Of the major pieces in Paine’s canon, the Letter to George Washington (1796) is the one that even Paine’s defenders have wished he had not written. Conway prints it in Volume III of the 1894-96 edition, with a long editorial introduction that essentially apologizes for it. Foner prints it in his 1945 edition with a similar prefatory note. The popular Paine anthologies, from the nineteenth century onward, have tended to either drop it entirely or to print only the milder opening sections. The Library of America volume of selected Paine, edited by Eric Foner in 1995, prints excerpts. The case for and against keeping the Letter in the canon turns on a question that goes deeper than the Letter itself.
That question: when an author of standing publishes a piece that the historical record subsequently shows to have overshot, does the editorial tradition serve the author better by cutting it, contextualizing it, or printing it whole?
The cutting argument is easy to summarize. The Letter is, on the most charitable reading, a thirty-thousand-word indictment of George Washington for failing to secure Paine’s release from the Luxembourg prison in 1793-94. On a less charitable reading, it is the bitter outburst of a man recovering from a near-fatal imprisonment, addressed to a friend who had failed him, in a political moment Paine had badly misjudged. The factual core of the indictment is partially defensible (Washington could have done more for Paine and chose not to, and the choice was at least partly political). The rhetorical excess is hard to defend. The Letter attacks Washington’s military reputation, his personal character, his religious sincerity, and his public motives, with a savagery that goes beyond what any reader of the historical record would now endorse. Its publication damaged Paine’s American standing for a generation, gave the Federalist press a permanent talking point, and contributed materially to the obscurity into which Paine fell after 1809.
The cutters argue: a piece that overshoots, that the author later might have wished he had not published, that distorts the rest of the canon when read alongside it, deserves to be excised in editions that aim to introduce a reader to the writer. Paine wrote, in his thirty-five public years, around two million words, the great majority of which are reasoned, careful, and well-judged. The Letter is unrepresentative. To include it without warning is to misrepresent the writer.
The contextualizers argue: the Letter should be printed with extensive editorial framing, including the historical record on Washington’s actual conduct, the medical record on Paine’s post-Luxembourg health, and the political record on the Federalist-Republican confrontation in 1796. Conway is the model here. He prints the full Letter but precedes it with a forty-page editorial introduction that lays out the documentary record. The reader is invited to judge for themselves but is given the materials to judge with.
The full-printers argue: the Letter is what Paine wrote. The editorial tradition that suppresses or contextualizes it is engaging in a form of paternalism that Paine himself would have rejected. Paine’s whole project was the case for citizens making their own judgments from the available evidence. To withhold a piece on the grounds that it might be misjudged is to deny readers the evidence on which to make a judgment. The piece may overshoot; that is a fact about the piece. The reader should encounter that fact directly.
This site sides, after some deliberation, with the full-printers, though with one practical concession.
The full text of the Letter is at /works/letter-to-george-washington/, exactly as it appears in Conway’s Volume III. The text is unedited; the page anchors are stable; the Foner cross-references are in the sidebar. We do not abridge.
The practical concession is that we print, immediately above the Letter in the work-page header, a short editorial note that summarizes what the historical record now tells us about Washington’s actual conduct, what we know about Paine’s post-Luxembourg condition, and what the publication context was in 1796. The note is six paragraphs. It does not interpret the Letter for the reader. It supplies the documentary frame.
The reason a Paine archive should make this choice is the choice Paine himself made in his own editorial work. Throughout his career Paine published pieces by his political opponents (the Letter to the Addressers reprints the King’s Proclamation in full; Rights of Man reprints the most damaging passages of Burke’s Reflections in full; the Letter to the Citizens of the United States prints in full the Federalist newspaper attacks on Paine that the Letter is responding to). His editorial principle was: print the opposing case in full, then make your own. The principle applies, with some discomfort, to his own pieces that the historical record has subsequently complicated.
What is most worth saying about the Letter, two and a quarter centuries on, is that it is a portrait of a friendship that broke under political pressure. The friendship was real; the disappointment was real; the failure of communication during 1793-94 was real; the political stakes that prevented Washington from intervening were real; the bitterness in Paine’s recovery was real. The Letter is the precipitate of all of those realities. To read it without the context is to misread Paine; to read the context without the Letter is to misread the historical record. The archive that prints both is the archive that takes the writer seriously.
If you are reading the Letter for the first time, read it after reading the Memorial to Monroe (1794) and the Forgetfulness essay (1795). The Memorial is the documentary case as Paine made it from the Luxembourg cell. Forgetfulness is the first published shot in what would become the Letter. Read in that sequence, the rhetorical escalation is legible: the writer is not, suddenly, in 1796, attacking Washington from nowhere. He is finishing a case he began two years earlier in the cell.
The full Letter is at /works/letter-to-george-washington/. The Memorial is at /works/the-memorial-to-monroe/. Forgetfulness is at /works/forgetfulness/. Read in that order if you want to see the writer doing the work.