Paine, Thomas (1737-1809)

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Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

Revolutionary writer

Background. Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England, on 29 January 1737. The son of a corsetiere, he was apprenticed to his father for three years before running away at age 16 to sail on a British privateer in the Seven Years’ War. Returning to London, he worked as a corsetiere, held a minor government post, and taught school briefly before securing a post as an excise officer. His first marriage ended with his wife’s death; a second marriage ended in separation. Paine’s wages as an excise officer were too low to support his family; the family shop barely kept them alive. At the request of other excise officers, Paine drew up a memorial urging Parliament to raise their wages, presenting it in 1773. Parliament was not persuaded, and Paine’s superiors fired him. Paine had to sell the shop to escape imprisonment for debt.

Flight to America. He boldly called on Benjamin Franklin, who thought Paine might make a good “clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor” in Philadelphia. With this reference Paine landed in America in November 1774, determined to start his life anew. He found work with printer Robert Aitken, publisher of the Pennsylvania Magazine, which had six hundred subscribers. Within a few months Paine’s vigorous literary style had attracted more readers, and circulation increased to more than fifteen hundred. Paine’s essays called for an end not only to the slave trade but also to slavery, and he attacked British colonial policies both in America and in India. Encouraged by Franklin and Benjamin Rush to write a history of the dispute between England and her American colonies, Paine published Common Sense, on 10 January 1776.

Common Sense. More than one-half million copies of Common Sense circulated in the colonies, and long excerpts appeared in newspapers and magazines. The real importance of Common Sense lay not so much in its vigorous call for independence as in its call for leveling the old order and starting anew. Most Americans believed that governments evolved naturally from society, and the English government, for example, reflected the country’s social organization. This, Paine said, was wrong. Society and government were two different things. “Society in every state is a blessing; but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.... Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.” Paine called for independence, but he also urged Americans to reject the British model of government, which gave too much power to the king and the aristocrats.

Model Governments. The whole premise of a balanced constitution, Paine said, was wrong. The British constitution worked only because the Commons were able to check the aristocrats and the king; if there were no king or aristocrats, it would be unnecessary to check the Commons. Americans should construct new governments that were not modeled on the British constitution: their governments should have a single-house legislature, and instead of having governors who could become tyrants, it should have the executive as a committee chosen by the legislature for a limited term. Pennsylvania adopted a government on Paine’s model. Common Sense had a profound influence on American opinion, and it helped convince Americans that they were not simply fighting for home rule or for their rights as English people. Instead they were fighting for essential human rights that could only come with independence. The Americans could make a break with the past, and with the British empire, and they should do it immediately.

The Crisis. Paine published Common Sense at a high-point of the American campaign. Though independence had not been declared, Washington had forced the British to evacuate Boston; royal authority was collapsing in all the American colonies; and an army led by Benedict Arnold was laying siege to Quebec. But by the end of 1776 the situation had changed. The Canadian expedition had failed; the British had captured New York; and Washington’s army was driven through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. In December 1776 the British fleet threatened Philadelphia, and Congress fled to Baltimore. Paine, enlisted in a Pennsylvania regiment, accompanying Washington’s retreating army in what seemed to be the final moments of the struggle, sat by the campfire and wrote a new pamphlet addressed to the problems of this moment. On Christmas Eve, Washington had his troops assemble to listen to the first four essays of Paine’s new pamphlet, The American Crisis (1776–1777), before they were rowed across the Delaware to surprise the British at Trenton.

The Times that Try Men’s Souls. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine began. “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;... the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.... [I]t would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.” Paine’s pamphlet rallied Washington’s troops, whose surprise victories at Trenton and Princeton in turn rallied public opinion. Paine would publish fourteen Crisis essays over the next seven years, all designed to strengthen American resolve and to comment on specific issues of a moment. His final number, published on the eighth anniversary of the battle of Lexington, 19 April 1783, declared that “The times that tried mens souls,’ are over—and the greatest and completest revolution the world ever knew, gloriously and happily accomplished.” Paine urged the American people to adopt a stronger central government that could protect their liberty against a hostile world.

After the Revolution. During the war Paine served in a number of political positions, as secretary to Congress’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, and as clerk of the Pennsylvania assembly. As clerk, in 1780 Paine drafted the preamble to Pennsylvania’s law abolishing slavery, a cause he had advocated in his first months in America. Paine continued to write on political questions, defending the Bank of North America and criticizing the citizens of Rhode Island for scuttling the proposed five percent impost duty. Paine was committed to the independence of America, and he had little patience with local political grievances that he felt detracted from American unity and strength. Paine also turned more attention to scientific matters, trying to develop a smokeless candle and inventing an iron bridge that would not require piers to support its span. To perfect the bridge Paine sailed for Europe in April 1787. He expected to be gone for about one year, but he would not return to America until 1802. After visiting his mother and British Whigs Edmund Burke and Charles Fox, Paine was invited by the Marquis de Lafayette to visit France. Paine met with Thomas Jefferson, American minister to France, and Lafayette, offering advice on a new constitution for France, and Paine helped draft France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. When the Bastille fell in 1789, Lafayette entrusted its key to Paine, who was to present it to George Washington (the key now hangs at Mount Vernon).

Paine and Burke. On a visit to London in 1790 Paine was stunned to read Edmund Burke’s speech denouncing the French Revolution. Burke, who had warmly and bravely supported the American cause, believed that the French Revolution was a mistake. Governments, Burke believed, evolved from the social customs and traditions of a people. Without a government to restrain men from injuring one another, the French would collapse into anarchy and ultimately tyranny. Paine was outraged at Burke’s attack, and later in the year, when Burke published his Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), Paine responded with a vigorous defense, Rights of Man (1791–1792). Paine not only vindicated the French Revolution but also argued for the power of all people to construct whatever kind of government they chose. This was the fundamental premise of Common Sense, and Paine held true to the revolutionary cause. Paine won the long-term historical argument: men and women can form their own governments. But for France, Burke was a far more able prophet since the French Revolution became a bloody reign of anarchy followed by military dictatorship.

Arrest. Paine was charged with seditious libel in England, and he fled to France, where he was elected to the French Convention. He arrived in September 1792, days before the Convention proclaimed France a republic. Paine welcomed this, but he opposed the execution of Louis XVI, fearing it would give England a pretext to declare war on France. When the radical Jacobins overthrew Paine’s more moderate faction, he stopped attending the Convention, and he was arrested on 18 December 1793. He narrowly escaped the guillotine and nearly died in prison. The American minister to France, James Monroe, secured Paine’s release in November 1794.

Final Pamphlets. Paine recovered from his imprisonment at Monroe’s home, writing two more pamphlets: The Age of Reason (1794–1795), an attack on organized religion, and Agrarian Justice (1797), a call for the redistribution of wealth. The Age of Reason brought down on Paine the charge of atheism as he tried to demonstrate that the Bible was not divinely inspired but was the work of men intent on maintaining power. He tried to demolish the institutional church, which he felt had conspired with wealth and privilege to oppress humankind. The attack on religion alienated Paine from many Americans, including Samuel Adams, who supported his political views. He also criticized Presidents Washington and Adams for their pro-British and anti-French policies, which led to his further estrangement from many Americans. President Thomas Jefferson invited Paine to return to America in 1802, and Paine spent his last years on a farm in New Rochelle, New York. Paine died on 8 June 1809. Two decades later English journalist William Cobbett had Paine’s body exhumed, to be reburied in England. Cobbett’s plans for a suitable memorial to Paine fell through, and Paine’s body disappeared.