A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  In the summer of 1770, John Wilkes undertook a tour of the South East in support of reform. He was warmly received in Lewes, in Sussex, an open borough with a history of political and religious dissatisfaction.* Lewes was then the home of a young excise officer, Thomas Paine. (Wilkes is alleged to have met Paine on this visit, but unfortunately there is no firm evidence to corroborate the story.) His American biographer, Eric Foner, has described Paine’s time in Lewes as ‘a period of almost unrelenting failure’.8 However, though his life in the town ended with domestic and professional failure, it was also, as George Hindmarsh and Colin Brent have demonstrated, crucial to his political education.9

  Paine had taken up lodgings in the High Street with an innkeeper, Samuel Ollive, and his family, and later joined Ollive in another business venture, running a tobacco mill from the premises. Paine, for a time at least, threw himself successfully into the town’s social life. Aside from his involvement in the Headstrong Club, a debating society, he was a very active member of St Michael’s parish vestry, helping administer poor relief, and was reputed to be a keen bowls player and ice skater. In spite of all this activity, his time in Lewes has left frustratingly little trace in the town’s archives. There remain only two letters by him in Lewes Record Office, dealing with a mundane property dispute with his neighbours in the Dissenting meeting house.10

  In 1771 Paine was married for a second time, to Samuel Ollive’s daughter Elizabeth. (Her father had died in 1769.) Elizabeth was only twenty-two, ten years younger than her husband. The couple opened a shop together but Paine was now being regularly drawn into London society, having been nominated by his fellow excisemen to press their case for better pay and conditions with their employers. Paine liked to portray his literary career as beginning only in the New World, falsely claiming that it ‘was the cause of America that made me an author’ and that Common Sense was ‘the first work I ever did publish’.11 However, two years before he arrived in Philadelphia, he had already published his first political pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of the Excise. It is a reflection of how much he wished to erase the memory of the failures of his early life that he did not make a freer acknowledgement of this work, which despite its limited purpose addressed broader themes that would dominate much of Paine’s later writings.12 Speaking from his own experience, he argued that the poor salaries of the excise officers, who had not seen a rise for nearly a century, were a recipe for peculation and corruption. Poverty would make thieves and liars of all men:

  true honesty is sentimental, and the practice of it dependent upon circumstances … The rich, in ease and affluence, may think I have drawn an unnatural portrait; but could they descend to the cold regions of want, the circle of polar poverty, they would find their opinions changing with the climate.13

  There was, however,

  a striking difference between dishonesty arising from want of food, and want of principle. The first is worthy of compassion, the other of punishment. Nature never produced a man who would starve in a well-stored larder, because the provisions were not his own: but he who robs it from luxury of appetite deserves a gibbet.14

  Paine distributed four thousand copies of his pamphlet, paid for by his fellow officers and produced with the tacit support of the Excise Board. But though the publication raised his public profile further, bringing him into contact with literary figures such as Oliver Goldsmith and with leading scientific virtuosi such as John Bevis and George Lewis Scott, the time away from Lewes had seen his business affairs fall into disarray.

  In April 1774 he was dismissed from his job by the Excise Board, ostensibly for being absent without leave. In the same month, he was forced to sell all the goods and effects of his tobacco business. By May, not just his professional but also his personal life lay in tatters. Paine and his wife separated, signing a formal document acknowledging the fact in June 1774. In eighteenth-century England the social stigma attached to separation was considerable, and hostile biographers later made much of the failure of this marriage, suggesting that it was the result of his impotence, his drinking, violent abuse of his spouse or a combination of all three. Loyalist writers contrasted the failure of Paine the husband with the firm and faithful regard shown by George III for both his own wife and children and his wider family, the nation.15 For his part, Paine adamantly refused to offer an explanation for the dissolution of his marriage, stating only, ‘I had cause for it, but I will name it to no one.’ Elizabeth received her full inheritance from her father as a result of the settlement and was free to trade independently, but the separation left her in an even more difficult position than it left Paine. While he was conspicuously able to resume a public life, his erstwhile wife was now consigned to a dreadful social limbo, enjoying neither the prospects of a young single woman nor the independence offered by widowhood.

  It was Paine’s scientific interests that rescued him from this personal nadir. Via his contacts in London he made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin, the inventor, philosopher, diplomat and later leading American revolutionary. Franklin provided him with a letter of introduction, and with this and a ticket for a berth on a ship to America Paine left his old life behind to seek fresh pastures in the New World. He nearly didn’t make it. In a letter to Franklin dated 4 March 1775, he described the outbreak of ‘putrid fever’ (lice-borne typhus) that had broken out on board ship:

  We buried five, and not above that number escaped the disease. By good Providence we had a Doctor on board, who entered himself as one of the servants, otherwise we must have been in as deplorable a situation, as a passage of nine weeks could have rendered us. Two cabin passengers escaped the illness but suffered dreadfully with the fever. I had very little hopes that the Captain or myself would live to see America.16

  On arriving in America, Paine was so weak that he had to be brought ashore on a stretcher. Franklin’s letter got him some accommodation, provided by the doctor who had dealt with the passengers on their arrival in Philadelphia. Nonetheless, it was a further six weeks before Paine was well enough to make contact with Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, who set about trying to find the immigrant some work as a teacher.

  In many respects Paine was right to say that he only really became the author Thomas Paine in America (the ‘e’ itself found its way on to the end of his surname only once he had crossed the Atlantic). Even his most famous work published in England, Rights of Man, was dedicated to an American, George Washington, and its text (beyond the references to his polemical Aunt Sally, Edmund Burke) was littered with transatlantic metaphors and allusions.17 However, though his early life in England had been blighted by personal and professional catastrophes, that experience was vital to the formation of his political outlook. His time in Lewes and London provided Paine with a political education via his exposure to Wilkite reform, his work as a vestryman and his involvement in the Headstrong Club. It was in England, though he denied the fact, that he first became a political writer, arguing on behalf of his fellow excise officers.

  More importantly than all this, though, the experience of failure marked him out from other radical luminaries. His Case of the Officers of the Excise shows a writer not simply placing himself in the shoes of the oppressed and the poor, but one who had felt the terrible pressure of poverty himself. Unlike William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft or William Blake, Paine had not been singled out as a precocious talent and carefully nurtured by parents and patrons to fulfil his artistic or literary potential. Until 1774, his life had promised to unfold as a banal, everyday tragedy: financial failure in an unglamorous trade leading to marital failure, destitution and a pauper’s death. It was that knowledge of the bitterness of everyday life, as well as its occasional rewards, that made him the writer he was. While Godwin wrote Political Justice and Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – radical classics, certainly, but, to their core, middle-class books for middle-class readers – only Paine could have written Rights of Man, a work targeted at and in sympathy with a r
eadership that could barely afford bread, let alone books.

  The Philadelphia that Paine found himself in was no less socially divided than the England he had just left. The richest 10 per cent of the population owned over half of the wealth of the city; the poorest 40 per cent only 4 per cent. The American rich aped the fashions of the English aristocracy, which included maintaining large landed estates outside Philadelphia. The rich also dominated the municipal government. One visitor remarked that among the ‘uppermost circles in Philadelphia … it seems as if nothing would make them happier than that an order of nobility should be established by which they might be exalted above their fellow citizens, as much as they are in their own conceit’. However, the middling sorts in the colonies were developing their own political organisations with the creation of the first artisan party, the Patriotic Society. There was great anxiety among the North American upper classes about the politicising and democratising effect of the evolving revolutionary struggle. Gouverneur Morris, the lawyer and later leading revolutionary, witnessing a mass meeting in New York in 1774, noted that now ‘the mob begin to think and reason’.18

  Paine had come to an America that was on the brink of outright revolt against British colonial overlordship. The first Continental Congress had met in Philadelphia at the beginning of September 1774 and resolved to boycott British goods unless the British government honoured their rights (the deadline for this ultimatum passed the day after Paine arrived). He took lodgings in the heart of the city, in a building with a clear view of the Philadelphia slave market. He regularly frequented the nearby bookshop of Robert Aitken. The two struck up a friendship and Aitken soon offered Paine the opportunity to renew his writing efforts by becoming executive editor of a new journal, the Pennsylvania Magazine, which he planned to publish. Paine accepted, though his literary offerings were initially constrained by Aitken’s insistence that he steer clear of controversial topics. One exception to this was an essay on the evils of slavery, which has earned Paine the undeserved title of ‘the first American [sic] abolitionist’.19

  Paine was not the first writer in America to condemn slavery. He did, however, underline the inherent hypocrisy in the white colonists’ repeated claim that they were being made slaves by the government of George III, pointing out that ‘they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery; and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them’.20 Yet, like many eighteenth-and nineteenth-century abolitionists, Paine’s comments appear far less enlightened once we examine the substance of them. Although he suggested that old or infirm slaves be cared for by their former masters and the healthy and productive be paid for their labours, he thought that freed slaves ‘might sometime form useful barrier settlements on the frontiers. Thus they may become interested in the public welfare, and assist in promoting it; instead of being dangerous, as now they are, should any enemy promise them a better condition.’ The destiny of emancipated slaves was, it seemed, to serve as a ‘human shield’ to protect white Americans.21

  The nature of Paine’s contributions to the Pennsylvania Magazine was fundamentally changed by one event: the Battle of Lexington on 19 April 1775, when British troops opened fire on American militiamen, killing eight and injuring ten. From this moment on, as he later declared in Common Sense, he became increasingly committed to the struggle of the American colonists against the British government:

  No man was a warmer wisher for a reconciliation than myself, before the fatal nineteenth of April, 1775, but the moment the event of that day was made known, I rejected the hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh of England for ever; and disdain the wretch, that with the pretended title of FATHER OF THE PEOPLE can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.22

  A dispute with Aitken over his contract, still unwritten, led Paine to seek an alternative literary outlet for his attacks on British tyranny. At this point, the colonies’ public communications with the British government continued to be couched in loyal terms: talk of ‘independence’ or of a republic was seen as deeply dangerous. But Paine was convinced that the time had come for a pamphlet that would destroy the tissue-thin fiction that Americans were nothing more than transplanted subjects of George III. Publishing Common Sense – as it was eventually titled – was not without difficulties. At first no printer would agree to sell it, until finally Robert Bell, a Scot of some ill-repute, agreed. The pamphlet was revised with the assistance of Franklin, Samuel Adams, the astronomer David Rittenhouse and Benjamin Rush. On 10 January 1776, at the price of two shillings, Common Sense went on sale.

  Paine estimated that it sold 150,000 copies, going through twenty-five editions and reaching hundreds of thousands of readers. Compared with contemporary colonial papers, which had a circulation of about 1000 to 2000, this constituted an enormous publishing success.23 However, we need to take some care with these figures, which historians have freely cited despite the fact that they were supported only by Paine’s own testimony as author. In-depth research into the dissemination of Common Sense suggests that its actual sales figures were less impressive, if still very high by colonial standards. Paine’s real success was not merely to produce a pamphlet that sold well, but as a skilled self-publicist convincingly to present the image of his book as articulating the feelings of the majority of Americans.24

  His abilities as a self-promoter should not distract us, though, from the revolutionary content of Common Sense. Dispensing with the usual cautious colonial rhetoric, here was a clear, energetic and republican voice calling for independence. The true novelty and radicalism of Paine’s pamphlet came in its opening passages, where he challenged the commonplace assumption that human society necessitated government. Indeed, a long tradition of writers on government had treated society and government as interchangeable terms. Not so, Paine countered. Nature dictated that people form societies as a concomitant of the inherent human values of sociability and solidarity. It was only when human beings ignored their consciences and common sense that they required the ‘necessary evil’ of government.25 On this basis, the way forward for the colonists was to resist the encroachments of the British state by forming a ‘civil society’ to protect their interests, by associating together in a ‘Continental Congress’ that would secure ‘freedom and property’ and ‘free exercise of religion’ for all.26

  Paine’s work was not written exclusively for an American audience. As he clearly stated, the ‘cause of America is, in great measure, the cause of all mankind’.27 Common Sense was widely circulated in England and translated into several European languages. It represented a stark break from the propaganda of the Wilkite reform movement. Its searing attack on the hereditary principle clearly prefigured the arguments of part one of Rights of Man. With a sharp dig at George III’s mental infirmity, Paine argued that ‘One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion.’28

  Monarchy was, then, unnatural, if not plain idiotic. Paine also dispensed with the appeals to history that had been such a common tactic of previous radical writers. The much vaunted English ‘ancient constitution’ was a myth, supported more by ‘national pride’ than by ‘reason’. Far from being a well-balanced parliamentary monarchy, England’s constitution was an ugly hotch-potch of republicanism (the Commons) and absolutism (the King). This politically eclectic arrangement was worsened by the fact that the ultimate veto was in the hands of the most antiquated part of the whole apparatus: the monarch.29 Republics, on the other hand, prospered everywhere, as in the cases of Holland and Switzerland.30 Paine also took a swipe at the rhetoric of the ‘freeborn Englishman’. America, not Britain, was the home of liberty, for the original settlers had fled ‘not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home,
pursues their descendants still’.31 For this reason, it was necessary that there be a clear and inviolable separation between Church and state: ‘As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of government to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government has to do therewith.’32

  Paine’s pamphlet provoked much hostile reaction, from both English and American writers, and started a spat with John Adams that lasted for the rest of Paine’s life. Transformed by his American experience, his politics now had little in common with the reform movement in England. By now, Wilkes was no longer the figurehead of electoral reform but a loyal courtier of George III.* The cause of reform in England had nonetheless continued to gather pace, revived by the developing crisis over the colonies. In Take Your Choice! (1776), Major John Cartwright, an advocate of separate legislatures for the American colonies but not full independence, had argued for universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot and annual parliaments. However, the radicalism of this position was less pronounced than it seemed at first. For Cartwright, universal male suffrage was mainly a bargaining position by which he hoped to barter down the government towards something like the concessions that would be offered by the Great Reform Act of 1832. His plans for the payment of MPs sought less to open the Commons to men without wealth than to limit the dangers of corruption and peculation. Similarly, the abolition of property qualifications was meant to allow merchants and businessmen to become MPs, not to open up politics to working-class men.