Volume 4, Chapter 28, The Sudden Emergence of Tom Paine
At the beginning of 1776, New England was ready for independence.
So were such leading radicals as Richard Henry Lee and Patrick Henry of Virginia,
Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina, and army leaders such as George Washington and Charles Lee.
But the bulk of the colonies and the Continental Congress were not.
One of the main stumbling blocks to a commitment to independence was personal loyalty to the
British Crown.
There has always been a political taboo of almost mystical force against attacking the
head of state, and always the convenient though emasculating custom of attributing his sins
to His Evil or Incompetent Advisors. Such long-standing habits impeded a rational analysis
of the deeds of King George III. Furthermore, the old and obsolete Whig ideal of virtual
independence under a figurehead king of both Britain and America could only be shattered
if the king were to be attacked personally. To rupture this taboo, to smash the icon,
And so to liberate America from its thrall required a special type of man, a man fearless,
courageous and radical, an intellectual with a gift for dramatic and exciting rhetoric and
unfettered by the many ties that bind a man to the existing system.
At this strategic hour, America found just such a man, Thomas Paine.
Unlike most of the other eminent leaders of his day, there was nothing in the least aristocratic
in the background of Tom Paine, the son of a poor English corset-maker.
He was forced to educate himself for lack of schooling.
After serving a checkered career as corset-maker, sailor and petty bureaucrat, he finally rose
to the status of a minor English tax collector.
He was soon characteristically in trouble with the authorities. Chosen by his fellow
excise collectors in 1772 to petition Parliament for higher wages, he was curtly dismissed
from the service by the authorities. Unemployed, bankrupt, the unhappy pain began his life
again at the age of 37 by emigrating to America, armed only with a letter of introduction he
He Quickly Proved Himself an Outstanding Writer and Publicist and Quickly Made His Reputation as a Libertarian by Publishing a Blistering Attack on the Institute of Human Rights and Human Rights
In African Slavery in America, written shortly after his arrival and published in early March 1775, Payne pointed out that the African natives were often peaceful and industrious farmers, brought into slavery either by European man theft or by outsiders inducing the African chieftains to war on each other and to sell their prisoners into slavery. He also pointed out that
So riddled the common excuse that purchase and ownership of existing slaves was somehow
moral in contrast to the wickedness of the original enslavement. Such men may as well
join with a known band of robbers, buy their ill-got goods and help on the trade. Ignorance
is no more pleadable in one case than the other, and as the true owner has the right
to Reclaim His Goods that Were Stolen and Sold, so the slave, who is proper owner of
his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold.
The slaves, being human, have not lost their natural right to their freedom and therefore
concluded pain, the governments should in justice set them free and punish those who
hold them in slavery.
Shortly after this article was published, the First Abolitionist Society, the Society for
the Promotion of the Abolition of Slavery, was established at Philadelphia.
Largely Quaker, it included the deist Paine as one of its members.
Lexington and Concord moved Paine to turn his talents to the radical revolutionary cause.
In July, he urged upon the Quakers the justice of taking up arms in defense of liberty, so
so long as disarmament is not universal.
He denounced the British government as highwaymen, setting forth to plunder American property.
Therefore, in self-defense, arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer
in awe.
For the British, nothing but arms or miracles can reduce them to reason and moderation.
And in October he combined his anti-slavery and pro-independence views to castigate Great
Britain for trafficking in human flesh, and he looked forward to an independence that
would end the slave trade and ultimately all of slavery.
All this culminated in Paine's tremendous blow for American independence.
This fiery and brilliant pamphlet Common Sense, off the press in early January 1776, spread
like wildfire throughout the colonies. A phenomenal 120,000 copies were sold in the space of three
months. Passages were reprinted in newspapers all over America. All this meant that nearly
Every literate home was familiar with the pamphlet. Tom Paine had, at a single blow,
become the voice of the American Revolution and the greatest single force in propelling
it to completion and independence. Charles Lee wrote jubilantly and prophetically to
Washington that, I never saw such a masterly, irresistible performance, it willing concurrence
with the transcendent folly and wickedness of the ministry give the coup de grace to Great
Britain. And Washington himself endorsed the sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning
of common sense. Common sense called squarely and openly for American independence and pointed
to the choice for Americans as essentially between independence and slavery. But what
For the first time, the king, the royal brute of Great Britain, was pinpointed as the major enemy, the king himself, not just his wicked advisers, the king's advisers were attacked as being enthralled to him.
Pain had quashed the taboo, and Americans flocked to imbibe his liberation.
The King's advisors were attacked as being enthralled to him.
Paine had quashed the taboo, and Americans flocked to imbibe his liberating message.
Not stopping at indicting George III, Paine pressed on to a comprehensive attack on the very principle of monarchy.
The ancient Jews had prospered without kings and had suffered under them, he wrote,
wrote, following the great English tradition of Milton and Sidney, and Holland flourished
as a republic. But more important, the division between kings and subjects is unnatural, and
bears no relation to the natural distinction between rich and poor on the market. How indeed
had the natural equality of men before the law become transposed into subjection to a
We should find the first of them, kings, nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or preeminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers, and who by increasing in power and extending his depredations overawed the quiet and defenseless.
And now the kings were but crowned ruffians. In this way, Paine not only laid bare the roots of monarchy, but provided a brilliant insight into the nature and origins of the state itself.
He had made a crucial advance in libertarian theory upon the social contract doctrine of
the origin of the state.
While he followed Locke in holding that the state should be confined to the protection
of man's natural rights, he saw clearly that actual states had not originated in this way
or for this purpose.
Instead, they had been born in naked conquest and plunder.
Another vital contribution of common sense to libertarian thought was Paine's sharp,
quasi-anarchistic distinction between society and government.
Indeed, Paine opened his pamphlet with these words.
Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave little or no distinction
Society is produced by our wants, and governed by our wickedness. The one encourages intercourse,
the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society
in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary
and Evil. In its worst state, an intolerable one, for when we suffer the same miseries
by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity
is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like
dress, is the badge of lost innocence. The palaces of kings are built upon the ruins
of the Bowers of Paradise.
In addition to limiting brilliantly the nature and origins of monarchy and the state, calling
boldly for independence and attacking George III, Payne set forth the proper foreign policy
for an independent America. Here he argued that the connection with Great Britain entailed
Put upon Americans burdens rather than rewards. The Americans should not be tempted by the
prospect of Anglo-American domination of the world. On the contrary, America would vastly
benefit from throwing open its trade and ports freely to all nations. Further, the alliance
with Britain tends directly to involve this continent in European wars and quarrels and
and set us at variance with nations against whom we have neither anger nor complaint.
As Europe is our market for trade, we ought to form no partial connection with any part
of it. It is the true interest of America to steer clear of European contentions, which
she can never do while she is made the make-weight in the scale of British politics. Thus, pain
Pain adumbrated for America what was later to be called a foreign policy of isolationism,
but which might also be called neutrality or neutralism.
Whatever it is called, it is essentially the libertarian policy of free trade
and peaceful coexistence with all nations.
It is an America that acts as a moral beacon for mankind rather than as judge or policeman.
In addition to all these achievements, Payne managed to outline in this brief pamphlet
the internal political program of the libertarian wing of the American Revolution,
the new democratic system naturally created by the Revolution.
This consisted of rule by democratically elected legislatures established by proportionate representation and responsible to checks upon them by the people.
The aim of such government was simply to protect every man's natural rights of liberty and property,
securing freedom and property to all men and, above all things, the free exercise of religion.
He saw that the superficially plausible lucabrations of such Tory writers as Montesquieu and Blackstone, with their talk of mixed constitutions and checks and balances, masked the repression and hobbling of the democratic element by unchecked aristocracy and oligarchy.
Human reason, he implied, must be brought to bear on the myths and accretions of government itself.
The much-vaunted British Constitution was a tangle of complexities, and hence vague and devoid of a focus of responsibility.
In effect, he charged, the so-called checks and balances have led to the aggrandizement of monarchial tyranny over the other branches of government.
Indeed, at any given time for government to act at all, one of the branches must predominate and outweigh the checks and balances.
This argument is reminiscent of Edmund Burke's blast against the idea of mixed and balanced government in his anarchistic first work, The Vindication of Natural Society.
Pain concluded the bulk of his magnificent pamphlet with these stirring lines,
Oh, ye that love mankind, ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth.
Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe.
Oh, receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.
Sounding the clarion call for the democratic libertarian cause as the party of hope, the
party of progress, in short, the party of a secular, rational messianism, he eloquently
hailed the impending future.
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
The birthday of a new world is at hand.
The explosive success of common sense emboldened the radicals to follow with pamphlets and
articles extolling the goal of independence, excoriating King George as a full-blooded
Nero, and anticipating the great benefits of free trade with all the world that would
flow from an independent status. That the Tories, the quasi-Tories and conservatives
who opposed independence should abominate common sense was, of course, to be expected,
reviling it as that artful, insidious and pernicious work of sedition and frenzy.
Several Tories hastened to publish pamphlets of rebuttal, warning of the ruin, horror and
desolation that would stem from abandoning the happy and peaceful status of a colony
to pursue the romantic chimera of independence. Independence was roundly denounced as absurdly
impractical and utopian, a project of ambitious innovators who are attempting to hurry into
a scene of anarchy. Their scheme of independence is visionary.
It is true that Paine wanted the polity to approximate as closely as possible the libertarian
State of Nature. In that sense, as Halavy pointed out, the principle of the natural
identity of interest when applied to the solution of the problem of politics seems logically
to lead to the anarchistic thesis. Conservative landed oligarchs such as Landon Carter and
and Henry Lawrence considered the pain pamphlet as indecent, rascally and dangerous. But the
Tories and conservatives soon found that their attacks on independence were in vain, that
there is a fascination belonging to the word liberty that beguiles the minds of the vulgar.