In Paine’s simple formulation, breeding was either conditioned by nature or it was corrupted through superstition. The first possibility allowed a people’s fullest potential to be unleashed, while the latter only reduced their ability to grow and improve themselves. Again, he was not alone in equating monarchy with bad breeding. Paine echoed another of Franklin’s friends, the Unitarian cleric and scientist Joseph Priestley, who argued in 1774 that British subjects were comparable to the “livestock on a farm,” being passively transferred from “one worn out royal line to another.” Even more telling, a newspaper article published in both London and Philadelphia in 1774 pointed out that the worship of kings was “absurd and unnatural” and defied “common sense.” This unnamed writer sarcastically contended that “simpering Lords” in England would worship a goose if it had been endowed with all the royal trappings. The line that would have caught Paine’s eye was this: that kings were “made to propagate, to supply the state with an hereditary succession of the breed.”46
But there was nothing sacred about a royal breed. Blind allegiance to what enlightened critics had reduced to a barnyard custom exposed how an intelligent, civilized people might lose their grip on reality. The natural order was greatly out of alignment: British kings were exalted above everyone else for no logical reason. Americans had a unique opportunity to break free from the relics of the past and to set a true course for a better future, one unburdened by the deadweight of kings and queens.
It was this antiauthoritarian idea that made Paine’s pamphlet most radical. If kings could be seen as “ignorant and unfit,” then why not royal governors, Quaker proprietors, or the “Better Sort” riding in their carriages? If monarchy was not what it was supposed to represent, other customary forms of power could be questioned too. Class appearances might be similarly seen as mere smoke and mirrors. This is why Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees. He wanted them to break with the Crown, not to disturb the class order.
For like reasons, he turned a blind eye to slavery. Paine’s America was above all else an “asylum” for future-directed Europeans. No one else need apply. He argued against the inherited notion that America was a dumping ground for lesser humans. It was only a sanctuary for able, hardworking men and women. This overly sanguine portrait cleaned up class and ignored what was unpleasant to look at. Indentured servitude and convict labor were still very much in evidence as the Revolution neared, and slavery was a fact of life. Philadelphia had a slave auction outside the London Coffee House, at the center of town on Front and Market Streets, which was directly across from Paine’s lodgings. In Common Sense, the propagandist mentioned “Negroes” and “Indians” solely to discredit them for being mindless pawns of the British, when they were incited to harass and kill white Americans and to undermine the worthy cause of independence. The English military had “stirred up Indians and Negroes to destroy us.” Us against them. Civilized America was being pitted against the barbarous hordes set upon them by the “hellish” power of London.47
Paine’s purpose was to remind his readers of America’s greatness, drawing on the visual comparison of the continent in its size and separation from the tiny island that ruled it. “In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet,” he declared, magnifying Newtonian optics. The existing scheme did nothing but “reverse the common order of nature.” England belonged to Europe, he contended, and America belonged to none but herself. Canadians would demand their freedom too, because according to Paine’s taxonomic portrait they were more American than English. They were as much the offspring of the North American continent as their forward-looking southern siblings, endowed with the same traits and ambitions.48
As he conjured an embryonic people, Paine gave consideration to one more element that impinges on our study of class. He was thoroughly convinced that independence would eliminate idleness. Like Franklin, he projected a new continental order in which poverty was diminished. “Our present numbers are so happily proportioned to our wants,” he wrote, “that no man need be idle.” There were enough men to raise an army and engage in trade: enough, in other words, for self-sufficiency. The land would only continue to be wasted if “lavished by a king on his worthless dependents.” (Here, Paine did take a swipe at the old Pennsylvania proprietors.) With room to grow, the infant nation would reach new heights by displaying a manly, youthful spirit of commerce that Londoners once possessed but had since lost. The Revolution would end petty quarrels between colonies that had been nurtured in a culture of imperial dependence. Only through independence could America achieve its natural potential for commercial growth.49
For a long time, Great Britain “engrossed us,” Paine explained, proud to be part of his adopted home, his American asylum. The government in London and the Crown were controlling land and resources of the North American continent for selfish purposes. But now the United Colonies were awake to a new reality: the British monopoly had run its course. Anything less than complete independence would be “like wasting an estate on a suit at law, to regulate the trespasses of a tenant, whose lease is just expiring.” Wasting an estate. Britain’s lease was up.50
In advocating for an American breed bent on productivity and expansion, Paine’s richly evocative language of waste, idleness, breeding, and engrossing of land fed excitable minds. Knowing his impressionable audience, he compared the coming Revolution to Noah and the great flood: it would give birth to a “race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe,” their “portion of freedom” to be passed on to future generations. Population would grow and flourish as long as Americans filled the continent and harvested its resources for export. Paine’s economic heroes were overseas merchants, commercial farmers, shipbuilders, inventors, and property-owning and property-protecting Americans—but decidedly not the landless poor.51
“Britain and America are now distinct empires,” declared Paine in 1776. Six years later, as the war was coming to an end, he would still be defending the distinct American breed. “We see with other eyes,” he wrote, “we hear with other ears, and think with other thoughts than those formerly used.”52
To his credit, Paine held nothing back in poking holes in the dogma of hereditary monarchy. But with his broad swipes at royalty, he obscured other forms of injustice. He too loosely clothed the language of class in the garb of continental races and commercial impulses. Indians and slaves are marginalized in his grand vision of a new world order. Neither did he allow the ignoble waste people to make any appearance in Common Sense; the vast numbers of convict laborers, servants, apprentices, working poor, and families living in miserable wilderness cabins are all absent from his prose.
For Paine, the crucial issue for Americans in 1776 was not whether but how soon a new and independent regime would advance toward its destiny as first among nations. He assumed that the mighty forces of commerce and continental expansion would eliminate idleness and correct imbalances. There was nothing wrong with cultivating Anglo-American commercial instincts and sustaining peaceful transnational trade alliances with Great Britain. But in other areas, Paine hoped that the British way of seeing and hearing would disappear from America. He presumed, incorrectly as it turns out, that class would take care of itself.
CHAPTER FOUR
Thomas Jefferson’s Rubbish
A Curious Topography of Class
By this means twenty of the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually, and be instructed, at the public expence, so far as the grammar schools go. . . .
The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)