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

Introduction

1 Introduction I arrived at Baltimore on the 30th October, and you can have no idea of the agitation which my arrival occasioned. From New Hampshire to Georgia (an extent of 1500 miles), every newspaper was filled with applause or abuse. —Thomas Paine to Thomas Clio Rickman, March 8, 1803 I N the fall of 1802 America’s taverns, coffee houses, and newspapers buzzed with the news that Thomas Paine was sailing back across the Atlantic after his fifteen-year sojourn in revolutionary Europe. In Philadelphia, James Perhouse, a British merchant who was friends with the city’s leading Federalists, followed Paine’s story closely, even recording in his diary the newspaper accounts of that notorious Jacobin and infidel’s departure from Europe. Perhouse traveled to Baltimore so he could be there when Paine’s ship arrived, and he described the scene in a letter to his brother: News came, that the Ship London . . . was beating up the bay, having the precious charge of Tom Paine on board. Tom upon his landing, immediately proceeded with a fellow passenger to the principal inn, but to the honour of the Landlord he wou’d not give him admittance. He then try’d another inn, but met with the same reception. Nay in this latter tavern the inmates of the house went in a body to the Landlord & told him that his admitting Paine would be a signal for one & all of them to leave his house. In this dilemma Tom was kept wandering thro the town for some time, at last, an honest hibernian, probably of congenial sentiments, admitted him into his tavern, & a paltry one it is. Great numbers of people, waggoners, porters, &c &c crouded round the house to have a peep at this famous animal.¹ This story of Paine’s humiliating return to America has much to tell us about what had happened during his absence. The standard account holds that 2 tom paine’s america Paine’s religious unorthodoxy, expressed most forcefully in his 1795 pamphlet The Age of Reason, drove an increasingly evangelical American public to reject Paine and everything for which he stood.² While accurate to an extent, this religious explanation tells only part of the story. In this book I argue that the reaction against Paine and his writings in the late 1790s—partly spontaneous and partly nurtured by a concerted effort to disgrace him—was also an important chapter in the history of American political thought. As influential Americans buried Paine’s political reputation, they built a moderate, non-revolutionary vision of American politics upon the foundation of his disrepute. Paine and his American supporters refused to lie quietly in the political grave that had been dug for them, but in the counterrevolutionary climate of the late 1790s and early 1800s, they had difficulty being heard or taken seriously, even by many who had once supported Paine’s vision. The author of the Rights of Man—the Atlantic world’s most widely read pamphlet of the 1790s—came to inhabit a newly fashioned space in the public imagination. He was the foreign agitator, the atheistic anarchist who roamed the radical fringe of American politics. But marginality is not the same as irrelevance. Though many of his ideas had been discredited, the image of Thomas Paine remained absolutely central to how Americans defined their political identity. James Perhouse was just one of thousands of people in the new nation who wrote private letters, newspaper essays, and even entire pamphlets representing Paine as a sideshow freak, a political writer not worth being taken seriously.³ The sheer weight of these hyperbolic denunciations, however, suggests that, despite the wishes of many Americans, it was impossible to declare Paine irrelevant and move on. As the chorus of anti-Paine sentiment grew louder, Paine himself detected that his enemies seemed strangely obsessed with him: “I am become so famous among them, they cannot eat or drink without me. I serve them as a standing dish, and they cannot make up a bill of fare if I am not in it.”⁴ Perhouse unintentionally enacted this point in his semiannual letters to his brother in England. Between 1802 and 1810 virtually every letter included some comment on Paine’s latest escapades, only to be followed by an insistence that Paine was “laugh’d at . . . by all sensible men,” and had “sunk into that obscurity which he merits.”⁵ Perhouse, and the other “sensible” Americans who aggressively denounced and ridiculed Paine, protested a...