On Tom Paine

...But these biographies of Paine all tended to concentrate their attention on his life and influence in America, neglecting his equally great and intellectually important activity in revolutionary France...

...In his biography of Paine, Vincent even quotes some unpublished writings of Paine he has discovered in French provincial archives, where they had never been previously consulted...

...Much of American political history can be interpreted as a long series of deliberate betrayals of some of the ideals that inspired most of the troops that fought and won our War of Independence...

...A reading of as factual, well-documented, and well-rounded a biography of Thomas Paine as this one should soon convince one that the United States, if most of Paine's political and economic principles had been applied and respected, would certainly not now be, after so many betrayals of his principles, what it has ultimately become under our present administration...

...He fought also for the abolition of the death penalty, and his suggestions for the reform of all taxation, though they may at first have been amateurish and not very practical, had the abolition of all poverty as their ultimate goal, so as to allow the children of the working class to obtain a decent education and all older workers to be assured of an old-age pension...

...Vincent points out, of course, that Paine's revolutionary ideas soon aroused considerable antagonism among some of his American contemporaries, above all among the Federalists...

...But by then, he had already embarked on the gradual shift of ideas and policies that led him to abandon so much that had inspired his troops during the Revolutionary War...

...SPRING • 1988 • 231 Notebook Its author is a scholar in the history of American political ideas, a translator of Paine, and the author of two previously published and philosophically very clear interpretations of the often somewhat confusing ideas of the late Paul Goodman in the fields of politics and education...

...Some years later, one of his most violent opponents, Alexander Hamilton, was killed in a duel...

...Later, however, when Paine was in danger of death as a prisoner in revolutionary France during its Reign of Terror, Washington failed to intervene on Paine's behalf with the French authorities...

...Among his many other proposed reforms, Paine had advocated that dueling be forbidden by law...

...His ideas on land tenure, in particular, were very original, though similar in some respects to those formulated in traditional Koranic law...

...Paine had even hoped that Washington might intercede officially on their behalf...

...Jefferson and Madison remained sympathetic to Paine at all times but often found him politically embarrassing, like their friend the poet Philip Freneau, who was a passionate admirer of Paine and, for this reason and some others, a scoundrel in the eyes of Washington...

...The Christian churches agreed to condemn him as an atheist, although Paine had actually expressed repeatedly and clearly his faith as a deist who believed in God, but not in the literature, the hierarchy or the liturgy of any organized church...

...A new French biographer of Paine, Bernard Vincent, has now amended this omission in Thomas Paine, ou la Religion de la Liberte (Paris: Aubier, 1987...

...Toward the end of the nineteenth century a few attempts were made to rehabilitate him...

...As a delegate to the French Revolutionary Convention, he thus argued at great length and in vain against the death penalty for Louis the Sixteenth and his queen, proposing instead that they remain imprisoned until the end of the war in which France was then engaged, after which they should be exiled, together with their children, to the United States...

...yet he nevertheless seems to have expected Washington to intervene on his behalf, if only in memory of their former friendship, their comradeship in arms, and the services he had rendered the American Revolution in its hour of need...

...Paine's greatest American enemies were Alexander Hamilton, of course, and Gouverneur Morris, who played a very devious and none too honorable part as the diplomatic representative of the United States in revolutionary France, in Paine's imprisonment there, and in delaying or discouraging any official American action to obtain his release...

...Paine also advocated the abolition of the slave trade, the liberation of all slaves, and even equal rights as citizens for the American Indians...

...American biographers of Thomas Paine remained, for nearly a century after his death, almost all malevolent...

...But history sometimes has its own bitter ironies...

...While they were fighting, these ideals were all expressed in the writings of Thomas Paine, and they were so widely read, and had so decisive an impact on the morale of Washington's troops at a time when the war had taken a disastrous turn, that Washington expressed openly his admiration and friendship for Paine...

...There, he firmly believed, they would be welcomed out of gratitude for their very considerable aid during the American War of Independence...

...Should these improvements be allowed to deteriorate, the land that once had thus been improved should become common property again...

...Paine had for some time been well aware of this change and had expressed his disagreements with Washington quite openly before his imprisonment...

...Although he found himself from time to time obliged to change slightly this program of economic reforms, he stuck by his guns on many of his other basic principles, such as the abolition of slavery and of the death penalty, until his death...

...Vincent produces ample documentary evidence of the duplicity of Gouverneur Morris, who turns out to have been a veritable scoundrel and, in some respects, the prototype of many of our equally unscrupulous or servile diplomatic representatives abroad under various administrations...

...Paine never forgave Washington his failure to intervene and later became involved in some all-too-personal bitter controversies with him...

...His previous disappointments over Washington's gradual political evolution toward a kind of conservative opportunism then began to develop into increasingly open and often cantankerous personal enmity...

...Paine argued that the land itself was common property, suggesting thereby that it was part of the Deity's creation and entrusted to man like the air or the seas and that only the improvements made by man on the land, such as buildings, crops, and planted trees, could be personal property that might be bought or sold...