Tom Paine
Keane, John
B y the time he died in 1809, Thomas Paine was well on his way to becoming the forgotten founder. The author of the period's most influential and widely read political tract, a catalyst in the...
...One believer rebuked him with cruel accuracy: "You, who were once the companion of Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton, are now deserted by every good man...
...As political philosophy, it was nothing special, but as incitement, it was a masterpiece...
...Worse still for him was his disdainfor Christianity, at odds with the religious revival sweeping over the nation...
...During the Revolutionary period, Paine was admirably resistant to the power-mad excesses of the Jacobins...
...Keane makes much, for example, of the fact that he grew up practically in the shadow of a hill used once a year for hangings, which may explain his lifetime aversion to capital punishment...
...Even before the victory at Yorktown, he acquired a durable habit of feeling terribly unappreciated, demanding that Congress recognize his contributions with financial compensation, which he had willingly forgone when he published his great work...
...struck a vital nerve in a people dispirited by setbacks in the war...
...Finally, Paine never gave his full allegiance to the American experiment, regarding himself as a citizen of the world, a voice for international revolution...
...Instead, he cast his eyes toward places where he might carry on the revolutionary cause...
...Paine was not an atheist, in fact?I believe in one God, and no more," he wrote, "and I hope for happiness beyond this life...
...He may be best known today by Theodore Roosevelt's memorable characterization of him as a "filthy little atheist...
...The government gave him a 300-acre farm in New Rochelle, New York, but he had no interest in farming...
...Paine was a failure at everything he tried...
...Keane wants it known that he would not be a Thatcherite or a Reaganite—while downplaying how well some of Paine's anti-statist sentiments ("government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil") would fit with modern conservative thinking...
...Paine has been lost ever since...
...The British government responded by organizing a campaign of harassment and vilification, which culminated in a court summons to answer a charge of seditious libel...
...The man who coined the term "sunshine patriot" was just the opposite—content only in the gloom of adversity, fighting authority rather than constructing it...
...With another Revolution over, Paine was once again ill at ease in his adopted home...
...Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence were, like Common Sense, published in 1776, but they are still read today...
...He began drinking more heavily than ever, fell into increasing isolation, and suffered declining health...
...The book's chief flaws lie in the author's loquacity and occasional lapses into a pedantry that betrays his background in political science...
...What followed illustrates how Paine's judgment had been irreparably warped by his passionate hatred of the British crown...
...But even on his deathbed, he was adamant in spurning Christianity...
...The book became a best-seller not only in his native land, where one of every ten literate adults bought a copy, but across Europe, where kings nervously watched events in Paris...
...As David Freeman Hawke wrote in his 1974 biography of Paine, the nation "could tolerate a drunkard as a hero but not an atheist...
...T he critical question for Americans is one Keane never addresses as directly as he should—why this man who gave such eloquent voice to the spirit of '76 ended his life alone, forgotten, and nearly friendless, and why he has never recovered a place of honor...
...Paine had perfect confidence in the people, while the framers of the Constitution saw the need to constrain popular desires with elaborate checks and balances...
...As he lay gravely ill, the execution squad made its rounds in the Luxembourg prison, putting a chalk mark on the door of each cell housing a condemned man...
...As it is a new generation that has risen up since the Declaration of Independence," he wrote mournfully once back in New York, "they know nothing of what the political state of the country was at the time the pamphlet Common Sense appeared, and besides there are but a few of the old standers left, and none that I know in this city...
...In 1787 he sailed for France, making a brief visit before returning to his native England in the hope of helping to bring about the overthrow of the monarchy...
...One reason is his militantly anti-clerical sentiments...
...I am very sorry that I ever returned to this country," he confided shortly before he died...
...644 pages/ $27.95 reviewed by STEPHEN CHAPMAN The American Spectator June 1995 63 ing martyrdom but by fleeing across the channel...
...H ere Keane's narrative grows more gripping...
...and even respectable deists cross the streets to avoid you...
...Paine was so highly regarded in revolutionary France that he was immediately elected to the National Assembly...
...Paine became a favorite target of the Federalist press and had his request for a pension from Congress turned down...
...His past defense of the Revolution, however, was a weak protection against the gathering spirit of repression, and he fell under suspicion for his speech opposing the execution of Louis XIV...
...Like Adams, John Keane exaggerates the importance of his subject, calling him "the greatest political figure of his age"—an age that included Washington, Madison and Napoleon...
...But the fact remains that at a moment when the cause of independence faced bleak prospects, he gave unforgettable voice to convictions and yearnings that Americans hardly realized they had—and thus helped make them reality...
...Paine's work is not...
...f it falls short of Hawke's portrait of the man in clarity and grace of style, Keane's biography is thorough and competent...
...He was imprisoned and sentenced to the guillotine...
...After he was buried at his New Rochelle farm in the presence of a handful of mourners, an admirer dug up his bones, took them to England and misplaced them...
...The author of the period's most influential and widely read political tract, a catalyst in the American Revolution, he never found a lasting place in the hearts of his American contemporaries or the memories of posterity...
...But his career in America was all downhill after 1776...
...Once victory was won, he lost interest...
...His cellmates, who were also on the list, closed it so that the mark couldn't be seen when the soldiers returned to drag their victims away—and, as Paine later wrote, "the destroying angel passed by it...
...With death approaching, he asked for permission to be buried in a cemetery for Quakers, in which faith he was raised, but was rejected...
...In 1790, he published the first part of The Rights of Man, a scathing attack on monarchy written as a rebuttal to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France...
...Paine finally responded as the government had hoped, not by embracTOM PAINE: A POLITICAL LIFE John Keane Little, Brown and Co...
...But in the aftermath, he proved unable to recognize that the defects of the British system of representative government were better than what prevailed in France...
...He does a comprehensive job with Paine's personal life, including a wealth of material on his early years in England...
...Paine enjoyed great acclaim and celebrity as a result of Common Sense, and he continued doing valuable work during the war—as a newspaper war correspondent, propagandist, and secretary to the congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs...
...A new account of Paine's life can only help educate Americans about his crucial role in the creation of a country that denied him not only lasting acclaim but a final resting place...
...It is a curious fate for a man of whom his frequent antagonist John Adams said resentfully, "I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or its affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine...
...But there is no doubt that he deserves far greater recognition from his adopted country, whose dispute with England he raised to what Common Sense called "the cause of all mankind...
...In no time, his reputation in England was as great as it had been in America...
...C1 64 The American Spectator June 1995...
...Americans respect the heroes of the war for independence, but their reverence is reserved for those who built the nation...
...So he returned to America, where no welcome awaited him...
...Like the Declaration, it helped to convert a battle for home rule into a struggle for the rights of man...
...A phenomenal 150,000 copies appeared in print, and its plain words and radical message Stephen Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune...
...Another factor is his radical democratic ideology, which made him comfortable in France but put him at odds with American revolutionaries who saw their cause as an effort to reclaim ancient liberties...
...Before the mistake was discovered, Robespierre fell from power, the Reign of Terror abruptly ended, and Paine regained his freedom...
...But Paine's door was open when it was marked...
...Also annoying is a heavy-handed stress on what he sees as Paine's advocacy of measures that seem to presage the welfare state...
...He rooted openly for the French dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, to invade England and destroy what was, after all, a constitutional monarchy...
...He was fired twice from his job (odd for a future American revolutionary) as an excise tax collector, saw his first wife and child die in labor, went bankrupt, and never consummated his marriage to his second wife, from whom he was legally separated when he emigrated to the colonies in 1774...
...There was much in Paine's life that makes him unappealing as an American hero—his indolence, his chronic (if often justified) self-pity, his frequent drunkenness, his iconoclastic views on politics and religion...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
