Liberty Asylum
Barbarous Relic 
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Liberty Asylum
Barbarous Relic
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By George
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Demagogue's Survival
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By George F. Smith Few men have done more for liberty in their lives than Thomas Paine, yet he died all but forgotten. On January 10, 1776, he published his 47-page polemic, Common Sense, which almost overnight turned the colonies towards revolution. Paine laid out argument after argument championing a complete break with England: "Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long at peace, and whenever a war breaks out between England and any foreign power, the trade of America goes to ruin, because of her connection with Britain." Common Sense sold 500,000 copies, roughly equal to 75 million copies today, and raised Paine from obscurity to international fame. [1] Not everyone rallied to his call to arms. A rich loyalist from Maryland, James Chalmers, wrote a rebuttal to Paine's pamphlet called Plain Truth. While Chalmers' essay sold under the noses of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, in other areas of the country the rebels had it seized. "If such doings are the first fruits of American liberty," Chalmers protested, "grant me Heaven!" [2] Still, Plain Truth was widely read and might have won more converts had it not been for some unfortunate timing. Shortly after it was released, the Americans chased the British from Boston with artillery hauled from Fort Ticonderoga. Independence from England now seemed possible. During the war Paine fought briefly in the army under General Nathanael Greene, from August, 1776, till January, 1777. The patriot cause fared poorly during this period, and morale suffered. To lift the country's sagging spirits, Paine wrote the first in a series of pamphlets called The American Crisis, which by late December, 1776 was being read throughout Philadelphia. "Instantly it was seized upon. Everyone quoted it, for its words seemed to spring from the very soul of Washington's army and of the leader himself:
Late in the war Paine went to France and brought back a shipload of ammunition, clothes, and money -- foreign aid from King Louis XVI. Paine returned to England in 1787 and wrote The Rights of Man (1791, 1792), a scathing rebuttal to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. Paine's treatise included a thorough condemnation of English monarchy. Over a million and a half copies sold before it was finally suppressed. The British convicted Paine of seditious libel in absentia while he fled to France in December, 1792. A hero in France, Paine served as a deputy on the National Convention, where he voted for the exile rather than the execution of King Louis XVI. He argued that by virtue of his aid to America, the king was a friend of liberty and therefore deserved mercy -- France should kill the monarchy but not the monarch. Robespierre took offense and had Paine incarcerated. [5] In terms of newsworthiness, Paine's imprisonment for eleven months and his near-execution were relegated to insignificance by the publication of Part One of his Age of Reason (1795). In it, Paine advanced the view that the true word of God was nature, not the Bible. He maintained that "all national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to [be] no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." [6] As an enemy of tyranny in all forms, Paine saw the church and state as the two great destroyers of human well-being. For his critique of Christianity and the Bible, most of his friends abandoned him. After returning to America in 1802, he lived on his modest estate in New Rochelle, NY and died there in 1809, without recanting his views. Paine understood that liberty's heart lies in its defenders; if they give up the fight, government will encroach on our lives. He wasn't always optimistic about liberty's future, as he wrote in a letter to President Washington: "A thousand years hence, perhaps in less, America may be what Europe now is. The innocence of her character, that won the hearts of all nations in her favor, may sound like a romance and her inimitable virtue as if it had never been. The ruin of that liberty which thousands bled for or struggled to obtain may just furnish materials for a village tale or extort a sigh from rustic sensibility, whilst the fashionable of that day, enveloped in dissipation, shall deride the principle and deny the fact." [7]
References 1. Common Sense, publisher review, 2. A Loyalist Answers Thomas Paine, M. Christopher New 3. Scheer, George F. and Rankin, Hugh F., Rebels and Redcoats: The American Revolution Through the Eyes of Those Who Fought and Lived It, DeCapo Press, 1957, p. 210. 4. The American Crisis, I, Thomas Paine, 5. Letter to George Washington, Thomas Paine 6. Age of Reason, Thomas Paine 7. Letter to George Washington, ibid.
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Other Interesting Sites
Ron Paul's Classics of Libertarian Thought Greenspan's 1966 "Gold and Economic Freedom"
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