Thomas Paine's letter ... to YOU.

To the Citizens of the United States

When Thomas Paine returned to the United States from France in 1802 after a razor-thin escape from the guillotine and a deadly illness contracted in prison, things in the U.S. were not as he hoped; not as he and others had envisioned at the end of the revolutionary struggle with Britain. A counter-revolution had been attempted by the Federalists and their poster-boy, George Washington. Alexander Hamilton’s “Plan of the Bank” mortgaged the country to the Bank of England and its usury-based economic system; and along the way cheated patriot soldiers out of their land-grant pensions. The administration of John Adams, the second Federalist President, tightened authoritarian control with the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798); the putrid carcass of the former Act just now resurrected by the current 47th President, himself an horrific reincarnation of Adams’ hyper-insecurity and borderline madness without, however, any of Adams’ learning. Adams’ attempt to instigate a war with France inflamed a deep wound inflicted by the Jay Treaty (1793) under Adams’ predecessor. These two Federalist administrations - Washington and Adams - created such a furious backlash in the land that Thomas Jefferson (Democratic-Republican aka “Anti-federalist”) was swept into office in 1800; inaugurated in March 1801. The election that brought Jefferson into office was one of the most acrimonious in US history. Haughty and bitter Federalists would stop at nothing to slander and smear the new President. This was the atmosphere into which Paine returned in 1802.

And this was the context in which Paine began a series of eight letters To the Citizens of the United States.

Note: The eight letters will NOT be printed here in their entirety; at least not at this time. Readers have enough before them with the previous Letter to George Washington. The intention of this excerpt and others to follow is highlight and expand on the situation in the early republic. A situation readers are not likely to have had explained to them. A SHORT excerpt, then:

THOMAS PAINE, TO THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES.
LETTER THE FIRST.
from The National Intelligencer, Washington, DC, November 15, 1802.

“AFTER an absence of almost fifteen years, I am again returned to the Country in whose dangers I bore my share, and to whose greatness I contributed my part.

When I sailed for Europe in the spring of 1787 it was my intention to return to America the next year, and enjoy, in retirement, the esteem of my friends and the repose I was entitled to. I had stood out the storm of one revolution and had no wish to embark in another. But other scenes and other circumstances than those of contemplated ease were allotted to me. The French Revolution was beginning to germinate when I arrived in France. The principles of it were good, they were copied from America, and the men who conducted it were honest. But the fury of faction soon extinguished the one, and sent the other to the scaffold. Of those who began that revolution, I am almost the only survivor, and that through a thousand dangers. I owe this, not to the prayers of priests, nor to the piety of hypocrites, but to the continued protection of Providence.

But while I beheld with pleasure the dawn of liberty rising in Europe, I saw, with regret the lustre of it fading in America. In less than two years from the time of my departure some distant symptoms painfully suggested the idea that the principles of the revolution were expiring on the soil that produced them.”

More to come, friends.