How ‘American’ was Thomas Paine? by Jack Fruchtman

by Jack Fruchtman Jr.

Professor of Political Science at Towson State University, and author of Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom

This paper was written for the TPNHA for its Fall 2000 Journal

Did Paine think of himself as an American? Or was he a self-styled “citizen of the world,” as he himself sometimes claimed? Clearly, he was a figure who articulated a radical vision of the world, so radical in fact that most commentators do not think of him as having a national, but only (and solely) an international consciousness. Recently, Thomas Walker argues, for example, “Paine was the first to offer an integrated, modern, cosmopolitan vision of international relations. Cosmopolitanism consists of more than a defiance of strict national attachments and a commitment to world citizenship.” This assessment echoed that of David Fitzsimons just a few years ago.1 Mark Philp, in his able addition to the Oxford Past Masters series, emphasizes Paine’s internationalism through his concept of “universal civilization.”2 Ian Dyck has confirmed this view when he says, “Paine put little store in these [national] citizenships, preferring to identify himself as a citizen of the world who held national identifications in contempt.”3 John Keane gives a slightly different picture. Keane’s view was that Paine’s linkage of national foundation for all modern-day national revolutionary movements, despite the seeming contradiction between nation and democracy( because the collective nature of nationalism seemed to Keane to work against the individualism and liberty).4 More recently (and rather curiously), Keane has tried to transform Paine into the consummate Englishman.5

The real question is whether Paine offers us any clear vision of his view of his own national sentiments on two grounds: first, was he concerned with the meaning of an eighteenth-century national consciousness, and second, what did it mean to him to be an American? I will argue that when Paine first emigrated to America from England in 1774, he was most likely uncertain of whom he was in terms of his nationality. This uncertainty remained with him until he resolved it during the French Revolution while living in Paris. It was not, however, to France that he turned as the object of his national consciousness, but rather to America. Evidence in his major writings and correspondence shows that although he lived in Philadelphia and its outskirts for only thirteen years (1774-87), it was there that he developed what might be called American national sensibilities. In Pennsylvania, he achieved the positive feeling that he was, affirmatively, an American. This sentiment stood in stark contrast to what other Americans seemed to possess, namely the negative feeling that they were not Europeans. Ironically, Paine never realized his “American-ness” while he was living in America. On the contrary he developed it only after he left Philadelphia in 1787 and headed to Europe where he remained for the next fifteen years. Finally, we will have to come to terms with Paine’s commitment to internationalism, which, I think, may well fit into his self-identification as an American.

“National consciousness” was an affirmative assertion of national identity rather than the negative idea that many Americans identified themselves by what they were not. It is difficult to determine when Americans began to develop a positive national consciousness in their own right. If Americans knew that they were not Europeans, what did they think they were? A true national consciousness does not merely ask what one is not. It does not presume the negative, but, on the contrary demands a positive affirmation and identity with one’s nation and its future. In this sense, it is more than patriotism, which suggests a fervent loyalty to country and a desire to protect it. Patriotism lacks the intensity of identification that citizens feel toward their own people, their mores, their language, and their future evolution. For Americans to say that they distinguished an “old world” from a “new” one certainly said something about what they thought of themselves. Benjamin Franklin perhaps best summarized this older view in 1775, when he expressed a sense of American self-identity in truly negative terms. For Franklin,

“When I consider the extreme corruption prevalent among all orders of men in this old rotten state, and the glorious public virtue so predominant in our rising country, I cannot but apprehend more mischief than benefit from a closer union. I fear they will drag us after them in all their plundering wars, which their desperate circumstances, injustice and rapacity may prompt them to undertake, and their wide-wasting prodigality and profusion is a gulf that will swallow up every aid we may distress ourselves to afford them. Here numberless and needless places, enormous salaries, pensions, perquisites, bribes, groundless quarrels, foolish expeditions, false accounts or no accounts, contracts and I jobs, devour all revenue and produce continual necessity in the midst of natural plenty.”6

Americans perceived the differences between two worlds, separated by the great gulf of the Atlantic Ocean, as being serious and deep, often perilous and unfathomable.

Franklin’s words were written from London in 1775. Nearly twenty years later, we can see the beginning of a shift in emphasis from differentness to distinctiveness, in large part due to the self-conscious nationalism of Thomas Paine. Paine was forced to resolve the problem of his own nationality while incarcerated for a year in the Luxembourg Prison during the Reign of Terror. But it was his earlier Philadelphia experience that gave him the grounding for rooting his feelings in a genuine American national consciousness. His struggle with who he was his self-identification with a homeland-paralleled his own inability to remain in one place. Residing in various towns and parishes throughout England during the first thirty-seven years of his life, he moved to Philadelphia when he came to America in 1774, only to return to England in 1787. Traveling back and forth between London and Paris for five years, he had to leave England forever in 1792 after he was found guilty (in absentia) of seditious libel for publishing Rights of Man. For the next ten years, Paine remained in France, a supporter and participant in French revolutionary activities, including service in the French National Convention, until he himself fell victim to the Terror. Even after his release from prison, thanks in large part to the American minister to Paris, James Monroe, Paine remained in Paris until he returned to America in 1802.

Just months before the United States of America, as an independent country came into being in 1776, Paine had urged in Common Sense that the Americans to separate from their British overseers. But his was a call that went beyond the necessities of political oppression. He also wanted to emphasize those same differences that Franklin had alluded to, which set the Americans apart from their English cousins. In his famous, often-quoted statement that, “We [the Americans] have it in our power to begin the world over again,” he told his new countrymen that America was different, because of its newness, and that its differences distinguished it from those nations of the old world that Franklin had roundly condemned.7 During the American Revolution, which broke out just six months later, Paine was unequivocally the true American patriot. But to be a patriot does not necessarily connote a national consciousness. It took something far more than the willingness of a people to cast aside those negative features that they find afflicting them from some old world configuration. The Continental Army’s retreat from the Hudson across the Delaware in the cold December of 1776 stimulated words from Paine’s pen about patriotism that would become timelessly famous. But what he wrote at that bleak moment of the war was an appeal to patriotism, to Americans’ differentness from their European taskmasters. At one of the grimmest points of the war, when all seemed lost, on one very cold night Paine wrote the words, so the legend goes, by the light of a campfire on the top of a drumhead. His words gave credence to what he thought was pure American steadfastness and patriotism:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. 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”.8

The Americans certainly were no “sunshine patriots,” but a special breed with a sense of mission to separate themselves from their British taskmasters. Americans had, he had written in Common Sense, the opportunity “to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth.”9 Their destiny was so different from those who lived in the old world because they were now becoming that new breed of people whom Crevecoeur had wondered about while farming in Pine Hill in New York. They comprised a new order of men, a veritable new race:

What, then, is-the American, this new man? He is neither an European nor the descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture or blood, which you will find in no other country. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds … Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.10

The Americans’ separation from Britain and their new constitution required tremendously heroic effort and sacrifice if they were to further that distinction between themselves and the rest of the world. Only at that point would they finally achieve something that no other people had ever before accomplished. Only at that point would they at long last see themselves as a distinctive people in their own right without the comparative negativism that characterized their early years.

Paine’s ideas about his own national consciousness evolved from this time onward in ways that paralleled the way in which Americans were thinking about themselves. In 1776, he understood that a true national consciousness had to move beyond politics and constitution making. And yet, despite his adulation of the American cause and its inherent justice, indeed of things generally American, Paine’s national consciousness, his sense of being an American, seemed very uneven while in America in the 1770s and 1780s. It still contained the baggage of sorting through the differences between those characteristics which made some people Americans, others Europeans, and some still English. His views, especially of his own place in the world, in this period were often confused and muddled, but it was in Philadelphia that the seeds of his American consciousness were first planted. Once out of America, these seeds would fully develop as he longed to return to his adopted home. After the French Revolution, but still during his years in France, Paine’s encounter with the doctrines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave him a new perspective of the meaning of national consciousness. Rousseau, it will be recalled, was far more interested in investigating how society might achieve collective freedom and responsibility rather than only anomic individual rights: the rights and freedom of the nation as a whole, that is, not only those of the single person.

In 1789, in one of his most succinct definitions of “nation,” Paine wrote that “a nation is only a great individual,” whereby the collective personality of the people congealed to form a single composite whole.11 This aggregate could be compared to a single person: if the nation, like a person, had a good or bad character, then a person could decide whether that nation would make a good “neighbor.” A nation was not society, per se, nor was it government. It was prior to both because it comprised the collective organization of human beings who act synchronously in all regard. Thus, he understood the organic nature of nations that united the people of a nation, an idea that Paine adopted from Rousseau’s writings, which he knew well, and often cited and often quoted.12

This Rousseauist element runs throughout the second part of Rights of Man (1792). There, Paine mused about the nature of a nation, about nationhood, about nationality and nationalism. “A nation is not a body, the figure of which is to be represented by the human body,” he said. Hence, in terms of a nation, there is no Hobbesian body natural, which is reified as the body politic (Thomas Hobbes’s frontispiece to his great 1751 work depicted Leviathan - the state in all its grandeur - as being comprised of the thousands of individual heads of its subjects). Paine continued: a nation “is like a body contained within a circle, having a common center, in which every radius meets.” A nation was more than simply being united. It is bound together by the perimeter of the circle. It “possesses a perpetual stamina, as well of body as of mind.”13 Nations had basic rights. Among these was the right of the people to form their own constitutions, as Paine had indicated years earlier in Common Sense. Only now his emphasis had changed: the nation as a whole had to form it collectively. It could not be created by only a few individuals because “a nation can have no interest in being wrong.”14 No nation would ever do anything that was ruinous to itself. People, acting as solitary individuals, might destroy their nation inadvertently, even as they claimed that they were acting on its behalf. A nation in its collective self would never destroy itself.

Paine addressed this very issue in a letter to James Monroe in 1794. The American people might have called themselves “Americans” before July 4, 1776, but they were not really so until after that date. “The Americans were not called citizens till after the government was established,” he said, “and not even then until they had taken the oath of allegiance.”15 Once they were bona fide American, they were not “summer soldiers” or “sunshine patriots,” but a manly lot, and he included himself among them. He claimed to have taken the oath of allegiance to the United States of America on two occasions, once in I776, again in 1777.16 Ironically Paine’s encounter with Rousseauist ideas coupled with his experiences, first unknowingly, in America, but later in France, helped him realize that he was first an American, and in so doing he resolved his problem of national consciousness. Writing from France just after the Revolution had occurred. he mentioned how much he missed “my much loved America. It is the country from whence all reformation must originally spring.”17 His years in Philadelphia seemed now to have been more powerfully inspirational than he himself had ever imagined while he actually lived there.

Paine’s newly minted American spirit now became firmly rooted in his own consciousness. Curiously, despite his newfound sense of being an American, in August of 1792, the French National Assembly made him a citizen. Just a few days before he was informed of the honor, on August l0th, Paris mobs attacked the National Assembly, which immediately suspended itself and removed the king from office. Thereafter, Louis XVI and his family were locked in the Temple for safekeeping. Paine was soon among seventeen foreigners honored with citizenship (the others included George Washington, Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, James Madison, and other republican leaders and writers in America, England, and elsewhere). Within a few weeks, he was elected to the National Convention, the successor to the Assembly, which was charged with preparing a new republican constitution for France. Four departments wanted him to represent them: “Aisne, Puy-de-Dome, Oise, and the Pas-de-Calais. Calais chose him as the last of five deputies, among the first had been a favorite son, Maximilien Robespierre, elected unanimously - and it took three ballots to put him across.”18

Paine served in the Convention, distinguishing himself by being one of the few to vote against the execution of Louis XVI and working on a committee, along with the Marquis de Condorcet, to draft the constitution for the newly established republic It might be reasonable to conclude that his service as an elected member of the Convention might have made him into a permanent French national, but in fact this never happened because he thought of himself as an American. Soon, however, he was arrested and incarcerated in the Luxembourg Prison, ironically accused of being an English citizen and thus a spy who was a threat to the security of the Revolution (as all Englishmen were so regarded). Of course, it is not unreasonable to argue that he pleaded that he was not an Englishman simply to avoid imprisonment or, worse, execution. Although he had been made a “citoyen” by the Assembly and although he worked hard in the Convention, writing from prison in 1794 he told Monroe that he “had no more idea than [Washington] of vacating any part of my real citizenship of America for a nominal one in France, especially at a time when she did not know whether she would be a Nation or not.” He said that he considered himself a true citizen of America because France did not yet have a consciousness of itself as a nation. Was this a ploy to convince Monroe to help him be released from the Luxembourg? Was he hoping that maybe French police authorities would intercept the letter and see that he really was loyal to France? It should be recognized that Paine never formally renounced his French citizenship. Indeed, he had accepted the seat with great relish in the National Convention, and spoke there just as if he were a true patriot of France and its Revolution. He even told Monroe that while a member of the Convention, he was connected to no particular party, “but considered myself a [French] National Man.”19 So, if he were a “national man,” if he served the national interests as a whole, was this the same as being a citizen of that nation? Could he have considered himself a French national citizen, in short?

Paine himself seemed to be confused in this letter to Monroe. He might well have been: after all, he was suffering terribly in prison, often quite sick and exhausted. But he went on to say that while he said he might have conducted himself as a French national while serving in the Convention, he still always thought of himself as an American: “I certainly then remained, even upon their own tactics, what I was before, a citizen of America.”20 Perhaps this is the way to clear up his perceived confusion. Paine probably meant that putting aside his predicament of languishing in prison, he wished to fulfill his job as a conventioneer as well and as best as he could. All along, he kept in mind what he thought the new republican nation (France), as a whole ought to be doing, while at the same time he believed that he was first, last, and always an American. He was never a French national because he would never feel as if he fitted into that particular “circle with a common center.” He had a specific duty to perform in 1792-93, that was all, and that duty was to France, surely, but also to his constituency in Pas-de-Calais”: I acted only as a friend invited among them as I supposed on honorable terms. I did not come to join myself to a government already formed, but to assist in forming one de nouveau, which was afterwards to be submitted to the people whether they would accept it or not, and this any foreigner might do.”21

After all, when he finally returned to America in 1802, he wrote that he was delighted to be back. America, he said, “is the country of my heart.” America was “the place of my political and literary birth. It was the American Revolution that made me an author, and forced into action the mind that had been dormant, and had no wish for public life.”22 Paine’s national consciousness became a final reality to him only after he returned to America. He realized only then, after having spent fifteen years away from America, that it was in his Philadelphia experiences from I774 to 1787 that he truly developed his American national consciousness.

But there was another side to Paine’s national consciousness, a side that is dissonant with the analysis so far: it is the view expressed by Thomas Walker whom I cited at the beginning of this essay and it is a view that must be seriously examined in this context. As early as 1782, Paine had spoken not a language of nationalism at all but used the vocabulary of internationalism. In his “Letter to the Abbe Raynal,” for the first time, he used this language, which obviated the expression of national consciousness that has hitherto been addressed.” Here he argued that the whole point of human progress was to move not toward the creation of a nation of virtue, like America, but to extend and promote what he called “universal society, whose mind rises above the atmosphere of local thoughts and considers mankind, of whatever nation or profession they may be, as the work of one Creator.” The world needed a system of extended civilization, and he considered himself to be “a universal citizen.”24 Could Paine have made these assertions only to respond to Raynal? This was hardly the case because five years later in 1787 he told the Marquis of Lansdowne that he was “a man who considers the world as his home.”25 A few years after that, in Rights of Man, in direct contradiction to his pleas to Monroe that he had always been an American, was still an American, and in the future he would be too, Paine claimed, “My country is the world.”26 One year later, in defending the life of Louis XVI, he told the National Convention that he considered himself “a citizen of the world.”27

We might argue that Paine declared himself anAmerican all along for convenience alone. First, itwas convenient to be an American when hethought he had an opportunity to play a direct role in governmental affairs during and just after theAmerican Revolution. He held only one federal job, however that of Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs, and he was forced to resignfrom that position over the Silas Deane affair whenhe accused Deane of war profiteering at the expenseof the United Sates. Moreover, Paine wantedto be a member of President Washington’s cabinet,and he later wanted to serve as the American Ministerto France after Jefferson returned to the United States in 1789. He had also hoped that Jefferson,as president, would appoint him to some position in his administration after Paine returned to America in 1802.28 At one point, while still inFrance, he even offered his expertise, for what it was worth, to Jefferson for him to act as the agentof the United States for American goods imported into France.tn Jefferson declined the offer. Second,it was convenient for him to say he was an American citizen when he wanted to be let out of prisonin 1794. Paine’s experience in the Luxembourg was not merely uncomfortable. Not only was hequite ill for much of the time, but also he undoubtedly feared that he would be executed at any moment.It turned out that it was probably only afluke that he escaped the guillotine, which he laterattributed to his jailers leaving his prison doorclosed with the executioner’s mark of death inscribedon the inside, not the outside, of the door.30 Paine’s sole hope of liberation, he said later, would not be on the basis of his past service to France. Rather, he knew that it “rested on the government of America, that it would remember me.”31 Finally, perhaps it was convenient because Paineknew that he could never return to England. After an English court had found him guilty of seditious libel and declared him an outlaw as a result of the successful prosecution against him for writing and publishing the second part of Rights of Man, he was afraid that he would be jailed, even hanged, should he ever try to return to England. If he wished to leave France, which was something he often spoke about doing after his release from the Luxembourg in 1794, he had only America to turn to for a homeland.

But to assert that Paine was an American as a matter of convenience does not do justice to his newly formed national consciousness. In deed, throughout his Parisian correspondence, Paine often spoke of his desire to return to America: “I am always intending to return to America,” he wrote in 1797; he later told Madison that he intended “to have set off for America,” but he didn’t like the ship’s captain; “my intention is to return to America as soon as I can cross the sea in safety,” he wrote in 1798; and he told Jefferson in 1800 that “if any American frigate should come to France . . . I will be glad you would give me the opportunity of returning.”32 Paine was now afraid to leave, fearing that at the moment he set sail, the English navy would pick him up on the high seas, return him to London for jail or execution. On the other hand, it may well have been that Paine was at once conscious of the contradictions that might have inherently existed in his American nationality and his internationalism. At heart, as he himself testified more than once, he was an American after 1776, but intellectually at least after 1782 an internationalist until his post-French revolutionary encounter with France. Writing from that country just before the Revolution broke out in 1789, he said, “my heart and myself are 3000 miles apart; and I had rather see my horse Button in his own stable, or eating the grass of Bordentown or Morrisania, than see all the pomp and show of Europe.”33 In the end, the two positions - his American nationality and his internationalist outlook - were not incompatible. He brought them together in a manner, which allowed him at once to say that while he was consciously an American, his mind was always on the world in its entirety. As he himself put it in 1787, “I defend the cause of humanittl.”34 Thus, Paine’s American consciousness was always just that: purely American after the break with England in 1776, thanks to his Philadelphia years, and while he himself might not have fully realized this until twenty years later, it would remain so until his death, giving a renewed impetus to the development of what it meant to be an American.

1 Thomas C. Walker, “The Forgotten Prophet: Tom Paine’s Cosmopolitanism and International Relations,” International Studies Quarterly 44 Q000): 5l-72, esp.52, and David Fitzsimons, “Tom Paine’s New World Order: Idealistic Internationalism in the Ideology of Early American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History l9 (Fall 1995):569-82.

2 Mark Philp, Paine, Past Masters Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989),68-70.

3 Ian Dyck, “Local Attachments, National Identities and World Citizenship in the Thought of Thomas Paine,” History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993): 119.

4 See John Keane, “D6mocratie r6publicaine, nation, nationalisme: repenser les ‘Droits de l’Homme’ de Thomas Paine,” trans. Bernard Vincent, Thomas Paine, ou la republique sais frontiires, ed. Bernard Vincent (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, 1993), 137-58.

5 John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Biography (Boston: Little-Brown, 1995).

6 Quoted in Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (New York: Vintage, 1978), 159.

7 Paine, Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976),120. This edition was used for thisstudy.

8 Paine, “American Crisis One,” 23 December 1776, in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, Philip S. Foner, ed., two vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), l:50 (emphasis added). Unless otherwise specified, this edition was used throughout this study. It is hereinafter cited as CW.

9 Paine, Common Sense, 120.

10 J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of L8th-Century America, ed,. Albert E. Stone (Harmondsworth: Penguin, l98l), 69-70.

11 Paine to Anonymous, 1789, in CW,2:1297. Foner estimates this to be about the date of the letter, but he is uncertain.

12 See, for example, Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Henry Collins, introduction by Eric Foner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 94. This edition was used for this study. See also Paine, “An Essay for the Use of New Republicans in their Opposition to Monarchy,” 26 October 1792, in Le patriote francais, in CW,2:543. Paine’s Dissertation on the First Principles of Government( 1795), in CW,2:570-88, is full of Rousseauist ideas. See also Jack Fruchtman. J r.. Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 147-50. A. Owen Aldridge, in Thomas Paine’s American Ideology (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984), chapter 10, notes the close sentiment between Rousseau and Paine as early as 1776.

13 Paine, Rights of Man, 181 -82. Paine, more particularly, was here addressing what a representative government was all about and compares it precisely to “the nation itself.”

14 ibid. 198.

15 Paine to James Monroe, 20 October 1794, in CW,2:1367 .

16 Paine to Monroe, l0 September 1794, in CW,2:1353.

17 From a letter dated 16 March 1790, quoted in Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, two vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892),’1:271. Conway was one of Paine’s most important, first serious biographers.

18 David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York: Harper and Row, 1914),252. See also Jack Fruchtman Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994), 266-67

19 Paine to Monroe, 18 August 1794, in CW,2:1342-43 (my emphasis).

20 Ibid, 1343. See also Paine to Monroe, 10 September 1794,2:1345,1353,and 20 October 1794,C W,2:1367.

21 Paine to Monroe, 20 October 1794, in CW.2:1367 .

22 Paine, “To the Citizens of the United States and Particularly to the Leaders of the Federal Faction,” Letter IV, 6December 1802, The National Intelligencer, in CW’,2:926.

23 See A. Owen Aldridge, “La Signification historique, diplomatique et lit6raire de la lettre d I’Abb6 Raynal de Thomas Paine,” Etudes Anglaises I (1955):223-32, Danel Abel, “The Significance of the ‘Letter to the Abb6 Raynal’ in the progress of Thomas Paine’s Thought,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History 66 (Apr., 1942):116-90, as well as the citations in note one above

24 Paine, Letter to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America: in which the Mistakes in the Abb6’s Account of the Revolution of America are Corrected and Cleared up, (1782), in CW,2:256. Abb6 Raynal, in his Revolution d’Amerique, had asserted, among other things, that the causes of the war with Britain were not due to a battle over rights and liberties but rather over taxation.

25 Paine to Lansdowne, 2l September 1787, in CW, 2:1265.

26 Paine, Rights of Man, 228.

27 Paine, “Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet,” (Speech of 15 January 1793 before the National Convention), in CW, 2:552.

28 For the latter, see A. Owen Aldridge, Man of Reason: The Lift of Thomas Paine (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1959), 274-77.

29 Paine to Jefferson, 4 October 1800, in CW,2:1417 .

30 See Paine, To the Citizens of the United States, Letter III, 26 November 1802, The National Intelligencer, in ClW, 2:921. See Fruchtman, Thomas Paine: Apostle,322-23.

31 Ibid., 2:922 (his emphasis).

32 Paine to Anonymous, 4 March 1797, in Cll,2:1385; to Madison, 27 April 1797, 2:1394; Paine to Anonymous, 12 Thermidor, Year 8, 2:1406; Paine to Jefferson, I October 1800,2:1412.

33 Paine to Kitty Nicholson Few, 6 January 1789, in CW,2:1276.

34 Paine, Prospects on the Rubicon, or an Investigation into the Causes and Consequences of the Politics to be Agitated at the Next Meeting of Parliament, (1787), in CW,2:632.