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       Independence Is My Happiness…             

         My Country  Is  The World,

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       Rights  of  Man,  part  2,  1792

 

 

B  U  L  L  E  T  I  N

                                         Newsletter   Of,   By,   For    Thomas   Paine   Friends,   Inc.

                    Volume  8   Number  1                                                                                                                           March   2007

 

MEMBERSHIPS   &   RENEWALS

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…Paine's Anti-Slavery Stance (by I. Spiegelman), from page 3

 

Dissenting Views on the Anti-Slavery Writings Attributed to Paine

  

     The above list of anti-slavery writings attributed by Conway to Paine, except for the Declaration of Rights, was compiled by James V. Lynch.6 He argues that only To the Inhabitants of Louisiana and the third Forester Letter are certainly by Paine and that A Serious Thought might well be. The rest, he concludes, should not be assigned to Paine, including the longest essay, African Slavery in America, which is also rejected by Aldridge3 and by Eric Foner,7 who writes in 1995, "There is no evidence that Paine wrote the essay…. although it is attributed to him," and in 1999, "No conclusive evidence confirms that a March, 1775 essay condemning slavery was written by Paine, although he later supported abolition in Pennsylvania."

 

     Aldridge and Lynch, specifically, reject Benjamin Rush's recollection that Paine was the author because of minor errors in a letter by Rush written many years later to James Cheetham, as well as on stylistic features claimed by Lynch to be foreign to Paine. However, most other authors from Conway1 to Nelson8 assign the work to Paine. A reply to Lynch by Irwin Spiegelman is in manuscript form.9

  

   Lynch concludes [on p. 197]6 that, "Paine's abolitionist reputation, nevertheless, is founded on no substantial evidence….Of the two anti-slavery essays attributed to him, only one resembles his writing style and neither stands out as an abolitionist tract."  Spiegelman produces a detailed rebuttal to these assertions.

 

   Thomas Paine Friends will try to obtain the required permissions to post on its website both the Lynch article and the relevant pages from Aldridge. Spiegelman's full article, Reply to Lynch,9 will soon be on the Articles link of the TPF website. It will be useful to read Aldridge's comments on African Slavery in America, the Lynch article and the Spiegelman reply to it all together on the TPF Website, which will allow full and open discussion of the authorship of these important works attributed by Conway to Thomas Paine.   [www.thomaspainefriends.org ]

 

 

1   Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine, two volumes, 1892, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons

2   John Keane, Tom Paine, A Political Life, 1995, Boston: Little, Brown & Co. (page 342 and footnote 214, on page 792)

3    A. Owen Aldridge, Thomas Paine's American Ideology, 1984, Newark: University of Delaware Press (page 291 and pages 289-290)

4   Philip Foner, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 1945, New York: The Citadel Press (volume 2, page 15)

5   Joseph Lewis, Thomas Paine, Author of the Declaration of Independence, 1947, NewYork: Freethought Press Association (page 95)

6   James V. Lynch, The Limits of Revolutionary Radicalism: Tom Paine and Slavery, 1999, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 123

7  Eric Foner, editor, Thomas Paine's Collected Writings, 1995, New York: The Library of America, "Chronology," by Eric Foner (page 835);  and

    Eric Foner, Biography of Thomas Paine, In: American National Biography, Garrity and Carnes, editors, (volume 16, page 925), 1999, New York 

8   Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine, Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations, 2006, New York, Viking Penguin

9   Irwin Spiegelman, A Reply to James V. Lynch's The Limits of Revolutionary Radicalism: Tom Paine and Slavery, 2000, in manuscript.  A short summary

     is found in Bulletin of ThomasPaine Friends, volume 12, number 2, page 4, November 2000, entitled, Thomas Paine Unfairly  Attacked: the Defamation

     of Paine and What We Can Do About It

 

 

A note regarding US abolition of the slave-trade. The US Constitution contains language that the slave-trade will end by 1808, and the document signed by President Thomas Jefferson on March 2, 1807 was the implementation. Some illegal slave trade into the US undoubtedly continued despite the law. Certainly, transfer of slaves from one state into another continued although such state-to-state slave movement was also to stop according to the law.  [US Constitution, Article I, Section 9]  -- Martha Spiegelman

 

 

12   Bulletin of Thomas Paine Friends, vol. 8, no. 1, March 2007