Legacy

The bones

Paine was buried under an apple tree on his New Rochelle farm because the Quakers refused him the meeting graveyard and the Anglicans refused him communion in advance. In October 1819 the English radical William Cobbett -- once one of Paine’s loudest enemies, latterly converted -- sailed to America, dug up the bones, and shipped them to England with the announced intention of building a monument. The monument was never built. Cobbett died in 1835. The bones disappeared. Their location is one of the genuine unsolved problems of nineteenth-century history. A skull surfaced in Australia in 1989 and was tentatively identified as Paine’s in 1996; nothing has been confirmed.

The radical-Whig tradition

In England, Paine’s prose was the schoolbook of the working-class radical movement that ran from the 1790s through Chartism. The London Corresponding Society distributed cheap editions of Rights of Man; the unstamped press of the 1830s reprinted him; Richard Carlile spent six years in prison (1819-1825) for publishing The Age of Reason and refused to recant. By the 1840s the Chartists were quoting Paine on the platform with the same authority American Patriots had quoted Locke. The People’s Charter (1838) is essentially the franchise program of Rights of Man Part II reduced to six points.

The abolitionists

African Slavery in America (1775) and the preamble Paine drafted for Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act (1780) were standard reading in the William Lloyd Garrison circle. Frederick Douglass quoted Paine; Wendell Phillips quoted Paine; the Quaker abolitionists who had once disowned him claimed him back during the 1850s when the moral arithmetic ran their way. By the time Lincoln read Paine in his New Salem years -- which he did, in cheap editions Cobbett’s heirs had kept in print -- the abolitionist line was already canon.

Lincoln

Lincoln read The Age of Reason in his early twenties, wrote a deistic essay of his own that his friends destroyed before he could publish it, and kept Paine’s argument visibly in mind for the rest of his life. The Second Inaugural -- “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other” -- is closer to Paine’s deism than to any orthodox Christianity Lincoln ever professed. The American president most demonstrably shaped by Paine never said so out loud.

The Pankhursts and the franchise

The British suffrage movement reached back to Rights of Man for its philosophical grammar. Emmeline Pankhurst read Paine; Sylvia Pankhurst wrote on Paine; the early-twentieth-century Independent Labour Party press reprinted him cheaply. The propertyless-franchise argument Paine made in the 1795 Dissertation on First Principles of Government -- a generation ahead of Chartism, a century ahead of universal suffrage -- finally arrived in 1928 when British women got the vote on the same terms as men.

Organized labor

In the United States, Paine survived the nineteenth century inside the labor movement long after he had been forgotten in the universities. Eugene Debs read Paine in his Indiana boyhood; the Knights of Labor printed selections; the Industrial Workers of the World invoked him on broadsides. The American left-radical tradition that runs from the Locofocos through Debs to the New Deal kept Paine alive in print when no respectable publisher would.

The welfare state

Agrarian Justice (1797) is the original case for what is now called the welfare state: a national fund, financed by an estate tax, paying every adult a one-time stake at twenty-one and a pension after fifty. The argument was ignored on both sides of the Channel for a century. Beveridge cited Paine in the 1942 white paper that became the British National Health Service. Bismarck’s 1880s German pension scheme is an unacknowledged debt. The U.S. Social Security Act of 1935 is the same shape. Paine’s “stake” idea has been rediscovered repeatedly under different names -- the negative income tax, the citizen’s dividend, universal basic income, the baby bond.

The academic recovery

Paine entered modern professional historiography late. Moncure Conway’s 1892 biography and 1894-96 four-volume edition (the source of this site’s text) were a private scholar’s rescue effort. Alfred Owen Aldridge’s Man of Reason (1959) reopened the case academically. Eric Foner’s Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976) recovered Paine inside the artisan radicalism of revolutionary Philadelphia. John Keane’s Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995/2003), Harvey Kaye’s Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (2005), and Craig Nelson’s Thomas Paine (2006) made him a serious figure for a popular audience again.

The contemporary scene

Christopher Hitchens’s short Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man: A Biography (2006) put Paine at the center of his argument that secular cosmopolitanism is the unfinished business of the eighteenth century. President Reagan quoted “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” in his 1980 acceptance speech without mentioning the source; President Obama did the same with the American Crisis in 2009. Paine has become quotable on every part of the American political spectrum, often by speakers who would otherwise disown his religion or his economics or both.

What endures

The texts. Common Sense, the Crisis papers, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice have not been out of print in any decade since they were written. The Conway Edition this site reproduces is one of three or four standard scholarly editions. The Thomas Paine Cottage Museum at New Rochelle and the Thomas Paine Birthplace at Thetford keep the physical record. The bones do not.

His own preferred epitaph was the one he wrote for an English friend: “The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”