Introduction
Whether the American “people” is defined by consent to shared principles, cultural affinities, race, a sense of religious exceptionalism, or something else has been one of the most enduring questions of American political development, as Michael Walzer,Footnote 1 Judith Shklar,Footnote 2 and Rogers Smith,Footnote 3 among others, have suggested. The arc of this story is often drawn in terms of an earlier, ascriptive notion of American citizenship rooted in an Anglo-Protestant heritage which is gradually superseded—first de jure and only belatedly de facto—by a relatively more open and inclusive civic membership.Footnote 4 According to Samuel Huntington, for instance, America’s “ethno-cultural” identity was associated with the original Puritan settlement of New England. The so-called “creedal” or civic conception emerged only much later in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 5
Huntington is hardly alone in stressing America’s ethno-cultural origins and the belated development of the civic conception of America.Footnote 6 In his influential study of the “ethically constitutive stories” by which peoples define themselves, Rogers Smith has pointed to Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense—alongside Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence”—as one of America’s earliest “people-forming” stories.Footnote 7 Americans are marked off not just by a sense of economic power or bonds of fraternal trust; they are also and maybe more importantly a “chosen people,” united “by blood and descent.”Footnote 8 Rather than a harbinger of the civic notion of America as open and inclusive, Common Sense allegedly envisions America as white, European, Christian, and male, over and against Native Americans and Africans thereby excluded from political membership.Footnote 9 Smith does allow that Paine’s characterization of America could be interpreted as “expansively” European rather than “narrowly” British, and he acknowledges that Paine’s own political sympathies were liberal and cosmopolitan, but his emphasis is on how Common Sense underwrites an illiberal and exclusionary story of American peoplehood.Footnote 10
Smith’s gloss on Common Sense is meant to illustrate the more general phenomenon of people-making rather than to offer a comprehensive study of Paine’s political theory. Yet the criticism of Paine’s vision of America as an erstwhile defense of racialized exclusion accords with recent trends in Paine scholarship. Following A. Owen Aldridge’s de-attribution in 1984 of Paine’s authorship of key anti-slavery writings,Footnote 11 James V. Lynch,Footnote 12 Anthony Dean Rizzuto,Footnote 13 and J. C. D. ClarkFootnote 14 have all questioned Paine’s reputation as staunch abolitionist and proponent of social justice. Indeed, Paine’s alleged indifference toward progressive causes such as abolition, racial inclusion, and gender equality is a running theme of perhaps the single most important work of Paine scholarship of the last decade, Clark’s 2018 book Thomas Paine: Britain, America and France in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution. Footnote 15 According to Clark, Paine’s political writing was a matter of “negations” rather than novel “affirmations,” derivative of extant British political discourses, and contained little determinative of the American colonial experience.Footnote 16 For all of his doubts about Paine’s originality, however, Clark is one of the only commentators to discuss the Revolutionary-era transformation of citizenship laws from doctrines of natural subjection to contractual membership, even if Paine, who allegedly “never wrote of the law of nationality or of these controversies,” gets no credit for this legal and conceptual revolution.Footnote 17
In this article I challenge these characterizations of Paine as either inimical or irrelevant to emergent liberal conceptions of American citizenship and national identity. Unlike Clark, who denies Paine’s contribution altogether, or Smith, who regards Paine’s stories of American peoplehood as novel but largely illiberal, I contend that Paine should be understood as one of the first and most articulate defenders of the civic nation. Rejecting the claim that American colonists owe allegiance to Britain based on shared ties of blood or ancestry, Paine offers a radical vision of America as a civic nation. Britain is not America’s “parent country,” in either the literal or metaphorical sense; many colonists are immigrants from other non-British parts of Europe; and what unites them into a single people cannot be “descent,” whether British or European, but instead shared principles of opposition to tyranny and religious persecution.Footnote 18 At the dawn of the American Revolution, then, we already find something resembling the “civic” conception of America taking shape.
Paine’s other revolutionary bequests have been duly accounted for by scholars. His legendary success in rallying public opinion in favor of the cause of American independence, his refutation of hereditary monarchy, and his affirmation of republican government are all well-known.Footnote 19 Other interpreters have highlighted progressive and egalitarian aspects of Paine’s political philosophy such as his development of a novel epistemic doctrine of “common sense” with democratic potentialities,Footnote 20 his articulation of a modern universalistic theory of human rights,Footnote 21 his “homiletic” expression of a messianic religious vision of freedom and equality,Footnote 22 his reformulation of doctrines of republicanism and British radicalism,Footnote 23 and even his anticipation of a pluralist vision of America, if only amongst his “Painite” legatees.Footnote 24 Thus far, however, no one has focused on Paine’s axial importance in transforming a British notion of natural-born subjectship into a modern volitional concept of citizenship.
This article’s primary task is to establish Paine’s decisive role in propounding the novel idea of America as a civic nation. Paine’s greatest revolution, I argue, is an enduring vision of America as a multi-ethnic nation of immigrants held together by civic ideals. Yet one of the things that makes Paine such a fascinating candidate for this study is how he comes to personify tensions inherent in the civic nation through his own life and subsequent political career. As I will show in the following analysis, regardless of when and how America came to be a civic nation, studying Paine’s political theory helps to reveal the promise and paradoxes of the civic vision of America.
My argument proceeds, first, by exploring Paine’s critique of the metaphor of nations and empires as akin to extended biological families. It is here that Paine rejects common ancestry as either a necessary or sufficient grounds for political membership. Next, I discuss his affirmative vision of American citizenship as a function of consent and shared principles which emerges once the metaphor of the imperial family has been overturned. The third and fourth sections highlight deeper tensions within the concept of the civic nation revealed by Paine’s own life and subsequent political writings. Finally, I explain how Paine purports to resolve at least some of these tensions by appealing to a civil religion.
British-Americans and family metaphors of empire?
Acclaimed for his defense of American independence, attack on hereditary monarchy, and affirmation of natural rights, Paine’s repudiation of the principle of consanguinity as the basis for citizenship has gotten little notice. Yet his running critique of empires conceived literally or metaphorically as extended families is one of the most conspicuous themes of his writings on American independence. Rejecting the view of Americans as part of the extended “family” of the British empire is necessary to transform ungrateful rebels into a sovereign and self-determining nation.Footnote 25 “While we continue to call ourselves British subjects,” he reasons, “the quarrel between us can only be called a family quarrel, in which it would be just as indelicate for any other nation to advise or any ways to meddle or make … as it would be for a third person to interfere in a quarrel between a man and his wife.”Footnote 26
Instead of condemning patriarchalism outright, Paine allows that there are “distinctions of nature” between men and women and concedes that families—unlike political communities—will be governed by husbands.Footnote 27 Rather than biblically authorized, however, monarchy represents a “national delusion,” an original sin compounded by hereditary descent and “an insult and imposition on posterity.”Footnote 28 “For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever,” Paine insists.Footnote 29
Likewise, just as kings are not the rightful fathers of nations, it is fallacious to think that a nation holds sway over its colonists by the same logic as parents exercise dominion over underage children. The first step of Paine’s critique of the British empire is to render patriarchal authority as “parental” or even “maternal.”Footnote 30 While complaining that “the phrase parent or mother country hath been jesuitically adopted by the king and his parasites” to portray the filial relationship between “sister colonies” as exclusively mediated “by the way of England,” Paine retains the family metaphor, although his own deployment turns its logic into a reproach: “Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families.”Footnote 31 Paine appeals instead to the tender and loving “mother,” whose ethic of care the British have mocked. Rather than enjoying the motherland’s “tender embraces,” and her “fond, tender, and forbearing” affections, the colonists have suffered the depredations of the “monster.”Footnote 32
Paine’s attack on the family metaphor of empire is not so much about whether parents may legitimately rule over minor dependents as whether the American colonies any longer deserve to be classed as underage children. Wilson Carey McWilliams has suggested the dual connotation of Paine’s vaunted “age of reason”: it may have less to do with the historical achievement of an era of Enlightenment than with reaching a chronological age of maturity at which point individuals and nations are emancipated from the tutelage of their elders.Footnote 33 Erring on the side of sooner rather than later, “The infant state of the Colonies, as it is called, so far from being against, is an argument in favor of independence.”Footnote 34 The real danger lies in lingering too long under British wardship. “For no nation in a state of foreign dependence, limited in its commerce and cramped and fettered in its legislative powers, can ever arrive at any material eminence,” Paine declares. Whatever modest successes the colonies have achieved so far are “but a childhood” compared to what they can accomplish on their own.Footnote 35 America is now ready to “provide for herself” rather than remaining a perpetual dependent: “She hath already a large and young family, whom it is more her duty to take care of, than to be granting away her property, to support a power who is become a reproach to the name of men and Christians.”Footnote 36
Paine’s reversal of the parental metaphor comes full circle when in later years he appeals to the United States as the “Parent of the Western world,” claiming that insofar as the science of republican government has advanced, “the NEW WORLD is now the preceptor of the OLD. The children are become the fathers of their progenitors.”Footnote 37
America as a civic nation
The upshot of Paine’s deconstruction of the family metaphor of imperial Britain is a benevolent, temporary guardianship that concludes once a people has reached an age of maturity. American colonists have transitioned from helpless wards of the cradle to full-blown adulthood. Upon closer examination, however, Paine’s challenge to the family metaphor of empire is even more radical. For whatever its normative implications, Paine denies that the model of nations as families is even applicable to America. Americans are the descendants of all of Europe, if not prospectively the whole planet.
It is not just that family ties of “consanguinity” between American colonists and their “British brethren” are no longer morally binding, as Jefferson would aver in the “Declaration of Independence.”Footnote 38 Paine goes further than Jefferson by insisting that the American colonists are not Anglo-Americans at all:
But Britain is the parent country, say some … wherefore the assertion, if true, turns to her reproach; but it happens not to be true, or only partly so … Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe.Footnote 39
Two distinct claims are offered here. The first is historical and descriptive: any notion of America as exclusively Anglo-Protestant is demographically false. Several colonies were founded or settled primarily by immigrants from other European nations such as the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Even by 1776 America is already well on its way to becoming a pluralistic nation of immigrants: “Not one third of the inhabitants, even of this province, [Pennsylvania], are of English descent.”Footnote 40 This explicit acknowledgment seems to belie Clark’s complaint that Paine is “insensitive … to the diversities of the American colonists.”Footnote 41 The second and broader claim is normative. Affirming the immigrant roots of America is also significant for moral reasons: “Wherefore, I reprobate the phrase of Parent or Mother Country applied to England only, as being false, selfish, narrow and ungenerous.”Footnote 42 Attempts to define America as strictly Anglo-American are not only empirically “false” but betray a reprehensible bigotry and parochialism. Immigrant America owes its origins to many nations, and “the title of Parent Country … if due anywhere, it is due to Europe collectively.”Footnote 43
Rogers Smith also notes Paine’s substitution of an “expansively” European for a uniquely British-American colonial ancestry.Footnote 44 According to Smith’s reading, the function of Paine’s insistence on the European roots of America is to set the colonists off from “Indians and Negroes,” in Paine’s words, giving rise to a racialized and exclusionary sense of American peoplehood.Footnote 45 Upon closer examination, however, the passages in question actually establish a solidarity of victimhood between American colonists and the native tribespeople and African slaves whom the British “hath stirred up” against them, an offense Paine flags for its “cruelty” and “double guilt” in treating colonists “brutally” and non-whites “treacherously.”Footnote 46 Rather than drawing a racial or civilizational line between Europeans and other non-white “inhabitants” of the Americas, it is the “barbarous and hellish power” of the British that Paine casts outside the penumbra of Christian civilization.Footnote 47 Even Paine’s ubiquitous usage of the term “inhabitant” to encompass all members of the “HUMAN RACE,” including “men, women, and children,” “the Indians of North America,” who find themselves occupying a particular physical territory, and eventually all “inhabitants of the globe that we call ours,” points in a more inclusive and egalitarian direction.Footnote 48
The full context of this argument in Common Sense supports my claim that Paine is trying to widen rather than narrow prevailing conceptions of national identity. As a matter of historical fact, Paine recalls, America “hath been” peopled by immigrants from all parts of Europe.Footnote 49 Yet his invocation of past European migration is only the beginning of the story. Paine concludes this section of the pamphlet by heralding the American colonies as a future refuge for all mankind. “Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression,” he laments: “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart.” Given the eclipse of freedom from all quarters of the globe, including “Asia and Africa,” Paine implores his adopted country to offer the same sanctuary to others: “O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”Footnote 50 While America has historically been the refuge of Europeans, its prospective vocation “in time” is to afford a safe harbor to all “mankind.”
When later pressed to defend his own legal status as an American citizen, Paine protests that being foreign-born is more the rule than the exception in the United States. Americans of the Revolutionary generation should all be reckoned as naturalized citizens, for regardless of their place of natural birth, whether in the colonies or other British or European territories, none were Americans until the birth of the nation on July 4, 1776.Footnote 51 “American,” then, is not a matter of national ancestry. It is a descriptor that confers an identity by virtue of coming to inhabit a new geographical place.Footnote 52 Just as strangers from the same neighborhood become kindred souls when meeting abroad, so too “all Europeans meeting in America, or any other quarter of the globe, are countrymen.” All inhabitants of America will come to embrace a “Continental,” or national understanding of political membership. While the “two-fold” political identities conferred by individual colonies are significant in maintaining domestic securities, they are rightly overshadowed by national citizenship.Footnote 53
Embracing this novel vision of Americans as adopted children of a new land, Paine reformulates the family metaphor as a blueprint for immigration. Responding in 1780 to Virginia’s disputed claim to Western territories seized from Britain, he recurs to the idea of America as a family, albeit in a way that severs American identity from any antecedent sense of biological kinship. New states carved from the Western territories should be granted admission to the confederation “on the ground of a family right, such a state standing in the line of a younger child of the same stock.”Footnote 54 Yet the “stock” Paine envisions here is necessarily metaphorical rather than ethnic or biological, as these lands will shortly be peopled by “new emigrants.”Footnote 55 Like children, recent arrivals have a lot to learn about the workings of American institutions and principles of self-government, and so they ought to be admitted to the representative body to hear, speak, and debate, but not to vote, for a period of seven years.Footnote 56 In addition to territorial residence and adopting a common mode of thinking, political membership entails the endorsement of shared political principles.
The political incorporation of Western territories remained hypothetical in the immediate wake of the Revolution, but Paine’s 1804 “Address to the French Inhabitants of Louisiana” reaffirms this commitment to the civic understanding of America. Jefferson’s acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from the French First Republic in 1803 left the legal status of former French colonists uncertain. The latter petitioned the US Congress to respect their sovereign rights to self-government, including their right to own and traffic in slaves. Responding to their petition, Paine complains that its authors “do not understand the principles and interest of a republic.”Footnote 57 Liberty may be freely accessible to anyone and everyone, but it must be earned through an initiation in self-government:
You are already participating [in], without any merit or expense in obtaining it, the blessings of freedom acquired by ourselves; and in proportion as you become initiated into the principles and practise of the representative system of government, of which you have yet had no experience, you will participate more and finally be partakers of the whole.Footnote 58
The civic status of the French in New Orleans—whether as territorial settlers, or as Paine foresees, eventual American citizens—is in no way precluded by their native language or national origins. French colonists in Louisiana “are already incorporated into it as fully and effectually as the Americans themselves are, who are settled in Louisiana.” French descendants “enjoy the same rights, privileges, advantages and immunities which they enjoy; and when Louisiana, or some part of it, shall be erected into a constitutional state, you also will be citizens equal with them.”Footnote 59 Their incorporation as free and equal citizens of the United States depends solely on their adoption of the constitutive “principles” of liberty and the “practise of the representative system of government.”
Despite the centrality of slavery to Paine’s engagement in the Louisiana question, his suggestion that the territories might be resettled by free Blacks as well as European immigrants has proven controversial.Footnote 60 Lynch,Footnote 61 Rizzuto,Footnote 62 and ClarkFootnote 63 complain not only that Paine’s public efforts on behalf of African slaves and indigenous peoples are less zealous than might be expected given anti-slavery discourses of his time. They fault his resettlement scheme as allegedly displacing the political dilemma of free Blacks to the periphery of American society.Footnote 64 What these criticisms miss, however, is how civic capacity—rather than race—is what animates the resettlement of Louisiana. German immigrants are supposed to dilute the moral and political sway of the Catholic, politically obtuse, and slave-owning French denizens,Footnote 65 and free Black resettlement is likewise meant to foster requisite virtues of republican citizenship, even if its immediate benefits for Blacks are economic independence rather than political citizenship.Footnote 66 Paine nowhere denies that free Blacks are capable of developing republican virtues, and he categorically rejects sending them to Louisiana as slaves.Footnote 67
If this is so, then why doesn’t Paine draw out the logical entailments of his vision of equality, natural rights, and citizenship for Blacks, women, or indigenous peoples? Emma McLeod speculates that Paine may have fixated on inequalities of rank and class more central to the European experience, or strategically downplayed these radical commitments (as did other Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans of the day) for fear of alienating Southern political allies.Footnote 68 Yet even if it is true, as Lynch contends, that “[t]hroughout his lifetime Paine avoided, for the most part, the issues of slavery and abolition,”Footnote 69 it does not follow that “he also joined other revolutionaries in the conviction that American citizens would only be white”Footnote 70 or that “he implicitly excluded not only free and enslaved [B]lacks, but also Indians from participation in American civil society.”Footnote 71 As Robert Lamb has responded, just because a thinker does not explicitly advocate for a position such as gender or racial equality is no reason to conclude that they oppose it, especially when other evidence—including writings such as “A Serious Thought,” whose authorship by Paine has never been disproven—confirms his antipathy to slavery, imperialism, and the brutalization of Native Americans.Footnote 72 Nothing in Paine’s writings excludes free Blacks from citizenship, as did Revolutionary-era state naturalization laws of the 1770s enacted by Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina, not to mention the major US Naturalization Laws of 1790, 1795, and 1798, all of which dictated whiteness as a condition of eligibility.Footnote 73 Paine’s expressed views (and the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution he defended) are in advance of both law and public opinion of the day.
Paine makes it abundantly clear that he regards Black chattel slavery and the African slave trade as abominable. From the footnote to the 1776 Forester Letters where he pleads to “forget not the hapless African”Footnote 74 to his 1805 letters to Jefferson and others, Paine excoriates slavers, likens the city of Liverpool to the “Sodom and Gomorrah of brutality,” and threatens to “blast” it “with fire and brimstone” for its role in the slave trade.Footnote 75 Ambivalent about revolutionary bloodshed in Santo Domingo, he nonetheless supports the righteousness of the cause and condones revolutionary violence as a “natural consequence of Slavery.”Footnote 76 There is even some evidence, as related by Gregory Claeys, that Paine pleads with Jefferson to allow the migration of Haitians to the United States, a position hard to reconcile with a racialized vision of citizenship in which Blacks could enjoy no possible civic status.Footnote 77 In sum, Paine did not elaborate on the universalistic potential of his conception of American citizenship, but he is explicit that the primary qualification for full inclusion is civic rather than ethnic or racial, as seen in the case of Louisiana.
Jack Fruchtman, Jr. maintains that Paine’s commitment to full manhood suffrage rooted in human equality is the strongest reason to think that he would support the admission not only of all national origins but of all races to the full benefits of citizenship.Footnote 78 When it comes to citizenship, Paine insists, “it is not only an essential but an indispensable provision that the practise should emanate from, and accord with, the principle.”Footnote 79 American, French, or any other iteration of citizenship cannot be a matter of formal “Principle” if these animating principles of liberty and equality are contradicted “in the Practise” by invidious distinctions or exclusions. Critiquing the 1795 draft Constitution of France, which restricts voting to tax-payers, Paine wonders “if those only who come under the above description are to be considered as citizens, what designation do you mean to give the rest of the people?” Are those who start businesses, labor, or otherwise contribute to the national welfare to be excluded from full manhood suffrage?Footnote 80
Similarly, alluding to an American Revolutionary controversy over suffrage rights, Paine clarifies that a commitment to principles of religious and civil liberty ought to supersede any invidious distinctions based on national ancestry:
A numerous body of Germans of property, zealots in the cause of freedom, were likewise excluded for non-allegiance. Notwithstanding which, the Tory non-conformists, that is those who are advertised as enemies to their country, were admitted to vote on the other side. A strange contradiction indeed!Footnote 81
Presumably neither religion, ancestry, nor social class should have any bearing on the enjoyment of equal rights as citizens. Conversely, disloyalty to civic principles would be legitimate grounds for exclusion.
Paine’s dismissal of Tories as “enemies to their country” does reveal one potentially ambivalent feature of the civic nation: namely, its paradoxical intolerance. Despite its nominally open and inclusive qualities, the flip-side of the civic ideal is that those who disagree with shared civic principles might be excluded. Civic nations, just like ethnic nations, can be intolerant. As Kunal M. Parker has documented, this was the fate of many Loyalists of the Revolutionary era whose conceptions of subjectship in terms of kingly allegiance ran up against the Revolutionary model of volitional consent.Footnote 82 Clark also underscores the climate of fanaticism, intolerance, and political violence of the colonies manifested in Paine’s Revolutionary writings.Footnote 83 Anyone who is not wholeheartedly in support of the American cause is axiomatically a traitor. Paine’s antipathy to Tories even extends to Quakers:
He that is not a supporter of the independent states of America, in the same degree that his religious and political principles would suffer him to support the government of any other country, of which he called himself a subject, is, in the American sense of the word, a TORY; and the instant that he endeavours to bring his Toryism into practice, he becomes a TRAITOR.Footnote 84
Rather than a principled act of religious conscience, the Quakers’ unwillingness to take up arms reflects a hypocritical partisanship.Footnote 85 For all the Quakers’ idealism and disdain for violence, their neutrality violates the principles of religious toleration and liberty constitutive of the American nation—and from which the Quakers themselves have disproportionately benefitted.Footnote 86 While professing to close his letter “without anger or resentment,” Paine condemns Quakers as disingenuous, hypocritical, and accuses them of breaking the “continental harmony and friendship” by which different religious and regional groups in America have been bound together.Footnote 87 When one’s membership is solely an artifact of shared principles, even neutrality is tantamount to betrayal by an enemy within.
Paine learned hard lessons about this kind of ideological intolerance first-hand, if only belatedly, as these Revolutionary-era excoriations of Quakers as Tories foreshadow his own persecution by French Jacobins in the 1790s. Especially in France where citizenship comes to be reckoned solely as a function of one’s unflinching embrace of Revolutionary principles, political moderation amounts to disloyalty. Paine’s opposition to Robespierre or even, ironically, his “Quaker” scruples about imposing a death sentence on Louis XVI, result in him being labeled an enemy of the Revolution, deemed once again a “foreigner,” imprisoned, and condemned to death as the French Revolution consumed its own children.Footnote 88
Nationality versus citizenship
Thus far I have made the case that Paine’s vision of America as a civic nation is conceptually open and imminently inclusive of all would-be citizens who embrace principles of freedom and equality. Despite its obvious appeal, however, the civic nation brings practical and philosophical difficulties of its own. Making political membership strictly a matter of shared principles not only invites intolerance whenever civic principles are disputed or contradictory, as Samuel Goldman has emphasized.Footnote 89 It also raises vexing questions about the fungibility of citizenship itself.
How, for example, does Paine navigate the tension between allegiance to a particular government, whose membership is a function of consent to shared principles, and the givenness of pre-political “nations” or “peoples”? Like the “Declaration of Independence,” Common Sense posits that an American “people” exists, even if it is murky how such a people came into being.Footnote 90 Some notion of being an “American” antedated the establishment of a formal Constitution, Paine allows, but strictly speaking, “there are no citizens before this is a government.” Americans there may have been, but they “were not called citizens till after government was established, and not even then until they had taken the oath of allegiance.”Footnote 91 Only after a government was formed—whether the Continental Congress or the Articles of Confederation—did there exist “American citizens.”
This distinction between government and peoplehood is central to Paine’s efforts to exculpate himself from charges of treason and purported American de-nationalization for his ill-fated engagement in the events of the French Revolution:
I have always considered that a foreigner, such as I was in fact, with respect to France, might be a member of a convention for framing a constitution, without affecting his right of citizenship in the country to which he belongs, but not a member of a government after a constitution is formed; and I have uniformly acted upon this distinction. To be a member of a government requires that a person be in allegiance to that government and to the country locally. But a constitution, being a thing of principle, and not of action … does not require allegiance in the persons forming and proposing it.Footnote 92
Nothing about Paine’s “nominal” involvement as a “French Citoyen” in the process of constitution-making is akin to swearing a formal “oath of allegiance or of citizenship” and thereby “vacating any part of my real Citizenship of American.”Footnote 93 While a “citizen” (at least “by compliment”) merely as “a token of honorary respect,” Paine remains a “foreigner” by virtue of his nationality and reckons himself an American throughout.Footnote 94
The Rights of Man relies on the same distinction between constitutions and governments, the former arising from the people and the latter an artifact of the constitution.Footnote 95 This nuance is at the heart of Paine’s famous engagements with Edmund Burke over the “rights of man.” Burke is wrong about the aboriginal and prescriptive quality of constitutions. Governments and laws are subject to revision by the nations that pre-exist and authorize them. On this account, it seems plausible that political compacts, as voluntary constructs, should be open to new citizens. Less obvious, though, is whether extant peoples are themselves susceptible to redefinition. Indeed, one might argue that it is precisely because nations are fixed in their collective identities that they possess this sovereign authority to accept or reject constitutions. It may be an error, as Paine alleges, “to confound the French nation with the French government.”Footnote 96 But as to how someone can join a nation—as opposed to a government—Paine is less forthcoming. Even on the purely civic account, nationality seems less fungible than citizenship.
One corollary of this theoretical dilemma emerges in Paine’s correspondence with United States Ambassador to France, James Monroe, to whom the desperate and imprisoned Paine appeals for diplomatic intervention. An Englishman by birth, why should Paine be reckoned an American citizen in the first place? This ambiguity applied to all American citizens born outside the colonies or British subjects in the colonies before the nation came into being:
I am imprisoned on the charge (if it can be called one) of being a foreigner born in England. You know that foreigner to be a citizen of the United States of America, and that he has been such since the fourth of July, 1776, the political birthday of the United States, and of every American citizen, for before that period all were British subjects, and the States, then provinces, were British dominions. Your reclamation of me therefore as a citizen of the United States (all other considerations apart) is good against the pretense for imprisoning me, or that pretense is equally good against every American citizen born in England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany or Holland, and you know this description of men compose a very great part of the population of the three states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and make also a part of Congress, and of the state legislatures.Footnote 97
Paine concedes that he is not, strictly speaking, a “native” citizen but one who acquired American citizenship by swearing an oath of allegiance to a new regime. As he notes, this legal circumstance was hardly unique among the Founding generation. Many signatories of the Declaration as well as leading architects of the Constitution such as Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson were also born outside the colonies.
In his response dated September 18, 1794, Monroe agrees that Paine should be counted an American citizen, albeit not without complications:
The Congress have never decided upon the subject of citizenship in a manner to regard the present case. By being with us through the Revolution you are of our country as absolutely as if you had been born there, and you are no more of England than every native American is. This is the true doctrine in the present case, so far as it becomes complicated with any other consideration.
Monroe’s letter provides Paine the encouragement he seeks, affirming his valid naturalization, but this hardly resolves the further complication of whether by accepting the honorific of “Citizen” and participating in the Revolutionary French government Paine may have abdicated this citizenship or even committed treason. This “other consideration” to which Monroe delicately alludes vexes Paine for the rest of his life: assuming that he was indeed a naturalized American citizen, could that legal status have been forfeited?Footnote 98
Paine denies any “idea that I had voluntarily abandoned my citizenship of America for that of France.” Not only did he not relinquish his citizenship, he insists, but there is no reason he ought to be stripped of it based on “any article of the American Constitution applied to me.”Footnote 99 In support, Paine offers the following mischaracterization of the relevant provisions of the Foreign Emoluments Clause, Article I, Section 9 of the US Constitution:
I am very well aware, and always was, of the article of the Constitution which says, as nearly as I can recollect the words, that “any citizen of the United States, who shall accept any title, place, or office, from any foreign king, prince, or state, shall forfeit and lose his right of citizenship of the United States.”Footnote 100
There is a categorical difference between a citizen accepting titles or offices from a “government in active existence,” he insists, and “a citizen of America who gives his assistance in a convention chosen by the people, for the purpose of forming a government de nouveau founded on their authority.”Footnote 101 His title of “Citoyen” is purely honorary—no different from the title conferred on George Washington—and while he actively participated (unlike Washington) in the writing of a constitution to form a government, this does not indicate any allegiance to or affiliation with the government to be formed.Footnote 102
Paine badly misquotes the relevant language of the US Constitution. His recollection of the Foreign Emoluments clause mistakenly assumes that the clause provides for the denationalization of all US citizens rather than, as it states, only current office-holders or persons operating in a position of trust who need the permission of Congress to receive any benefit from a foreign state.Footnote 103 Whether it is an honest error or self-serving deception, Paine’s misreading reflects his novel conception of citizenship. If, as he maintains, citizenship is purely a matter of commitment to civic principles, then to pledge allegiance to a different regime implies a dereliction or apostasy of the sole tether that binds to one’s former government. Thus, we see Paine’s extraordinary efforts to deny this interpretation of what he has done:
My acceptance of that, or of the deputyship, not conferred on me by any king, prince or state, but by a people in a state of revolution and contending for liberty, required no transfer of my allegiance or of my citizenship from America to France. There I was a real citizen, paying taxes; here, I was a voluntary friend, employing myself on a temporary service.Footnote 104
“Real citizens” indicate their allegiance by virtue of property ownership and paying taxes, but this does not prevent them from actively assisting other nations whose constitutive principles align with those of their own nation.Footnote 105
Paine may be telling the truth. He never meant to forsake his status as American citizen by participating as an elected official in the creation of a new liberal regime. Yet his missives to Monroe hint at the transactional nature of his relationship to America: “If I only glide out of prison by a sort of accident America gains no credit by my liberation, neither can my attachment to her be increased by such a circumstance.”Footnote 106 This is hardly the first evidence of Paine’s conditional ties to his adopted land. Shortly after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, his petitions to the Continental Congress already betray an opportunistic view of citizenship. Given his sacrifice to the cause of American independence, Paine thinks he deserves to be paid. Professing his commitment to the “better principles” of America, Paine pleads that he has “no wish or inclination to seek another citizenship elsewhere or be recognized as a member of any other country or community than that which I have helped to raise.”Footnote 107 Still, if Congress fails to reward his past contribution with a sinecure as “National Historiographer,” his international literary celebrity is “sufficient to make any liberal country in Europe a happier home to me, as a private individual, than America has been to me as a public one.”Footnote 108 “She has it in her choice,” Paine inveigles in 1783, “whether she will in return make my situation such, as I can with happiness to myself, and unconfined by dependence, remain in the rank of a citizen of America, or whether I must wish her well and say to her, Adieu.”Footnote 109
Spurned by the Continental Congress, Paine does in some sense bid “Adieu” to America, relocating to England in pursuit of ingenious scientific schemes for personal advancement. Caught up again in radical causes and vituperative rhetoric, he ends up convicted in absentia of slanderous libel and banned from the country of his birth. In 1793, in recognition of his commitment to its ideals, the French National Assembly confers on Paine the title of “Citoyen,” a metamorphosis he extols at the time as transformative not only of his own legal status but of the very nature of citizenship:
FELLOW CITIZENS, I receive, with affectionate gratitude, the honor which the late National Assembly has conferred upon me, by adopting me a citizen of France: and the additional honor of being elected by my fellow citizens a member of the National Convention. Happily impressed, as I am, by those testimonies of respect shown toward me as an individual, I feel my felicity increased by seeing the barrier broken down that divided patriotism by spots of earth, and limited citizenship to the soil, like vegetation.Footnote 110
Here the family metaphor reappears, and yet Paine’s “adoption” by France confirms the principle that there are other ways of entering a national family than by blood or birth. Citizenship bears no necessary relationship to soil or the related doctrine of jus soli, as if it were a native “vegetation” confined to grow only within territorial boundaries. Furthermore, citizens, just like children, may be adopted in defiance of legal principles of jus sanguinis. Insofar as the cause of liberty is a universal cause, citizenship need no longer be confined to one single place—or regime—on the earth.
Citizen of the world?
We have seen that making citizenship a function of voluntary consent hardly resolves all ambiguities of political membership. Paine’s willingness to shed one nationality for another not only drew political backlash from his contemporaries; it also raises philosophical dilemmas for subsequent interpreters. Besides the legal subtleties of whether Paine forfeited his American citizenship, his statements create uncertainty about whether he should be reckoned a citizen of any political community. How, as ClaeysFootnote 111 and Thomas WalkerFootnote 112 have wondered, can Paine’s assertions of American citizenship be reconciled with his professions to be a cosmopolitan citizen of the world? And are the tensions between universal ideals and particular memberships exacerbated or alleviated in the case of “civic” nations such as America and France?
Claeys and Walker largely take Paine at his word by granting priority to Paine’s cosmopolitanism. Yet simply prioritizing Paine’s universal commitments may overshadow a deeper philosophical and practical tension. “Citizen” Paine’s engagement in the French Revolution is in no way inimical to the commitments of American citizenship, he maintains. Bringing American-style self-government to another people only proves his dedication: “As my citizenship in America was not altered or diminished by anything I had done in Europe (on the contrary, it ought to be considered as strengthened, for it was the American principle of government that I was endeavoring to spread in Europe).”Footnote 113 Paine is at one with France and America alike based on a fraternity of all people of the world who value civic ideals of liberty and humanity, a cosmopolitan brotherhood that transcends particular nations. But this is not just a matter of determining whether Paine ultimately regarded himself as a citizen of one, another, or no political community. The real issue is whether any political community legally recognizes the cosmopolitan Paine as a citizen entitled to the requisite privileges and immunities.
According to Lamb, Paine’s commitment to universal principles can be reconciled with national sovereignty by making sovereignty itself conditional on the provision of human rights.Footnote 114 States are illegitimate if they do not respect human rights. Still, the practical difficulty remains. One of the defining features of sovereignty is that states exercise supreme authority over their own criteria for membership. We may disregard some states as morally illegitimate, but no one can declare a human being a citizen of another state. Thus, Lamb’s demonstration of Paine’s philosophical consistency is not—I think—incompatible with the existence of political dilemmas of the sort identified here. Regardless of whether human rights are morally or ontologically prior to national communities, the practical enjoyment of what Paine calls political rights is a function of citizenship.
One upshot of such a world where individuals may freely withdraw consent and exit from a political community is the dilemma of statelessness, as Lamb recognizes.Footnote 115 Yet this is not only a hypothetical possibility, as Lamb supposes, of a world where there is only one political community and in which expatriation deprives individuals of any national citizenship. When states themselves are in a position to dictate conditions of eligibility and, legitimately or not, to recognize, deny, or withdraw political membership, statelessness is both a more general and acute problem than the philosophy of human rights would seem to allow.
In Rights of Man Paine effuses that “I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”Footnote 116 Prejudice can be eradicated by multiplying one’s vantages; a global viewpoint allows us to see the world from the perspective of “other people.”Footnote 117 Yet for all of the virtues of this cosmopolitan revolution in sentiments, we might wonder if the “prejudice” of the political community can be so easily dispensed with? Can one be both a patriotic citizen and a rootless cosmopolitan citizen of the world? Even if Paine’s heart remains always in America, as Fruchtman contends,Footnote 118 his political exploits raise doubts about whether one can simply “view things as they are” and operate “without regard to place or person.”
Wherever Paine’s affections may have come to rest, his plaintive appeals to his legal status as American citizen amid struggles to extricate himself from the Luxembourg Prison are hard to square with a practical indifference to places or governments. In her seminal book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt disclaimed eighteenth-century declarations of the “Rights of Man” for the very reasons indicated by Paine’s predicament in France. Cosmopolitan human or natural rights proved to be feckless in the face of the modern problem of statelessness.Footnote 119 Imprisoned by the Jacobins, rendered de facto stateless by his banishment from England and classification as a “foreigner,” and facing impending execution, Paine in desperation expresses one of Arendt’s central insights. For all of his cosmopolitan enthusiasms, Paine concedes the political shortcomings of philosophical conceptions of human rights, avowing that “A citizen without citizenship is a term nondescript.”Footnote 120
Civic nations and civil religion
One final challenge presented by the civic nation, and personified by Paine’s own vacillations, is whether a shared commitment to abstract principles such as religious liberty or civil rights provides a sound basis for political cohesion. If the virtue of the civic nation is that it is open to anyone who shares its constitutive principles, then a weakness may be its inability to command permanent allegiance. This is all the more concerning in light of the cultural and religious pluralism to which Paine’s immigrant nation gives rise. Citizens will make existential sacrifices in the name of family, tribe, and territory, but it is by no means self-evident that civic principles—especially if these are widely shared across many nations—inspire the same degree of patriotism. As witnessed by “Citizen” Paine’s threats to emigrate, flirtations with adopting a new national identity, and gradual disenchantment with the American and French projects, civic commitments can be evanescent.
“Independance is the only bond that can tye and keep us together,” Paine declares in Common Sense. Footnote 121 The cause of “Independance” may be the “only Bond” requisite for political solidarity, but is it sufficient to constitute a nation in the absence of other unifying factors? Like so many revolutionary movements that threaten to splinter into factions once their common adversary is vanquished, early America reveals the tenuousness of national sentiments. The American colonies are “held together by an unexampled concurrence of sentiment,” but this is “nevertheless subject to change.”Footnote 122 Having identified the problem, Paine offers a potential remedy for fleeting revolutionary passions. What is needed is no mere political compact formed by words and sundry legalities, but a Charter invested with quasi-religious majesty, that is to say, a civil religion:
[L]et a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the Charter; let it be brought forth placed on the Divine Law, the Word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other. But lest any ill use should afterwards arise, let the Crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.Footnote 123
The significance of this curious ceremony cannot be overstated. Here even Paine, notorious defender of reason, acknowledges the Burkean sociological and ontological reality. Legal authority must be invested with a religious awe. The Charter assumes the sacral quality of a religious scroll or relic, literally replacing the discarded Bible at the end of the ceremony. Despite its ostensibly secular sources, this novel civil religion partakes of all the sacred mystery of the religious liturgies it aims to replace. Otherwise, the Charter is a mere parchment, the fallible invention of human reason commanding the people’s loyalty only so long as it is in their advantage to support it.
One cannot read Paine’s description without thinking of the sacralization of the documents and figures of the American Revolution enshrined like holy relics, deified as saints, and their resting places perpetually visited by pilgrims forever after. By 1782, Paine has supplanted the ties of “common interest and affection” with a “sacred constitution” that forms the moral basis of “legal obligation.”Footnote 124 The kind of patriotism that spurs revolutions and sustains republican government relies on a moral partiality that is less a matter of prosaic wants than of spiritual energy.Footnote 125 The bonds of national existence must be “capable of reaching the whole soul of man and arming it with perpetual energy.”Footnote 126
Paine writes that “A union so extensive, continued and determined, suffering with patience and never in despair, could not have been produced by common causes.”Footnote 127 The meaning of “common causes” is ambiguous. The most obvious connotation of “common” is “shared,” that is causes or interests held jointly, in common. But “common” also means ordinary, routine, which implies that national sentiments cannot be reduced to everyday affairs of trade or taxation:
I ever feel myself hurt when I hear the union [the Articles of Confederation], that great palladium of our liberty and safety, irreverently spoken of. It is the most sacred thing in the constitution of America, and that which every man should be most proud and tender of. Our citizenship in the United States is our national character.Footnote 128
The political union constitutive of citizenship is no mere economic or juridical artifice; rather, it is a “sacred” matter revolving around the existence of a “national character” that supersedes “local distinctions” and cannot be reduced to reason, calculation, or mutual self-interest.
That these national sentiments rely upon emotions, myths, and traditions that transcend reason is what makes them so powerful. The nation and its sacred institutions are objects of national worship. But there is yet another way in which the religious quality of these shared principles is salient, one that potentially cuts against the idea of a strictly “civil” religion. Paine’s universalizing conception of citizenship insists not only that other would-be citizens may adopt these principles, but that other nations must recognize them. America needs to be, to adopt a religious metaphor, “the Mother Church of government,” advancing what Fruchtman characterizes as a “homiletic” and “millenarian” “religion of nature.”Footnote 129 Paine’s rhetoric of rights and revolution combines—as Burke earlier divined of the Revolutionary spirit—the substance of secular Enlightenment ideals with the messianic universalism of Christianity. This same ambiguity—with all of its revolutionary implications—remains with us to this day.
Conclusion
My analysis highlights Paine’s decisive contribution to emergent conceptions of America as a civic nation. Paine’s vision of America as a safe harbor for lovers of liberty from all corners of the globe exemplifies what Rogers Smith has termed an “ethically constitutive story” of peoplehood. I have explored how Paine transforms family metaphors of empire dictated by birth or shared ancestry into a form of political membership based on volitional consent. This liberal vision may have been eclipsed for more than two centuries by America’s illiberal historical realities. Even to this day, it coexists uneasily with restrictive immigration policies and laws that distribute American citizenship according to principles of jus sanguinis and jus soli. Nonetheless, if only as a civic ideal, Paine’s vision of America ultimately displaced racialized and ethno-cultural conceptions in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Most commentators on Paine’s writings about American citizenship have focused on their alleged exclusions, as we have seen above. Besides challenging these criticisms, I have argued that Paine’s writings on American peoplehood are just as important for illuminating tensions within the civic nation as they are for highlighting the contradictions of those ostensibly excluded on grounds of race, ethnicity, gender, or other ascriptive factors. Self-professed patriot and citizen of the world, enthusiastic immigrant, embittered émigré, and scorned apostate—Paine’s own life exemplifies the paradoxical qualities of the civic nation. Both in his writings as well as in his political travails, I have shown, Paine unwittingly demonstrates how the civic nation may encourage fanatical intolerance, generate shifting political allegiances, and disguise the primacy of citizenship as guarantor of the vaunted rights of man. This is all the more reason to look to Paine’s political philosophy for insights into questions of nationality, citizenship, patriotism, and other central political dilemmas of our age.
Open access
