"Lives" of Thomas Paine
(I’m reposting this, because I posted it very early, when I had few subscribers. So not a lot of people ever saw it.)
Thomas Paine is a central figure in the early transatlantic freethought and radical traditions. Born in 1737 in Thetford, Paine emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin. His Common Sense has been described as the most popular pamphlet in American history, and it probably helped rally British Americans to the revolutionary cause. Although Paine later became less than a hero to some Americans, the spinning of anti-Paine myths began in Britain in 1792. A Life of Thomas Paine appeared in London, ostensibly by Francis Oldys of the University of Pennsylvania. The actual author was George Chalmers, a Baltimore Royalist who had returned to Britain to be chief clerk to the Privy Council. Chalmers received five hundred pounds for the libel from Lord Hawkesbury on behalf of the Pitt government. [1] Paine was in London at the time of the libel’s publication and his publisher immediately issued an anonymous Impartial Sketch of the Life of Thomas Paine, probably with the subject’s active collaboration. Since then, two centuries of biographers have argued over Thomas Paine’s place in American history.
Less than ten years after Paine’s 1809 death in New York, another uncomplimentary account called The Life of Thomas Paine was published in New York and London. The author, James Cheetham, claimed that over the three years he had known Paine, “intercourse with him was more frequent than agreeable.” Cheetham portrayed a slovenly, drunken Paine, whose “dogmatism,” “peevishness,” and tyrannical, opinionated ranting excluded him from polite society and forced him to keep “low company.” [2] Paine had been a bit disillusioned with the American administrations of Washington and Adams, which he believed had not made a particularly strenuous effort on his behalf when he was imprisoned by the Jacobins in France.
Responses were immediate. Thomas “Clio” Rickman was a friend of Paine’s from Lewes, where Paine had lived from 1768 to 1774, who had moved to London, where Paine stayed with Rickman in 1791 and 1792. Rickman claimed he had substantially written his Life in 1811, and the 1819 London publication drew on his personal memories of Paine and reflected their friendship. But Rickman returned throughout the book to refuting Cheetham’s libels, confirming that the book was edited and published specifically as a response the earlier Life. [3] W. T. Sherwin’s 1819 biography identified the libelous “Francis Oldys” as George Chalmers, but Sherwin also called Cheetham “an illiterate blockhead.” Sherwin concentrated on Paine’s years in Britain and France and on his two books The Rights of Man and Age of Reason, which were naturally more interesting to London audiences than Paine’s earlier writings, Common Sense and The Crisis. [4]
Sherwin’s biography was published by his friend Richard Carlile, a London radical at the center of the struggle for a free press. Carlile was a fanatical freethinker, so thoroughly devoted to Paine that he would spend over six years in prison for continuing to print the The Rights of Man and Age of Reason, banned after Paine was convicted in absentia of sedition in 1792 for his reaction to Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revolution. Carlile published a volume of Paine’s collected works in 1819 with his own biographical sketch, resulting in a three-year sentence for sedition and blasphemy. [5]
Sherwin and Carlile claimed Thomas Paine for the radicals and secularists, and the tradition of associating these movements with Paine persisted. Gilbert Vale’s 1841 biography illustrates the importance of Paine’s legacy for freethinkers on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to combating myths of Paine’s drunkenness and general nastiness and including a twenty-nine-page appendix of Paine’s letters to George Washington, Vale included a comprehensive account of Paine’s final hours. The purpose of this terminal narrative was to refute charges by Paine’s religious adversaries that the secularists’ hero had embraced Christ in his last moments. Death-bed conversions were a hotly contested issue in the nineteenth century. Vale’s biography shows Paine’s ongoing significance in the battle between churchmen and freethinkers.
New biographies of Paine were written for freethinking audiences throughout the nineteenth century. Calvin Blanchard, a positivist and early sociologist, considered Paine the “author-hero of the American Revolution,” standing beside Rousseau and Comte to prove the “irrepressible” historical momentum towards freedom. [6] Moncure Conway’s two-volume Life quoted extensively from Paine’s works and letters, and Conway did a good job (for its time) documenting his sources. In a significant aside, Conway recalled seeing Clio Rickman’s desk on which Paine had written The Rights of Man. It had passed into the hands of London freethought publisher Edward Truelove, who was also imprisoned during Britain’s final battle to free the press. [7]
After World War II, revisionist history threatened to make Thomas Paine “the darling of the twentieth-century ‘liberal’.” [8] The rehabilitation of Paine began with a 1933 article by Harry Hayden Clark, whose 1944 collection of Paine’s works was eclipsed by Philip Foner’s Complete Writings of Thomas Paine the following year. Clark argued for a greater appreciation of Paine’s influence. Comparing Paine’s knowledge of classical texts to Jefferson’s, Clark said Paine’s genius lay in his ability to communicate high ideas in plain language and “combine a priori thinking of a Utopian sort with interest in concrete details relative to putting his theories into social practice.” [9]
Popular biographers also rediscovered Paine and tried to add his name to the pantheon of the Founders. W. E. Woodward argued that Paine “inspired the Declaration of Independence and was the most potent advocate during the whole of the eighteenth century for human freedom.” [10] Joseph Lewis went so far as to claim that Paine had actually written the Declaration. Lewis’s overheated argument, ignored by the academy, did have the merit of pointing out similarities between Paine’s writing and the prose of the Jefferson draft. His comment that similar language was missing from the Adams draft sheds light on the rival assessments of Paine’s value to the new nation. [11] Alfred Owen Aldridge, President of the American Comparative Literature Association, presented Paine in 1959 as a tragic figure. “Nearly every cause which he espoused ended in checkmate or defeat,” Aldridge said (apparently Aldridge believed the American and French Revolutions were failures?). Although the first modern, scholarly biographer of Paine, Aldridge failed to include a bibliography. His endnotes consisted of run-on paragraphs that made it difficult to determine how sources related to the text.[12]
The approach of the American bicentennial produced both scholarly and popular Paine biographies. The popular 1974 biography, Rebel!, read like a novel and cited no sources. [13] Aldridge accused its author of making up events and characters. “By its designation as a biography,” he said, “the book is a fraud and must be exposed. The publisher shares the author’s culpability and should be severely censured,” he concluded. [14] Audrey Williamson’s life-and-times approach to Paine stressed his years in Britain and especially in France. Her narrative was journalistic and was praised by scholars for covering and insightfully interpreting a little-known period in Paine’s life. But her psychological approach sometimes reached too far. In one instance, Williamson declared that Paine’s vanity “was his armour against an inferiority complex induced in him by the criticism of his views and overt reflections on his background.” This is an interesting supposition, but she produced no primary evidence to back it up. All of her sources were secondary.
Eric Foner’s 1976 study, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, was as much about the intellectual history of the era as about Paine. Foner credited Paine with a pivotal role in expanding what would later be called the “public sphere.” Paine’s greatness “lay in his role as the pioneer of a new political language,” said Foner, suggesting that the rhetorical methods Paine invented were deliberate and sophisticated. [15] David Freeman Hawke’s 1974 Paine was the most complete of the bicentennial biographies. Hawke’s Paine “seems to be everywhere transported by rage,” in the words of a 1776 critic. Critics suggested Hawke didn’t much like his subject much, but the text was backed by abundant references to Paine’s writings, previous biographies, and the published writing of Paine’s contemporaries. Although Hawke seems to have done little primary research beyond newspapers, he took advantage of the period’s wealth of published letters and diaries and rolled them into a readable yet scholarly biography.
In the 1980s authors focused on specific elements of Paine’s legacy. Aldridge returned in 1984, to examine Paine’s intellectual career between 1775 and 1783. He attributed the anonymous Four Letters on Interesting Subjects to Paine for the first time, with a close comparison between it and Paine’s contemporary work. And this time, Aldridge provided extensive notes and bibliography, including several French and Spanish sources. [16] In 1985, David Powell argued that it was absurd to assume the first thirty-six years of Paine’s life were not critical to his politics. But, lacking evidence, Powell wrote what amounted to a documentary of what life must have been like for the young Paine. The study fell between scholarship and a historical novel, and failed to be either. [17] Three years later, a British knight and logician combined a brief review of Paine’s life, based on Conway and Aldridge, with a “critical examination of his political and religious standpoints.” The discussion veered widely from its purported subject, suggesting if nothing else that the issues Paine raised are still topics of lively debate among philosophers and intellectuals. [18] Radicals and secularists also continued to study Paine in the 80s. In 1988, a former CEO of American Airlines wrote a series of essays examining Paine’s influence on Richard Carlile and other freethinkers. [19] Also appearing in 1988 was a study linking Paine and William Cobbett; suggesting that Cobbett’s changing relationship with Paine’s writing was the key to his political transformation from arch-Tory to nostalgic Radical. [20]
The most insightful and well-documented treatment of Paine’s work was a 1989 study by Gregory Claeys. Though scholars “might even concede Paine’s virtually single-handed creation of a mass reading public conscious for the first time of its right to participate in politics,” Claeys said, Paine’s genius in synchronizing his message with the language of his audience caused him to be dismissed. Because Paine refused to make his case in elite discourse, scholars mistakenly believed Paine “spoke the unsophisticated thoughts of the multitude, and then moreover as an enthusiast or demagogue pandering to the crowd, ‘a mere Hyde Park orator’,” said Claeys. But while Burke’s philosophical defense of the ancien régime sold thirty thousand copies, Paine’s straightforward response sold hundreds of thousands, prompted hundreds of published replies, and is still read today. [21]
In the 1990s, Paine was once again pressed into service of other people’s agendas. Jack Fruchtman called him an “Apostle of Freedom,” and insisted that Paine “truly thought he was undertaking God’s work on earth.” [22] John Keane argued that Paine derived his republicanism from events, contacts, and organizations that were outside of polite society, unavailable to the other founders of the republic. [23] Both books overreached in their arguments, but both are so well documented that a student of Paine will want them for their thousands of notes and hundreds of bibliographic entries.
Finally, in the new millennium, three books illustrate the continuing variety of routes that can be taken through Paine’s life. In 2005, populist Harvey Kaye placed Paine “on the losing side of the perennial contest between those who would try to set limits to the expansion of democracy and those who would seek to extend and deepen it.” Kaye argued that scholars, “torn between the genius of Jefferson and the genius of the people, have persistently ignored what both Jefferson and the people appreciated—that the making of the Republican movement depended fundamentally on the writings of Paine.” [24] In 2006, the politically ambiguous Christopher Hitchens, cashing in on Paine’s continuing appeal, used his subject primarily to advance his own cryptic agenda, which included dedicating his book to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. [25] In contrast, Edward Larkin’s 2005 literary biography celebrated both Paine’s rhetorical skill and his political savvy. Paine “created an idiom where politics could be simultaneously popular and thoroughly reasoned,” said Larkin. The power of Common Sense’s “simple and unassuming language,” as Jefferson put it, served the revolution well. Afterward, the Federalists needed to arrest the momentum of what John Adams saw as “a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.” The battle between those two reactions to Paine is American history. [26]
Thomas Paine has by now taken his rightful place among the Founders, in the minds of most Americans. But his life and work still provide unresolved challenges for America. Reformers who have taken Paine seriously in the two centuries since his death have continued his struggle to “think of a public sphere that could be democratized outside the narrow confines” of an economic and intellectual elite. [27] There has never been a more pressing need to reconnect complexity with common sense—in public, out loud—through plain, honest language.
[1] Hawkesbury, later the Earl of Liverpool. W. T. Sherwin, Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine, (London: R. Carlile, 1819), iv, v.
[2] Mrs. Bonneville, who Cheetham said was Paine’s mistress, won a libel suit against him. James Cheetham, The Life of Thomas Paine, (London: A. Maxwell, 1817), 14.
[3] Paine wrote the Rights of Man while staying with Rickman in 1791-2. Thomas Clio Rickman, The Life of Thomas Paine, (London: Thomas Clio Rickman, 1819), x, 4, 59, 99.
[4] Sherwin published the works of Lord Byron, The London Tradesman, and Southey’s Wat Tyler. W. T. Sherwin, Memoirs, v.
[5]Theophila Carlile Campbell, The Battle of the Press, As Told in the Story of the Life of Richard Carlile (London: A. & H. B. Bonner, 1899), 53. (H. B. stands for Hypatia Bradlaugh, a daughter of Charles who had been named after Theophila Carlile’s sister)
[6] Calvin Blanchard, The Life of Thomas Paine, the Man, New York: D. M. Bennett, 1860, 3.
[7] Truelove was jailed for selling birth-control pamphlets, during the blasphemy/obscenity prosecution of Charles Bradlaugh in 1878. Hypatia Bradlugh Bonner edited the 1909 reprint of Conway’s Life, noting that after Truelove’s death, the desk passed to a nephew of William Constable who had met Paine in New York. Conway was also the London literary agent of Mark Twain, who introduced a new generation of Americans to skepticism. Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, (London: Watts & Co., 1909), 9.
[8] Richard D. Challener, Review: Thomas Paine: Author of the Declaration of Independence by Joseph Lewis, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Jul., 1947), 379.
[9] Clark listed among Paine’s achievements “a crane, smokeless candles, a planning machine, an engine operated by gunpowder, a steam turbine, remedies for yellow fever, and his single-arch [iron] bridge,” as well as political programs including “adequate salaries for excise-men, abolition of slavery, abolition of dueling, effective international copyright laws, abolition of the death penalty, better universal education, old age pensions, abolition of primogeniture, curtailment of property inequalities, especially through an income tax, a league of nations, and international disarmament.” Harry Hayden Clark, “Toward a New Interpretation of Thomas Paine,” American Literature, 5:2 (May, 1933), 141.
[10] W. E. Woodward, Tom Paine, America’s Godfather, 1737-1809, (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1945).
[11] Joseph Lewis, Thomas Paine, Author of the Declaration of Independence, (New York: Freethought Press, 1947).
[12] Alfred Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason, The Life of Thomas Paine, (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1959), 8.
[13] Samuel Edwards, Rebel! A Biography of Thomas Paine, (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974).
[14] A. Owen Aldridge, Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 8:4 (Summer, 1975), 493.
[15] Literary scholars tended to discount Paine’s historical significance, and historians tended to ignore his rhetoric, so Foner’s suggestion that Paine knew what he was doing, and didn’t simply write that way naturally, is a significant change. Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, (New York: Oxford, 1976), xii.
[16] A. Owen Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology, (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1984), 18.
[17] David Powell, Tom Paine, The Greatest Exile, (London: Croom Helm, 1985).
[18] A. J. Ayer, Thomas Paine, (New York: Atheneum, 1988), ix.
[19] The authors’ insider status is shown by the fact they knew the British National Secular Society had printed 60,000 copies of the Age of Reason in 1937 and sold them out in two years. Ian Dyck, Ed., Citizen of the World, Essays on Thomas Paine, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 146 n. 20.
[20] David A. Wilson, Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988).
[21] The archetypal “Hyde Park orator” is of course, Charles Bradlaugh, who would have been both pleased and flattered by the comparison. Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine, Social and Political Thought, (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 3.
[22] Jack Fruchtman Jr., Thomas Paine, Apostle of Freedom, (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994).
[23] John Keane, Tom Paine, A Political Life, (Boston: Little, Brown, & co., 1995), xxi.
[24] Harvey J. Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 53, 97.
[25] Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography, (London: Atlantic Books, 2006).
[26] Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution, (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 3-4.
[27] Ibid., 5.