The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History
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Harry Washington, who had run away from Mount Vernon, left America in 1783. A clerk dutifully noted his departure in the “Book of Negroes,” a handwritten ledger listing the three thousand runaway slaves and free blacks who evacuated from New York with the British that summer: “Harry Washington, 43, fine fellow. Formerly the property of General Washington; left him 7 years ago.”27 Washington, with some fifteen hundred families, settled in bleak Birch-town, Nova Scotia. By the time he arrived there in August of 1783, though, there was nothing to eat, it was too late to plant, and it turned out that the topsoil was too thin to plant much, anyway. Two years later, the settlers were still starving. A settler named Boston King reported, “Many of the poor people were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life. When they had parted with all their clothes, even to their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streets, thro’ hunger. Some killed and ate their dogs and cats; and poverty and distress prevailed on every side.” They made a plan to leave, and to sail to Sierra Leone. In January 1792, nearly twelve hundred black men, women, and children, including Harry Washington, found berths on fifteen ships in Halifax harbor. Each family received a certificate “indicating the plot of land ‘free of expence’ they were to be given ‘upon arrival in Africa.’ ” But the colony’s new capital, the Province of Freedom, did not live up to its name. Boston King’s wife, Violet, died of “putrid fever” within weeks of arrival. The promised plots turned out to be not so free after all; investors demanded exorbitant quit rent payments. “We wance did call it Free Town,” one worn-out settler wrote in 1795, but now “have a reason to call it a town of slavery.” By 1799 Sierra Leone’s settlers had become so discontent, so revolutionary in their rejection of the colony’s white government, that it was said they were “as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.” The next year, a group of rebels tried to form a sovereign republic. They were crushed. Tried by a special military tribunal, they were banished from Freetown to the other side of the Sierra Leone River. In their exile, they elected Harry Washington as their leader, just months after George Washington died at Mount Vernon.28
In 1777, Vermont became the first state to outlaw slavery. That same year, John Adams defeated a bill put forward, in the Massachusetts legislature, to do the same.29 Slavery ended in Massachusetts in the 1780s, with vague court rulings, reinforced by the weight of public opinion.30 James Otis was killed by lightning in 1784. Sometime before he died, he burned all of his papers in a bonfire that lasted two days. In 1785, the government of Massachusetts passed its own stamp tax. Benjamin Edes argued against it, signing himself “The Printer’s Friend.” Thomas Paine left the United States for England in 1787. “Where liberty is, there is my country,” Franklin once said, to which Paine replied, “Wherever liberty is not, there is my country.” Franklin spent the last years of his life in Philadelphia. He died in 1790, at the age of eighty-four. In his will, he left one hundred pounds to the public schools of Boston. To his sister, Jane, he left the house in which she lived. “Who that Know & Love you,” Jane Mecom wrote to her brother, just months before he died, “can Bare the thoughts of Serviving you in this Gloomy world.”31
Twenty thousand mourners came to Franklin’s funeral, but his fate, in the American imagination, is a dreary tale. “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise,” Franklin had written in “The Way to Wealth.” “The sorrow that that maxim has cost me through my parents’ experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell,” Mark Twain once wrote. By the time Twain was writing, in 1870, Poor Richard’s parody, the useless advice to a wayward nephew, was taken literally. Of the thrifty, frugal, prudent, sober, homey, quaint, sexless, humorless, and preachy Benjamin Franklin, the prophet of prosperity, Twain wrote, “He was a hard lot.”32 To his twee reputation, Franklin’s breath-takingly vast, cosmopolitan, enlightened, revolutionary life seems to matter not at all. As Poor Richard once said, sometimes “Force shites upon Reason’s back.”33
“It is an age of revolutions, in which every thing may be looked for,” Paine wrote in the first part of The Rights of Man, in 1791, in England. The next year Paine wrote Rights of Man, Part the Second: “When, in countries that are called civilized, we see age going to the work-house and youth to the gallows, something must be wrong in the system of government.” By way of remedy, Paine proposed tax tables calculated down to the last shilling, to pay for public services.34 The first part of Rights of Man sold fifty thousand copies in just three months. The second part was outsold only by the Bible. But British conservatives didn’t want to follow France, especially as the news from Paris grew more gruesome. Paine was charged with seditious libel. In 1792, he fled to Paris, where, as the Reign of Terror unfolded, he drafted the first part of The Age of Reason. In 1793, when the police knocked at his door, he handed a stash of papers to his friend, the American poet and statesman Joel Barlow. Barlow carried the manuscript to the printers; the police carried Paine to an eight-by-ten cell on the ground floor of a prison that had once been a palace. There, he would write most of the second part of The Age of Reason as he watched his fellow inmates go daily to their deaths. (In six weeks in the summer of 1794, Jacobins executed more than thirteen hundred people.)35
In The Age of Reason, Paine was uncompromising in his condemnation of the world’s religions. Paine believed in God; he just didn’t believe in scriptures; these he considered hearsay, lies, fables, and frauds that served to wreak havoc with humanity while hiding the beauty of God’s creation, the evidence for which was everywhere obvious in “the universe we behold.” He offered his own creed:
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy. But . . . I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
For this, Paine was destroyed. He lost, among other things, the friendship of Samuel Adams, who had become governor of Massachusetts in 1793, when John Hancock died in office. Adams wrote to Paine, bitterly, “Do you think that your pen, or the pen of any other man, can unchristianize the mass of our citizens?”36
Jane Mecom died in Boston in 1794. A notice of her death in a Boston newspaper is the only time her name ever appeared in print: “Mrs. Jane Mecom, widow of the late Mr. Edward Mecom of this town and the only sister of Doctor Franklin, in the 83d year of her age.”37 What few books she owned, and most of her letters, have since been lost.
Two years later, John Adams was elected president, narrowly defeating Thomas Jefferson. Adams’s administration proved controversial and inspired printers opposed to it to found seventy new papers (during Adams’s term in office, newspapers grew at four times the rate of the population).38 In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, edited the Aurora, a newspaper as passionately devoted to the cause of unseating John Adams from the presidency as James Franklin’s Courant had been to tipping over Cotton Mather’s pulpit.39 In Boston, Adams’s election left Benjamin Edes despairing. Edes, like Mercy Otis Warren, believed that Adams had betrayed everything the Revolution had been fought for. In 1798, Adams signed the Sedition Act, making defaming his administration a federal crime. Twenty-five people were arrested, fifteen indicted, and ten convicted, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, who died of yellow fever before he could be brought to court.40 Two months after passage of the Sedition Act, Edes gave up his newspaper. “I bid you FAREWELL!” he wrote, in the final issue of the Boston Gazette. “Maintain your Virtue—Cherish your Liberties!” He closed his shop. He moved his printing press into his house—it filled the whole of his small parlor—and tinkered with types.41
Jefferson defeated Adams in the election of 1800. Without the three-fifths clause,
Adams would have won, which is why one Boston newspaper writer observed that Jefferson had ridden “into the temple of Liberty on the shoulders of slaves.”42 On March 4, 1801, the day after the Sedition Act expired, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated. In his inaugural address, he talked about “the contest of opinion,” a contest waged, in his lifetime, in the pages of the newspaper. Three months after Jefferson’s inauguration, Edes died, destitute. In his will, he left a single font of types to his son, Peter, who had suffered in his stead. The rest of his estate he instructed his wife to sell, to settle his debts.43 It wasn’t enough.
Thomas Paine returned to the United States in 1802, a broken man. Samuel Adams died in Boston the next year. In Paine’s tortured final years, living in New Rochelle and New York City, he displayed signs of dementia. He was besieged by visitors who came either to save his soul or to damn it. He told all of them to go to hell. When an old woman announced, “I come from Almighty God to tell you that if you do not repent of your sins and believe in our blessed Savior Jesus Christ, you will be damned,” Paine replied, “Pshaw. God would not send such a foolish ugly old woman as you.”44
The longer John Adams lived, the more he hated Thomas Paine. By the end of his life, the ex-president would call Common Sense “a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.” Adams also railed that the latter part of the eighteenth century had come to be called “The Age of Reason”: “I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from the Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason.” But even Adams admitted, “I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine,” concluding, “Call it then the Age of Paine.”45 Adams wrote those words, in 1806, as if Paine were already dead. He was not. That year, a neighbor of Paine’s came across the old man himself, in a tavern in New York, so drunk and disoriented and unwashed and unkempt that his toenails had grown over his toes. Once, Paine hobbled to the polls in New Rochelle to cast his vote in a local election. He was told that he was not an American citizen and was turned away. In 1809, as the seventy-two-year-old Paine lay dying in a house in Greenwich Village, his doctor pressed him, “Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?” Paine paused, then whispered, “I have no wish to believe on that subject.”46
“History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine,” John Adams once complained to Thomas Jefferson.47 It hasn’t exactly worked out that way. At the end of the war, Congress asked Paine to write the history of the Revolution. He declined. Disavowed by his contemporaries, Paine left little behind in his own defense; the bulk of his papers, including notes for an autobiography, were destroyed in a fire. David Ramsay wrote about Common Sense admiringly, but his History was published before Paine’s Age of Reason. (Ramsay, who wrote The Life of Washington in 1807, died in 1817 when he was shot in the back, on the streets of Charleston, by a mad tailor whom he had earlier diagnosed as dangerously insane.)48 Mercy Otis Warren, who felt about Paine the same way Samuel Adams did, relegated the author of Common Sense, literally, to a footnote.49 Warren died in Plymouth in 1814. Four years later, Paul Revere died in Boston. His obituary made no mention his ride. Neither had Ramsay or Warren, in their histories. Neither the ride nor Revere was famous until Longfellow wrote his poem in 1860—as a commentary on the coming war—after which Revere became a legend.50 Paine’s fate has been weirder. In 1800, a New York Republican Society resolved: “May his Rights of Man be handed down to our latest posterity, but may his Age of Reason never live to see the rising generation.”51 That’s more or less what’s happened. So wholly has The Age of Reason been forgotten that Paine’s mantle has been claimed not only by Ronald Reagan but also by the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed, who has quoted him, and by North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, who in 1992 supported a proposal to erect a Paine monument in Washington, DC. In 1974, Jeremy Rifkin’s Peoples Bicentennial Commission published a manifesto called Common Sense II: The Case Against Corporate Tyranny, which, while left, not right, has a lot in common with Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government.52 Thomas Paine, Beck once said on his show, was the Glenn Beck of the American Revolution.53 Paine’s not rolling over in his grave, though. In 1819, ten years after he was buried, his bones were dug up, and they’ve since been lost.54 All things considered, that might be for the best.
The Founding Fathers, of course, had children. In 1782, John Adams’s daughter became engaged to a twenty-five-year-old poet named Royall Tyler, the son of one of Boston’s original Sons of Liberty, an old friend of James Otis’s. Young Tyler was charming and talented. “I am not acquainted with any young Gentleman whose attainments in literature are equal to his,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband. “I am not looking out for a Poet,” Adams wrote back, testily. The engagement was quietly ended.55 Tyler next tried his hand at playwriting. The Contrast, the first professionally produced American play, was performed in New York while delegates to the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia. Overnight, Tyler became a literary celebrity. The Contrast is a comedy; George Washington owned two copies of it. Tyler was a wit—the “Rabelais of America,” he was called. But in an age when no one could make a living as a writer (and no one wanted a poet for a son-in-law), he had to earn his keep as a lawyer. He set up a law practice in Vermont: “If writing for the public is attended with no more profit, I had rather file legal process in my attorney’s office, and endeavor to explain unintelligible law to Green Mountain jurors.”56
Tyler often wished he had chosen the ministry instead of the law, but he was sure that the dissipation of his youth would have been a blot upon the church. What he meant by his depravity is suggested by The Origin of Evil, a bawdy poem he published in 1793, about Adam and Eve . . .
As her arm Eve held him hard in,
And toy’d him with her roving hand,
In the middle of Love’s Garden,
She saw the Tree of Knowledge stand.57
Tyler got past this sort of thing, or at least he didn’t publish any more of it. He married in 1794, and he and his wife, Mary, raised eleven children. Mary Tyler, a celebrated midwife, was the author of an immensely popular parenting manual, The Maternal Physician. Four of their seven sons became clergymen. In a state where ministers were few and far between, Tyler served as a lay preacher. He often wrote and preached about religious liberty. In a sermon he delivered on Christmas Day in 1793, Tyler offered this prayer: “It is our Blessed Saviour who has caused His day spring of religious liberty from on high to visit us and that we may now worship every man according to the dictates of his own conscience.”58
Many eighteenth-century men of letters shared Thomas Paine’s views about religion, certainly his anticlericalism, and even his skepticism.59 Very many, like Samuel Adams, most vehemently did not. And, of course, and especially outside the republic of letters, very many Americans, including Mercy Otis Warren, Phillis Wheatley, and Jane Mecom, were devout Christians. Faith, in the end, was all Jane Mecom had. Paine’s views on religion were radical. But a commitment to religious liberty, religious pluralism, and the separation of church and state was not.
In 1797, Tyler published a novel called The Algerine Captive, about a luckless New Englander named Updike Underhill who is sold into slavery among Muslims after Barbary pirates capture the Sympathy. He is told that if he converts to Islam, he’ll be freed. He refuses, but agrees to a debate with a mullah. “Our bible was written by men divinely inspired,” Underhill says. “Our alcoran was written by the finger of the Deity himself,” counters the mullah. “Our religion was disseminated in peace; yours was promulgated by the sword,” Underhill insists. “The history of the christian church is a detail of bloody massacre,” answers the mullah. The mullah, himself a convert, contends that Underhill, who had inherited his faith, never examined it.
“Born in New England, my friend, you are a christian purified by Calvin,” the mullah observes. “Born in the Campania of Rome, you had been a papist. Nursed by the Hindoos, you would have entered the pagoda with reverence, and worshipped the soul of your ancestor in a duck. Educated on the bank of the Wolga the Delai Lama had been your god. In China, you would have worshipped Tien, and perfumed Confucius, as you bowed in adoration of your ancestors.”60
This was fiction founded in fact. In 1783, when the Treaty of Paris ended the war, American seamen lost the protection of Britain’s treaties with the so-called Barbary States: Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and Tunisia. Over the next decade, more than seven hundred American sailors were captured and held as slaves in North Africa.61 In Tyler’s novel, Underhill holds firm. The mullah, after weeping for a man he can only see as an infidel, helps him escape. The actual end of Algerine slavery was a little different, and interestingly so. In May of 1797, just three months before The Algerine Captive was published, John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, freeing the American captives in North Africa. Its Article 11, an assurance that the United States would never engage in a holy war, declared, in no uncertain terms, that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”62