Thomas Paine
January 10, 1776, 250 years ago: Thomas Paine publishes a pamphlet he titles Common Sense. However, in the words of François-Marie Arouet, the French philosopher known as Voltaire, whom Paine would have admired as a freethinker and an atheist -- and who, 2 years later, just before his death, would meet Paine's fellow Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin, in Paris -- is alleged to have said, "Common sense is not very common."
Paine was born on February 9, 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk, East Anglia, England. He trained as a corsetmaker, and opened a shop in Sandwich, Kent, south of London. He married, but both wife and child died in childbirth. He became an excise officer in Cornwall in England's West Country, then a schoolteacher in Lewes, Sussex, near the South Coast.
Lewes was a center of antimonarchy sentiment, and it was there, in 1771, that he began writing antimonarchy pamphlets. It's also where he married again, but they separated in 1774, and he never married after that, and is not known to have fathered any children that survived.
In September 1774, mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Commissioner of the Excise George Lewis Scott introduced him to Benjamin Franklin, who was there as a voice for colonial opposition to British colonial rule. Franklin recommended emigrating to America, and Paine arrived in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774, with letters of introduction from Franklin to his friends in his adopted hometown.
In March 1775, he became editor of Franklin's publication, the Pennsylvania Magazine. In it, he published articles opposing British rule of America, slavery, and the effect of religion in public life.
In April 1775, the War of the American Revolution broke out, and was getting more serious on January 10, 1776, when Paine's 47-page pamphlet, Common Sense, appeared, signed anonymously "by an Englishman." Paine's original title for the pamphlet was Plain Truth -- which, with considerable irony, later became the title of a Christian magazine -- but Paine's friend, the Philadelphia-based physician and pro-independence advocate Benjamin Rush, suggested Common Sense instead.
It was passed around and often read aloud in taverns, contributing significantly to spreading the idea of republicanism, bolstering enthusiasm for separation from Britain, and encouraging recruitment for the Continental Army.
Paine provided a new and convincing argument for independence by advocating a complete break with history. Common Sense was oriented to the future in a way that compelled the reader to make an immediate choice. It offered a solution for Americans disgusted with and alarmed at the threat of tyranny.
It was an immediate success, with Paine estimating it sold 100,000 copies in 3 months to the 2 million residents of the 13 colonies. During the course of the American Revolution, one biographer estimated a total of about 500,000 copies were sold, including unauthorized editions.
The June 29, 1776, issue of the Pennsylvania Evening Post contained a letter by Paine, signed "Publicus," in which he, aware of the Continental Congress' move toward independence -- he has long been rumored to have assisted Thomas Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence -- misspelled "Independence," but also suggested an official name for the new country:
The Declaration was approved on July 2, and published on July 4. On December 19, 1776, with the war going badly for the Continental Army, Paine published a new pamphlet, The American Crisis, to re-inspire patriotism in Americans:
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. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
General George Washington thought it would be effective enough to inspire his soldiers, so he read it aloud to them. Within a week, they crossed the Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, and won the Battle of Trenton. Within a few more days, they won the Battle of Princeton.
Paine returned to Britain in 1787, and wrote Rights of Man in 1791, to rebut critics of the French Revolution, particularly the Anglo-Irish conservative writer Edmund Burke.
The British government of Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger was worried by the possibility that the French Revolution might spread to Britain, and had begun suppressing works that espoused radical philosophies. Paine's work advocated the right of the people to overthrow their government and was therefore targeted with a writ for his arrest issued in early 1792.
Paine fled to France in September, despite not being able to speak French, but he was quickly elected to the French National Convention. While there, his authorship of Rights of Man led to a trial and conviction in absentia in England in 1792, for the crime of seditious libel.
The Girondins, the moderate faction in the Revolution, regarded him as an ally; consequently, the more radical Montagnards regarded him as an enemy. In December 1793, Paine was arrested, and taken to Luxembourg Prison in Paris. He completed the first part of The Age of Reason just before he was arrested.
He was released in November 1794, thanks to the efforts of the U.S. Minister to France, future President James Monroe. But Paine had already angered many of his allies with his attacks on both Christianity and Washington, now in his 2nd term as the nation's 1st President. He returned to the U.S. in 1802, but his attacks on religion led to him being ostracized, and when he died on June 8, 1809, in New York at the age of 72, only 6 people attended his funeral.
His reputation began to recover in the mid-19th Century, as the last remaining participants in the American Revolution died of old age. President Abraham Lincoln and scientist Thomas Edison both considered Paine to be a great influence on them. In 1884, his house and farm in New Rochelle, New York became the basis for the Thomas Paine Memorial, a National Historical Site.
In 1943, novelist Howard Fast wrote Citizen Tom Paine. In 1987, actor Richard Thomas adapted it into a one-man stage play. Paine has been played by Robert Vaughn in a 1974 installment of the TV anthology series Witness to Yesterday, Harvey Keitel in the 1982 film That Night in Varennes, Roger Reese in the 1996 PBS miniseries Liberty! The American Revolution, and was voiced by Nils Haaland in the animated PBS series Liberty's Kids in 2002.
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