Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain, February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736] – June 8, 1809; ) was an English-born American Founding Father, French Revolutionary, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman. His pamphlets Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783) framed the Patriot argument for independence from Great Britain at the outset of the American Revolution. Paine advanced Enlightenment-era arguments for human rights that shaped revolutionary discourse on both sides of the Atlantic.

Born in Thetford, Norfolk, Paine immigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every American Patriot read his 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, which catalyzed the call for independence from Great Britain. He followed that breakthrough with the pro-independence American Crisis pamphlet series. Paine returned to Britain in 1787 and wrote Rights of Man (1791) to rebut critics of the French Revolution, particularly the Anglo-Irish conservative writer Edmund Burke. His authorship of the tract led to a trial and conviction in absentia in England in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel.

The British government of 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. The Girondins regarded him as an ally; consequently, the Montagnards regarded him as an enemy, especially Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier, the powerful president of the Committee of General Security. In December 1793, Vadier arrested Paine and took him to Luxembourg Prison in Paris. He completed the first part of The Age of Reason just before he was arrested. Mark Philp notes that "In prison Paine managed to produce (and to convey to Daniel Isaac Eaton, the radical London publisher) a dedication for The Age of Reason and a new edition of the Rights of Man with a new preface." James Monroe used his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794.

Paine became notorious because of his pamphlets and attacks on his former allies, who he felt had betrayed him. In The Age of Reason and other writings, he advocated Deism, promoted reason and freethought, and argued against religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. In 1796, he published a bitter open letter to George Washington, whom he denounced as an incompetent general and a hypocrite. He published the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1797), discussing the origins of property and introducing the concept of a guaranteed minimum income through a one-time inheritance tax on landowners. In 1802, he returned to the U.S. He died on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral, as he had been ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity and his attacks on the nation's leaders.

Early life and education

Paine was born on January 29, 1736 (NS February 9, 1737), in Thetford, Norfolk, England, to Joseph Pain (1708–1787), a tenant farmer and stay-maker, and Frances (née Cocke) Pain. Joseph followed the Quaker faith and Frances was an Anglican. Despite claims that he adopted a new spelling after emigrating to America in 1774, he was already using "Paine" in 1769 while living in Lewes, Sussex.

Paine attended Thetford Grammar School from 1744 to 1749, when schooling in England was not compulsory. At age 13 he began an apprenticeship with his father. After completing his apprenticeship he enlisted as a privateer at 19 and served aboard the King of Prussia. He returned to Britain in 1759, became a master staymaker, and opened a shop in Sandwich, Kent.

Paine married Mary Lambert on September 27, 1759, but his business soon collapsed. Mary became pregnant, and after the couple moved to Margate she went into early labour, and both she and their child died.

In July 1761 he returned to Thetford to work as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762 he became an Excise Officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire, and in August 1764 he transferred to Alford with a salary of £50 per annum. On August 27, 1765, he was dismissed for "claiming to have inspected goods he did not inspect". On July 31, 1766, he petitioned the Board of Excise for reinstatement, which it granted the following day when a vacancy arose. While he waited he resumed corsetmaking.

In 1767, he was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall. Later he asked to leave this post to await a vacancy, and he became a school teacher in London.

On February 19, 1768, he was appointed to Lewes in Sussex, a town with a tradition of opposition to the monarchy and pro-republican sentiments since the revolutionary decades of the 17th century. Here he lived above the 15th-century Bull House, the tobacco shop of Samuel Ollive and Esther Ollive.

Paine first became involved in civic matters when he was based in Lewes. He appears in the Town Book as a member of the Court Leet, the governing body for the town. He was also a member of the parish vestry, an influential local Anglican church group whose responsibilities for parish business would include collecting taxes and tithes to distribute among the poor. On March 26, 1771, at age 34, Paine married Elizabeth Ollive, the daughter of his recently deceased landlord, whose business as a grocer and tobacconist he then entered into.

A 95-page essay in pamphlet form entitled The Journeyman's Touch-stone published under the pen name "Censor-General" in 1771 has recently been attributed to Paine. It offered a defense of the rights of jurors in support of a publisher named Henry Woodfall who faced criminal prosecution by the Crown for printing and distributing anti-government papers known as the Junius letters.

From 1772 to 1773, Paine joined excise officers asking Parliament for better pay and working conditions, publishing, in summer of 1772, The Case of the Officers of Excise, a 12-page article, and his first political work, spending the London winter distributing the 4,000 copies printed to the Parliament and others. In spring 1774, he was again dismissed from the excise service for being absent from his post without permission. The tobacco shop failed. On April 14, to avoid debtors' prison, he sold his household possessions to pay debts. He formally separated from his wife Elizabeth on June 4, 1774, and moved to London. In September, 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, especially as it related to the Stamp Act, and the Townshend Acts. He was publisher and editor of the largest American newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette and suggested emigration to Philadelphia. He gave a letter of recommendation to Paine, who emigrated in October to the American colonies, arriving in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774.

In Pennsylvania Magazine

Paine barely survived the transatlantic voyage. The ship's water supplies were bad and typhoid fever killed five passengers. On arriving at Philadelphia, he was too sick to disembark. Benjamin Franklin's physician, there to welcome Paine to America, had him carried off ship; Paine took six weeks to recover. He became a citizen of Pennsylvania "by taking the oath of allegiance at a very early period". In March 1775, he became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, a position he conducted with considerable ability.

Before Paine's arrival in America, sixteen magazines had been founded in the colonies and ultimately failed, each featuring substantial content and reprints from England. In late 1774, Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken announced his plan to create what he called an "American Magazine" with content derived from the colonies. Paine contributed two pieces to the magazine's inaugural issue dated January 1775, and Aitken hired Paine as the Magazine's editor one month later. Under Paine's leadership, the magazine's readership rapidly expanded, achieving a greater circulation in the colonies than any American magazine up until that point. While Aitken had conceived of the magazine as nonpolitical, Paine brought a strong political perspective to its content, writing in its first issue that "every heart and hand seem to be engaged in the interesting struggle for American Liberty."

Paine wrote in the Pennsylvania Magazine that such a publication should become a "nursery of genius" for a nation that had "now outgrown the state of infancy", exercising and educating American minds, and shaping American morality. On March 8, 1775, the Pennsylvania Magazine published an unsigned abolitionist essay titled African Slavery in America. The essay is often attributed to Paine on the basis of a letter by Benjamin Rush, recalling Paine's claim of authorship to the essay. The essay attacked slavery as an "execrable commerce" and "outrage against Humanity and Justice."