THE LIFE OF THOMAS PAINE -- VOLUME I

Introduction by Professor Eric Foner, The City University of New York

"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." So wrote John Adams in 1805. Neither a personal friend nor political admirer of Paine's, the conservative Adams believed that Paine's influence had, on the whole, been pernicious. In 1776 Adams had rushed into print to combat what he called the  "democratical" philosophy of Paine's great pamphlet Common Sense, and in the 1790s he had ridiculed the spread of egalitarian ideas on both sides of the Atlantic as "Paine's yellow fever." But Adams, like many of his contemporaries, was forced to admit that, in an age of pamphleteering, Paine had become the greatest pamphleteer of all. In Common Sense and the Crisis papers in America, and Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice in Europe, Paine had done more than bring the political issues of his time to an unprecedented popular audience. He had helped to create the very language of politics, the vocabulary in which men and women expressed timeless discontents and voiced aspirations for a better world. The slogans and rallying cries we associate with the late eighteenth century -- "the Age of Reason" "the times that try men's souls" -- derive from Paine's writings. Most of all, Rights of Man, his greatest and most widely read work, remains today a classic statement of the egalitarian, democratic faith of the Age of Revolution.

Striking as Paine's success as a pamphleteer was, it was no less remarkable than the trajectory of his life. Unlike most of the men who made the American Revolution, who sprang from middle- and upper-class families long resident on American soil, Paine's origins lay among the lower orders of eighteenth-century England. He did not even arrive in America until the very eve of the war for independence, and never sank deep roots there. "Where liberty is not," he once told Benjamin  Franklin, "there is my country." Nor is his ultimate legacy easily assessed. Unlike Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and his other contemporaries, Paine was never accorded a place among the Revolutionary leaders canonized in American popular culture. His memory was primarily kept alive by succeeding generations of radicals, who found in him an outstanding symbol of resistance to established authority.

Certainly Paine's early life gave no indication of the greatness he was to achieve.  Born in Thetford, England, in 1737, the son of a Quaker staymaker (i.e., corset-maker) and a local attorney's daughter, Paine spent the first thirty-seven years of his life in obscurity. He attempted to make a living at his father's craft, later tried his hand as a teacher and shopkeeper, and served as excise-tax collector in Lewes, an unenviable position in a region where smuggling was virtually a way of life. Paine was well into middle age by the time he embarked for America, but so scanty is information concerning his early career that the formative influences which shaped his thinking remain largely unknown. Certainly his father's Quaker faith influenced his later humanitarianism. Paine also developed a strong interest in Newtonian science, a common theme in the lives of eighteenth-century reformers, who found in the harmonious Newtonian system based on natural laws a sharp contrast to governmental structures resting simply on precedent and the obviously "irrational" principle of hereditary rule. Paine had also had some contact with a group of London advocates of Parliamentary reform, and may well have been influenced by underground currents of popular republicanism dating back to the seventeenth century. But whatever these early influences, one thing is certain: not until he emigrated to America in 1774 did Paine find an environment capable of nourishing the seeds of his political discontent.

Bearing a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met through mutual scientific acquaintances in London, Paine arrived in Philadelphia as the ten-year-old crisis between Britain and her American possessions was reaching a point of no return. The first Continental Congress had convened in the city in December 1773, bringing to Philadelphia the most prominent leaders of the thirteen colonies.  Talk of political change agitated the city's clubs, taverns; and workshops. Paine secured a position as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, and in the months that followed made the acquaint ance of Benjamin Rush and other leaders in the struggle against Britain. It was Rush who suggested that Paine write a pamphlet on the conflict, although he specifically warned him to avoid the word "independence." Although war between British and colonial soldiers had broken out in Massachusetts in 1775, attaining the "rights of Englishmen," not national independence, was still the avowed goal of most patriot leaders.

Common Sense, Paine's remarkable pamphlet advocating the independence of America and the establishment of republican government, appeared on January 9, 1776, and immediately caused a sensation. It outlined ideas that would continue to define the remainder of Paine's career: the superiority of re publican government to monarchy, equality of rights among all citizens, and the world significance of the American Revolution. It also revealed Paine as a brilliant, innovative stylist, capable of breaking with time- honored traditions of political writing to forge a new language that would reach out to a mass audience.

Paine began Common Sense not with a discussion of America's relations with Great Britain but with an analysis of the nature of government. His most striking phrases were reserved for a savage attack on "the so much boasted Constitution of England," and the very principle of hereditary rule. His description of the accession of William the Conqueror seven centuries earlier would become one of his most frequently quoted passages: "A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.... The plain truth is that the antiquity of the English monarchy will not bear looking into." Far from Britain enjoying the most perfect system of government on earth, as even American leaders had contended, the king was nothing more than "the royal brute of England," and the constitution simply "the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new Republican materials.... The remains of monarchial tyranny in the person of the king ... the remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers." Paine called instead for the creation of republican government -- based entirely on the representation of the people -- in a newly independent America, and a written constitution guaranteeing the rights of persons and property and establishing freedom of religion.

Common Sense then turned to a discussion of independence, rebutting the arguments of proponents of reconciliation. "There is something absurd," Paine wrote, "in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island," But he reserved his most eloquent words for a soaring vision of the meaning of American independence. Paine transformed the struggle over the rights of Englishmen into a contest with meaning for all mankind:

O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her as a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

The immediate success of Common Sense was nothing short of astonishing. The pamphlet sold perhaps 150,000 copies and was credited with converting countless men and women to the cause of independence. One American announced, "You have declared the sentiments of millions. Your production may justly be compared to a land-flood that sweeps all before it. We were blind, but on reading these enlightening words the scales have fallen from our eyes." It was not that what Paine had said was strikingly new. Many of the elements of his argument -- the distinction between the Old World and the New, the absurdity of hereditary privilege, even the possibility of independence -- had been voiced before. What was new was the way in which Paine wove these themes into a coherent statement, and the language in which he expressed them, a language aimed at extending political discussion beyond the narrow bounds of the eighteenth century's "political nation."

The first thing that struck contemporaries about Common Sense was its tone, Paine's "daring impudence" and "uncommon frenzy," as critics described it. The roots of his outrage may well have lain in the years of disappointment in England. But Paine was indeed a conscious artist. He intentionally rejected the decorous and reasonable language of previous pamphlets in order to make a point: that kings were simply men, entitled to no more deference and respect than they earned. And there was more to his literary style than his assaults on monarchy. Addressing a mass audience unfamiliar with legal precedents, classical learning, and complex rhetoric, Paine strove for simplicity. The hallmarks of his style were clarity, directness, and forcefulness.  He employed straightforward grammar, and rarely referred to any work other than the Bible. The message conveyed in his literary style was that anyone could grasp the nature of politics and government: all that was necessary was common sense.

In Common Sense and his subsequent writings, Paine outlined a vision of republican government and society that would exert a profound influence on the transatlantic radical tradition. For Paine, a republic was simply a government devoted to the common good and equality of rights among its citizens. America, Paine believed, was uniquely fitted to create a republican government because of its relatively equal distribution of wealth (excepting, of course, black slavery). In such a circumstance, governmental structures need not be particularly complex. Indeed, a central axiom of Paine's outlook, one that has led modern anarchists to claim him as an intellectual forebear, was the distinction between society and government: "Society is in every state a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil." Without the expensive and oppressive governmental systems of Europe -- the courts, kings, and landed aristocracies -- men and women could, Paine believed, dispense with familiar structures of government. Indeed, Paine contended that much of the misery in the Old World derived not from economic exploitation but from war, excessive taxation, political oppression. and corruption -- all inescapable consequences of monarchy and hereditary right.

Paine thus entered the multifaceted debate about the definition of republicanism that played so central a role in the political experience of the Revolutionary generation. For Paine and other thinkers of the era, what was characteristic of republics was not so much a specific structure of government as a set of qualities among the citizenry. The key terms in republican discourse were virtue - the willingness to subordinate selfish interests to the good of the whole; equality -- which encompassed not simply equal treatment before the law, but also the absence of vast disparities of personal wealth; and independence --  the ability to resist outside coercion. All were seen to rest on a broad diffusion of private property among the citizens. Only property provided the autonomy that enabled men to exercise their political rights freely and to rise above personal concerns to pursue the good of the entire society. Even Paine, while in America, believed personal servants -- propertyless men dependent on others for a livelihood -- should not exercise the franchise, although later, in England, he came to advocate universal male suffrage.

Within the republican tradition, of course, there existed numerous crosscurrents and competing strands. Paine's version was shaped not simply by the writings of the English "country party" theorists whose writings so strongly influenced  eighteenth-century American thought, but by his own experiences in England and America. An artisan himself, Paine had forged a special relationship with the radical artisan community of Philadelphia. Indeed, on both sides of the Atlantic in these years, artisans proved particularly receptive to the democratic, egalitarian emphasis of Paine's republicanism. If American thinkers like Jefferson identified the yeoman farmer as the social basis on which republican government should rest, and as the most virtuous of all citizens, Paine often spoke for the artisans of the cities. He was an urbanite, a cosmopolitan, and a strong proponent of economic progress. If Jefferson's republicanism looked to the past, fearing economic and social changes that threatened to undermine the small farmer's independence, Paine, like the artisans, embraced economic growth. To Paine, the past was a burden, not a guide, and the present only a temporary resting place from which to propel society into the future. Paine envisioned a society in which republican government together with economic growth would produce social harmony, equality, and an economic abundance in which all classes would share.

Common Sense marked Paine's emergence as a leading figure in the American struggle for independence. For the next several years he was deeply involved in American affairs, writing the famous Crisis papers to bolster the morale of the American army and to suggest solutions to some of the financial and political problems that confronted the new nation. He also took part in the conflicts that convulsed revolutionary Pennsylvania, influencing the state's 1776 constitution, the most democratic frame of government of the period, and playing a role in the abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania in 1780.

Yet with the close of the war for independence, Paine's interest in American politics began to wane. The problems of peace he found less stirring than the struggle for independence. Madame Roland, who came to know Paine during the French Revolution, made an astute observation about his cast of mind: "I find him more fit, as it were, to scatter the kindling sparks than to lay the foundation or prepare the formation of a government. Paine is better at lighting the way for revolution than drafting a constitution ... or the day-to- ay work of a legislator." By 1787, Paine was ready to return to Europe. The immediate reason was to promote his design for an iron bridge -- one of several scientific inventions on which he worked during his lifetime. But it came as no surprise to those who knew him that Paine soon found himself caught up in another political upheaval, this time in the land of his birth.

Paine returned to England on the eve of events that fundamentally transformed the political climate. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1189 cast an ever-deepening shadow over English affairs, reinvigorating demands for political reform but also inspiring conservatives to rally around king and country. In November 1790, Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France, which not only denounced events in France and extolled the British political system, but unfolded a classic exposition of eighteenth-century conservative thought. Authority, religion, morality, law -- these were the crucial concepts in Burke's schema of politics. His central idea was that English liberties were "an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity." Society and government were like a family, in which each generation sought to transmit and slowly improve upon the traditions it had inherited. Gradual change might be acceptable, but a sudden overthrow of existing institutions would lead only to the sort of chaos that was convulsing France. Rebellion in one quarter, moreover, threatened the disintegration of the whole, so England had to quarantine herself against the contagion of revolution. For Burke, the accumulated wisdom of the past was a far better guide to political behavior than abstract "prattling about the rights of men," which had the dangerous tendency to overthrow long-established institutions and upset the "principles of natural subordination" that stable government required of "the body of the people."

Prior to 1790, Burke had been known as a reformer, an advocate of the American cause in the 1770s and of relieving the political disabilities of Catholics and Dissenters. He and Paine had become acquaintances of "some intimacy" in 1788 and 1789, and had exchanged letters on developments in France. But it was inevitable that their paths would diverge. To Burke, the fall of the Bastille proved the French were "not fit for liberty," while to Paine it heralded the dawn of a new era for Europe. When mobs stormed Versailles in October 1789, Burke wrote, "in France the elements which compose human society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of monsters is to be produced in the place of it." Burke saw in France only anarchy; Paine perceived the unfolding of an "age of revolution," in which republican principles, now legitimized by the success of the American Revolution, would be embraced in the Old World.

Paine, moreover, knowing humble origins and difficult  circumstances for most of his life, evinced a real compassion for the plight of the poor, while Burke's phrase "the swinish multitude" -- made famous through ironic repetition by radicals -- told more of his inner thinking than a host of legalistic arguments. Paine was not the first friend of the French Revolution to respond to Burke; Mary Wollstonecraft, Dr. Richard Price, and others had preceded him. But Paine's reply, Rights of Man, became the classic defense not only of revolutionary France but also of equality, democracy, and a new order for Europe. The Burke-Paine debate was the classic confrontation between tradition and innovation, hierarchy and equality, order and revolution.

Dedicated to George Washington, the first portion of Rights of Man appeared on March 16, 1791. In part, it was a vindication of events in France, in part a critique of the British system of government. Long sections narrated the overthrow of the ancien regime, challenging Burke's version of the storming of the Bastille, the march on Versailles, and other events. Paine was particularly outraged by the contrast between Burke's sympathy for the royal family and his studied indifference to the suffering of the old regime's victims:

Not one glance of compassion, not one commiserating reflection, that I can find throughout his book, has he bestowed on those who lingered out the most wretched of lives, a life without hope, in the most miserable of prisons ... He is not affected by the reality of distress touching the heart, but by the showy resemblage of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.

Paine pointedly contrasted the new French system of govern ment, with its broad right of suffrage, with that of England: "Can anything be more limited, and at the same time more capricious, than what the qualifications are in England?" he asked. As in Common Sense, he reserved his sharpest barbs for monarchy and hereditary privilege: "The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries, and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man."

In contrast to Burke's invocation of precedent and experience to justify the English constitution, Rights of Man insisted that every generation had the right and duty to act for itself.

The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation property in the generations which are to follow.... I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead.

In Paine's appeal, centuries-old taboos and inhibitions came tumbling down, and in the process English radicalism was transformed. In place of modest demands for Parliamentary reform, Paine announced that nothing les than "a general revolution in the principle and construction of governments" was on the agenda in Europe.

Not only was Paine's political stance diametrically apposed to Burke's, but his literary style, as in Common Sense, marked a striking departure from the conventions of English political writing. "I wished to know," he later explained, "the manner in which a work, written in a style of thinking and expression different to what had been customary in England, would be received." As in America, Paine's style and content were of one piece. If Burke addressed the narrow "political nation" of voters and officeholders, Paine's audience was the entire adult population. His very tone, idiom, and rhetoric suggested that the issues of the day could be addressed in the language of common speech. Where Burke drew upon classical authorities, legal precedents, and obscure works of political philosophy to make his case, Paine employed the language of everyday life ("What a stroke has Mr. Burke now made! To use a sailor's phrase, he has swabbed the deck!"). Paine translated foreign expressions ("Aux armes -- to arms"), used familiar anecdotes, and in images like "the puppet-show of state and aristocracy" evoked the farces, ballad-dramas, and other forms of popular theater so common in eighteenth-century England. And he held Burke's tortuous literary style up to ridicule: "As the wondering audience, whom Mr. Burke supposes himself talking to, may not understand all this learned jargon. I will undertake to be its interpreter."

Eleven months after the first, a second part of Rights of Man appeared. While Part One had essentially been a defense of the French Revolution, Paine now outlined his general theory of government and society. Rights of Man, Part Two, is probably Paine's greatest work and the finest example of political pamphleteering in the Age of Revolution. As in Common Sense, Paine began with the distinction between society and government. Society, resting on the mutual needs and "social affections" of mankind, was natural and benevolent; government, at least in the Old World, presented nothing more than "a disgustful picture of human wretchedness." Echoing his description of William the Conqueror in Common Sense, Paine assailed the origin of monarchy in a "band of ruffians" whose chief contrived to "lose the name of robber in that of monarch."  He introduced English readers to American definitions of republican government, and broke with the time-honored tradition of employing "democracy" as synonym for anarchy, using it instead in its modern sense as a government reflecting the will of the majority.

So far, little that Paine said was new, although he had never said it better. But suddenly, in Chapter Five, Paine unveiled a new vision, that of the republican state as an agent of the social welfare. Previously, Paine's radicalism had been essentially political. The "hordes of miserable poor, with which the old countries abound," he believed, were the consequence of bad government. Now, without completely breaking with his earlier view, or challenging private property as an institution, be insisted that more than simply a transition to republicanism would be required to alleviate the plight of the European masses. Paine outlined a breathtaking economic program. as close to a welfare state as could be imagined in the eighteenth century. The basis of taxation would be changed from regressive levies on consumption to a progressive tax on landed property. From the proceeds, every poor family would receive funds to enable it to raise and educate its children, a system of social security would be established, enabling workers to retire on a pension at age sixty, public employment would be provided for those in need of work, and funds would be appropriated for a decent burial to those who died in poverty. At the same time, laws limiting wages would be abolished, since workingmen ought to be free to "make their own bargains" without the interference of the state.

"From all we now see," Paine had written at the close of the first part of Rights of Man. "nothing of reform in the political world ought to be held improbable. It is an age of revolutions, in which every thing may be looked for." And the response to his pamphlet seemed fully to justify Paine's optimism. Rights of Man, historian E. P. Thompson writes, became the "foundation-text of the English working-class movement." In a population of ten million, the two parts sold perhaps 250,000 copies within two years. Rights of Man transformed the English radical tradition, providing political reformers with an explicit social program, making the traditional demands for Parliamentary reform meaningful to the daily lives of the lower classes. Some middle-class reformers embraced Paine's ideas, though more were appalled by his attack on the monarchy and his call for working people to enter the stage of politics. But the places of those who deserted the ranks of reform were more than taken up by a new generation of artisan and lower-class radicals, organized into "corresponding societies" throughout the British Isles. Paine freed such men to think in new and startling ways about the political and social order, to imagine for the first time a complete transformation of British life. There was little room in these societies for gradual constitutional reform, but much talk of utopian dreams of a better world. They accepted Paine's fervent conviction that the American and French revolutions demonstrated that constitutions could be drawn up from first principles. The dead weight of the past, Karl Marx once wrote, "weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." Paine's mission was to free mankind from this burden.

So too, Paine provided a radical sociology, a way of thinking about the social order that would remain characteristic of radical thought on both sides of the Atlantic well into the nineteenth century. As in America, Paine envisioned a society of small property owners, united voluntarily for the common good. Republican government would serve the interests of all classes; indeed, it would create a society without the class conflict that wracked the Old World. But in this harmonious vision one social group was missing: the landed aristocracy, which would be destroyed once its court-provided privileges were abolished. For Paine, society was not divided precisely between rich and poor, or between capital and labor, but between aristocracy and people (or, as they would later be called, nonproducers and producers):

Why ... does Mr. Burke talk of this House of Peers, as the pillar of the landed interest? Were that pillar to sink into the earth, the same landed property would continue, and the same ploughing, sowing, and reaping would go on. The Aristocracy are not the farmers who work the land ... but are the mere consumers of rent.

Not surprisingly, the response of the English government to the flames of revolution abroad and the threat of political upheaval at home was political repression. Paine himself was quickly indicted for seditious libel and fled to France one step ahead of the law. By 1795 the radical societies had been crushed. It was symptomatic of the differences between British and American political culture at the close of the eighteenth century that Paine's ideas were outlawed in the former but had become commonplace in the latter. Thomas Jefferson, who considered the pamphlet a formidable weapon "against the political heresies which have sprung up among us," helped publicize Rights of Man in America. John Adams's young son John Quincy Adams did publish a series of anonymous newspaper pieces attacking Paine, but few in America would disagree with Paine's defense of republican government or his attack on monarchy. The French Revolution, by 1792, did divide American polities, but far more Americans seem to have responded favorably to the pamphlet than against it. As for the social chapter, which had the most profound impact in England, Paine himself did not believe his far-reaching proposals were relevant to America, where the problem of poverty was far less acute than in England. The ideas of Rights of Man did not seem dangerous in America because, thanks in part to Paine's earlier writings, they were already embedded in the common currency of the political culture.

Paine lived for seventeen years after the publication of Rights of Man. In France, where he remained until 1802, his career entered its most problematic phase. Elected to the National Convention as a symbol of appreciation for his defense of the Revolution, Paine quickly found himself out of step with rapidly changing political events. His political associates were among the Girondin faction, and with their fall Paine found himself imprisoned in 1793 in the Luxembourg Palace, which now held opponents of the Jacobin regime. He remained there for ten months, in constant danger of execution. Released in 1794, he spent several unhappy years longing for an opportunity to return to America.

Nonetheless, Paine in these years was able to compose his last great pamphlets: The Age of Reason and Agrarian Justice. The first was an exposition of Deism and an attack on the basic principles of Christianity, rejecting the Bible as the revealed word of God and exalting reason and science as modes of understanding the natural world. Reprinted in countless editions, the pamphlet became the most popular Deist work ever written. It established Paine as an inspiration to nineteenth-century freethinkers, but alienated devout believers, who tarred Paine, inaccurately, with the labels "infidel" and "atheist." His last great work, Agrarian Justice, published in 1796, criticized the accumulation of landed property in the hands of a few men of wealth as a major cause of poverty in Europe. Like so many of his other writings, it helped inspire an important strand of the nineteenth-century radical tradition -- land reform.

In 1802, Paine finally got his wish and, at age sixty-five, returned to America. He lived out the rest of his life in obscurity, contributing occasional essays to the Jeffersonian press but finding himself under constant assault in this most evangelical of cultures for his Deist writings. His final years were ones of "lonely, private misery." Isolated from his old associates, drinking heavily, he died in 1809. Six mourners attended the funeral of the man who had once inspired mil lions to think in new ways about the world in which they lived, and his death passed virtually unnoticed in the American press.

What, then, was Paine's legacy? In England, as we have seen, his writings inspired the birth of a working-class radicalism to which Paine has remained a hero down to the present day. (The former head of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, is also the honorary president of Britain's Thomas Paine Society.) In America, it is difficult, however, to discern a sustained tradition of Paineite radicalism. But it would be wrong to underestimate Paine's impact on the evolution of the American radical tradition. More than any other individual, it was Paine who defined the terms and created the political language of nineteenth-century American radicalism. Even those who rejected his religious beliefs could not escape the impact of Paine's radical variant of republicanism. Paine's writings provided a vision of the good society, a definition of active citizen ship, which helped inspire expressions of protest ranging from the labor movement of the 1830s to the Populists of the 1890s. Thus, despite the fact that Paine as an individual was often forgotten, Paine's thought deeply affected the evolution of radicalism in nineteenth-century America.

There were always those Americans, moreover, who found in Paine an abiding symbol of the radical persona. Even while Paine pursued his checkered career as founding father of British radicalism and unhappy participant in revolutionary France, his writings had helped inspire the formation of the Democratic-Republican societies in the United States. Formed to promote the party of Jefferson and defend the French Revolution, the societies distributed copies of Rights of Man and drank toasts to Paine as the quintessential opponent of aristocratic tyranny. The ranks of American Paineites were reinforced by an influx of British radicals in the 1790s and in the early nineteenth century. Later, in the 1830s, the early labor movement held dinners to honor Paine's birthday. Thomas Skidmore, a leading figure in the New York Workingmen's Party, published The Rights of Man to Property, whose title suggested both a tribute to Paine and the need to move beyond his analysis, to extend political equality, which had been achieved in America, to the economic realm. Similarly, George Henry Evans, an immigrant British reformer, drew on Agrarian Justice to agitate for the government to provide free homesteads on the public lands for any individual desiring to escape labor conditions in eastern cities. Later in the century, freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll and radical democrats like Walt Whitman paid homage to Paine's memory. Later still, Eugene V. Debs hailed Paine as a founder of the radical tradition, the man who had said, "a share in two revolutions is living to some purpose."

Despite Paine's exclusion from the list of revered revolutionary forebears in the culture at large, then, his influence was indeed profound. More than any other individual, Paine in his revolutionary internationalism, his rationalism and faith in human nature, his defiance of existing institutions, epitomized the radical cast of mind. His ideas and personal example have continued to inspire those who believe that the modern world has betrayed, not fulfilled, the high hopes for a just social order raised during Paine's Age of Revolution.

-- Eric Foner

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