Review

Textbooks, Readers, and References

Modern editors typically strive for comprehensive collections. Recent anthologies of Thomas Paine's writings by Eric Foner (Library of America, 1995) and Sidney Hook (Meridian, 1969) include all or parts of The Crisis, The Rights of Man, and the Age of Reason. By comparison, Thomas P. Slaughter's classroom-friendly edition of Common Sense and Related Writings contains only materials published in the 1770s. Comprehensive editions have their place, of course, and every scholar who wishes to understand the late eighteenth century Atlantic world should own a copy of Foner's anthology. But Slaughter's anthology, part of the admirable Bedford Series in History and Culture, will be the book to assign in survey classes and courses on the American Revolution. Where Hook introduced his large collection of essays with a brief, twelve-page preface, Slaughter opens this slim volume with a marvelous fifty-one-page introduction. Part biography, part mediation on the sources of Paine's radical thought, Slaughter's densely footnoted essay carries the reader through the complicated political landscape of the mid-1770s. Particularly insightful is Slaughter's discussion of the (rather unpopular) connection Paine drew in 1774 between American colonists as slaves of King George and African bondpeople as slaves of American patriots. Rejecting James V. Lynch's recent doubts as to Paine's authorship, Slaughter demonstrates that the Englishman's earliest essays combined Biblical rhetoric, appeals to nature, and sarcastic logic_all techniques he would later resort to in Common Sense_in hopes of transforming his adopted country into the sort of egalitarian republic he believed it had the potential to become.	1
Students who witnessed the recent debates about the connection, or lack thereof, between presidential performance and private behavior will also be fascinated by the way Paine linked his private failures in England to America's political problems. In a 1775 essay, aptly entitled "Reflections on Unhappy Marriages," Paine, a veteran of two unhappy marriages, condemned forced unions that had outlived their initial usefulness. Perhaps subconsciously, Slaughter suggests, Paine's use of this metaphor reflected his personal "repentance," which allowed him to "express guilt, sorrow, and [even] to forgive himself" for "the cuts and bruises that his neighbors said he inflicted on both of his wives" (p. 24). Had he stopped there, of course, Paine would be remembered today as a minor Pennsylvania pamphleteer. But two months after his "Marriages" essay appeared, Paine began work on his most celebrated essay. Slaughter has little use for the conventional wisdom that American printers produced 150,000 copies of Common Sense in 1776, a claim "consistent with Paine's ego, but at odds with contemporary printing technology (p. 29). Still, Slaughter concedes that the twenty-five known printings of the pamphlet are twice that of any American book published before the mid-nineteenth century. (The editor here uses the expanded edition published by Benjamin Towne in February 1776, which he regards as the most accurate of the early editions).	2
Although he briefly describes Paine's intellectual influences, Slaughter is far more concerned with making the reader understand that what Paine wrote was not as important as how he crafted his prose. Upper-class writers the colonies had in abundance, but much of what he produced was designed only for the American elite. Paine knew that his essay would be read aloud in taverns and in artisan shops and on street corners. So while Thomas Jefferson's prose style was "intellectually powerful," Paine's was "emotionally hot" (p. 40). Slaughter encourages students to read several crucial passages aloud to understand that Paine's muscular prose was designed not merely to be accessible to the common folk, but to inflame them to action. Finally, Slaughter touches upon Paine's "Forrester" essays, in which Paine responded with sarcasm and bitterness to his critics (an unhappy tendency that modern scholars will have to concede was not limited to the eighteenth century) before rushing through his career after 1783. Curiously, Slaughter fails to repeat an ironic observation first made by Foner in Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (Oxford, 1976) that Paine, who relocated to Paris but fell from grace after recommending a pardon for King Louis XVI, called himself a citizen of the world but was released from prison when the United States claimed him as one of its own. Following the documents_five 1774 and 1775 essays, Common Sense, and the first numbers of the "Forrester" and American Crisis writings, each of which begins with a brief preface_Slaughter includes a detailed chronology of Paine's life and writings, forty-two questions for discussion, and a brief bibliography of other books and anthologies of Paine's work. Reasonably priced, thoughtful, elegantly written, and nicely packaged with eleven illustrations, this version is the one that most teachers will wish to adopt.	3
Le Moyne College Douglas R. Egerton

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