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2 In the Name of “Justice and Humanity” Thomas Paine’s Ethical Envisionings of the American Republic On January 10, 1776, when Thomas Paine’s Common Sense first appeared in print, its intent was revolutionary, its effects dramatic and disruptive . Almost immediately, Paine’s insurgent pamphlet achieved unprecedented sales, surpassing “those of any of the other 400 pamphlets of the pre-Revolutionary debate: in twenty-five American editions some 120,000 copies were sold in the first three months alone and perhaps half a million in the first year.”1 As one eighteenth-century observer noted, Common Sense “burst ‘forth like a mighty conqueror, bearing down all opposition.’”2 Throughout the colonies , in varying circles of influence and station, the praise for Paine was nearly unanimous: “Nothing could have been better timed than this performance . . . . It has produced most astonishing effects; and been received with vast applause; read by almost every American; and recommended as a work replete with truth.” Paine’s contemporary Benjamin Rush asserted the pivotal importance of Paine’s incendiary text in terms that bear directly upon the themes of this study: “Its effects were sudden and extensive upon the American mind. It was read by public men, repeated in clubs, spouted in Schools, and in one instance, delivered from the pulpit instead of a sermon by a clergyman in Connecticut.”3 That Paine’s Common Sense captured the American imagination is certain . Its arguments in the name of independence and its fearless condemnation of the tyranny of government were stunning elements of its radicalism 1. Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 51. 2. Quoted ibid. 3. Quoted in John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 112. 54 i n th e n am e o f “ j u st i c e a n d hu m a ni t y ” 55 and popular appeal. But Paine was hardly the first to call for American independence , and it is not merely his revolutionary rhetoric that distinguishes his emergence in American consciousness. Thomas Paine is that presence in the American mind and landscape who is called forward in the pre-Revolutionary moments of potential chaos to speak and to answer for the destitute, unknown, Levinasian Others whose voices have yet to be heard. In his charged and accusatory words, a new language surfaces, and an originary political possibility is envisioned. Neither an American farmer nor a Founding Father, Paine’s investment in the American landscape is one of vision and possibility rather than of property or conquest. In Paine’s fervently idealistic vision, America is the “only spot in the political world where the principles of universal reformation could begin,” and where, echoing Crèvecoeur, “Man becomes what he ought to be” (ColW, 548). “It was the cause of America that made me an author,” Paine asserted seven years after the publication of Common Sense. These words suggest his difference from the Crèvecoeurian farmer who is forced into flight as the prospect of war impinges upon his horizon. In the latter moments of Letters, Crèvecoeur’s representation of the American situation is marked by uncertainty and the terrifying trauma of fissure. Farmer James, in the forced departure from his farm and the threatened invasion of his home, undergoes a kind of symbolic death that is revelatory of the chaos that war and revolution entail. The implication of death, as the process through which the existing totality of meaning must perish or be transformed, applies not only to James (whose life is irreparably altered), but to the republic as a whole. Implicit in the advent of war is the shattering of a national identity previously articulated through the paradigm of property and the self-certain identity of the farmer, whose privilege is suddenly subject to question. At the end of Letters, Farmer James runs to the safety of the Indian; yet this safety is housed in a Romantic possibility. The Indian towards whom James flees is the Other whose very being has been relegated to another historical time. When James takes refuge in the culture of Native peoples, he does so to escape the threat of discontinuity, the brutal experience and dislocation of revolution. In other words, he takes refuge out of time, in an ahistorical past prior to the disruptive threat of revolutionary war. In that breach of meaning and historical uncertainty, Thomas Paine comes to voice. Unlike Crèvecoeur, Tom Paine has no...

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