323). A radical proposition, Paine’s scheme was integral to his critique of private property within. In the beginning the world was “the common property of the human race,” he announced (p. 332), an assertion that John Locke had popularized in the seventeenth century. People who improved property added greatly to the wealth and comforts of modern society, but they should, Paine argued, pay a ground rent, since that property originally belonged to all. It was from the revenues of this rent that Paine projected financing his gift to those passing into adulthood.

What The Age of Reason was to religious fidelity, Agrarian Justice was to political and economic orthodoxy. Paine’s goal was to eliminate existing inequalities in wealth and make the interests of all people converge with those of the nation. Here his peculiar blend of liberal and democratic convictions appears most salient. He believed in economic freedom and limited government. He was no socialist, but his indignation about poverty compelled him to devise ways to invest everyone with some stake in society. Always ahead of his time, he went on in Agrarian Justice to propose social insurance for the aged and public welfare programs financed through progressive taxation. To demonstrate the reasonableness of these proposals, he detailed with typical brio the historical trajectory of civilization from the equal state within Indian tribes to the egregious social distances of contemporary society.

An invitation from the newly elected Jefferson offering Paine passage on an American warship proved decisive. In 1802 Paine sailed back to an America quite different from the one he had left fourteen years earlier. Both Washington and Franklin were now dead. Partisan warfare between the Federalists and their Democratic-Republican opponents had replaced the cooperation among the patriot leaders during the Revolution. Jefferson’s election had been accompanied by a campaign filled with vituperation. Publication of The Age of Reason, which Paine had dedicated to the citizens of the United States, had wrecked his reputation, especially among the Federalists. The New England Palladium greeted news of Paine’s return by characterizing him as “that lying, drunken, brutal infidel who enjoyed the opportunity of basking and wallowing in the confusion, devastation, bloodshed, rapine, and murder, in which his soul delights.” A century later Theodore Roosevelt called Paine “that filthy little atheist.”12

The Federalists convinced themselves that the success of the Jeffersonians was ephemeral and that people would come to their senses soon. Paine’s radicalism, they believed, was out of step with the sentiments of the American people, many of whom had been swept up in the religious revivals that were changing the spiritual complexion of the United States. Attacking Paine was one way of getting at Jefferson, who was associated with him in the public mind. And they were probably right, but somehow Jefferson remained popular while Paine remained controversial. Ever the polemicist, Paine plunged into politics with his year-long series To the Citizens of the United States, in which he excoriated the Federalists’ betrayal of what he and the Jeffersonians considered the true principles of the American Revolution.

Far from backing away from the sentiments in The Age of Reason, he carried on a running war with his critics in published letters that continued his examination of biblical prophecies and introduced new themes like the use of dreams in the New Testament. With one of his best-known proselytes, Elihu Palmer, a free-thinking former Presbyterian clergyman and fellow Deist, Paine founded a theistic church in New York City. Palmer’s journal, The Prospect; or, View of the Moral World, offered Paine an outlet for his never-ending stream of commentary and polemics. He also found a new friend in inventor Robert Fulton, who shared Paine’s love of mechanics, science, Deism, and democracy with almost equal fervor.

Paine was useful to the Federalists as a brush for painting Jefferson as an infidel, but America was essential to Paine. Upon his return, he hailed the United States as “the country of my heart, and the place of my political and literary birth” (p. 367). True enough, but there was more. The success of ordinary men and women establishing a society with protected rights, open opportunity, widespread property ownership, religious freedom, and no political privileges or social distinctions was all the proof Paine needed to hammer home the truth that the future would be different. More than anyone else, Paine made America “the cause of all mankind” and used its example to show how to make good on the Enlightenment promise that people born with a capacity for benign self-direction could work out their own destinies and bring into existence a world that reflected the fulfillment of desire rather than a compromise with despair.

Paine had been ill several years before his death in 1809.