ON A MILD SEPTEMBER DAY in 1790, Thomas Paine, the American revolutionary, stood before a 110-foot iron-arch bridge on Lisson Green, at the corner of Edgware Road and the new Marylebone Road on the outskirts of London. Over the course of the previous few months, Paine had overseen a crew of five workmen as they erected the structure out of cast-iron parts shipped from Yorkshire. It was a strange sight, a bridge spanning no waterway or gorge. But it represented a compelling vision, Paine’s plan for the enduring success of the new American republic.
Nothing remains of Paine’s bridge, and the Green has long since disappeared beneath council houses and the Marylebone Flyover, an elevated extension of the A40 roadway. You can hardly imagine that the place was once a way station for weary travelers or that it served as a transit point for herdsman moving sheep, pigs, and cattle east, along Marylebone Road (at the time known as New Road) to the Smithfield Market. But in 1790, the Green was one of the few places near central London suited to the display of an architectural marvel. Much of the city remained a warren of medieval roads, and although developers had begun incorporating open squares in Mayfair, Bloomsbury, and other Georgian neighborhoods, there was little chance the landowners and their genteel tenants would tolerate public spectacles undertaken by foreign visitors.
Lisson Green was a different kind of space. Some years before Paine began building his bridge, it had been the location of a white-paint manufactory, an enterprise whose emissions were rivaled only by the leather tanners’ for foulness. Now, with the ebb and flow of travelers, and its nearby entertainments, including the Yorkshire Stingo Pub and Lord’s Cricket Grounds, Lisson Green was ideally situated to display a new industrial-age marvel.1
Paine’s bridge was composed of hundreds of cast-iron bars fastened together to form a series of five parallel arches, the tops of which were linked by heavy wooden planks. The structure loomed above the ground like a whale’s arched back situated between two wooden platforms, which countered the downward force of the arch. At a distance, the low-slung structure—rising to a height of five feet at its peak—might have seemed part of the landscape. It emerged from the ground, as if a small segment of a full circle. The visible lattice of iron bars, joined together to form the structural arches, and the pedestrian railings were all that interrupted the pleasing geometry of the bridge.
For strollers on the Green, the purpose of the bridge was entirely ornamental. It crossed no river or stream. Nonetheless, through September of 1790, a steady stream of Londoners paid one shilling to traverse the bridge, walking its gentle incline to a rounded peak. From here, they gazed upon the Green and the tavern across the way. The easy descent of the bridge deposited visitors on the Green with the feeling of having barely left the ground.
Such was, in fact, the intent of its architect. In the eighteenth century, movement could rarely be described with adjectives like “gentle” and “easy.” Whether traveling by sea, inland waterway, or land, the risks to person and property were countless. This was especially true for travelers in Thomas Paine’s adopted home of Pennsylvania. The state’s hills, from the Alleghenies east, fed a river system that ultimately emptied into the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays. In summer and fall, those rivers were vital conduits for goods being shipped to Baltimore and Philadelphia. But in winter and spring, they became impassible torrents of water and ice.
Having established his reputation as the American Revolution’s most celebrated propagandist, Paine now hoped to free his fellow Pennsylvanians from these riverine hazards. Once his bridge was endorsed and adopted in the country of his birth, he would return to America and throw his span across the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia. That bridge would give rise to imitators, which would transform the Pennsylvania countryside and, ultimately, the whole of the United States from a welter of natural obstacles and commercial interruptions into a unified empire of liberty.
OF THE MANY ESSAYS Thomas Paine wrote, among the least known is “The Construction of Iron Bridges.” This brief history of Paine’s architectural career, written in 1803, was of no particular interest to his political followers, nor has it been to his many subsequent biographers. The essay after all has little to do with the radical critique of hereditary monarchy or the cult of natural rights for which Paine has been so justly celebrated. But it is a window into his world. Many of the luminaries in Paine’s circle were inventors. Paine’s friend Benjamin Franklin devised bifocals, the lightning rod, the glass armonica, and countless other devices. Another friend, Thomas Jefferson, invented an improved plow and a mechanism for copying letters. Some revolutionary leaders not known for their inventions devoted time to building things. George Washington often seems to have lavished as much attention on his house at Mount Vernon as on matters of state. From this vantage, Paine seems no different.
But Paine was different. Unlike so many of his American contemporaries, Paine had a narrow field of interests. He never showed any passion for art or philosophy. He claimed repeatedly to have learned little from books. He did have other mechanical interests. He attempted to invent a smokeless candle and later in life he contemplated a perpetual-motion machine driven by gunpowder. But neither of these consumed Paine in the way his bridge did. Indeed, far from a gentlemanly hobby, bridge architecture became a career for Paine. In his essay on iron bridges, he wrote that he had had every intention of devoting himself fully to architecture but was drawn away by events beyond his control.
The most disruptive of these was the 1790 publication by the British politician, and former friend of Paine, Edmund Burke, of Reflections on the Revolution in France. For Paine, Burke’s fierce denunciation of the course of events across the English Channel was about much more than France and its revolution; it was an attack on the political ideals on which his adopted country had been founded and on which a just future would depend. “The publication of this work of Mr. Burke,” Paine explained, “absurd in its principles and outrageous in its manner, drew me . . . from my bridge operations, and my time became employed in defending a system then established and operating in America and which I wished to see peaceably adopted in Europe.” The refutation of Burke became “more necessary,” for the moment, than the construction of the bridge.
Paine’s response to Burke, Rights of Man, the first part of which appeared in early 1791, earned him the admiration of a broad coalition of Atlantic radicals, from the United States to Ireland, England, France, and across much of the rest of Europe. Paine’s rejection of Burke’s antirevolutionary doctrine was so popular in France that in the early fall of 1792, after the appearance of the second part of Rights of Man, Paine was elected to serve in a new French constitutional convention.2
Paine made it clear to his correspondents that, even after fleeing England and enduring much revolutionary chaos in France, he intended to return to the United States to bridge the Schuylkill with an arch of iron. But his plans were derailed. The Wars of the French Revolution and America’s own reluctance to receive Paine made safe passage impossible. When Paine finally did return to the United States, in 1802, he found no supporters for his bridge and was forced to abandon architecture once and for all.3
IN SOME WAYS, PAINE’S architectural career is indicative of so much that has come to be known about him. Although he was among the American Revolution’s most vocal and radical proponents, and author of some of the most influential political pamphlets ever written, so much of what Paine stood for came to naught in his lifetime. His dream of an irresistible wave of democracy, spreading from America to Europe, and ultimately enveloping the world, came crashing down amid the wreckage of the French Revolution. His expectation that government by the people would bring an end to war, monarchy’s chosen tool of statecraft, was proven hopelessly naïve. His hatred of the most brutal and controversial labor system of his age, American chattel slavery, was met with only the most incremental adjustment of attitudes and law. His ambitious programs to alleviate human misery through more equitable systems of taxation would come nowhere near realization for decades, if not centuries. Like so many radical visionaries, Paine often seems more the man of ideas than of action, more the dreamer than the doer.
The perception is not just the work of hindsight. Many of Paine’s contemporaries regarded him as a hyperventilating crank. Gouverneur Morris, the New York attorney and statesman, dismissed Paine as “a mere adventurer from England, without fortune, without family or connections, ignorant even of grammar.” The idea that such a person could be responsible for some of the age’s most eloquent political statements was too much for some of Paine’s contemporaries to accept. John Adams, who came to despise Paine in the years after the French Revolution, wrote of him that “there can be no severer a satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief.” Paine’s enemies even attacked his architectural ideas. During a 1788 trip to Philadelphia, the liberal French politician Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville was told that not only was it “generally agreed” that Paine had plagiarized portions of his war-time cri de coeur, a series of essays entitled The American Crisis, but “he is also accused of having copied the plan of his iron bridge.”4
Paine himself had much to do with this hostility. He was flighty and impolitic, prone to drunken fits and debilitating personal grudges. Unlike so many of his equally well-known contemporaries, he never seemed to grasp the fundamental social truth of his age, namely that to gain the good graces of the powerful, it was necessary to flatter their sense of propriety and social superiority. At times, the democratic Paine was flagrantly oblivious to this mandate, all too prepared to arouse the fury of those very elite gentlemen who could do much to advance his causes.
In late 1778, during one of the most precarious moments of the American Revolutionary War, Paine publicly accused the American agent and merchant Silas Deane of improperly profiting from the sale of French arms and munitions. This kind of principled attack, so typical of Paine, would likely be little remembered but for its dangerous repercussions. In exposing Deane’s profiteering, Paine revealed a covert French alliance begun well before the formal Franco-American alliance of February 1778. The revelation compromised earlier diplomacy and became a terrible embarrassment for the French government. To Paine’s American detractors, the slip seemed to confirm his duplicity. Surely a sincere champion of American independence would never so clumsily imperil relations with America’s most important ally. Even to Paine’s friends, this kind of political ineptitude meant that when it came to delicate matters of state, he simply could not be trusted.
But he was to be reckoned with. John Adams confessed that his own age might just as well have been called “the age of Paine.” For better or worse, the immigrant Englishman, the son of a humble stay-maker, and the notorious pamphleteer would leave his mark. Paine’s begrudging contemporaries had to acknowledge that his writings struck a chord. Common Sense, Paine’s call for American independence from Britain, which appeared in 1776, sold tens of thousands of copies. Rights of Man, a dense work of politics and economics, sold thousands of copies, far outselling Burke’s Reflections. Had it not been for a deliberate British campaign to suppress the pamphlet, many tens of thousands more would surely have been sold.
Paine’s language resonated in his own age as it does in ours. From Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” From The American Crisis of December 23, 1776: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Thomas Jefferson described Paine’s gifts best when he wrote that “no writer has exceeded Paine in ease and familiarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language.”5 Paine wrote for the masses and he did so with success known by no other political writer until, perhaps, Karl Marx.
To his many critics, Paine’s popularity merely confirmed his reputation as a revolutionary gadfly. It is all good and well to assail an old world of kings and tyrants, to lament the failings of the British government, and to deride the arrogance and superficiality of the rich and powerful. But where was Paine, his detractors always asked, when the time came to build the new world so vividly imagined in his writings? As John Adams said of Paine, and as Paine’s career as pamphleteer might suggest, he had “a better hand at pulling down than building.”6
I HAVE COME to know a different Thomas Paine. The Paine I know was as committed to building a new world as to tearing down an old one. This Thomas Paine emerged only after I came to see that his political thought and his architecture were of a piece. They reflected the same capacious revolutionary ideology. It took me some time to find this Paine. After years of reading his writings and following his life story, I began to wonder why, at the height of his literary powers, Paine turned to architecture. What I came to see was that this turn was not an abrupt life change for Paine. It was a logical step forward for a man committed to the causes of democracy and liberty.
Free societies, Paine believed, would work only insofar as their citizens could communicate with one another. In the United States, this assumption became a source of intense political disagreement during the debates over a new federal constitution in 1787 and 1788. Opponents of the Constitution doubted that so vast a country could bind together its disparate parts. Free inhabitants of a large territory would inevitably seek to govern themselves without the intrusions of distant authorities. As one anonymous opponent of the Constitution wrote, “History furnishes no example of a free republic, anything like the extent of the United States.”7 The only way America’s far-flung parts could be bound together into a single political community was with the instruments of tyranny. But even these would ultimately fail, as the examples of the Roman Empire and Britain’s own empire in America made all too plain.
For James Madison, the political visionary behind the new constitution, an American empire would be different. Infrastructure and communications would make size irrelevant. “The intercourse throughout the union,” he assured skeptics, “will be daily facilitated by new improvements,” by which Madison meant bridges, roads, canals, dredged rivers, and other arteries of connection and commerce. As long as Americans could overcome barriers to communications, whether the natural ones of threatening weather and rushing rivers or the human-made ones of faction and party, there was every reason to be optimistic about the prospects of even so sprawling a republic as the United States. These are precisely the ideals that compelled Paine to devote himself to something as prosaic as an iron bridge.8
In Paine’s lifetime, these ideals went largely unrealized. The first permanent bridge would be built across the Schuylkill before he died, but it was a bridge that entirely ignored the architectural principles Paine advocated. The National Road and the Erie Canal, the early American republic’s two greatest internal improvements, were begun in 1811 and 1817, respectively, well after Paine’s death. These extraordinary public works, along with hundreds of others less well-known, drew the country together in a way that even Paine could never have imagined. Time and again, Europeans traveling in the United States marveled at the nation’s capacity to create new arteries of commerce and communications. Alexis de Tocqueville, the celebrated French student of American democracy, was stunned by all the roads, bridges, and canals he saw while traveling through the country in 1831. Regarding these “means of carrying rapidly from place to place the produce of industry and of thought,” he remarked,
I do not pretend to have made the discovery that they served the prosperity of a people. That’s a truth universally felt and recognized. I say only that America makes you put your finger on this truth, that it throws the fact more in relief than any other country in the world, and that it is impossible to travel through the union without becoming convinced, not through argument but by the witness of all the senses, that the most powerful, infallible way of increasing the prosperity of a country is to favor by all possible means a free intercourse among its inhabitants.9
Tocqueville’s sense of American prosperity may have been exaggerated, but his sense of America’s capacity to draw together its widely scattered continental populace was not. America’s internal improvements were astonishing even to this Frenchman, whose country was celebrated the world over for the quality and extent of its roads and bridges. And his conclusion that that capacity was a foundation of American democracy would have entirely confirmed an ideal Paine championed decades earlier.
Paine’s faith in the unifying powers of internal improvements reflected the optimism of his revolutionary age. He never grasped, as Tocqueville did decades later, that even with these advances the United States could become deeply and catastrophically divided. Paine understood sectional division in a more local sense. It was an issue for the state of Pennsylvania, which had been divided since the colonial era between an alienated and underrepresented western population and an older, more prominent eastern one. In drawing together the state’s sections, Paine believed, iron bridges would do much to address these divisions. A similar process, he assumed, would follow in other states. Here Paine’s thinking bears a utopian cast. But, as I hope the following pages make clear, that utopianism is really only evident with hindsight. Paine’s own perception was that he was offering a concrete, practical solution to a serious political threat.
AS A PRODUCT of the European enlightenment and its neoclassical habits of mind, Thomas Paine admired symmetry. Whether in governments or bridges, balance and rational order were the ultimate tests of worth. Paine’s bridge would have all the grace and balance of a small segment of a large circle. Government at its best would express a similar aesthetic balance. Its size and complexity would be scaled to the needs of the governed, not the interests of officeholders. To Paine, the ultimate insult to this natural law of politics was the British empire, a governing instrument whose form defied all reason. As Paine remarked in Common Sense, “there is something absurd, in supposing a Continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet.”10
An alternative political order was being devised in Pennsylvania and its capital city, Philadelphia. In this new American republic, empire would take a felicitous turn toward symmetry and balance. And it would do so, Thomas Paine came to believe, with the help of his remarkable new invention.