Most of us remember Thomas Paine for his writings at the beginning of the Revolutionary War: Common Sense and The Crisis, both published in 1776. But Paine had a whole interesting life after that. As we move through 1794 and 1796, Paine published another one of his major works, The Age of Reason. I thought this would be a good time to catch up with what he has been doing.
Paine Finishes the Revolution
Early in the war, Paine was a radical’s radical. He was among the first to call for independence publicly, and doing away with monarchy entirely. His writings pushed for the abolition of slavery, universal male suffrage, public education, public housing, employment assistance, a progressive income tax, social security, and many other reforms that would take generations to see the light of day.
Paine also did not let personal relationships get in the way of good policy. In 1778 and 1779, Robert Morris and Paine were bitter opponents, mostly fighting over the Silas Deane Affair. In late 1779, Paine received an appointment to serve as the Clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly. He helped raise money the following year for Morris’ Bank of North America, seeing it as critical to financing the war effort. He even donated much of his own salary to the project.
In late October of 1780, he published the tenth installment of his Crisis Series. In The Crisis Extraordinary calling for higher taxes to fund the war effort. He began working much more closely with Morris on financial matters. Two men who had been bitter opponents managed to find common ground and work closely together.
During the bitter dispute over Silas Deane, Paine had been on the side of men like Richard Henry Lee. Despite their friendship, Paine published an essay called Public Good at the end of 1780, arguing that western lands belonged to the United States, not Virginia. This created division between Paine and many leaders from Virginia, including Lee.
In early 1781, Pained sailed to France in order to assist in the appeals for more financial assistance from Versailles. His trip was a great success. Paine personally sailed back with a shipload of silver French livres, arriving back in Boston in August. He organized and carried this money to Philadelphia by wagon. This gift from King Louis helped to fund the Yorktown Campaign.
Despite all of his work in finance, Paine was always broke. Anytime he made any money, he donated it to the cause. As the war wound down in 1782, Robert Morris, along with George Washington and Robert Livingston, helped to get Paine a job writing articles to raise public support for more taxes to keep the war effort going.
In 1783, he wrote his 13th and final installment of The Crisis series, beginning it with “The times that tried men’s soles are over — and the greatest and compleatest revolution the world ever knew is gloriously and happily accomplished.” His essay continued in a way that would make the most conservative federalists proud - calling for a more secure union and paying off all the war debts.
Post-War
Following the war, Paine began to turn away from politics. Instead he hoped to focus on science and working on new inventions. He began working on a new type of single arched iron bridge as well as a smokeless candle.
Unlike many patriots who had sacrificed so much for the war effort, Paine managed to receive considerable rewards for his work. New York, grateful for Paine’s wartime efforts, gave him a 277 acre farm in New Rochelle. The property had been confiscated from a loyalist named Frederick Devoe and was valued at over £1,100. In addition, Pennsylvania awarded him £500 cash. The Confederation Congress gave him $3000.
Paine continued to write on behalf of federalist causes. In 1786 he published Dissertations on Government defending the Bank of North America.
He did not stick around for the debate over the Constitution though. In April of 1787, Paine sailed to France. He wanted the French Academy of Science to approve his designed for a single arched iron bridge. His design would make bridge building much easier. After receiving approval, he sailed to London and visited his mother.
You might think that British officials might take offense at a returning subject who had written so many works against the king. Many of his works would be considered treason under British law. But officials didn’t seem to mind his presence. Paine remained in Britain for several years, helping to build several of his iron arched bridges. It’s not like Paine kept a low profile either. He published Prospects on the Rubicon calling on Britain to avoid a war with France. While his opinions received criticism, the government took no action against him. Edmund Burke even invited Paine to visit his estate. The two men spent a week together discussing a whole range of things and parted as friends.
When the French Revolution began in 1789, Paine crossed the channel to get involved there. After the fall of the Bastille, Lafayette gave Paine the key to the Bastille to carry to George Washington.
The French Revolution turned Paine back to his radical ways. His old friend Burke wrote an essay critical of the Revolution, Paine responded by writing the Rights of Man. In it, Paine fleshed out many of his radical views, calling for an end to hereditary power, praising the benefits of a representative republic, and advocating for a welfare state to help the working class benefit more from society’s productivity. His book sold over 1.5 million copies in Britain.
Back to France
Paine’s attacks on monarchy did not differ greatly from his earlier writings in America, but this time, officials decided that his publications were going a little too far. Getting Americans to dump the king was one thing. Encouraging British subjects in England to do the same was quite another. King George released a proclamation against seditious writings and prosecutors charged Paine with sedition. Prosecutors explicitly targeted his notions that all hereditary government is by its very nature tyranny since people living today have no say in who governs them. After issuing an indictment in the spring of 1792, the trial was delayed until December.
In the meantime, revolutionaries in France thought much better of Paine’s ideas. So much so, that they elected the Englishman to the French Convention. Paine gave the matter careful thought to his options and decided that serving as a French legislator was better than rotting in a British prison for sedition. He fled the country in September and sailed over to France. The British held his trial anyway. He was convicted of sedition in absentia and declared an outlaw. Jingoists held up Paine as a despicable character, leading him being burned in effigy in towns all across Britain.
In France, he received a hero’s welcome. He represented Calais, because, why not? On his first full day at the Convention, Paine joined in a unanimous vote to abolish the French monarchy and establish a republic.
Keep in mind that King Louis was still alive at this point. The next step for the Convention was to put Louis on trial for the conspiracy of kings against liberty. While Paine went along with finding Louis guilty, he voted against the death penalty. Instead he argued that Louis should be imprisoned and later banished to the United States. Killing him would alienate Americans, who still held gratitude for the king’s support of the American Revolution.
Despite his pleas, the Convention sent Louis to the guillotine. But Paine’s arguments against the execution made him a target of the radicals. At the end of 1793, the Jacobins took power in the Convention. One of the first things they did was vote to exclude all foreigners from the Convention. This was clearly directed at Paine. A few days later, they ordered Paine arrested and threw him in prison.
This was an especially bad time to be in a French prison. The Reign of Terror had just begun, meaning thousands were being sent to the guillotines for the smallest infractions. One might have thought that Paine being a hero of the American Revolution might help him. France was still trying to get the US to join France in the European war on monarchy. The American Minister in France, Gouverneur Morris, who never liked Paine, told French officials that Paine was not an American citizen and that the US was not seeking any special protections for him.
As a result, Paine was marked for death, literally. Officials wanted to purge all the political prisoners in Luxembourg Prison, where Paine was being held. They put a chalk mark on the cell doors of all prisoners who would be executed the following day. Paine’s door received the mark for execution. Fortunately for Paine, his cell door was wide open when the guy with the chalk came by. He put the chalk mark on the door. But after the door was closed, the mark was on the inside. The people collecting the prisoners for execution the following morning did not see it and passed by his cell.
This mistake might have been corrected after officials discovered that Paine was still attached to his head. But Paine then fell ill with a high fever which rendered him nearly unconscious. Officials delayed bringing him before the revolutionary tribunal because he was apparently too sick to be executed.
Paine’s imprisonment finally ended after about ten months. Gouverneur Morris was recalled and James Monroe took his place as US Minister to France. Unlike Morris, Monroe declared that Paine was an American citizen and that has a hero of the American Revolution. He told officials that the US would be grateful they showed leniency with Paine.
By this time also, the Reign of Terror had ended. Its architect Maximilien Robespierre had been introduced to the guillotine himself. Officials released Paine in November of 1794, and a month later, actually invited him to return to his seat at the Convention. Paine went back to arguing for a true republic. His final major speech came in July of 1795, when he argued against limiting voting rights to property owners. Shortly after that, the Convention dissolved. Paine was not elected to the new convention.
Prison, however, had taken its toll. In addition to helping him get released, Monroe opened up his home to Paine for his recovery. Paine was still suffering from the diseases that he had contracted in prison. Paine lived in Monroe’s home, and under his care for about a year and a half. Monroe covered all of his food and medical costs. The luxury of the residence of the US ambassador at La Folie de la Bouexière. Paine used this time not only to recover, but also to complete his work on The Age of Reason. Eventually, Paine would leave the care of the US ambassador. Paine wrote a vicious public letter condemning President Washington for letting Paine rot in a French prison for so long. Following publication of that letter, Monroe decided it was better if Paine found another place to live.
Age of Reason
Paine told friends that his survival of the reign of terror wasn’t just luck, but that the hand of providence must have been involved. If that was true, Paine decided to bite the hand that fed him by publishing The Age of Reason.
Paine actually began writing this book before he went to prison. There is some evidence that he had been working on it for years. He dropped off part one of the work with his friend for safe keeping as he was on his way to prison. He wrote some of part 2 while in prison, with the remainder written after his release.
The Age of Reason covered Paine’s views on religion. Paine considered himself to be a deist. Some people think that deism is a lack of belief in God. It really isn’t. Paine begins his book by stating that he believed in one God, and that there is a duty of all men to do justice, to love, and to show mercy to one another.
From there, Paine announced that he opposed all organized religions, saying that they are human inventions designed to terrify and enslave mankind so that leaders could monopolize power for themselves. He argues that even if God would reveal messages to a particular person, there is no way for others to verify that. His attacks on religious leaders were just as brutal as his earlier attacks on aristocracy.
His book continues by denying the divinity of Jesus. Paine claims that, while Jesus taught a benevolent morality, the miracles and other fables associated with Jesus were written by others centuries later. Christian mythology, he argued, is actually a composite of stories found in earlier heathen religions.
Instead, Paine finds the proof of God in the miracles of nature. The vast universe that supports mankind and gives us reason is what Paine reveres. He declares “my own mind is my own church.” God is the creator of all things that make life possible. He also notes the vastness of the universe, making the focus on our tiny planet ridiculous.
Paine focuses on how organized religion keeps us from understanding God’s creation. The Church’s use of dead languages and persecution of scientists like Galileo are evidence of this. He identifies the use of mystery, miracle, and prophecy as the tools used to impose religion and keep us from truly understanding God.
Part II of his book is a detailed look at each book of the old and new testaments critiquing the stories and pointing out historical contradictions to prove that these stories were made up by religious leaders long after the fact.
Paine concludes his work by reaffirming his view that only rational belief and reason can help us to understand God though understanding science and the universe. It is only through the freedom of opinion and the use of reason that truth will eventually prevail.
Public Response
From the very beginning, Paine’s attack on religion was not received well. It is probably not surprising that some of the most brutal reactions came in Great Britain, where Paine was already considered an outlaw and a crazed radical for rejecting monarchy and aristocracy.
While the author was out of the reach of British authorities, several people who published or sold the book were prosecuted for blasphemous libel. One of the lawyers who aided in the prosecution, Thomas Erskine, was the same lawyer who had defended Paine for writing The Rights of Man.
Before the government suppressed the work, printers had made and sold thousands of copies in Britain. These continued to circulate among British readers.
The British clergy also roundly condemned the work from the pulpit. At least thirty six formal answers were also published by various defenders of religion. The most famous was probably Bishop Richard Watson’s Apology for the Bible. Watson warned potential readers that Paine would “unsettle the faith of thousands, and lead to “public insecurity”. At the same time though, he noted that some of Paine’s criticisms of some biblical passages seemed to have some merit.
The response to the book in America was similarly hostile. Paine printed 15,000 copies of his book in Paris and shipped them to Benjamin Franklin Bache for sale in America.
Although the federal government did not ban the book, it was roundly attacked and very unpopular. Political radicals who had favored Paine’s earlier writings that attacked efforts by the aristocracy to limit our freedom balked at Paine’s similar criticisms of organized religion.
Once again, people who had associations with Paine tended to pay the price for this controversy. Federalists used Thomas Jefferson’s association with Thomas Paine to attack him. Jefferson would eventually have to publicly distance himself from Paine’s ideas, although he did not reject Paine personally.
Others were not so kind. Benjamin Rush had been very close with Paine from the time Paine first arrived in America before the Revolutionary War began. Rush refused even to meet with Paine after he returned to America many years later. Other radicals who had used Paine’s earlier works to further the Revolution also turned on him Samuel Adams proclaimed astonishment that Paine had turned his mind to a “defence of infidelity.”
Rise of Theophilanthropy
Even the French reception of the book was mixed. Paine had written his book in English, but his friend, Francois Lanthenas, translated and published a French version of part 1 in 1793, while Paine was still in prison. The radical Jacobin government that favored atheism objected to the book. The government effectively suppressed this early version of the book.
Paine said that one intention in writing the work was to prevent people from accepting atheism. He believed that deism made more sense. This position drew criticism from both the radical atheists, as well as the conservatives who still favored some version of organized religion. The atheist radicals believed that even deism, which accepted a belief in God, could be used to justify monarchy.
Following Paine’s release from prison and the end of the reign of terror, French intelligentsia began to warm up to Paine’s ideas. Robespierre had tried to replace Catholicism with the Cult of the Supreme Being in France, which seemed very compatible with Paine’s ideas. This eventually gave rise to Theophilanthropy as the religious replacement for Catholicism. Theophilanthropy, which is loosely translated from Greek as "Friends of God and Man”. Its adherents accepted the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but rejected traditional theology. Instead, principles of behavior were based on rationalism and utilitarian morality.
In January of 1797, Paine helped to launch the first Church of Theophilanthropy at the former Church of St Catherine in Paris.
Paine gave the inaugural address for the new religion with only five families in attendance. He put forward that theology should be combined with scientific instruction - learning how the universe works was the closest we could come to understanding the hand of God in its creation.
Next week, we return to war in Ohio as General Mad Anthony Wayne fights the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
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Next Episode 389 Battle of Fallen Timbers (coming soon)
Previous Episode 387 The Jay Treaty
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Further Reading
Websites
Thomas Paine Historical Association: https://thomaspaine.org
Dissertations on Government: https://thomaspaine.org/essays/american-politics-and-government/dissertations-on-government
Thomas Paine’s letter to George Washington: https://thomaspaine.org/major-works/letter-to-george-washington
“Thomas Paine to George Washington, 20 September 1795,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-18-02-0463.
“Thomas Paine to George Washington, 30 July 1796,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-20-02-0329.
Lyttle, Charles. “Deistic Piety in the Cults of the French Revolution.” Church History, vol. 2, no. 1, 1933, pp. 22–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3691955
Prochaska, Franklyn K. “Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason Revisited.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 33, no. 4, 1972, pp. 561–76. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2708857
Voelker, David J., and Mark A. Noll. “Thomas Paine’s Civil Religion of Reason.” Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life, edited by Daniel L. Dreisbach et al., University of Notre Dame Press, 2009, pp. 171–95. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.21995863.12
Walters, Kerry S. “Thomas Paine: My Own Mind Is My Own Church.” The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic, University Press of Kansas, 1992, pp. 209–39. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1p2gmcn.9
Free eBooks
(from archive.org unless noted)
“The Sovereign as God? Theophilanthropy and the Politics of the Directory 1795-99” Religion and rebellion: papers read before the 22nd Irish Conference of Historians, held at University College Dublin, 18-22 May 1995, Univ. College Dublin Press, 1997 (borrow only).
Conway, Moncure D. The Life of Thomas Paine, Vol 1 & Vol 2 New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1908.
Paine, Thomas Prospects on the Rubicon, London: J. Debrett, 1787.
Paine, Thomas The Age of Reason, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896.
Paine, Thomas The Great Works Of Thomas Paine - Political And Theological - Complete, New York: D.M. Bennett, 1878.
Vale, Gilbert The Life of Thomas Paine with Critical and Explanatory Observations on his Writings, Boston: J.P. Mendum, 1876.
Watson, Richard An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters, Addressed to Thomas Paine, London: T. Evans, 1796.
Books Worth Buying
(links to Amazon.com unless otherwise noted)*
Aldridge, Alfred Owen Man of Reason, the Life of Thomas Paine, Lippincott, 1959 (borrow on archive.org).
Dreisbach, Daniel et. al (ed) Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life, Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2009.
Speck, W.A. A Political Biography of Thomas Paine, Routledge, 2013.
Unger, Harlow G. Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence, Grand Central Publishing, 2019.
* As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
