive the church had to suppress freedom of thought.
There was a religious creed suitable for an age of reason, Paine
believed, the deistic creed of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, as
well as Voltaire and other European Enlightenment leaders. Paine made
his deistic beliefs clear:
The only idea man can affix to the name of God is that of a first
cause, the cause of all things. And incomprehensible and difficult as
it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is. he arrives at the
belief of it from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it.
People did not need the church and ministers to have access to the mind
of God: "It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover
God." The Bible served only to diminish God and to make Him appear cruel
and angry.
So Paine ended the first part of The Age of Reason. He did not have the
leisure to worry about its reception. Maximilien Robespierre and his
radical comrades imprisoned Paine and kept him locked up through most of
1794. They probably did not intend to execute him but wanted to keep his
pen from being turned against their excesses. He nearly died of illness
before James Monroe helped free him. As Paine recovered, he read attacks
on the first part of The Age of Reason. He had not had access to a Bible
in anticlerical France when he wrote the first part. Now he had a Bible
at hand and, he wrote, found that it was worse than he remembered.
Paine did not develop new themes in part 2 of The Age of Reason but
provided more details of biblical criticism to support his argument that
Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and others could not have written the books
ascribed to them, thus removing any authority that they had as
revelation. Paine again hammered at the theme that the Bible reduced God
and His holy disciples to barbaric evildoers. Only the Book of Job could
be read without indignation and disgust, he said. The New Testament
began with the debauchery of Mary and ended with the absurdity of men
placing God on a cross. The heart of the New Testament was the
often-conflicting Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each of whom
seemed to have known a different Jesus.
Paine reiterated his central message. God's glory and benevolence were
not found in the Bible or in churches or in ministers' sermons. Humans
did not need mediating institutions to reach God. All people could find
God's revelation by looking at his creation, using reason.
Although The Age of Reason was a book of profound morality and ethics
and a paean to the glories of God, it gained for Paine undying hatred
throughout the Christian world. His message was derived from the thought
of Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes. He did not add anything to the
deistic thought of Voltaire, Franklin, and Jefferson. Paine's
unforgivable sin was to take deistic theology out of the gentlefolk's
drawing rooms and to place it in the plain language of the people. His
book horrified many of the common people by its seeming blasphemy and
frightened the elite by its threat of freeing the masses from religious
control. The Age of Reason came at the close of the Enlightenment, as
reason was being dethroned. A century would pass before Paine's message
of political, religious, and economic freedom could again be clearly
heard.
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