* "Omitted Chapters of History Disclosed in the Life and Papers of Edmund Randolph," pp. 47, 60.
Paine contended that to the sovereignty of the Crown over all territories beyond limits of the thirteen provinces the United States had succeeded. This early assertion of the federal doctrine, enforced with great historical and legal learning, alienated from Paine some of his best Southern friends. The controversy did not end until some years later. After the peace, a proposal in the Virginia Legislature to present Paine with something for his services, was lost on account of this pamphlet.
* Of course this issue of State v. National sovereignty was adjourned to the future battle-field, where indeed it was not settled. Congress accepted Virginia's concession of the territory in question (March I, 1784), without conceding that it was a donation; it accepted some of Virginia's conditions, but refused others, which the State surrendered. A motion that this acceptance did not imply endorsement of Virginia's claim was lost, but the contrary was not affirmed. The issue was therefore settled only in Paine's pamphlet, which remains a document of paramount historical interest.
There was, of course, a rumor that Paine's pamphlet was a piece of paid advocacy. I remarked among the Lee MSS., at the University of Virginia, an unsigned scrap of paper saying he had been promised twelve thousand acres of western land. Such a promise could only have been made by the old Indiana, or Vandalia, Company, which was trying to revive its defeated claim for lands conveyed by the Indians in compensation for property they had destroyed. Their agent, Samuel Wharton, may have employed Paine's pen for some kind of work. But there is no faintest trace of advocacy in Paine's "Public Good." He simply maintains that the territories belong to the United States, and should be sold to pay the public debt,--a principle as fatal to the claim of a Company as to that of a State.
The students of history will soon be enriched by a "Life of Patrick Henry," by his grandson, William Wirt Henry, and a "Life of George Mason," by his descendant, Miss Rowland. In these works by competent hands important contributions will be made (as I have reason to know) to right knowledge of the subject dealt with by Paine in his "Public Good." It can here only be touched on; but in passing I may say that Virginia had good ground for resisting even the semblance of an assertion of sovereignty by a Congress representing only a military treaty between the colonies; and that Paine's doctrine confesses itself too idealistic and premature by the plea, with which his pamphlet closes, for the summoning of a "continental convention, for the purpose of forming a continental constitution, defining and describing the powers and authority of Congress."