Conway on Paine

The editor

Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907) was the most consequential editor of Paine in the nineteenth century. Born in Stafford County, Virginia, into a slaveholding family, he repudiated slavery as a young man, attended Harvard Divinity School, took a Unitarian pulpit in Cincinnati and then a freethought congregation at South Place Chapel in London, and spent thirty years in the British and American freethought movements as a public intellectual, biographer, and editor. He published the standard nineteenth-century biography of Paine (The Life of Thomas Paine, two volumes, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1892), edited Carlyle's letters, and corresponded with Emerson, Whitman, and Mark Twain.

The Conway Edition of Paine grew directly out of the 1892 biography. In the course of preparing the Life, Conway concluded that no usable scholarly text of Paine's writings existed -- that every "complete" edition since 1809 had been incomplete, inaccurate, or politically expurgated. He spent the next four years at the British Museum, the Bodleian, the Library of Congress, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, and several private collections in England and France, reconstructing the corpus. The result is the four-volume edition published by Putnam between 1894 and 1896, the source text for this archive.

The volumes

Volume I (1894) -- The American Revolution. Common Sense (January 1776), the surviving Crisis papers (December 1776 through April 1783), African Slavery in America (1775), the Preamble to the Pennsylvania Abolition Act (1780), Public Good (1780), the Letter to the Abbe Raynal (1782), and the shorter pieces of the war and post-war years.

Volume II (1894) -- The British years and the great political pamphlets. The two parts of Rights of Man (1791-92), Paine's answer to Burke and the most-read political pamphlet in English during the decade of the French Revolution. The volume also contains the early Rights-of-Man-period letters and the Dissertations on Government.

Volume III (1895) -- The French years and the late political writings. The open letters to Sieyes, Dundas, and Onslow Cranley; the speeches in the National Convention on the trial of Louis XVI; the Memorial to Monroe (1794), written from the Luxembourg Prison; the Letter to George Washington (1796); and the late pamphlets on finance, government, and economic justice including Agrarian Justice (1797). This is the longest volume.

Volume IV (1896) -- The religious writings. The Age of Reason Parts I and II (1794-95), the Discourse to the Theophilanthropists (1797), the Examination of the Prophecies (1807), and the marginalia and shorter theological pieces of Paine's last decade.

Editorial principles

Conway's editorial method, set out in the prefaces to each volume and consistently applied across the four, was straightforward and scholarly:

1. Print from the best surviving source. Where Paine's manuscript survives, Conway prints from it. Where it does not, he collates the earliest authorised printing against any later edition Paine is known to have supervised.
2. Silently regularise accidentals. Spelling and punctuation are modernised to the conventions of the 1890s except where Paine's original carries argumentative weight (the SHOUTING capitalisation in The American Crisis, for instance, Conway preserves as the printed pamphlets give it).
3. Note substantive variants. Where two authorised texts differ in meaning, Conway records the variant at the foot of the page rather than choosing for the reader.
4. Frame in historical context. Each major piece is preceded by an editorial headnote giving the date, place, occasion, and original audience.
5. Document the source. The provenance of each manuscript or printed copy used is recorded in the apparatus.

These principles are nearly identical to what modern textual scholarship calls the "best-text" method, established by W. W. Greg in the 1950s. Conway was practicing it sixty years earlier.

What Conway omits

The Conway Edition is comprehensive but not complete. Conway himself notes the gaps in his prefaces:

• Some of Paine's private correspondence, particularly the letters to Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe held at the time in family hands, was not available to him. The State Department papers and the manuscript collections at the Library of Congress would not be properly catalogued until the early twentieth century.
• The fragments and marginalia in Paine-owned books, scattered after the New Rochelle estate auction of 1809-10, were largely lost or in private hands Conway could not reach.
• The French-language manuscripts of Paine's Convention speeches were sometimes available only in published translations of varying quality; where Conway could not find Paine's English original, he translates the French back.

Philip S. Foner's Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (2 volumes, Citadel Press, 1945) -- the standard twentieth-century edition -- supplements Conway in some of these areas. The two editions are best used together. For each work on this site, the sidebar lists both the Conway and Foner page anchors where available.

How Conway reads Paine

Conway's biographical introduction in Volume I, and the longer treatment in the 1892 Life, establishes the framework most twentieth-century Paine scholarship would adopt. The argument has four parts:

1. Paine's politics is consistent. The argument for popular sovereignty in Common Sense, the argument against hereditary government in Rights of Man, the argument for universal stake-grants in Agrarian Justice, and the argument against revealed religion in The Age of Reason are the same argument applied across four domains. Paine is not, as the Federalist tradition had it, a man whose principles drifted; he is a man whose principles held against extraordinary pressure.
2. Paine's religion is not atheism. The deism of The Age of Reason is, on Paine's own account, a profession of belief, not a denial of it. The slur that Roosevelt would deploy ninety years later -- "filthy little atheist" -- is, by Conway's reckoning, a misreading of the book's first sentence.
3. The Federalist attack on Paine in the 1790s was political, not personal. The campaign of personal vilification that Cheetham would consolidate in his 1809 biography served a specific factional purpose: to discredit the most popular spokesman of the Jeffersonian-Republican opposition during the Adams administration. Conway reads the personal slanders as artifacts of the politics, not as evidence about Paine.
4. The break with Washington is not Paine's fault. Conway, working from the Morris Papers and the State Department correspondence newly available to him, concludes that Washington could have intervened for Paine's release from the Luxembourg in 1793-94 and made the political calculation not to. The Letter to George Washington, however excessive its rhetoric, is on the substantive case factually defensible.

Modern Paine scholarship -- Hawke (1974), Aldridge (1959), Keane (1995/2003), Kaye (2005), Nelson (2006) -- has refined Conway on details but accepted the substance of his framework. The current archive follows that consensus.

Why this edition still matters

The Conway Edition is now in the public domain. The Foner Edition (1945) is not yet, though its individual texts are largely Conway's. The first editions are scarce and expensive. Internet Archive holds scans of the original Putnam printings, but the scans are OCR-noisy and not citation-stable. A clean, page-anchored, modernised text of Paine's complete writings, freely available, citable by paragraph, downloadable in TEI XML for further scholarly work, is what this archive provides. The textual basis is Conway. The apparatus is ours.

Wherever Conway erred, modern scholarship has shown where. Wherever Conway took a position, we have linked the relevant secondary literature in the per-work editorial notes. Wherever Conway transcribed a manuscript, we have where possible cross-checked against Foner and against any surviving first edition. This is, in short, Conway brought forward.

For the per-volume bibliographic apparatus see the Editor's Introduction; for the four volume openings see I, II, III, and IV. For the technical details of how the digital edition was built see the colophon and tech stack pages.