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, Liberalism, Radicalism, Republicanism
Main interests	Religion, Ethics, Politics

Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was a British pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, inventor, and intellectual. He lived and worked in Britain until age 37, when he emigrated to the British American colonies, in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contribution was the powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and of The American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series.

Later, he greatly influenced the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), a guide to Enlightenment ideas. Despite not speaking French, he was elected to the French National Convention in 1792. The Girondists regarded him as an ally, so, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), the book advocating deism and arguing against Christian doctrines. In France, he also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.

He remained in France during the early Napoleonic era, but condemned Napoleon's dictatorship, calling him "the completest charlatan that ever existed". In 1802, at President Thomas Jefferson's invitation, he returned to America.

Thomas Paine died, at the age of 72, at 59 Grove Street, Greenwich Village, New York City, on June 8, 1809. He was buried at what is now called the Thomas Paine Cottage in New Rochelle, New York, where he had lived after returning to America in 1802. His remains were later disinterred by an admirer, William Cobbett, who sought to return them to England. The bones were, however, later lost and his final resting place today is unknown.

Early life

Thomas Paine's house in Lewes.

Thomas Paine was son of Joseph Pain, a Quaker, and Frances Pain (née Cocke), an Anglican, in Thetford, a small, market town and coach stage-post, in rural Norfolk. Born Thomas Pain, he changed his family name upon his emigration to America in 1774.

He attended Thetford Grammar School (1744-1749) that selected pupils on ability, at a time when there was no compulsory education. At age thirteen, he was apprentice to his corset-maker father; in late adolescence, he enlisted and briefly served as a privateer, before returning to Britain in 1759. There, he became a master corset and stay maker, establishing a shop in Sandwich, Kent. On September 27, 1759, Thomas Paine married Mary Lambert. His business collapsed soon after. Mary became pregnant, and, after they moved to Margate,she went into early labour, in which she and their child died.

In July 1761, Paine returned to Thetford to work as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762, he became an excise officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire; in August 1764, he was transferred to Alford, at a salary of £50 per annum. On August 27, 1765, he was fired as an Excise Officer for "claiming to have inspected goods he did not inspect." On July 31, 1766, he requested his reinstatement from the Board of Excise, which they granted the next day– upon vacancy. While awaiting that, he worked as a stay maker in Diss, Norfolk, and later as a servant (per the records, for a Mr Noble, of Goodman's Fields, and for a Mr Gardiner, at Kensington). He also applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England and, per some accounts, he preached in Moorfields.

In 1767, he was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall; subsequently, he asked to leave this post to await a vacancy, thus, he became a schoolteacher in London. On February 19, 1768, he was appointed to Lewes, East Sussex, living above the fifteenth-century Bull House, the tobacco shop of Samuel Ollive and Esther Ollive. There, Paine first became involved in civic matters, when Samuel Ollive introduced him to the Society of Twelve, a local, élite intellectual group that met semestrally, to discuss town politics. He also was in the influential Vestry church group that collected taxes and tithes to distribute among the poor. On March 26, 1771, at age 34, he married Elizabeth Ollive, his landlord's daughter.

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 twenty-one-page article, and his first political work, spending the London winter distributing the 4,000 copies printed to the Parliament and others. In spring of 1774, he was fired from the excise service for being absent from his post without permission; his tobacco shop failed, too. On April 14, to avoid debtor's prison, he sold his household possessions to pay debts. On June 4, he formally separated from wife Elizabeth and moved to London, where, in September, a friend introduced him to Benjamin Franklin, who suggested emigration to British colonial America, and gave him a letter of recommendation. In October, Thomas Paine emigrated from England to America, arriving in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774.

He barely survived the transatlantic voyage, because the ship's potable water was bad, and typhoid fever had killed five passengers. On arriving to Philadelphia, he was too sick to debark. Benjamin Franklin's physician, there to welcome Paine to America, had him carried off ship; Paine took six weeks to recover his health.

In January 1775 he became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine a position he conducted with considerable ability

Moreover, Thomas Paine was an inventor, who received a European patent for a single-span iron bridge; developed a smoke-less candle, and worked with inventor John Fitch in developing steam engines. Mechanical aptitude and intellectual originality made him saint of Thomas Edison's devotion.

American Revolution

Common Sense, published in 1776.

Thomas Paine has a claim to the title The Father of the American Revolution because of Common Sense, the pro-independence monograph pamphlet he anonymously published on January 10, 1776; it quickly spread among the literate, and, in three months, 100,000 copies sold throughout the American British colonies (with only two million free inhabitants), making it a best-selling work in eighteenth-century America.

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

Paine was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, and was granted, along with Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and 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 probably 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 open 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,"

While in prison, Paine narrowly escaped execution. A guard walked through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the prisoners who were due to be sent to the guillotine on the morrow. He placed a 4 on the door of Paine's cell, but Paine's door had been left open to let a breeze in, because Paine was seriously ill at the time. That night, his other three cell mates closed the door, thus hiding the mark inside the cell. The next day their cell was overlooked. "The Angel of Death" passed over Paine, he kept his head, and survived the few vital days needed to be spared by the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor (July 27, 1794).

Paine was released in November 1794 largely because of the work of the new American Minister to France, James Monroe. In July 1795, he was re-admitted into the Convention, as were other surviving Girondins. Paine was one of only three deputees to oppose the adoption of the new 1795 constitution, because it eliminated universal suffrage, which had been proclaimed by the Montagnard Constitution of 1793.

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 discussed with Napoleon on how best to invade England and in December 1797 wrote two essays, one of which was pointedly named Observations on the Construction and Operation of Navies with a Plan for an Invasion of England and the Final Overthrow of the English Government, in which he promoted the idea to finance 1000 gunboats to carry a French invading army across the English Channel. In 1804 Paine returned to the subject, writing To the People of England on the Invasion of England advocating the idea.

On noting Napoleon's progress towards dictatorship, he condemned him as: "the completest charlatan that ever existed". Thomas Paine remained in France until 1802, returning to America only at President Jefferson's invitation.

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 dislike 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.

"In the summer of 1803 the political atmosphere was in a tempestuous condition, owing to the widespread accusation that Aaron Burr had intrigued with the Federalists against Jefferson to gain the presidency. There was a Society in New York called "Republican Greens," who, on Independence Day, had for a toast "Thomas Paine, the Man of the People", and who seem to have had a piece of music called the "Rights of Man". Paine was also apparently the hero of that day at White Plains, where a vast crowd assembled".

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.

Political views

Thomas Paine developed his natural justice beliefs in childhood, while listening to a mob jeering and attacking the town folk being punished in the Thetford stocks. Also, he might have been influenced by his Quaker father. In The Age of Reason– the treatise supporting deism– he says:

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.

He was an early advocate of republicanism and liberalism, dismissing monarchy, and viewing government as a necessary evil. He opposed slavery, proposed universal, free public education, a guaranteed minimum income, and other ideas then considered radical.

In the second part of The Age of Reason, about his sickness in prison, he says: ". . . 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'". This quotation encapsulates its gist:

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.

About religion, The Age of Reason says:

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 also wrote An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry (1803-1805), about the Bible being allegorical myth describing astrology:

The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun

He described himself as deist, saying:

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.

Paine was once often credited with writing "African Slavery in America", the first article proposing the emancipation of African slaves and the abolition of slavery. It was published on March 8, 1775 in the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser (aka The Pennsylvania Magazine and American Museum). Citing a lack of evidence that Paine was the author of this anonymously published essay, some scholars (Eric Foner and Alfred Owen Aldridge) no longer consider this one of his works. By contrast, John Nichols speculates that his "fervent objections to slavery" led to his exclusion from power during the early years of the Republic.

His last, great pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, he published in winter of 1795, further developing the ideas in the Rights of Man, about how land ownership separated the majority of people from their rightful, natural inheritance, and means of independent survival. Contemporarilly, his proposal is deemed a form of basic Income Guarantee. The U.S. Social Security Administration recognizes Agrarian Justice as the first American proposal for an old-age pension; per Agrarian Justice:

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 writing greatly influenced his contemporaries and, especially, the American revolutionaries. His books inspired philosophic and working-class radicals in the U.K., and U.S. liberals, libertarians, democratic socialists, social democrats, anarchists, freethinkers, progressives, and radicals often claim him as intellectual ancestor.

Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison respectfully read his works. Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, reports that he (Lincoln) wrote a defence of Paine's deism in 1835, and friend Samuel Hill burned it to save Lincoln's political career; and of him, Thomas Edison said:

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 war's end, the Congress gave Thomas Paine a farm in New Rochelle, New York, for services rendered. On it are the Thomas Paine Cottage, the Thomas Paine Historical Society museum, and the man's grave. In the U.K., a statue of Thomas Paine (quill pen and inverted copy of Rights of Man in hand), stands in King Street, Thetford, Norfolk, his birth place. Moreover, in Thetford, the Sixth form is named after him. At Bronx Community College, there is a bust of Thomas Paine in their Hall of Fame of Great Americans, and there are statues of Paine in Morristown and Bordentown, New Jersey, and in the Parc Montsouris, in Paris. The town of Diss has a Thomas Paine Street. In Paris, there is a plaque in the street where he lived from 1797 to 1802, that says: "Thomas PAINE / 1737–1809 / Englishman by birth / American by adoption / French by decree". Yearly, between 4 and July 14, the Lewes Town Council celebrates the life and work of Thomas Paine.

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

Thomas Paine's words were quoted by President Barack Obama in his inaugural address: 'Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.'"

See also

• United States Declaration of Independence
• Asset-based egalitarianism
• 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
• New Rochelle, New York

References

40. Paine Thomas (The Popular Encyclopedia (Blackie & Sons london Glasgow & Edinburgh 1875)

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.
• Ayer, A. J., 1990. Thomas Paine. University of Chicago Press.
• 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.
• Griffiths, Trevor (2004), These Are the Times: A Life of Thomas Paine, Spokesman Books
• 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 Modern Nations. Viking. ISBN 0670037885.
• 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 (Foner, 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.
• Wilensky, Mark (2008), The Elementary Common Sense of Thomas Paine. An Interactive Adaptation for All Ages, Casemate, ISBN 9781932714364
• 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
• 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
• The theological works of Thomas Paine to which are appended the profession of faith of a savoyard vicar by J.J. Rousseau
• Common Sense by Thomas Paine; HTML format, indexed by section