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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Collected Works" of Thomas Paine, readers are presented with a comprehensive anthology that encapsulates the fervor of Enlightenment thought and the revolutionary spirit of the 18th century. This compilation includes Paine's most influential writings, such as "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis," characterized by his compelling clarity, persuasive rhetoric, and egalitarian ideals. Paine's literary style is both accessible and provocative, employing straightforward language to engage a broad audience while confronting the complex moral dilemmas of governance, liberty, and human rights. The works collectively underscore the battle for individual freedom against oppressive regimes, serving as a critical lens into the political landscape of his era. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was a pivotal figure in the American Revolution, whose experiences as an immigrant fueled his passion for social justice and political reform. Raised in England, Paine's tumultuous early life and encounters with political oppression shaped his radical views on monarchy and organized religion. His commitment to reason and personal liberty impelled him to advocate for democracy and human rights, making him an emblematic voice of his time and a revered thinker whose ideas resonate today. "The Collected Works" is an essential read for anyone interested in the foundations of modern democracy, political philosophy, and social justice. Paine's eloquence and radical ideas challenge readers to reflect on their own beliefs about freedom, governance, and the nature of society. As we navigate contemporary political discourse, Paine's writings provide a vital reminder of the enduring struggle for rights and liberties. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
The Collected Works
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles the breadth of Thomas Paine’s published work—major pamphlets, sustained treatises, urgent crisis papers, public addresses, open letters, memorials, proposals, and private correspondence—together with an authoritative biographical study. Its purpose is to present the full arc of Paine’s thought as it unfolds across different political theaters and controversies, enabling readers to see how foundational arguments are tested, refined, and redeployed from one arena to the next. By gathering both celebrated and lesser-known writings, the volume provides a coherent view of a working author in the public sphere, showing how ideas move from first principles to practical measures amid revolutionary change.
The texts gathered here span multiple genres central to eighteenth-century public discourse. They include pamphlets designed for wide circulation, periodical essays composed in moments of crisis, long-form political and religious treatises, proclamations and addresses directed to civic bodies, memorials and proposals aimed at policy, and an extensive suite of letters—some private, many written for publication. Together they map a career in which the boundary between journalism, advocacy, and philosophy is deliberately porous. Complementing the primary writings is The Life of Thomas Paine by Moncure D. Conway, a biographical work that offers historical framing and reception context alongside Paine’s own voice.
The historical settings of these writings are the transatlantic upheavals of the late eighteenth century, especially the American and French revolutions and the public debates that followed in Britain and Europe. Pamphlets and crisis essays respond to immediate political developments, while treatises elaborate general principles for constitutional design, civil rights, and civic responsibility. Letters and addresses engage officials, assemblies, and the public in real time, reflecting an author who chose print as his principal forum of action. Read together, the documents reveal both the contingency of their occasions and the consistent intellectual commitments that guide Paine’s interventions across changing contexts.
Several unifying themes link the collection. Foremost are arguments for natural rights, popular sovereignty, and representative government; a critique of hereditary privilege and arbitrary power; a defense of freedom of conscience and expression; and a pragmatic concern for material welfare and legal equality. Paine’s method is to derive political claims from first principles and then apply them to concrete cases, often proposing institutional or fiscal remedies. Stylistically, his prose is direct, analytic, and urgent, designed to reach a broad public. The works remain significant because they connect universal claims to practical reforms, inviting readers to test principles against lived political conditions.
The volume’s best-known landmarks illustrate the range of Paine’s project. Common Sense makes the case for independence and republican government in accessible terms. The American Crisis sustains morale and political resolve during wartime through a sequence of timely essays. The Rights of Man defends revolutionary change and argues against hereditary monarchy while outlining representative principles. The Age of Reason advances a deist critique of revealed religion and upholds liberty of conscience. Each text addresses a distinct sphere—constitutional politics, public resolve, rights theory, and religious inquiry—yet all share a commitment to reasoned argument, civic agency, and the moral legitimacy of reform.
A significant portion of the collection engages French politics and law, showing Paine’s concern with justice even amid revolution. Writings such as On the Propriety of Bringing Louis XVI to Trial, Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet, and Shall Louis XVI Have Respite? examine legal process, punishment, and the responsibilities of a representative assembly. Address to the People of France and Appeal to the Convention place principle before faction, urging deliberation and public justification. A Declaration of Rights distills core propositions about liberty and representation. These pieces illustrate a consistent insistence on due process, humane policy, and public accountability.
Across multiple controversies, Paine turns the open letter into a civic instrument. Texts addressed to the Attorney General, to Mr. Secretary Dundas, to the Sheriff of the County of Sussex, and to various addressers answer official measures and public proclamations with arguments grounded in law and rights. Letters to Onslow Cranley, private letters to Jefferson, and a letter to George Washington reveal how personal correspondence and public discourse intersect in his practice. By publishing reasoned rebuttals and defenses, he models how citizens might contest policy, explain principle, and demand justification from power without relinquishing clarity, civility, or resolve.
Institutional design and economic policy are recurring concerns. Dissertation on First Principles of Government outlines representative structures and the basis of political legitimacy. The Constitution of 1795 reflects ongoing engagement with constitutional arrangements. The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance critiques fiscal practices and their social effects. Agrarian Justice addresses property, inheritance, and material security, proposing remedies consistent with natural rights. Proposals and addresses related to Louisiana and to audiences in the United States and France consider territorial policy, civic integration, and republican interest. Together these writings pair normative commitments with concrete plans for administration and reform.
Paine’s rhetorical hallmark is lucidity in the service of principle. He writes to be understood, avoiding technical jargon while preserving conceptual rigor. Arguments typically proceed from definitions to consequences, anticipating objections and concluding with clear implications for action. He addresses readers as citizens capable of judgment, not as clients of authority, and crafts sentences to carry complex ideas without ornament that obscures meaning. This stylistic discipline widens participation in political reasoning, enabling pamphlets and letters to travel quickly through print networks. The resulting clarity helps explain both the immediate impact of his writings and their long afterlife in public discourse.
Religious thought is treated with the same commitment to inquiry that informs Paine’s politics. The Age of Reason advances a deist perspective, distinguishing between the authority of reason and the claims of revealed texts, and it condemns persecution for belief. This position complements his political emphasis on rights and conscience: civil government, in his view, should protect freedom of thought rather than enforce doctrine. Throughout the collection, he maintains that public morality is strengthened, not weakened, by open examination. In linking religious liberty to broader civic freedom, he provides a framework that continues to inform debates over belief and the state.
Because the works were written for immediate audiences, historical framing enriches their reading. The inclusion of The Life of Thomas Paine by Moncure D. Conway offers a sustained biographical account that situates the publications within the controversies, alliances, and trials of their time. Placed alongside Paine’s own arguments, this perspective clarifies reception, influence, and the personal costs of public authorship. It also helps readers track the evolution of themes across different venues and genres. Taken together, biography and primary texts furnish both the intellectual architecture and the lived context of a writer who made print his principal instrument of citizenship.
The significance of this collection lies in the continuous thread it reveals: a prose committed to first principles and to the public’s capacity for self-government. Whether confronting hereditary rule, outlining representative institutions, arguing for material security consistent with rights, or defending free inquiry, Paine writes with an urgency that remains legible. The arrangement here encourages readers to move between cornerstone treatises and shorter interventions, seeing how the same commitments are tested under pressure and translated into policy proposals. Scholars, students, and citizens will find not only historical documents, but a working demonstration of how argument can serve liberty in practice.
Author Biography
Thomas Paine was an English-born writer and political thinker whose pamphlets helped ignite and articulate the age of revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Active from the 1770s through the early nineteenth century, he became one of the most widely read voices arguing for independence, republican government, and universal rights. His major works - Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason - combined plain style with uncompromising arguments, bringing complex ideas to a mass audience. Paine's influence reached soldiers, artisans, and statesmen alike, shaping public opinion during the American Revolution and inspiring democratic reformers in Britain, France, and beyond.
Raised in Thetford, Norfolk, Paine received modest schooling before apprenticing as a staymaker and later working as an excise officer. These experiences acquainted him with labor, regulation, and the grievances of working people. In the early 1770s he wrote The Case of the Officers of Excise, a petition for better pay and conditions, revealing his aptitude for persuasive advocacy. While in London he met Benjamin Franklin, whose encouragement and letters of introduction helped him emigrate to Philadelphia in the mid-1770s. Paine carried with him the intellectual inheritance of the Enlightenment - skepticism of arbitrary power, confidence in reason, and a belief in civic equality.
In Philadelphia Paine quickly entered the public sphere as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, where he promoted science, political reform, and colonial rights. He became a defining voice of the independence movement with Common Sense in early 1776, a bestselling pamphlet that rejected monarchy and urged a republican break from Britain. During the Revolutionary War he wrote The American Crisis, a series that rallied morale with lines beginning "These are the times that try men's souls." Paine also served in revolutionary-era governmental roles, applying his pen to diplomacy and finance. His style - direct, moral, impatient with deference - made complex political theory accessible to ordinary readers.
After the war Paine pursued mechanical projects and transatlantic politics, eventually returning to Europe in the late 1780s. Alarmed by attacks on the French Revolution, he penned Rights of Man (1791-1792), defending popular sovereignty and proposing reforms such as expanded representation and social protections. The work's popularity provoked the British government, leading to a prosecution for seditious libel; Paine left England and was elected to the French National Convention. There he supported a republican constitution and argued against the execution of Louis XVI, aligning himself with a more moderate, humanitarian strain within the revolution's turbulent politics.
The radicalizing crisis in France soon engulfed Paine. He was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror and released after the fall of Robespierre, aided by the intervention of the American minister James Monroe. Out of this period came The Age of Reason, a deist critique of revealed religion that championed reason, natural religion, and freedom of conscience. Paine also wrote on political economy, notably Agrarian Justice, which proposed a fund financed by landholders to provide payments to young adults and the elderly. These writings broadened his program from constitutional change to social welfare, linking natural rights to material security.
Paine returned to the United States in the early 1800s. Though welcomed by some leading Republicans, he encountered intense hostility from Federalist opponents and many clergy, who condemned The Age of Reason. He lived modestly in New York and nearby, continued to publish polemics and letters, and maintained friendships with sympathetic figures. He died in 1809 in New York City and was buried on his farm at New Rochelle. Years later the journalist William Cobbett exhumed Paine's remains and transported them to Britain in hopes of a memorial; their ultimate resting place is unknown.
Paine's legacy has been contested and resilient. In the nineteenth century, many in the United States admired his revolutionary writings but recoiled from his religious critiques, leading to a period of neglect. Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, scholars and readers have reappraised him as a foundational voice of modern democratic culture. Common Sense remains a touchstone for studies of political communication; Rights of Man informs debates about reform and citizenship; The Age of Reason is central to histories of freethought. Today Paine is read for his clarity, his insistence on equality and consent, and his belief that ordinary people can govern themselves.
Historical Context
Thomas Paine’s collected writings emerged from the age of Atlantic revolutions, when empires, churches, and inherited hierarchies faced unprecedented public scrutiny. Between 1760 and 1809, imperial wars, commercial expansion, and the spread of Enlightenment natural-rights philosophy unsettled old regimes in Britain, North America, and France. New publics formed around print, voluntary associations, and debate societies, while improvements in postal systems and seaborne trade linked London, Philadelphia, and Paris. Paine moved through this world as a transnational pamphleteer, translating radical arguments into accessible prose that could mobilize citizenries and unsettle governing elites. His works collectively track the institutional birth of republican government and a concomitant critique of monarchy, aristocracy, and priestcraft.
Paine’s early experiences in England, especially in Thetford (born 1737) and Lewes, Sussex, grounded his sensitivity to labor, taxation, and local governance. Apprenticed as a staymaker and later an excise officer, he encountered precarious wages and administrative arbitrariness, themes that recur in his later economic and constitutional writings. The sociability of Lewes debating clubs, the freethinking temper of dissenting and Quaker communities, and the reach of London print into provincial towns trained him in persuasive polemic. His early agitation on behalf of excisemen anticipated later appeals to equality before the law, while his Sussex ties contextualize addresses to county officials and aristocratic “addressers” defending Crown policy.
Benjamin Franklin’s encouragement facilitated Paine’s emigration to Philadelphia in 1774, where a literate, commercially vibrant city read newspapers, broadsides, and sermons as a form of politics. The imperial crisis after the Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress created a market for plainspoken arguments about sovereignty and representation. Paine’s pamphleteering style—concise, moral, and strategic—fit colonial print culture, where anonymity, cheap editions, and rapid reprinting multiplied influence. In a year that saw intensifying conflict at Lexington and Concord (April 1775) and the capture of Boston (March 1776), his call for independence and republican constitutions resonated with committees of safety, militia leaders, and ordinary readers who were shaping a break with monarchy.
During the American War of Independence (1775–1783), Paine’s writings were instruments of morale and political consolidation. When General George Washington needed words equal to the military crisis of December 1776—after defeats in New York and before the Delaware crossing—the cadence of Paine’s prose reached encamped soldiers and skeptical civilians. The shifting fortunes of the Continental Army, the state-building efforts of the Continental Congress, and diplomatic courtship of France formed the backdrop for his wartime publications. Beyond rallying readers, his texts pressed for republican virtue, fiscal prudence, and civic equality, arguing that the social foundations of a durable republic mattered as much as battlefield success.
Paine’s public service as secretary to the Committee for Foreign Affairs (1777–1779) placed him at the intersection of war finance, alliance-building, and revolutionary propaganda. The Franco-American alliance of 1778 and the diffusion of Atlantic news through merchants, diplomats, and printers generated controversies—such as the Silas Deane affair—in which he framed transparency as a republican necessity. As the Treaty of Paris (1783) recognized independence, European commentators, among them the Abbé Raynal, reassessed colonial rebellion. Paine’s interventions in that debate asserted American agency and corrected metropolitan narratives. His voice as a “citizen of America” and of the wider Atlantic public sphere linked military victory to a broader, exportable republican doctrine.
Returning to Europe in 1787, Paine stood at the crossroads of Enlightenment science and politics. His iron bridge project in Yorkshire and Paris, backed by industrialists and savants, aligned him with a cosmopolitan circle that included Condorcet and other reformers. Meanwhile, Britain’s coffeehouses, clubs, and reading societies incubated critiques of parliamentary corruption, rotten boroughs, and aristocratic monopolies. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) set the terms of a transnational argument about rights, tradition, and sovereignty. Paine answered by consolidating a popular case for hereditary monarchy’s obsolescence and for written constitutions grounded in natural rights—an argument that would radiate across Britain and the Continent.
British authorities, under Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, escalated repression as reformist associations multiplied. The Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Writings (21 May 1792) mobilized loyalist addresses and prosecutions, drawing in officials such as Home Secretary Henry Dundas and Attorney General Sir Archibald Macdonald. Trials at the Court of King’s Bench, surveillance of printers like J. S. Jordan, and pressure on provincial distributors created a legal theatre for contesting free expression. Paine’s replies to ministers, addressers, and county officers invoked constitutional first principles and public reason against prerogative and fear. His conviction in absentia in December 1792 formalized a political exile already mapped by his ideas.
In France, Paine found a revolution institutionalizing its principles. On 26 August 1792 the Legislative Assembly granted him honorary French citizenship alongside figures such as George Washington and Anacharsis Cloots. Elected to the National Convention for Pas-de-Calais, he advocated for a republican order legitimated by a declaration of rights and a representative constitution. His involvement with reformers, including Emmanuel-Joseph Sièyès, and his connection to ventures like Le Républicain indicated a desire to fuse public pedagogy with institutional design. Addresses to the French people and proclamations of republicanism situate his writings within the moment that abolished the monarchy (21 September 1792) and sought to recast sovereignty as popular.
The trial of Louis XVI (December 1792–January 1793) required Convention deputies to legislate justice under revolutionary pressure and war. Paine’s positions—arguing the propriety of trial yet urging clemency or exile for “Louis Capet”—reflected a consistent rejection of judicial killing as policy. This stance, articulated in appeals to the Convention and exchanges with leading figures such as Georges Danton, placed him among deputies seeking to reconcile law with revolutionary necessity. The votes of January 1793, which divided on guilt, appeal to the people, and sentence, became a crucible for Paine’s broader theory: that republics best vindicate themselves through procedures, rights, and the measured punishment of dethroned rulers.
The Year II brought war on multiple fronts, the Law of Suspects (September 1793), and Paine’s imprisonment in Luxembourg. Disease, scarcity, and faction narrowed political horizons while he drafted deist reflections that would become the first part of The Age of Reason (1794). James Monroe’s arrival as American minister (August 1794) facilitated Paine’s release that November, but diplomatic ruptures and unmet expectations hardened his view of George Washington’s administration. Memorials recording his confinement and letters assessing executive conduct belong to a landscape where the Atlantic alliance frayed, and where republics struggled to reconcile external war, internal purges, and the rights they had proclaimed in their founding texts.
After Thermidor (July 1794), the Constitution of Year III (1795) inaugurated the Directory, reviving discussions of representation, suffrage, and checks on power. Paine’s contributions on first principles and governance joined debates over property qualifications, bicameralism, and executive design. Simultaneously, Britain financed continental coalitions against France, prompting his analyses of debt, taxation, and paper credit in critiques of William Pitt’s system. The looming Bank Restriction crisis of 1797, when specie payments were suspended, gave his warnings a prescient edge. His writings from these years thus merge constitutional theory with political economy, treating fiscal arrangements as instruments of oligarchy or emancipation depending on how burdens and benefits were distributed.
Paine’s social thought culminated in proposals for a national fund financed by charges on landed inheritances, providing universal endowments at majority and pensions in old age. Articulated in the later 1790s, these claims drew on earlier reflections about enclosure, poor relief, and the natural rights to subsistence and opportunity. Across Europe, demographic growth, rural displacement, and wartime taxation sharpened the question of economic citizenship. Paine’s argument reframed property as an institution subject to social obligations, not a barrier to inclusion. Throughout his oeuvre, fiscal transparency, public credit, and social insurance appear as mutually reinforcing elements of a republican settlement aimed at dignity as well as liberty.
The entanglement of American and European politics shaped Paine’s late-1790s correspondence. The Jay Treaty (1794–1795), partisan conflict between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, and the diplomatic conduct of ministers such as James Monroe became tests of revolutionary solidarity. Washington’s decision to recall Monroe in 1796 intensified Paine’s defense of the envoy and sharpened his criticisms of executive secrecy. Private letters to Thomas Jefferson explored policy and principle from natural rights to finance. Meanwhile, British treason trials (1794), and, in the United States, the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), signaled a broader crisis of speech and dissent. Paine’s interventions examine how republics navigate opposition without betraying founding ideals.
Religious controversy threaded Paine’s career, but it became central with The Age of Reason (Part I, 1794; Part II, 1795). His deism affirmed a Creator discoverable by reason while rejecting revelation’s authority to legislate civil society. In Britain, prosecutions of radical publishers and booksellers—such as Thomas Williams in 1797 for printing Paine’s text—exposed the interface of theology, law, and press freedom. In the United States, clergy and Federalist editors attacked deism as corrosive to order, while defenders linked free inquiry to republican virtue. Paine’s religious writings thus contextualize his political ones, asserting that liberty requires emancipation from priestly monopolies over truth and conscience.
Invited by President Jefferson, Paine returned to the United States in 1802 as the republic negotiated its continental future. The prospect and execution of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) raised questions of constitutional power, diplomacy with France and Spain, and the incorporation of diverse populations into a federal union. Paine engaged these issues by urging acquisition, outlining administrative principles for new territories, and addressing French-speaking inhabitants on rights and civic participation. His letters to American audiences reviewed the young nation’s memory of 1776, warning against factional forgetfulness while endorsing expansion consistent with republican equality. Foreign policy, finance, and citizenship once again converged in his public reasoning.
Paine’s style and reach were products of an eighteenth-century media ecology of pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, salons, and clubs. Translation between English and French, piracy and cheap reprints, and the cadence of public meetings amplified his arguments. At the same time, legislation such as Britain’s Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings Acts (1795) and press prosecutions limited debate even as they validated the stakes of free expression. His addresses to ministers, jurists, and citizens exhibit a pedagogy of rights designed for mass readerships. By uniting lucid rhetoric with institutional proposals, he fashioned a civic discourse that traveled more quickly than armies and proved more durable than ministries.
The later reception of Paine’s works—punctuated by William Cobbett’s exhumation of his remains in 1819 and the subsequent loss of the bones—testifies to the contested memory of revolution. Nineteenth-century reformers reprinted Rights of Man in campaigns culminating in measures like the Reform Act of 1832, while freethinkers kept The Age of Reason in circulation. Moncure D. Conway’s The Life of Thomas Paine (1892) sought to reconstruct the transatlantic career that linked Lewes, Philadelphia, and Paris, editing and contextualizing texts for modern readers. The collected works thus map not only a life but an international movement in which constitutions, finance, and faith were reimagined for democratic citizenship.
Synopsis (Selection)
Common Sense
A pamphlet urging the American colonies to declare independence, denouncing monarchy and hereditary rule. It lays out a case for a republican government grounded in natural rights and popular consent.
The American Crisis
A series of wartime essays written to sustain morale during the Revolution and justify resistance to British rule. Paine stresses perseverance, civic virtue, and the necessity of defending liberty.
The Rights of Man
A defense of the French Revolution and rebuttal to Edmund Burke that asserts popular sovereignty and rejects hereditary power. Paine advocates representative democracy and social reforms to secure natural rights.
The Age Of Reason
A deist critique of organized religion and revealed theology that upholds reason and natural religion. Paine questions scriptural authority and champions freedom of conscience.
A Letter Addressed To The Abbe Raynal
A rebuttal to Abbé Raynal’s account of the American Revolution, correcting factual errors and interpretations. Paine presents causes and events from an insider’s perspective to clarify the Revolution’s principles.
Declaration of Rights
Paine’s proposed declaration for France enumerating natural and civil rights as the basis of legitimate government. It affirms popular sovereignty and limits on governmental power.
Dissertation On First Principles Of Government
An exposition of republican representation and suffrage that argues for broad electoral rights and accountability. Paine critiques property qualifications and endorses frequent elections and rotation in office.
The Constitution Of 1795
An analysis of the French Constitution of Year III cautioning that its checks and restrictions could weaken popular sovereignty. Paine urges a more democratic framework to secure rights and stability.
The Decline And Fall Of The English System Of Finance
A critique of Britain’s debt-funded war finance, forecasting fiscal strain and political consequences. Paine dissects funding mechanisms and the burdens placed on the public.
Agrarian Justice
A proposal for a land-inheritance funded endowment and old-age pension based on the idea that the earth is common property. Paine outlines practical means to alleviate poverty while respecting legitimate property.
The Eighteenth Fructidor
A commentary on the 1797 French coup that purged royalist influence and protected the republic. Paine justifies emergency measures as necessary to prevent restoration of monarchy.
Letter To George Washington
An open letter criticizing Washington’s administration, especially regarding Paine’s detention in France. It challenges the conduct of foreign policy and questions personal and official decisions.
British Prosecution and Proclamation Letters (1792–1793)
Replies to British officials and loyalist 'Addressers' during the crackdown on reformers after Rights of Man (including letters to the Attorney General, Secretary Dundas, Onslow Cranley, the Sheriff of Sussex, and on the Proclamation). Paine defends free expression, challenges the royal Proclamation against Seditious Writings, and answers seditious-libel actions.
French Revolutionary Correspondence and Addresses
Short letters and addresses to French leaders, editors, and the public (including The Republican Proclamation; To the Authors of 'Le Républicain.'; To the Abbé Sièyes; Address to the People of France; Anti-monarchal Essay; Letter to Danton; Appeal to the Convention; A Citizen of America to the citizens of Europe). Paine advocates republicanism, constitutional clarity, moderation, and international solidarity against monarchy.
Pamphlets on the Trial of Louis XVI
Three interventions on the legal fate of the former king (On the Propriety of Bringing Louis XVI. to Trial; Reasons for Preserving the Life of Louis Capet; Shall Louis XVI. Have Respite?). Paine supports legal accountability while urging clemency to legitimize the new republic.
Diplomatic and Personal Correspondence with Jefferson and Monroe
Personal and public letters concerning Paine’s imprisonment, American diplomacy in France, and administrative decisions (including Private Letters to Jefferson, Private Letter to President Jefferson, The Memorial to Monroe, and The Recall of Monroe). They combine appeals for assistance with reflections on republican alliances and policy.
Louisiana and American Expansion Writings
Pieces advocating the Louisiana Purchase and addressing its implications (Proposal That Louisiana Be Purchased; To the French Inhabitants of Louisiana; Thomas Paine to the citizens of the United States). Paine stresses securing western commerce, peaceful expansion, and incorporation into republican institutions.
Short Political Essays
Brief reflections on events and principles (Observations; Forgetfulness). Paine urges consistency in public memory and clarity in policy and practice.
The Life Of Thomas Paine by Moncure D. Conway
A comprehensive biography tracing Paine’s life, travels, and writings, situating his political and religious ideas in historical context. Conway draws on letters and records to portray Paine’s influence and controversies.
