Letter Addressed to the Abbé Raynal on the Affairs of North-America

Nine years after this letter appeared, the title page of Rights of Man still introduced Thomas Paine as the author of Common Sense and of the letter to the Abbé Raynal. Raynal, a French churchman and historian read across Europe, had written an account of the American Revolution. In 1781 it came out in London, in French and in English, from a copy obtained, Paine believed, without Raynal's consent; the English version was soon reprinted in Philadelphia. Its readers learned that the Americans had broken with Britain for no great cause: no martyrs, no laws trampled, only a dispute over whether Parliament might levy a small tax. Paine answered in 1782 with a letter of nearly eighty pages, printed in Philadelphia by Melchior Steiner. He began by condemning the piracy, on the ground that an author's work is his own property until he chooses to publish it. On the tea duty itself, he agreed that the sum was trivial, and that was the point: Parliament kept the tax as a test of its claim to make laws for the colonies on any matter it chose, and the Americans resisted the claim, not the amount. Raynal had also written that Congress refused Britain's peace offers in 1778 because it knew of the new alliance with France; Paine, who had been secretary to Congress's committee for foreign affairs at the time, showed that the refusal came on 22 April, ten days before news of the treaty reached Congress. The longer closing part becomes an essay on what the Revolution had changed. Commerce and science, Paine argued, were drawing nations out of inherited prejudice, and an alliance between a republic and a monarchy that had been its enemy showed how fast old hatreds could be unlearned. French translations of the letter soon followed.