Washington did not rescue Paine from French imprisonment

Real Clear History ^ | Dec 28, 2017 | William Hogeland

[CondoleezzaProtege]

George Washington refused to come to the rescue when the pamphleteer who put him on his high horse faced the guillotine...

Citizen Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense helped ignite the American Revolution, was an enthusiastic early supporter of the French Revolution. He received a hero’s welcome when he arrived in Paris in 1792 and was even granted honorary French citizenship and a seat in the National Convention, the body charged with writing a constitution for the new republic. But Paine angered Maximilien Robespierre and other Jacobin extremists when he urged the Convention to spare the life of the deposed French king, Louis XVI. Instead, Jacobins brandished the king’s severed head in front of a cheering crowd. Then they proceeded to round up thousands of suspected counterrevolutionaries who, Paine observed, fell “as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off.” Now they’d come for him, too.

Paine believed two lucky circumstances might help him keep his own head: He was still officially an American citizen, and he was an old friend of President George Washington. Immediately after his arrest he penned a letter by candlelight to Gouverneur Morris, Washington’s envoy in Paris. Morris refused to intervene...

The president had little patience for revivals of the moods of 1776. He and members of his Cabinet believed that otherwise tractable Americans were being infected with dangerous French ideas about liberty and equality. The administration’s foreign policy leaned toward England and excoriated French extremism.

Paine would not return to the United States until nearly a decade later, after Jefferson was elected president and the Republican Party was in ascendancy. But he had long since become a potential liability to any party in power, and his book The Age of Reason (written in part during his imprisonment) drew accusations of scandalous atheism.

[21twelve]

Thanks for the ping to this interesting history lesson about Thomas Paine. Regarding having only a few friends at his burial. I knew a guy that was well-respected in his field of business - and he knew everybody. I thought the church would be filled to the rafters.

I was very surprised at his funeral when perhaps only 20 people showed up. Family and friends and a few of his closest business associates.

I told my wife and she said “Oh - I’m not surprised. Business friends aren’t really “friends”.

I’m guessing the same goes for the political types that work in the trenches. And especially if you have served your purpose of raising the banner and the emotions of the people. But now your government wants to be on a more even-keel.

I wonder if when he died, seemingly with few friends and little to no recognition by his nation, that 250 years later folks would still be memorizing his words?

(Probably not, just like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address!)

[otness_e]

Unfortunately, I suspect he knew full well what that revolution actually entailed, mostly because he was on-site in France at the time its version of the shot that rang through the world, the Storming of the Bastille, happened. There’s no way he COULDN’T have witnessed the parading of the severed body parts from that riot. It’s also why I don’t nearly have as much respect for him now (had he truly been consistent with his views on liberty, that if anything would have inspired him to be AGAINST the French Revolution, citing John Adams’ handling of the British during the Boston Massacre on WHY he’d be a vocal critic of it, NOT singing praises for it). Only thing I can respect him for is the Louisiana Purchase, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Navy (and even the Declaration of Independence in particular I’d probably say was a narrowly-dodged bullet ESPECIALLY after his involvement in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’s drafting). At least the other Founding Fathers had relative ignorance due to delays in communication at that time as an excuse for why they might have initially supported the French Revolution, Jefferson doesn’t.

As far as Thomas Paine, he shouldn’t have sided with the Jacobins, that much I will say. I also heard that he actually advocated for a progressive tax, showing he completely forgot why we even HAD our revolution (King George III had us undergo a progressive tax system, and that was a major part in why we rebelled. He ought to remember, since he wrote about it).

[rlmorel]

Right.

With respect to Jefferson,I have, over the years, lost a great deal of respect for him for just that reason.

I did admire him for the Louis-Clark Expedition, for his actions with The Barbary Pirates, and also for his personal intellectual curiosity, but I have never been able to square that circle of his support for the bloodthirsty French Revolution.

Even worse, was his involvement in slandering and defaming President Washington in the most of heinous ways, and doing so via whispering campaigns. It was interesting that Washington, who had evidence that Jefferson was behind one particularly vicious attack on his character, made a point of letting Jefferson know that he knew full well that Jefferson was behind it, and that their personal relationship was at an end.

Thereafter, whenever they had to meet in the presence of other people at events, Washington would exchange cold and formal salutations with Jefferson for the benefit of others who might be present, but for the rest of his life, Washington did not communicate or engage in discourse with Jefferson.

In this, I respect Washington even more than I already did.

And, while I recognize Thomas Paine's importance in the early part of the American Revolution and the critical importance of his work Common Sense, I found many aspects of him apart from the famed pamphlet to be ideologically and personally repulsive.

I particularly took issue with his attacks on George Washington and his own embrace of anti-Christianity. Deism was not what I have against him, it was his vitriolic anti-Christianity that increasingly diminished any respect I had for him.

For me, Paine was a one-trick pony in our history with his writing of Common Sense. It was there at the critical time when it was needed, and played a vital part. But that is it, in my estimation.