The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine

Appendix: A Note on Paine’s American National Consciousness

APPENDIX A NOTE ON PAINE’S AMERICAN NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS Despite his English birth in 1737 and his longtime residency in Paris, which included his service in the French National Convention , after his arrival in the colonies in 1774, Thomas Paine considered himself an American citizen and patriot.1 At the same time, we often find him speaking of “universal civilization” and referring to himself as “a citizen of the world.”2 Can we reconcile these two incongruous thoughts? Because Paine articulated a democratic vision of the world, some commentators are convinced that he possessed only an international consciousness. Thomas Walker argues, for example, that “Paine was the first to oVer an integrated, modern, cosmopolitan vision of international relations,” an assessment that echoes the position of David Fitzsimons and Mark Philp.3 Ian Dyck confirms this view when he says that “Paine put little store in these [national] citizenships , preferring to identify himself as a citizen of the world who held national identifications in contempt.”4 The question is then to inquire into how Paine presents his views of national consciousness . First, was Paine concerned with nationality at all, and second, what did it mean to him to be an American? The answer to these two critical questions will help us understand just how and why he saw himself as an American. 157 ;l: When Paine first immigrated to America in 1774, he was most likely uncertain as to his nationality. During his first thirteen years in Philadelphia, from 1774 to 1787, he, like his fellow citizens , was gradually developing an American sensibility. Most Americans, until they realized that reconciliation with England was impossible, believed that they were English, with all the rights and liberties accorded to Englishmen. At the same time, their sense of a national consciousness gave them the distinct sense of what they were not. Hence, they typically distinguished between a “new” American world and an “old” European or English one. Their national character had an entirely diVerent emphasis from their patriotism because national consciousness involved more than love of one’s country. It included an identity with one’s nation, its values, its language, and its future. Patriotism lacked the intensity of identification that citizens felt toward their own people, their mores, their language, and their destiny. Writing from London in 1775 to his friend Joseph Galloway, Benjamin Franklin best summarized this view when he expressed his sense of American self-identity in negative terms by depicting the crisis in terms of the old and new worlds: When I consider the extream Corruption prevalent among all Orders of Men in this old rotten State, and the glorious publick Virtue so predominant in our rising Country, I cannot but apprehend more Mischief than Benefit from a closer Union. I fear they will drag us after them in all their plundering Wars, which their desperate Circumstances, Injustice and Rapacity, may prompt them to undertake; and their wide-wasting Prodigality and Profusion is a Gulph that will swallow up every aid we may distress ourselves to aVord them. Here Numberless and needless Places, enormous Salaries, Pensions, Perquisites, Bribes, groundless Quarrels, foolish Expeditions, false Accounpts and no Accounpts, Contracts and Jobbs, devour all Revenue, and produce continual Necessity in the Midst of natural Plenty.5 Americans like Franklin and Paine perceived the diVerences between the two worlds, separated by the great gulf of the Atlantic, as serious and deep, perilous and unfathomable. Franklin’s words came at the moment when Paine was searching for his own roots in his newly adopted nation. In Common Sense, he emphasized the same diVerences Franklin had expressed Appendix 158 setting Americans apart from their English cousins. In his famous , often quoted statement—“we [Americans] have it in our power to begin the world over again”—he told his new countrymen that America was diVerent because of its newness and that its diVerences distinguished it from those nations of the old world that Franklin condemned (120). During the Revolution, Paine was unequivocally a patriot, as can be seen throughout his American Crisis series, but to be a patriot does not necessarily connote a national consciousness. It would take something more than the willingness of a people to cast aside the feeling that they were no longer English. The Continental Army’s retreat from the Hudson stimulated words from Paine’s pen about patriotism that are timeless. His ringing words at...