Thomas Paine Had More “Common Sense” Than Most of the Founders

He Wanted to End Enslavement and Provide Reparations

By Laurent Dabos — XgHRnk_RV2alKA at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=127417518

I’ve written previously about why most of America’s Founders don’t get a pass on enslavement. I’ve credited the first Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay, who ended enslavement in New York and freed many of those he owned during his lifetime. America’s second President, John Adams, never enslaved people, though he did look the other way as some worked in and around the President’s House, which later became the White House.

Judging The Founders By The Standards Of Their Day | by William Spivey | Black History Month 365 | Medium

I overlooked Thomas Paine, the publisher of “Common Sense,” who spelled out in no uncertain terms that slavery was wrong; he couldn’t understand how supposed Christians could approve it. He said enslaved people should be freed and even suggested reparations. Here’s a belated recognition that Thomas Paine got it right when others didn’t.

To Americans:

“That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is [more] lamentable than strange. But that many civilised, Christianised people should approve and be concerned in the savage practice is surprising… It has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of justice and humanity, even good policy, by a succession of eminent men…

Our traders in men (an unnatural commodity) must know the wickedness of that slave trade if they attend to reasoning or the dictates of their own hearts. [But they] shun and stifle all these [and] wilfully sacrifice conscience and the character of integrity to that golden idol…

The managers of [the slave trade] testify that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors… By such wicked and inhuman ways, the English are said to enslave towards 100,000 yearly, of which 30,000 are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year…

So monstrous is the making and keeping them slaves at all… and the many evils attending the practice, [such] as selling husbands away from wives, children from parents and from each other, in violation of sacred and natural ties; and opening the way for adulteries, incests and many shocking consequences, for all of which the guilty masters must answer to the final judge…

The chief design of this paper is not to disprove [slavery], which many have sufficiently done, but to entreat Americans to consider:

1. With that consistency… they complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority or claim upon them.

2. How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which providence threatens us? We have enslaved multitudes and shed much innocent blood in doing it, and are now threatened with the same [by the English]…

3. [Should] all not immediately discontinue and renounce it, with grief and abhorrence? Should not every society bear testimony against it and [consider] obstinate persisters in it bad men, enemies to their country, and exclude them from fellowship, as they often do for much lesser faults?

4. The great question may be: What should be done with those who are enslaved already? To turn the old and infirm free would be injustice and cruelty; those who enjoyed the labours of their better days should keep and treat them humanely. As to the rest, let prudent men, with the assistance of legislatures, determine what is practicable for [their] masters and best for them…”

Here are more Thomas Paine quotes, which give me more faith in Paine, though less in his contemporaries, whom America still worships.

“I wish most anxiously to see my much loved America — it is the Country from whence all reformations must originally spring — I despair of seeing an Abolition of the infernal trafic in Negroes — we must push that matter further on your side the water — I wish that a few well instructed Negroes could be sent among their Brethren in Bondage, for until they are enabled to take their own part nothing will be done.”

It is always to be taken for granted, that those who oppose an equality of rights never mean the exclusion should take place on themselves.

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

The Grecians and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty but not the principle, for at the time they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind.

The accumulation of great wealth is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it, the consequence of which is that the working people perish in old age and the employer abounds in affluence.

Prejudice, like the spider, makes everywhere its home. It has neither taste nor choice of place, and all that it requires is room. If the one prepares her food by poisoning it to her palate and her use, the other does the same. Prejudice may be denominated the spider of the mind.

Given America’s history, it was a ray of sunshine to discover Thomas Paine’s words, which are so different from those of many of his peers.