* Dr. Franklin had these constitutions translated, and presented them in a finely bound volume to the King. According to Paine, who must have heard it from Franklin, Vergennes resisted their publication, but was obliged to give way to public demand. Paine could not allude to the effect of his own work, "Common Sense," which may have been the more effective because its argument against monarchy was omitted from the translation. But his enemies did not fail to credit his pen with the catastrophes in France. John Adams declares that the Constitution of Pennsylvania was ascribed wrongly to Franklin; it was written by Paine and three others; Turgot, Condorcet, and the Duke de la Rochefoucauld were enamored of it, and two of them "owed their final and fatal catastrophe to this blind love" (Letter to S. Perley, June 19, 1809). Whence Cheetham. dwelling on the enormity of the "single representative assembly," queries: "May not Paine's constitution of Pennsylvania have been the cause of the tyranny of Robespierre?"
And it goes without saying that it was not the reactionary America with which John Adams and Gouverneur Morris had familiarized Burke. "The Rights of Man" was the first exposition of the republicanism of Jefferson, Madison, and Edmund Randolph that ever appeared. And as this republicanism was just then in deadly struggle with reaction, the first storm raised by Paine's book occurred in America. It was known in America that Paine was about to beard the British lion in his den, and to expectant ears the roar was heard before its utterance.
"Paine's answer to Burke (writes Madison to Jefferson, May 1st) has not yet been received here [New York]. The moment it can be got, Freneau tells me, it will be published in Child's paper [_Daily Advertiser_], It is said that the pamphlet has been suppressed, and that the author withdrew to France before or immediately after its appearance. This may account for his not sending copies to his friends in this country."
Mr. Beckley, however, had by this time received a copy and loaned it to Jefferson, with a request that he would send it to J. B. Smith, whose brother, S. H. Smith, printed it with the following Preface:
"The following Extracts from a note accompanying a copy of this pamphlet for republication is so respectable a testing of its value, that the Printer hopes the distinguished writer will excuse its present appearance. It proceeds from a character equally eminent in the councils of America, and conversant in the affairs of France, from a long and recent residence at the Court of Versailles in the Diplomatic department; and at the same time that it does justice to the writings of Mr. Paine, it reflects honor on the source from which it flows by directing the mind to a contemplation of that Republican firmness and Democratic simplicity which endear their possessor to every friend of the Rights of Man.