FORGOTTEN FOUNDING FATHER
#491 Column Written 1/18/2001

"Free America without her Thomas Paine is unthinkable." - General Lafayette

It is impossible for one to be an American without hearing nonstop paeans of praise to those called "The Founding Fathers" of the American Revolution, and of the United States.

In every part of the world one finds people aware of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and folks like Patrick Henry. Their lives and ideas are studied by school children around the world.
How few of us know of, study, or teach about the American revolutionary, Thomas Paine!

As the writer of the pamphlet Common Sense (Jan. 1776), Paine called for the separation of the Anglo- American colonies from Britain.

Paine was truly a remarkable man, who left the fledgling U.S. after the revolution, to go to Britain. Paine, born in England, returned to his birthplace as a man convinced of the inherent rights of common folks to freedom, and the necessity of equality. In 1791 he published Rights of Man in critical response to the book by British conservative, Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution.
Paine argued that the world belongs to those who live in it, not to the dead. The Crown didn't care for Paine's ideas, and banished him from England for "high treason." His book was banned.

Paine set sail for a France that was in the grip of revolutionary extra-judicial violence, and was contemplating regicide. Hearing of the coming of the American revolutionary, the French National Assembly named him a French citizen, and residents of the rural district of Calais elected Paine to the Revolutionary Convention, as a deputy.

Paine was further elected to the "Committee of the Nine," with Danton, Brissot, and others, to draft a new Constitution for the newly-declared republic. He was in the Assembly when Louis XVI was placed on trial, and argued (quite successfully) for the life of the usurped royal.

Paine's defense of the life of Louis landed him in prison with a date for the guillotine. He was himself luckier than the king, and escaped the thirsty blade by purest chance. It was the custom of the executioner to draw a cross on the doors of those to be guillotined the next dawn. When he came to Paine's door, it was open, and the cross mark was made on the inside. Once the door was closed, the mark was invisible. Several days later, French revolutionary, Robespierre was sent to the Blade, and Paine was spared. As neither President Washington, nor U.S. diplomat Gouverneur Morris, did anything to help him during his long detention, and close brush with death, Paine was both bitter and angry. He would later write to Washington (1796):

And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.

Just a few years before, he wrote Washington in a far lighter mood, saying, "A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose."

Paine was an internationalist, who was an Englishman by birth, a French citizen by decree, and an American by adoption. He wrote, "The World is my country, all mankind my brethren, and to do good is my religion."
This, the most radical of American revolutionaries, should not be forgotten.