"Tom Paine's America" explores the vibrant, transatlantic
traffic in people, ideas, and texts that profoundly shaped American
political debate in the 1790s. In 1789, when the Federal
Constitution was ratified, "democracy" was a controversial term
that very few Americans used to describe their new political
system. That changed when the French Revolution--and the wave of
democratic radicalism that it touched off around the Atlantic
World--inspired a growing number of Americans to imagine and
advocate for a wide range of political and social reforms that they
proudly called "democratic."
One of the figureheads of this new international movement was
Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense. Although Paine spent the
1790s in Europe, his increasingly radical political writings from
that decade were wildly popular in America. A cohort of democratic
printers, newspaper editors, and booksellers stoked the fires of
American politics by importing a flood of information and ideas
from revolutionary Europe. Inspired by what they were learning from
their contemporaries around the world, the evolving democratic
opposition in America pushed their fellow citizens to consider a
wide range of radical ideas regarding racial equality, economic
justice, cosmopolitan conceptions of citizenship, and the
construction of more literally democratic polities.
In Europe such ideas quickly fell victim to a
counter-Revolutionary backlash that defined Painite democracy as
dangerous Jacobinism, and the story was much the same in America's
late 1790s. The Democratic Party that won the national election of
1800 was, ironically, the beneficiary of this backlash; for they
were able to position themselves as the advocates of a more
moderate, safe vision of democracy that differentiated itself from
the supposedly aristocratic Federalists to their right and the
dangerously democratic Painite Jacobins to their left.
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