The Oration
Delivered in 1870, “Thomas Paine” was one of Ingersoll’s earliest great public orations. It is a passionate defense of one of America’s most important — and most slandered — founders. Ingersoll believed Paine had been written out of American history by those who feared his ideas, and he set out to restore him.
The Man Who Made the Revolution
Thomas Paine was one of the most important men in the history of the United States. Without Paine, it is possible that the American Revolution would never have succeeded — or never have begun.
I say this not as a partisan. I say it as a reader of history.
When the army of Washington was starving at Valley Forge, when the morale of the colonies was broken, when the most sensible men in America were beginning to doubt whether independence was possible — Thomas Paine wrote the words that turned the tide. He sat down by a drumhead, lit a fire of pine knots, and wrote:
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
Washington ordered these words read to every soldier in the army. They kept the Revolution alive.
What Paine Believed
Thomas Paine was not a Christian. He was a deist — he believed in a God of reason and nature, not the God of miracles and scripture. He wrote The Age of Reason to say so clearly, and to examine the Bible honestly and systematically.
For this, he was condemned. The man who had helped to create the United States, who had made the case for the rights of man before any government had accepted it, who had lived in poverty and given everything he had to the cause of human liberty — this man was called an infidel, a beast, a wretch.
President Theodore Roosevelt, long after Paine’s death, called him “a dirty little atheist.” This from the man who benefited from the republic Paine had helped to create.
I call Thomas Paine a hero.
The Injustice of His Fate
When Paine died in 1809, almost no one came to his funeral. The man who had helped to kindle the American Revolution, who had been a deputy in the French National Convention, who had been imprisoned under Robespierre and escaped the guillotine by a chance of timing — he died in poverty, in semi-isolation, denied a Christian burial by those who believed he had no soul worth saving.
His body was buried on his farm in New Rochelle, New York. Ten years later, the English reformer William Cobbett dug up his bones and took them to England, intending to give him a proper monument. The monument was never built. His bones were lost.
There is something darkly appropriate about this. Paine died homeless in the country he had helped to create. His bones were lost in the country that had given him birth. He belongs to neither, and to both, and to the world.
What He Gave Us
Paine gave us the idea that rights are not the gift of kings or priests, but the inheritance of every human being by virtue of being human. He gave us the idea that government is not ordained by God but created by consent of the governed. He gave us the idea that we have the right and the duty to examine what we are told to believe.
These ideas are the foundation of the modern world. They are so commonplace now that we forget they were once revolutionary. Paine made them commonplace.
“The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”
This is the creed of a truly civilized man. It has no geography, no ethnicity, no doctrine. It has only humanity.
My Debt to Paine
I owe Thomas Paine a debt I can never repay. His Age of Reason was one of the books that helped me find my own way out of the orthodoxy in which I was raised. He showed me that honest doubt is not a sin but a virtue — that following the evidence of my reason is not rebellion against God but obedience to the highest law I know.
He was vilified for saying what he thought. He died alone for saying what he thought.
I am proud to say what I think, and I am proud to follow in his footsteps.
“Thomas Paine had more brains in his body than all his detractors put together.”
I believe this. I believe it with all my heart.
The complete “Thomas Paine” oration appears in Volume 3 of the Dresden Edition and at Project Gutenberg.