Thomas Paine: Britain, America, and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution

504 Pages·2018·11.44 MB·English

by  J. C. D. Clark

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THOMAS PAINE
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Portrait bust of Thomas Paine by John Wesley Jarvis, 1809 (New York Historical Society)
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Thomas Paine
Britain, America, and France in the
Age of Enlightenment and Revolution
J. C. D. CLARK
CLARENDON • OXFORD
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1
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Preface
In 1789 Thomas Paine, then in London, wrote to his friend, the first President of
the United States: ‘I am going over to France—A Share in two revolutions is living
to some purpose.’1 Paine lived an extraordinary life in an extraordinary era that still
grips the attention of many readers. What were that era’s meanings and lessons?
Readers have often turned for authoritative answers to Paine’s texts. But their evolving
afterlives in later decades had the consequence that Paine became one of those
canonical figures who have often been less studied than celebrated. More than many
other authors in the current canon of the history of political thought, the ‘usable
Paine’ obscured the ‘historic Paine’. He was too often taken for granted; Paine
became public property. This allowed assumptions about the meanings of his texts
to be linked with inherited preconceptions about the societies in which he lived
and wrote. When the causes of the American and French Revolutions or the threat
of revolution in Britain were made to seem self-evident, myth-making was not far
away. A reconsideration of the ‘age of revolution’ is overdue, and historians have
begun to explore just such a revision.
In that polemical and rhetorical age, Paine was a highly effective polemical and
rhetorical author. This book is, necessarily, a study of polemic and rhetoric rather
than of the detached writing of an author in his library. Its subject is argument,
both then and now, but argument that led to slaughter and destruction on both
sides of the Atlantic in ways that Paine did not intend. Explaining these outcomes
is not easy. The task of historians of political thought is not to pronounce that
‘Paine was right’ or ‘Paine was wrong’; rather, to discover why he wrote as he did,
what his meanings were, and how he was received. That is, to take him seriously as
a contributor to extended arguments in a period populated by principled and mutu-
ally antagonistic political actors for whom the outcomes were often unhappy. It
was once observed that all political careers end in failure. But this is a truism that
applies equally to careers in such fields as political theory, philosophy, and eco-
nomics; Utopia would otherwise have arrived. The historian of political thought
makes no such judgement. This book does not argue that Paine was ‘a failure’; he
did not ‘fail’ to write this, or ‘fail’ to think that. Historians seek, instead, to under-
stand what Paine did and did not write and think, and why: for them he succeeded,
but in relation to his goals and those of his contemporaries.
Paine’s authorial intentions are hard, and often impossible, to reconstruct in the
absence of an extensive cache of his manuscripts; he can scarcely be assessed as if
he were another Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, both Oxford or Cambridge dons
by vocation though excluded from their universities for political reasons, both leaving
extensive paper trails. Consequently what Paine thought could not easily be distin-
guished from what he wrote, either by his contemporaries or by later scholars.
1 Paine to Washington, 6 Oct. 1789: Washington, Papers, iv. 196–7.
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vi Preface
Instead, this book is chiefly about texts as public acts. It gives much attention
to Paine’s writings, but also to the texts of other activists, both pro- and anti-
revolutionaries. It argues that contexts must be given due weight if these texts are
to be understood. That, indeed, is why it could not be a short book: contexts are,
necessarily, larger than texts.
By this method, the book arrives at a different view both of Paine’s political and
social thought and of the intellectual history of the ‘age of revolution’, an age in
which religion is here reinstated as a leading political preoccupation. It gives cen-
tral attention to such themes as radicalism, reform, republicanism, revolution, and
rights: alliteration should not distract us from the momentous present-day signifi-
cance of these issues, and to these must be added others including slavery, democ-
racy, and poverty. This study derives from my reservations over many years about
assumptions that the long eighteenth century was the ‘birthplace’ of ‘the modern’:
these doubts have led me in turn to a fascination with the man himself. Paine is
compelling because he poses a series of historical problems of the greatest present-
day importance. Others must join me in a renewed attention to their solution if
this foundational era and its consequences are to be better understood. Some readers
of Paine still see themselves as Guardians of the Sacred Flame; I see the role of the
historian as being to investigate, to question, and to challenge.
I hope that readers will share my willingness to test new explanations of this
most remarkable of English revolutionaries. In my writing on another extraordin-
ary figure of that age, Edmund Burke, I sought to avoid hagiography by removing
successive layers of later varnish to reveal the eighteenth-century portrait beneath;
not to judge Burke as a hero or a villain, nor to claim his obvious relevance to
present-day politics, but to understand him as an historical character.2 Here I pay
the same compliment to Thomas Paine. In both cases, removing accretions of later
misinterpretation allows a better understanding of their thought and an appreci-
ation that neither’s writings give privileged or shorthand access to the complex and
still controversial ‘age of revolution’ in which they found themselves. Indeed it
frees us to examine the age of revolution afresh at a time when the destabilization
of states needs urgently to be better understood.
Readers should note two basic aims of this study. Previous writers on Paine were
sometimes drawn to produce either denunciations or, later, eulogies. Paine was
from an early date the subject of deliberately denigratory biographies.3 Not until
2 Burke, Reflections, ed. Clark, introduction.
3 [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain, The Author of Rights of Men. With a Defence of his
Writings. By Francis Oldys, A.M. of the University of Pennsylvania (London: Stockdale, 1791); James
Cheetham, The Life of Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, The Crisis, Rights of Man, &c. &c. &c.
(New York: Southwick and Pelsue, 1809). Some alleged evidence presented in these hostile works may
deserve consideration, but caution is necessary. For the increasing assessment in the late eighteenth
century of many public figures (not just Paine) in respect of their private lives, see Corinna Wagner,
‘Loyalist Propaganda and the Scandalous Life of Tom Paine: “Hypocritical Monster!”’, British Journal
for Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (2005), 97–115.
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Preface vii
the late nineteenth century did academic opinion turn in his favour,4 but since
then his depiction has often been as normatively positive as it once was hostile.
This study is a work neither of celebration nor of demonization. It seeks to explain
him historically; it invites renewed attention to its remarkable subject in that non-
partisan spirit. When this book expresses a professional historiographical scepti-
cism towards the interpretation of themes like republicanism, rights, revolution,
and religion, that scepticism is not a normative response to any individual.
Secondly, this account of Paine necessarily relates to my earlier work, and this
relation calls for an explanation. My English Society 1660–1832 might be misun-
derstood as arguing in general terms for the residual survival of an ‘old’ world into
a ‘new’. This study makes clear that my intention is to argue for a reinterpretation
of that ‘new’ world itself. The radical and revolutionary tradition in America,
France, and Britain is a subject of great and lasting intellectual importance; it must
now be thought about in radical and even revolutionary ways. In the present age
of religious wars, Paine has a renewed significance.
callaly castle
northumberland
december 2017
4 The first favourable biography was Thomas Clio Rickman, The Life of Thomas Paine (London:
Rickman, 1819), but the key work of scholarship was Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas
Paine (2 vols., New York, 1892).
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Acknowledgements
The extensive aims of this book, outlined in the Introduction, mean that it draws
with gratitude on the work of several generations of scholars whose many achieve-
ments are set out in detail in the footnotes. Where others have anticipated the ideas
presented here, my wish is to honour them by specific references. Historiography
is often a collaborative enterprise; by acknowledging intellectual debts one can also
appreciate how scholarship itself has developed over time, and this helps historians to
see beyond their immediate commitments. If I have seen further, it is by standing
on the shoulders of orthodoxies. Other historians have sought to contextualize
Paine as a figure of the eighteenth century, which is my purpose also; it is older
assumptions about the content of that context that I question here.
In a work that nevertheless differs from some historians in points of method
and interpretation, it would have been distracting and discourteous to have
listed every disagreement. I do so here only where it was necessary to situate my
argument, usually with respect to lastingly influential interpretations (for example,
of classics like those of R. R. Palmer and E. P. Thompson, historians for whom I
have a high regard); I normally prefer to present primary evidence to support my
own vision. Where I have written in general terms of ‘conventional interpretations’ of
Paine, I ask only that these remarks be read as self-criticisms of misinterpretations
that I myself once entertained.
For the convenience of readers, references to Paine’s writings are here given to
the most readily available collected version, Philip Foner’s two-volume edition of
1945. Despite its merits, it had its shortcomings; I have noted ‘text corrected’
where I have conformed to the originals, and I argue for the de-attribution of texts
and passages that Foner (and many others) accepted as Paine’s. A new edition,
undertaken to the latest standards, would be valuable; none was available at the
time of writing. Similarly, a project to identify Paine’s prose by computer model-
ling, and so to attribute to him material published anonymously, has not yet been
completed. Both may contribute to knowledge.
‘Every work of this kind is by its nature deficient, and I should feel little solici-
tude about the sentence, were it to be pronounced only by the skilful and the
learned.’5 1Scholarship on the ‘age of revolution’ will continue to develop. To its
future success this book is intended as a small contribution.
5 ‘Preface’, in The Plays of William Shakespeare … To which are added Notes by Sam[uel] Johnson
(8 vols., London: J. and R. Tonson et al., 1765), i. lxxii.