He was buried on his farm in New Rochelle. Having seen his ideas ignite people all over the world, he lived long enough to taste the bitterness of a younger generation’s indifference to his prescriptions. Paine wanted his remains to rest in his adopted country, but another English radical, William Cobbett, had a different scheme. Cobbett had lived in the United States when the Federalists were vilifying Paine and had himself promoted their views in his Peter Porcupine essays. Returning to England, Cobbett became a convert to Paine’s reforms. He turned his acerbic wit on those who still blocked their adoption twenty-five years after Paine had proposed them. In 1819 Cobbett came back to the United States and, in homage to Paine, dug up his bones for repatriation. Those were Cobbett’s intentions, but somewhere along the line the bones got lost.13

This was not a fitting tribute to Paine, but an impulse that demonstrates the powerful attachments he had generated among those who were committed to change. And his relevance continued. In 1821, when Latin America was on the cusp of its great colonial revolutions, an edition of Common Sense appeared in Lima. And today, with this new edition of his writings, Paine has moved into the twenty-first century. His fame will persist because his passion for human rights never flagged, and his expression of that passion has proved enduringly contagious. Joel Barlow hit the mark when he said that Paine’s writings were “his best life.”14

 

Joyce Appleby, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, has followed the trajectory of American nation-building in her Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (1978), Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (2000), Thomas, Jefferson (2003), and A Restless Past: History and the American Public (2004). Past president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society for the History of the Early Republic, she has thought deeply about the complex relationship of the American public with the country’s professional historians. Her research on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, France, and America has focused on the impact of an expanding world market on the way people understood and talked about their society. A revolution in social theory accompanied a revolution in economic activity, according to Appleby, exemplified here in the writings of Thomas Paine.

 

Notes to the Introduction

1. Philip S. Foner, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 vols., New York, Citadel Press, 1945, p. xi.

2. Franklin to Mary Stevenson, Philadelphia, March 25, 1763.

3. Peach, Selections, p. xi.

4. Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, pp. 53-54.

5. Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1976.

6. Philip Foner, Appendix to Common Sense in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, p. 116.

7. David Powell, Tom Paine: The Greatest Exile, London, Croom Helm, 1985, p. II.

8.