The Great Agnostic (14 page)

For the Great Agnostic, the relative obscurity of Thomas Paine in the second half of the American nineteenth century was nothing less than a crime against the true history of the United States. Paine's writings were, by then, much better known among the educated classes in England than in America. “These are the times that try men's souls”—the opening line of
The Crisis Papers
—may have been more familiar to nineteenth-century American schoolchildren than it is to children today, but Paine himself was a touchy and largely unexplored subject. The prerevolutionary call to arms “Common Sense” sold more than half a million copies in the colonies in the mid-1770s. Paine received no money for his famous revolutionary pamphlets, because he allowed them to be published and circulated freely as his contribution to American independence. As Ingersoll noted in his standard speech on Paine, “no one stood higher in America” at the successful conclusion
of the Revolution than the author of
The Crisis Papers.
“The best, the wisest, the most patriotic, were his friends and admirers,” Ingersoll recalled, “and had he been thinking only of his own good he might have rested from his toil and spent the remainder of his life in comfort and in ease.” This alternative Paine could have remained “what the world is pleased to call ‘respectable.' He could have died surrounded by clergymen, warriors and statesmen. At his death there would have been an imposing funeral, miles of carriages, civic societies, salvos of artillery, a nation in mourning, and, above all, a splendid monument covered with lies. He chose rather to benefit mankind.”
7

The benefit to mankind, as outlined by Ingersoll for his audiences, was Paine's exploration of the religious tyranny that had always been indispensable to political tyranny: “He knew that the throne skulked behind the altar, and both behind a pretended revelation from God.”
8
Living out his credo that “the world is my country, and to do good my religion,” Paine resided and wrote in both England and France after the American Constitution was ratified. Threatened with a possible charge of treason, Paine was forced to flee England after publication, in 1791, of the anti-monarchist
The Rights of Man,
but his writings were so popular in France that he was elected to the revolutionary National Assembly in 1792. Soon he
was in trouble again, imprisoned, and in danger of being put to death, because of his principled opposition to capital punishment. Even though Paine was the most passionate of anti-monarchists, he opposed the execution of King Louis XVI on the ground that the state degraded itself and, in a democracy, its citizens by claiming and exercising the authority to take human life. Ingersoll, like nearly all freethinkers, opposed both the death penalty and torture because such punishments were historically rooted in the idea that since God has the power of life and death, the government, as the deity's representative on earth, could also lay claim to that power.
*

The death penalty was prescribed for hundreds of offenses in the Old Testament, Ingersoll noted, and Christian countries followed suit until the end of the eighteenth century. He described the prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment,” enshrined in the Bill of Rights, as another secular concept. By the late nineteenth century, the death penalty was considered too cruel and unusual to be
imposed for such crimes as horse thievery—though not for rape. Murder and treason, however, remained capital crimes in every state. Like Paine, Ingersoll opposed the death penalty not out of pity for criminals but because he thought that such punishments debased the people whose government claimed the right to murder—whatever the form of government. “Search the records of the world,” Ingersoll insisted, “and you will find but few sublimer acts than that of Thomas Paine voting against the king's death. He, the hater of despotism, the abhorrer of monarchy, the champion of the rights of man, the republican, accepting death to save the life of a deposed tyrant—of a throneless king. This was the last grand act of his political life—the sublime conclusion of his political career.”
9

The Age of Reason
was widely read in the 1790s because it was written in the same direct, commonsensical language as Paine's revolutionary pamphlets and was therefore understandable—unlike abstruse theological arguments in defense of orthodox religion and union between church and state—to anyone who could read. “The ‘Age of Reason' has liberalized us all,” Ingersoll said. “It put arguments in the mouths of the people; it put the church on the defensive; it enabled somebody in every village to corner the parson; it made the world wiser, and the church better; it took power from the pulpit and divided it among the pews.”
10

Ingersoll often told the story of Paine's near-death of an ulcer in the Luxembourg prison before the U.S. government intervened to obtain his release. He was not allowed to return to the United States until 1802, after Thomas Jefferson was elected president, and Jefferson was sharply criticized for allowing the revolutionary hero—now denigrated as an infidel—to come home on an American navy ship. As Ingersoll had noted in one of his early freethought orations in 1870, Paine was forced to eat “the bitter bread of sorrow” for expressing his skepticism about religion. “His friends were untrue to him because he was true to himself and true to them. He lost the respect of what is called society, but kept his own. His life is what the world calls failure and what history calls success.”
11

Only in 1892 would Paine receive his full due as both a revolutionary writer and a religious skeptic, in a magisterial two-volume biography by Moncure Daniel Conway, a minister-turned-freethinker. This book, which received considerable attention because it was published at the height of the nineteenth-century freethought movement, remains an indispensible source for Paine scholars today. Conway concluded his biography with an account of the removal of Paine's skeleton from his obscure grave in New Rochelle, New York, and the transportation of his bones to England. “There is a legend that Paine's little
finger was left in America,” Conway wrote, “a fable, perhaps of his once small movement, now stronger than the loins of the bigotry that refused him a vote or a grave in the land he so greatly served. As to his bones, no man knows the place of their rest to this day. His principles rest not.”
12
Ingersoll, in an 1892 review of Conway's biography, rejoiced that at long last, “the real history of Thomas Paine, of what he attempted and accomplished, of what he taught and suffered, has been intelligently, truthfully and candidly given to the world. Henceforth the slanderer will be without excuse.”
13
(In an 1888 biography of the Federalist politician Gouverneur Morris, Theodore Roosevelt had described Paine as a “filthy little atheist.” Morris, as it happens, was President George Washington's minister to France in 1793, when Paine was arrested for his opposition to the execution of Louis XVI. A fierce critic of Paine's religious and economic views, Morris misled the French with the claim that the new United States government did not recognize the British-born Paine's American citizenship. At the same time, Morris told Washington—who, though he too disliked Paine's economic radicalism, recognized his debt to the author of
The Crisis Papers
—that everything was being done to obtain Paine's release from Luxembourg Prison. Only when James Monroe, a freethinker, replaced Morris in Paris did
the American government apply pressure to obtain Paine's freedom. He had spent nine months in solitary confinement and nearly died of an ulcer.)

Like the public's reaction against Paine in the early 1900s, the intense, divided response to Ingersoll at the end of the century was ignited not only by the continuing tension between religious power in American society and legal separation of church and state but also by the expanding influence of secularism even among the religious. In this respect, the religious landscape of the United States during the Gilded Age was not dissimilar from our own: the influence of biblically literal evangelicalism was growing even as mainstream Protestantism struggled to accommodate science and modernism by viewing the stories in both the Christian and Jewish Bibles in a metaphoric rather than a literal sense.

In the nineteenth century, despite the much stronger influence of Protestantism and the growing influence of Catholicism, the formidable nature of the challenge posed by contemporary science, especially biology and geology, to biblical literalism may be inferred from the fact that the young William Jennings Bryan, while a student at Illinois College, wrote a letter to Ingersoll asking for his advice about dealing with the emerging contradictions between his education and his faith. This approach by Bryan to
Ingersoll is not entirely surprising, since Bryan was born in 1860 in Marion County, Illinois, where Ingersoll, like Lincoln, began his career as a lawyer. By the time Bryan was a college student in the 1870s, Ingersoll had also begun his career as an opponent of organized religion.
*
The man who would one day be known as “the great commoner” had heard the great agnostic speak, although Bryan himself would follow the more histrionic and sentimental style of evangelical preachers, better suited to his message than Ingersoll's matter-of-fact way of speaking to an audience.
14
The connection between old-time religion and politics, however, was the reverse of today's close relationship between religion and economic conservatism. Bryan was the leader of the entwined forces of economic and religious populism until his death in 1925 (shortly after the Scopes trial). His famous 1896 “cross of gold” speech had embodied the philosophical linkage between turn-of-the-century evangelical religion and the desire for economic (though not racial) justice. Bryan would undoubtedly have been astonished had someone told him in the 1890s that a century in the future, Americans who upheld the literal truth of Genesis would be equally committed
to the idea that the rich should pay lower taxes and that corporations should be treated as people.

The great religious and political paradox of the golden age of freethought was that even as the proportion of freethinkers and “religious liberals” increased, politicians were required to pay greater obeisance to religion than they had been either in the founding generation or at various earlier points in the nineteenth century. President Andrew Jackson, at a time when Paine's reputation had been obliterated except among freethinkers, declared that “Thomas Paine needs no monument made with hands” because he “has erected a monument in the hearts of all lovers of liberty.” Lincoln—unlike William McKinley during the Spanish-American War—had explicitly rejected the claim that “God is on our side” during the Civil War. He pointedly observed in his Second Inaugural Address that both sides “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other,” adding that the prayers of both the North and the South could not be answered and that neither had been answered fully.

For Ingersoll, the primary danger of entanglement between religion and politics was that invoking divine authority would simply shut down discussion on controversial issues. The requirement that politicians be religious, or at least appear to be religious, ruled out a significant group of independent thinkers from office. Ingersoll decried the
public religiosity required of politicians in a statement that is just as applicable today as it was then.

At present, the successful office-seeker is a good deal like the centre of the earth; he weighs nothing himself, but draws everything else to him. There are so many societies, so many churches, so many isms, that it is almost impossible for an independent man to succeed in a political career. Candidates are forced to pretend that they are Catholics with Protestant proclivities, or Christians with liberal tendencies, or temperance men who now and then take a glass of wine, or, that although not members of any church their wives are, and that they subscribe liberally to all. The result of all this is that we reward hypocrisy and elect men entirely destitute of real principle; and this will never change until the people become grand enough to do their own thinking.
15

A candidate's religious outlook, in Ingersoll's opinion, should be an entirely private matter. “If we were in a storm at sea,” he said, “with deck wave-washed and masts strained and bent with storm, and it was necessary to reef the top sail, we certainly would not ask the brave sailor who volunteered to go aloft, what his opinion was on the five points of Calvinism.”
16
Ingersoll felt that the churches of his day were becoming politicized and correctly predicted
that it would not be long until religious institutions would “divide as sharply upon political, as upon theological questions.”

Then as now, American religious conservatives favored the use of government power to enforce specific, religiously based moral principles. The Comstock Laws, used to define both Walt Whitman's poetry and advertisements for contraceptives as obscene, were backed by the most conservative Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church. Ingersoll had no particular interest in the obscenity issue per se—he was personally repelled by images that degraded women—but he argued that the Comstock Laws were being used to persecute editors and writers of publications like the
Truth Seeker
for unpopular antireligious and political views under the guise of obscenity. Since Ingersoll believed that women could be truly liberated only when science enabled them to decide whether to have children, he could hardly have considered advertisements for (largely ineffective) contraceptives obscene.
*
Comstock not only hounded the editors of freethought publications but played a personal role in the use of the law to prevent distribution of Whitman's
Leaves of Grass
for several decades after Whitman first self-published it
in 1855. Ingersoll had long considered Whitman the greatest American poet and viewed the government-sponsored campaign to obstruct distribution of his work as a disgraceful example of religious interference, backed by the state, with liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment.