Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic

Notes

215 Notes Abbreviations AAS American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. APS American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia MCC Mathew Carey Correspondence, Lea & Febiger Records, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia MCLB Mathew Carey Letter Books, Lea & Febiger Records, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PRO Public Records Office, London Introduction 1. James Perhouse to John Perhouse, undated, James Perhouse Papers, APS. 2. See, e.g., Elkins and McKitrick, The Age of Federalism; Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution; and Miller, The Federalist Era. 3. For accounts of the American response to Paine’s return, see Keane, Tom Paine, 455–63; and Hawke, Paine, 353–56, 365–71. 4. Paine, Letters from Thomas Paine to the Citizens of the United States, 21. 5. John Perhouse to James Perhouse, 8 April 1803, 4 May 1804, John Perhouse Papers, APS. 6. Saxton, Indispensable Enemy. 7. See Wilentz, Chants Democratic; and Lause, “Unwashed Infidelity.” 8. The best account of Paine’s place in American political life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is Kaye, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. 9. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, 117–21. 10. Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution; Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution , pt. 3. 11. For an account of the 1790s that stresses the dystopian elements of pro-French politics in America, see Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America, chaps. 1–2. 12. See, e.g., Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic; and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. 13. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, 53. 14. See Durey, Transatlantic Radicals in the Early American Republic; Wilson, United Irishmen, United States; Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia, and the Re-Invention of America;Twomey, Jacobins and Jeffersonians. 15. On immigration, see Carter, “Naturalization in Philadelphia”; and Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia, and the Re-Invention of America, 123–24. 216 notes to pages 8–14 16. Joel Barlow to the London Corresponding Society, 6 October 1792, London Corresponding Society Papers,, TS 11/953, PRO. In his widely read description of the French Revolution, Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, Barlow described the popular movements of the day in very similar terms. 17. Paine, Rights of Man. Part the Second, 23. 18. Darnton quoted in Davis, Revolutions, 35. 19. See, e.g., McDonnell, The Politics of War; Kars, Breaking Loose Together; Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution; and Bouton, Taming Democracy. 20. Merrill and Wilentz, The Key of Liberty, 73. 21. Schudson, The Power of News, 40–42. See also Carey, Communication as Culture. 22. The editorial careers of several key figures from the 1790s are detailed in Daniel, Scandal & Civility. 1. Imagining a Nation of Politicians 1. Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half in the United States of America, 70. 2. Moreau de St. Méry’s American Journey, 298. 3. La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels through the United States of North America, 1:25, 399. 4. Wansey, Journal of an Excursion to the United States of North America in the Summer of 1794, 56, 61. The quotations in this paragraph offer but a small sampling of travelers’ descriptions of newspapers and politics. See also Pierre Dupont de Numours’s comment in 1800 that “a large part of the nation reads the Bible, [and] all of it assiduously peruse[s] the newspapers. The fathers read them aloud to their children while the mothers are preparing breakfast” (quoted in Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Era, 630). John Drayton also noted with some surprise that most American farmers read “religious books, the public laws, and the newspapers” (Drayton, Letters Written during a Tour through the Northern and Eastern States of America, 65–67). 5. The most notable exceptions are Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York; Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers; Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes; Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street; Koschnik, Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together; and Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash. Despite this substantial body of work attesting to the vibrancy and complexity of popular politics in the 1790s, the leading syntheses and popular biographies that cover this period still tend to portray popular politics from the perspective of the elite leaders, who almost without exception regarded such aspirational activity as laughable at best and dangerous at worst. 6. The use of the word “politician” to describe non-elites who were interested in politics is impossible to trace systematically, but its usage turns up...