Paine, Thomas

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Paine, Thomas

PAINE, THOMAS. (1737–1809). British author and revolutionary. Thomas Paine was born at Thetford, an inland Norfolk town, on 29 January 1737, the son of a Quaker stay maker and tenant farmer. He was later confirmed in the Church of England, his mother's faith, although his father forbade him to learn Latin and Greek when he entered the local grammar school at seven. He showed some ability at mathematics and literature and absorbed the seagoing stories of one of the masters, before leaving at eleven to be apprenticed to his father. Early in the Seven Years' War, when he was about twenty, he joined the privateer King of Prussia for one or possibly more voyages. At around this time he also worked for a London stay maker, thus combining the prim with the semi-piratical. In the spring of 1758 he was employed by a Dover stay maker, and in 1759 he set up on his own account in Sandwich. Here he seems to have become a Methodist lay preacher, at a time when Methodism was an evangelical movement within the Church of England. He married Mary Lambert in September and, when his business began to fail, moved with her to Margate where in 1760 she died in childbirth. In 1762, after training in Thetford, he entered the excise service only to be dismissed two years later for malpractice. He had to return to stay making until he was reinstated in 1766. While waiting for a posting he taught in two London schools, and in February 1768 he accepted an excise job in Lewes, Sussex. There, though a poor public speaker, he was prominent in the town debating society and wrote some poems and other literary pieces. He lodged at first in the High Street with the family of the innkeeper Samuel Ollive, with whom he set up a tobacco mill to supplement his excise pay. After Ollive died in 1769, he started a shop with Ollive's widow and in 1771 married her daughter, Elizabeth.

Up to this time he appears to have been some sort of Whig, but he began to move in a radical direction by writing his first political pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, which argued for higher salaries. Toward the end of 1772 he travelled up to London with a petition signed by three thousand excise men, and although his lobbying was ignored by both ministers and Parliament, he associated with Oliver Goldsmith, moved in scientific circles, and probably met Benjamin Franklin. He returned to Lewes in April 1773 to find his businesses in ruins. Twelve months later he was sacked by the excise board for neglect of duty and forced to sell the tobacco mill. In May he and Elizabeth parted, and in June their separation became formal. In October, with a letter of introduction from Franklin in his pocket, he took ship for America.

Soon after his arrival in Philadelphia on 30 November 1774, he met Franklin's son-in-law, Richard Bache, and went into partnership with the bookseller Robert Aitkin to found the Pennsylvania Magazine. One of Paine's contributions, an argument against slavery, led to a meeting with the physician Benjamin Rush, who in the autumn of 1775 encouraged Paine to write a pamphlet in favor of independence. Common Sense, "written by an Englishman," appeared in Philadelphia on 10 January 1776, price two shillings. It was unique in that it was written for an audience wider than the educated elite and in that it articulated radical notions already abroad but until then never so directly or plainly expressed. Paine argued that society, in its natural origins, was free and without government. As vice crept in laws, governments became a necessary evil at best, repressive tyrannies at worst. The earliest, most nearly natural, and least repressive form of government was republican, whereas monarchy was a later invention that enslaved the people. Paine claimed that in "the early ages of the world, according to the Scripture chronology there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars"; this was breathtakingly specious and misleading, but Paine, of course, was dealing in effects, not facts. Having established that monarchical Europe was corrupt and war-ridden, he went on to argue that even the British constitution was no more than a mongrel blend of republican freedoms with monarchical and aristocratic remnants. It was now America's divinely appointed destiny, her duty to the world, to break free of this old world corruption and establish a pure free republic. "O receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind!"

While hardly original, and assailable on many counts, this brilliant piece of propaganda reduced argument for independence to a formula anyone could understand. Appearing on the very day of news of the king's rejection of American petitions, it turned disappointment into outright hostility to monarchy, especially among artisans whose notion of a republic was quite different from that of grandees like Washington. Pirate editions appeared within three weeks, (120,000) copies of Paine's version alone were sold within three months, and total sales may have reached 500,000 in America and abroad. There were immediate counter-blasts from those who (like James Chalmers) opposed independence and those who (like John Adams) disliked Paine's kind of republic: a united republic with a single legislature elected on the widest possible franchise. As "The Forester," Paine found himself composing replies to these criticisms and becoming drawn into both local provincial politics and the politics of the Continental Congress. He may even have helped to draw up Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, passed by Congress on 4 July 1776.

A few days later, having committed himself to the war of words, Paine now tried to join in the shooting war with a company of Philadelphia volunteers marching to join the "flying camp," Washington's mobile strategic reserve, forming at Amboy, near New York. William Howe, of course, did not attack until late August, so Paine became a headquarters secretary. Even after Howe struck, like so many unfit flying camp soldiers Paine saw little or nothing of the front line. He became aide-de-camp to Nathanael Greene at Fort Lee, where most of the garrison was from flying camp units, and wrote propaganda reports, playing down major defeats, playing up minor successes, and explaining away Washington's blunders. He escaped across the Delaware in 1776 and returned to Philadelphia to find revolutionary morale in collapse. He immediately began writing a series of propaganda essays, starting with The American Crisis, brilliantly designed to stiffen rebel resolve in adversity. More practically, he became secretary first to a mission to the Susquehanna Indians and, beginning in March 1777, to the congressional committee on foreign affairs. In September, with Washington defeated at Brandywine and Howe's army at the gates of Philadelphia, Paine fled from the city and soon after became the Pennsylvania observer with Washington's army.

With France's entry into the war early in 1778, and with Congress's return to Philadelphia in June, Paine began to believe that victory was assured. In October he revived American Crisis number 6, shortly followed by number 7, to attack the Carlisle mission's peace proposals. His secretarial duties with the foreign affairs committee, while not demanding, and probably intended merely to provide him with a living, gave him an inflated idea of his political importance, which led him to accuse Silas Deane of profiteering in collusion with French interests. The dispute seriously embarrassed the French government, and in January 1799 Congress forced him to resign. Short of income, Paine took a job in a merchant's office before entering a bitter dispute over America's Newfoundland fishing rights, which he defended. In November he returned to respectability with appointment as clerk to the Pennsylvania assembly. In May 1780, driven by his belief that rich and poor had a common stake in victory, he made a first move toward establishing the Bank of North America to raise funds for the war. In 1781 he was dissuaded from going home to stir up revolution in Britain and took part in a successful mission to France instead. Later in the year he once again combined conviction with pecuniary need by writing for Congress a series of tracts demanding more powerful federal government. He was probably getting money from the French as well, so Crisis number 11 decried the notion that America could possibly make peace separately from her Bourbon allies.

In 1784 he was rewarded with a confiscated Loyalist estate and grants from the federal and Pennsylvania governments. He divided his time between a property in Bordertown, New Jersey, and New York City, writing in support of the independence of the Bank of North America, dabbling in scientific experiments, and developing plans for an iron bridge across the Schuylkill River. When the cost of the bridge turned out to be beyond American resources, he took his models to Europe in the spring of 1787, eventually persuading a Rotherham firm to put a scaled-down version across the Thames. The bridge, erected in May 1790, was a failure by the autumn, but Paine was already launched on a new journalistic project—the defense of the French Revolution.

He answered Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (November 1790) with The Rights of Man (21 February 1791), a muddled scissors-and-paste job that nevertheless became immensely popular. In April 1791 he returned to France, where he joined the Girondins (also called the Brissotins after their leader, Brissot de Warville) as a republican publicist. Returning to Britain in February 1792, he brought out a much more coherent second part of the Rights of Man, which credited the American Revolution with sparking the revolt against European despotisms and suggested a union between a republican Britain and France. Already rewarded with French citizenship, Paine prudently retired to Paris in September, where he became a member of the Convention, was briefly imprisoned under the Jacobins, and wrote The Age of Reason, an attack on organized religion. In 1796 he bitterly attacked Washington, who he thought had abandoned France. He returned to America in 1802 and died there on 8 June 1809.

Paine was a man of humble origins in an age when aristocratic connections mattered, who failed in both business and the service of the state. Combined with a modest education, a talented pen, and a gift for polemic, it is hardly surprising that he turned a prolific, radical pamphleteer. Against that accomplishment must be set his alcoholism, laziness, inordinate vanity, and carelessness with money. Neither a systematic philosopher nor a careful historian, he never let facts get in the way of his grand polemic. Nevertheless, his capacity to articulate and popularize radical ideas turned him into perhaps the greatest propagandist of the age of revolution.