66 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periodsmajor work, The Age of Reason (1794–1795), led to further notoriety and unpopu-
larity in his adoptive homeplace. In The Age of Reason, Paine attacks the irrationality
of religion and, in particular, Christianity. In the name of reason, he denies the truth
of such primary tenets of the Christian faith as the Virgin Birth, the Holy Trinity,
miracles and revelation, and the divinity and resurrection of Jesus. Paine did not
deny the existence of “one God” and, like Franklin, he insisted that, as he put it,
“religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make
our fellow-creatures happy.” But that did not enable him to escape the anger of many
Americans: he was vilified in papers and on pulpits as a threat to both Christian and
democratic faiths. “My own mind is my own church,” Paine insisted in The Age of
Reason. “The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human
speech,” he added; “it preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God
reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.” Such impeccably deis-
tic sentiments were entirely consistent with all that Paine had ever written; they were
marked by his customary belief in the determining importance of reason and his
customary use of maxim, epigram, and antithesis to get his point across. There was
little here that Franklin or many of the other founding fathers of the republic would
have found fault with: but times had changed and, in any event, such an unrestrained
and unambiguous assault on Christian mystery would have been likely to provoke a
backlash in early America at any time. Not surprisingly, Paine lived his last few years
in obscurity.
Obscurity was never to be the fate of Thomas Jefferson (1724–1826). A person of
eclectic interests – and, in that, the inheritor of a tradition previously best illustrated
by William Byrd of Westover – Jefferson’s very myriad-mindedness has led to quite
contradictory interpretations of both his aims and his achievement. What is incon-
testable, however, is the central part he played in the formation of America as a
nation. His A Summary View of the Rights of British America, for example, published
in 1774, was immensely influential. In it, Jefferson argued that Americans had effec-
tively freed themselves from British authority by exercising “a right which nature has
given to all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has
placed them.” “God, who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” Jefferson
insisted. “Kings are servants, not the proprietors of the people.” Such stirring words
earned him a place, in 1776, on the committee assigned the task of drafting the
Declaration of Independence. And, if any one person can be called the author of that
Declaration, it is undoubtedly Jefferson. This founding document of the American
nation enshrines the beliefs that Jefferson shared with so many other major figures
of the Enlightenment: that “all men are created equal,” that they are endowed with
certain “inalienable rights” and notably the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness”; and that “to secure those rights, governments are instituted among
men.” Like many great American documents, the Declaration of Independence
describes an idea of the nation, an ideal or possibility against which its actual social
practices can and must be measured – and, it might well be, found wanting.
Jefferson relied on the principle of natural rights and the argumentative tool of
reason to construct a blueprint of the American nation. When it came to filling inGGray_c01.indd 66ray_c 01 .indd 66 8 8/1/2011 7:54:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 56 AM