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Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer, controversialist and international revolutionary. His Common Sense (1776) was a central text behind the call for American independence from Britain; his Rights of Man (1791–2) was the most widely read pamphlet in the movement for reform in Britain in the 1790s and for the opening decades of the nineteenth century; he was active in the French Revolution and was a member of the French National Convention between 1792 and 1795; he is seen by many as a key figure in the emergence of claims for the state’s responsibilities for welfare and educational provision, and his Age of Reason provided a popular deist text that remained influential throughout the 19 th century. In his own lifetime, and subsequently, he has been extensively vilified and often dismissed. Yet many of his ideas still command wide interest and enthusiasm in readers throughout the world.

2.1 Society and Government

2.3 sovereignty and its limits, 2.4 the new order of government, 2.5 welfare, 2.6 property, 2.7 representation, 3. religion, 4. significance and legacy, archival resources, paine’s works, bibliographic works, contemporary writing, modern biography and commentary, other internet resources, related entries.

Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1737 to a family of moderate means in Norfolk, England. His father was a Quaker and his mother an Anglican, and it is likely Paine was baptized into the Anglican church. He had some schooling, although his father forbade him to learn Latin, and at the age of twelve he was withdrawn from school and apprenticed to his father to learn the craft of staymaking. When he was in his mid-teens, inspired by the romantic stories of naval life by one of his teachers, Paine twice ran away from home to sea. The first time he was intercepted. The second time he enlisted on the privateer, the King of Prussia . The exact sequence of events over the subsequent ten to fifteen years is unclear. He lived in London on and off, but also had periods in Sandwich and in Margate. He continued periodically to ply his skills as a staymaker; he may have done some preaching (in the Methodist persuasion); and in 1759 he married a Mary Lambert, who died the following year in childbirth. Following his wife’s death, he sought his father-in-law’s support to take up a career in the excise service. He first served as an officer in December 1762, but in August 1765 he was dismissed. Tradition has it that this was for ‘stamping’—providing certificates for goods not inspected. New research (in Brent et al) suggests it may have been for whistleblowing. He wrote formally seeking re-admission to the service, which was granted. While awaiting a posting he taught school in London. In 1768 he accepted a posting to Lewes, on the South Coast of England, and he took up lodgings with a Samuel Ollive, a local tobacconist. In Lewes he became a member of the debating society—the Headstrong Club—and he was also reputed as a skater and player of bowls. Ollive died in July 1769, and Paine took lodgings elsewhere. But he sustained his links with the family, and in March 1771 he married the daughter, Elizabeth Ollive (1741–1808) and established himself as part proprietor of the business. The following year he went to London to press the claims of the excisemen for higher pay. Although he returned to Lewes, he was sacked by the excise and his marriage had failed, and he sold up his business. In the final settlement between Paine and his wife he was awarded £400. He headed to London, where he secured letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had encountered on an earlier visit to the capital, and embarked in April 1774 for the New World. He was carried ashore in Philadelphia in November 1774 suffering from putrid fever, but he survived.

In Philadelphia Paine developed an acquaintance with Robert Aitkin, a publisher and bookseller, who employed him to edit the Pennsylvania Magazine . There remains considerable disagreement about which pieces in the Magazine were written by Paine, but it seems clear that he did contribute and that he developed a reputation among political circles in Philadelphia as a result, at just the time that tensions with Britain were reaching a crisis point. In the autumn of 1775, encouraged by Benjamin Rush, Paine began work on a pamphlet defending the case of American independence. He discussed his work with Rush, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Franklin, and Samuel Adams, but the work was his own (save for the title, for which Rush claimed responsibility). Common Sense (1776) was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution. It was a clarion call for unity, against the corrupt British court, so as to realize America’s providential role in providing an asylum for liberty. Written in a direct and lively style, it denounced the decaying despotisms of Europe and pilloried hereditary monarchy as an absurdity. At a time when many still hoped for reconciliation with Britain, Common Sense demonstrated to many the inevitability of separation.

Paine consolidated his reputation as a pamphleteer with his series of American Crisis letters (1777–83); he also served in a number of capacities for Congress and the Pennsylvanian Assembly. Although he had links with the more radical elements of Pennsylvanian politics, he also committed his energies to a number of more elite projects—contributing to the establishment of the Bank of America to help raise money for the war, and working with Robert Morris to encourage State Legislatures to accept the need for Federal taxation to support the war. Following the conclusion of the war he was awarded a farm by the New York assembly, and Congress voted him a grant of $3,000 for his services.

After the Revolution he dedicated his time to scientific experiments, designing an iron bridge capable of spanning wide distances without the use of piers, experimenting with marsh gas with Washington, and attempting to produce a smokeless candle with Franklin. In 1787 he took a wooden model of his bridge to Paris, and subsequently to England where an iron model of 110 feet was forged and constructed for public display in a field near Paddington in May 1790. He also became increasingly caught up in the initial events of the French revolution, thanks in part to his involvement with a group of French intellectuals enabled by Thomas Jefferson (US Minister to France until late 1789). Paine contemplated writing a history of the French Revolution but he made slow progress—exacerbated by his poor French. When Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France appeared in November 1790, he determined to answer it and turned his materials to that task. The result, Rights of Man (February/March 1791) coupled a narrative of French events with a trenchant attack on Burke and the Revolution Settlement of 1688. It was an immediate success, and brought Paine into the circles of those seeking to achieve parliamentary reform in Britain. He continued to visit France and was in Paris in June 1791 in the immediate aftermath of Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes. He collaborated with a small group (including Nicholas Bonneville and the Marquis de Condorcet) to produce a republican manifesto that was pasted on the walls of Paris, to the outrage of most members of the National Assembly. That movement was firmly repressed at the Massacre of the Champs de Mars in July 1791, by which time Paine was already back in Britain. But the occasion marks a shift in his thinking—from seeing monarchy as an inevitable part of the institutional order in the corrupt states of Europe, to thinking that the American model could be applied more generally throughout Europe. Where Rights of Man had shown considerable tolerance for France’s limited monarchy, his Rights of Man: Part the Second (March 1792) was explicitly republican and he drew extensively on his American experience in sketching the basic principles of a largely self-regulating commercial society, coupled with representative government, the rule of law, and a periodically renewable covenant. The final chapter, influenced by his friendship with Condorcet and other members of the Comité de Mendicité , outlined a program for welfare provision for the poor, aged, disabled and destitute.

The two parts of Rights of Man were quickly combined in cheap editions (at Paine’s insistence) and sold in unprecedented numbers. Paine’s advocacy of natural rights, his attacks on mixed government, his outspoken republicanism, and his extensive proposals for schemes of social welfare set him apart from the more common opposition rhetoric that emphasized the need to protect the integrity of the mixed constitution to secure English liberties. His success suggests that he was reaching a popular audience who attached diminishing weight to these traditions and were struck by his insistence on their essential equality and their right to challenge the status quo. In May 1792 a prosecution for sedition was initiated against him. When the case was heard in November of that year he was outlawed—but by this time he had returned to France, having been elected as a member to the National Convention in the summer of 1792.

He arrived in Paris shortly before the September massacres, and it seems clear that he found it hard to find his feet—being out of sympathy with the more sanguinary elements in the city. His closest connections were with Girondin leaders in Paris, who were rapidly to fall from favour. Moreover, his plea in the National Convention for clemency for Louis XVI at his trial at the end of 1792, led to his denunciation by Marat and the enmity of the Jacobin faction. He served with Condorcet and Sieyes on the Committee to design a republican constitution, but the extent of his contribution is unclear, and although Condorcet pressed on with the work, producing a report in the spring of 1793, it was immediately shelved. Paine led an increasingly constrained life as the Jacobins assumed ascendancy and his friends were arrested and executed, fled, or killed themselves. Orders for his arrest were issued on 27 December 1793. While he was being taken into custody he passed to his American friend Joel Barlow the manuscript for the first part of Age of Reason which was published shortly thereafter. Paine spent eleven months in the Luxembourg (not unconnected to the studied neglect of his case by the US Minister, Gouvernor Morris), and seems only narrowly to have escaped the guillotine. When he left prison, after Robespierre’s execution, it was thanks to the intervention of Morris’s successor, James Monroe. On his release, Paine was in an extremely debilitated state, and Monroe looked after him in his home. Paine’s angry denunciation of Washington, whom he believed had ignored his pleas for help, and the publication of subsequent parts of Age of Reason made Monroe increasingly uncomfortable with his guest and Paine left to live with the printer Nicholas Bonneville and his family.

Although still a member of the National Convention, Paine had rarely attended and did not do so after his release. His one intervention was his Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795), a critique of the Constitution of 1795, and a summary of his own thinking about politics, in which he urged the Convention to institute universal manhood suffrage. In 1796, responding to the attempted coup by Babeuf’s ‘conspiracy of equals’, Paine’s Agrarian Justice developed further ideas fist canvassed in the second part of Rights of Man and set out a principled case for a tax on inheritance so as to provide a capital grant for all reaching the age of majority, together with an annual pension for all at fifty, arguing that the earth is common property to the human race and that everyone is owed compensation for the private appropriation of it.

Paine finally left France to return to America in 1803, during the Peace of Amiens, but was vilified on his return for his radicalism, his deism, and for his embittered critique of Washington. He was joined in America in 1804 by the wife of Nicholas de Bonneville and her three sons who lived with him for a period; but this arrangement broke down and Paine became increasingly ill and isolated. He died in obscurity in 1809. In 1819, William Cobbett, the Tory turned radical and critic of Paine turned supporter, had Paine’s bones dug up and returned to England to be buried with honour. They were promptly lost, thereby ensuring that the man who declared his attachment to be ‘to all the world, not to any particular part’ retained his universal citizenship.

2. Political Theory

Paine’s reputation has been a source of controversy since his own lifetime. He was a controversialist—what he wrote invariably provoked controversy and was intended to do so. As such, one needs a reasonably capacious understanding of ‘philosophy’ to count him as a philosopher. He was a pamphleteer, a journalist, a propagandist, a polemicist. Nonetheless, he also settled on a number of basic principles that have subsequently become central to much liberal-democratic culture. Few of these are original to Paine, but his drawing together of them, and his bringing them before a wide popular audience, at this key historical moment when the people emerge as a consistent and increasingly independent force on the political stages of Europe and North America, has ensured that his works remain widely read and are seen as of enduring value. That said, a great deal about his life and about the value and interpretation of his work is hotley disputed and promises to remain so.

For example, the intellectual and emotional legacy of Paine’s experience in Britain is a matter of speculation in secondary work, and has recently been strongly emphasised in Clark (2018) to the exclusion of other influences. Other authors have emphasised American influence (Cotler, 2011), and still others that of his French experience (Lounissi 2018). These debates also involve disputes over the character of English radicalism, the impact of evolving American traditions of exceptionalism and internationalism, and the question of how far Paine’s thinking changes and develops over time and in response to particular political circumstances. What should be emphasised is that these ongoing disagreements also involve conflicting interpretations of events, ideas, and actions. This means that locating Paine and his ideas is also partly a question of arguing for a particular interpretation of the political debates, events and controversies in which he was involved in America, France and Britain. And, since these remain a matter of controversy in both academic and contemporary popular debate, it is fair to say that Paine’s thought and legacy remains deeply contested.

In Common Sense Paine opens his account with the contrast between society and government: ‘Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices’ (CW I, 4). [CW refers to The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine , P.S. Foner (ed.), 1945.] As with many Paine claims, this seems simple, intuitive, and attractive. Our interests unite us, and it is only when we overstep the legitimate bounds of those interests, or push them to the detriment of others, that we need constraint. But when we do that, we ought to know better, and as such Government can appropriately be regarded as constraining our vices. What is less clear is how far we must assume vice (and thereby government). ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.’ The opening of Common Sense can be read as a gloss on Locke’s Second Treatise , without the references to God. Yet Paine claimed never to have read Locke. He also seems clear in his first major pamphlet that government ‘is a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world’ (CW I, 6). The issue, then is how extensive must government be, and what sort of government provides the necessary benefits, without multiplying the evils. Paine’s view is that ‘the more simple anything is, the less liable it is to be disordered…’ Simple government for Paine is ‘republican government’: he rejects monarchical and mixed forms of government, in favour of a system in which ‘the liberty of choosing an House of Commons out of their own body’ is the key republican moment (CW I, 16).

Paine’s attack on monarchy in Common Sense is essentially an attack on George III. Whereas colonial resentments were originally directed primarily against the king’s ministers and Parliament, Paine lays the responsibility firmly at the king’s door. And he appeals to a sense among Americans that they have all the resources, and every claim, to rule themselves without the interference and control of a body half-way around the world. Subverting paternalist metaphors for Britain’s colonial claims, Paine creates an image of a nation come of age, ready for freedom from its leading strings, having every justification for separation from its unnatural parent, and seeking to stand on its own as a commercial republic, trading in its own right. It is not America who is behaving unnaturally and ungratefully, but the ‘royal brute of Great Britain.’ ‘Nature has deserted the connection, and art cannot supply her place’ (CW I, 23).

Americans do not see the way forward, but it is simple. The colonies need to be divided into districts, districts should elect their representatives to Congress, and Congress should choose a President by ballot from the delegates of each state in turn, with the first state being chosen by lot. To avoid injustice, three fifths should be required for a majority. To avoid imposing his views, however, he suggests that each state nominate two members to a Continental Congress to frame a charter fixing the details of the government—‘always remembering that our strength is continental, not provincial’ (CW I, 29). And in a rare citation of another’s works, Paine appeals to Dragonetti’s adage that the aim should be ‘a mode of government that should combine the greatest sum of individual happiness with the least national expense’ (CW I, 29).

For all its success, Common Sense is not without flaws. It contains a digression on biblical accounts of the origin of monarchy; its powerful rhetoric leaves unanswered a range of more practical and theoretical questions, and the argument jumps around considerably. Later editions added an appendix denouncing the Quakers for their quietism. But its rhetorical effectiveness cannot be doubted—which suggests that it intersected powerfully with the concerns and beliefs that were widespread in colonial America at the point of rupture. Political theorists might want to press for more details about who will have the vote; about whether there is an implicit acceptance of a doctrine of the fall; about the extent to which his appeals to republics envisage a degree of republican civic virtue; about whether the argument is based on an account of natural rights; and so on. But on such issues the pamphlet is either silent or only barely suggestive. Unlike Locke, this is not a principled justification for resistance, so much as a concatenation of points about Americans taking their collective identity and independent interests seriously and separating from the increasingly arbitrary rule of Britain. Given these sweeping claims, it is easy to see why so many commentators have held that Paine was both lacking in intellectual sophistication and basically held to a consistent set of principles throughout his work, since it is difficult to demonstrate that much he says is actively inconsistent with what he later wrote. Nonetheless, if we take increasing precision in his claims as evidence of greater attention to issues that he felt he could confidently sweep past in Common Sense , then a case for a deepening of his thinking and for a process of change over time can be made.

While there may be suggestions of rights claims in Common Sense and in a number of minor texts attributed by some to Paine but where the authorship is a matter of dispute, it is clear that the fully fledged account of rights that Paine advances in the first part of Rights of Man (1791) represents a significant development in his thinking. It is common to attribute that development to the foil he found in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), where Burke inveighs against the idea that rights are preserved from the state of nature in the civil state. ‘Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together…That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it’ (CW VIII, p. 110). And where he claims that, in England, ‘We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rage, and paltry, blurred shred of paper about the rights of man’ (CW VIII, p. 137). It seems more likely, however, that Paine’s distinction between natural rights, where we necessarily have the power to execute the right (as in the right of conscience), as against rights where we need the arm of society to secure the right (as in property), although more sharply expressed in Rights of Man (1791), is a product of discussions with Jefferson and French sympathizers with America in the late 1780s, when they were discussing the proposed Federal Constitution and its failure to contain a bill of rights. In a letter to Jefferson written in 1788/9 Paine draws a distinction between ‘rights they could individually exercise fully and perfectly, and those they could not’ (CW II, 1298). In the reply to Burke this is used to show that every civil right grows out of a natural right or ‘is a natural right exchanged)’; that the civil power is made up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of power; and that the power produced from the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in power in the individual’, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights which are retained by the individual…’ (CW I, 276).

How much, in fact, separates Paine from Burke? The rights in which our power is perfect, are relatively few—so that many of the things that really matter, access to means of labour and sustenance, freedom of movement and contract, seem to fall under Burke’s sense of matters of convenience which government orders on the basis of general utility. Although Paine does not provide much detail, it seems clear that he sees himself as different from Burke primarily because he argues for continuing normative salience of the natural right and for the on-going collective sovereignty of the people over the arrangements that they make the better to secure those rights. Paine’s readers had little doubt that he sought to defend their rights from invasion, but his distinction does not in-itself do that. After all, what is to stop the collective encroaching on the rights of citizens? One answer is given in Paine’s account of popular sovereignty.

Common Sense might presume a principle of collective self-determination and the sovereignty of the people, but it does not articulate or defend it. Something like this issue does come under consideration in Paine’s Dissertations on Government , a pamphlet written in 1786, defending the Bank of America and the principle that contracts formed by government ought to be respected by subsequent occupants of power. ‘Every government…contains within itself a principle common to all, which is that of a sovereign power, or a power over which there is no control, and which controls all others….In republics, such as those established in America, the sovereign power…remains where nature placed it—in the people. …This sovereignty is exercised in electing and deputing a certain number of persons to represent and to act for the whole. But he goes on to insist that

When a people agree to form themselves into a republic…it is understood that they mutually resolve and pledge themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support this rule of equal justice among them… (and) they renounce as detestable, the power of exercising, at any future time any species of despotism over each other, or of doing a thing not right in itself, because a majority of them may have the strength of numbers sufficient to accomplish it. (CW II, 373)

As a result,

The sovereignty in a republic is exercised to keep right and wrong in their proper and distinct places, and never suffer the one to usurp the place of the other. A republic, properly understood, is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of will. (CW II, 375)

This position sits uncomfortably with more direct and active interpretations of the sovereignty of the people or any general will. Hence Paine’s claim in 1791 to be ‘a Citizen of a country which knows no other Majesty than that of the People; no other Government than that of the Representative body; no other sovereignty than that of the Laws…’ (CW II, 1315).

Paine’s account of sovereignty dramatically delimits collective power to the securing of civil rights, based on natural right. In Rights of Man (1791) he quotes Lafayette’s claim that ‘For a nation to be free it is sufficient that she wills it’ (CW I, 322). Lafayette most likely meant it as a call to reject despotism; but Paine’s account is perhaps more subtle, seeing it as a right of the nation to determine its government, but also as a right that is itself delimited by the end of liberty—that is, by the protection of individual rights and by ensuring their more adequate security within the collective.

That this is so helps account for Paine’s account of generational sovereignty. In Rights of Man (1791) he attacks Burke’s claim that the terms of the 1688 Revolution Settlement “bind us,” (meaning the people of the day) “our heirs and our posterity , to them , their heirs and posterity , to the end of time” (CW I, 250). Paine demurs:

There never did, there never will, there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the ‘ end of time ’…Every generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases , as the ages and generation which preceded it.

This too looks like a principle that Paine worked out with Jefferson, in 1788–9, when Jefferson first mentions it in his correspondence, although the prior source is likely to be Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations . The principle is a powerful one—but it is negative: no generation can be bound by those before it; and none can bind those after. But equally, no generation is free to act unjustly. In his Dissertations of Government (1786), Paine had struggled with precisely this issue in wanting to claim both the sovereign power of the people and the duty on the part of the state to respect contracts made previously by others in their capacity of representatives. Paine tries to reconcile the claims by arguing that a contract is not a law but an action, and while laws can be changed, acts are binding. He does not yet claim generational sovereignty, although the right to change laws is clearly there. But the insistence on a sovereignty of justice is designed to ensure that actions that involve the transfer of rights must have the protection of the state and cannot be justly abrogated.

What becomes clear, is that, as Paine struggles to articulate his account of rights, he comes to defend a very Lockean account in which the government is there to interpret and to secure antecedently defined rights and just claims that are the outcome of the exercise of these rights. Rights acquired through clear contract or agreement deserve every protection: even if subsequent generations are at liberty to question the laws of the nation and to alter them as they will, they are not at liberty to invade the property rights of people secured through past agreements.

Paine’s institutional suggestions in Common Sense are hardly fully fledged proposals. Indeed, one of the most surprising aspects of Paine’s writing is how little institutional discussion there is—he is not a man for the detailed discussions of constitutions and legislative and executive arrangements. Even his piece in the summer of 1791 Answer to Four Questions on the Legislative and Executive Power is not especially illuminating. Most modern commentators tend not to notice this. Paine is clearly a democrat, he advocates democratic institutions, and he rejects those of monarchy and aristocracy. But such judgments are often deeply anachronistic. If we examine what Paine actually says, we see that his own perspective was one which evolved and remained inclusive in many areas. It seems clear that Paine was a republican—but in a changing and always very specific sense. In Dissertations on Government (1786) he specifies it as government directed towards ‘the public good, or the good of the whole’ (II, 372). In Rights of Man (1791) he understands it as government by election and representation (I, 338)—a definition of republic that matches closely that advocated by Madison in the Federalist Papers . In Rights of Man (1792) he switches back to the earlier formulation:

What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter, or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed, res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good….Republican government is no other than government established and conducted for the interest of the public, as well individually as collectively. (CW I, 369–70)

Yet he steadfastly refuses to call the form of government he is interested in a ‘democracy’—which he identifies with ancient direct democracy and sees as essentially limited. The system he sees as operating in America is ‘representation ingrafted upon democracy’ (CW I, 371). And, unlike Joel Barlow, he does not use the neologism ‘representative democracy’ nor, like John Adams, ‘representative government.’ Paine thus plays a part in the process of transforming representation from something that was seen as compatible with monarchical—indeed with absolutist—states, although it could also take more popular forms, often linked to a gothic feudal past—into something that was directly linked to the sovereignty of the people in their nations. But, in many respects, he does little especially innovative. The one major impact of his work was to bring to a wide audience some of the thinking that he shared with both Madison and Jefferson about the distinctive features of the American form of government.

Rights of Man (1791) is a rather mixed performance, combining historical narrative of events in France, engagement with Burke, the adumbration of principles, and some powerful moments of political rhetoric—suggesting that Burke has constructed a set of tragic paintings by which he has ‘outraged his own imagination’ (CW I, 258), that Burke ‘pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird’ (CW I, 260) and that he has worked ‘up a tale accommodated to his own passions and prejudices.’ He makes his points about rights polemically, as he does those concerning the sovereignty of each generation and in drawing a distinction between the constitution and the government, and his most passionate attacks are on the hereditary principle and its accompanying ‘gibberish’ of titles and distinctions—‘the idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate’ (CW I, 289).

In Rights of Man (1792) Paine shifts the ground substantially. He hardly mentions events in France, and barely touches on Burke. Instead, the revolution in America is announced as an event of global importance—the place ‘where the principles of universal reformation could begin’ (CW I, 354). What began in America is now seen, not as an exception, but as the trigger for a renovation or the world as a whole. The relative tolerance for France’s monarchy in the first part of Rights of Man is set aside, suggesting that Paine had not previously thought that the old world states could manage a representative system of the American form, but that he now does think this. Moreover, his old distinction between society and government is re-animated but, instead of emphasizing the inevitability of vice, he represents society as in almost every respect sufficient unto itself: ‘Government is no further necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and civilisation (a new concept) are not conveniently competent’ (CW I, 357–8). Indeed, ‘the more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself…’ (CW I, 358–9). And, again, it is America that is the model—where the country subsisted with hardly any form of government throughout the revolution and the subsequent period. Moreover, America becomes the model for reform: a society that agrees articles, establishes a constitution, and is able periodically to revise the constitution as the collective act of the people. Contrasting old forms of government, based on an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself’; and the new: ‘a delegation of power, for the common benefit of the people’ (CW I, 363), Paine roots the new forms in the establishment of a constitution and the regulation of government in accordance with the constitution for the good of all, seeing the American example as one that may be spread throughout the globe. Indeed, Paine thinks ‘it is too soon to determine to what extent of improvement government may yet be carried. For what we can foresee, Europe may form but one great republic, and man be free of the whole’ (CW I, 397). This is a hymn to representative government, to minimal government, and to government with the primary concern of protecting the natural rights of man more effectively. It is not a defense of democracy or universal suffrage. For all his characterization as a democrat he does not embrace that description; and there is no advocacy of universal suffrage prior to Paine’s Letter Addressed to the Addressers , written and published in the summer of 1792 shortly before he left for France. This should further alert us to the fact that, in this period, Paine’s thinking was changing, often as rapidly as events around him changed.

In the final chapter of Rights of Man , Paine addresses the expenditure of the British state and to issues of commerce. Since his Letter to the Abbe Raynal (1782), he had expressed a growing confidence in commerce as a means of uniting the interests of nations and rendering outdated and irrelevant the European system of war. The final chapter of Rights of Man develops the same view, suggesting the incompatibility between monarchical regimes and the growth of commerce and national wealth, and going on to itemize the taxation raised in Britain to support the costs of monarchical wars. Given the new era of peace between nations consequent upon the revolutions in America and France, Paine raises the question of what should be done about the immense sums raised in taxes in Britain (some £15.5 millions), suggesting that ‘whoever has observed the manner in which trade and taxes twist themselves together, must be sensible of the impossibility of separating them suddenly’ (CW I, 423). Paine then develops a series of welfare proposals that seem to have no underlying principle of justice, but are proffered wholly as a way of redirecting spending. He advocates that poor relief be removed as a local tax and replaced by central provision from government coffers; that pensions be offered for those advanced in age, starting at 50, and in full form at 60; that provision be made for the education of the poor; that maternity be benefit be granted to all women immediately after the birth of a child; that a fund be established for the burial of those who die away from home; and that arrangements be made for the many young people who travel to the metropolis in search of a livelihood to provide initial accommodation and support until they find work. Paine ends by identifying provision for those who have served in the army and navy, and suggesting that, as demands on the public purse from these sources declines, then items of indirect taxation might also be lifted, and the burden of taxation gradually shifted towards a progressive taxation on landed property, coupled with the abolition of primogeniture, and a progressive tax on the income from investments. Although certainly influenced by his acquaintance with Condorcet and members of the Comité de Mendicité de la Constituante , this raft of proposals represents a major innovation on Paine’s part, its slight oddity being the absence of any clear set of underlying principles for its justification.

The ad hoc turn to welfare in the second part of Rights of Man (1792) finds some compensation in the short pamphlet, Agrarian Justice (1795–6), that Paine wrote after his release from prison in response to the unrest in 1795 in Paris as protests spread against the economic hardship suffered in the capital, stimulating culminating in Babeuf’s conspiracy of equals. Unlike the final chapter of Rights of Man, Agrarian Justice provides a principled defense for welfare provision, rooted in a conception of the original equality of man and the equal right to a subsistence from the earth. He acknowledges that there are benefits to allowing private property in land and its cultivation, but argues that every proprietor owes the community a ground-rent for the land he holds, which should be used as a right of inheritance for all, paying the sum of £15 as a compensation for the loss of natural inheritance at the age of twenty-one and an annual grant to the aged. These payments are a matter of right, not of charity. A claim against the common stock that all may make, on the ground that ‘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…’ (I, 613). The money is to be raised from progressive taxation in inherited wealth and will contribute to its more equal distribution.

To modern critics it may seem odd to couple the essentially libertarian sentiments of the opening of the second part of Rights of Man with a major raft of welfare reforms. But Paine clearly did not think about these reforms as an extension of government . Although he does not make the point, they seem to be more a matter of administration, and that is in keeping with his essentially consensual view of the formal exercise of responsibilities by those invested with the confidence of the nation as a whole.

Paine’s proposals probably had little practical effect on the emergence of the welfare state, but they helped influence early socialist doctrines and working men’s associations, and they have since been taken up by those advocating a right to basic income or a child inheritance as a way of ensuring that the young need not inherit their parents’ poverty.(See Van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017)

In his Letter Addressed to the Addressers (1792), and more fully in Dissertation on First Principles of Government 1795) Paine commits to the conclusion that equal rights entail an equal right to have a say in one’s representative. He provides two main arguments. In the Letter… he argues that as every man over the age of twenty-one pays taxes in one form of another, so everyone has a right to vote—or a form of entitlement through contribution. But in the Dissertation he makes the case wholly on the basis of equal natural rights: ‘the right of voting for representatives 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, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case. (II, 579) ‘It is possible to exclude men from the right of voting, but it impossible to exclude them from the right of rebelling against that exclusion; and when other rights are taken away, the right of rebellion is made perfect.’ (II, 580) This suggests that the role of rights grows in importance for Paine, making little appearance at all before 1788, and then coming to play an expanding role in his account, to provide the underpinning for political authority and an account of its limits, to justify the right to vote, and to make the case for a right to land and the fruits of nature which is translated into an inheritance right and a range of welfare rights. In his account of the origin of rights in Rights of Man (1791), he suggests that those (like Burke) who appeal to the authority of antiquity simply do not go back far enough:

If antiquity is to be an authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other; 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 have now arrived at the origin of man, and at the origin of his rights…It is authority against authority all the way, until we come to the divine origin of the rights of man, at the Creation. Here or inquiries find a resting-place, and out reason finds a home. (I, 273)

For a man so frequently called an atheist, Paine shows a remarkable confidence in the divine order of the creation. The work that did most to damage his reputation in America, and which split his supporters in Britain, was his Age of Reason (1793/4), which was followed by a further part in 1795, and additional writings compiled by later editors into a third part, from 1804. The Age of Reason is not an atheist tract, but a deist one. It combines scathing criticism of claims to authority for the bible by religious authorities, with an expression of confidence in a divinely ordered world, revealed in nature through the exercise of reason, that drew heavily on the lectures he had attended in London prior to leaving for America, given by James Ferguson and Benjamin Martin. Indeed, he seemed to have committed their account to memory, and uses the text to lay out the order of the universe, to speculate on the possibility of a plurality of worlds, and to dismiss all claims for mystery, miracles and prophecy. God is an unmoved first cause, who designs and sets the universe in motion for the benefit of man, and the moral duty of man consists in ‘imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God, manifested in the creation toward all His creatures…everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything off cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty.’ (I, 512). Although the later parts of Age of Reason descend into detailed interpretation and controversy, and lose much of their intuitive appeal, the first part is a powerful confession of rationalist faith in a divine creator whose design can be appreciated by man in the Bible of Creation, whose principles are eternal, and which rejects as meaningless the claims to authority and the theology of the Christian Churches. ‘The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it produces no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion’ (CW I, 601). ‘The only religion that has not been invented, and that has in it every evidence of divine originality, is pure and simple Deism’ (CW I, 600). And as simple government avoids us becoming the dupes of fraud, so simple belief protects us from the fraud of priestcraft, which so often runs hand in hand with despotism.

Paine’s religious views, not unlike his political views, are not especially original or subtle. They follow much of the deist writing of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But, as with much Paine wrote, the bluntness and sweeping rhetoric that alienates the more philosophically inclined modern reader were an essential element in his success and his continuing importance. Paine spoke to ordinary people—and they read him in their thousands—indeed, he was often read aloud in public houses and coffee shops. He claimed no authority over them, but helped them to doubt those who did claim such authority, whether civil or religious, and he affirmed over and over again their right and responsibility to think for themselves and to reach their own judgment on matters. He did so at a time when the press had become capable of reaching even the poorest of society—when the Attorney General launched the prosecution of Rights of Man (1792) he distinguished between the first part, which was ‘ushered into the world under circumstances that led me to conceive that it would be confined to the judicious reader’, and the second part, which ‘with an industry incredible, it was either totally or partially thrust into the hands of all persons in this country, of subjects of every description…Gentlemen, to whom are those positions, that are contained in this book addressed…to the ignorant, to the credulous, to the desperate.’ (State Trails v. 22, 381–3).

Paine would have embraced the description—although he was less of a ‘common man’ than many who have subsequently eulogized him make him out to be. In many respects, he was a moderately respectable radical, with a deep suspicion of the hierarchical systems of Europe, a brimming confidence in his own judgment that his experience in America confirmed—which expressed itself in his willingness to tackle a range of subject areas, including bridge-building and scientific experiments—and with a growing sense that he knew how to communicate, with powerful effect, with a popular audience at exactly the point at which that popular audience was beginning to feel and test its political influence.

Paine was vehemently attacked in his own lifetime—if the scurrilous biography was not invented for him it certainly attained something of an art form in his depiction. He was outlawed in England, nearly lost his life in France, and was largely ostracized and excluded when he returned to America. A sizable collection of papers at his New Rochelle farm were destroyed in a fire, and his oeuvre remains contested, at least at the margins. Biographers have drawn heavily on early work by Moncure Conway, but while several new accounts appear each decade few add much to our knowledge. Serious analysis of his ideas is relatively rare, and tends to be more historically than philosophically orientated (although recent work by Robert Lamb does give his ideas serious philosophical attention, and van Parijs’s work on Basic Income recognizes his importance). But until very recently he has remained on the edges of the canon of political thought, easily dismissed by those who want more substantial philosophical fare, and subject to fits of enthusiasm by writers who are either insufficiently attuned to the complexities of the period or are simply uncritical. Such an attitude does poor service to the history, to the ideas, or to the man.

• American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Richard Gimbel Collection of Thomas Paine manuscripts
• Indiana University, Bloomington, Lilly Library, Paine collection
• Historical Society of Philadelphia, Paine Letters
• Norwich Central Library, Thomas Paine collection at Thetford: an analytical catalogue
• Thomas Paine National Historical Association, New York
• Thomas Paine Society, Nottingham
• Bodleian Library, Petty MSS, letters to Lord Lansdowne
• P. S. Foner (ed.), 1945, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine , 2 vols., Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press. [This is referenced as CW in the text.]
• M. D. Conway (ed.), 1894, The Writings of Thomas Paine , 4 vols., New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
• Hazel Burgess (ed.), 2010, Thomas Paine: A Collection of Unknown Writings , Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave MacMillan. [Many of the items in this collection are disputed. See (Philp 2011, p. 185); and Clark, 2018, Appendix]
• R. Gimbel, 1956, Thomas Paine: A Bibliographical Checklist of ‘Common Sense’ , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• F. Oldys [pseud for G. Chalmers], 1791/3, The Life of Thomas Paine London: Stockdale. [Is “G. Chalmers” an editor?]
• J. Cheetham, 1809, The Life of Thomas Paine ,London.
• C. Rickman, 1819, Life of Thomas Paine , London: T.C. Rickman.
• Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France , in L. G. Mitchell (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: Vol VIII The French Revolution 1790–1794 , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
• Abel, D., 1942, ‘The significance of the letter to the Abbé Raynal in the progress of Thomas Paine’s thought’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography , 66: 176–90
• Aldridge, A. O., 1960, Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine , London: The Cresset Press.
• –––, 1984, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology , Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses.
• Armytage, W. H. G., 1951, ‘Thomas Paine and the Walkers: An early episode in Anglo-American cooperation’, Pennsylvania History , 18: 16–30
• Ayer, A. J., 1988, Thomas Paine , London: Secker and Warberg.
• Bailyn, B., 1990, Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence , New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Brent, C., Gage, D., Myles, P., 2009, Thomas Paine in Lewes 1768–1774: A Prelude to American Independence , Lewes, Sussex: PM Trading.
• Brent, C., 2009, ‘Thirty Something: Thomas Paine at Bull House in Lewes 1768–74—Six formative years’ Sussex Archaeological Collections , 147: 153–67.
• Chiu, F., 2020, The Routledge Guidebook to Paine’s Rights of Man , Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
• Claeys, G., 1989, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought , Boston: Unwin Hyman.
• Clark, J. C. D., 2018, Thomas Paine: Britain, America and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Clark, H. H., 1933, ‘An historical interpretation of Thomas Paine’s religion’, University of California Chronicle , 35: 56–87
• –––, 1944, Introduction to Thomas Paine: Representative Selections, with Introduction, Bibliography and Notes , New York: Hill and Wang.
• Cleary, S., 2016, ed., New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies , Basingstoke, Hants: Pagrave/Macmillan.
• Conway, M. D., 1892, The Life of Thomas Paine, with a History of his Literary, Political, and Religious Career in America, France, and England , 2 volumes, London: Watts and Co.
• –––, 1900, Thomas Paine (1737–1809) et la révolution dans les deux mondes , Paris: Plon-Nourrit et cie.
• Copeland, T. 1950, ‘Burke, Paine, and Jefferson’, in his Edmund Burke: Six Essays , London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 146–89.
• Cotler, S. 2011, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Republicanim in the Early Republic , Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.
• Dyck, I. (ed.), 1988, Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine , New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• –––, 1933, ‘Local attachments, national identities and world citizenship in the thought of Thomas Paine’, History Workshop Journal , 35: 117–35.
• Fennessy, R. R., 1963, Burke, Paine, and the ‘Rights of Man’ , The Hague: Catholic University of Louvain.
• Foner, Eric, 1976, Tom Paine and revolutionary America , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Fruchtman, Jack, 1994, Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom , New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
• –––, 1993, Thomas Paine and the religion of nature , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• –––, 2011, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Hawke, D., 1974, Paine , New York: W. W. Norton.
• James, J. G., 1988, ‘Thomas Paine’s iron bridge work, 1785–1803’, Newcomen Society Transactions , 57: 189–221
• Kates, G., 1989, ‘From liberalism to radicalism: Tom Paine’s Rights of man ’, Journal of the History of Ideas , 50: 569–87.
• Keane, J., 1995, Tom Paine: A Political Life , London: Bloomsbury.
• Kaye, H. J., 2005, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America , New York: Hill and Wang.
• Kramnick, I., 1990, ‘Tom Paine: radical liberal’, reprinted in I. Kramnick, Republicanism and bourgeois radicalism: political ideology in late-eighteenth century England and America , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
• Kuklick, B. (ed.), 2006, Thomas Paine , Burington, VT: Ashgate.
• Lamb, R., 2015, Thomas Paine and the Idea of Human Rights , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lounissi, C., 2018, Thomas Paine and The French Revolution , Cham: Springer.
• Myles, P., 2018, The Rise of Thomas Paine and the Case of the Officers of Excise , Lewes: The Thomas Paine Society.
• Nelson, C., 2006, Thomas Paine: His Life, His Time and the Birth of Modern Nations , London: Profile Books.
• Payne, E. A., 1947, ‘Tom Paine: preacher’, Times Literary Supplement May 31, No. 2365, p. 267.
• Philp, M., 1989, Paine , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011, ‘Review of Hazel Burgess (ed.), Thomas Paine: A Collection of Unknown Writings ’, English Historical Review , 126(518): pp. 185–7.
• –––, 1998, ‘Paine and science’, Enlightenment and Dissent , 16: 210–249.
• –––, 2007, Thomas Paine , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––,2013 Reforming Ideas in Britain , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2019, ‘Paine and Socioeconomic Rights’, French History , 33(4): 554–71. doi:10.1093/fh/crz092
• Prochaska, F. K., 1972, ‘Thomas Paine’s “The age of reason revisited” ’, Journal of the History of Ideas , 33: 561–76.
• Robbins, C., 1983, ‘The lifelong education of Thomas Paine (1737–1809): Some reflections on his acquaintance among books’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , 127: 135–42.
• Roosevelt, T., 1888, Gouverneur Morris , Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
• Speck, W. A., 2013, A Political Biography of Thomas Paine , London: Pickering and Chatto.
• Thomson, A., 1991, ‘Thomas Paine and the United Irishmen’, Études Irlandaises , 16: 109–19.
• Turner, J., 1989, ‘Burke, Paine, and the nature of language’, in J. R. Watson (ed.), Yearbook of English Studies: The French Revolution in English Literature and Art , 19: 75–92.
• van Parijs, P., and Vandeborght, Y. 2017, Basic Income: a Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Vincent, B., 1987, Thomas Paine, ou la religion de la liberté , Paris: Aubier.
• –––, 1993, Thomas Paine, ou la république sans frontières , Nancy: Presses universiaires de Nancy.
• Williamson, A., 1973, Thomas Paine: His Life, Work and Times , London:George Allen.
• Wilson, D. A., 1988, Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection , Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
• Woodward, W. E., 1945, Tom Paine: America’s godfather, 1737–1809 , London: Secker and Warberg.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Facsimile PDFs of the four volume Conway edition of Paine’s works , a libertyfund.org
• Basic Income Earth Network , The BIEN Archive provides a comprehensive listing of books, journal articles, reports and conference papers on basic income, published in a variety of languages.

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Thomas Paine

(1737-1809)

Who Was Thomas Paine?

Thomas Paine was an influential 18th-century writer of essays and pamphlets. Among them were "The Age of Reason," regarding the place of religion in society; "Rights of Man," a piece defending the French Revolution; and "Common Sense," which was published during the American Revolution. "Common Sense," Paine's most influential piece, brought his ideas to a vast audience, swaying the otherwise undecided public opinion to the view that independence from the British was a necessity.

Paine was born in Thetford, England, in 1737, to a Quaker father and an Anglican mother. Paine received little formal education but did learn to read, write and perform arithmetic. At the age of 13, he began working with his father as stay maker (the thick rope stays used on sailing ships) in Thetford, a shipbuilding town. Some sources state he and his father were corset makers, but most historians cite this as an example of slanders spread by his enemies. He later worked as an officer of the excise, hunting smugglers and collecting liquor and tobacco taxes. He did not excel at this job, nor at any other early job, and his life in England was, in fact, marked by repeated failures.

The Move to America

Paine arrived in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774, taking up his first regular employment — helping to edit the Pennsylvania Magazine — in January 1775. At this time, Paine began writing in earnest, publishing several articles, anonymously or under pseudonyms. One of his early articles was a scathing condemnation of the African enslaved people trade, called "African Slavery in America," which he signed under the name "Justice and Humanity." Paine's propagandist ideas were just coming together, and he couldn't have arrived in America at a better time to advance his general views and thoughts on revolution and injustice, as the conflict between the colonists and England had reached a fever pitch.

Within five months of Paine's arrival, however, the precipitating event to his most famous work would occur. After the battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775), which were the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War, Paine argued that America should not simply revolt against taxation, but demand independence from Great Britain entirely. He expanded this idea in a 50-page pamphlet called "Common Sense," which was printed on January 10, 1776.

'Common Sense'

Worded in a way that forces the reader to make an immediate choice, "Common Sense" presented the American colonists, who were generally still undecided, with a cogent argument for full-scale revolt and freedom from British rule. And while it likely had little effect on the actual writing of the Declaration of Independence, "Common Sense" forced the issue on the streets, making the colonists see that a grave issue was upon them and that a public discussion was direly needed. Once it initiated debate, the article offered a solution for Americans who were disgusted and alarmed at the presence of tyranny in their new land, and it was passed around and read aloud often, bolstering enthusiasm for independence and encouraging recruitment for the Continental Army. ("Common Sense" is referred to by one historian as "the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era.")

Paine wrote "Common Sense" in an unadorned style, forgoing philosophical ponderings and Latin terms, and relying instead on biblical references to speak to the common man, as would a sermon. Within just a few months, the piece sold more than 500,000 copies. "Common Sense" presents as its chief option a distinctly American political identity and, more so than any other single publication, paved the way for the Declaration of Independence, which was unanimously ratified on July 4, 1776.

'Crisis' Papers

During the American Revolution, Paine served as a volunteer personal assistant to General Nathanael Greene, traveling with the Continental Army. While not a natural soldier, Paine contributed to the patriot cause by inspiring the troops with his 16 "Crisis" papers, which appeared between 1776 and 1783. "The American Crisis. Number I" was published on December 19, 1776, and began thusly: "These are the times that try men's souls." George Washington 's troops were being decimated, and he ordered that the pamphlet be read to all of his troops at Valley Forge, in hopes of inflaming them to victory.

Government Appointment

In 1777, Congress named Paine secretary to the Committee for Foreign Affairs. The following year, however, Paine accused a member of the Continental Congress of trying to profit personally from French aid given to the United States. In revealing the scandal, Paine quoted from secret documents that he had accessed through his position at Foreign Affairs. Also around this time, in his pamphlets, Paine alluded to secret negotiations with France that were not fit for public consumption. These missteps eventually led to Paine's expulsion from the committee in 1779.

Paine soon found a new position as clerk of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, and observed fairly quickly that American troops were disgruntled because of low (or no) pay and scarce supplies, so he started a drive at home and in France to raise what was needed. The wartime supplies that his effort provided were important to the final success of the Revolution, and the experience led him to appeal to the states, to pool resources for the well-being of the entire nation. Furthering his goal, he wrote "Public Good" (1780), calling for a national convention to replace the ineffectual Articles of Confederation with a strong central government under "a continental constitution."

Thomas Paine Books: 'Rights of Man,' 'The Age of Reason'

In April 1787, Paine headed back to England, where he soon became fascinated with what he heard of the roiling French Revolution. He immediately and passionately supported the Revolution, so when he read Edmund Burke's 1790 attack on it, he was inspired to write the book Rights of Man (1791) in a scathing response. The tract moved beyond supporting the French Revolution to discussing the basic reasons for discontent in European society, railing against an aristocratic society, and end of Europe’s inheritance laws. The British government banned the book and Paine was indicted for treason, although he was already on his way to France when the decree went out and avoided prosecution. He was later named an honorary citizen of France.

While rallying for the revolution, Paine also supported efforts to save the life of deposed King Louis XVI (instead favoring banishment), so when the radicals under Robespierre took power, Paine was sent to prison—from December 28, 1793, to November 4, 1794 — where he narrowly escaped execution. In 1794, while Paine was imprisoned, the first part of his The Age of Reason ( The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology in full) was published.

The book criticizes institutionalized religion for perceived corruption and political ambition, while challenging the validity of the Bible. The book was controversial, as was everything that Paine wrote, and the British government prosecuted anyone who tried to publish or distribute it. After his 1794 release from prison, Paine stayed in France, releasing the second and third parts of The Age of Reason before returning to the United States at President Thomas Jefferson 's invitation.

Engineer and Inventor

Among his many talents, Paine was also an accomplished — though not widely-known — inventor. Some of his devices were never developed beyond the planning stage, but there are a few of note. He developed a crane for lifting heavy objects, a smokeless candle, and tinkered with the idea of using gunpowder as a method for generating power. For years, Paine had possessed a fascination with bridges. He made several attempts to build bridges in both America and England after the Revolutionary War. Perhaps his most impressive engineering achievement was the Sunderland Bridge across the Wear River at Wearmonth, England. His goal was to build a single span bridge with no piers. In 1796, the 240-foot span bridge was completed. It was the second iron bridge ever built and at the time the largest in the world. Renovated in 1857, the bridge remained until 1927, when it was replaced.

Final Years

Paine returned to the United States in 1802 or 1803, only to find that his revolutionary work, influence and reputation had mostly been forgotten, leaving only his status as a world-class rabble-rouser intact. It would take a century later before Paine's reputation would be reinstated as a vital figure to the American Revolution.

Paine died alone on June 8, 1809. Only six mourners were present at his funeral — half of them formerly enslaved. To drive home the point of his tarnished image as a mere political rabble-rouser, the New York Citizen printed the following line in Paine's obituary: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." For more than a century following his death, this was the historical verdict handed down upon the legacy of Paine. Finally, in January 1937, the Times of London turned the tide, referring to him as the "English Voltaire" — a view that has prevailed ever since, with Paine now regarded as a seminal figure of the American Revolution.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Thomas Paine
• Birth Year: 1737
• Birth date: January 29, 1737
• Birth City: Thetford
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Thomas Paine was an English American writer and pamphleteer whose "Common Sense" and other writings influenced the American Revolution, and helped pave the way for the Declaration of Independence.
• U.S. Politics
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• Death Year: 1809
• Death date: June 8, 1809
• Death State: New York
• Death City: New York City
• Death Country: United States

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• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be true.
• An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.

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Thomas paine's common sense, 1776.

Description by Kenneth Hong, Brandeis undergraduate and special contributor to the Special Collections Spotlight.

“Common Sense,” published on January 10, 1776, was originally printed in the city of Philadelphia, but was soon reprinted across America and Great Britain, and translated into German and Danish. [1]  Thomas Paine’s pamphlet was first published anonymously, due to fears that its contents would be construed as treason; it was simply signed, “by an Englishman”. [2]  The version housed at Brandeis University is one of the London printings, which had hiatuses, where words and phrases were omitted that were offensive to the British crown. [3]  “Common Sense” sold about 120,000 copies in the first three months alone, being read in taverns and meeting houses across the 13 original colonies (the U.S. Census Bureau estimates the population in 1776 to be about 2.5 million and today to be about 320 million, that would make it proportionally equivalent to selling 15,000,000 copies today!) [4]

Paine used his writing as his weapon against the crown. With masterful language, Paine united the will of the colonists, planting the seed and giving hope and inspiration to fulfill the dream of America as an independent nation. The pamphlet was originally published without his name and all of the royalties associated with “Common Sense” were donated to the Continental Army. [9]  It would appear that Paine was looking for neither fame nor fortune in writing a pamphlet that profoundly affected the creation of a nation. To Paine, these ideas came naturally, they were simply, “Common Sense.” 

August 2 , 2015

•  Powell, Jim. “ Thomas Paine, Passionate Pamphleteer for Liberty ,” in The Freeman, January 1, 1996. Foundation for Economic Education. Accessed March 11, 2015.
•   Ibid .
•   Entry for Call# D793.P147c . Brown University Library Online Catalog. Accessed March 12, 2015.
•  Harvey Kaye. “ Common Sense and the American Revolution. ” The Thomas Paine National Historical Association. Accessed February 10, 2015.
•  “ Praise for Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, 1776 as Reported in American Newspapers, ” in “America in Class: Making the Revolution: America, 1763-1791: Primary Source Collection.” The National Humanities Center. Accessed March 13, 2015.
•   Ibid.
•  Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. London: J. Almon, 1776.
•  Kaye, Accessed February 10, 2015.

This essay, by Brandeis undergraduate Kenneth Hong, resulted from a Spring 2015 course for the Myra Kraft Transitional Year Program, taught by Dr. Craig Bruce Smith, entitled, “Preserving Boston’s Past: Public History and Digital Humanities.” In this course, students worked with archival materials, developed website content, and produced their own commemoration event, “The 250th Anniversary of the Stamp Act: A Revolutionary Exhibit and Performance,” marking one of the first steps of the American Revolution.

The Transitional Year Program was established in 1968 and was renamed in 2013 for Myra Kraft ‘64, the late Brandeis alumna and trustee. It provides small classes and strong support systems for students who have had limitations to their precollege academic opportunities.

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Thomas Paine

Paine was born in 1737 in Thetford, England. After brief stints as a sailor and tax official, Paine was introduced to Benjamin Franklin in London in 1774 and subsequently moved to Philadelphia. As anger at Great Britain deepened and armed conflict erupted in the American colonies, Paine wrote his most famous pamphlet, Common Sense, which appeared in January 1776. While many other writers spoke of England trampling on the British rights of colonials, but believed King George III would soon rectify the wrongs done to the colonies, Paine argued that the entire British system was fundamentally based on a tyranny of aristocracy and monarchy.

Paine claimed that the colonies should sever their ties to England once and for all, establish a democratic government with a written constitution, and thus gain the advantages of free trade and freedom from being constantly dragged into European wars. Paine wrote clearly and simply in order to reach the common masses and his ideas contributed greatly to spreading enthusiasm for independence from Great Britain. It has been estimated that nearly 50,000 copies of the pamphlet appeared in the colonies in the years leading to the Revolution.

George Washington was amongst the wide readership of Paine's writings. Before the famous crossing of the Delaware on the way to victory at Trenton in late 1776, General George Washington ordered officers to read Paine's The American Crisis to the Continental Army . Contained in that pamphlet were Paine's famous words, "These are the times that try mens souls." During the Revolution, Paine also worked with radicals in Philadelphia to draft a new state constitution in 1776 that abolished property qualifications for voting and holding office. 

Paine returned to Britain in 1787, but soon experienced persecution due to his fervent support of the French Revolution. When the conservative English writer and politician Edmund Burke heavily criticized the French Revolution, Paine wrote a new work titled The Rights of Man which argued that oppression in society stemmed from aristocratic control of an unequal and undemocratic political system. Paine was charged with treason and escaped to France in 1793 where he was elected a member of the National Assembly. When he objected to the beheading of the French King Louis XVI, he was thrown in jail until the American ambassador to France, James Monroe, was able to secure his release.

Paine remained in France for several years, writing his last well-known work, the three-part Age of Reason. In 1796 Paine published a bitter open letter to George Washington, personally attacking Washington as an incompetent general and elitist president who had betrayed Paine for not protecting him when he claimed American citizenship when arrested by France. Paine scathingly wrote in regards to Washington that, "Monopolies of every kind marked your administration almost in the moment of its commencement. The lands obtained by the Revolution were lavished upon partisans; the interest of the disbanded soldier was sold to the speculator…In what fraudulent light must Mr. Washington's character appear in the world, when his declarations and his conduct are compared together!" 1 Despite Paine's dissatisfaction with the years following the America Revolution, Paine returned to the United States in 1802 upon the invitation of President Thomas Jefferson . Paine remained in the United States until his death in 1809.

Kevin Grimm, Ph.D. Beloit College

Notes: 1. The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. 3 , ed. Moncure Daniel Conway (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1895), 243.

Bibliography: Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Fruchtman Jr., Jack. The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Kaye, Harvey J. Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

Paine, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. 1, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway . New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1894.

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The American Crisis

The essay that strengthened the resolve of the Patriots during the darkest days of the American Revolution.

During the first few months of the American Revolution in 1776, hope for an American victory dimmed as the British won continuous victories over the Continentals. When the rebellion almost seemed lost, Thomas Paine , American soldier and author of "Common Sense," wrote a series of essays, "The American Crisis" to bolster morale among American soldiers and renew hope in the American cause. His first essay was read to Patriot troops, the power of his message echoing into the minds and hearts of every American soldier who heard his words. George Washington understood the power of Paine's words and ordered that "The American Crisis" be read to his men at Valley Forge before the Battle of Trenton to give them a reason to persevere. Likely inspired by Paine's encouraging message, Washington and his army, in turn, saw victories at both Trenton and Princeton , changing the course of the war and renewing American resolve. The following text, written in 1776, is the first of the 13 essays that Paine wrote as part of the "The American Crisis." 

"The American Crisis"

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER,” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Whether the independence of the continent was declared too soon, or delayed too long, I will not now enter into as an argument; my own simple opinion is, that had it been eight months earlier, it would have been much better. We did not make a proper use of last winter, neither could we, while we were in a dependent state. However, the fault, if it were one, was all our own; we have none to blame but ourselves. But no great deal is lost yet. All that Howe has been doing for this month past, is rather a ravage than a conquest, which the spirit of the Jerseys, a year ago, would have quickly repulsed, and which time and a little resolution will soon recover.

I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent. Neither have I so much of the infidel in me, as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils; and as I do not, I cannot see on what grounds the king of Britain can look up to heaven for help against us: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a house-breaker, has as good a pretence as he.

‘Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them. Britain has trembled like an ague at the report of a French fleet of flat-bottomed boats; and in the fourteenth [fifteenth] century the whole English army, after ravaging the kingdom of France, was driven back like men petrified with fear; and this brave exploit was performed by a few broken forces collected and headed by a woman, Joan of Arc. Would that heaven might inspire some Jersey maid to spirit up her countrymen, and save her fair fellow sufferers from ravage and ravishment! Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered. In fact, they have the same effect on secret traitors, which an imaginary apparition would have upon a private murderer. They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world. Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head, that shall penitentially solemnize with curses the day on which Howe arrived upon the Delaware.

As I was with the troops at Fort Lee, and marched with them to the edge of Pennsylvania, I am well acquainted with many circumstances, which those who live at a distance know but little or nothing of. Our situation there was exceedingly cramped, the place being a narrow neck of land between the North River and the Hackensack. Our force was inconsiderable, being not one-fourth so great as Howe could bring against us. We had no army at hand to have relieved the garrison, had we shut ourselves up and stood on our defence. Our ammunition, light artillery, and the best part of our stores, had been removed, on the apprehension that Howe would endeavor to penetrate the Jerseys, in which case Fort Lee could be of no use to us; for it must occur to every thinking man, whether in the army or not, that these kind of field forts are only for temporary purposes, and last in use no longer than the enemy directs his force against the particular object which such forts are raised to defend. Such was our situation and condition at Fort Lee on the morning of the 20th of November, when an officer arrived with information that the enemy with 200 boats had landed about seven miles above; Major General [Nathaniel] Green, who commanded the garrison, immediately ordered them under arms, and sent express to General Washington at the town of Hackensack, distant by the way of the ferry=six miles. Our first object was to secure the bridge over the Hackensack, which laid up the river between the enemy and us, about six miles from us, and three from them. General Washington arrived in about three-quarters of an hour, and marched at the head of the troops towards the bridge, which place I expected we should have a brush for; however, they did not choose to dispute it with us, and the greatest part of our troops went over the bridge, the rest over the ferry, except some which passed at a mill on a small creek, between the bridge and the ferry, and made their way through some marshy grounds up to the town of Hackensack, and there passed the river. We brought off as much baggage as the wagons could contain, the rest was lost. The simple object was to bring off the garrison, and march them on till they could be strengthened by the Jersey or Pennsylvania militia, so as to be enabled to make a stand. We staid four days at Newark, collected our out-posts with some of the Jersey militia, and marched out twice to meet the enemy, on being informed that they were advancing, though our numbers were greatly inferior to theirs. Howe, in my little opinion, committed a great error in generalship in not throwing a body of forces off from Staten Island through Amboy, by which means he might have seized all our stores at Brunswick, and intercepted our march into Pennsylvania; but if we believe the power of hell to be limited, we must likewise believe that their agents are under some providential control.

I shall not now attempt to give all the particulars of our retreat to the Delaware; suffice it for the present to say, that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back. Voltaire has remarked that King William never appeared to full advantage but in difficulties and in action; the same remark may be made on General Washington, for the character fits him. There is a natural firmness in some minds which cannot be unlocked by trifles, but which, when unlocked, discovers a cabinet of fortitude; and I reckon it among those kind of public blessings, which we do not immediately see, that God hath blessed him with uninterrupted health, and given him a mind that can even flourish upon care. I shall conclude this paper with some miscellaneous remarks on the state of our affairs; and shall begin with asking the following question, Why is it that the enemy have left the New England provinces, and made these middle ones the seat of war? The answer is easy: New England is not infested with Tories, and we are. I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness. The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall. And what is a Tory? Good God! what is he? I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.

But, before the line of irrecoverable separation be drawn between us, let us reason the matter together: Your conduct is an invitation to the enemy, yet not one in a thousand of you has heart enough to join him. Howe is as much deceived by you as the American cause is injured by you. He expects you will all take up arms, and flock to his standard, with muskets on your shoulders. Your opinions are of no use to him, unless you support him personally, for ‘tis soldiers, and not Tories, that he wants.

I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, “Well! give me peace in my day.” Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;” and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty. Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them. A man can distinguish himself between temper and principle, and I am as confident, as I am that God governs the world, that America will never be happy till she gets clear of foreign dominion. Wars, without ceasing, will break out till that period arrives, and the continent must in the end be conqueror; for though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine, the coal can never expire.

America did not, nor does not want force; but she wanted a proper application of that force. Wisdom is not the purchase of a day, and it is no wonder that we should err at the first setting off. From an excess of tenderness, we were unwilling to raise an army, and trusted our cause to the temporary defence of a well-meaning militia. A summer’s experience has now taught us better; yet with those troops, while they were collected, we were able to set bounds to the progress of the enemy, and, thank God! they are again assembling. I always considered militia as the best troops in the world for a sudden exertion, but they will not do for a long campaign. Howe, it is probable, will make an attempt on this city [Philadelphia]; should he fail on this side the Delaware, he is ruined. If he succeeds, our cause is not ruined. He stakes all on his side against a part on ours; admitting he succeeds, the consequence will be, that armies from both ends of the continent will march to assist their suffering friends in the middle states; for he cannot go everywhere, it is impossible. I consider Howe as the greatest enemy the Tories have; he is bringing a war into their country, which, had it not been for him and partly for themselves, they had been clear of. Should he now be expelled, I wish with all the devotion of a Christian, that the names of Whig and Tory may never more be mentioned; but should the Tories give him encouragement to come, or assistance if he come, I as sincerely wish that our next year’s arms may expel them from the continent, and the Congress appropriate their possessions to the relief of those who have suffered in well-doing. A single successful battle next year will settle the whole. America could carry on a two years’ war by the confiscation of the property of disaffected persons, and be made happy by their expulsion. Say not that this is revenge, call it rather the soft resentment of a suffering people, who, having no object in view but the good of all, have staked their own all upon a seemingly doubtful event. Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled with prejudice.

Quitting this class of men, I turn with the warm ardor of a friend to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out: I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake. Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but “show your faith by your works,” that God may bless you. It matters not where you live, or what rank of life you hold, the evil or the blessing will reach you all. The far and the near, the home counties and the back, the rich and the poor, will suffer or rejoice alike. The heart that feels not now is dead; the blood of his children will curse his cowardice, who shrinks back at a time when a little might have saved the whole, and made them happy. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a ray of light. Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to “bind me in all cases whatsoever” to his absolute will, am I to suffer it? What signifies it to me, whether he who does it is a king or a common man; my countryman or not my countryman; whether it be done by an individual villain, or an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being, who at the last day shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow, and the slain of America.

There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both. Howe’s first object is, partly by threats and partly by promises, to terrify or seduce the people to deliver up their arms and receive mercy. The ministry recommended the same plan to Gage, and this is what the tories call making their peace, “a peace which passeth all understanding” indeed! A peace which would be the immediate forerunner of a worse ruin than any we have yet thought of. Ye men of Pennsylvania, do reason upon these things! Were the back counties to give up their arms, they would fall an easy prey to the Indians, who are all armed: this perhaps is what some Tories would not be sorry for. Were the home counties to deliver up their arms, they would be exposed to the resentment of the back counties who would then have it in their power to chastise their defection at pleasure. And were any one state to give up its arms, that state must be garrisoned by all Howe’s army of Britons and Hessians to preserve it from the anger of the rest. Mutual fear is the principal link in the chain of mutual love, and woe be to that state that breaks the compact. Howe is mercifully inviting you to barbarous destruction, and men must be either rogues or fools that will not see it. I dwell not upon the vapors of imagination; I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as A, B, C, hold up truth to your eyes.

I thank God, that I fear not. I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well, and can see the way out of it. While our army was collected, Howe dared not risk a battle; and it is no credit to him that he decamped from the White Plains, and waited a mean opportunity to ravage the defenceless Jerseys; but it is great credit to us, that, with a handful of men, we sustained an orderly retreat for near an hundred miles, brought off our ammunition, all our field pieces, the greatest part of our stores, and had four rivers to pass. None can say that our retreat was precipitate, for we were near three weeks in performing it, that the country might have time to come in. Twice we marched back to meet the enemy, and remained out till dark. The sign of fear was not seen in our camp, and had not some of the cowardly and disaffected inhabitants spread false alarms through the country, the Jerseys had never been ravaged. Once more we are again collected and collecting; our new army at both ends of the continent is recruiting fast, and we shall be able to open the next campaign with sixty thousand men, well armed and clothed. This is our situation, and who will may know it. By perseverance and fortitude we have the prospect of a glorious issue; by cowardice and submission, the sad choice of a variety of evils – a ravaged country – a depopulated city – habitations without safety, and slavery without hope – our homes turned into barracks and bawdy-houses for Hessians, and a future race to provide for, whose fathers we shall doubt of. Look on this picture and weep over it! and if there yet remains one thoughtless wretch who believes it not, let him suffer it unlamented.

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This Day In History : January 10

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Thomas Paine publishes “Common Sense”

On January 10, 1776, writer Thomas Paine publishes his pamphlet “Common Sense,” setting forth his arguments in favor of American independence. Although little used today, pamphlets were an important medium for the spread of ideas in the 16th through 19th centuries.

Originally published anonymously, “Common Sense” advocated independence for the American colonies from Britain and is considered one of the most influential pamphlets in American history.  Credited with uniting average citizens and political leaders behind the idea of independence, “Common Sense” played a remarkable role in transforming a colonial squabble into the American Revolution .

At the time Paine wrote “Common Sense,” most colonists considered themselves to be aggrieved Britons.  Paine fundamentally changed the tenor of colonists’ argument with the crown when he wrote the following:  “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America.  This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.  Hither they have fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their descendants still.”

Paine was born in England in 1737 and worked as a corset maker in his teens and, later, as a sailor and schoolteacher before becoming a prominent pamphleteer. In 1774, Paine arrived in Philadelphia and soon came to support American independence.  Two years later, his 47-page pamphlet sold some 500,000 copies, powerfully influencing American opinion. Paine went on to serve in the U.S. Army and to work for the Committee of Foreign Affairs before returning to Europe in 1787.  Back in England, he continued writing pamphlets in support of revolution. He released “The Rights of Man,” supporting the French Revolution in 1791-92, in answer to Edmund Burke’s famous “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790). His sentiments were highly unpopular with the still-monarchal British government, so he fled to France, where he was later arrested for his political opinions.  He returned to the United States in 1802 and died in New York in 1809.

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National Archives News

Thomas Paine’s Attitudes Toward Religion Impacted His Legacy, Author Says

By Jonathan Marker | National Archives News

WASHINGTON, October 18, 2019 — Thomas Paine's open call for American independence from Great Britain in Common Sense inspired revolutionaries across the 13 colonies to revolt against the crown. The ripple of insurrection across the Atlantic earned Paine notoriety—and infamy—through the prolific distribution of his pamphlet and his support of the French Revolution. But Paine’s many other accomplishments in writing, poetry, science, and engineering have failed to appeal to the American public as treasured relics of history because of Paine’s scathing criticism of organized religion, according to Harlow Giles Unger, author of Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence.

Harlow Giles Unger, author of Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence, speaks at the National Archives in Washington, DC.

Looking beyond Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Unger, a prolific author and historian, discussed his latest book in the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, on October 15. 

David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, spoke about the important role Paine played in America’s history during his welcome.

“Thomas Paine's words were instrumental to the success of the Revolution,” Ferriero said. “His famous pamphlet Common Sense predated the Declaration of Independence and laid out the argument for a break with Great Britain. The American Crisis pamphlets inspired and encouraged Americans to persevere against the British Army. Even today, the opening line is familiar to us: ‘These are the times that try men's souls.’”

You can find many documents written by or to Thomas Paine at Founders Online , administered by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, part of the National Archives.

“Common Sense became the most widely read work in the western world, after only the Bible,” Unger said of Paine’s famous pamphlet, published in January 1776. “[Paine] wrote dozens of essays, earning tens of thousands of dollars of which he kept not a penny for himself. He ordered his printers to give every cent he earned to Congress to buy war supplies for George Washington.”

It's been said: “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.”

Paine’s antimonarchy works made their way across the Atlantic, where “in France, he was known as the ‘celebrated author of Common Sense,’” Unger said. Paine’s service to the French National Convention between 1792 and 1795 fell victim to his refusal to support the execution by guillotine of Louis XVI. The decision drew ire from French Revolutionaries, and he was imprisoned in France until an American diplomat secured his release and return to the United States.

In addition to his role as a passionate advocate of revolution, Paine was a vitriolic opponent of organized religion and the so-called “divine right of kings.” Paine’s disdain for both ideas intersect in this excerpt from Part 2 of Common Sense:

In England a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

“Like many other great men in those times Tom Paine educated himself,” Unger said. “He devoured books on philosophy, Greek and Roman history, and sciences such as electricity, hydrostatics, mechanics and astronomy. He was brilliant; he absorbed enough for the equivalent of two or three university educations by himself.”

But Paine’s scathing criticisms of religion, in general, and of Christianity, in particular, overshadowed acclaim for his ingenuity in writing, poetry, science, and engineering. Many of Paine's contemporaries ridiculed him for his criticism, and only a handful of people attended his funeral following his death in 1809, according to Unger.

Even today, Unger said, school systems in the United States are loath to promote the works of Thomas Paine because of his negative views on organized religion. Paine’s deism—the belief in God, but the eschewing of organized religion—is often erroneously confused with atheism.

“You have two problems with history texts in secondary schools in America,” Unger said. “The first is the small amount of time given to study subjects in a typical school day, which makes learning centuries of American history difficult.

“The other problem is a religious problem: in towns across America, school boards are run by everyday people, many of whom are churchgoers who simply will not tolerate their kids reading any of the works that Thomas Paine wrote . . . especially Age of Reason.”

Unger devoted an entire appendix in his biography of Thomas Paine to the controversial Age of Reason. “In that appendix, you will see why most school boards in America would not tolerate their children reading Thomas Paine’s works.”

You can watch the program at the National Archives YouTube channel .

Find out about upcoming events in the National Archives online calendar .

An Essay on Dream

A ESSAY on Dream.

from the 1807 book Examinaton of the passages in the Hew Testament , printed by author in New York. The paragraphs edited from the 1803 Paris version have been added at the end.

AS a great deal is said in the New Testament about dreams, it is first necessary to explain the nature of dream, and to shew by what operation of the mind a dream is produced during sleep. When this is understood we shall be the better enabled to judge whether any reliance can be placed upon them; and consequently, whether the several matters in the New Testament related of dreams deserve the credit which the writers of that book and priests and commentators ascribe to them.

IN order to understand the nature of dream, or of that which passes in ideal vision during a state of sleep, it is first necessary to understand the composition and decomposition of the human mind.

The three great faculties of the mind are IMAGINATION, JUDGMENT and MEMORY. Every action of the mind comes under one or the other of these faculties. In a state of wakefulness, as in the day time, these three faculties are all active; but that is seldom the case in sleep, and never perfectly; and this is the cause that our dreams are not so regular and rational as our waking thoughts.

The seat of that collection of powers or faculties that constitute what is called the mind is in the brain. There is not, and cannot be, any visible demonstration of this anatomically, but accidents happening to living persons, shew it to be so. An injury done to the brain by a fracture of the scull will sometimes change a wise man into a childish idiot; a being without a mind. But so careful has nature been of that sanctum sanctorum of man, the brain, that of all the external accidents to which humanity is subject, this occurs the most seldom. But we often see it happening by long and habitual intemperance.

Whether those three faculties occupy distinct apartments of the brain, is known only to that almighty power that formed and organized it. We can see the external effects of muscular motion in all the members of the body, though its primum mobile, or first moving cause, is unknown to man. Our external motions are sometimes the effect of intention, sometimes not. If we are sitting and intend to rise, or standing and intend to sit, or to walk, the limbs obey that intention as if they heard the order given. But we make a thousand motions every day, and that as well waking as sleeping, that have no prior intention to direct them. Each member acts as if it had a will or mind of its own. Man governs the whole when he pleases to govern, but in the interim the several parts, like little suburbs, govern themselves without consulting the sovereign.

And all these motions, whatever be the generating cause, are external and visible. But with respect to the brain, no ocular observation can be made upon it. All is mystery; all is darkness in that womb of thought.

Whether the brain is a mass of matter in continual rest; whether it has a vibrating pulsative motion, or a heaving and falling motion like matter in fermentation; whether different parts of the brain have different motions according to the faculty that is employed, be it the imagination, the judgment, or the memory, man knows nothing of. He knows not the cause of his own wit. His own brain conceals it from him.

Comparing invisible by visible things, as metaphysical can sometimes be compared to physical things, the operations of these distinct and several faculties have some resemblance of a watch. The main spring, which puts all in motion, corresponds to the imagination; the pendulum, or balance, which corrects and regulates that motion, corresponds to the judgment, and the hand and dial, like the memory, record the operations.

Now in proportion as these several faculties sleep, slumber, or keep awake, during the continuance of a dream, in that proportion will the dream be reasonable or frantic, remembered or forgotten.

If there is any faculty in mental man that never sleeps it is that volatile thing the imagination. The case is different with the judgment and memory. The sedate and sober constitution of the judgment easily disposes it to rest, and as to the memory it records in silence and is active only when it is called upon.

That the judgment soon goes to sleep may be perceived by our sometimes beginning to dream before we are fully asleep ourselves. Some random thought runs in the mind and we start, as it were, into recollection that we are dreaming between sleeping and waking.

If the judgment sleeps while the imagination keeps awake, the dream will be a riotous assemblage of misshapen images and ranting ideas, and the more active the imagination is the wilder the dream will be. The most inconsistent and the most impossible things will appear right; because that faculty whose province it is to keep order is in a state of absence. The master of the school is gone out and the boys are in an uproar.

If the memory sleeps we shall have no other knowledge of the dream than that we have dreamt, without knowing what it was about. In this case it is sensation rather than recollection that acts. The dream has given us some sense of pain or trouble, and we feel it as a hurt, rather than remember it as a vision.

If memory only slumbers we shall have a faint remembrance of the dream, and after a few minutes it will sometimes happen that the principal passages of the dream will occur to us more fully. The cause of this is that the memory will sometimes continue slumbering or sleeping after we are awake ourselves, and that so fully, that it may, and sometimes do, happen, that we do not immediately recollect where we are, nor what we have been about, or have to do. But when the memory starts into wakefulness it brings the knowledge of these things back upon us, like a flood of light, and sometimes the dream with it.

But the most curious circumstance of the mind in a state of dream is the power it has to become the agent of every person, character and thing of which it dreams. It carries on conversation with several, asks questions, hears answers, gives and receives information, and it acts all these parts itself.

But however various and eccentric the imagination may be in the creating of images and ideas, it cannot supply the place of memory, with respect to things that are forgotten when we are awake. For example, if we have forgotten the name of a person, and dream of seeing him and asking him his name, he cannot tell it; for it is ourselves asking ourselves the question.

But though the imagination cannot supply the place of real memory it has the wild faculty of counterfeiting memory. It dreams of persons it never knew, and talks to them as if it remembered them as old acquaintances. It relates circumstances that never happened, and tells them as if they had happened. It goes to places that never existed, and knows where all the streets and houses are as if we had been there before. The scenes it creates are often as scenes remembered. It will sometimes act a dream within a dream, and in the delusion of dreaming tell a dream it never dreamed and tell it as if it was from memory. It may also be remarked, that the imagination, in a dream, has no idea of time, as time . It counts only by circumstances; and if a succession of circumstances pass in a dream that would require a great length of time to accomplish them, it will appear to the dreamer that a length of time equal thereto has passed also.

As this is the state of the mind in a dream, it may rationally be said that every person is mad once in twenty-four hours, for were he to act in the day as he dreams in the night he would be confined for a lunatic. In a state of wakefulness those three faculties being all active and acting in unison constitute the rational man. In dream it is otherwise, and therefore that state which is called insanity appears to be no other than a disunion of those faculties and a cessation of the judgment, during wakefulness, that we so often experience during sleep; and idiocy, into which some persons have fallen, is that cessation of all the faculties of which we can be sensible when we happen to wake before our memory.

In this view of the mind, how absurd it is to place reliance upon dreams, and how much more absurd to make them a foundation for religion; yet the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, begotten by the holy ghost, a being never heard of before, stands on the story of an old man’s dream. “ And behold the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not thou to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the holy ghost. ” Matt. ch. 1, v. 20.

After this we have the childish stories of three or four other dreams: about Joseph going into Egypt; about his coming back again; about this, and about that, and this story of dreams has thrown Europe into a dream for more than a thousand years. All the efforts that nature, reason, and conscience have made to awaken man from it have been ascribed by priestcraft and superstition to the workings of the devil, and had it not been for the American revolution, which by establishing the universal right of conscience, first opened the way to free discussion, and for the French revolution that followed, this religion of dreams had continued to be preached, and that after it had ceased to be believed. Those who preached it and did not believe it, still believe the delusion necessary. They were not bold enough to be honest, nor honest enough to be bold.

(The following, in parentheses, is from the 1803 edition which has not been edited for accuracy:)

(Every new religion, like a new play, requires a new apparatus of dresses and machinery, to fit the new characters it creates. The story of Christ in the New Testament brings a new being upon the stage, which it calls the Holy Ghost; and the story of Abraham, the father of the Jews, in the Old Testament, gives existence to a new order of beings it calls angels. There was no Holy Ghost before the time of Christ, nor angels before the time of Abraham.

We hear nothing of these winged gentlemen, till more than two thousand years, according to the Bible chronology, from the time they say the heavens, the earth and all therein were made. After this, they hop about as thick as birds in a grove. The first we hear of pays his addresses to Hagar in the wilderness; then three of them visit Sarah; another wrestles a fall with Jacob; and these birds of passage having found their way to earth and back, are continually coming and going. They eat and drink, and up again to heaven.

What they do with the food they carry away in their bellies, the Bible does not tell us. Perhaps they do as the birds do, discharge it as they fly; for neither the Scripture nor the Church hath told us there are necessary houses for them in heaven. One would think that a system loaded with such gross and vulgar absurdities as Scripture religion is could never have obtained credit; yet we have seen what priestcraft and fanaticism could do, and credulity believe.

From angels in the Old Testament we get to prophets, to witches, to seers of visions, and dreamers of dreams; and sometimes we are told, as in I Samuel ix, 15, that God whispers in the ear. At other times we are not told how the impulse was given, or whether sleeping or waking. In II Samuel xxiv, 1, it is said, “And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go number Israel and Judah.” And in I Chronicles xxi, 1, when the same story is again related, it is said, “And Satan stood up against Israel, and moved David to number Israel”

Whether this was done sleeping or waking, we are not told, but it seems that David, whom they call “a man after God’s own heart,” did not know by what spirit he was moved; and as to the men called inspired penmen, they agree so well about the matter that in one book they say it was God, and in the other that it was the devil.

Yet this is trash that the Church imposes upon the world as the WORD OF GOD; this is the collection of lies and contradictions called the HOLY BIBLE! this is the rubbish called REVEALED RELIGION!

The idea that writers of the Old Testament had of a God was boisterous, contemptible, and vulgar. They make Him the Mars of the Jews, the fighting God of Israel, the conjuring God of their priests and prophets. They tell us as many fables of Him as the Greeks told of Hercules. They pit Him against Pharaoh, as it were to box with him, and Moses carries the challenge. They make their God to say insultingly, “I will get me honor upon Pharaoh and upon all his host, upon his chariots and upon his horsemen.” And that He may keep His word, they make Him set a trap in the Red Sea, in the dead of the night, for Pharaoh, his host and his horses, and drown them as a rat-catcher would do so many rats. Great honor indeed! the story of Jack the giant-killer is better told!

They match Him against the Egyptian magicians to conjure with them, and after hard conjuring on both sides (for where there is no great contest there is no great honor) they bring Him off victorious. The first three essays are a dead match: each party turns his rod into a serpent, the rivers into blood, and creates frogs: but upon the fourth, the God of the Israelites obtains the laurel, He covers them all over with lice! The Egyptian magicians cannot do the same, and this lousy triumph proclaims the victory!

They make their God to rain fire and brimstone upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and belch fire and smoke upon Mount Sinai, as if He was the Pluto of the lower regions. They make Him salt up Lot’s wife like pickled pork; they make Him pass like Shakespeare’s Queen Mab into the brain of their priests, prophets and prophetesses, and tickle them into dreams, and after making Him play all kinds of tricks they confound Him with Satan, and leave us at a loss to know what God they meant!

This is the descriptive God of the Old Testament; and as to the New, though the authors of it have varied the scene, they have continued the vulgarity.

Is man ever to be the dupe of priestcraft, the slave of superstition? Is he never to have just ideas of his Creator? It is better not to believe there is a God than to believe of Him falsely. When we behold the mighty universe that surrounds us, and dart our contemplation into the eternity of space, filled with innumerable orbs revolving in eternal harmony, how paltry must the tales of the Old and New Testaments, profanely called the Word of God, appear to thoughtful man!

The stupendous wisdom and unerring order that reign and govern throughout this wondrous whole, and call us to reflection, put to shame the Bible! The God of eternity and of all that is real, is not the god of passing dreams and shadows of man’s imagination. The God of truth is not the god of fable; the belief of a god begotten and a god crucified, is a god blasphemed. It is making a profane use of reason.)

I shall conclude this Essay on Dream with the two first verses of the 36 chapter of Ecclesiasticus one of the books of the Apocrypha.

• “ The hopes of man void of understanding are vain and false; and dreams lift up fools. — Whoso regardeth dreams is like him that catcheth at a shadow, and followeth after the wind, ”

I now proceed to an examination of the passages in the bible called prophecies of the coming of Christ, and to shew there are no prophecies of any such person. That the passages clandestinely stiled prophecies are not prophecies, and that they refer to circumstances the Jewish nation was in at the time they were written or spoken, and not to any distance of future time or person.

6 New Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List

All by Columbia alumni authors.

By Kara Swisher ’85JRN 

Journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher has covered American tech since the dot-com boom in the early 1990s and has become known for holding industry leaders accountable in her no-holds-barred interviews. With thirty years of unparalleled access to a who’s who of Silicon Valley — from Jeff Bezos to Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg — she has plenty of tea to spill in her much-hyped new book . But there’s more than just gossip here: it’s a thoughtful history of a period that has irrevocably changed our world and a surprisingly hopeful vision of the potential role of tech in our future. 

Last House  

By Jessica Shattuck ’01SOA

In her latest novel , Jessica Shattuck, the best-selling writer of The Women in the Castle , captures two generations, each caught up in the politics of their time. The book opens in 1953, when World War II vet Nick Taylor, a lawyer for a major American oil company, gets drawn into the Iranian coup d’état. Meanwhile, his wife, Bet, once an Army code-breaker, bides her time in the suburbs, raising their children, Katherine and Harry. Fifteen years later, those children are grown and protesting all that their parents stood for, Katherine at a liberal newspaper in Morningside Heights and Harry near the family’s country home in Vermont. 

The Age of Grievance 

By Frank Bruni ’88JRN

American politics has changed drastically over the last several decades. In his compelling new book , Frank Bruni argues that much of that change can be attributed to a cultural shift in attitude: we’ve become a nation of whiners. Bruni writes that Americans on both sides of the aisle feel victimized and aggrieved (though he is clear that he thinks the Right has weaponized this tactic in more dangerous ways), and politicians have responded in kind. Bruni contends that while grievance is not a new concept, and has historically often been good, this new era is different. Legitimate complaints are lost among exaggerated ones. And in a nation with broad gun ownership, the results can be devastating. 

You Get What You Pay For

By Morgan Parker ’10CC

The author of three award-winning poetry collections and a young-adult novel, Morgan Parker has a bold, provocative, often hilarious voice, and her insights about Black womanhood in contemporary America have resonated with a wide audience. But in her personal life, Parker often feels isolated and alone: “I’m a poet who has never experienced true romantic love; I believe this is an American tragedy.” Her latest book , an essay collection, explores this and other intimate themes, with plenty of reflection on the greater societal contexts. 

A Walk in the Park

By Kevin Fedarko ’88CC

Veteran journalist Kevin Fedarko is no stranger to the Grand Canyon: his first book, The Emerald Mile , told the story of a thrill seeker who rode a wooden boat the entire length of the Colorado River. But now, Fedarko himself is the adventurer. Accompanied by National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, Fedarko embarked on a 750-mile, end-to-end trek through the awe-inspiring gorge. With no marked trail, punishing temperatures, and death-defying cliffs, it’s considered one of the hardest hikes in the world — and indeed, the year-long trip nearly killed them both. Fedarko’s prose is often funny, but he also pays appropriate respect to both the land and the native people that have called it home for thousands of years. 

The Age of Revolutions

By Nathan Perl-Rosenthal ’11GSAS 

In an ambitious survey of what Thomas Paine called “the age of revolutions,” historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal traces revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in North America, Spanish America, Europe, and Haiti. Producing the first narrative history of the era, Perl-Rosenthal assembles a cast of famous (John Adams, Napoleon, Toussaint Louverture) and lesser-known figures (Peruvian nun Maria De La Concepción Rivadeneyra) to show how two generations forged massive transformations and how political progress often came at the expense of racial and social equality. 

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Jamelle Bouie

This Whole King Trump Thing Is Getting Awfully Literal

By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

Donald Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity for criminal acts taken in office as president is an insult to reason, an assault on common sense and a perversion of the fundamental maxim of American democracy: that no man is above the law.

More astonishing than the former president’s claim to immunity, however, is the fact that the Supreme Court took the case in the first place . It’s not just that there’s an obvious response — no, the president is not immune to criminal prosecution for illegal actions committed with the imprimatur of executive power, whether private or “official” (a distinction that does not exist in the Constitution) — but that the court has delayed, perhaps indefinitely, the former president’s reckoning with the criminal legal system of the United States.

In delaying the trial, the Supreme Court may well have denied the public its right to know whether a former president, now vying to be the next president, is guilty of trying to subvert the sacred process of presidential succession: the peaceful transfer of power from one faction to another that is the essence of representative democracy. It is a process so vital, and so precious, that its first occurrence — with the defeat of John Adams and the Federalists at the hands of Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans in the 1800 presidential election — was a second sort of American Revolution.

Whether motivated by sincere belief or partisanship or a myopic desire to weigh in on a case involving the former president, the Supreme Court has directly intervened in the 2024 presidential election in a way that deprives the electorate of critical information or gives it less time to grapple with what might happen in a federal courtroom. And if the trial occurs after an election in which Trump wins a second term and he is convicted, then the court will have teed the nation up for an acute constitutional crisis. A president, for the first time in the nation’s history, might try to pardon himself for his own criminal behavior.

In other words, however the Supreme Court rules, it has egregiously abused its power.

It is difficult to overstate the radical contempt for republican government embodied in the former president’s notion that he can break the law without consequence or sanction on the grounds that he must have that right as chief executive. As Trump sees it, the president is sovereign, not the people. In his grotesque vision of executive power, the president is a king, unbound by law, chained only to the limits of his will.

This is nonsense. In a detailed amicus brief submitted in support of the government in Trump v. United States, 15 leading historians of the early American republic show the extent to which the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution rejected the idea of presidential immunity for crimes committed in office.

“Although the framers debated a variety of designs for the executive branch — ranging from a comparatively strong, unitary president to a comparatively weaker executive council — they all approached the issues with a deep-seated, anti-monarchical sentiment,” the brief states. “There is no evidence in the extensive historical record that any of the framers believed a former president should be immune from criminal prosecution. Such a concept would be inimical to the basic intentions, understandings, and experiences of the founding generation.”

The historians gather a bushel of quotes and examples from a who’s who of the revolutionary generation to prove the point. “In America the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote in his landmark pamphlet, “Common Sense.” “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

James Madison thought it “indispensable that some provision should be made for defending the Community against the incapacity, negligence or perfidy of the chief Magistrate.” The presidency was designed with accountability in mind.

Years later, speaking on the Senate floor, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina — a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia — said outright that he and his colleagues did not intend for the president to have any privileges or immunities: “No privilege of this kind was intended for your Executive, nor any except that which I have mentioned for your Legislature.”

What’s more, as the brief explains, ratification of the Constitution rested on the “express” promise that “the new president would be subject to criminal conviction.”

“His person is not so much protected as that of a member of the House of Representatives,” Tench Coxe wrote in one of the first published essays urging ratification of the Constitution, “for he may be proceeded against like any other man in the ordinary course of law.”

James Iredell, one of the first justices of the Supreme Court, told the North Carolina ratifying convention that if the president “commits any misdemeanor in office, he is impeachable, removable from office, and incapacitated to hold any office of honor, trust or profit.” And if he commits any crime, “he is punishable by the laws of his country, and in capital cases may be deprived of his life.”

Yes, you read that correctly. In his argument for the Constitution, one of the earliest appointees to the Supreme Court specified that in a capital case, the president could be tried, convicted and put to death.

If there were ever a subject on which to defer to the founding generation, it is on this question regarding the nature of the presidency. Is the president above the law? The answer is no. Is the president immune from criminal prosecution? Again, the answer is no. Any other conclusion represents a fundamental challenge to constitutional government.

I wish I had faith that the Supreme Court would rule unanimously against Trump. But having heard the arguments — having listened to Justice Brett Kavanaugh worry that prosecution could hamper the president and having heard Justice Samuel Alito suggest that we would face a destabilizing future of politically motivated prosecutions if Trump were to find himself on the receiving end of the full force of the law — my sense is that the Republican-appointed majority will try to make some distinction between official and unofficial acts and remand the case back to the trial court for further review, delaying a trial even further.

Rather than grapple with the situation at hand — a defeated president worked with his allies to try to overturn the results of an election he lost, eventually summoning a mob to try to subvert the peaceful transfer of power — the Republican-appointed majority worried about hypothetical prosecutions against hypothetical presidents who might try to stay in office against the will of the people if they aren’t placed above the law.

It was a farce befitting the absurdity of the situation. Trump has asked the Supreme Court if he is, in effect, a king. And at least four members of the court, among them the so-called originalists, have said, in essence, that they’ll have to think about it.

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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @ jbouie