Volume II Part 13 (1/2)
Paine attacks the treaty, which is declared to have put An doate is reduced to the right of escaping; that is, until soland or France stops her vessels and carries them into port”
The lect of Araph Washi+ngton's military mistakes are relentlessly raked up, with soiven him for victories won by others heavily discounted
{1796}
That Washi+ngton smarted under this pamphlet appears by a reference to it in a letter to David Stuart, January 8, 1797 Speaking of hih he is soon to become a private citizen, his opinions are to be knocked down, and his character reduced as low as they are capable of sinking it, even by resorting to absolute falsehoods As an evidence whereof, and of the plan they are pursuing, I send you a letter of Mr Paine to me, printed in this city [Philadelphia], and dissereat industry” In the same letter he says: ”Enclosed you will receive also a production of Peter Porcupine, alias Willialish and coarse expressions, and a want of official infor”
Cobbett's answer to Paine's personal grievance was really an arraignment of the President He undertakes to prove that the French Convention was a real government, and that by membershi+p in it Paine had forfeited his American citizenshi+p But Monroe had formally claimed Paine as an American citizen, and the President had officially endorsed that claim
That this approval was unknown to Cobbett is a re that even such small and tardy action in Paine's favor was kept secret from the President's new British and Federalist allies
”Porcupine's Political Censor, for December, 1796 A Letter to the Infamous Toton”
For the rest it is a pity that Washi+ngton did not specify the ”absolute falsehoods” in Paine's paht assist us in discovering just how the case stood in his estion of his connivance with Paine's imprisonht by his Minister into the conspiracy which so nearly cost Paine his life
On a review of the facts,came indirectly from Great Britain It was probably one h any injustice against an interest of this country He ignored coill, in the Revolution; and when convinced that this nation land he virtually broke faith with France
In ahis papers, Washi+ngton writes: ”Did then the situation of our affairs adotiation or war?” (Sparks' ”Washi+ngton,” xi, P- 505) Since writing my ”Life of Randolph,” in which the history of the British treaty is followed, I found in the French Archives ( etats- Unis, vol ii, doc 12) Minister Fauchet's report of a conversation with Secretary Randolph in which he (Randolph) said: ”What would you have us do? We could not end our difficulties with the English but by a war or a friendly treaty We were not prepared for war; it was necessary to negotiate” It is now tolerably certain that there was ”bluff” on the part of the British players, in London and Philadelphia, but it won
To the new alliance he sacrificed his most faithful friends Edmund Randolph and James Monroe; and to it, mainly, was probably due his failure to express any interest in England's outlaw, Paine For this overne Washi+ngton Let justice add that he included hi France and ee III he lost his old friends, lost the confidence of his own State, incurred denunciations that, in his oords, ”could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket” So he wrote before Paine's pamphlet appeared, which, save in the personal eneral accusations It is now forgotten that with one exception--Johnson--no President ever went out of office so loaded with odiuton It was the penalty of Paine's power that, of the thousand reproaches, his alone survived to recoil on his memory when the issues and the circumstances that explain if they cannot justify his paton worshi+pper of to-day to condemn Paine's pa it But could he i imprisonment and imminent death by an old friend and comrade, whose letters of friendshi+p he cherished, that friend avowedly able to protect hilect but deference to an eneht as comrades, an unprejudiced reader would hardly consider Paine's letter unpardonable even where unjust Its trey Aout It is only in poetry that dying Desdemonas exonerate even their deluded slayers Paine, hen he wrote these personal charges felt hilect, saw not Iago behind the President
His private deh Bache, was answered only with cold silence ”I have long since resolved,” wrote Washi+ngton to Governor Stone (December 6, 1795), ”for the present time at least, to lettaken of their invectives by e” But now, nearly a year later, comes Paine's pamphlet, which is not made up of invectives, but of stateton sent, to one friend at least, Cobbett's answer to Paine, despite its errors which he vaguely ood reason why he should not have specified those errors, and Paine's also By his silence, even in the confidence of friendshi+p, the truth which rave For such silence the best excuse to norance of the part Morris had acted, the President's mind may have been in bewilderment about the exact facts
As for Paine's public letter, it was an answer to Washi+ngton's unjustifiable refusal to answer his private one It was the natural outcry of an ill and betrayed man to oneknow to have been also betrayed Its bitterness and wrath reatness of the love that ounded The ton and Paine had continued fro of the American revolution to the tinized, as Washi+ngton hinified his successes; his all-powerful pen defended hies on account of the retreat to the Delaware, and the failures near Philadelphia In those days what ”Common Sense” wrote was accepted as the People's verdict It is even doubtful whether the proposal to supersede Washi+ngton ht not have succeeded but for Paine's fifth _Crisis_
”When a party was for of seventy-eight, of which John Adaton from the co, I wrote the fifth nuress then being at Yorktown, in Pennsylvania), to ward off that h I well knew that the black times of seventy-six were the natural consequence of his want of ment in the choice of positions into which the army was put about New York and New Jersey, I could see no possible advantage, and nothing butthe army into parties, which would have been the case had the intended one on”-- Paine's Letter iii to the People of the United States (1802)
The personal relations between the two had been even affectionate We find Paine consulting him about his projected publications at little oyster suppers in his own roo him one of his two overcoats, when Paine's had been stolen Such incidents imply many others never ra Paine's papers,--”Advice to the statuary who is to execute the statue of Washi+ngton
”Take from the mine the coldest, hardest stone, It needs no fashi+on: it is Washi+ngton
But if you chisel, let the stroke be rude, And on his heart engrave--Ingratitude”
Paine never published the lines Washi+ngton being dead, old memories may have risen to restrain him; and he had learned reat man which had poisoned his mind towards other friends besides hiy to s to the history of a period prolific in intrigues, of which both Washi+ngton and Paine were victims
CHAPTER XI ”THE AGE OF REASON”
The reception which the ”Age of Reason” met is its sufficient justification The chief priests and preachers answered it with personal abuse and slander, revealing by such fruits the nature of their tree, and confessing the feebleness of its root, either in reason or human affection
Lucian, in his ”[--Greek--]” represents the Gods as invisibly present at a debate, in Athens, on their existence Daues from the evils of the world that there are no Gods, is answered by Tie salary The Gods feel doleful, as the arguainst Damis,--”You blasphemous villain, you! Wretch! Accursed e, and exclaiive hiin, to reason and you will be duht of the Gods was brought on by faith in the Son of Man Not very different was it when this Son of Man, dehumanized by despotism, made to wield the thunderbolts of Jove, reached in turn his inevitable Twilight The anism in the despotic system then called Christianity, who said, ”the church has set up a religion of pomp and revenue in the pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty,” was denounced as a sot and an adulterer These accusations, proved in this work unquestionably false, have accuenerations, so that a mountain of prejudice e of Reason” as the work of an honest and devout mind
It is only to irrelevant personalities that allusion is here nh for them to strike back with animadversions on Deisainst the antiquity of Genesis to call Paine a drunkard, had it been true This kind of reply was heard chiefly in Aonist, the Bishop of Llandaff, to rebuke Paine's strong language, when his lordshi+p could sit serenely in the House of Peers with knowledge that his opponent was answered with handcuffs for every Englishman who sold his book But in America, slander had to take the place of handcuffs
Paine is at times too harsh and militant But in no case does he attack any person's character Nor is there anything in his language, wherever objectionable, which I have heard censured when uttered on the side of orthodoxy It is easily forgotten that Luther desired the execution of a rationalist, and that Calvin did burn a Socinian The furious language of Protestants against Rolish Church, is considered even heroic, like the invective ascribed to Christ, ”Generation of vipers, how can you escape the darates on the ear of an age that understands the real forces of evolution, the historic sense remembers that moral revolutions have been made ords hard as cannon-balls
It was only when soft phrases about the evil of slavery, which ”would pass away in God's good time,” made way for the abolitionist denunciation of the Constitution as ”an agreean to fall In other words, reforht by those who are in earnest It is difficult in our time to place one's self in the situation of a heretic of Paine's time Darho is buried in Westminster, remembered the imprisonment of some educated e III egoistic insanity appears (1892) to have been inherited by an imperial descendant, and should Gerion, as Paine's early folloere in England, we shall again hear those words that are the ”half-battles” preceding victories
”In writing upon this, as upon every other subject, I speak a language plain and intelligible I deal not in hints and intimations I have several reasons for this: first, that I may be clearly understood; secondly, that it may be seen I am in earnest; and thirdly, because it is an affront to truth to treat falsehood with complaisance”--Paine's reply to Bishop Watson