My Pen and My Soul Have Ever Gone Together           

Thomas Paine and the American Revolution

by Vikki J. Vickers

Reviewed by Klara Rukshina

     In my opinion, the first book of a young historian, Vikki J. Vickers, is the best of all works published about Thomas Paine during the last two decades (2006, New York & London: Routledge). Her only outstanding rival is Eric Foner, the famous author of Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976, London: Oxford University Press). Vickers appreciates Foner's book as a "brilliant work," but to her mind, "it is not a biography of Paine; in many ways it is more significant as a micro history of Revolutionary Philadelphia." She states: "Foner did issue an important challenge to historians; the challenge of producing a complete study to explain how Paine's beliefs developed and their significance." (pp. 10-11) Vickers accepted the challenge.  
    The purpose of her study is "to investigate who Thomas Paine was, what he believed, how those beliefs motivated him to political action and how those actions helped to found the United States of America." She calls her work "the first intellectual biography" of Thomas Paine (p. 11).

     Vickers is the first who applied consistently an interdisciplinary investigation into Paine's politics, religion, and rhetoric. As Paine was an exceedingly reticent person, the lack of reliable data of his life is always in the way of his biographers.[1] In order to deal with the problem properly, Vickers works out

and strictly keeps to the following rules: "Circumstantial evidence may be employed but carefully. Far too often scholars state as facts what can best be termed conjecture, and conjecture should never give way to suppositions." She is most careful while choosing her arguments and right in the confession: "in the end what evolves can only be a rough portrait of a very public yet very private man." (p. 62)

     What are, in my opinion, Vickers' main results ?

(1) First and foremost, Vickers is a pioneer in investigating Paine's religious beliefs in-depth and their influence on his political ideas. She managed to reject the scholarly tradition of considering separately "Paine as a political figure investigating his career as a political pamphleteer and Paine as the author of The Age of Reason, dealing with his religious beliefs." The historian traces the evolution of Paine's religious beliefs from his birth until the publication of The Age of Reason in 1794 when "he opened his mind to the world." (p. 144)

    In Vickers opinion, Paine's God differs from the widely spread notion of God during the period of enlightenment. As she puts it: "Paine's deist God connected with the need for humanitarian philanthropy should not be confused with a theistic God who is completely transcendent, utterly unknowable, and completely independent of His creation. So the principal difficulty with the theistic deity is that there is no incentive to pray or worship God. In contrast, Paine's deist God was knowable, at least to the point of establishing God's benevolent nature. More importantly, Paine's God both watches and judges mankind and has an active role in His creation. Humanitarianism in Paine's system, therefore, was not only logical, but also necessary." (p. 123)  "He envisioned nations (in particular Great Britain) that took responsibility for the welfare of its citizens." (p. 8)
    As Vickers reasonably asserts, Paine would never be tolerant to atheists. "Paine's championing of the cause of religious freedom did not extend to atheists. Moreover, Paine's career as a pamphleteer (in which he tried to convert the world to deism) is strong evidence that what Paine really advocated was religious tolerance --not freedom." (p. 123)

     Vickers' analysis of Common Sense from the point of view of Paine's religious beliefs is original. She offers evidence that "at times Paine... forced his fellow countrymen to choose between paradise and purgatory." For example, Vickers demonstrates that Paine's arguments against monarchy and his appeal to replace "George III with a government based on equality and reason assured Americans not only of freedom from British but freedom from God's vengeful grasp." (p. 51)

     Vickers is the first who investigated thoroughly the origin of Paine's arguments against monarchy and biblical citations to the point in Common Sense. She suggests that Paine took all these ideas from John Milton's A Defence of the People of England (1658). Milton presented monarchy as "an evil, blasphemous institution" and Paine's argument against monarchy "is practically a carbon copy of Milton's ideas." (p. 49)

     Vickers' summary on the interrelation of Paine's political and religious beliefs runs as follows: "God's 'benignity', according to Paine, required reciprocation. Man's duty to God was simple: as God was benevolent to mankind, so should mankind be benevolent to one another. Ultimately Paine came to the conclusion that political revolution was the most benevolent act of all. Replacing false systems with true ones, encouraging mankind to use their reason to discover not only the truth about politics, but also the truth about God --this was his mission." (p. 107) Vickers concludes: "Paine's dual mission to spread both political revolution and deism throughout the western world is a prime example of the information that can be gleaned by approaching Paine's work with a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective. The confluence of his religion and concomitant political ideology created a rhetorical style that was both recognizable and immutable. Paine's mission led him to a degree of success unparalleled in his day." (p. 130)

     It seems that Vickers has fruitfully solved a most urgent problem--interrelation and interaction of religion and politics in Paine's beliefs which clarified his double mission and "revealed a significance previously missed by historians." (p. 130)
(2) Common Sense "catapulted America towards Independence" (p. 59), as Vickers aptly expressed its immediate effect. Why not any of the famous Americans, but "Thomas Paine -- an absolute nobody from nowhere" (p. 57) happened to write the trailblazing pamphlet? This is another most complicated problem Vickers tries to examine. She defines the starting point of her approach to the enigma: "The fact that Paine was reared and educated in England is crucial, because it gave the future author of CS a more immediate knowledge of King and Parliament which most Americans were not privy to." (p. 61) Vickers presents a detailed and well-grounded description of Paine's life in England and "the influence his times there had on his political ideology." The appropriate context of eighteenth-century England is skillfully and professionally applied.  

     As an innovator, Vickers studies Paine's writings before Common Sense. In her opinion, the Case of the Officers of Excise (1772) served as a warning for Paine, who at that time "sees only trees instead of the whole forest." So whether Paine "did it consciously or not but Common Sense is an absolute contrast to the Case. It was as if Paine recognized how poorly executed his first political work was and made every attempt to do exactly the opposite." (pp. 56-57)

     Paine's contribution to The Pennsylvania Magazine (February-August, 1775) has likewise been considered from a new approach. Vickers states that "scholars will never know with any degree of certainty what Paine wrote. There simply is no concrete evidence to link him conclusively to any of these essays. To be sure, many of those written by 'Atlanticus' and others do closely resemble Paine's style. But to say definitively that Paine wrote this essay or that poem would not be good scholarship." As an historian she prefers "a broader analysis and the larger significance of Paine's time in the magazine." Vickers makes a comparative study of Paine's editorship versus that of Aitken, the owner, and "reveals that clearly Paine brought a radical political voice to The Pennsylvania Magazine whether or not one of those voices was his own is irrelevant." Vickers comes to the conclusion that "during Paine's editorship the magazine was rarely explicitly political." (pp. 30-31) [2]

                                                                                                                                                            continued on page 10, My Pen and My Soul

1 See: Vickers, pp. 68, 155-156, where she writes that recent evidence has been reported by Australian researcher, Hazel Burgess, that Paine had a daughter Sarah who died on September 12, 1761; she was nine months old. (Thetford Magazine, 22: 15, Summer 2000)

2 My remark concerns the section Monthly Intelligence of The Pennsylvania Magazine that still remained a political one even after Paine left his job as a contributing editor in September 1775.

                                                                                                                                          Bulletin of Thomas Paine Friends, vol. 7, no. 4, December 2006   5

ANNUAL  ELECTION  AND  ANNUAL  MEETING

Members elected the slate of Officers and other Directors recommended by the Nominating Committee. Mail ballots were tallied by the Committee on December 3, 2006, before the convening of the Annual Meeting by President Joyce Chumbley. 

Board of Directors
Joyce Chumbley, President        Irwin Spiegelman, Vice President        Robert N. Walsh, Vice President 
              Vernon Turner, Treasurer             Martha Spiegelman, Secretary
Maurice Bisheff        Louis Worth Jones        Ann Kalloudis        Mark Levinson       Timothy Nelms
Klara Rukshina        John F. Skibiski, Jr.        Sherwood V. Smith        James Tepfer

The Annual Meeting then proceeded by teleconference. Discussion brought general agreement on several suggested new plans and committees for the coming year. All committees are open--some committee members are listed (in parenthesis) to contact about any activity in which anyone wishes to participate. The Board also invites suggestions for other projects.
The 2009 World Paine Year (Joyce Chumbley)      Financial and Fundraising (Vern Turner, Irwin Spiegelman)
Website--Expand as a Resource (Robert Walsh, Joyce Chumbley, Martha Spiegelman)
Newsletter--Enhance as a Resource (Martha Spiegelman, Joyce Chumbley)
Paine Teaching Unit (Sherwood Smith)       Required Civics Course in High Schools (Irwin Spiegelman)
Membership and TPF Brochure (Maurice Bisheff, Irwin Spiegelman)
Two TPF Publications: 1. The 1987 United Nations Paine Colloquium (Joyce Chumbley, Martha Spiegelman)
2. A Thomas Paine "Basic Pamphlet" (Irwin Spiegelman)

                                                                                          

Thomas Paine Monument, in New Rochelle NY, about 1839, soon after its construction.    Gravesite marker of recent vintage, near original Paine gravesite, New Rochelle NY. 
The Monument was sponsored by and funds raised by liberal NY publisher Gilbert Vale.     It is engraved as instructed in Paine's last will: Author of COMMON SENSE.
Sculptor, James Frazee.