What You Never Learned in History Class about Tom Paine

Posted by: Hercules Mulligan on Thursday, July 19th, 2007

I am quite sure that the public schools and the media have insured that my readers have heard about Thomas Paine, so my introduction will not be long.

Thomas Paine was born in 1737 in England. He immigrated to America in 1774, when the disputes between the American colonists and the English government were escalating. Paine wrote the pamphlet which annexed his name to the list of fiery patriots — and perhaps to the British death list — Common Sense.

He continued to use his gift for writing eloquently, and penned such pamphlets as The American Crisis over the period of the Revolutionary War.

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot, will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country. But he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if such a celestial article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. … I have as little superstition in me as any man living, but my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction, or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by every decent method which wisdom could invent. Neither have I so much of the infidel in me, as to suppose that He has relinquished the government of the world, and given us up to the care of devils; and as I do not, I cannot see on what grounds the king of Britain can look up to heaven for help against us: a common murderer, a highwayman, or a house-breaker, has as good a pretence [sic] as he.” (1)

These words inspired not just Americans everywhere, but especially the American Continental soldiers, who were suffering a hard winter after a whole season of defeat, retreat, and heavy slaughter at the time Paine penned those immortal words.

It is also well-known that Paine later left America for England and then France, supported the French Revolution, and, as always, put his opinions down in widely-read pamphlets. The two most famous pamphlets that he wrote during this time period were The Rights of Man (in defense of the French Revolution) and The Age of Reason (a delineation of his deism). Unlike today, whereas these pamphlets have earned his name praise from modern secularist historians, these pamphlets were what turned his reputation in America upside-down. No longer was he an esteemed patriot; but rather he was now viewed as a radical libertine and an apostate to the American vision. (It is interesting to note that America, which modern revisionists say was founded by deistic men, was the very country that despised Thomas Paine for his deism.) Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams wrote letters of rebuke to Paine, Patrick Henry considered writing a rebuttal (but declined upon seeing another’s rebuttal and thought it sufficient), and Elias Boudinot (another Founder, a former president of the Continental Congress) wrote and published Age of Revelation in rebuttal to Paine’s work.

Thomas Paine later returned to America in 1802, at the request of Thomas Jefferson, who was then President, and still held Paine in esteem as a perpetual “advocate of human liberty.” (1) Jefferson’s unique sentiments toward Paine are not surprising in the light of the fact that Jefferson and Paine both supported the idealism behind the French Revolution.

Paine spent the remainder of his days in New York City, where he boarded in the home of Elihu Palmer, one of Paine’s most ardent supporters and disciples in America and in New York State. Elihu Palmer was the president of the Columbian Illuminati, a deist group based in New York City that was said to have connections to Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati in Germany (2). Palmer was also the author of Principles of Nature, and the founder of the Deistical Society of New York.

Paine died in June of 1809, and had to be buried in a farmer’s field because no cemetery would dare accept his remains. William Cobbett, a newspaper editor, wanted to return Paine’s remains to England, Paine’s native country. He dug up Paine’s remains and shipped them back to England, with the intent of making a memorial to Paine there. However, Cobbett’s plan was never carried out, and the location of Paine’s remains is now a mystery.

This is the well-known history of Thomas Paine. In the last few decades, Paine has been accepted into the pantheon of great American Founding Fathers. Although it is true that the pamphlets he penned during the Revolution gave great support nationally to the Patriot cause, Thomas Paine only qualifies as an American patriot, but should not be considered as a formal Founding Father of America. Paine’s views on politics and religion differed so widely from the Founding Fathers’ views (Thomas Jefferson is the only individual whose beliefs are more easily reconciled with Paine’s), and much of Paine’s time was not even spent in America. In order to be a Founding Father, of course, one must have had a direct influence upon the founding of the government. Those who qualify as Founding Fathers had either framed or signed one of our Founding documents (Declaration of Independence, US Constitution, Bill of Rights) or served in American public office during the Founding Era (1760-1805), and thus helped establish precedent in the nation’s government. Paine fulfilled none of these qualifications. It has been said that Paine was the first to coin the phrase “United States of America,” and a 20th-century historian even wrote a biography of Paine, titling Paine “America’s Godfather.” However, this claim is erroneous. Paine did not give the United States of America its name. The first appearance of the phrase “United States of America” in his writings was in 1777, in writing one of the episodes of The American Crisis, and by that time, the American colonies already considered themselves as “the united States of America,” as demonstrated in the title to the Declaration of Independence: “The unanimous declaration of the united States of America.”

Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, is perhaps his greatest contribution to the cause of the Patriots. But it’s important background history is not taught in public schools or in the textbooks either. Common Sense was largely Paine’s work, but he neither named the pamphlet nor was it his idea to write it in the first place. When Paine came to America, he wrote a pamphlet about his observances of slavery in this country. Benjamin Rush, an early social reformer and visionary in America (who never receives any favorable attention from contemporary historians because he was an outspoken Christian), read Paine’s slavery pamphlet and was pleased with Paine’s style of writing and revolutionary line of thinking. Rush called upon Paine, and urged him to write a pamphlet that would, in the simple language of the “common people,” educate the ordinary people of America on the disputes between America and Great Britain, and vindicate the side of the Americans. Paine accepted, but he did not perform his work alone. Rush, Samuel Adams (the “father of the American Revolution), and James Wilson (a future framer and signer of the US Constitution) aided Paine in preparing the manuscript. When the writing was complete, the time came to give the work a title. Paine proposed “Plain Truth,” but Rush thought that are more succinct title would be “Common Sense.” And so the pamphlet was named, and anonymously published. (4) Interestingly, the pamphlet that was written in reply to Common Sense by a Tory was named “Plain Truth”!

I think that the reason that Paine’s “contributions” have been trumped up to be far more than they actually were is rooted in the attempt of modern secularist historians to block out the majority of our Christian Founders from public attention, in order to convince the American public that Christianity had little, if any, positive impact upon our Founding Era.

But interestingly, there is a chink in their armor. Secularist historians (and revisionist extremist groups such as the ACLU) may take pride in and boast about Paine’s deism, but they should consider Paine’s warning about atheism and public education, which he made in a speech in 1797:

It has been the error of the schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of Divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles. He can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author. …

The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of the creation to the Creator himself, they stop short, and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence. They labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe everything they behold to innate properties of matter; and jump over all the rest, by saying that matter is eternal.

His writings are available online here. Visit my special collection “The Founders’ Bookshelf for more collections of the Founders’ writings, and more!

(4)Benjamin Rush: Signer of the Declaration of Independence, by David Barton; pp.15-17 (1999)