Washington [453]
Among those trying to place the French Revolution squarely in the American grain, perhaps none was more influential than Thomas Paine. In 1791 he published The Rights of Man as a response to Edmund Burke’s influential denunciation, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke had condemned the royal family’s mistreatment and prophesied bloodshed to come. Paine, in contrast, portrayed events in France as reprising the spirit of 1776 and called for a written constitution, with an elected assembly and chief executive. Paine, who could be both arrogant and presumptuous, dedicated his polemic to Washington without first seeking his permission and published his screed in London on February 22, 1791—Washington’s birthday. Drawing further parallels to the American Revolution, Paine informed Washington that he wanted to “make a cheap edition, just sufficient to bring in the price of the printing and paper, as I did by Common Sense.”23
Thomas Jefferson helped to arrange for publication of The Rights of Man in Philadelphia, telling the printer that he was “extremely pleased to find it will be reprinted here and that something is at length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.”24 Jefferson professed amazement when the printer used this letter as a preface to Paine’s work. Since Jefferson’s reference to “political heresies” was widely construed as a swipe at the supposed crypto-monarchism of John Adams’s treatise Discourses on Davila, it created a brouhaha. The mortified Jefferson wrote a long, repentant letter to Washington, claiming that his letter had been used without permission and denying any intention to vilify the vice president. Washington’s failure to acknowledge Jefferson’s apology suggests his silent fury. Jefferson’s own letters to Paine reflect his fear of highly placed monarchists in Washington’s administration who were “preaching up and panting after an English constitution of king, lords, and commons and whose heads are itching for crowns, coronets, and mitres.”25
Because of the controversy over Paine’s work, Washington responded to his letter with a blandly evasive reply. He pleaded the pressing duties of office and his imminent return to Mount Vernon as reasons why he couldn’t react in detail: “Let it suffice, therefore, at this time to say that I rejoice in the information of your personal prosperity and . . . that it is the first wish of my heart that the enlightened policy of the present age may diffuse to all men those blessings to which they are entitled and lay the foundation of happiness for future generations.”26 Washington had a matchless talent for skirting unwanted controversies.
In June 1791 King Louis XVI and the royal family fled Paris in disguise—the king dressed as a valet, the queen as the children’s governess—only to be stopped and arrested by Lafayette’s National Guard at Varennes, northeast of Paris. Although Lafayette duly informed the king and queen that the National Assembly had placed them under a full-time guard, he was nonetheless denounced as a traitor on the Paris streets, and Danton accused him of engineering the royal family’s escape. The underground press in France went so far