Thomas Paine

Their life

A failed corset-maker and twice-dismissed excise officer who arrived in Philadelphia at 37 with little but a letter from Franklin — and within two years wrote Common Sense, the pamphlet that talked a continent into independence. The American Crisis steadied Washington’s freezing army; Rights of Man defended revolution; The Age of Reason cost him nearly every friend he had. He never took a royalty from Common Sense.

Known for

• Common Sense (1776)
• The American Crisis pamphlets
• Rights of Man
• The Age of Reason
• Case for American independence
• Radical pamphleteering style

The road they walked

Thomas Paine was born in 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk, the son of a Quaker corsetmaker, and for nearly four decades England gave him little but failure — a bankrupt stay-making shop, a collapsed marriage, two dismissals from his post as an excise officer, the second for agitating on behalf of underpaid colleagues. He was nearly forty, broke, and by most measures a man whose life had not worked out. What he had was an unusual gift for argument and, through a chance meeting in London, a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin urging the Americas to give him a chance.

He arrived in Philadelphia in late 1774, into a colonial world still arguing over grievances with Britain rather than independence from it — most colonists imagined reconciliation, not revolution. Paine had no such patience. In January 1776 he published Common Sense anonymously, stripping the case for independence of legal argument and monarchy of its mystique in plain, furious prose ordinary readers could follow. It sold in the hundreds of thousands within months, an almost unimaginable circulation for the era, and it moved the political center of a continent. That December, with Washington's army starving and deserting after a string of defeats, Paine followed with the first of his American Crisis pamphlets — 'These are the times that try men's souls' — read aloud to troops before the crossing of the Delaware.

His later years complicated the myth of the founding pamphleteer. He went to France, took a seat in the Revolutionary National Convention despite barely speaking French, and argued against executing Louis XVI — a position that helped land him in a Paris prison under Robespierre's Terror. There he wrote much of The Age of Reason, a defense of deism and an attack on organized religion and scripture that cost him nearly every friend and ally he had left in America, where it was received as blasphemy. He returned to the United States in 1802 at Jefferson's invitation, but the country that once passed his pamphlets hand to hand now largely shunned him.

How their story ended

Paine died on June 8, 1809, in Greenwich Village, New York, in poverty and public disrepute, his revolutionary service overshadowed by the outrage his religious writings had provoked. Barred from a Quaker burial, he was interred on his farm in New Rochelle; only a handful of mourners came. Years later the journalist William Cobbett dug up his bones to bring them to England for a proper memorial — a plan that never came off, and Paine's remains were subsequently lost, their fate still unresolved.