THOMAS PAINE

Thomas Paine was born in the village of Thetford in Norfolk, England, on January ₂₉, ₁₇₃₇, the son of Joseph Pain, a Quaker who made stays for women’s corsets, and Frances Cocke, the daughter of a lawyer. Tom attended the village grammar school, where he showed an early talent for poetry, mathematics, and the natural sciences. At age thirteen he was put to work as an apprentice to his father. Upon the outbreak of the Seven Years War with France in 1756, he ran off to sea, enlisting as a crewman on a privateer; his father stopped him from boarding that ship, but he served as a crewman on another for six months, returning to England in August 1757. While in London he pursued his interest in natural science, attending lectures at the Royal Society.

Paine returned to staymaking, first in Dover, then, in 1759, setting up his own business in Sandwich, Kent. Subsequently he secured a position as an excise officer in Lincolnshire, collecting taxes from merchants and smugglers, but was discharged in 1765. He returned to staymaking again briefly, then in ₁₇66 took a teaching position in London for a few months. In May of that year he was readmitted into the Excise Service and in early ₁₇68 was appointed as an excise officer at Lewes, Sussex, where he remained for the next six years. He found his political voice as a representative for his fellow excise officers in their petition to Parliament for better wages, writing The Case of the Officers of Excise (₁₇₇₂); he spent several months in London distributing copies of his pamphlet, to no avail. During his time there he was admitted into a distinguished circle of intellectuals and political thinkers that included English historian Edward Gibbon and Benjamin Franklin, America’s colonial agent for Pennsylvania.

In ₁₇₇₄ Paine was again dismissed from the excise service. At age thirty-seven, he had failed at every enterprise and was virtually penniless. At Franklin’s urging, and with his letter of recommendation, Paine immigrated to Philadelphia in the fall of 1774. Arriving in the thick of political tumult, he found work as an editor at the Pennsylvania Magazine and wrote articles condemning British tyranny. Impassioned by the revolutionary zeal around him and the outbreak of war, Paine published Common Sense in January 1776 to enormous popularity. The pamphlet’s clear and powerful argument for American independence from Great Britain sounded the revolutionary call as the voice of the common citizen. He followed with the first of his American Crisis Papers (1776-1783). “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he began, in an address so inspiring that General George Washington had it read to his troops. But Paine was not merely a propagandist; his articles were brilliantly reasoned, and he gained the ear of the Revolutionary leadership. A prolific writer, he published influential essays on political theory, the war effort, foreign affairs, taxes, and monetary policy. His influence grew as the war progressed, and he was rewarded upon victory with secretarial posts in the new government.

In 1787 Paine traveled to Europe, sometimes acting as an unofficial envoy of the American government. The bloody outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 shocked the monarchy and many progressive reformers in Britain, but Paine vigorously defended it. In 1791 he published the first part of Rights of Man (the second appeared in 1792), articulating the political necessity of the revolution in France and calling for the English to establish a constitutional democracy. The pamphlet was wildly successful; in response, in May 1792 the English government charged Paine with seditious libel and issued a warrant for his arrest. Before his case came to trial Paine left for France, never to return to England, where he was tried and convicted of treason in absentia.

Paine was made an honorary delegate to the National Convention and helped frame a new French constitution. He did not escape the Reign of Terror led by Maximilien Robespierre; in 1793 Paine was arrested as an enemy of France and sentenced to death. Shortly before his imprisonment, he finished writing the first part of The Age of Reason (1794), an essay attacking organized religion and the Bible. He spent ten months in prison until James Monroe, the American minister to France, secured his release in late 1794. Seriously ill, he stayed at Monroe’s home to recuperate and finished writing the second part of The Age of Reason (₁₇₉6).

Paine remained in France for seven more years, fearing arrest or seizure should he attempt a return to England or America. In 1797 he published his last major work, Agrarian Justice, and for the next few years attempted to advise Napoleon Bonaparte. But life abroad had become less and less tenable, and when Paine’s old friend Thomas Jefferson, newly elected president of the United States, offered him safe passage on an American warship, he returned to his adopted country in ₁8₀₂.

But America had changed since he had left in 1787. Political partisanship was rife. And Paine found that through a number of his radical views—his attack on religion with The Age of Reason, in particular—he had alienated many of his former friends. Common Sense and the climate in which it had been written seemed all but forgotten. Without family or many close friends and in poor health, he spent his remaining years in New York City and at his farm in New Rochelle, continuing his polemical writing nonetheless. Thomas Paine died on June 8, 1809.