The Life Of Thomas Paine Volume I Part 4

CHAPTER IV. THE NEW WORLD

Paine left England in October and arrived in America November 30, 1774.

He bore a letter of introduction from Dr. Franklin to Richard Bache, his son-in-law, dated September 30, 1774:

"The bearer Mr. Thomas Paine is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man. He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there. I request you to give him your best advice and countenance, as he is quite a stranger there. If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or a.s.sistant tutor in a school, or a.s.sistant surveyor, of all of which I think him very capable, so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well, and much oblige your affectionate father."

{1775}

On March 4, 1775, Paine writes Franklin from Philadelphia:

"Your countenancing me has obtained for me many friends and much reputation, for which please accept my sincere thanks. I have been applied to by several gentlemen to instruct their sons on very advantageous terms to myself, and a printer and bookseller here, a man of reputation and property, Robert Aitkin, has lately attempted a magazine, but having little or no turn that way himself, he has applied to me for a.s.sistance. He had not above six hundred subscribers when I first a.s.sisted him. We have now upwards of fifteen hundred, and daily increasing. I have not entered into terms with him This is only the second number. The first I was not concerned in."

It has been often stated that Paine was befriended by Dr. Rush, but there is no indication of this. Their acquaintance was casual.

"About the year 1773 [says Dr. Rush--the date is an error for 1774] I met him accidentally in Mr. Aitkin's bookstore, and was introduced to him by Mr. Aitkin. We conversed a few minutes, and I left him. Soon afterwards I read a short essay with which I was much pleased, in one of Bradford's papers, against the slavery of the Africans in our country, and which I was informed was written by Mr. Paine. This excited my desire to be better acquainted with him. We met soon afterwards in Mr.

Aitkin's bookstore, where I did homage to his principles and pen upon the subject of the enslaved Africans. He told me the essay to which I alluded was the first thing he had ever published in his life. After this Mr. Aitkin employed him as the editor of his Magazine, with a salary of fifty pounds currency a year. This work was well supported by him. His song upon the death of Gen. Wolfe, and his reflections upon the death of Lord Clive, gave it a sudden currency which few works of the kind have since had in our country."

As the anti-slavery essay was printed March 8, 1775, it appears that Paine had been in America more than three months before Rush noticed him.

The first number of the _Pennsylvania Magazine_, or _American Museum_, appeared at the end of January, 1775. Though "not concerned" in it pecuniarily, not yet being editor, his contributions increased the subscription list, and he was at once engaged. For eighteen months Paine edited this magazine, and probably there never was an equal amount of good literary work done on a salary of fifty pounds a year. It was a handsome magazine, with neat vignette--book, plough, anchor, and olive-twined s.h.i.+eld,--the motto, _Juvat in sylvis kabitare_. The future author of the "Rights of Man" and "Age of Reason" admonishes correspondents that religion and politics are forbidden topics! The first number contains a portrait of Goldsmith and the picture of a new electrical machine. A prefatory note remarks that "the present perplexities of affairs" have "encompa.s.sed with difficulties the first number of the magazine, which, like the early snowdrop, comes forth in a barren season, and contents itself with modestly foretelling that choicer flowers are preparing to appear." The opening essay shows a fine literary touch, and occasionally a strangely modern vein of thought.

"Our fancies would be highly diverted could we look back and behold a circle of original Indians haranguing on the sublime perfections of the age; yet 't is not impossible but future times may exceed us as much as we have exceeded them."

Here is a forerunner of Macaulay's New Zea-lander sketching the ruins of St. Paul's. It is followed by a prediction that the coming American magazine will surpa.s.s the English, "because we are not exceeded in abilities, have a more extended field for inquiry, and whatever may be our political state, our happiness will always depend upon ourselves."

A feature of the magazine was the description, with plates, of recent English inventions not known in the new world--thres.h.i.+ng-machine, spinning-machine, etc.,--such papers being by Paine. These attracted the members of the Philosophical Society, founded by Franklin, and Paine was welcomed into their circle by Rittenhouse, Clymer, Rush, Muhlenberg, and other representatives of the scientific and literary metropolis. Many a piece composed for the Headstrong Club at Lewes first saw the light in this magazine,--such as the humorous poems, "The Monk and the Jew," "The Farmer and Short's Dog, Porter"; also the famous ballad "On the Death of General Wolfe." printed March, 1775, with music. Lewes had not, indeed, lost sight of him, as is shown by a communication in April from Dr.

Matthew Wilson, dated from that town, relating to a new kind of fever raging in England.

The reader who has studied Paine's avowed and well-known works finds no difficulty in tracking him beneath the various signatures by which he avoided an appearance of writing most of the articles in the _Pennsylvania Magazine_, though he really did. He is now "Atlanticus,"

now "Vox Populi," or "aesop," and oftener affixes no signature. The Thetford Quaker is still here in "Reflections on the Death of Lord Clive" (reprinted as a pamphlet in England), "A New Anecdote of Alexander the Great," and "Cursory Reflections on the Single Combat or Modern Duel." The duel was hardly yet challenged in America when Paine wrote (May, 1775)

"From the peculiar prevalence of this custom in countries where the religious system is established which, of all others, most expressly prohibits the gratification of revenge, with every species of outrage and violence, we too plainly see how little mankind are in reality influenced by the precepts of the religion by which they profess to be guided, and in defence of which they will occasionally risk even their lives."

But with this voice from Thetford meeting-house mingles the testimony of "common sense." In July, 1775, he writes:

"I am thus far a Quaker, that I would gladly agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiations; but, unless the whole world wills, the matter ends, and I take up my musket, and thank heaven he has put it in my power.... We live not in a world of angels. The reign of Satan is not ended, neither can we expect to be defended by miracles."

t.i.tles he sees through (May, 1775):

"The Honourable plunderer of his country, or the Right Honourable murderer of mankind, create such a contrast of ideas as exhibit a monster rather than a man. The l.u.s.tre of the Star, and the t.i.tle of My Lord, overawe the superst.i.tious vulgar, and forbid them to enquire into the character of the possessor: Nay more, they are, as it were, bewitched to admire in the great the vices they would honestly condemn in themselves.... The reasonable freeman sees through the magic of a t.i.tle, and examines the man before he approves him. To him the honours of the worthless seem to write their masters' vices in capitals, and their Stars s.h.i.+ne to no other end than to read them by. Modesty forbids men separately, or collectively, to a.s.sume t.i.tles. But as all honours, even that of kings, originated from the public, the public may justly be called the true fountain of honour. And it is with much pleasure I have heard the t.i.tle 'Honourable' applied to a body of men, who n.o.bly disregarding private ease and interest for public welfare, have justly merited the address of _The Honourable Continental Congress_."

He publishes (May, 1775), and I think wrote, a poetical protest against cruelty to animals, to whose rights Christendom was then not awakened.

His pen is unmistakable in "Reflections on Unhappy Marriages" (June, 1775): "As extasy abates coolness succeeds, which often makes way for indifference, and that for neglect. Sure of each other by the nuptial bond, they no longer take any pains to be mutually agreeable. Careless if they displease, and yet angry if reproached; with so little relish for each other's company that anybody else's is more welcome, and more entertaining." It is a more pointed statement of the problem already suggested, in the April magazine, by his well-known fable "Cupid and Hymen," whose controversies are now settled in the Divorce Court.

In his August (1775) number is found the earliest American plea for woman. It is ent.i.tled "An Occasional Letter on the Female s.e.x,"

and unsigned, but certainly by Paine. His trick of introducing a supposit.i.tious address from another person, as in the following extract, appears in many examples.

"Affronted in one country by polygamy, which gives them their rivals for inseparable companions; inslaved in another by indissoluble ties, which often join the gentle to the rude, and sensibility to brutality: Even in countries where they may be esteemed most happy, constrained in their desires in the disposal of their goods, robbed of freedom of will by the laws, the slaves of opinion, which rules them with absolute sway, and construes the slightest appearances into guilt, surrounded on all sides by judges who are at once their tyrants and seducers, and who after having prepared their faults, punish every lapse with dishonour--nay usurp the right of degrading them on suspicion!--who does not feel for the tender s.e.x? Yet such I am sorry to say is the lot of woman over the whole earth. Man with regard to them, in all climates and in all ages, has been either an insensible husband or an oppressor; but they have sometimes experienced the cold and deliberate oppression of pride, and sometimes the violent and terrible tyranny of jealousy. When they are not beloved they are nothing; and when they are they are tormented.

They have almost equal cause to be afraid of indifference and love. Over three quarters of the globe Nature has placed them between contempt and misery."

"Even among people where beauty receives the highest homage we find men who would deprive the s.e.x of every kind of reputation. 'The most virtuous woman,' says a celebrated Greek, 'is she who is least talked of.' That morose man, while he imposes duties on women, would deprive them of the sweets of public esteem, and in exacting virtues from them would make it a crime to aspire to honour. If a woman were to defend the cause of her s.e.x she might address him in the following manner:

"'How great is your injustice! If we have an equal right with you to virtue, why should we not have an equal right to praise? The public esteem ought to wait upon merit. Our duties are different from yours, but they are not less difficult to fulfil, or of less consequence to society: They are the foundations of your felicity, and the sweetness of life. We are wives and mothers. 'T is we who form the union and the cordiality of families; 't is we who soften that savage rudeness which considers everything as due to force, and which would involve man with man in eternal war. We cultivate in you that humanity which makes you feel for the misfortunes of others, and our tears forewarn you of your own danger. Nay, you cannot be ignorant that we have need of courage not less than you: More feeble in ourselves, we have perhaps more trials to encounter. Nature a.s.sails us with sorrow, law and custom press us with constraint, and sensibility and virtue alarm us by their continual conflict. Sometimes also the name of citizen demands from us the tribute of fort.i.tude. When you offer your blood to the state, think that it is ours. In giving it our sons and our husbands we give it more than ourselves. You can only die on the field of battle, but we have the misfortune to survive those whom we love the most. Alas! while your ambitious vanity is unceasingly laboring to cover the earth with statues, with monuments, and with inscriptions to eternize, if possible, your names, and give yourselves an existence when this body is no more, why must we be condemned to live and to die unknown? Would that the grave and eternal forgetfulness should be our lot. Be not our tyrants in all: Permit our names to be sometime p.r.o.nounced beyond the narrow circle in which we live: Permit friends.h.i.+p, or at least love, to inscribe its emblems on the tomb where our ashes repose; and deny us not the public esteem which, after the esteem of one's self, is the sweetest reward of welldoing.'"

Thus the Pennsylvania Magazine, in the time that Paine edited it, was a seed-bag from which this sower scattered the seeds of great reforms ripening with the progress of civilization. Through the more popular press he sowed also. Events selected his seeds of American independence, of republican equality, freedom from royal, ecclesiastical, and hereditary privilege, for a swifter and more imposing harvest; but the whole circle of human ideas and principles was recognized by this lone wayfaring man. The first to urge extension of the principles of independence to the enslaved negro; the first to arraign monarchy, and to point out the danger of its survival in presidency; the first to propose articles of a more thorough nationality to the new-born States; the first to advocate international arbitration; the first to expose the absurdity and criminality of duelling; the first to suggest more rational ideas of marriage and divorce; the first to advocate national and international copyright; the first to plead for the animals; the first to demand justice for woman: what brilliants would our modern reformers have contributed to a coronet for that man's brow, had he not presently wors.h.i.+pped the G.o.d of his fathers after the way that theologians called heresy! "Be not righteous overmuch," saith cynical Solomon; "neither make thyself over-wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?"

CHAPTER V. LIBERTY AND EQUALITY

With regard to Paine's earliest publication there has been needless confusion. In his third _Crisis_ he says to Lord Howe: "I have likewise an aversion to monarchy, as being too debasing to the dignity of man; but I never troubled others with my notions till very lately, nor ever published a syllable in England in my life." It has been alleged that this is inconsistent with his having written in 1772 "The Case of the Officers of Excise." But this, though printed (by William Lee of Lewes) was not published until 1793. It was a doc.u.ment submitted to Parliament, but never sold. The song on Wolfe, and other poetical pieces, though known to the Headstrong Club in Lewes, were first printed in Philadelphia.*

* Mr. W. H. Burr maintains that Paine wrote in the English Crisis (1775) under the name of "Casca." As Casca's articles bear intrinsic evidence of being written in London--such as his treating as facts General Gage's fictions about Lexington--the theory supposes Paine to have visited England in that year. But besides the facts that Rush had an interview with Paine near the middle of March, and Franklin in October, the accounts of Aitkin, preserved in Philadelphia, show payments to Paine in May, July, and August, 1775. As Mr. Burr's further theory, that Paine wrote the letters of Junius, rests largely on the identification with "Casca," it might be left to fall with disproof of the latter. It is but fair, however, to the labors of a courageous writer, and to the many worthy people who have adopted his views, to point out the impossibilities of their case. An able summary of the facts discoverable concerning the personality of Junius, in Macaulay's "Warren Hastings,"

says: "As to the position, pursuits, and connexions of Junius, the following are the most important facts which can be considered as clearly proved: first, that he was acquainted with the technical forms of the Secretary of State's office; secondly, that he was intimately acquainted with the business of the War Office; thirdly, that he, during the year 1770, attended debates in the House of Lords, and took notes of speeches, particularly of the speeches of Lord Chatham; fourthly, that he bitterly resented the appointment of Mr. Chamier to the place of Deputy Secretary of War; fifthly, that he was bound by some strong tie to the first Lord Holland."

Now during the period of Junius' letters (Jan. 21, 1769, to Jan. 21, 1772) Paine was occupied with his laborious duties as exciseman at Lewes, and with the tobacco mill from which he vainly tried to extort a living for himself and wife, and her mother. Before that period there was no time at which Paine could have commanded the leisure or opportunities necessary to master the political and official details known to Junius, even had he been interested in them. He declares that he had no interest in politics, which he regarded as a species of "jockeys.h.i.+p." How any one can read a page of Junius and then one of Paine, and suppose them from the same pen appears to me inconceivable.

Junius is wrapped up in the affairs of Lord This and Duke That, and a hundred details. I can as easily imagine Paine agitated with the movements of a battle of chessmen. But apart from this, the reader need only refer to the facts of his life before coming to America to acquit him of untruth in saying that he had published nothing in England, and that the cause of America made him an author.

In America Wolfe again rises before Paine's imagination. In the _Pennsylvania Journal_, January 4th, appears a brief "Dialogue between General Wolfe and General Gage in a Wood near Boston." Wolfe, from the Elysian Fields, approaches Gage with rebuke for the errand on which he has come to America, and reminds him that he is a citizen as well as a soldier. "If you have any regard for the glory of the British name, and if you prefer the society of Grecian, Roman, and British heroes in the world of spirits to the company of Jeffries, Kirk, and other royal executioners, I conjure you immediately to resign your commission."

Although this "Dialogue" was the first writing of Paine published, it was not the first written for publication. The cause that first moved his heart and pen was that of the negro slave. Dr. Rush's date of his meeting with Paine, 1773,--a year before his arrival,--is one of a number of errors in his letter, among these being his report that Paine told him the antislavery essay was the first thing he had ever published. Paine no doubt told him it was the first thing he ever wrote and offered for publication; but it was not published until March 8th. Misled by Rush's words, Paine's editors and our historians of the antislavery movement have failed to discover this early manifesto of abolitionism. It is a most remarkable article. Every argument and appeal, moral, religious, military, economic, familiar in our subsequent anti-slavery struggle, is here found stated with eloquence and clearness. Having pointed out the horrors of the slave trade and of slavery, he combats the argument that the practice was permitted to the Jews. Were such a plea allowed it would justify adoption of other Jewish practices utterly unlawful "under clearer light." The Jews indeed had no permission to enslave those who never injured them, but all such arguments are unsuitable "since the time of reformation came under Gospel light. All distinctions of nations, and privileges of one above others, are ceased. Christians are taught to account all men their neighbours; and love their neighbours as themselves; and do to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes." Bradford might naturally hesitate some weeks before printing these pointed reproofs. "How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which Providence threatens us? We have enslaved mult.i.tudes, and shed much innocent blood, and now are threatened with the same." In the conclusion, a practical scheme is proposed for liberating all except the infirm who need protection, and settling them on frontier lands, where they would be friendly protectors instead of internal foes ready to help any invader who may offer them freedom.

This wonderful article is signed "Justice and Humanity." Thomas Paine's venture in this direction was naturally welcomed by Dr. Rush, who some years before had written a little pamphlet against the slave trade, and deploring slavery, though he had not proposed or devised any plan for immediate emanc.i.p.ation. Paine's paper is as thorough as Garrison himself could have made it. And, indeed, it is remarkable that Garrison, at a time when he shared the common prejudices against Paine, printed at the head of his _Liberator_ a motto closely resembling Paine's. The motto of Paine was: "The world is my country, my religion is to do good"; that of the _Liberator_: "Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind." Garrison did characteristic justice to Paine when he had outgrown early prejudices against him.* On April 12th, thirty-five days after Paine's plea for emanc.i.p.ation, the first American Antislavery Society was formed, in Philadelphia.

* It will be seen by the "Life of William Lloyd Garrison,"

i., p. 219, and iii., p. 145, that Mr. Garrison did not know of Paine's motto ("Rights of Man," i., chap. v.). His review of Paine's works appeared November, 1845. The Liberator first appeared January 1, 1831.

Although the dialogue between Wolfe and Gage (January 4th) shows that Paine shared the feeling of America, the earlier numbers of his _Pennsylvania Magazine_ prove his strong hope for reconciliation. That hope died in the first collision; after Lexington he knew well that separation was inevitable. A single sentence in the magazine intimates the change. The April number, which appeared soon after the "Lexington ma.s.sacre," contains a summary of Chatham's speech, in which he said the crown would lose its l.u.s.tre if "robbed of so princ.i.p.al a jewel as America." Paine adds this footnote: "The princ.i.p.al jewel of the crown actually dropt out at the coronation." There was probably no earlier printed suggestion of independence by any American.*

* The London Chronicle, of October 25, 1774, printed Major Cartwright's "American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great Britain," and it was reprinted in the Pennsylvania Journal. Although it has little relation to the form in which the question presently suggested itself, the article is interesting as an indication that separation was then more talked of in England than in America. Twelve years before the Revolution a pamphlet in favor of separation was written by Josiah Tucker of Bristol, England. Then as now colonists were more loyal than the English at home.

There are three stages in the evolution of the Declaration of Independence. The colonies reached first the resolution of resistance, secondly of separation, and thirdly of republicanism.

In the matter of resistance the distribution of honors has been rather literary than historical. In considering the beginnings of the Revolution our minds fly at once to the Tea-party in Boston harbor, then to Lexington, where seven Ma.s.sachusetts men fell dead, and seven years of war followed. But two years before the tea was thrown overboard, and four years before the Lexington ma.s.sacre, North Carolinians had encountered British troops, had left two hundred patriots fallen, and seen their leaders hanged for treason. Those earliest martyrs are almost forgotten because, in the first place, North Carolina produced no historians, poets, magazines, to rehea.r.s.e their story from generation to generation. In the second place, the rebellion which Governor Tryon crushed at Alamance, though against the same oppressions, occurred in 1771, before the colonies had made common cause. Governmental anachronisms have a tendency to take refuge in colonies. Had Great Britain conceded to Americans the const.i.tutional rights of Englishmen there could have been no revolution. Before the time of George III.

British governors had repeatedly revived in America prerogatives extinct in England, but the colonists had generally been successful in their appeals to the home government. Even in 1774 the old statesmen in America had not realized that a king had come who meant to begin in America his mad scheme of governing as well as reigning. When, in September, 1774, the first Continental Congress a.s.sembled, its members generally expected to settle the troubles with the "mother country"

by pet.i.tions to Parliament. There is poetic irony in the fact that the first armed resistance to royal authority in America was by the North Carolina "Regulators." On the frontiers, before official courts were established, some kind of law and order had to be maintained, and they were protected by a volunteer police called "Regulators." In the forests of Virginia, two hundred years ago, Peter Lynch was appointed judge by his neighbors because of his wisdom and justice, and his decisions were enforced by "Regulators." Judge Lynch's honorable name is now degraded into a precedent for the cowardly ruffians who hunt down unarmed negroes, Italians, and Chinamen, and murder them without trial, or after their acquittal. But such was not the case with our frontier courts and "Regulators," which were civilized organizations, though unauthorized.

For several years before the Revolution lawful and civilized government in some of the colonies depended on unauthorized administrations. The authorized powers were the "lynchers," as they would now be called, with traditional misrepresentation of Peter Lynch. The North Carolina Regulators of 1771 were defending the English const.i.tution against a king and a governor acting as lawlessly as our vile lynchers and "White Caps." It was remarked, by Paine among others that after the royal authority was abolished, though for a long time new governments were not established, "order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe."*

* "The Rights of Man," part ii., chapter i.

In the dialogue between Wolfe and Gage, Paine writes as an Englishman; he lays no hand on the const.i.tution, nor considers the sovereign involved in ministerial iniquities. Apart from his Quaker sentiments he felt dismay at a conflict which interrupted his lucrative school, and the literary opportunities afforded by his magazine. "For my own part,"

he wrote to Franklin, "I thought it very hard to have the country set on fire about my ears almost the moment I got into it." And indeed there was a general disgust among the patriots during the year 1775, while as yet no great aim or idea illumined the smoke of battle. They were vehemently protesting that they had no wish for separation from England, just as in the beginning of our civil war leading Unionists declared that they would not interfere with slavery. In March, 1775, Franklin maintained the a.s.surance he had given Lord Chatham in the previous year, that he had never heard in America an expression in favor of independence, "from any person drunk or sober." Paine says that on his arrival he found an obstinate attachment to Britain; "it was at that time a kind of treason to speak against it." "Independence was a doctrine scarce and rare even towards the conclusion of the year 1775."

In May, George Was.h.i.+ngton, on his way to Congress, met the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, in the middle of the Potomac; while their boats paused, the clergyman warned his friend that the path on which he was entering might lead to separation from England. "If you ever hear of my joining in any such measures," said Was.h.i.+ngton, "you have my leave to set me down for everything wicked."* Although Paine, as we shall see, had no reverence for the crown, and already foresaw American independence, he abhorred the method of war. In the first number of his magazine he writes: "The speeches of the different governors pathetically lament the present distracted state of affairs. Yet they breathe a spirit of mildness as well as tenderness, and give encouragement to hope that some happy method of accommodation may yet arise."