Review by Edward Tanguay August 3, 1997

But when the country, into which I had just set my foot,
was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.

I knew that Paine had written this pamphlet which helped instigate the American Revolution, but what I did not know is that he had only arrived in America a year before he wrote it, having been bankrupt, separated, and jobless in England, going from place to place writing little controversial pamphlets. He was a true rebel without a cause, and he happened to wander into the right place at the right time. His life and legacy gets even more interesting. After finding his calling and becoming famous during the explosive atmosphere of the 1775 America, he traveled to England and France. Being kicked out of England for being too radical, he escaped to France, where he got embroiled in the bloody political aftermath of the French Revolution, even getting thrown into jail for some time. Returning to America in 1802, Paine found an America subdued by a federal constitution and powered by the well-to-do. The firey atmostphere of the Revolution was gone and Common Sense was a thing of the past. The ironic and sad end of Paine's life is that when he died on June 8, 1809, there were only a handful of neighbors and friends at his funeral. No dignitaries, no eulogies, no offical notices of his death--this was a man who had been toasted by Washington and Lafayette, served on the Committee of Nine to frame the French constitution, and had played a fundamental role in the history of the United States of America. He was simply laid to rest in a quiet pasture with no ceremony, no fanfare, no appreciation. His former housekeeper at the funeral recognized the irony of the situation and later wrote:

This interment was a scene to affect and to wound any sensible heart. Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help feeling most acutely. Before the earth was thrown down upon the coffin, I, placing myself at the east end of the grave, said to my son Benjamin, 'stand you there, at the other end, as a witness for grateful America'. Looking round me, and beholding the small group of spectators, I exclaimed, as the earth was tumbled into the grave, 'Oh! Mr Paine! My son stands here as testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!' This was the funeral ceremony of this great politician and philosopher!

The double irony of the whole story comes ten years later when a man named William Cobbet in England, a follower of Paine's radicalism, sent for his bones to be dug up and carried back to England for a proper burial. But nobody knows where they are today, for somewhere along the journey, his bones were lost.

That was quite a sad end for a man who embodied the spirit of the times which moved America to separate from England and through his influential writings helped define and promote the rebellious anti-authority American character which still shows itself today.

The main thing to remember about Paine is that he came at the right time. He was dying to make a big explosion and America was waiting for someone to light the fuse. The colonists at that time were far from clear about what they were fighting for. The pressure from England had been getting worse and worse, step by step more outrageous: wanted America pay for the French and Indian War, forbade settlement west of the Appalachians, Stamp Act, Quartering Act, dissolved legislatures, overreaction to the Boston Tea Party. It was not Paine's job to point all of these abuses out (the Declaration of Independence did that), but rather Paine simply said, "Stop. Everybody. Look at how ridiculous this is. Here is a short description of what democracy should be and here is what we get from England." Anyone with common sense would conclude that America should thus fight for its separation.

He argued that a king is an absurd thing and should be done away with as soon as we realize it. The hereditary principle has got to go, it is absurd. Paine has a beautifully sober way of putting it.

There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.

He bases a lot of his arguments on the Bible. It was the Jewish people, he said, who wanted a king. God told them no, but they demanded a king. We have carried that tradition on, but if you think about it, a king is a ridulous thing. We have to remember that in the 18th century when he stated this, he was arguing against all of history:

. . . and that William the conqueror was an usurper is a fact not to be contradicted.

In England a k--- has little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for, and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

. . . and for the back row:

One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kinds, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.

And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.

He goes on to site numerous reasons why America should separate:

Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.

Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'TIS TIME TO PART.

Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America, is a strong and natural proof, that the authority of the one, over the other, was never the design of Heaven.

He makes his concern not only that of America, but of all mankind:

The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. 'Tis not the affair of a city, a country, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent--of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe. 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.

Still need more arguments? Paine gets personal:

But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, Hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank of title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

Act now:

It is not in the power of Britain or of Europe to conquer America, if she do not conquer herself by delay and timidity.

We are sufficiently numerous, and were we more so, we might be less united.

It is only self defense:

We fight neither for revenge nor conquest; neither from pride nor passion; we are not insulting the world with our fleets and armies, nor ravaging the globe for plunder. Beneath the shade of our own vines are we attacked; in our own houses, and on our own lands, is the violence committed against us.

And then the last bit of irony:

There is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.

Paine was a firey American, a product of the age and one who stamped his revolutionary explosiveness on the age itself. In a letter of 1805, John Adams wrote of Paine:

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. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.

Edward Tanguay

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