Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was born on February 9, 1737, in Thetford, a market town in Norfolk, England. His father, Joseph Pain, was a Quaker who made stays, the stiffened cords used in corsets, and his mother, Frances Cocke, belonged to the Church of England ^[1]. The mixed religious household left a mark: Paine absorbed the Quaker suspicion of pomp and hierarchy while never formally joining the Society of Friends.

He attended Thetford Grammar School from about age seven until twelve, when his father withdrew him to learn the family trade ^[2]. The apprenticeship did not hold him. As a young man he briefly went to sea aboard a privateer during the Seven Years' War, then drifted through a series of occupations in southern England: staymaker, schoolteacher, tobacconist, and excise officer collecting duties on liquor and tobacco ^[1].

His first marriage, to Mary Lambert in 1759, ended within a year when she died, apparently in childbirth. A second marriage, to Elizabeth Ollive in 1771, dissolved by formal separation in 1774 ^[2]. In Lewes, Sussex, where he worked as an exciseman, Paine joined a debating club at the White Hart inn and discovered a talent for argument. In 1772 he wrote his first political pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, petitioning Parliament for better pay for excise officers. The campaign failed, and Paine was dismissed from the service in 1774 ^[1].

In London, Paine met Benjamin Franklin, then acting as a colonial agent, who supplied him with letters of introduction to contacts in Philadelphia ^[3]. Paine sailed for America in late 1774, arriving so ill with typhus that he had to be carried off the ship. He was thirty-seven years old, twice separated from wives, bankrupt, and unknown.

Philadelphia changed his fortunes quickly. Within months he was editing the Pennsylvania Magazine, where he wrote on subjects ranging from science to social reform ^[3]. An essay published in 1775 under a pseudonym attacked the slave trade, an early sign of the moral directness that would define his career. When fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Paine concluded that reconciliation with Britain was impossible and that the colonies should separate entirely ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Thomas Paine before 1776 would have found a failed exciseman and a minor magazine editor. Within a year he became the most widely read political writer in the Atlantic world.

On January 10, 1776, Paine published Common Sense anonymously in Philadelphia ^[1]. The pamphlet made two arguments with unusual force: that monarchy itself was an absurd and corrupt institution, and that America gained nothing from its connection to Britain. He wrote in blunt, biblical, conversational English rather than the classical style favored by educated pamphleteers, and the effect was electric. The work went through dozens of printings and sold on a scale no previous American publication had approached, with estimates commonly running to 100,000 copies or more within the first year in a population of under three million ^[2]. Historians have long credited it with shifting public opinion toward independence in the months before the Declaration was adopted in July 1776 ^[4].

Paine donated his share of the profits to the revolutionary cause and enlisted, serving as an aide to General Nathanael Greene ^[3]. During the bleak retreat across New Jersey in December 1776, he began a series of essays called The American Crisis. The first number opened with the words "These are the times that try men's souls," and George Washington had it read to his troops before the crossing of the Delaware and the attack on Trenton ^[1]. Thirteen Crisis papers appeared over the course of the war, steadying morale at its lowest points.

Congress appointed him secretary to its Committee for Foreign Affairs in 1777, a post he lost in 1779 after he publicly disclosed confidential details of negotiations with France during a dispute with the diplomat Silas Deane ^[2]. He later served as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly and, in 1781, traveled to France with John Laurens on a successful mission to secure money and supplies for the war effort ^[3].

After the war Paine turned to engineering, designing a single-span iron bridge, and in 1787 he crossed the Atlantic to promote it in England and France ^[2]. Politics soon reclaimed him. When Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, condemning the upheaval in Paris, Paine answered with Rights of Man, issued in two parts in 1791 and 1792 ^[1]. The book defended the French Revolution, argued that each generation had the right to remake its government, and in the second part sketched startlingly modern proposals: progressive taxation, public support for the poor and elderly, and funds for education ^[4].

Rights of Man sold in vast numbers among artisans and laborers, and the British government responded by charging Paine with seditious libel. He escaped to France in September 1792, was tried in absentia, and was outlawed from Britain ^[2]. The French, meanwhile, had made him an honorary citizen and elected him to the National Convention for Pas-de-Calais, despite his inability to speak French ^[3].

In the Convention he aligned with the moderate Girondins and argued against executing Louis XVI, proposing exile to America instead. When the Jacobins consolidated power, that stance became dangerous. Paine was arrested in December 1793 and held in the Luxembourg prison for roughly ten months ^[1]. He later claimed he survived the Terror partly through luck: a chalk mark meant to flag his cell door for execution was made while the door stood open, so it faced inward when closed. The American minister James Monroe secured his release in November 1794 ^[3].

Just before his arrest Paine had completed the first part of The Age of Reason, a work he finished in prison and afterward. In it he attacked organized religion and the claim that the Bible was divine revelation, while affirming his own deist belief in a creator God known through nature and reason ^[1]. The book was written for a popular audience, which made it far more alarming to the devout than the drawing-room deism of earlier philosophers. It brought him lasting notoriety, and in both Britain and America he was widely denounced as an atheist, a label he explicitly rejected ^[4].

He remained productive in Paris. Agrarian Justice, published in 1797, argued that landownership deprived people of their natural inheritance in the earth and proposed a fund, financed by an inheritance tax on land, to pay every citizen a lump sum at adulthood and a pension in old age ^[4]. Scholars of social policy have pointed to the essay as an early ancestor of ideas about universal basic capital and state pensions.

Paine also wrote an open letter to George Washington in 1796, bitterly accusing the president of abandoning him during his imprisonment. The attack on the most revered man in America cost Paine much of his remaining goodwill in the United States ^[2].

At the invitation of President Thomas Jefferson, Paine returned to America in 1802 after fifteen years abroad ^[1]. The country he found was not the one he had helped create in print. His assault on Christianity in The Age of Reason and his letter against Washington had made him a pariah in many circles. Newspapers abused him, old allies kept their distance, and in 1806 he was even denied the right to vote in New Rochelle, New York, on the claim that he was not an American citizen ^[2].

He spent his last years between New York City and the farm in New Rochelle that the state had granted him in 1784 for his wartime services, living in poverty and declining health ^[3]. Thomas Paine died on June 8, 1809, at the age of seventy-two, in Greenwich Village in New York City. Only a handful of mourners attended his burial on the New Rochelle farm, since consecrated ground had been refused him ^[1].

Even his remains found no rest. In 1819 the English radical William Cobbett exhumed the bones and shipped them to England, intending a grand memorial that never materialized. After Cobbett's death the bones were dispersed, and their final whereabouts remain unknown ^[2].

Any honest account of Thomas Paine achievements must begin with reach. No other writer of his era spoke so directly to ordinary readers about the largest political questions, and none sold so widely. Common Sense helped convert a colonial protest into a movement for independence, Rights of Man carried democratic argument to British workshops, and Agrarian Justice anticipated the welfare state ^[4]. John Adams, no admirer, reportedly grumbled that the age might as well be called the Age of Paine, a remark historians cite as a measure of his influence ^[2].

His reputation took generations to recover from the religious controversy. Nineteenth-century freethinkers such as Robert Ingersoll championed him, and Theodore Roosevelt's dismissal of Paine as a "filthy little atheist" showed how durable the hostility remained ^[4]. The twentieth century brought rehabilitation: statues in Thetford, Paris, and Morristown, a national historical association founded in 1884, and steady scholarly attention, notably Eric Foner's 1976 study of Paine and revolutionary America ^[4].

Among the essential Thomas Paine facts is this: he took no copyright income from his greatest works, insisting that cheap editions mattered more than profit ^[3]. That choice kept him poor and kept his ideas in circulation. Every Thomas Paine biography returns to the same paradox, a man indispensable to two revolutions who died almost friendless, and whose plain sentences about rights, reason, and self-government still read as if addressed to the present.