Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (review)

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776) famously inspired the American Revolution. Within three decades, however, “the most widely read theorist in the age of democratic revolution [had] become persona non grata in the modern world’s first self-described democracy” (3). Cotlar seeks to understand that transformation. More broadly, he explores not only the course of a potentially radical mode of political development that was not taken in the United States but also how, by the time of Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration, that mode had been abandoned and de-legitimized even by its putative friends.

In this important book, Cotlar examines the newspaper editors, printers, and booksellers who in the early 1790s attempted to create a nation of citizen readers, an activist community striving to implement Paine’s brand of egalitarianism. These writers were interested more in influencing ideological development than in political organizing. They consciously tried to craft a community of the democratic “many” whose interests stood against the privileged “few.” In fact, not until the late 1790s did they turn primarily to electioneering. Crucial to this venture was the identity that they constructed as transatlantic, cosmopolitan democrats. Conceiving of themselves as citizens of the world, developing radical notions of a democratic political economy, and taking their arguments directly to the public, these writers offered an alternative political path, a possible future that receded even before the decade was out.

Their egalitarian democratic vision was snuffed out for four reasons: (1) Its link to French Jacobinism made it toxic through guilt by association. (2) Events such as the Whiskey Rebellion and the French Terror furthered perceptions that it was dangerous and illegitimate. (3) Federalists, applying “Jacobin” as an all-purpose term of derision, mounted a concerted campaign against it, which, in the contested 1790s, succeeded in winning public opinion. (4) Moderate Jeffersonians, who might have championed this vision, instead saw it as politically lethal, joining Federalists in expunging it from political discourse as something “foreign,” thus un-American and dangerous.

The radical democratic moment faded rapidly. But that it existed at all is a major point of this book. Cotlar suggests, contrary to conventional historiographical wisdom, that the Constitutional settlement of 1787/88 was not a permanent counterrevolutionary rollback of democracy. As he demonstrates, a potentially viable democracy on Paine’s terms found articulate advocates during the early 1790s. Rather, it was the 1800/01 triumph of the moderate Jeffersonians who soon joined with Federalists in declaring “Jacobinism” illegitimate and unacceptable that marked the American Thermidor. The irony that this triumph occurred with the victory of “Jeffersonian democracy” is not lost on Cotlar, who writes that key Jeffersonians and their opponents “sheared the word ‘democracy’ of its previously revolutionary . . . even levelling implications”; what was once called democratic came to be dismissed as “Jacobinical” (214). Cotlar laments these developments and the “fundamentally constricted” range of meanings for democracy in the early republic (4). Furthermore, this marginalization of radical democracy forces us to reappraise the nature of Jeffersonian democracy.

Cotlar’s methodology involves the close reading and contextualization of newspapers published by the radical democratic opposition during the 1790s. He pays close attention to the intellectual content of these writings, which circulated radical European ideas and stressed the interconnectedness of democrats worldwide. Literary and social-science theories also inform his discussions, which remain grounded in historical research despite their theoretical orientation.

This provocative, if brief, work makes a persuasive case for the transatlantic dimensions of the 1790s political world. It also raises fascinating unexplored questions: What relationship did these radical Jeffersonian editors have with Jefferson himself in the 1790s, or with Jeffersonian Republican congressmen? What did Jefferson think of their writings? Were there links between the radical papers and other grass-roots democratic organizations besides the Democratic Societies? A fuller epilogue might have addressed these issues, but Cotlar’s achievement is significant nevertheless.