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THE AGE OF REASON AND UNREASON

Talking against Religion is unchaining a Tyger;

The Beast let loose may worry his Deliverer.

—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN,

Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1751

In his preface to The Age of Reason, addressed from Paris in 1794 “to my fellow citizens of the United States of America,” Thomas Paine recalled that even before America declared its independence from Britain, he had envisioned “the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion.” It was not to be—not, at any rate, in the sense Paine intended. America’s revolution did separate church and state, but it did not replace conventional religion, based on belief in the supernatural, with a humanism rooted in rationality and the laws of nature. By the turn of the century, America entered its first cycle of reaction against the nation’s recent secularist heritage—even as the freethought movement expanded and exerted a secularizing and liberalizing influence on a growing number of citizens. This combination of religious reaction with continuing assaults on religious orthodoxy became one of the defining cultural characteristics of the new republic.

In the early 1800s, the author of “Common Sense”—which had sold some 500,000 copies in the mid-1770s—would be castigated as a Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, archbeast, brute, liar, and of course infidel. The archbeast had earned not a penny from his most famous revolutionary pamphlet, because he allowed his words to be published freely in order to further the cause of independence—a sacrifice that made no difference to his detractors. In 1797, a scurrilous “biography,” published by the Englishman William Cobbett, attested to the transformation of Paine from revered patriot into devil’s spawn in little more than twenty years. “How Tom gets a living now, or what brothel he inhabits,” the author exulted, “I know not, nor does it much signify. He has done all the mischief he can do in this world; and whether his carcass is at last to be suffered to rot on the earth, or to be dried in the air, is of very little consequence. . . . Like Judas, he will be remembered by posterity; men will learn to express all that is base, malignant, treacherous, unnatural, and blasphemous by the single monosyllable of Paine.”¹ Cobbett, who arrived in the United States in 1792 and stayed for some years before returning to England as a social reformer, eventually changed his mind about Paine after actually reading his books—something he had neglected to do before publishing the biography.

Although Paine’s economic and political ideas were too radical for some of his contemporaries, his jaundiced view of religion proved the primary cause of his fall from American grace. The shunning of Paine, who was still revered by small groups of freethinkers in pre–Civil War America but whose reputation was not truly revived until the “golden age of freethought” in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, offers what is in many respects a paradigm of America’s periodic and powerful impulse to deny the importance of the secularist contribution to the building of the nation.

Born in Norfolk, England, in 1737, Paine was the son of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother—a mixed religious background, unusual among his contemporaries, that could well have contributed to his lifelong hatred of state-established churches. He left school at age thirteen to work in his father’s corset-making establishment, then ran away at sixteen to go to sea. As a young man patching together a livelihood from a variety of poorly paid jobs, which included making stays for corsets, part-time teaching, and collecting excise taxes for the Crown, Paine somehow managed to buy the books he needed to improve on his rudimentary formal education. (His lifelong indebtedness was often attributed to his fondness for drink, but perhaps a fondness for books was the real culprit.) As a tax collector, Paine had ample opportunity to observe economic and social injustice in England, and he involved himself in a cause that foreshadowed his later preoccupations as a writer and radical thinker. Indignant that English Jews were obliged to pay taxes but not allowed to vote, Paine forcefully and publicly articulated his views in coffeehouse debates. Depriving Jews of legal rights, he declared in what was then a novel argument, violated the natural rights of man. Word of this troublemaking on behalf of Jews reached Paine’s superiors in the tax administration, who ordered him “to cease all religious and political controversy” or face the consequences. Shortly thereafter, Paine took on another battle when he lobbied Parliament on behalf of salary increases for the poorly paid “excisemen.” Having ignored the order to avoid controversy, he was, predictably, fired.

Benjamin Franklin, then representing the interests of the colony of Pennsylvania in London, was introduced to Paine by the only excise commissioner who had been sympathetic to his arguments before Parliament. Franklin convinced Paine that a man of his talents and distaste for authority would be better off in America. Jobless and penniless, His Majesty’s former tax collector arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 with just two assets—his pen and a letter of recommendation from Franklin. Within a matter of months, Paine would find both his public voice and a receptive American audience. His first article, published in March 1775 in the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, was a denunciation of slavery. Paine regarded it as particularly ironic that Americans should complain with increasing vociferousness of injustices done them by Britain while the colonists themselves enslaved other men. Six weeks after the article was published, the first antislavery society in America was established in Philadelphia, with Paine as a founding member. Certain that American independence would lead as inevitably to the abolition of slavery as to a revolution in religion, the English immigrant soon became one of the most ardent and articulate advocates of rebellion against England.

By December 1776, after the publication of Paine’s legendary call to arms in “Common Sense,” the thirty-nine-year-old patriotic propagandist, determined to bear firsthand witness to the struggle for independence, was immersed in the wartime travails of his adopted country. As legend has it, Paine was shivering by a New Jersey campfire with the beleaguered troops under George Washington’s command when he placed a sheet of paper on top of a drumhead and wrote the sentence “These are the times that try men’s souls.” As soon as he finished writing, Paine rushed the first installment of “The American Crisis” to a publisher in Philadelphia. It is fact, not legend, that the stirring words were first read aloud on Christmas Eve, upon orders from General Washington, to the apprehensive young men preparing to cross the Delaware River and mount a surprise attack on the Hessians at Trenton.

Contemporary accounts agree that Paine’s rallying cry had a galvanizing effect on soldiers who, in retreat after being routed by the British in the Battle of Long Island, feared that the revolutionary cause was lost. As familiar as the words have become today, it is nonetheless easy to imagine how heartening it must have been for Americans to hear, for the first time, that “tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” What would have been hard to imagine in 1776 was the reversal of fortune that awaited the much-acclaimed author.

Paine’s reputation in America slowly began to change with the publication in 1791 of The Rights of Man, a defense of the French Revolution and a scathing critique of hereditary privilege and all forms of monarchy. Only two years earlier, many Americans had celebrated the news of the storming of the Bastille and the publication of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which so closely resembled the Declaration of Independence in its Enlightenment sentiments. The public remembered, and was grateful to, those Frenchmen who had provided military and diplomatic assistance to the revolutionary cause. The Marquis de Lafayette, who served as a general under Washington, was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine, and shared the hardships of the American troops during the bitter winter at Valley Forge, was an American hero. The secularists among the founders acknowledged their debt to French Enlightenment thought, and the French reciprocated by lionizing American luminaries, especially the Francophiles Franklin and Jefferson, who had represented American interests in Paris during and after the war. The near feudalism of France’s ancien régime, dominated by the monarchy and the Catholic Church, reinforced the initially positive American response to the French Revolution. Many Americans also applauded the new French National Assembly’s nationalization of church properties—not only because separation of church and state was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution but because many American Protestants were strongly anti-Catholic and the properties in question had belonged to the Church of Rome. But by 1791, Americans’ identification with the French Revolution had begun to weaken—the first of many turn-abouts in what would become a permanent love-hate relationship. Frightening firsthand accounts of mob violence and destruction of property crossed the Atlantic after French nobles began fleeing for their lives to England. King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, prevented from escaping across the English Channel, were prisoners of the revolutionary government. It was an inauspicious time for publication of a book defending a revolution that, in the view of at least some Americans, seemed out of control.

Paine had written The Rights of Man in England, where he settled in 1787 for what was intended to be a visit but turned into a stay of several years. The first part of the book, published in London in 1791, was a reply to the conservative British statesman Edmund Burke’s famous indictment of the French Revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Accompanied by a letter of endorsement from Jefferson, part 1 was printed in America and France shortly after its London publication. By then, English feeling against the French Revolution—with its obvious implications for the British monarchy—was running high, and Paine soon fled, in a reversal of the journey being made by terrified French nobles, for what he thought would be the more hospitable shores of revolutionary France. Indeed, English sentiment was so against Paine that he was tried and convicted of sedition in absentia, barred from ever returning to the country of his birth, and burned in effigy. His books, too, were burned, often atop a scaffold that the incendiaries considered a fitting place for the author as well as his works. As a result of Paine’s sedition conviction, part 2 of The Rights of Man, published in France and America in 1792, was not published in London.

In America, the reception of The Rights of Man was more positive—though decidedly mixed. Americans still agreed with Paine’s antimonarchical arguments, having acted on them so decisively in the recent past, even if they did not approve of the violence and social disorder overtaking France. Indeed, Paine dedicated the first volume to Washington, whose personal modesty and devotion to representative government presented such a pointed contrast to the behavior of the monarchs of Europe. But most members of Washington’s Federalist Party strongly objected to Paine’s linkage between the American and French revolutions, considering the latter far too violent and too radical in its approach to established institutions. It was this issue that first created a breach—which developed into a chasm during the bitter presidential campaign of 1800—between Jefferson and Adams. For the most part, though, the debate over The Rights of Man was confined to America’s governing elite; there is little evidence that the book greatly damaged Paine’s reputation among the ordinary literate Americans who had been stirred only fifteen years earlier by his patriotic exhortations. What the book’s mixed reception did accomplish was to knock the author down from the revolutionary pedestal he had previously occupied. Criticism of The Rights of Man prepared the way for the more savage and widespread attacks directed at The Age of Reason, which assailed organized religion in general and Christianity in particular.

Part 1 of The Age of Reason was written in Paris in 1793—in haste, because although Paine had originally been lionized by the French as a true ally in the cause of liberté, égalité, fraternité, he soon became disillusioned by the increasing violence of the revolution. When Paine declared his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI, he placed his own life in imminent danger. Arrested on Robespierre’s orders, Paine was able to deliver the manuscript to his friend Joel Barlow, who was also a close friend of Jefferson’s, while en route to the Luxembourg Prison on December 28, 1793. In one of the more disgraceful manifestations of ingratitude by any American administration, Paine was left for more than nine months to rot in prison—literally, because he almost died of a suppurating ulcer. Gouverneur Morris, the American minister to France from 1792 to 1794, detested Paine’s views on both religion and politics and misled the French by informing them that the United States did not recognize the English-born Paine’s claim to American citizenship. At the same time, Morris persuaded President Washington—who, though he, too, disagreed with Paine’s economic views, recognized his debt to the man whose writings had inspired widespread popular support for the revolutionary cause—that he was doing everything possible to obtain Paine’s release. Only when the freethinking James Monroe replaced Morris as minister to France did the American government exert its influence to obtain Paine’s freedom. Paine wrote part 2 of The Age of Reason while recovering from his severe ulcerative illness in Monroe’s home; at the time of Paine’s release from prison, his condition was so grave that Monroe did not expect him to live. In his preface to part 2, Paine demonstrated that he belongs to the select company of political idealists who do not take refuge in illusions when they see that their ideals have been betrayed. Recalling his imprisonment and the fate of many friends who went directly from prison to the guillotine, the author declared that the “intolerant spirit of Church persecutions had transferred itself into politics; the tribunal styled revolutionary supplied the place of an inquisition; and the guillotine of the stake.”

Paine was to remain in Paris until his old friend Jefferson was elected the nation’s first Democratic Republican president. In 1802, Jefferson invited Paine to return home on an American ship and assured him that his abandonment by American emissaries during the Jacobin period did not reflect the true sentiments of the American people. But The Age of Reason, with its attacks not only on ecclesiastical hierarchies but on all religious beliefs at odds with science and rational thought, had in fact created many enemies for Paine in America. Although the text repeatedly affirms Paine’s belief in some form of deity, it is nevertheless easy to understand what so enraged the defenders of institutionalized religion on both sides of the ocean:

Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God were not open to every man alike.

Each of these churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses; face to face; the Christians say that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.²

Paine was surprised by the venom that awaited him when he took Jefferson up on his invitation. The revolution’s greatest publicist was greeted in the press—especially the Federalist press, which seized on Paine’s “infidelity” as a weapon to use against Jefferson—by admonitions to shut up, return to the Old World, or prepare to endure his just punishment in the next world. “And having spent a lengthy life in evil / Return again unto thy parent Devil” was a typical piece of advice from a New York newspaper—even though, or perhaps because, New York had become one of the centers of deist activity flourishing in the midst of the orthodox backlash.

The America Paine found when he returned in 1802 was far less hospitable to secularists in a public capacity than the America Paine had left fifteen years earlier. Had the Constitution been written in 1797 instead of 1787, it is entirely possible that God, not “we, the people,” would have been credited with supreme governmental authority. Yet the revival of religious conservatism around the turn of the century, like the rise of Enlightenment liberalism in the second half of the 1700s, was an uneven process fraught with anomalies and ironies—the most obvious being the apparent contradiction between the renewal of religious conservatism and the political victory of Jefferson, the nation’s best-known freethinker and deist, in the 1800 election. Throughout their presidencies, Jefferson and his successor, Madison, never ceased to uphold the separation of church and state they had conceived as a model for the new nation. But their views on orthodox religion had become a political liability, and they knew it. Jefferson, unlike Washington and Adams, refused to issue presidential proclamations of thanksgiving to God, often requested on official occasions by the evangelical churches that had played such an important role in passage of the Virginia religious freedom act and ratification of the Constitution. But Jefferson was careful to couch his refusals in terms that emphasized his opposition to government intrusion on religious prerogatives rather than to religious intrusion on government. A secular leader who made quasi-religious proclamations, Jefferson insisted, was not only violating the First Amendment but exceeding his civil authority by usurping a function that properly belonged to churches. Even so, Jefferson’s undeserved reputation as an atheist and his deserved reputation as a deist were used against him by his political opponents before, during, and after the presidential campaign of 1800. Attacks on Jefferson the infidel were sharper, and more effective politically, than the rumors of his relationship with his slave and mistress, Sally Hemings.

While many prominent Federalists, including Washington and Adams, were far removed from religious orthodoxy and fully shared Jefferson’s views on the separation of civil government from religion, the party had more than its share of conservative church spokesmen. All Federalists were not religious conservatives, but nearly all religious conservatives were Federalists. In 1796, when the Federalist John Adams took office as president, with the Democratic Republican Jefferson as his vice president,* the ardent Federalist minister Jedidiah Champion of Litchfield, Connecticut, offered an admiring prayer for the welfare of President-elect Adams and then added pointedly on Jefferson’s behalf, “O Lord! wilt Thou bestow upon the Vice President a double portion of Thy grace, for Thou knowest he needs it.”³

In the 1800 campaign, Jefferson’s own writings on the subject of religion were repeatedly used against him. One famous passage from Notes on Virginia (1784) was most commonly cited as proof of Jefferson’s religious infidelity and unfitness for office. “The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others,” Jefferson wrote. “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”⁴ Jefferson went on to argue:

Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects form a censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What have been the effects of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and terror all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand.⁵

John Mason, the New York minister who warned in 1793 of the divine retribution awaiting America as a result of its godless constitution, turned his oratorical powers on Jefferson in 1800. He castigated Jefferson’s religious views as “the morality of devils, which would break in an instant every link in the chain of human friendship, and transform the globe into one scene of desolation and horror, where fiend would prowl with fiend for plunder and blood—yet atheism ‘neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ I will not abuse you by asking, whether the author of such an opinion can be a Christian?”⁶

The failure of the Federalists to defeat Jefferson by linking him with atheism is attributable in part to the high personal esteem in which the author of the Declaration of Independence continued to be held and in part to other political issues, among them the assault on the First Amendment represented by the Alien and Sedition Acts.* Another vital factor in Jefferson’s election was the support of evangelical Christians, who had been his staunch allies since the debate over Virginia’s religious freedom act in the mid-1780s. Although evangelicals, many of whom believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible, were far removed from Jefferson’s deist views, they were nevertheless profoundly offended by the Federalist attempt to turn the candidate’s private religious beliefs into a public issue. At the same time—another irony of the early 1800s—the passionate proselytizing of evangelicals was playing an important role in the reaction against freethought. Historians of American religion generally date the “Second Great Awakening” from around 1805, but popular revival movements began to crop up during and immediately after the Revolution, from New England to the Deep South.

The historian G. Adolph Koch argues convincingly in Republican Religion (1933) that the grassroots resurgence of theological conservatism at the turn of the century was largely the work of Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, whose membership was composed primarily of Jeffersonian Republicans rather than of the wealthier, and politically more conservative, Congregationalists like Timothy Dwight. “The same uncalculating and unreasoning emotionalism which had characterized the exuberant American republicanism in the heyday of the French revolution was decorously transferred to a new channel—evangelical revivalism,” Koch asserts.⁷ That many Americans could embrace evangelical revivalism while voting for the deist Jefferson attests to the widespread acceptance of separation of church and state in the young republic.

The resurgence of religious conservatism in the late 1790s and early 1800s was essentially a social rather than a political phenomenon, although the ideas of that era’s theological and social conservatives would have a lasting impact on American political thought. At the turn of the revolutionary century, Americans had recently lived through and were continuing to cope with extraordinary changes affecting their daily lives as well as their view of the world. Even when revolutions are welcomed by the majority, they tend to generate social instability and a longing for the anchors of former times. The American Revolution, though it did not, and was never intended to, overturn established economic arrangements and class distinctions, was no exception. As early as 1789, conservatives were issuing warnings of a deist-atheist-radical conspiracy. The prominent geographer and minister Jedidiah Morse decried freethinkers and deists—along with anti-Federalists, Freemasons, dissatisfied farmers, and debtors trying to avoid paying what they owed—as integral components of a “conspiracy against all Religions and Governments.”⁸ In many respects, the challenge to religious orthodoxy became a symbol of all the other disruptions in social order. In 1793, Lyman Beecher, who would become one of the most influential ministers of the nineteenth century, entered Yale College and found it in a most “ungodly state,” characterized not only by religious skepticism but by a whole range of social vices. Beecher reported that “rowdies were plenty,” wine and liquor flowed freely, and “intemperance, profanity, gambling, and licentiousness were common.” All of this he blamed on the prevalence of religious heresy:

That was the day of the infidelity of the Tom Paine school. Boys that dressed flax in the barn, as I used to, read Tom Paine and believed him; I read, and fought him all the way. Never had any propensity to infidelity. But most of the class before me were infidels, and called each other Voltaire, Rousseau, D’Alembert, etc., etc.⁹

This passage clearly demonstrates the emerging conservative linkage between private vices and public irreligion and between religious infidelity and the French Enlightenment. Infidelity, in turn, became conflated with French revolutionary terror. As Beecher’s allusions to Voltaire and Rousseau indicate, French names had become a kind of shorthand for freethought and deism. The very fact of having lived in France—of having had the opportunity to be corrupted by direct contact with infidels like Voltaire—became a political accusation in the 1790s.

In reality, the religious skepticism displayed by “boys that dressed flax in the barn” could not be blamed solely on heretical notions originating on the other side of the Atlantic. The Reverend Timothy Dwight, a grandson of the severe theologian Jonathan Edwards (whose best-known sermon was titled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”), assumed the presidency of Yale in 1795 and emphasized the role of peer pressure in the spread of religious infidelity. In a speech to the class of ’97 he asserted that “the fashionable bias of the present time will be readily acknowledged to be unfavorable to Christianity.” That fashionableness had made infidelity particularly attractive to the young, he warned:

At home, you will see one decent or doubtful person, and another, sliding slowly down the declivity of irreligion, and many, more heedless, or more daring, leaping at once into the gulph beneath. Here, a companion will turn his back, and walk no more with Christ. There, a Parent, or Instructor, will forsake him, having loved the present world. Among these will frequently be found the gay, the pleasing, and the accomplished; and in some instances, the grave, the learned, and the honourable. On one side, the temptation will charm; on the other it will sanction. Allured, awed, supported, perhaps without a friend at hand to pluck you by the arm, or to point to you either the danger or the means of escaping it, it can scarcely be hoped, that none of you will be destroyed. Most of the Infidels, whom I have known, have fallen a sacrifice to this cause, or to the fear of ridicule.¹⁰

Dwight had already thrown down the gauntlet against deism, which he regarded as atheism by another name. In the widely circulated satirical poem “The Triumph of Infidelity” (1788), he declared that the eighteenth century had seen “New gates of falsehood opened on mankind, / New Paths to ruin strew’d with Flowers divine, / And other aids, and motives, gain’d to sin.” As Beecher recounted in his autobiography, his Yale contemporaries thought that the college faculty would oppose free discussion of religion, but “when they handed Dr. Dwight a list of subjects for class disputation, to their surprise he selected this: ‘Is the Bible the word of God?’ and told them to do their best.” So persuasive were Dwight’s responses, according to Beecher, that the college was soon cleansed of freethought. “He heard all they had to say, answered them, and there was an end. He preached incessantly for six months on the subject, and all infidelity skulked and hid its head.”¹¹ Skulking would seem to have been the prudent course for any heretical student at Yale during Dwight’s tenure, since he personally delivered more than two hundred sermons to undergraduates on the dangers of religious infidelity. One of his most memorable perorations proclaimed the immorality of smallpox vaccination, introduced by Dr. William Jenner in 1796. An earlier form of inoculation against smallpox had been employed by progressive, educated New Englanders like the Adams family since the 1760s. In a departure from the general eighteenth-century approval of scientific advances—a predilection of many orthodox believers as well as freethinkers—Dwight argued that if God had decided from all eternity that an individual’s fate was to die of smallpox, it was a sin to interfere with the divine plan through a man-made trick like vaccination.

Yet even as the defenders of orthodoxy mounted an attack on every form of Enlightenment rationalism, the secularist genie could not be stuffed back into the bottle. Many of the freethinking tempters whom Dwight described as “the grave, the learned, and the honourable” could be found within the American clergy itself. Nothing was more horrifying to those who still preached Calvinist predestination than the transformation, beginning in the late eighteenth century, of many of New England’s Puritan-founded Congregationalist churches into much more liberal and rationalist Unitarian fellowships, which rejected not only predestination but a wide variety of orthodox Christian tenets, including the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The ministers who led this transformation were American originals, men of both passion and moderation, combining a philosophical commitment to natural rights with a pragmatic reliance on empirical knowledge.

One of the most engaging (and, like so many other figures in this history, long-forgotten) leaders of the Unitarian metamorphosis was the Reverend William Bentley, pastor of the East Church in Salem, Massachusetts, from 1783 until his death in 1819. By the time Bentley took up his duties in Salem, the memory of the 1692 witch trials had receded and the mercantile, seafaring town had become one of the more cosmopolitan, intellectually open communities in America—a striking example of the evolution of secularism in the revolutionary century. Even at the height of the witch hysteria, Salem was not a backward-looking Puritan stronghold but the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s version of sin city. Indeed, the accusations of witchcraft originated not in Salem itself—even though that is where tourist monuments memorialize the events—but in what was once called Salem Village, a farming community a two-hour walk from the alluring and, by Puritan standards, bawdy town. The village had been settled west of Salem in order to supply the growing port’s need for food, and the family feuds involved in the witchcraft trials stemmed, at least in part, from the envy of poorer farmers on the western edge of the settlement of their eastern neighbors, who had closer and more lucrative connections with the booming town.¹²

Bentley, a Jeffersonian Democratic Republican, held religious views closely resembling those articulated in Jefferson’s Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, written during his first presidential term and motivated to some extent by his desire to deflect accusations of religious infidelity. Both Bentley and Jefferson believed in the goodness but not necessarily the divinity of Christ and in the ethics but not the authority of Christianity. A true man of the Enlightenment, Bentley had broad intellectual interests shared by his parishioners, many of whom were ship’s captains and mariners whose voyages had taken them to China, Japan, India, Africa, and Persia. He was said to have mastered twenty languages, and his biographer reported that he spent approximately two hours a day reading to improve his proficiency: Monday was devoted to Greek; Tuesday to French; Wednesday to Latin; Thursday to Spanish and Italian; and Friday to German, Dutch, and Slavonic dialects. Saturday was reserved for Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, sources for his sermons. On the seventh day he rested.

The minister’s remarkable diaries, which by themselves should have secured him a place in American cultural history, demonstrate his interest in literally everything: Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese art; American Indian remains; botanical and marine specimens from around the world; coins; rare books; religions of every culture and country. Jefferson held Bentley in such high esteem that he offered him the presidency of the University of Virginia, but the minister declined the honor, explaining that he could not bear to leave his longtime parishioners in Salem.

*Until the Twelfth Amendment took effect in 1804, the Constitution specified that the presidential runner-up would automatically be named vice president by the electoral college. Hence, Jefferson—who lost the 1796 election to Adams—served as his vice president. Beginning in 1804, electors voted separately for the president and vice president, thereby ending a system in which political enemies might hold the nation’s two top offices—and in which the death of a sitting president could nullify the voters’ wishes by turning over the White House to the party defeated in the previous election. Since then, electors have voted for the vice presidential candidate of the president’s party—the party ticket, as it is now known.

*The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed by the Federalist-controlled Congress, with the support of President Adams, in 1798. The Sedition Act imposed broad prohibitions on written and spoken criticism of the government, virtually nullifying the First Amendment. Several Republican editors were tried and convicted under the law. Ostensibly enacted in response to hostile acts by the French revolutionary government, the laws were intended to silence Jeffersonian Republicans and destroy their party. After Jefferson’s election, the new Republican-controlled Congress allowed the Sedition Act to expire.

The connection among freethinkers, Unitarians, and Universalists was such that many religious conservatives considered the liberal Protestant sects just another species of infidelity. Universalism, another dissident form of Protestantism that emerged in America in the late eighteenth century, maintained—in a reversal of the Calvinist predestination doctrine—that God intended every human being to be saved. Ministers like Bentley, by virtue of their position between orthodoxy and infidelity, did indeed play a significant role in the spread of freethought throughout their communities because they encouraged open discussion of all religious ideas. Bentley even offered his pulpit to a Catholic priest—an act of stunning iconoclasm in eighteenth-century New England—to explain the tenets of his faith to anyone who cared to listen. In a comical yet revealing 1787 diary entry headed “The danger of Loan of Books, for whose sentiments, you wish not to be accountable,” Bentley described the consequences of his having loaned a copy of Ethan Allen’s heretical Reason the Only Oracle of Man to a friend:

Allen’s oracles of reason, given by J.W. Esq was lent to Col. C. under solemn promise of secrecy, but by him lent to a Mr. Grafton, who was reported to have died a Confirmed Infidel. The book was found at his death in his chamber, examined with horror by his female relations. By them conveyed to a Mr. Williams, whose shop is remarkable for news, & therefore examined—reported to be mine from the initials W.B., viewed as an awful curiosity by hundreds, connected with a report that I encouraged infidelity in Grafton by my prayers with him in his dying hour, & upon the whole a terrible opposition to me fixed in the minds of the devout and ignorant multitude.¹³

The following year, when conservatives were insisting that the as yet unratified Constitution should include a religious test for public office, Bentley asked, “But what security is it to a government, that every public officer shall swear that he is a christian? . . . One man will declare that the Xtian religion is only an illumination of natural religion . . . another Christian will assert that all men must be happy thereafter in spite of themselves; a third Christian reverses the image, & declares that let a man do all he can, he will certainly be punished in another world. . . . Sir, the only evidence we can have of the sincerity and excellency of a man’s religion, is a good life. . . . That man who acts an honest part toward his neighbour, will most probably conduct honorably toward the public.”¹⁴

Between 1790 and 1830, approximately half of the tax-supported Congregationalist churches in Massachusetts were transformed into Unitarian congregations. Many historians have argued that the success of the Unitarian movement, which tended to attract the most educated members of New England communities, was an important and enduring factor in the greater acceptance of Christianity by influential Americans than by their counterparts in Europe.¹⁵ Liberal Protestantism in America, by virtue of its opposition to state-established churches, fitted comfortably into and made a major contribution to the secularist foundations of the republic. Another way of looking at Unitarianism is that it moved religion itself into the camp of Enlightenment rationalism. Men like Bentley believed as deeply in freedom of thought and of speech as they did in freedom of conscience; at the core of their religion lay not an unquestioning faith but a deep reverence for the power of the human mind and the value of human doubt.

While Bentley and the Unitarians represented the most secular and most liberal end of the conventional religious spectrum, the American ministry in this period also produced radical freethinkers who broke with religion altogether. Elihu Palmer, an unruly deist who was even less acceptable to his contemporaries than his friend Paine, began his public career in 1787 as a Presbyterian minister in what is now the New York City borough of Queens, but he did not last long in the pulpit. A local historian with whom Palmer apparently stayed while he was recovering from a smallpox inoculation explained why. One evening, Palmer’s host overheard him reciting a well-known, theologically orthodox couplet: “Lord I am vile, conceived in sin, / And born unholy and unclean.” Palmer turned to a female guest and “declared that he did not believe a word, not one word. . . . Surprised at this announcement, she advised him not to give utterance to such sentiments in public, for people would not hear of it.”¹⁶ Palmer was dismissed from his pulpit in less than a year, moved to Philadelphia, and joined the Baptist Church in 1789. The Baptists kicked him out too, and he then announced both his allegiance to Universalism and his rejection of the divinity of Christ—even though Universalists at that time accepted the divinity of Jesus. Bentley had found a hospitable reception for unorthodox theological views among Salem’s Unitarians, but Palmer and his small group of followers were soon banned in Philadelphia. Alerting and outraging the Christian citizenry, he imprudently placed a notice in a local publication of his intention to preach a sermon challenging the divinity of Jesus. His biographer later reported that “the society of Universalists were in an uproar; and being joined by people of other denominations, instigated probably by their priests, an immense mob assembled at an early hour before the Universalist Church, which Mr. Palmer was unable to enter. In fact, it is stated, that he was in personal danger, and was induced to quit the city, somewhat in the stile of the ancient apostles upon similar occasions.”¹⁷ Wisely deciding that his prospects in any ministry were nil, Palmer took up the study of law and passed the bar in 1793. Unfortunately, and mystifyingly, since his local notoriety would seem to have augured ill for the practice of law in Philadelphia, Palmer returned to the city in 1793. A few months later, the nation’s first epidemic of yellow fever took more than five thousand lives. Palmer’s wife was among the dead, and although he survived, his sight was destroyed. His enemies naturally saw his blindness as God’s punishment for heresy, notwithstanding the thousands of fresh graves housing the corpses of pious churchgoers.

Since blindness had put an end to his hopes of a legal career, Palmer took to the road as an itinerant lecturer on deism. His first stop was Augusta, Georgia—the state had modeled its law separating church and state on Virginia’s religious freedom act—where he delivered a series of lectures from the steps of the courthouse. Palmer’s reception in Georgia, in contrast to his treatment in Philadelphia, was cordial and reflected the religious liberalism that still prevailed in a region where Jefferson and Madison were revered. Then he swung north to New York City, which he would make his base for speaking tours of New England and the Middle Atlantic states. Palmer delivered his first public speech in New York on Christmas Day, which he regarded as a holiday well suited to the denunciation of both Christianity and Christ. By then, Palmer had moved far beyond any form of Protestantism: unlike Bentley, he saw little good in Christianity and had a low opinion of Jesus the man. Palmer was also far more radical in his condemnation of Christianity than Paine, who respected the ethics espoused in the New Testament and believed in the virtue, if not the divinity, of Jesus. From the text of Palmer’s Christmas Day speech, it is easy to understand why he usually wore out his welcome: respect for the beliefs of others was not, to put it mildly, one of his strong points. “This, my friends, we are told is Christmas day,” he began, “and while the pious and learned divines of all Christendom are extolling the beauties, the excellencies, and the divinity of the Christian religion . . . be it our task to inquire into the truth or falsehood of these declarations.” Palmer went on to mock the gospel account of the Annunciation and the miraculous conception of Jesus: “This story of the virgin and the ghost, to say no more of it, does not wear the appearance of much religion; and it would not, it is presumed, be difficult in any age or country, to find a sufficient number of men, who would pretend to be ghosts, if by such pretensions they could obtain similar favours. . . .” Palmer even tried to eviscerate the sacred mystery at the heart of Christianity—Jesus’s redemptive death on the cross:

In his last moments he cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!” What conclusion is it natural to draw from this distressing exclamation? It appears to be this, that on the part of Jesus Christ, there was a virtual renunciation of his confidence in the Creator. . . . On the part of the Father, there is a want of attention and support in this trying hour. He forsakes his beloved Son, gives him up to the murderous fury of vindictive enemies; and neither one nor the other of the parties exhibits that spirit of fortitude and constancy which might have been expected on so interesting an occasion.¹⁸

Elihu Palmer was emphatically not a charming or tolerant man, and it would be easy to conclude that he deserves to be forgotten. Yet he is an important figure in the history of American secularism because, like the much better known Paine, he attempted to carry the message of deism beyond its original audience of educated upper-class intellectuals. Between 1800 and his death in 1806, Palmer published two deist newspapers in New York, the Temple of Reason and Prospect, or View of the Moral World. It is significant that both ventures failed not for lack of readers but because the readers, who came from all walks of life and economic classes, failed to pay their subscription bills on time. Palmer organized deist societies in New York City, Newburgh (New York), Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and the membership was drawn not from leading citizens but from artisans and shopkeepers. With the exception of doctors, almost no members of learned professions were recorded as members.¹⁹ His only book, the 1801 Principles of Nature; or, a Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species, sold out three editions before 1806. In his view, nonreligious advances in human thought began with the invention of the printing press and proceeded slowly but inevitably toward the day when philosophical assaults on church and state despotism produced both the American and French revolutions. The importance of Enlightenment philosophy, and of the consequent upheavals in religion and government, lay not in the replacement of one malevolent class of rulers by a more beneficent group but in the enfranchisement of masses of men who had never before been considered fit to govern themselves. “This philosophy,” he argued, “has already destroyed innumerable errors; it has disclosed all the fundamental principles which have been employed in the construction of machines, mathematical instruments, and the arrangements of those moral and political systems which have softened the savage and ferocious heart of man, and raised the ignorant slave from the dust, into the elevated character of an enlightened citizen.”²⁰

The idea that religious revolutions might result in a rebellion of the downtrodden was exactly what worried many leaders of the new republic. That concern was not confined to the most conservative Federalists or the most orthodox clerics but was also expressed by moderate, or what Koch calls “respectable,” deists like Franklin. In 1786, Franklin warned an acquaintance against circulating an inexpensive pamphlet setting forth his arguments against the existence of God. “He that spits against the Wind, spits in his own Face,” Franklin cautioned, advising his young correspondent “not to attempt unchaining the Tyger, but to burn the Piece before it is seen by any other Person. . . . If men are so wicked as we now see them with religion, what would they be if without it.”²¹ Deism and freethought, in this view, were fine for privileged members of society such as Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin himself but were dangerous when exported to the lower classes, ill-educated and lacking in the putative self-discipline practiced by their social betters. A prominent minister put the case against populist deism even more bluntly:

The effort of infidels, to diffuse the principles of infidelity among the common people, is another alarming symptom peculiar to the present time. Hume, Bolingbroke, and Gibbon addressed themselves solely to the more polished classes of the community, and would have thought their refined speculations debased by an attempt to enlist disciples from among the populace. Infidelity has lately grown condescending: bred in the speculations of a daring philosophy, immured at first in the cloisters of the learned, and afterwards nursed in the lap of voluptuousness and of courts; having at length reached its full maturity, it boldly ventures to challenge the suffrages of the people, solicits the acquaintance of peasants and mechanics, and seeks to draw whole nations to its standard.²²

The indictment of an infidelity that “solicits the acquaintance of peasants and mechanics” was, once again, a reflection of changing American attitudes—in any event, changing clerical attitudes—toward the French Revolution. Only the most liberal clergymen, like Bentley, insisted on distinguishing between the Jacobin terror directed at the French upper classes and the original democratic and libertarian ideals embodied in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. To Enlightenment liberals, the enemy was not the Revolution itself but the actions of a particular group of revolutionaries who had, as Paine wrote, turned into a new species of Grand Inquisitor and taken over the role of the church whose wealth they had confiscated. But by 1800, most American Protestant clergymen had chosen to forget their initial tolerance, bordering on gleeful enthusiasm, for the French revolutionary government’s early actions abolishing the secular power of the Catholic Church. The French assault on the privileged position of Catholicism now looked like an assault on all religion: to Protestant conservatives, any church—even one as misguided as the Church of Rome—was better than no church at all. In a 1798 Fourth of July sermon, Dwight declared that “where religion prevails . . . a French directory cannot govern, a nation cannot be made slaves, nor villains, nor atheists, nor beasts. To destroy us, therefore, in this dreadful sense, our enemies must first destroy our Sabbath, and seduce us from the house of God.”²³ The view of France as the source of America’s original secularist sin would prevail among orthodox clerics throughout the nineteenth century. William Meade, the Episcopal archbishop of Virginia from 1841 to 1862, lamented that “the successful termination of the [revolutionary] war, and all the rich blessings attending it, did not produce the gratitude to the Giver which was promised by the hearts of our people in the day of danger and supplication. The intimacy produced between infidel France and our own country, by the union of our arms against the common foe, was most baneful in its influence with our citizens generally, and on none more so than those of Virginia.”²⁴ Meade must have been regretfully contemplating the Virginia religious freedom act of 1786, which permanently expelled his church from its former state-supported Eden.

Both before and after his death, Paine was the perfect target for social and religious conservatives because his life and his writings combined associations with religious heresy, economic radicalism, and the French Revolution. Paine’s books, by virtue of their greater lucidity as well as his reputation as a revolutionary, were far more widely known—certainly outside the urban centers of deist activity—than works by his like-minded American contemporaries Ethan Allen and Elihu Palmer. Mainstream twentieth-century historians have tended to dismiss the idea that Paine’s deist arguments had any real impact on the general public; The Age of Reason, it is often said, was more often denounced by anxious clerics than read by ordinary people. That viewpoint is suspect because it reflects the customary denigration of secularists and their role in American history. The Age of Reason was reprinted eighteen times in five American cities between 1794 and 1796. It is impossible to determine exactly how many people read the book, but the total number of readers was surely many times more than the 25,000 printed copies. On this point, the testimony of Paine’s contemporaries, including scholars working in the early years of the American republic, is persuasive. John W. Francis, a physician and historian born in 1789—and no admirer of Paine’s religious philosophy—declared flatly that “no work had a demand for readers comparable to that of Paine. The ‘Age of Reason,’ on its first appearance in New York, was printed as an orthodox book by orthodox publishers—doubtless deceived by the vast renown which the author of ‘Common Sense’ had obtained, and by the prospects of sale.”²⁵ A chronicler of the early American Methodist Church regretted that “the minds of many people were corrupted by the deistical writings of Thomas Paine.” Paine’s arguments against the truth of the Bible, the Methodist historian wrote, “were received with greater avidity by Americans on account of the eminent services he had rendered to his country during the war of the revolution. But Thomas Paine as a politician and Thomas Paine as a theologian were very different men. His book, however, against the Bible, . . . together with others of a kindred character, were widely circulated, and they were exerting a most deleterious influence on the minds of many citizens, and threatened to poison the fountains of knowledge with their pestiferous contents.”²⁶

But Paine the theologian and Paine the politician were not different men—even though many historians, wishing to credit the author of “Common Sense” but not the author of The Age of Reason, have tried to make the case that they were. The antimonarchical and antiecclesiastical Paines were united in the belief that there could be no legitimacy in forms of government or forms of religion that defied reason and nature. Hence, in “Common Sense,” Paine argues that “one of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion.”²⁷ And in The Age of Reason, Paine envisions a god who reveals himself not through miracles and mysteries but in a manner consistent with the laws of nature. The word mystery, he argues, “cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. The God in whom we believe is a God of moral truth, and not a God of mystery or obscurity. Mystery . . . is a fog of human invention, that . . . represents itself in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist.”²⁸

To this day, the received opinion about Paine—except among scholars specializing in the history of American radicalism—is that he was an important revolutionary propagandist but an unimportant thinker. The Atlantic Monthly, from its lofty perch in mid-nineteenth-century Boston, described The Age of Reason as a “shallow deistical essay,” while nevertheless calling for a restoration of Paine to the canon of revolutionary heroes.²⁹ However, the idea that spiritual truth can be sought and found only in accordance with reason is not “shallow” but merely controversial—no less so today than yesterday.

The story of Paine’s last years in America is a painful one. Most of Paine’s old friends, embarrassed by his anti-Christian writings, deserted him—Jefferson once again being a notable exception. After his ship landed in Baltimore, Paine stopped in Washington to pay his respects to the president, who had endured the no-holds-barred invective characteristic of eighteenth-century political commentary after it became known that he had played a role in Paine’s return to America. In 1859, the Atlantic looked back on Jefferson’s invitation as an act of political courage. “He [Jefferson] knew that he strengthened the hands of his enemies by inviting home the Arch-Infidel,” the article acknowledged. “We are and were then a religious people. . . . Mr. Jefferson . . . was well aware that the old man was broken, that the fire had gone out of him, and that his presence in the United States could be of no use whatsoever to the party. But he thought that Paine’s services to the revolution had earned him asylum, and their old acquaintance made him hasten to offer it. We think that the invitation to Paine was one of the manliest acts of Jefferson’s life.”³⁰

In 1802, though, the American press reaction was scathing, and the commentary revived the campaign invective portraying Jefferson himself as an enemy of religion. One Federalist journal, the Philadelphia Port Folio, epitomized the tone of the attacks:

If, during the present season of national abasement, infatuation, folly, and vice, any portent could surprise, sober men would be utterly confounded by an article current in all our newspapers, that the loathesome Thomas Paine, a drunken atheist and the scavenger of faction, is invited to return in a national ship to America by the first magistrate of a free people. A measure so enormously preposterous we cannot yet believe has been adopted, and it would demand firmer nerves than those possessed by Mr. Jefferson to hazard such an insult to the moral sense of the nation. If that rebel rascal should come to preach from his Bible to our populace, it would be time for every honest and insulted man of dignity to flee to some Zoar as from another Sodom, to shake off the very dust of his feet and to abandon America.³¹

After Paine’s short stay in Washington, he headed north. In Trenton, New Jersey, the stagecoach driver, moved to indignation by press commentary on The Age of Reason, refused Paine a seat for the trip to New York City. In New York, an admirer was suspended from church membership for shaking hands with Paine. As Paine sat in his house in New Rochelle on Christmas Eve, a bullet fired by an unknown assailant narrowly missed his head. The temper of the times with regard to religious unorthodoxy is captured in an exchange of letters in early 1803 between Paine and an old friend from the 1770s, the revolutionary firebrand Samuel Adams. Writing more in sorrow than in anger, Adams reminds Paine that he has always viewed him, as a result of his writings on behalf of independence, as “a warm friend to the liberty and lasting welfare of the human race.” But he goes on to condemn Paine’s defense of “infidelity” with locutions—such as having “heard” of the book—suggesting that he has not actually read The Age of Reason. Even so, he chides Paine for publishing views “so repugnant to the true interest of so great a part” of the citizenry:

Do you think that your pen or the pen of any other man can unchristianize the mass of our citizens, or have you hopes of converting a few of them to assist you in so bad a cause? We ought to think ourselves happy in the enjoyment of opinion without the danger of persecution by civil or ecclesiastical law.

Our friend, the President of the United States, has been calumniated for his liberal sentiments, by men who have attributed that liberality to a latent design to promote the cause of infidelity. This and all other slanders have been made without a shadow of proof. Neither religion nor liberty can long subsist in the tumult of altercation, and amidst the noise and violence of faction.³²

Paine’s reply was also written in sorrow, in temperate tones that show an author bearing no resemblance to the coarse ruffian depicted by the Federalist press. He informs Adams that his belief in God is spelled out in the preface to The Age of Reason:

When then (my much esteemed friend, for I do not respect you the less because we differ, and that perhaps not too much in religious sentiments), what, I ask, is this thing called infidelity? If we go back to your ancestors and mine three or four hundred years ago, for we must have had fathers and grandfathers or we should not be here, we shall find them praying to Saints and Virgins, and believing in purgatory and Transsubstatiation; and therefore all of us are infidels according to our forefathers’ belief. . . .

The case, my friend is that the world has been over-run with fable and creeds of human invention, with sectaries of whole nations against all other nations, and sectaries of those sectaries in each of them against the other. Every sectary, except the Quakers, had been a persecutor. Those who fled from persecution persecuted in their turn, and it is this that has filled the world with persecution and deluged it with blood.

A particularly important passage in this letter, in view of the constant efforts of Federalists to tar Paine with the violence of the French Revolution, is his reminder to Adams that he wrote The Age of Reason when he had good reason to believe that he, too, would lose his life in the Jacobin terror—and when he was daily appalled by the inhumanity of the revolutionary terrorism that surrounded him. “My friends were falling as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off,” he recalls, “and as I every day expected the same fate, I resolved to begin my work. I appeared to myself to be on my death-bed, for death was on every side of me, and I had no time to lose.” Paine tells Adams that he wrote The Age of Reason in great haste because he hoped that the book would be speedily translated into French and serve as an argument against violence. Finally, Paine reiterates his belief in the God of nature—a God who is served by helping others in this life rather than by obeisance to churches that promise eternal life. Humans “can add nothing to eternity,” Paine asserts, but it is within the power of men to render a service to their God “not by praying, but by endeavoring to make his creatures happy.”³³

There is no doubt that the constant Federalist attacks on Paine, and his abandonment by many old friends, took a considerable emotional toll in his final years. Many of his writings in the press during this period were saturated with a bitterness and personal venom that he had once reserved for George III. In particular, he never got over the failure of the American government to make vigorous early attempts to gain his release from prison in France, and he blamed not only Gouverneur Morris but also George Washington. The younger Paine, the practical and visionary man of the Enlightenment, reemerged in occasional essays on such topics as the causes of yellow fever, the benefits of constructing more bridges, and the importance of harbor fortifications. Although his financial situation had deteriorated, Paine remained a man of personal charity. When Elihu Palmer died in 1806, leaving no property or money, his widow—he had remarried after his first wife’s death—would have been destitute without Paine’s support.

Paine died on June 8, 1809, at age seventy-two. Like so many other famous freethinkers, he would be pursued beyond the grave by false reports that he had asked for a minister and recanted his antireligious views on his deathbed. In fact, he died in his sleep. He had expressed a wish to be buried in a Quaker cemetery—the Quakers being the one religious sect of which he had always approved—but the local elders decided that they did not wish to be associated with such a notorious character. One of the few charitable reactions from the clergy was voiced by the Unitarian pastor William Bentley, who praised Paine for his devotion to rationalism. “He was indeed a wonderful man,” Bentley said, “& he was the first to see in what part every System was most vulnerable. Even in his attacks on Christianity he felt without knowing it, the greatest difficulties which rational Christians have felt. Without their prejudices he found what was simple, powerful, & direct, & what might be renounced without injury to morality, to the reverence of God & the peace of the mind.”³⁴

Paine was buried on his farm in New Rochelle, his interment witnessed by less than a dozen friends. Among them were Marguerite de Bonneville and her two sons, Thomas and Benjamin, all refugees from Napoleonic France. Years later, Madame de Bonneville described the unceremonious burial as “a scene to wound any sensible heart.” Looking around at the small group of spectators—who included none of Paine’s old friends from the revolutionary years—she said, as the clods of earth were shoveled onto the coffin, “Oh! Mr. Paine! My son stands here as testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!”³⁵

In a final indignity, Paine’s bones were spirited away in 1819 by William Cobbett—the same Cobbett who had published the slanderous biography in 1797 but who changed his mind after actually reading Paine’s books. Cobbett, who had returned to England many years earlier, intended to bury Paine in his native land but, for no apparent reason, kept the bones in a box in his house. His heirs failed to keep track of the remains, so they are lost to posterity—something that probably would not have struck the author of The Age of Reason as a catastrophe.

In the 1820s and 1830s, Paine’s memory was kept alive only by small, marginalized groups of freethinkers. In the early nineteenth century, Americans who cherished similar political, social, and religious views affirmed their common values by celebrating the birthdays of their heroes. Jacksonian Democrats observed Jefferson’s birthday, freethinkers honored both Paine and Jefferson, and everyone celebrated Washington’s birthday. That Washington’s birthday became a national holiday while Jefferson’s did not might well be related to the divisiveness engendered by Jefferson’s image as a religious heretic. The British-born freethinker Benjamin Offen organized the first Paine birthday celebration in 1825 in New York City, and the practice of annual commemorations—including dancing, singing, eating, and drinking as well as serious speeches—soon spread to other eastern and midwestern communities with nests of freethinkers. When Offen had arrived in New York from England—where Paine’s writings were, ironically, much better known in the 1820s than they were in America—he was surprised at the general denigration of Paine and attributed it to “sheer religious bigotry, together with thousands of falsehoods uttered from the pulpits respecting his moral character.”³⁶

It was not until the eve of the Civil War that the irreproachable Atlantic Monthly would decry the lack of historical respect accorded Paine’s contributions to the cause of independence. Another forty-three years would pass before a biographer, the minister turned freethinker Moncure Daniel Conway, gave both the revolutionary and the religious skeptic his due. Conway’s magisterial two-volume The Life of Thomas Paine was published in 1892, at the height of the golden age of freethought. “There is a legend that Paine’s little finger was left in America,” Conway recounts, “a fable, perhaps, of his once small movement, now stronger than the loins of the bigotry that refused him a vote or a grave in the land he so greatly served. As to his bones, no man knows the place of their rest to this day. His principles rest not.”³⁷