THE TROUBLE WITH TOM
PAUL COLLINS
In the early 1980’s I had the opportunity, for the first time in years, to read for pleasure in volume. As I collected reading material, I began to document my reading on a spreadsheet.
My first read, recorded in 1983, was Common Sense, by Thomas Paine. Written in Enlightenment-Age English, he makes a clear point that the notion of monarchy, and more to the point, a monarchy with hereditary succession was evil. He makes the point that the British colonies could and should become independent and “masters” of their own fate with all the benefits that would follow.
Paine’s Common Sense was published in January 1776. 100,000 copies were printed between January and April of that year. As written material was shared in those days, virtually every literate person in the colonies had access to this essay. Only the Bible had more readers and more volumes printed. It influenced a generation and catalyzed the Revolutionary War. John Adams said, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”
In another essay, he wrote the memorable, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
This book provides a walk through both England and the United States, using the task of researching where Tom Paine’s final resting place is as a metaphor for all the social change his attitude, and that of progressives during the Enlightenment raised over the next century. It is an amusing read as Mr. Collins takes you to the current place that rises from some memory in Paine’s life. He has a sense of irony and a sense of humor. I will not spoil the ending or many of the juicy details but offer some of the following to wet your whistle.
Paine immigrated from England; he had a recommendation from Benjamin Franklin to get him started. Before he came to the colonies, he made a friendship that demonstrated just what kind of a guy he was and what he could entertain. For starters: Walking John. Walking John was an eccentric man who did unusual things. His career started out in the Raj where quit his job. He subsequently walked through Persia, Turkey, Arabia, and into Central Africa to then walked back to the Mediterranean Sea and up to London. He wore exotic dress (of an East Indian sort) and wrote pamphlets. He subsequently walked through Lapland and Central Asia, and then from New York to Paraguay. He attributed his survival to two things: a vegetarian diet and an absolute refusal to carry a weapon of any kind…….As Tom raised his issues about the rights of kings, Walking Tom worried that it was incomprehensible to him that women put up with child care and believed that the state should establish daytime nurseries to mothers and fathers who needed to work and improve their minds. He saw no problem with prostitutions as a business and thought a lot about sex in general, believing that there should be “promiscuous intercourse……” Paine himself was unlucky in love: his first wife and child died in childbirth. He married his landlord’s daughter and separated from her when bankrupt.
Paine became an unapologetic Deist, was labeled accordingly, an atheist and for this, his reputation would suffer. While he catalyzed the American Revolution, once it passed, he was a persona non grata who went on to newer things, like, the French Revolution where he was actually elected to the French National Convention. By now he was an ardent anti-monarchist and associated with the radical revolutionaries in France, some of whom he came into conflict with (the left wing radicals always seem to eat their children). He escaped France with the aid of an American official and lived out his days in New York, dying penniless and unconverted. It turned out no one would bury him in consecrated ground. So he was buried in a family field in upstate New York………where………years later his remains were dug up and shipped to England. He was disinterred by a Mr. Cobbett.
Some time when isolated but before Paine died, a critic, Mr. Cobbett penned the following as a criticism from England:
First: How tom gets a living now or what brothel he inhabits, I know not nor does it much signify. He has done all the mischief he can in this world; and whether his carcass is at last suffered to rot on the earth or to be dried in the air, is of very little consequence . Whenever and wherever he breathes his last, he will excite neither sorrow nor compassion; no friendly hand will close his eyes not a groan will be uttered, not a tear will be shed. Like Judas, he will be remembered by posterity; men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural and blasphemous by the single monosyllable, of Pain….
To this point, 20,000 people attended Benjamin Franklin’s memorial service. Paine got six.
HIs epitaph? “Author of Common Sense”
OK, then, years later…..Cobbett is introduced as a conservative monarchist who after a stint in debtor’s prison, reforms himself into the Paine model and digs up the bones to use as a focal point for social revolution in England. You cannot make this up!. His notions of social revolution were a response to his personal failures financially in a world of social change; the rural landscape of England had been transformed by the wealthy and former agrarian workers now herded into the cities. Regarding the wealth this brought to the nation, he agreed that some get wealthy—and he had no issue with that, “…provided that none be miserable in consequence of it.” He worried that the newly landless poor faced becoming a hereditary race—- in poverty. The rich increased wealth through heredity so his thought was using estate taxes to provide a minimum stake for everyone when they (the poor) were getting a start in life and when they (the rich) were approaching its close. Now I call that being ahead of one’s time! Versions of that would become reality in Europe a hundred years later.
A London printer named Carlile also “finds Paine” while in debtor’s prison. His crime? He was willing to push the envelope and publish “radical” tracts, like Common Sense among others which was a crime against the king. He went to jail. HIs pregnant wife, published in his absence. She went to jail. Like a Hong Kong rights movement, serial publishers publish and perish, going to jail until they figure out that to prosecute a publisher for selling radical tracts, you needed a witness to point out the defendant at trial and testify about the exchange of many with that person. So, they invented the first “book vending machine” whereby one purchased the book without ever seeing the seller.
Cobbet of bone stealing frame when talking to Carlile the jailed publisher: “Had I been in America, they would not have thrown me in prison!” Cobbet’s response? “no, they would have tarred and feathered you!”
Carlile become famous for some of his beliefs which included, after seeing a coy pretty young woman seek out a very specific book labeled, Aristotles Master-Piece and learning that it was a book on contraception (with mostly bad information) became a feminist and was the first person to publish in a general periodical specific contraceptive advice:
“If, before sexual intercourse,” he wrote, “The female introduces into her vagina a piece of sponge as large as can be pleasantly introduced, having previously attached a bobbin or a bit of narrow riband to withdraw it , it will in most cases be fond a preventative to conception.”
Every Woman’s Book flew off the shelves.
The book introduces us to a Dr. Edward Bliss Foote who in the United States, years later carried on Tom Paine’s tradition by printing, Medical Common Sense. He advocated openly and gave advice for contraceptive advice to women. “Predicting the future: “Rebels of the year 1900 against Old King Custom” reads a caption below three smiling women: liberated not just from King George. No, they have been liberated from King Tom, Dick, and Harry ie from their husbands and thus from bad marriages, from unwanted pregnancies and unequal pay”….. a very ambitious book………
The Post master general, a Mr. Comstock persecuted Foote over the mailing of this literature. It was deemed obscene. He survived this pressure and then went on to fund Susan B Anthony’s legal fees.
His book winds up supporting animal rights, shiatsu, and herbal remedies. He fights capital punishment as ineffective. Dr. Foote also paid the legal bills for Mr. Comstock’s father as a means to demonstrate further the failure of a son with power.
There are a number of other characters that flow in and out of this book. My last to present is Moncure Conway. Moncure was a white supremist of Virginia. He did not believe the Bill of Rights applied to blacks, because, after all, they were not exactly human. He is all the things we love to hate these days but redeems himself—he has a St Paul experience of sorts. He opens his eyes when surveying a community of Quaker farmers in Virginia. Quakers were anti-slavery. Their farms were superior to surrounding slave-holding farms. He asks why.
“Has it ever occurred to thee, that it may be because of paying wages to all who work for us?”
He decides to get a theology degree at Harvard after finding literary guiding light: Ralph Waldo Emerson. His father disowns him. While walking Walden pond with Ralph Waldo, Emerson suggests, “An actually existent fly is more important than a possibly existent angel….” His views on race were profoundly influenced by the experience of his education in New England.
Moncure violates Federal Law when he and Thoreau visit a family who is hiding a Virginia slave. The slave becomes agitated fearing this new Southerner but is reassured and heads on to Canada the next day. Moncure is changing. Upon meeting Thoreau he is asked, “What are you studying?” Moncure’s response was, “the scriptures.” And Thoreau, who studied Eastern Philosophers asked, “of which religion?”
New times in a New Republic!
Moncure would become a Unitarian Minister in the midwest. He met Lincoln and never reconciled himself to the man with the following thinking in mind:
“Lincoln Decided that the fate of the country should be determined by powder and shot,” he wrote bitterly, “In the canonization of Lincoln, there lurks the canonization of the sword….’by the same method, Booth placed in the presidential chair a tipsy tailor from Tennessee, who founded in the South a reign of terror over the negro race.”
Now (2020) we have not so new times in a not so new Republic. It is astounding to me to realize so many “new ideas” took root so long ago and despite very unfavorable settings, continued to grow and change all of us.
The book closes, “where is Tom Paine? Reader, where is he not?”
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