“A sotish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man”

Having whole-heartedly adopted the American cause, Thomas Paine embedded himself with the Continental Army in the fall of 1776.

That was not a good time for the Continental Army.

Returning to Philadelphia, Paine started to publish The Crisis, urging Americans not to let themselves fall back under the control of a tyrant:

Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sotish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.

I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being, who at the last day shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow and the slain of America.

There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful.

It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war: The cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolfe, and we ought to guard equally against both.

In that quotation I followed the spelling and punctuation of the broadside issued “opposite the Court-House, Queen Street,” in Boston. That was how Edward Eveleth Powars and Nathaniel Willis, publishers of the Independent Chronicle, described their print shop, in a space originally used by James Franklin. The town hadn’t yet gotten around to giving the street a new, non-monarchical name.

“In free countries the Law ought to be the King”

For Independence Day I’m going back before the Declaration to a text published at the end of 1775 which paved the way for blaming everything on King George III.

These passages are from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, advocating both independence from Britain and a republican form of government—meaning he set out to convince people who had lived under a monarch their whole lives that that figure wasn’t necessary.

The powers of governing still remaining in the hands of the king, he will have a negative [i.e., veto] over the whole legislation of this continent. And as he hath shewn himself such an inveterate enemy to liberty, and discovered such a thirst for arbitrary power; is he, or is he not, a proper man to say to these colonies, You shall make no laws but what I please?

And is there any inhabitant in America so ignorant, as not to know, that according to what is called the present constitution, that this continent can make no laws, but what the king gives leave to: and is there any man so unwise, as not to see, that (considering what has happened) he will suffer no law to be made here, but such as suits his purpose? . . .

BUT where, say some, is the King of America? I will tell you, friend, he reigns above, and does not make havock of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honours, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth, placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far we approve of monarchy, that in America, THE LAW IS KING.

For as in absolute governments the King is Law, so in free countries the Law ought to be the King; and there ought to be no other. But left any ill use should afterwards arise, let the crown, at the conclusion of the ceremony, be demolished, and scattered among the people, whose right it is.

A GOVERNMENT of our own is our natural right; and when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. If we omit it now, some Massanello may hereafter arise, who, laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.

When Paine republished Common Sense in London in 1791, some lines in these passages still constitutied lese-majeste. The printer left blank spaces at those spots instead. In the copy scanned for Google Books, someone has gone through and inserted the original text by hand.

James Smither, Engraver of Philadelphia

The 18 Apr 1768 Pennsylvania Chronicle included this advertisement:

James Smither, Engraver,
At the first house in Third Street, from the Cross Keys, Corner of Chestnut-Street, Philadelphia,
PERFORMS all manner of ENGRAVING in Gold, Silver, Copper, Steel, and all other Metals—Coats of Arms, and Seals, done in the neatest Manner. Likewise cuts Stamps, Brands, and metal Cuts for Printers, and ornamental Tools for Bookbinders. He also ornaments Guns and Pistols, both engraving and inlaying Silver, at the most REASONABLE RATES.

Smither had come from Britain, where he reportedly worked for a while in the Tower of London engraving guns for the government.

In January 1769, Smither proposed to start a drawing school for “young gentlemen and ladies.”

Meanwhile, he was also doing a wide range of engraving jobs, including:

• book plates, bill heads, and illustrations for the printer Robert Bell.
• a portrait of John Dickinson during his fame as the author of the Farmer’s Letters (shown above).
• a map of “the CITY and LIBERTIES of PHILADELPHIA,” advertised by John Reed in 1773.
• currency for the colony of Pennsylvania in 1772.
• this hot water urn made by silversmith Robert Humphrey in 1774, presented to Charles Thomson in thanks for his services to the First Continental Congress.

In October 1775, the colony was at war, and it needed to print more money. Pennsylvania hired Smither to engrave another series of notes, issued through April 1776.

In the fall of 1777, the British army took Philadelphia.

By May 1778, Smither was engraving the tickets for the Meschianza, Maj. John André’s elaborate ball and theatrical tournament for army officers and wealthy Loyalists.

But that may not have been the only job James Smither did for the royal authorities in Philadelphia. On 11 April, Thomas Paine wrote to Henry Laurens, then president of the Second Continental Congress, about counterfeiters. He made this proposal:

As Forgery is a Sin against all men alike and reprobated by all Civil Nations. Query, would it not be right to require of General [William] Howe, the Persons of Smithers and others in Philadelphia suspected of this Crime; and if he or any other Commander, continues to conceal or protect them in such practices, that in such case the Congress will Consider the Crime as the Act of the Commander in Chief.

The idea that the Congress could ask Gen. Howe to hand over anyone suspected of forging Continental or state notes was ludicrous, but no one ever said Thomas Paine wasn’t visionary.

On 18 June, the British army pulled out of Philadelphia, heading across New Jersey back to New York. James Smither probably went with them. In 1778 the Pennsylvania council put him on a long list of people who had “willingly aided and assisted the enemies of this state,” and at the end of the war it seized his property.

TOMORROW: Meeting Maj. Donkin.

Dickinson Biography to be Published in 2024

More than eleven years ago I posted this observation about how many books on Thomas Paine had come out in recent years, belying his fans’ claim that he was a neglected Founder.

As I wrote that, I looked around for a foil and landed on this:

Let’s compare Paine to, say, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the most influential American political essay before Common Sense.

In addition to writing that book and “The Liberty Song,” Dickinson was an important delegate to the Continental Congress, top official of Pennsylvania’s wartime government, and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.

Dickinson was on the losing side of the debate over the Declaration of Independence but on the right side of the debate over slavery.

Dickinson made even more contributions to the American cause, such as writing the first draft of the Articles of Confederation and chairing the Annapolis Convention.

Nonetheless, back in 2011 I could find only two recent books on Dickinson, one from a press affiliated with the National Review and the other by Jane Calvert, apparently based on her doctoral dissertation.

Calvert went on to launch the John Dickinson Writings Project, where she is Director and Chief Editor, as well as becoming a professor at the University of Kentucky.

Oxford University Press has just announced that next summer it will publish Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson by Calvert. This will be the first full, scholarly, modern biographer of this important and unique figure among the Founders.  

Ironically, Calvert’s university webpage says, “Professor Calvert has also produced work on Thomas Paine.” So it’s possible to do both!

“We have every opportunity and every encouragement”

Over the Independence Day holiday, the political reporting website called The Bulwark published a provocative article by history professors Timothy C. Hemmis and David Head titled “This July Fourth, Remember the ‘Founding Scoundrels’.”

The subhead explains the thesis: “They helped build America, too.”

As Americans celebrating Independence Day, we tend to want to remember the ideal promised by the new nation: that the United States would be a place where high-minded people led virtuous citizens in a spirit of well-ordered liberty.

That’s what Thomas Paine meant in 1776 when he wrote that “we have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth.” And it’s certainly how the Founding Fathers themselves wanted to be remembered.

But some of their contemporaries interpreted “every opportunity” differently.

These particular individuals would fight for independence from Britain, sure, and even establish new political and social institutions—so long as they could also serve themselves.

Follow the link to see which three scoundrels these authors picked to spotlight.

All three of those men went after opportunities in the old American Southwest, or the new nation’s frontier border with Spain/France. Arguably, such adventurism had as much to do with creating the modern, continent-wide U.S. of A. as the mercantile ventures more typical gentlemen were trying back along the coast.

There’s a book coming, of course. Hemmis and Head are the editors of the collection A Republic of Scoundrels: The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New American Nation, which will arrive in December.

Exploring the Sid Lapidus Collection Online

Princeton University announced this month that alumnus Sidney Lapidus had completed the gift of a large collection of pamphlets and other political material from the broadly defined Revolutionary Era.

Lapidus started his collection in 1959 as a recent graduate, well before entering what turned out to be the rewarding field of private equity. He first bought a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man from a London bookshop. (Paine’s cottage in New Rochelle, New York, was across the street from Lapidus’s high school.)

The Sid Lapidus ’59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution at Princeton now includes “more than 2,700 original books, atlases, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines relating to human and political rights, liberty, and independence around the time of the American Revolution.”

In addition, Lapidus provided funds to digitize the material and make the collection keyword-searchable for anyone.

I tried out the site by asking to see all the material that used the phrase “Intolerable Acts.” That search produced several hits, but the phrase didn’t appear in the original texts, only in the dealers’ descriptions and other metadata attached to those items. As I wrote years ago, the phrase “Intolerable Acts” didn’t become widely used until the late 1800s.

One writer in Revolutionary America who used the word “intolerable” a lot was the Rev. Thomas Bradbury Chandler, author of A Free Examination of the Critical Commentary on Archbishop Secker’s Letter to Mr. Walpole, published by Hugh Gaine of New York in 1774. Chandler was a Loyalist, and what he found intolerable wasn’t a stricter Parliament but the “Hardship” of an ocean voyage, the “Licentiousness” of a totally free press, and the writer he was responding to.

I also searched for all material published in 1774 and mentioning Boston. That brought up the official texts of Parliament’s new Coercive Acts, the responses from the First Continental Congress, sermons and almanacs with commentary on current events, and so on.

One item that caught my eyes was A Letter to a Friend. Giving a Concise, But Just, Representation of the Hardships and Sufferings the Town of Boston is Exposed to and Must Undergo in Consequence of the Late Act of the British-Parliament; Which, by Shutting Up It’s Port, Has Put a Fatal Bar in the Way of that Commercial Business on which it Depended for It’s Support, published by Joseph Greenleaf.

That pamphlet from the summer of 1774 is signed “T.W. A Bostonian.” However, it was widely known that the author was the Rev. Dr. Charles Chauncy. Usually ministers stayed out of secular political disputes, preferring to work behind the scenes or through sermons, but Chauncy felt no compunction when the economic well-being of his town was in danger.

On page 22 of this pamphlet Chauncy embarked on a long footnote complaining about a Customs service policy that required firewood ships signing into Marblehead to completely unload and reload before going on to Boston. So he really was writing about earthly concerns.

Now the text of this Letter to a Friend is already scanned and transcribed on the web. So the arrival of this digital version from Princeton isn’t a revelation. But anything that makes research easier is welcome.

TOMORROW: Charles Chauncy’s friends.

“To Begin the World Again” in Boston

Starting next week, the Associates of the Boston Public Library will host free performances of Ian Ruskin’s one-person show, To Begin the World Again: The Life of Thomas Paine.

The show description says:

Through his portrayal of this pivotal patriot, Ruskin will provide audiences with an intimate insight into Paine’s life and his important role in bringing about revolutionary changes in the world. The play’s period costuming and props, the soundtrack of original music by Joe Romano, and the sound effects by Keith Robinson will add immediacy and intimacy to Ruskin’s powerful performance.

Like Paine, Ruskin started his career in Britain before coming to America, in his case in 1985. He appeared on many television shows, often playing “the intelligent villain,” as his website says. (There are advantages to a British accent in our culture.)

Ruskin has developed at least three one-person shows reflecting his interests in history and social justice; the subjects beside Paine include labor leader Harry Bridges and inventor Nikola Tesla.

There will be two in-person performances in Rabb Hall of the Boston Public Library’s central branch:

• Tuesday, 1 November, 10:00 A.M.
• Wednesday, 2 November, 6:00 P.M.

At the second performance, Thomas E. Patterson, the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, will introduce the show and connect it to today’s issues. He is the author of, among other books, How America Lost Its Mind: The Assault on Reason That’s Crippling Our Democracy.

Reserve tickets for those live performances through this page. Folks can also tune into showings of a prerecorded performance on 3–9 November. Again, that requires tickets, but the tickets are free.

(Some folks might remember the film of To Begin the World Again directed by Haskell Wexler, which aired on PBS for several years. These performances are, of course, Ruskin’s latest iteration.)

“Extremely messy as documents”

In 1726, Mary Toft claimed to have given birth to rabbits.

This generated a lot of news coverage and debate in Britain. The episode continues to interest social historians.

Earlier this month Karen Harvey, author of The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England, wrote about her work on documents that seemed at once absolutely central to the event and very difficult to work with:

Mary Toft’s three ‘confessions’ were new to me. These were taken down by James Douglas, a doctor present on these three occasions that Toft was questioned by a Justice of the Peace. . . .

Reading these thirty-six pages was an absolute revelation. The writing jumped off the screen. In their form and their content, they were urgent, vivid and disturbing. They recorded Toft’s version of events in what appeared to be as close to a transcription as Douglas could possibly muster. They were also far richer than I had imagined from the fairly cursory discussions in existing scholarship.

But it also became immediately apparent why historians had not undertaken a thoroughgoing analysis of the confessions and placed this centre-stage in their accounts of the case. Not only were these extremely messy as documents – full of errors and deletions – but the narratives they offered were inconsistent and contradictory.

Before her book, Harvey wrote about the Toft confessions in this article for History Workshop Journal.

Her essay is part of a series from the University of Birmingham’s Eighteenth Century Centre on sources that historians have found powerful, including:

• Naomi Pullen on a letter from John Locke to Quaker preacher Rebecca Collier deemed fake for mistaken reasons—but is it genuine?
• Charles Walton on Thomas Paine’s letter to Georges Danton urging the French Revolutionary government to crack down on “calumniators.”

“Some people talk of impeaching John Adams”

In 1802, Thomas Paine returned to the U.S. of A. after nearly a decade and a half in Europe.

Paine had spent the previous several years in France, some of them in prison. Before that he had built bridges in Britain and then burned them metaphorically with his books on religion and revolutionary politics.

Paine had also started a one-sided feud with President George Washington, who he thought hadn’t done enough to get him out of that French prison. But an invitation from President Thomas Jefferson convinced Paine that at least some Americans would be glad to see him return.

Paine wasted no time in going back to arguing about American politics. From a temporary base in Washington, he started to issue public letters to the citizens of his newly readopted country. The second one, dated 19 Nov 1802, included this passage:

Some of John Adams’s loyal subjects, I see, have been to present him with an address on his birthday; but the language they use is too tame for the occasion. Birthday addresses, like birthday odes, should not creep along like mildrops down a cabbage leaf, but roll in a torrent of poetical metaphor.

I will give them a specimen for the next year. Here it is:

When an ant, in traveling over the globe, lifts up its foot, and puts it again on the ground, it shakes the earth to its center: but when YOU, the mighty Ant of the East, was born, etc., etc., etc., the center jumped upon the surface.

This, gentlemen, is the proper style of addresses from well-bred ants to the monarch of the ant hills; and as I never take pay for preaching, praying, politics, or poetry, I make you a present of it.

Some people talk of impeaching John Adams; but I am for softer measures. I would keep him to make fun of. He will then answer one of the ends for which he was born, and he ought to be thankful that I am arrived to take his part.

It’s not hard to see how Paine made so many enemies.

See Jett B. Conner’s John Adams vs. Thomas Paine: Rival Plans for the Early Republic for more on the fraught relationship between those two advocates for independence.

“A large Collection of interesting Papers”

In 1843, the London bookselling firm of Thomas Thorpe issued its catalogue of manuscripts for sale, “Upon Papyrus, Vellum, and Paper, in Various Languages.”

Among those items was “A large Collection of interesting Papers, formed by the late George Chalmers, Esq., relating to New England, from 1635 to 1780, in 4 vols. folio, neatly bound in calf, £21.”

Chalmers (1742-1825, shown here) was born in Scotland and at age twenty-one settled in Maryland as a young lawyer. In early 1776 he published Plain Truth, a point-by-point riposte to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. That went over so well that Chalmers soon moved back to Britain.

In 1780 Chalmers published Political Annals of the Present United Colonies from Their Settlement to the Peace of 1763. Or rather, he published the first volume of documents about the colonial governments, tracing the history up to 1688, but never produced the second.

In 1786 Chalmers became a secretary to Britain’s privy council, and he kept that postion for decades. It provided him with the income and access he needed to collect manuscripts and write books and pamphlets about the history of Scotland, Shakespeare, other authors, controversial issues of the day, and much more.

In 1796, as Britain fought Revolutionary France, the government paid Chalmers to write a critical biography of Paine. He issued that under the pseudonym of Francis Oldys, supposedly a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Otherwise, he focused mainly on British topics, particularly the long history of Scotland.

Nevertheless, Chalmers’s manuscript collection shows that he never gave up on accumulating material about the old North American colonies. After his death, his papers went to a nephew, and two years after that man died in 1841, they were on the market.

Here’s a sample of what the collection included from the Revolutionary years, according to the bookseller’s catalogue:

• Various papers relating to the paper currency in the colonies, 1740-60.
• Account of the dispute at New London, at the burial of a corpse, 1764.
• List of graduates in Harvard College, who have made any figure in the world.
• Part of Mr. Otes’s speech in the general assembly at Boston, in 1768.
• Autograph letter from W. Molineux, relating to the riots at Boston, 1768.
• Letters relating to the seizure of the sloop Liberty, 1768, very curious.
• Information of Richard Silvester, of the speeches of the Boston leaders, 1769.
• Declaration of Nathaniel Coffin to Governor J. [sic] Bernard, on the designs to drive off the Governor and Lieutenant Governor, 1769.
• Key to the characters published in the Boston Chronicle of Oct. 26, 1769, (The Boston patriots characterized.)
• Autograph letter from George Mason, containing an account of the riot and attack of Mr. Mein’s house, 1769.
• Copy of a curious letter from Boston, relating to Franklin’s duplicity, &c. 1769.
• Autograph letters from John Mein and George Mason to Joseph Harrison, concerning the riot at Boston, 1769.
• Papers relating to the outrage on Owen Richards, an officer of the customs at Boston, 1770.
• Copy of a letter from Lord Dartmouth to Dr. Benjamin Franklin, about presenting a remonstrance of the court to the king, 1773.
• Account of the proceedings of Governor Hutchinson, relating to Massachusetts, &c., 52 pages, 1774.
• Account of an attack that happened on His Majesty’s troops, by a number of the people of the province of Massachusetts Bay, 1775.

It looks like Chalmers obtained many of those documents from Joseph Harrison, a Boston-based Customs official, or his estate.

Prof. Jared Sparks (1799-1866) of Harvard College must have seen the bookseller’s listing. He apparently arranged for the college library to buy some of Chalmers’s papers in 1847 while he bought others for himself, leaving them to the library on his death. Thus, the papers listed above are now at the Houghton Library and digitized as part of the university’s Colonial North America project.

“The unsubstantial fabric of visionary politicians”

Given that John Quincy Adams’s first comment on the idea of a hollow Earth was decidedly skeptical and negative, how did modern writers come to believe he supported the theory as President?

I think one key may lie in how Adams referred to the theory as “so visionary” when he wrote about supporting an Antarctic expedition advocated by a man who had once believed in that theory. The full paragraph reveals that Adams favored the expedition only because the hollow-Earth theory was no longer involved.

For us today, the word “visionary” has positive connotations. Merriam-Webster’s primary definition is “having or marked by foresight and imagination.”

But Adams used the word differently. For example, in an essay in the 20 July 1791 Columbian Centinel he wrote:

But if the principles of Mr. [Thomas] Paine, or those of the French National Assembly, would lead us by a vain and delusive pretence of an impracticable union, between the right of declaring, and the expense of supporting a war, to the sacrifice of principles founded in immutable truth, if they could persuade us, by establishing in the legislative body all negotiations with foreign nations relative to war and peace, to open a thousand avenues for base intrigue, for furious faction, for foreign bribery, and domestic treason, let us remain immoveably fixed at the banners of our constitutional freedom, and not desert the impregnable fortress of our liberties, for the unsubstantial fabric of visionary politicians.

On 30 Nov 1837, after his Presidency, Adams wrote in his diary:

Mr. G. W. Cherry was here again this morning, and I had a long conversation with him upon his project of colonization. He is one of the most benevolent visionaries of that fraudulent charitable institution, the Colonization Society. His plan is, to raise a fund for purchasing a number of slaves and locating them in small villages, where they may in a given time purchase their freedom by their own labor. I freely gave my opinion to Mr. Cherry: that the whole colonization project was an abortion; that as a system of eventual emancipation of the slaves of this country it was not only impracticable, but demonstrated to be so; that as a scheme for relieving the slave States of free negroes its moral aspect was not comely, and it was equally impracticable.

Especially in his later years, J. Q. Adams was not afraid to let you know how he felt.

Thus, Adams was using “visionary” in accord with Merriam-Webster’s other definitions: “incapable of being realized or achieved,” “existing only in imagination,” “disposed to reverie or imagining.” Back in 1757, Dr. Samuel Johnson defined a visionary as “One whose imagination is disturbed.” In sum, the word had negative connotations.

Without knowing about that shift in meaning, we might well assume that Adams’s description of the hollow-Earth theory as “so visionary” meant he thought it was a good thing. He didn’t.

And likewise, I don’t think he’d like the title of Fred Kaplan’s 2014 biography, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary.

“Life of Thomas Paine” at Faneuil Hall, 7 Oct.

On Saturday, 7 October, Ian Ruskin will perform his one-person play To Begin the World Over Again: The Life of Thomas Paine in Faneuil Hall.

Ruskin wrote this play with advice from “a distinguished group of Paine scholars,” he says. This will be its Boston debut. Ruskin has performed it in various venues around the world, including most recently in Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York. A filmed version aired on P.B.S. on Independence Day weekend.

Ruskin’s description for his play says:

No other Founding Father was anywhere close to Thomas Paine in his vision of democracy. Paine’s book Common Sense sold hundreds of thousands of copies and everybody read it or had it read to them. It was the spark that ignited the American Revolution and remains in print today over 200 years later. He helped shape our national character and inspires us to be better guardians of that legacy.

Paine based his beliefs on one simple yet powerful idea, “justice for all.” This call resounds in America now, echoing the words of Martin Luther King [actually Theodore Parker]: “the moral arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Today’s political environment, while never specifically mentioned in the play, reminds us to revisit Paine’s words with his calls for the end of slavery and voter suppression, and for a government that cares for its citizens and provides equality for women. In this time of division and despair, we need, more than ever, to hear Paine’s words.

Tickets cost $10-15 and are available through this site. The show is scheduled to run from 7:30 to 9:00 P.M. on 7 October.

In Our Time, If You’ve Got the Time

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite podcasts is the B.B.C. Radio 4 discussion show In Our Time. In each episode, novelist and television host Melvyn Bragg discusses a particular topic with three experts drawn from Britain’s universities.

For the podcast, the forty-five minutes of discussion recorded live is augmented with the few extra minutes of “what did we miss?” chat.

Here are some episodes over the past year that have improved my understanding of the British Empire of the 1700s:

• Fanny Burney
• Frederick the Great
• Emma
• Salem Witch Trials
• Voyages of James Cook
• Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
• Titus Oates and the “Popish Plot”
• Songs of Innocence and Experience
• The Gin Craze

As I recall, the Emma discussion eventually came down to the academics reading out their favorite bits. And who can blame them?

“As they were not reasoned up, they cannot be reasoned down”

In 1721, the Rev. Jonathan Swift published A Letter to a Young Clergyman, Lately Enter’d Into Holy Orders, by a Person of Quality. It included this sentence about men wasting their college education by thinking in new ways and thus making such education look bad for everyone else:

It is from such seminaries as these, that the world is provided with the several tribes and denominations of freethinkers, who, in my judgment, are not to be reformed by arguments offered to prove the truth of the christian religion, because reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired: for in the course of things, men always grow vicious before they become unbelievers; but if you would once convince the town or country profligate, by topics drawn from the view of their own quiet, reputation, health, and advantage, their infidelity would soon drop off: This I confess is no easy task, because it is almost in a literal sense, to fight with beasts.

Eventually the clause “Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired” was pulled out of that sentence as wisdom on its own. Ironically, Swift wasn’t extolling reasoning so much as faith.

In the letter dated 21 Mar 1778 in The American Crisis, Thomas Paine offered a variation on that idea in a public letter to Gen. Sir William Howe:

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival and a bear your master.

You always knew where you stood with Paine.

In the 12 Oct 1786 Independent Chronicle, young Fisher Ames (shown above) published an essay about the Shays’ Rebellion then roiling Massachusetts. He restated the same thought about the futility of reasoning with the unreasonable, this time calling that older wisdom.

It may be very proper to use arguments, to publish addresses, and fulminate proclamations, against high treason: but the man who expects to disperse a mob of a thousand men, by ten thousand arguments, has certainly never been in one. I have heard it remarked, that men are not to be reasoned out of an opinion that they have not reasoned themselves into. The case, though important, is simple. Government does not subsist by making proselytes to sound reason, or by compromise and arbitration with its members; but by the power of the community compelling the obedience of individuals.

Ten years later, on 28 Apr 1796, Ames was a member of the House of Representatives. He spoke in favor of the Jay Treaty, repeating the thought in new terms:

We hear it said, that this is a struggle for liberty, a manly resistance against the design to nullify this assembly, and to make it a cypher in the government: that the president and senate, the numerous meetings in the cities, and the influence of the general alarm of the country, are the agents and instruments of a scheme of coercion and terrour, to force the treaty down our throats, though we loath it, and in spite of the clearest convictions of duty and conscience.

It is necessary to pause here, and inquire, whether suggestions of this kind be not unfair in their very texture and fabrick, and pernicious in all their influences. They oppose an obstacle in the path of inquiry, not simply discouraging, but absolutely insurmountable. They will not yield to argument; for, as they were not reasoned up, they cannot be reasoned down. They are higher than a Chinese wall in truth’s way, and built of materials that are indestructible. While this remains, it is vain to say to this mountain, be thou cast into the sea.

Ames was known for his Federalist oratory, and that speech was reprinted many times in the nineteenth century. Several more American writers echoed Ames’s “reasoned up/reasoned down” phrase.

(This posting was aided by the inquiry at Quote Investigator.)

The Hangings of Thomas Paine

In 1791 and early 1792, Thomas Paine published the two parts of The Rights of Man, supporting the principles of the French Revolution and proposing radical reforms for British society. The book inspired a lot of reform societies, and also a lot of backlash. The government convicted him, in absentia, for sedition.

By the end of 1792 Paine had become a public enemy for some British. From John Mayhall’s Annals and History of Leeds (1860):

At Leeds the effigy of Tom Paine, (holding a pair of stays in one hand, and his Rights of Man in the other) was carried through the streets with a halter round his neck, and (having been well whipped and hanged at the market cross) thrown into a large bonfire, amidst the shouts of the surrounding multitude.

A letter to Notes and Queries in 1896 added:

Leeds was not by any means alone in burning Paine’s effigy, for the Bury Post, of Bury St. Edmunds, recorded on 9 January, 1793, that “On Saturday last [5 January] the effigy of T. Paine was carried round Swaffham, hung on a gibbet, and committed to the flames.”

And on 7 January, in the small West Yorkshire village of Ripponden, the lawyer John Howarth recorded paying people “who carried about Tom Payne’s Effigy and shot at it, 10s.6d.” I’m guessing those demonstrations of conspicuous piety and patriotism were part of Twelfth Night rituals.

The British cartoon above, titled “The End of Pain,” is dated to the same year. And that’s not all. In Spen Valley, Past and Present (1893), Frank Peel wrote:

Benjamin Popplewell, one of the founders of Stubbins Mill, Heckmondwike, had always belonged to the progressive party until scared by the excesses which followed the first French Revolution, he seems, like the great Edmund Burke and many lesser lights, to have fairly lost his head, and when the American Colonies revolted and Paine’s “Rights of Man” began to be circulated among the working classes, he joined one of the “Church and King” Clubs which were established about this time in various parts of the country by those who were anxious to prevent the spread of revolutionary doctrines. . . .

Popplewell, in order to show his detestation of the principles inculcated by Paine, got up what would now be considered a very laughable farce, in which he was himself the chief actor. Personating the arch-agitator, he was “discovered” reading the “Rights of Man” among the coal-pit hills of White Lee. He was seized, his face covered with a frightful mask, supposed to be a counterfeit presentment of the face of the writer of the hated book. It had a ring through the nose, and with a rope tied to the ring the representative of the arch sedition-monger was led into the market-place.

Locomotion then being no longer required, the mask was deftly removed to a straw effigy of Paine covered from view in a cart. This figure was then propped against the stone foundation of the old lamp post which stood where the fountain now is, and shot amidst tremendous hootings and cries of “Church and King” and “Down with Tom Paine.”

And yet more from the same book:

Mr. Thomas Cockhill’s envy being probably aroused by Mr. Popplewell’s curious anti-Tom Paine demonstration, got up one of a similar character at Littletown. Instead, however, of having a live man to represent Paine he had one roughly made of wood. This figure was dressed up and placed on a waggon, and with it they made a circuit of the village amid tremendous uproar.

Arrived at Littletown Green, preparations were made to burn the effigy, when Joe Yates, one of Cockhill’s workmen, earnestly begged to “have a round with it” before it was committed to the flames. Permission being given, Joe, who was a powerful fellow, stripped off his jacket, and mounting the waggon commenced a terrific onslaught on “Tom Paine.” Striking him a sledge hammer blow full in the face he knocked him against the sides of the waggon and then falling on him as he lay prone he pounded his wooden face with maniacal fury until his hands streamed with blood, and both he and the figure presented a most sanguinary aspect, his martial fire being kept at white heat by the joking cries of the spectators “Give it him Joe!” “Kill him lad!”

“I’ll shiver him!” responded Joe, and “Shiver him” he was called all the rest of his life.

I don’t think Paine ever returned to Britain after that year, living the rest of his life in France and the U.S. of A. And with countrymen like that, it’s not hard to see why.

The Evidence for Paine as a Staymaker

As I discussed yesterday, a claim appeared on Wikipedia last month that Thomas Paine started out making stays for sailing ships, not stays for women to wear, and that Paine’s political enemies misrepresented him as a maker of underwear.

This fraud apparently fooled every historian and biographer who has written about Paine. At least, the citations that Wikipedia editor “Jkfkauia” inserted after that statement did not actually name any scholar who had seen through the ruse. In fact, those citations offer no outside support for the new statement.

Normally I’d point out that “Jkfkauia” has the responsibility to provide evidence for a claim, especially if he or she is going to dress it up with footnotes. Skeptics don’t have the burden of proving a historical statement is untenable. But I can’t resist poking some holes in the theory.

First, it wasn’t just Paine’s enemies who wrote that he had trained as a staymaker. Paine’s friends did, too. The jokes about Paine making stays for women appeared during and shortly after his lifetime when he or his friends could have refuted them. After all, Paine didn’t build a career as a political writer on two continents by staying quiet about his opponents’ errors.

Second, I have yet to find any eighteenth-century use of the word “staymaker” to mean someone who made stays for ships. Those were a type of rope, and the common term for someone who made ropes was “ropemaker.” If “staymaker” was also used for someone who spun stays for ships, there would surely be period sources remarking on its double meaning.

Instead, sources like this guide to professions from 1747, defined “The Stay-Maker” as “employed in making Stays, Jumps, and Bodice for Ladies.” (That book went on to nasty remarks about women before getting to the working conditions and wages young staymakers might expect.) And here’s a court case from 1771 when “James Paterson, staymaker,” sued to be paid for “furnishings to Taylor’s wife and daughter.”

Furthermore, Paine’s early biographers identified particular staymakers he worked for: his father in Thetford, a “Mr. Morris” on Hanover Street in London, and a “Mr. Grace” in Dover. Records from the late 1700s have helped recent biographers identify the latter two as John Morris and Benjamin Grace. Morris was in fashionable Covent Garden, not a shipbuilding center.

Thetford is an inland town in the east of England. According to “Jkfkauia,” Thomas’s father John Pain was supplying a port downriver with ropes, but it wouldn’t have made economic sense for a ropemaker serving ships to be so far away from the sea. On the other hand, half the people in Thetford needed stays. Making them was a steady, skilled profession.

In fact, Thomas Paine wasn’t the only British political writer of the period who had been trained to make stays. Hugh Kelly, who wrote propaganda for Lord North and plays and poems for himself, was also apprenticed to a staymaker as a teenager. And, like Paine, people who disliked Kelly didn’t let him forget that he’d trained to sew women’s underwear. Because he had.

This Season’s New Paine Claim

Last month, on 24 September, someone signed in to Wikipedia as “Jkfkauia” in order to revise the Thomas Paine entry. He or she explained the editing this way:

(I am correcting a widely repeated piece of insulting misinformation about Thomas Paine. He was involved in youth with making rope stays used on sailing ships, NOT the stays used in corsets. This lie about his life story was invented by his foes.)

Wikipedia records four other edits by “Jkfkauia” in 2012 and 2013, none having to do with eighteenth-century history.

The section on Paine’s early life now reads in part:

At the age of 13, he was apprenticed to his stay-maker father. Paine researchers contend his father's occupation has been widely misinterpreted to mean that he made the stays in ladies’ corsets, which likely was an insult later invented by his political foes.[citation needed] Actually, the father and apprentice son made the thick rope stays (also called stay ropes) used on sailing ships.[10][better source needed] Thetford historically had maintained a brisk trade with the downriver port city of Yarmouth.[11][not in citation given]

Those “citation needed” variants were added later on that same day by “Tedickey,” an active Wikipedia editor who’s worked on entries about the Articles of Confederation and Connecticut Compromise.

“Jkfkauia” did not cite or name the “Paine researchers [who] contend his father’s occupation has been widely misinterpreted.” As far as I can tell, no biographers from the 1790s, when Paine became prominent as a political writer in Britain, to the last decade identified him or his father as making stays for ships. And, despite the complaints of his fans, Paine has not been neglected by biographers.

It’s true that Paine’s political enemies in the 1790s made fun of his early work as a staymaker. In 2011 the Two Nerdy History Girls analyzed two political cartoons (one above) that showed “Thomas Pain / Stay Maker” squeezing Britannia into stays that were too strait for her.

But “Jkfkauia” wrote that Paine had never made stays, only ropes for ships.

TOMORROW: Does that make any sense?

Founders’ Favorite Quotations, part 3

Here’s the final run of “quotations” from America’s founders as chosen by some current tech company founders earlier this year. I put “quotations” in quotation marks because not all of them are, in fact, quotations from the people said to have said them.

I’m not holding these sayings to the original standards of punctuation, capitalization, or spelling, but I do want to see all the same words in the same order for them to qualify as quotations.

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” –Thomas Paine
From Paine’s The American Crisis.

“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.” –Patrick Henry
From Henry’s 23 Mar 1775 speech to the Virginia Convention, the same that includes the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death”—at least as reconstructed by Henry’s biographer William Wirt in 1817. But a lot of Henry’s contemporaries thought Wirt’s work was bogus.

“Fear is the passion of slaves.” –Patrick Henry
Henry said this in a speech to Virginia’s ratifying convention in 1788. At the time he was arguing against the new U.S Constitution.

“The circulation of confidence is better than the circulation of money.” –James Madison
Madison said this in a speech to Virginia’s ratifying convention in 1788. At the time he was arguing for the new U.S. Constitution.

“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.” –Abraham Lincoln
This use of the word “hustle” would have been anachronistic for Lincoln, and he was, again, not a Founder.

“Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, we pursued a new and more noble course: We accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.” –James Madison
Madison wrote something like this in The Federalist, Number 14, in 1787. However, this misquotation says “we pursued” and “We accomplished” when Madison wrote “they,” referring to “the leaders of the revolution.” Madison was only twenty-four when the Revolutionary War began and didn’t claim to be a leader of that movement.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” –Benjamin Franklin
Oh, please—that’s not eighteenth-century style. This appears to be a modern translation of a Chinese proverb, but that could be a myth as well.

“Lost time is never found again.” –Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1748. Franklin later elaborated on this sentence in “The Way to Wealth,” so I’m willing to give him credit even if he had a habit of quoting old sayings.

“The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.” –James Madison
Someone took a longer sentence that Madison wrote to a friend in 1825 and stitched together this short sentence; at the very least there should be an ellipsis mark after “knowledge.”

“Diligence is the mother of good luck.” –Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1736. But the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations dates it to the late 1500s.

Out of these ten statements, five are correctly attributed to prominent American Founders, though one of those attributions has been debated since it appeared. Two more are significantly changed from what a man wrote, one is a much older saying, and two are falsehoods.

So what have we learned? First, for generations Americans have been attributing pithy things to Benjamin Franklin that he didn’t write or didn’t originate. More recently, we’ve been doing the same with Thomas Jefferson—not just on political matters but also lifestyle wisdom.

Finally, as the dueling speeches from Henry and Madison about the Constitution show, we can’t expect to treat the Founders as a single bloc of wise folk when they had hearty disagreements and temperamental differences among them.

Founders’ Favorite Quotations, part 2

As I explained yesterday, last month a website publishing for the technology world asked more than three dozen company founders to share their favorite quotations from America’s Founders.

Some of those were actual quotations from America’s Founders. Others, not so much. But we’re entering a good stretch.

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” –Thomas Paine
From Paine’s Common Sense.

“Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.” –George Washington
Washington to Gen. Philip Schuyler, 20 Aug 1775.

“Well done is better than well said.” –Benjamin Franklin
This saying appeared in Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1737. However, it’s likely that someone else has written this before Franklin. He copied a lot of the sayings in his almanacs straight out of published books when he wanted to fill space on a page. Americans like to attribute those quotations to him, but in fact he was usually quoting someone else.

“To be good and to do good is all we have to do.” –John Adams
Adams to his daughter Abigail, 17 Mar 1777.

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” –Benjamin Franklin
Franklin writing for the Pennsylvania assembly, 11 Nov 1755.

“Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.” –Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln to Gen. Joseph Hooker, 26 Jan 1863—but Lincoln was not actually a Founder.

“Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee.” –Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1735. But published previously in 1605 and (with “your” instead of “thy”) 1712.

“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.” –Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson to his daughter Martha, 5 May 1787, while he was in Marseilles.

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” –Thomas Jefferson
False, according to Monticello.

“A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind…Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks.” –Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson to his nephew Peter Carr, 19 Aug 1785, while he was in Paris.

“We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.” –George Washington
Washington to John Armstrong, 26 Mar 1781, though he actually wrote, “We ought not to look back…”

“That government is best which governs least.” –Thomas Jefferson
False, according to Monticello.

“Whenever you do something, act as if all the world were watching.” –Thomas Jefferson
Not found in Founders Online or other authorities or all of Google Books. Nor a thought that fits well with Jefferson’s private behavior, which he liked to keep private.

“Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” –Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1735. But in print as early as 1639.

So out of these fourteen items, seven are traceable to eighteenth-century American writings (though one is slightly misquoted). Three were published by Franklin, though he didn’t coin two and may not have coined any; three are falsehoods about Jefferson; and one is from a man born in 1809.

TOMORROW: The final batch, plus wrestling with Wirt.

Digging for “Heretical” Roots

Matthew Stewart’s new book Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic is getting a lot of attention now. Here are interviews with Stewart in:

• The Boston Globe
• Church & State

And here are reviews of the book in:

• Kirkus
• Christianity Today
• The New Republic
• The Los Angeles Times, which uses a picture of Thomas Young the nineteenth-century British scientist instead of Dr. Thomas Young the eighteenth-century American physician.

As one should expect, the Christianity Review piece by a professor at a Christian college is much more critical than the piece in Church & State, which is the newsletter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

Stewart is clearly arguing against claims of our modern religious right that the U.S. of A. was founded on and for Christian beliefs—almost always the beliefs of the people making those claims. As Stewart points out, people of a particular faith tend to assume that when historical figures they admire mention “God,” that means the same God they themselves believe in. But even when people of the past specifically allude to Christianity or Jesus, they may not share the same understanding of those terms and ideas as their modern readers.

That can cut in all directions. “Presbyterian“ was often used as a general derogatory term by eighteenth-century non-Presbyterians. John Adams’s understanding of “Unitarianism” doesn’t map directly onto the modern Unitarian-Universalist creed. And so on.

The interviews and reviews indicate that Stewart has focused his work on certain Revolutionary figures: Young, his friend and coauthor Ethan Allen, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine. But those men were only a narrow slice of a mass movement toward independence and repuhlicanism.

Samuel Adams, for example, appears in those articles above only in the Globe interview as “Sam Adams,” comrade of Young’s. Yet Adams clearly had more influence on the course of the Revolution than Young, who never served in public office and died in 1777. Adams was also a devout Calvinist, and therefore less helpful to Stewart’s thesis.

As much as I’m pleased to see the name of Dr. Young in a Boston newspaper again, I thought the Globe interview didn’t offer an accurate picture of the man. Stewart twice calls him a “street warrior” but doesn’t identify him as a physician. While Young’s free thinking allowed him to imagine political change (he was a true democrat as early as the late 1760s), his deism was a liability to the local Whig movement; friends of the royal government used Young’s unorthodox beliefs to discredit him in heavily Calvinist Boston. Young and Allen were clearly outliers in the spectrum of American religious thought during his lifetime.

Stewart’s academic background is in philosophy, not history, and he’s shining a spotlight on the classical roots of Enlightenment deism. I hope Nature’s God does better at putting those ideas in the full context of Revolutionary history than the short interviews and reviews allow.