In 1802, the political writer Henry Redhead Yorke went looking for Thomas Paine in Paris. Asking after the erstwhile celebrity revolutionary in a bookstore, he was upbraided by a chorus of four individuals cursing the English American radical. They had just heard troubling news out of the Caribbean: the French attempt to master the uprising of formerly enslaved Blacks in their colony of Saint-Domingue (soon to be a fully independent Haiti) was not going well. Upon hearing the discredited revolutionary’s name, the four affronted French spat that Paine was a villain, a bandit, and a rascal, angrily “ascribing to him,” Yorke says, “the resistance which [General Charles] Leclerc [Napoleon’s brother-in-law] had experienced from the Negroes of St. Domingo.” This is the story as Yorke tells it in his Letters from France in 1802 (published in book form in 1804).
A bit of background. France in 1802 was a vastly different place than the revolutionary France of 1789, or even the rousing years of 1791–92, when Paine’s two-part Rights of Man was published. Those heady days had devolved into the Terror and then military rule. By the time of Yorke’s visit, France was headed by three consuls. The First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, was in the process of aggressively consolidating power. It was a culturally and politically reactionary time as soon-to-be-Emperor Napoleon cracked down on free political discourse. In the words of historian François Furet, “Deep-rooted opinion in the country, exhausted after so many years of revolutionary talk, no longer took any interest in political liberty.” Yorke himself is a tricky figure: the son of a Barbudan freedwoman and an English plantation owner, he met Paine in the early 1790s as a radical. Imprisonment for sedition changed Yorke’s politics: he publicly recanted his support for France and its revolution, and in his 1804 preface to the Letters falls over himself to display his remediated English loyalism. As the originator of this anecdote linking Paine to the events in Saint-Domingue, Yorke presents himself as far from an unbiased source, although his continued admiration for Paine shines through.
At all events, those who were still standing in the France of ’02 had not survived the previous decade by being outspoken radical agitators. Frustrated by challenges to French supremacy in the Caribbean, the four good bourgeois citizens Yorke quotes do their jingoistic duty by cursing Paine. But proslavery forces who blamed rights-of-man advocates for the uprising in Saint-Domingue were not new in ’02. Thanks to radicals like Paine, the argument went, Black people were misled into thinking that they had rights too. In fact, these proslavery voices had a point: the Haitian rebels were claiming the rights of man for themselves! But white liberals like Paine never made that connection. Indeed, they resolutely resisted crossing the color line when talking of the rights of man.
Yorke does not indicate that Paine himself said anything about the Haitian Revolution. But a funny thing happened to this story on its way to us. In 1892, radical Virginia abolitionist Moncure Conway made Paine over into an antislavery crusader. To do this, he attributed to Paine some antislavery pieces that he did not write. He also fudged Yorke’s anecdote. Whereas Yorke had simply said that the grumpy French nationalists “ascrib[ed] . . . the resistance” of Saint-Domingue’s formerly enslaved people to Paine—an intrinsically questionable proposition—Conway says that what they “ascribed” to him was “his espousal of the rights of the [N]egroes of St. Domingo.” Somehow, the ascribing swelled considerably between 1802 and 1892, making Paine into a kind of antiracist hero.
As the saying goes: Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. In 1974, historian and biographer David Freeman Hawke told the story as Paine being “hissed by Frenchmen for his praise of the free blacks of Santo Domingo.” Espousal of rights, meet praise. Historian Pauline Maier then inverted Hawke, stating that Paine “cheered, as many one-time American revolutionaries did not, for Toussaint L’Ouverture and the black republic of revolutionary Haiti.” Inspirational radical historian and Paine biographer Harvey Kaye also reveled in Paine’s “cheer[s].” The transubstantiation of Paine into a civil rights icon then took another step when historian and Paine scholar Gregory Claeys added some advocacy for the “slaves fleeing Santo Domingo,” for which there is no available evidence (more’s the pity). Claeys gestures to an important book on Paine, Alfred Owen Aldridge’s Man of Reason (1960). Interestingly, Aldridge casts some warranted suspicion on Yorke’s narrative reliability, but unfortunately, his book does not contain the evidence for Claeys’s claim. More recently, the huzzahs of Paine’s cheering have been toned down into “support” for and “careful sympathy with the slave rebellion,” in the words of scholars Miriam Touba and Emma Macleod respectively. Would that it were so.
The prospect of the uncompromisingly radical firebrand Thomas Paine standing with the Black rebels of Haiti is rousing indeed, but I would argue that the original story as Yorke tells it has much less to do with Thomas Paine than with popular opinion about the loss of French colonies, the prospect of a successful uprising of Black subalterns against their white would-be overlords, the embroilment of the French military in the Caribbean, and (not least) the fall from grace of the surviving rabble rousers from the previous decade. We might also postulate some ritualistic tub-thumping on behalf of the powerful First Consul’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc. In any event, turning Yorke’s anecdote of blimpish Parisians jeering Paine into “Paine cheers Haitians” would be rather like a twenty-third-century historian ascribing to Kamala Harris the espousal of radical communitarian ideals based on the evidence of a Trump voter’s vilification of her as a communist.
The Republic of Haiti was declared on January 1, 1804. Paine never cheered or praised it, nor indeed did he even name it properly, calling it “Domingo” till he died in 1809. There is no mention of the great Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture in his extant writings. He did say in a private letter of 1791 that the uprising was “the natural consequence of Slavery and must be expected everywhere.” Does this sound like cheering? Well, in the same letter he finds the event “distressing,” and describes the insurgency thus: “The Negroes are enraged at the opposition made to their relief and are determined, if not to relieve themselves[,] to punish their enemies.” Praise this ain’t.
The transformation of Yorke’s 1802 anecdote obviously tells us a great deal about how we want to remember Thomas Paine. Perhaps it is a case study in how great figures can be retroactively made to serve in worthy causes from which they sadly remained absent. It also tells us more than we may want to know about how complex and troublingly racialized history can get simplified and romanticized in the service of telling a good story.
Bibliography
Aldridge, Alfred Owen. Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine. London: Cresset Press, 1960.
Claeys, Gregory. Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
Conway, Moncure. The Life of Thomas Paine. 2 volumes. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892.
Furet, François. The French Revolution 1770–1814. Translated by Antonia Nevill. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Goodrich, Amanda. Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical: Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1772–1813. London: Routledge, 2019.
Hawke, David Freeman. Paine. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Kaye, Harvey J. Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.
Macleod, Emma. “Thomas Paine and Jeffersonian America.” In Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions, edited by Simon P. Newman and Peter S. Onuf. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013.
Maier, Pauline. “No Sunshine Patriot.” Review of John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life. The New York Times Book Review, March 12, 1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/12/books/no-sunshine-patriot.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap
Paine, Thomas. “To William Short (November 2, 1791).” In The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, edited by Philip Foner. New York: The Citadel Press, 1969.
Touba, Miriam. “Paine’s Anti-Slavery Legacy: Some Additional Considerations.” 2012. The Thomas Paine National Historical Association, https://www.thomaspaine.org/pages/resources/touba-paine-antislavery.html, 2023.
Yorke, Henry Redhead. Letters from France, in 1802. 2 vols. London, 1804.
Anthony Dean Rizzuto teaches in the English Department at Sonoma State University in California. He is the author of “Paine and Race: Ideologies of Racial Liberalism and Settler Colonialism in the Founding of the United States” (EAS, Spring 2025).
Read Rizzuto’s article “Paine and Race: Ideologies of Racial Liberalism and Settler Colonialism in the Founding of the United States“ in EAS’s Spring 2025 issue.