Knoxville's journalism began with liberty for all
in mind
by Jack Neely
In 1791, before there was a church established in Knoxville, before there was a city government in place, before there was a courthouse or a jail, there was a newspaper called the Knoxville Gazette.
The Gazette's editor, Tennessee's first newspaper editor, was a 24-year-old printer from Boston named George Roulstone. Ambitious to be the first printer in the new territorial capital of Knoxville, he began the Knoxville Gazette in the better-established town of Rogersville several months before floating his printing presses down the Holston and hauling them up the bluffs to Knoxville.
It was a new country, full of possibilities. Roulstone might have published any number of interesting and useful articles. It would have been a great help to local historians if he had published a detailed account of the founding of a new territorial capital called Knoxville, or an interview with Gov. Blount, or a description of a night at Chisholm's Tavern.
But young Roulstone didn't do any of that. He inaugurated journalism in Tennessee by publishing what may have been the most inflammatory essay published anywhere that year. It was a long, book-length piece, ostensibly an analysis of the French Revolution, written by an Englishman charged with sedition, in exile in Revolutionary France. It would become, by some sources, the best-selling book of the 18th century. The author—and therefore the owner of the first byline in Tennessee journalism history—was Thomas Paine.
Paine was well known here. A sometime American, he had, 15 years earlier, exerted a tremendous influence on the American revolution, especially through his 1776 essay Common Sense. Roulstone thought it fitting to devote the first 16 issues of the biweekly Knoxville Gazette to the publication of Paine's The Rights of Man. Every issue for eight months, the serialized installments took up the entire first page of the four-page biweekly, and usually much of the second page.
Paine's essay begins as a rebuke of English statesman Edmund Burke's book, Reflections On the Revolution In France, a book which criticized that insurrection in its early days, and also defended the English aristocracy. In reaction to Burke's perspective, Paine's essay is largely a sympathetic account of the French Revolution, an event the first Knoxvillians followed closely and sometimes argued about. But Paine's "review" goes beyond Burke's specifics. The Rights of Man was a call for worldwide revolution—beginning with the overthrow of the English crown and aristocracy, and the establishment of a democratic European Congress, events which he seems to have expected to see in his own lifetime. Paine's essay contributed to his conviction, in absentia, of treason.
The Rights of Man also had strong implications about slavery, an institution much better known in Knoxville than the European aristocracy. While he addresses it only briefly in the essay, Paine makes it clear that there is no place for slavery in the new democratic world.
If Metro Pulse were to do the same thing the Gazette did in 1791-92, and publish The Rights of Man as a cover story, you can bet we'd get letters. Few Americans today would agree with everything in this essay passed around by the first adventurers in the taverns and stockades and flatboats of a region not yet called Tennessee. Liberals might be annoyed by Paine's admiration for low taxation, and the limitations in government that he implies. Conservatives would be troubled by his skepticism of patriotism, inheritance, and the self-perpetuating military. Both would probably be unsettled by his implication that the Constitution should be rewritten regularly to suit changing times.
Christians would be uncomfortable with his attacks on organized religion, specifically theirs, which he often dismissed as "superstition" and "priestcraft," as well as his insistence that all religions were more or less the same. Atheists would be alarmed by his repeated assertions that people have equal rights only because they were endowed with them by a creator. Paine, an Englishman writing in France, occasionally refers to "we people of America." He claimed to be an internationalist. "My country is the world," Paine wrote, "and my religion is to do good."
All of this appeared in the first issues of Knoxville's first newspaper. Following are some more excerpts of the essay that Tennesseans were reading about 211 years ago, from the brittle pages of the Knoxville Gazette:
On governments based on tradition
The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow.... When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered.... The circumstances of the world are continually changing, and the opinions of men change also; and as government is for the living, and not for the dead, it is the living only that has any right in it.
On Edmund Burke's romantic view of aristocracy
When we see a man dramatically lamenting in a publication intended to be believed, that 'The age of chivalry is gone!'...because the Quixote age of chivalry nonsense is gone, what opinion can we form of his judgment, or what regard can we pay to his facts?
On bloody dictatorships
Lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind.... It is over the lowest class of mankind that government by terror is intended to operate, and it is on them that it operates to the worst effect. They have sense enough to feel they are the objects aimed at; and they inflict in their turn the examples of terror they have been instructed to practise.
On the basis of equal rights
Every history of creation...however they may vary in their opinion or belief of certain particulars, all agree in establishing one point, the unity of man; by which I mean, that men are all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural right.... Every child born into the world must be considered as deriving his existence from God....
On aristocratic titles
The thing is perfectly harmless in itself; but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it.... It talks about its fine blue ribbon like a girl, and shows its new garter like a child.
On separating church and state
All religions are in their nature kind and benign, and united with principles of morality.... Like everything else, they had their beginning; and they proceeded by persuasion, exhortation, and example. How is it that they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant?... By engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called The Church Established By Law. It is a stranger, even from its birth, to any parent mother on which it is begotten, and whom in time it kicks out and destroys.... Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all law-religions, or religions established by law.
On the irreversible course of revolution
The opinions of men with respect to government are changing fast in all countries. The revolutions in America and France have thrown a beam of light over the world, which reaches into man. The enormous expense of governments [has] provoked people to think, by making them feel: and once the veil begins to rend, it admits not of repair. Ignorance is of a peculiar nature: and once disspelled, and it is impossible to re-establish it.... It has never been discovered how to make man unknow his knowledge, or unthink his thoughts.
On the mathematic properties of human rights
The rights of men in society are neither devisable, nor transferable, nor annihilable, but are descendable only; and it is not in the power of any generation to intercept finally, and cut off their descent. If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent.
On the usefulness of monarchs
If there existed a man so transcendently wise above all others that his wisdom was necessary to instruct a nation, some reason might be offered for monarchy; but...when we look around the world, and see that of all men in it, the race of kings are the most insignificant in capacity, our reason cannot fail to ask us: What are these men kept for?
If there is anything in monarchy which we people of America do not understand, I wish Mr. Burke would be so kind as to inform us. I see in America a government extending over a country ten times as large as England, and conducted with regularity for a fortieth part of the expense which government costs in England. If I ask a man in America if he wants a king, he retorts, and asks me if I take him for an idiot.... I see in America the generality of people living in a style of plenty unknown in monarchial countries; and I see that the principle of its government, which is that of the equal Rights of Man, is making a rapid progress in the world.
On the English government
The continual use of the word Constitution in the English parliament shows there is none; and that the whole is merely a form of Government without a Constitution, and constituting itself with what powers it pleases.
On taxation
The continual whine and lamenting the burden of taxes, however successfully it may be practised in mixed Governments, is inconsistent with the sense and spirit of a republic. If taxes are necessary, they are of course advantageous; but if they require an apology, the apology itself implies an impeachment. Why then is man thus imposed upon, or why does he impose upon himself?
On the inevitability of revolution
From the Revolutions in America and France, and the symptoms that have appeared in other countries, it is evident that the opinion of the world is changing with respect to systems of Government, and that revolutions are not within the compass of political calculations.... All the old Governments have received a shock from those that already appear, and which were once more improbable, and are a greater subject of wonder, than a general revolution in Europe would be now.
On the necessity of revolution
When we survey the wretched condition of man under the monarchial and hereditary systems of Government, dragged from his home by one power, or driven by another, and impoverished by taxes more than by enemies, it becomes evident that those systems are bad, and that a general revolution in the principle and construction of Governments is necessary.
On the purpose of politics
The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and impresciptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
On the military-industrial complex
War...easily furnishes the pretence of necessity for taxes and appointments to places and offices [and] becomes a principle part of the system of old Governments; and to establish any mode to abolish war...would be to take from such Government the most lucrative of its branches. The frivolous matters upon which war is made show the disposition and avidity of Governments to uphold the system of war.... As war is the system of Government on the old construction, the animosity which Nations reciprocally entertain is nothing more than what the policy of their Governments excites, to keep up the spirit of the system. Each Government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective Nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of man, but through the medium of a false system of Government.
On his times
From what we now see, nothing of reform in the political world ought to be held improbable. It is an age of Revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.
July 4, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 27
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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