History: A lesser known founder

Washington Post -  “Common Sense,” the pamphlet that helped spark the American Revolution, turns 250 this month. But despite its author’s centrality in the Revolutionary pantheon, Thomas Paine has always been the most elusive founder. Abraham Lincoln reportedly said, “I never tire of reading Paine” and praised him as one of the greatest founders because equality, to him, was a “great fundamental principle.” By contrast, others dismissed Paine as a radical extremist. John Adams said Paine “has a better hand at pulling down than building,” dismissing his polemics for producing “confusion and every evil work.” In Theodore Roosevelt’s eyes, Paine was a “filthy little atheist.”

In fact, neither the attempts to whitewash or exaggerate Paine’s radicalism do justice to his principled devotion to liberty, equality and reason. He was an abolitionist who was among the first to denounce slavery as a violation of Christian ethics and to equate Britain’s tyrannical attempts to enslave White Americans with White Americans’ enslavement of African Americans. And Paine’s 1794 treatise “The Age of Reason” was an argument not in favor of atheism but against it, grounded in Paine’s conviction that faith could be reconciled with reason.

As Edward J. Larson notes in his book “Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters,” in March 1775, Paine met a future signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, with whom he shared common cause regarding the abolition of slavery. Years later, Rush recalled “I called upon Mr. Paine, and suggested to him the propriety of preparing our citizens for a perpetual separation of our country from Great Britain, by means of a work of such length that would obviate all the objections to it. He seized the idea with avidity.” MORE