Abstract
Thomas Paine was known in his lifetime as an “Apostle of Liberty” and an “Apostle of Freedom.”1 Those phrases speak to the liberty-loving strain at the heart of Paine’s career. They also testify to a profound religious fervor. Paine focused on human rights and political emancipation, but the manner in which he did so bore witness to a prophetic, missionary quality.2
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Notes
Daily Advertiser, April 24, 1794; Henry Redhead Yorke, cited in Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1994), vi.
Jack Fruchtman, Jr., Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Vikki J. Vickers, “My Pen and My Soul Have Ever Gone Together”: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Peter Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson and American Democracy,” in Seeing Jefferson Anew: In His Time and Ours, ed. John Boles and Randal Hall (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 33.
R. R. Palmer, “Notes on the Use of the Word ‘Democracy’ 1789–1799,” Political Science Quarterly 68 no. 2 (1952): 64–80.
For “speech acts,” see John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970); J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1975).
The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Series III, The Sketchbooks and Miscellaneous Drawings: Latrobe’s View of America, 1795–1820, Selections from the Watercolors and Sketches, ed. Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Horne, and Charles E. Brownell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 96–97. My thanks to Tina Sheller for referring me to this source.
William Cobbett, Peter Porcupine in America: Pamphlets on Republicanism and Revolution, ed. David A. Wilson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 97–98. Cobbett does not explain in what sense the “Crusaders” believed that a statue would “endanger the salvation” of the city; he does not specify whether the “Crusaders” were worried about individual souls or in the general well-being of the city.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
For the neo-religious, neo-monarchical veneration of Washington (and Washington’s encouragement of that veneration), see Marcus Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 110–111; Paul Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 200–205; Simon Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 44–82; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 53–94. American veneration of Washington drew upon British royalist traditions. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 195–236. My comments about Bache rely heavily upon Daniel’s brilliant analysis in Scandal and Civility, 109–147.
See David Harden, “Liberty Caps and Liberty Trees,” Past and Present 146 (1995): 66–102; Jennifer Harris, “The Red Cap of Liberty: A Study of Dress Worn by French Revolutionary Partisans, 1789–1794,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1980–1981): 283–312.
Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 29–36, 111–112; Clarence Ryan, “The Jacobean Oath of Allegiance and English Lay Catholics,” Catholic Historical Review 28 (1942): 159–183; M. C. Questier, “Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance,” Historical Journal 40 (1997): 311–329; Francis Jennings, “Thomas Penn’s Loyalty Oath,” American Journal of Legal History 8 (1964): 303–313; John Spurr, “A Profane History of Early Modern Oaths,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11 (2001), 37–63, esp. 46; Edward Vallance, “Oaths, Casuistry, and Equivocation: Anglican Responses to the Engagement Controversy,” Historical Journal 44 (2001): 59–77; Caroline Robbins, “Selden’s Pills: State Oaths in England, 1588–1714,” Huntington Library Quarterly 35 (1972), 303–321; Charles Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 137–158.
Ray Irwin, Daniel D. Tompkins: Governor of New York and Vice President of the United States (New York: New York Historical Society, 1968), 12–13; Columbian Centinel, June 26, 1793; Alexander Anderson Diary, May 18, 1795, New York Historical Society. See also Alan Blau, “New York City and the French Revolution, 1789–1797: A Study in French Revolutionary Influence,” Ph.D. Dissertation, City University of New York, 445–447.
Blau, “New York City,” 445–447; Simon Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 170–171.
Phineas Hedges, An Oration, Delivered before the Republican Society, of Ulster County (Goshen, NY: 1795), 3; City Gazette, January 23, 1793.
National Gazette, May 25, 1793 (quotation); Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Republican Court; or, American Society in the Days of Washington (New York: Haskell House Publishers, Ltd., [1867]1971), 350; General Advertiser, March 15, 1794; Columbian Herald or Southern Star, February 17, 1794; Daily Advertiser, February 26, 1794; Eagle, October 27, 1794. Newman, Parades, 165; Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion, 181–183.
For American civic festivals in the 1790s, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Newman, Parades; Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Albrecht Koschnik, “Political Conflict and Public Contest: Rituals of National Celebration in Philadelphia, 1788–1815,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 118 (1994): 209–248; Robert Hay, “A Jubilee for Freemen: The Fourth of July in Frontier Kentucky, 1788–1816,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 64 (1966): 169–195.
On these points, see Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1976]1988), 262–282; Lynn Hunt, “The World We Have Gained: The Future of the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 108 (2003): 1–19.
For French Revolutionary millennial fervor, see Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 119–201; Matthew Rainbow Hale, “On Their Tiptoes: Political Time and Newspapers during the Advent of the Radicalized French Revolution, circa 1792–1793,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (Summer 2009), 191–218; Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). For the French regeneration movement, see Mona Ozouf, “Regeneration,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, eds. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 781–791; Ozouf, L’homme régénéré: essais sur la revolution française (Paris, 1989); Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: The Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770–1800, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, [1993]1997), 131–156; Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).
General Advertiser, April 24, 1794; Jersey Chronicle, July 18, 1795. In The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 143 and 159–168, David A. Bell describes French republican efforts to regenerate as a process of “conversion.”
Alexander Graydon, Alexander Graydon’s Memoirs of His Own Times, ed. John Stockton Littell (New York: The New York Times and Arno Press, 1969), 351, 382.
John Marshall, The Life of George Washington (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), 406.
Cited in Marcus Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 174.
Cited in Charles Downer Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, [1897]1964), 290.
See Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108 (2003), 1061–1080; Dale Van Kley, “Christianity as Casualty and Chrysalis of Modernity: The Problem of Dechristianization in the French Revolution,” American Historical Review 108 (2003), 1081–1104; and the scholarship cited in these two excellent articles. In The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), Henry May urged historians to shift from an “Enlightenment and religion” paradigm to an “Enlightenment as religion” one. See also John Fea, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil War, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York: Basic Books, 1999); Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Jeffrey Burson, The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
Peter Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Benjamin Kaplan, Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009); Ethan Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion, and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2012); The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, ed. Chris Beneke and Christopher Grenda (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Evan Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Eric Schlereth, An Age of Infidels: The Politics of Religious Controversy in the Early United State (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Steven Green, The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Ibid., 25–26; Keith Michael Baker, “Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History,” in Willem Melching and Wyger Velema, eds., Main Trends in Cultural History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 95–120; Anthony Pagden, “The ‘Defence of Civilization’ in Eighteenth-Century Social Theory,” History of the Human Sciences 1 (1988): 33–45; Roberto Romani, “All Montesquieu’s Sons: The Place of Esprit Général, Caractère National, and Mœurs in French Political Philosophy, 1748–1789,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 362 (1998): 189–235; Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Jon Cowans, To Speak for the People: Public Opinion and the Problem of Legitimacy in the French Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2001); Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 167–199.
Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Herbert Morais, Deism in Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), 120–158; Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 14–47; Schlereth, Age of Infidels; Kerry Walters, Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011); Kerry Walters, The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1992).
Mark Philp, “Revolutionaries in Paris: Paine, Jefferson, and Democracy,” in Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions, ed. Simon Newman and Peter Onuf (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 137–160.
Thomas Paine, Paine: Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge, MA: University of Cambridge Press, 2000), 180.
Jack Fruchtman, Jr., The Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 120.
Thomas Paine, Letter to George Washington in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, vol. II, ed. Philip Foner (New York, 1945), 695.
Ibid., 694; see also 700.
Ibid., 692.
Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, ed. Kerry Walters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 105.
Ibid., 56.
Ibid., 108.
Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London, 1989), 206.
Steven Englund, “Converting to Religion after Its Demise: Thoughts on Marcel Gauchet and His American Reception,” Cross Currents: Journal of American Association for Religion and Intellectual Life 49, no. 1 (Spring 1999).
See Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 42; Patrick Hughes, “Irreligion Made Easy: The Reaction to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason,” conference paper presented at the International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies, New Rochelle, New York, October 2012. My thanks to Hughes for sharing his essay.
Oliver Wolcott to Frederick Wolcott, 1793, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Edited from the Papers of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, ed. George Gibbs (New York, 1846), 92. For a brilliant analysis of Webster’s worries about and war against the “demoralization” of the body politic, see Daniel, Scandal, 148–186. For Federalists and their antidemocratic schemes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998); Marshall Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001); William Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801–1811 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Jonathan Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Bryan Waterman, Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Albrecht Koschnik, ‘Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together’: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007); J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Catherine Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Todd Estes, The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006); Daniel, Scandal, 19–61, 148–230; Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); John Brooke, “Cultures of Nationalism, Movements of Reform, and the Composite-Federal Polity: From Revolutionary Settlement to Antebellum Crisis,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (2009): 1–34.
George Washington, “Farewell Address,” George Washington: A Collection, ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1988), 521.
Ibid., 105. See also Englund, “Converting to Religion after Its Demise,” and Brian C. Anderson, “Modernity and Christianity Reconsidered,” First Things 84 (June/July 1998): 55–57.
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Hale, M.R. (2016). Apostles of Freedom: Pro-French American Democrats and Thomas Paine as Religious Crusaders. In: Cleary, S., Stabell, I.L. (eds) New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137589996_5
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