Thomas Paine Reader

PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE THOMAS PAINE READER

Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England, in 1737, the son of a staymaker. He had little schooling and worked at a number of jobs, including tax collector, a position he lost for agitating for an increase in excisemen’s pay. Persuaded by Benjamin Franklin, he emigrated to America in 1774. In 1776 he began his American Crisis series of thirteen pamphlets, and also published the incalculably influential Common Sense, which established Paine not only as a truly revolutionary thinker, but as the American Revolution’s fiercest political theorist. In 1787 Paine returned to Europe, where he became involved in revolutionary politics. In England his books were burned by the public hangman. Escaping to France, Paine took part in drafting the French constitution and voted against the king’s execution. He was imprisoned for a year and narrowly missed execution himself. In 1802 he returned to America and lived in New York State, poor, ill, and largely despised for his extremism and so-called atheism (he was in fact a deist). Thomas Paine died in 1809. His body was exhumed by William Cobbett, and the remains were taken to England for a memorial burial. Unfortunately, Cobbett was forbidden to bury Paine in English soil and the remains were subsequently lost.

Michael Foot was born in 1913 and was educated in Reading and at Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He became Editor of the Evening Standard in 1942 and subsequently of Tribune. He first entered Parliament as Labour Member for Devonport in 1945, and after a series of increasingly important political posts became Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in 1976 and Leader in 1980, until his resignation in 1983. He was Labour Member for Blaenau Gwent from 1983 to 1992, when he retired from Parliament. Michael Foot is also the author of The Pen and the Sword (1957), Aneurin Bevan, Vol. 1, 1897-1945 (1962), and Vol. 2, 1945-1960 (1973), Debts of Honour (1980), Another Heart and Other Pulses (1984), Politics of Paradise (1984) and H.G., The History of Mr Wells (1995).

Isaac Kramnick was born in 1938 and educated at Harvard University, where he received a BA degree in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1965, and at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He has taught at Harvard, Brandeis, Yale and Cornell, where he is now Professor of Government. He is married to Miriam Brody Krannick and lives in Ithaca, New York. Among his publications are Bolingbroke and His Circle, The Rage of Edmund Burke and numerous articles on eighteenth-century topics. He has edited William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, The Federalist Papers by James, Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense for the Penguin Classics. He is also the author, with Barry Sheerman, MP, of Laski: A Life on the Left.

THOMAS PAINE READER

EDITED BY MICHAEL FOOT
AND ISAAC KRAMNICK

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This collection first published 1987
19

Collection, introduction and annotation copyright © Michael Foot
and Isaac Kramnick, 1987
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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978-0-14-193775-5

Contents

    EDITORS INTRODUCTION: THE LIFE, IDEOLOGY AND LEGACY OF THOMAS PAINE
    PAINE’S WRITINGS
    [1] THE CASE OF THE OFFICERS OF EXCISE (1772)
    [2] AFRICAN SLAVERY IN AMERICA (l775)
    [3] REFLECTIONS ON THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LORD CLIVE (1775)
    [4] LIBERTY TREE (l775)
    [5] COMMON SENSE (1776)
    [6] THE AMERICAN CRISIS (1776-83)
    [7] PUBLIC GOOD (1780)
    [8] SIX LETTERS TO RHODE ISLAND (I782-3)
    [9] LETTER TO THE ABBE RAYNAL (1782)
    [10] DISSERTATIONS ON GOVERNMENT, THE AFFAIRS OF THE BANK, AND PAPER MONEY (1786)
    [11] THE RIGHTS OF MAN (179I-2)
    [12] LETTER ADDRESSED TO THE ADDRESSERS ON THE LATE PROCLAMATION (1792)
    [13] AN ESSAY FOR THE USE OF NEW REPUBLICANS IN THEIR OPPOSITION TO MONARCHY (1792)
    [14] REASONS FOR PRESERVING THE LIFE OF LOUIS CAPET (1793)
    [15] THE AGE OF REASON, PART ONE (1794)
    [16] DISSERTATION ON FIRST PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT (1795)
    [17] AGRARIAN JUSTICE (l795)
    [18] LETTER TO GEORGE WASHINGTON (l795)
    [19] TO THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES (1802-3)
    [20] THE CONSTRUCTION OF IRON BRIDGES (1803)
    [21] CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM (1805)

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION:
THE LIFE, IDEOLOGY AND LEGACY
OF THOMAS PAINE

In Number VII of his American Crisis, addressed in 1778 ‘To the People of England’, Thomas Paine described his feelings on arriving in America four years earlier. An unknown Englishman of thirty-seven undistinguished years, he was plunged into tumultuous Philadelphia:

I happened to come to America a few months before the breaking out of hostilities… The world could not then have persuaded me that I should be either a soldier or an author… But when the country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir.

Few men have ‘stirred’ as much as Paine would in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

PAINE’S LIFE

Thomas Paine was born in the country town of Thetford, Norfolk, on 29 January 1737. His father, Joseph Paine, was a respected Quaker staymaker, his mother the daughter of an attorney. Tom was raised a Quaker and schooled in the village from his sixth to his thirteenth year. In 1750 he was apprenticed to his father’s shop, where he learned the trade of making women’s corsets and inserting their steel or whalebone ribs. He ran away from home at the age of sixteen and went to sea on a merchant ship only to be brought back by his father.