That Mr. Paine did not attach his name to the pamphlet, Common Sense, there is abundance of evidence to prove. The author of a pamphlet, subscribed Rationalis, in answer to Common Sense, says: "I know not the author, nor am I anxious to learn his name or character, for the book, and not the writer of it, is to be the subject of my animadversions."
But we have Mr. Paine's own testimony, in the second edition of Common Sense, direct to the point. In a postscript to the Introduction, he says: "Who the author of this production is, is wholly unnecessary to the public, as the object for attention is the doctrine, not the man. Yet it may not be unnecessary to say that he is unconnected with any party, and under no sort of influence, public or private, but the influence of reason and principle."
An examination of all the earliest editions which can be seen in the Congressional Library at Washington will satisfy any one on this subject.
If Mr. Jefferson had read Common Sense before the writing of the Declaration, he would never have erred so in regard to this fact. This goes to show he had not even read it, much less studied it. How, then, was the exact order followed, in writing the Declaration, which Mr. Paine laid down in Common Sense?
My first proposition, then, I have proven, namely: that Thomas Paine wrote a work for the sole purpose of bringing about a separation and making a Declaration of Independence. I have proven, also, that he therein submitted the subject-matter in the order in which it was afterwards put. This much on the positive side. On the negative side, I have shown that Mr. Jefferson did none of these things, for it was produced from "the fullness of his own mind, without consulting one single book."
But if Mr. Bancroft be a truthful historian, there is already great doubt thrown on Jefferson's authorship of it, and it would have been better to have made Jefferson a close student and thorough reader for this special purpose. This is the view, in fact, taken of the question of authorship in the New American Cyclopedia (article Thomas Jefferson), and I will give an extract therefrom, to show how historians differ. Speaking of the Declaration, the Cyclopedia says: "Two questions have, however, arisen as to its originality: the first, a general one upon the substance of the document; the second, in regard to its phraseology in connection with the alleged Mecklenburg declaration of May, 1775. It is more than probable that Jefferson made use of some of the ideas expressed in newspapers at the time, and that his study of the great English writers upon constitutional freedom was of service to him. But an impartial criticism will not base upon this fact a charge of want of originality. It should rather be regarded as the peculiar merit of the writer that he thus collected and embodied the conclusions upon government of the leading thinkers of the age in Europe and America, rejecting what was false, and combining his material into a production of so much eloquence and dignity."
This does not sound much like Bancroft. The two historians have placed Mr. Jefferson in a sad dilemma. The one, to make him an original in the production of the Declaration, says he did not consult one single book, but produced it from the fullness of his own mind. The other, to defend him from the charge of want of originality, says he made use of the newspapers, collected and embodied, etc. But the single fact which I have brought from the conclusion of Common Sense destroys the first hypothesis, and the last hypothesis, in being contradictory in itself destroys itself. How the reader will fathom this labyrinth of contradictions, and reconcile this conflict of historic opinion, is a question which does not trouble me, and I pass on to something more important.
STYLE.
The style of the Declaration of Independence is in every particular the style of Mr. Paine and Junius; and it is in no particular the style of Thomas Jefferson. This I now proceed to prove.