The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Brigenbach.
Depending on whether you reckon by the Julian calendar or the Gregorian calendar, Thomas
Paine was born late in January or early in February of 1737 in Thetford, England, a small
The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit
At 16, in 1753, he brought it off. He shipped out on a privateer, a private warship authorized by the English government to attack and loot commercial vessels sailing under the flag of any nation with whom England was legally at war.
England was then at war with France in North America in the conflict Americans know as the French and Indian War, which would evolve in a couple of years into the Seven Years War, a truly worldwide war that included battles in such far-flung places as Europe, Africa, India, South America and the Philippines, as well as North America.
All the major European powers of the period participated in the Seven Years' War.
More than a million people lost their lives in it.
And the map of the world underwent major changes as a result.
Canada passed from France to England.
Florida passed from Spain to England.
But when Thomas Paine signed on as a crewman on a privateer in 1753,
all this was in the future.
For the next few years, he and his fellow crewmen concentrated on robbing whatever French commercial vessels they could locate, and they seemed to have done pretty well for themselves.
The costs of commissioning privateers were borne by private investors who hoped to make a profit from the value of the goods seized by their crew members.
Politicians liked them, too. They argued that privateering was less destructive and wasteful than conventional warfare, since the privateer's goal was to capture ships rather than sink them.
Also, and more to the point, privateering was a way of mobilizing armed ships and sailors without spending public money or commissioning naval officers.
Craig Nelson, author of the 2006 book Thomas Paine, Enlightenment, Revolution and the Birth of Modern Nations, told WNYC interviewer Leonard Lopate in 2007 that Thomas Paine's brief career as a privateer was a definite financial success.
When Paine was a young man, he made a lot of money during the Seven Years' War working as a pirate.
And he took two years off and really educated himself in the ideas of the Enlightenment, primarily the theories of Isaac Newton.
And this self-education, which also Benjamin Franklin and George Washington did, is really what made him a figure of his time.
He was able to impress very successful, very famous men, starting with Franklin most importantly.
Payne's meeting with Franklin was still some years in the future, however, for now he had his education to get on with.
He moved to London and spent his two years hanging around bookshops and discussing ideas with the often rather widely read and knowledgeable types he met in such places,
something that became a lifelong habit for him. In 1759, at the age of 22, he married a servant girl.
By then, his two years as a full-time student behind him, he had gone back to corset-making.
It was work he knew.
It enabled him to pay the bills.
But he didn't like it any better than he had as a teenager.
After his wife and their infant child both died less than a year after his marriage,
he began struggling once more to put corset-making behind him.
He tried working as a cobbler, a cabinet-maker, a school teacher.
He failed at everything he tried.
He wasn't as expert a worker in leather or wood as he was at making corsets, much as
he hated it, and since his work wasn't so expert in those trades, his inability to get
along with people raised further problems for him.
As Harvard historian Jill Lepore put it recently in an article on pain in the New Yorker, even
at his best, pain was rough and unpolished.
He was plain-spoken, direct, tactless, blunt. People might put up with that from a man whose
work was of the very highest quality, but they wouldn't put up with it from a man whose
work was only average. Nor were headmasters and fellow teachers too keen on it. As Craig
Nelson put it in that 2007 interview on WNYC,
He made a lot of people mad. He was something of a hard-nosed kind of guy when it came to
philosophical purity, so he made a lot of enemies.
And so it was that in 1762, at the age of 25, Paine turned to thievery once again, this
time as a tax collector for the English government. To his credit, he hated that occupation at
at least as much as he hated sewing whale bones into corsets, and fortunately an opportunity
to escape another despised line of work soon presented itself.
He was living in London, in a boarding house operated by an elderly tobacconist who owned
and managed his own tobacco shop.
The tobacconist, whose health was not good, died.
Payne married the man's daughter and took over the tobacco shop.
And his new career was short-lived.
He lost the shop and had to go back to tax collecting and corset making.
By the summer of 1774 he had had enough.
He was 37 years old and poor as the proverbial church mouse.
He had been forced to sell almost everything he owned to pay his debts.
He and his second wife had split up and gone their separate ways.
He had no prospects, but more corset-making and more tax-collecting.
Willing to try almost anything else, he presented himself to Benjamin Franklin, who was living
in London at that time as a sort of lobbyist or diplomat seeking to influence English policies
that affected the colony of Pennsylvania.
Payne talked with the 68-year-old Franklin and made a major impression on him.
As I say, Paine was plain-spoken, tactless, blunt, but he was also insightful, even brilliant.
He asked Franklin for a letter of recommendation to someone in the American colonies who might
provide him with work of some sort.
Then he packed up what few possessions he could still call his own and boarded a ship
for America.
The voyage over did not go well.
According to Jill Lepore, Paine had sickened with typhus during the journey.
He arrived in Philadelphia in December 1774, so weak that he had to be carried off the
ship.
What saved his life was a letter found in his pocket.
The bearer, Mr. Thomas Paine, is very well recommended to me as an ingenious, worthy
young man.
It was signed by Benjamin Franklin.
was better than a bag of gold.
Payne recovered his health with the aid of a Philadelphia doctor who was a friend of
Franklin's.
With the aid of his letter from Franklin, he also found work, mostly as a school teacher
and as a freelance writer for local magazines and newspapers.
And he quickly slipped into his old habit of hanging around bookshops.
It was in this way that he met Robert Aitken, a Scot who had come to Philadelphia five years
was before and set up as a bookseller and bookbinder. In 1774, the year of Paine's
arrival on the scene, Aitken had added a print shop to his establishment. Eventually he would
produce the first English-language Bible printed in the colonies. For now, however, in 1774,
he had decided he wanted to establish a new magazine, which he would call the Pennsylvania
magazine. He hired Thomas Paine as editor. Under Paine's editorship, the new
magazine quickly earned a remarkable degree of influence in the colonies, and
Paine himself was able to meet and befriend such men as George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, John Randolph, and Samuel Adams, with all of
whom he seems to have talked at length. The more he talked and listened, the more
More convinced he became that the American colonists needed to act swiftly and decisively,
lest the opportunity for full independence from England pass them by.
He quit the Pennsylvania Magazine after less than a year as editor to write a pamphlet
he hoped would make his case as persuasively as it could be made.
It was published in January 1776 under the title Common Sense.
It was a huge success.
It sold like hotcakes, in both its original edition and in pirated editions issued by
printers throughout the colonies.
By April of 1776, according to Howard Fast, almost every adult in the thirteen colonies
had read, or had read to him, some part of the booklet.
In December of 1775, only wild-eyed radicals called for independence.
Six months later, only the most conservative elements, and few they were, of the American
Popular Front, stood out against independence.
In that six-month period, the country united itself, tightened itself, and set its face
solidly against the enemy, the loose alliance of thirteen far-flung colonies becoming a
solid coalition.
And by testimony of many, not a little of this was due to the slim book Tom Paine wrote.
Paine was, Fast wrote, catapulted overnight to a position as foremost protagonist of the
rebel cause.
By the end of the year, Paine had become, as Jill Lepore puts it, the first embedded
journalist in American history.
You might also describe him as the first syndicated columnist.
He was following General Washington's ragtag Continental Army, which had dwindled in the
mere year and a half of its existence from 20,000 enthusiastic soldiers to what Fast calls
a few hundred beaten and hopeless men.
And Paine got to know those men very well.
He lived with the men, Fast writes, marched with them, spoke with them, pleaded with them.
The idea was that he would work up his experiences with the Continental Army in a series of articles,
The American Crisis, which would appear simultaneously in major newspapers throughout the colonies.
Although according to Fast, Paine never admitted how bad things were, he saw very clearly indeed
just how bad they really were.
We knew from bitter personal experience that, as Fast puts it, December of 1776 seemed close
to the end.
And so it was that in December of 76, camped in New Jersey with Washington and his troops,
Payne wrote the first of his syndicated columns about the war, the first of his so-called
crisis papers, the one that begins famously, 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 by 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.
A few paragraphs on, Payne stressed his firm opposition to any initiation of force against
the English by the American colonists, even as part of an effort to win the independence
he himself so fervently supported.
"'Not all the treasures of the world,' he wrote, "'could have induced me to support
an offensive war, for I think it murder.
And 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
Howard Fast reports that Washington read this essay and was tremendously moved and ordered
it to be read aloud to the assembled brigades.
Thereafter it appeared in the newspapers.
Then it was independently printed in dozens of editions in dozens of cities, folded and
sold as a pamphlet and posted everywhere as a bill. It was memorized by thousands, and
the phrases summer soldier and sunshine patriot were on every tongue. It became the battle
cry of the day. Altogether, according to Fast, it had, if anything, more of a success than
common sense. Flash forward a few years. It's now 1783.
The war is over.
Payne, now 46 years old, is given a 300-acre farm which had been seized from loyalists
during the war years.
It's near New Rochelle, New York, on Long Island Sound, northeast of New York City on
the way to Connecticut.
He lives there a few years, then travels to France in 1787 and to England in 1788.
He has almost as big a name and almost as many fans in those countries as he has in
the United States.
It was Paine, by the way, who came up with the phrase United States of America and suggested
it in one of his crisis papers as a name for the new nation to be created when the colonies
had won their independence.
It was in London in 1791 that Paine, now in his mid-fifties, would meet the radical journalist,
by the novelist, editor, bookseller and writer of children's books, William Godwin, who was at that time working on his inquiry concerning political justice and its influence on modern morals and manners.
The inquiry was published in 1793 and went on to be widely considered what the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the founding work of philosophical anarchism.
At the same time, Payne met Mary Wollstonecraft, a freelance journalist and translator who
would publish her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, and thus make a very plausible
case for herself as the founder of individualist feminism.
Later in the 1790s, Godwin and Wollstonecraft would marry.
Their daughter, Mary Shelley, would become world famous as the author of the novel, Frankenstein.
Interestingly, back in the late 1950s, Robert Lefebvre, a major figure in the early years
of the modern libertarian movement, argued that Frankenstein was really a fable about
what happened when man invented the state, that is, coercive government.
Government alone of all man's inventions is capable of independent life, Lefebvre wrote.
Government alone, like Mrs Shelley's terrifying creation of the monster born in Frankenstein's
mind, has the power and the ability to turn upon its creators and destroy them.
And given the atmosphere Mary Shelley grew up in, the kinds of political ideas she had
In the rights of man, fifteen years ago,
Years later, he wrote that the great part of that order which reigns among mankind is
not the effect of government.
It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man.
It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished.
The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts
and the influence of civilized community upon each other create that great chain of connection which holds it together.
The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation prospers by the aid which each receives from the other and from the whole.
Common interest regulates their concerns and forms their law, and the laws which common usage ordains have a greater influence than the laws of government.
In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.
By way of example, Paine pointed out that, for upwards of two years from the commencement of the American War
and to a longer period in several of the American states, there were no established forms of government.
The old governments had been abolished and the country was too much occupied in defense
to employ its attention in establishing new governments.
Yet during this interval, order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe.
The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act.
A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.
It is not true, according to Paine, that the abolition of any formal government is the
dissolution of society, for in fact the abolition of formal government acts by a contrary impulse
and brings society the closer together.
For it is but a few general laws that civilized life requires, and those of such common usefulness
that whether they are enforced by the forms of government or not, the effect will be nearly
the same.
To no one's surprise, the rights of man was suppressed by the English government.
By the beginning of 1792, it had become a crime to be found with a copy of the rights
of man in one's possession.
A warrant was issued for Payne's arrest. He had written The Rights of Man in defense of the French Revolution in reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which the famed member of parliament who had supported the American Revolution severely criticized the French one.
The rights of man was very popular in France.
Paine himself was at least as famous there as he was in England or even America.
So, Paine fled England for France.
When he arrived, he was celebrated as a hero of the revolution and elected to the National Assembly,
the body that had conferred honorary French citizenship upon him only a month earlier.
But if Paine had problems getting along with people and making enemies in England and English-speaking America, imagine the difficulties he confronted in a country where he didn't even speak the language.
According to his biographer, Craig Nelson, his biggest mistake in the France of the early 1790s was choosing not to affiliate with the Jacobins, the faction that controlled the revolution during the reign of terror.
Payne became involved with a group that we know as the Girondins, who are the group that
came to power between Lafayette and Robespierre.
And the Girondins were purged by Robespierre and his followers and Payne was among them.
But because he was so popular and his writings were so popular across Europe and because
he was associated with the American cause, the French didn't know what to do with him
during the reign of terror.
So finally they threw him in prison on these trumped up charges of being a foreigner trying
to wreak havoc in France and I think left him there to die.
This is something they did when they didn't know that they should chop someone's head
off.
And so it was that Paine wrote his last book, The Age of Reason, in prison.
The Age of Reason, as Craig Nelson explained back in 2007 to WNYC interviewer Leonard Lopate,
is about religion.
From the Age of Reason period, it was very common for people to be a religion that was
called deism, where because of Newton's theories about math underlying the cosmos, people believed
that what was called a first being or providence or the invisible hand had created the world,
but you couldn't pray to him and there wasn't really a reason to have a church.
And this is what Paine and Jefferson and Roche-Pierre and Napoleon and almost every significant
person of the 18th century believed, and this is what Age of Reason is about, frankly.
The Accusation that Paine's Arguments were Arguments for Atheism was spread far and wide
by the clergy and other officials and employees of the churches Paine regarded as unnecessary
and inadvisable.
The minions of organized religion caused Paine a good deal of trouble and torment during
his last years on this earth.
and as Craig Nelson notes, The Age of Reason sold very well indeed, just as his earlier
books had done.
He was the biggest best-selling author of the 18th century.
The Age of Reason was the second biggest best-seller, Rites of Man was first and Common
Sense was third.
Why was Payne so successful an author?
According to Craig Nelson, it was because he wrote in what was, for the 18th century,
a highly unusual style.
More specifically, Nelson argues, Payne wrote for the ear rather than for the eye.
Actually, he wrote To Be Read Aloud. Since so many people were illiterate or had trouble reading at this time, reading was still something for the upper middle class and upper class of the country.
So he actually wrote To Be Read Aloud, and that's a hallmark of good fine writing today, that you hear the writer's voice when you read something.
Paine was eventually released from prison, but he was trapped in France for years.
He couldn't go back to England where he was a wanted man, and he couldn't try to sail for America
for fear his French ship would be interdicted by the British Navy
and he'd be put under arrest and dragged back to England.
Finally, in 1802, at the personal invitation of Thomas Jefferson, now President of the United States,
Thomas Paine returned to America. Seven years later, he died. His name and reputation be smirched by accusations of atheism on the part of those who didn't understand, or pretended not to understand, the age of reason.
Thomas Paine wasn't a fully consistent libertarian. He understood and very memorably articulated the basic principles of libertarianism.
Almost alone among the founding fathers, he spoke out unequivocally against slavery.
But he also advocated government-funded old age pensions and an international organization much like the United Nations to enforce world peace.
On the other hand, where in the 18th century are you going to find a fully consistent libertarian?
You won't. In the 18th century, a man like Payne is the best you're likely to do.
And for my money, he's plenty good enough. He grasped the big picture.
If he got some of the details wrong, well, none of us is perfect.
This is Jeff Riggenbach.