Thomas Paine

For other people named Thomas Paine (disambiguation), see Thomas Paine (disambiguation) (disambiguation).

Thomas Paine
Era	18th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Enlightenment, Radicalism, Classical liberalism, Republicanism
Main interests	Ethics, Politics

Thomas Paine (Thetford, England, 29 January 1737 – 8 June 1809, New York City, U.S.) was an English pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, classical liberal, inventor and intellectual. He lived and worked in Britain until the age of 37, when he migrated to the American colonies just in time to take part in the American Revolution. His main contribution was as the author of the powerful, widely read pamphlet, Common Sense (1776), advocating independence for the American Colonies from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and of The American Crisis, supporting the Revolution.

Later, Paine was a great influence on the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791) as a guide to the ideas of the Enlightenment. Despite an inability to speak French, he was elected to the National Assembly of France in 1792. Regarded as an ally of the Girondists, he was seen with increasing disfavour by the Montagnards and in particular by Robespierre.

Paine was arrested in Paris and imprisoned in December 1793; he was released in 1794. He became notorious with his book, The Age of Reason (1793-94), which advocated deism and took issue with Christian doctrines. While in France, he also wrote a pamphlet titled Agrarian Justice (1795), which discussed the origins of property and introduced a concept that is similar to a guaranteed minimum income.

Paine remained in France during the early Napoleonic era, but condemned Napoleon's moves towards dictatorship, calling him "the completest charlatan that ever existed." Paine remained in France until 1802, when he returned to America on an invitation from Thomas Jefferson, who had been elected president.

Paine died at age 72, on 59 Grove Street in Greenwich Village, New York City, on the morning of June 8, 1809. His burial site is located in New Rochelle, New York where he had lived after returning to America in 1802. His remains were later disinterred by an admirer looking to return them to England; his final resting place today is unknown.

Early life

Thomas Paine's Lewes home.

Thomas Paine was born to Joseph Paine, a Quaker, and Frances Paine (née Cocke) an Anglican, in Thetford, a small market town and coaching stage-post, in rural Norfolk. He attended Thetford Grammar School, which selected entrants on ability, from 1744-1749 at a time when there was no compulsory education. He was apprenticed to his father, a corset maker, at 13, but apparently failed at this. In his late teens Paine enlisted as a privateer , serving a short time before returning to Great Britain in April 1759. There he became a master corsetmaker and set up a shop in Sandwich, Kent. On September 27, 1759, Paine married Mary Lambert. His business collapsed soon after. His wife became pregnant, and, following a move to Margate, went into early labor and died along with her child.

In July 1761, Paine returned to Thetford where he worked as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762, he became an excise officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire. In August 1764, he was again transferred, this time to Alford, where his salary was £50 a year. On 27 August 1765, Paine was discharged from his post for claiming to have inspected goods when in fact he had only seen the documentation. On July 3 1766, he wrote a letter to the Board of Excise asking to be reinstated. The next day the board granted his request to be filled, upon vacancy. While waiting for an opening, Paine worked as a staymaker in Diss, Norfolk and later as a servant (records show he worked for a Mr Noble of Goodman's Fields and then for a Mr Gardiner at Kensington). He also applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England and, according to some accounts, he preached in Moorfields.

In 1767, Paine was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall. He was subsequently asked to leave this post to await another vacancy and he became a schoolteacher in London. On February 19th 1768, Paine was appointed to Lewes, East Sussex. He moved into the room above the 15th-century Bull House, a building which held the snuff and tobacco shop of Samuel and Esther Ollive. Here Paine became involved for the first time in civic matters when Samuel Ollive introduced him into the Society of Twelve, a local elite group that met twice a year to discuss town issues. In addition, Paine participated in the Vestry, the influential church group that collected taxes and tithes and distributed them to the poor. On 26 March 1771, at age 34, he married his landlord's daughter, Elizabeth Ollive.

From 1772 to 1773, Paine joined other excise officers in lobbying Parliament for better pay and working conditions for excisemen, and in the summer of 1772 he published The Case of the Officers of Excise, a 21-page article and his first political work. Paine had 4,000 copies printed and spent the winter in London distributing the pamphlet to Members of Parliament. In the spring of 1774, Paine was dismissed from the excise service for being absent from his post without permission, and his tobacco shop failed as well. On April 14, he auctioned off his household possessions to pay his debts. On June 4, he signed a separation agreement with his wife and moved to London where a friend introduced him to Benjamin Franklin in September. Franklin advised Paine to emigrate to the British colonies in America, and wrote him letters of recommendation. Paine left England in October, arriving in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 30, 1774.

Paine barely survived the transatlantic voyage. The drinking water on the ship was so bad that typhoid fever killed five passengers, and Paine was too ill to leave his cabin when he arrived in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin's physician, who had arrived to welcome him to America, literally had to pick up Paine and carry him off. It took the doctor six weeks to nurse Paine back to health.

Paine was also an inventor, receiving a patent in Europe for a single-span iron bridge, even though through a lack of funds, the bridge was in a field in Paddington, London. He developed a smokeless candle, and worked with John Fitch on the early development of steam engines. This aptitude for invention, coupled with his originality of thought, found him an advocate more than a century later in the famous inventor Thomas Edison. Edison championed Paine's achievements and helped restore him to his proper place in history.

American Revolution

Common Sense, published 1776.

Thomas Paine is sometimes known as "The Father of the American Revolution" for his writing advocating complete independence from royal rule—his pro-independence monograph pamphlet Common Sense was published anonymously on January 10 1776 and spread quickly among literate colonists. Within three months, 120,000 copies are alleged to have been distributed throughout the colonies, which themselves totaled only two million free inhabitants, making it the best-selling work in 18th-century America, with the exception of the Bible. Its total sales in both America and Europe reached 500,000 copies. It convinced many colonists, including George Washington and John Adams, to seek redress in political independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and argued strongly against any compromise short of independence. The work was greatly influenced (including in its name – Paine had originally proposed the title Plain Truth) by the equally controversial pro-independence writer Benjamin Rush and was instrumental in bringing about the Declaration of Independence.

Loyalists attacked Common Sense with vigor. One such early attack, entitled Plain Truth, was written in 1776 by prominent loyalist James Chalmers. An expatriate of Scotland, Chalmers attacked Paine as a "political quack." Chalmers would serve as commander of the First Battalion of Maryland Loyalists in the American Revolution.

Paine's strength lay in his ability to present complex ideas in clear and concise form, as opposed to the more philosophical approaches of his Enlightenment contemporaries in Europe, and it was Paine who proposed the name United States of America for the new nation. When the war arrived, Paine published a series of important pamphlets, The Crisis, credited with inspiring the early colonists during the ordeals faced in their long struggle with the British. To inspire the troops, General George Washington ordered Paine's "The American Crisis" to be read out loud to his men. The first Crisis paper began with the famous words:

These are the times that try men's souls: 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; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

— Published on 23 December 1776

In 1778, Paine alluded to the then ongoing secret negotiations with France in his pamphlets, and there was a scandal which resulted in Paine's being dropped from the Committee on Foreign Affairs. In 1781, however, he accompanied John Laurens during his mission to France. His services were eventually recognized by the state of New York by the granting of an estate at New Rochelle, New York, and he received considerable gifts of money from both Pennsylvania and – at Washington's suggestion – from Congress.

He served in the War as aide to Gen. Nathanael Greene, and appointed by Congress as secretary to the committee on foreign affairs. In his later years, he established himself as "a missionary of world revolution."

Rights of Man

Returning to Europe, Paine finished his Rights of Man on 29 January 1791, while staying with his friend Thomas 'Clio' Rickman. On January 31, he passed the manuscript to the publisher Joseph Johnson, who intended to have it ready for Washington's birthday on February 22. Johnson was visited on a number of occasions by agents of the government. Sensing that Paine's book would be controversial, he decided on the day it was due to be published not to release it. Paine quickly began to negotiate with another publisher, J.S. Jordan. Once a deal was secured, Paine left for Paris on the advice of William Blake, leaving three good friends, William Godwin, Thomas Brand Hollis and Thomas Holcroft, in charge of concluding the publication. The book appeared on March 13, three weeks later than originally scheduled. It was an abstract political tract published in support of the French Revolution, written as a reply to Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke. The book — which was highly critical of monarchies and European social institutions — sold briskly but was so controversial that the British government put Paine on trial in absentia for seditious libel. In the summer of 1792, he answered the charges with these famous words: "If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy (..), to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous (...) let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb." In a second edition of the Rights of Man in February 1792 Paine proposed a plan for the reformation of England, including one of the first proposals for a progressive income tax.

Sketch by Jacques-Louis David of the French National Assembly taking the Tennis Court Oath.

Paine served in the 1792 National Convention. Paine was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, and was granted, along with Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin among others, honorary French citizenship. Despite his inability to speak French, he was elected to the National Convention, representing the district of Pas-de-Calais. He voted for the French Republic; but argued against the execution of Louis XVI, saying that he should instead be exiled to the United States: firstly, because of the way royalist France had come to the aid of the American Revolution; and secondly because of a moral objection to capital punishment in general and to revenge killings in particular.

Regarded as an ally of the Girondins, he was seen with increasing disfavour by the Montagnards who were now in power, and in particular by Robespierre. A decree was passed at the end of 1793 excluding foreigners from their places in the Convention (Anacharsis Cloots was also deprived of his place). Paine was arrested and imprisoned in December 1793.

Before his arrest and imprisonment, knowing that he would likely be arrested and executed, Paine wrote the first part of The Age of Reason, an assault on organized "revealed" religion combining a compilation of inconsistencies he found in the Bible with his own advocacy of Deism. In his "Autobiographical Interlude," which is found in The Age of Reason between the first and second parts, Paine writes, "Thus far I had written on the 28th of December, 1793. In the evening I went to the Hotel Philadelphia . . . About four in the morning I was awakened by a rapping at my chamber door; when I opened it, I saw a guard and the master of the hotel with them. The guard told me they came to put me under arrestation and to demand the key of my papers. I desired them to walk in, and I would dress myself and go with them immediately."

Paine protested and claimed that he was a citizen of America, which was an ally of Revolutionary France, rather than of Great Britain, which was by that time at war with France. However, Gouverneur Morris, the American ambassador to France, did not press his claim, and Paine later wrote that Morris had connived at his imprisonment. Paine thought that George Washington had abandoned him, and he was to quarrel with Washington for the rest of his life. Years later he wrote a scathing letter to Washington, accusing him of private betrayal of their friendship and public hypocrisy as general and president, and concluding the letter by saying "the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any," He was also vehemently opposed to Washington owning slaves.

While in prison, Paine escaped execution apparently by chance. A guard walked through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the prisoners who were due to be condemned that day. He placed one on the door of the Paine's cell, but did not notice that the door was open. After the door was closed, the mark was hidden inside the cell. Hence, he was overlooked, and survived the few vital days needed to be spared by the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (27 July,1794). Paine was released in November 1794 largely because of the work of the new American Minister to France, James Monroe.

In 1800, Paine purportedly had a meeting with Napoleon. Napoleon claimed he slept with a copy of Rights of Man under his pillow and went so far as to say to Paine that "a statue of gold should be erected to you in every city in the universe." Paine quickly moved from admiration to condemnation, however, as he saw Napoleon's moves toward dictatorship, calling him "the completest charlatan that ever existed." Paine remained in France until 1802, when he returned to America on an invitation from Thomas Jefferson.

Later years

Thomas Paine's monument on North Avenue in New Rochelle, New York.

Paine returned to America in the early stages of the Second Great Awakening and a time of great political partisanship. The Age of Reason gave ample excuse for the religiously devout to hate him, and the Federalists attacked him for his ideas of government stated in Common Sense, for his association with the French Revolution, and for his friendship with President Jefferson. Also still fresh in the minds of the public was his Letter to Washington, published six years before his return.

Paine died at the age of 72, at 59 Grove Street in Greenwich Village, New York City on the morning of June 8, 1809. Although the original building is no longer there, the present building has a plaque noting that Paine died at this location. At the time of his death, most American newspapers reprinted the obituary notice from the New York Citizen, which read in part: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." Only six mourners came to his funeral, two of whom were black, most likely freedmen. The great orator and writer Robert G. Ingersoll wrote:

Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of life. One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances had deserted him. Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred – his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his soul. He was a victim of the people, but his convictions remained unshaken. He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently waiting for his death, Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their hearts. On the 8th of June, 1809, death came – Death, almost his only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display. In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of Thomas Paine.

File:01 Paine burial location.JPG

The burial location of Thomas Paine in New Rochelle, New York.

A few years later, the agrarian radical William Cobbett dug up and shipped his bones back to England. The plan was to give Paine a heroic reburial on his native soil, but the bones were still among Cobbett's effects when he died over twenty years later. There is no confirmed story about what happened to them after that, although down the years various people have claimed to own parts of Paine's remains, such as his skull and right hand.

Views

Some believe Paine may have begun to form his early views on natural justice during his childhood, while listening to a mob jeering and attacking those punished in the Thetford stocks. Others have argued that he was influenced by his Quaker father. In The Age of Reason – Paine's treatise in support of deism – he wrote:

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers … though I revere their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at [their] conceit; … if the taste of a Quaker [had] been consulted at the Creation, what a silent and drab-colored Creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.

Paine was an early advocate of republicanism and liberalism. He dismissed monarchy, and viewed all government as, at best, a necessary evil. He opposed slavery and was amongst the earliest proponents of universal, free public education, a guaranteed minimum income, and many other ideas considered radical at the time.

In the second part of The Age of Reason, Paine writes about his illness and the fever he suffered while in prison. ". . . I was seized with a fever that in its progress had every symptom of becoming mortal, and from the effects of which I am not recovered. It was then that I remembered with renewed satisfaction, and congratulated myself most sincerely, on having written the former part of 'The Age of Reason.'" The content of the work can be briefly summarized in this quotation:

The opinions I have advanced… are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues—and that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter. So say I now—and so help me God.

With regard to his religious views, in The Age of Reason (begun in France in 1793), Paine stated:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

He described himself as a "Deist" and commented:

How different is [Christianity] to the pure and simple profession of Deism! The true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything moral, scientifical, and mechanical.

The first article published in America advocating the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery was written by Paine. Titled "African Slavery in America," it appeared on March 8, 1775 in the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, more popularly known as The Pennsylvania Magazine, or American Museum.

Paine published his last great pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, in the winter of 1795-96. It further developed ideas proposed in the Rights of Man concerning the way in which the institution of land ownership separated the great majority of persons from their rightful natural inheritance and their means of independent survival. Paine's proposal is now deemed a form of basic Income Guarantee. The Social Security Administration of the United States recognizes Agrarian Justice as the first American proposal for an old-age pension. In Agrarian Justice Paine writes:

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity… [Government must] create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property; And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

Legacy

Statue of Thomas Paine in Thetford, Norfolk, Paine's birthplace.

Thomas Paine's writings had great influence on his contemporaries, especially the American revolutionaries. His books inspired both philosophical and working-class radicals in the United Kingdom, and he is often claimed as an intellectual ancestor by United States liberals, libertarians, anarchists, freethinkers, progressives and radicals. Both Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison read his works with respect.

Lincoln is reported by William Herndon to have written a defense of Paine's deism in 1835 that was burned by Lincoln's friend Samuel Hill as a gesture meant to save Lincoln's political career.

Edison said of Paine:

I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic… It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood… it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me then about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember very vividly the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine's writings and I recall thinking at that time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!' My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days.

At the close of the Revolutionary War, Paine was given, for his services to the nation, a farm located in New Rochelle, New York. On that site remains his house, the Thomas Paine Cottage and a museum housing the Thomas Paine Historical Society, . His burial site is also located on that site.

A statue of him stands in King Street, Thetford, Norfolk, his place of birth. The statue holds a quill and his book, Rights of Man, although the book is upside down. The Sixth Form in Thetford is also named after Paine. New York University also has a bust of Thomas Paine in their pantheon of heroes. There are additional statues of Paine in Morristown, New Jersey and Bordentown, New Jersey, as well as in Paris, in the Parc Montsouris.

There is a small street in Diss which is named after Paine.

The Thomas Paine Museum at 983 North Avenue in New Rochelle, New York.

There is a plaque in Paris at the street where he lived from 1797 to 1802, which reads "Thomas Paine. Englishman by birth. American by choice. French by decree. Citizen of the World."

Every year, between 4 July and 14 July, Lewes Town Council organizes a festival to celebrate the life and work of Thomas Paine.

See also

• United States Declaration of Independence
• American Revolution
• Liberalism
• Liberty
• United States history
• Bill of Rights
• Political philosophy
• Contributions to liberal theory
• Founding Fathers of the United States
• Deism
• Bordentown, New Jersey

Bibliography

• Aldridge, A. Owen, 1959. Man of Reason: The Life of Thomas Paine. Lippincott. Regarded by British authorities as the standard biography.
• Aldridge, A. Owen, 1984. Thomas Paine's American Ideology. University Press of Delaware.
• Bailyn, Bernard, 1990. "Common Sense", in Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence. Alfred A. Knopf.
• Bernstein, R. B. "Review Essay: Rediscovering Thomas Paine." New York Law School Law Review, 1994 -- valuable blend of historiographical essay and biographical/analytical treatment.
• Butler, Marilyn, 1984. Burke Paine and Godwin and the Revolution Controversy.
• Gregory Claeys, 1989. Thomas Paine, Social and Political Thought. Unwin Hyman. Excellent analysis of Paine's thought.
• Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1892. The Life of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. G.P. Putnam's Sons. Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Facsimile. Long hailed as the definitive biography, and still valuable.
• Fast, Howard, 1946. Citizen Tom Paine (historical novel, though sometimes taken as biography).
• Foner, Eric, 1976. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. Oxford University Press. The standard monograph treating Paine's thought and work with regard to America.
• Hawke, David Freeman, 1974. Paine. Regarded by many American authorities as the standard biography.
• Hitchens, Christopher, 2006. Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man": A Biography.
• Ingersoll, Robert G., 1892, "Thomas Paine," North American Review.
• Kates, Gary, 1989, "From Liberalism to Radicalism: Tom Paine's Rights of Man," Journal of the History of Ideas: 569-87.
• Kaye, Harvey J., 2005. Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. Hill and Wang.
• Keane, John, 1995. Tom Paine: A Political Life. London. One of the most valuable recent studies.
• Larkin, Edward, 2005. Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution. Cambridge Univ. Press.
• Nelson, Craig, 2006. Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Moderrn Nations. Viking; also Penguin paperback.
• Paine, Thomas (Foner, Eric., editor), 1993. Writings. Library of America. Authoritative and scholarly edition containing Common Sense, the essays comprising the American Crisis series, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, Agrarian Justice, and selected briefer writings, with authoritative texts and careful annotation.
• Paine, Thomas (Fomer, Philip S., editor), 1944. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2 volumes. Citadel Press. We badly need a complete edition of Paine's writings on the model of Eric Foner's edition for the Library of America, but until that goal is achieved, Philip Foner's two-volume edition is a serviceable substitute. Volume I contains the major works, and volume II contains shorter writings, both published essays and a selection of letters, but confusingly organized; in addition, Foner's attributions of writings to Paine have come in for some criticism in that Foner may have included writings that Paine edited but did not write and omitted some writings that later scholars have attributed to Paine.
• Powell, David, 1985. Tom Paine, The Greatest Exile. Hutchinson.
• Russell, Bertrand, 1934. The Fate of Thomas Paine.
• Vincent, Bernard, 2005. The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the age of revolutions.
• Books of Our Time: Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (video)

External links

• Complete Works of Thomas Paine
• Works by Thomas Paine at Project Gutenberg
• Deistic and Religious Works of Thomas Paine
• The theological works of Thomas Paine to which are appended the profession of faith of a savoyard vicar by J.J. Rousseau
• The theological works of Thomas Paine
• Thomas Paine Birthday Celebrations
• The Thomas Paine Society
• Essays on the Religious and Political Philosophy of Thomas Paine
• Thomas Paine's Memorial
• Thomas Paine Quotations
• Books of Our Time: Thomas Paine and the Promise of America by Harvey Kaye (video)
• Take a video tour of Thomas Paine's birthplace
• Common Sense in mp3 audio at Americana Phonic
• Rights of Man book on Google books (full-view)
• office location while in Alford
• Thomas Paine's time at Bordentown, New Jersey

Lesson Plan

• Common Sense: The Rhetoric of Popular Democracy[1] at edsitement.neh.gov