Now, he never acknowledged that he was the author of it in any of his works before the death of Mr. Paine. He gave several full accounts of the whole transaction, and calls on Heaven and earth to witness the truth of his statements. About the time Mr. Paine dies he says he can make no personal claim to it. Ten years after Mr. Paine's death, he very ambiguously claims it, as if his pen refused to write it, and drops his oath. But twelve years after Mr. Paine's death, and he now in his eightieth year, he first says he drew it. Was he too modest to affirm it till he had got into his dotage? The reader must answer. It is with painful feelings I record the above facts. "But they are too true, and the more is the pity." But to proceed.
Mr. Jefferson could not have followed so closely Common Sense in the production of the Declaration of Independence, if he had studied it for a whole year with this special purpose in view. For, the style he could not have imitated; the figures of speech he could not have adopted; the impassioned eloquence would have stuck to the dry leaves; the exact order would have been missed; the fine shades of sentiment would have been blotted out; the complex ideas he would have failed to grasp; its architectural plan he could not have idealized; and its construction would never have arisen from the chaos of scattered materials which he would have gleaned. And, above all, the personal character of Mr. Paine would have been left out. He would have failed in every one of these things. And why? Want of mental similarity thereto. This, and nothing else.
I will sum up his mentality as I find it in his writings. I have given you Mr. Paine's already. In this I shall be brief, speaking only of those powers which would be incompatible with, or necessary to, the production of the Declaration.
Mr. Jefferson was a zealous partisan. Mr. Paine was a consummate statesman. Here was the great difference between the two men. Those qualities of the mind which produce the former are very unlike those which produce the latter. The former mind must be narrow and selfish, the latter broad and generous. This will take in the whole world, that but a small portion of it. The partisan has an understanding subject to the vice and discipline of cunning; the statesman has an understanding subject to the noblest and most generous affections. It was this which made Mr. Jefferson such a grand success as a party leader, and that, too, which perhaps saved the nation from passing into the hands of the monarchists. Without these consummate powers of the partisan, it would have been impossible for Mr. Jefferson to have taken command of the people, to have organized his party, to have marshaled his forces, and with his army of followers to have put royalty under his heel. How unlike Washington and John Adams, who preceded him. Hamilton, who would toast a president of America and give three cheers for George the Third of England, ruled Washington and governed the nation. John Adams, who was so beguiled with royalty and the British constitution, could not heartily sympathize with the people; the dupe of his own passions, he was unfit to be the ruler of a free people. But Jefferson, while secretary under Washington, began to form his party and draw his party lines. Through Freneau he drove Washington to cry out: "By God, I had rather be in my grave than in my present situation!" And, afterward, the party he was marshaling made John Adams, then president of the United States, desert his post for seven months, at the most trying crisis of this government. But the cold, unfeeling partisanship of the great democrat saved the nation.
The other crowning difference between the two men is, Mr. Paine had extraordinary genius, Mr. Jefferson had not; and by genius I mean a lively constructive and comprehensive mind, one that can generalize facts and deduce principles therefrom, one that can idealize and build in the imagination what it would put into material shape or on paper. If this comparison be true (and the reader is at liberty to bring facts to contradict it), then Mr. Jefferson could not produce the Declaration for want of capacity.
The Declaration is the work of a master. It is the work of one with great experience in the art of composition, one who produced the whole in the ideal before he touched pen to paper, and one who followed plan and specifications with unerring precision. It is a work of the most finished rhetoric, and produced with such skill as to defy adverse criticism. It shows vast labor and time bestowed upon its execution. In its mechanism I have never seen its equal in all my reading and study. It is the most masterly work of genius I ever saw in composition. It stands alone in the world of letters. There is nothing its equal which has come down to us from the ages, and I know of no one save Thomas Paine capable of producing it. That he was a master in the art of composition, no one can dispute, and he frequently takes pains to give the principles which reveal his success; here is one of them, to be found in his Letter to the Abbe Raynal: "To fit the powers of thinking and the turn of language to the subject, so as to bring out a clear conclusion that shall hit the point in question, and nothing else, is the true criterion of writing," See a fine passage on this point in the introduction to the same letter. Now Jefferson had not the genius to produce the Declaration.
If we look also at several passages in the Declaration we can only feel their full force after knowing the previous career of Mr. Paine as Junius in England. Take for example the two paragraphs, 24 and 25, the one of the king and the other of the "British brethren." We see in the one the proud disdain and haughty contempt for the tyrant; in the other that tender sympathy for the English people, with a sly thrust at the Scotch, and then the wounded affection which comes from betrayal of friendship—"the last stab to agonizing affection." And then regathering himself from the affliction of a broken heart, he exclaims, "Manly spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren." But no, this can not be done, and in the next breath he says, "we must endeavor to forget our former love for them;" and then comes the wail of anguish in the loss of his native country, "We might have been a great and a free people together, but a communication of grandeur and of freedom it seems is below their dignity. Be it so." He now bends beneath the hand of fate and cries out, "I acquiesce in our eternal separation," but persist in denouncing it. This is the very picture of Mr. Paine's own heart. It is a pitch of enthusiasm and anguish which Mr. Jefferson had neither circumstance in his life nor capacity in his soul to work himself up to. It is neither art nor contrivance, it is the recorded beating of his own heart, the sequel to his previous life.
Take again the passage on human slavery. "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself." It is well known that Mr. Paine, before he wrote Common Sense, attracted the eyes of the world to him by denouncing human slavery in the most impassioned eloquence. This piece he termed "Serious Thoughts," etc. Herein he hopes when the Declaration is made that "our first gratitude to the Almighty may be shown by an act of Continental legislation, which shall put a stop to the importation of negroes, soften the hard fate of those already here, and in time procure their freedom." And he says, long afterward, to the French inhabitants of Louisiana who wished the power to import and enslave Africans, "Dare you put up a petition to Heaven for such a power without fearing to be struck from the earth by its justice?" But the person who wrote the passage on slavery in the original draft of the Declaration could never have kept a slave in bondage, if any thing can be gathered from the nobility, the manliness, the justice, and the philanthropy of its spirit. But Jefferson, while he has left on record his opposition in words to slavery, has left also on record his acts to contradict both them and the Declaration. I here draw the veil over Jefferson as a slaveholder.
While Mr. Jefferson was far above the average mind, yet from his mental make-up, either in his head, heart, character, or capacity, he could not be the author of the Declaration of Independence. Neither in the circumstances of his previous life nor personal history, neither in the heart nor the head, can we find a foundation for the famous document. I know of but one man American born, at that day, with sufficient genius to write it—Benjamin Franklin—and he would have failed in the style and language, and especially in those fine strokes of the affection.[A]
For Mr. Paine to write the Declaration and be ready to hand it to the chairman of the committee, is characteristic of the man. He did the same thing at the "Thatched House" tavern meeting in England in 1791. Mr. Horne Tooke who signed the Address and Declaration as chairman of the meeting, received the document privately from the hand of Mr. Paine, and had Mr. Tooke not afterward disclaimed the authorship of it when charged upon him, Mr. Paine would never have revealed the secret. It was revealed in this manner: Mr. Tooke having spoken in commendation of the Declaration which he signed "was jocularly accused of praising his own work, and to free him from this embarrassment [says Mr. Paine], and the repeated trouble of mentioning the author, as he has not failed to do, I make no hesitation in saying, I drew up the publication," etc. Now, Mr. Paine was never guilty of praising his own work, and nowhere can I find that he ever praised the Declaration of Independence as a work, or that he ever mentioned Junius but once. [B]Had Mr. Jefferson been the author of the Declaration, Mr. Paine no doubt would have called it "A masterly performance."