A very important part of Paine's answer was that which related to the United States. Burke, the most famous defender of American revolutionists, was anxious to separate their movement from that in France. Paine, with ample knowledge, proved how largely the uprising in France was due to the training of Lafayette and other French officers in America, and to the influence of Franklin, who was "not the diplomatist of a court, but of man." He also drew attention to the effect of the American State Constitutions, which were a grammar of liberty.* He points out that under this transatlantic influence French liberalism had deviated from the line of its forerunners,—from Montesquieu, "obliged to divide himself between principle and prudence"; Voltaire, "both the flatterer and satirist of despotism"; Rousseau, leaving "the mind in love with an object without describing the means of possessing it"; Turgot, whose maxims are directed to "reform the administration of government rather than the government itself." To these high praise is awarded, but they all had to be filtered through America.
* Dr. Franklin had these constitutions translated, and
presented them in a finely bound volume to the King.
According to Paine, who must have heard it from Franklin,
Vergennes resisted their publication, but was obliged to
give way to public demand. Paine could not allude to the
effect of his own work, "Common Sense," which may have been
the more effective because its argument against monarchy was
omitted from the translation. But his enemies did not fail
to credit his pen with the catastrophes in France. John
Adams declares that the Constitution of Pennsylvania was
ascribed wrongly to Franklin; it was written by Paine and
three others; Turgot, Condorcet, and the Duke de la
Rochefoucauld were enamored of it, and two of them "owed
their final and fatal catastrophe to this blind love"
(Letter to S. Perley, June 19, 1809). Whence Cheetham.
dwelling on the enormity of the "single representative
assembly," queries: "May not Paine's constitution of
Pennsylvania have been the cause of the tyranny of
Robespierre?"
And it goes without saying that it was not the reactionary America with which John Adams and Gouverneur Morris had familiarized Burke. "The Rights of Man" was the first exposition of the republicanism of Jefferson, Madison, and Edmund Randolph that ever appeared. And as this republicanism was just then in deadly struggle with reaction, the first storm raised by Paine's book occurred in America. It was known in America that Paine was about to beard the British lion in his den, and to expectant ears the roar was heard before its utterance.
"Paine's answer to Burke (writes Madison to Jefferson, May 1st) has not yet been received here [New York]. The moment it can be got, Freneau tells me, it will be published in Child's paper [Daily Advertiser], It is said that the pamphlet has been suppressed, and that the author withdrew to France before or immediately after its appearance. This may account for his not sending copies to his friends in this country."
Mr. Beckley, however, had by this time received a copy and loaned it to Jefferson, with a request that he would send it to J. B. Smith, whose brother, S. H. Smith, printed it with the following Preface:
"The following Extracts from a note accompanying a copy of this pamphlet for republication is so respectable a testing of its value, that the Printer hopes the distinguished writer will excuse its present appearance. It proceeds from a character equally eminent in the councils of America, and conversant in the affairs of France, from a long and recent residence at the Court of Versailles in the Diplomatic department; and at the same time that it does justice to the writings of Mr. Paine, it reflects honor on the source from which it flows by directing the mind to a contemplation of that Republican firmness and Democratic simplicity which endear their possessor to every friend of the Rights of Man.
"After some prefatory remarks the Secretary of State observes:
"' I am extremely pleased to find it will be reprinted, and that something is at length to be publickly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.
"'I have no doubt our citizens will rally a second time round the standard of Common Sense.'"
As the pamphlet had been dedicated to the President,* this encomium of the Secretary of State ("Jefferson" was not mentioned by the sagacious publisher) gave it the air of a manifesto by the administration. Had all been contrived, Paine's arrow could not have been more perfectly feathered to reach the heart of the anti-republican faction. The Secretary's allusion to "political heresies" was so plainly meant for the Vice-President that a million hands tossed the gauntlet to him, and supposed it was his own hand that took it up. These letters, to The Columbian Centinel (Boston), were indeed published in England as by "John Adams," and in the trial of Paine were quoted by the Attorney-General as proceeding from "the second in the executive government" of America. Had it been generally known, however, that they were by the Vice-President's son, John Quincy Adams, the effect might not have been very different on the father. Edmund Randolph, in view of John Adams' past services, felt some regret at the attacks on him, and wrote to Madison: "I should rejoice that the controversy has been excited, were it not that under the character of [Publicola] he, who was sufficiently depressed before, is now irredeemable in the public opinion without being the real author." The youth, however, was only in his twenty-fourth year, and pretty certainly under his father's inspiration.