This Day in Resistance History: Remembering a True Revolutionary

June 8, 1809, marked the end of the life of the most revolutionary and radical of the US’s founding fathers: Thomas Paine. Today, there is a movement among the Tea Party to recast the founding fathers as a group of devout, conservative Christians who wanted no separation of church and state; and insists that the United States is a country founded on “Biblical principles.” Thomas Paine’s life and work shatters that fairy tale completely.

Paine was an Englishman whose life as a rebel began in 1772, when he organized an early attempt at unionization by the excise officers of Lewes. They made an attempt to gain better working conditions and more pay, and Paine wrote his first pamphlet about their struggle against the government He was fired from his own excise office job as a result, and had to sell his possessions to pay debts. Benjamin Franklin was in London at the time, and suggested that Paine come to America. Paine arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, just as the heat of public anger was reaching a fever pitch against British rule.

When Paine released his treatise Common Sense in January of 1776, John Adams wrote, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

No new publication in America has ever, per capita, outsold Common Sense. Six months after its release, one out of every five people in the colonies owned a copy. People read the book in their homes and at family gatherings. It was read out loud in pubs, in village squares, and at town meetings.

Common Sense attacked the institutions of monarchy and aristocracy. It declared that Britain’s imperialism held America enslaved. It stated that the monarchy had no “regard” for its subjects in the American colonies. Despite what King George III declared, the king and Great Britain simply used Americans for profit. Paine added dryly, “What at first was plunder assumed the softer name of ‘revenue.’”

The work pointed out that America had, and would again, be dragged into European wars in which it had no stake or interest. And it argued that America, a wealthy colony with shipbuilding capability and trained militias, had enough fighting power to gain its independence.

But what many people today don’t realize is that Common Sense did more. It actually outlined the exact process in which a new republic could be created. It described a “charter” for the United States; suggested a Continental Charter Conference to draft the document, with representatives from each colony present to provide the viewpoints of the entire population. It explained how a Congress could be assembled; it described the division of voting districts; and outlined the concept of an electoral college. This visionary set of instructions was followed almost to the letter after the colonists drove the British out of America.

Benjamin Franklin wrote to Paine after the Constitution was confirmed, “You…are more responsible than any other living person on this continent for the creation of what are called the United States of America.”

After fighting began in the American Revolution, Paine released his series of “Crisis” pamphlets to encourage soldiers and citizens to stay the course even though the beginning of the conflict was disastrous. The most famous of these pamphlets contained the words, “These are the times that try men’s souls…Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

Paine also aided the revolutionaries in other ways. He traveled to France in March of 1781 to raise funds for the revolutionary cause. He is credited with securing a loan of 10 million silver livres, and also convincing the French to give 6 million of it as a gift to the American army.

At the end of America’s revolutionary period, Paine returned to Europe. He went first to London, but then spent time during the French Revolution in Paris. There he wrote another major work, The Rights of Man, in defense of revolution and against the concept of the monarchy. Because of this work, he was tried in absentia in England and found guilty of seditious libel. Paine wrote:

“When I contemplate the natural dignity of man; when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honor and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon.”

Despite having defended the French Revolution to the world, Paine was considered dangerous by revolutionaries like Robespierre whose agenda included an eventual takeover of government control. Paine was imprisoned. While he was in prison in Paris, he wrote The Age of Reason. It presented a rejection of Christianity, outlining the corruption in the various Christian churches and damning all of them for attempting to grab political power. While it does not reject the idea of a creator, The Age of Reason presented the idea of “natural religion” which is based on an understanding from personal experience and one’s own sense of reason. This book greatly influenced Americans like Thomas Jefferson, Elihu Palmer, and Mark Twain.

Paine was released from prison in 1794 through the efforts of James Monroe, who was the American Minister to France at the time. In 1795, Paine wrote his most radical work (and ironically, his least well known): Agrarian Justice. This treatise presents Paine’s view of what is meant by a “just society.” He advocated for ownership of all farmland by the entire population of a nation, since land was “the common property of the human race.” He pinpointed what he considered true evil in the world: the ownership of the majority of assets by the elite. “…the landed monopoly that began with [farming] has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance.”

If the land was not returned to the general population, Paine went on, then every laborer should be paid an indemnity in compensation for “the loss of his or her natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property.” He advised creating programs of public assistance to help the poor.

In 1803, Paine returned to America, but he found less than a warm welcome. In the intervening years, the Second Great Awakening had created an ardent group of religious fundamentalists who vilified Paine for his anti-church writings. Many Federalists objected to his support of the French Revolution and hated the fact that he had become a close friend of their political rival, President Thomas Jefferson. Even John Adams, who had praised Common Sense on its publication, now said it was a “poor, ignorant, malicious, short-sighted crapulous mass.”

Another factor in Paine’s sudden unpopularity was his publication of Letter to Washington in 1797. This work criticized ignorant military decisions that Washington made which Paine felt had prolonged the war. It described Washington as growing increasingly egotistical and autocratic, alienating European allies. It castigated the first President for not being a true radical and revolutionary, and taking credit away from those who had a genuine belief in radical politics. Washington had just died in 1799 and had reached the status of a demigod in the nation, so this incensed the public.

When Paine died in Greenwich Village in 1809, the New York Citizen wrote an editorial that said, “He had lived long, did some good, and much harm.”  Six people went to his funeral.

Today, schoolchildren are taught little about Thomas Paine, although his work triggered the popular support of revolution in this country, and his concepts shaped the initial form of our government. His revolutionary views do not fit neatly into the conservative idea of “patriotism.” And as our teaching materials are revised to present an ever-more-conservative viewpoint, Paine has been relegated to the attic of the 18^th Century.

Were he to return to our country today, Paine might well find the same conditions against which he called for direct action in the 1770s. He had already seen in the autocracy of George Washington the shadow of how the founding principles of America could be twisted by those in power. Perhaps he might remind us of his description of life whenever the wealthy and their heirs play profit games with nations and the lives of working class:

Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.