Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (29 January 1737 – 8 June 1809) was a British-born American political philosopher, pamphleteer, and revolutionary who was the most widely read political writer of the Age of Revolution and whose works — Common Sense (1776), the American Crisis papers (1776–1783), Rights of Man (1791–1792), and The Age of Reason (1794–1807) — constitute some of the most powerful and influential political prose in the English language. Paine did not merely argue for revolution — he made revolution seem reasonable, necessary, and morally imperative, in prose that ordinary people could read and understand. He was the great populariser of Enlightenment political thought, and his influence on the American founding, on democratic theory, and on the tradition of radical pamphleteering is incalculable.

Life

Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk, England, the son of a Quaker corset maker. He was largely self-educated. His early life was a series of failures: he was a failed corset maker, a failed excise officer (dismissed twice), and a failed husband (two marriages, one wife died, one separated). At thirty-seven, he emigrated to Philadelphia with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in London.

He arrived in America in late 1774 and immediately threw himself into journalism, editing the Pennsylvania Magazine. Within eighteen months, he published the pamphlet that changed the course of history.

Common Sense (1776)

Common Sense was published anonymously in January 1776 and sold an estimated 500,000 copies in its first year — in a country of approximately 2.5 million people. No work of political argument has ever achieved comparable saturation.

The pamphlet argued, in plain, forceful, deliberately unsophisticated language, that the American colonies should declare independence from Britain. This was, at the time, a radical position — many colonists still hoped for reconciliation with the Crown. Paine attacked the institution of hereditary monarchy (“Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived”), argued that the colonies had no economic or political interest in remaining attached to Britain, and insisted that the moment for independence had arrived.

The pamphlet’s power lay in its accessibility. Paine deliberately wrote for a popular audience — shopkeepers, farmers, artisans — not for the educated elite. His sentences are short, his arguments are concrete, and his rhetoric is democratic in both content and form.

The American Crisis (1776–1783)

The Crisis papers — sixteen pamphlets published during the Revolutionary War — sustained American morale during the darkest periods of the conflict. The first, published in December 1776 as Washington’s army was retreating across New Jersey, opens with one of the most famous sentences in American literature: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Washington ordered the pamphlet read aloud to his troops before the Battle of Trenton.

Rights of Man (1791–1792)

Written in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Rights of Man is a comprehensive defence of the French Revolution and of the principle that sovereignty belongs to the people, not to hereditary rulers. The work goes beyond political argument to propose practical social reforms: a progressive income tax, family allowances, old-age pensions, and public education — proposals that anticipate the modern welfare state by a century and a half.

The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Britain and provoked the British government to charge Paine with seditious libel. He fled to France, where he was elected to the National Convention, only to be imprisoned during the Terror for opposing the execution of Louis XVI.

The Age of Reason (1794–1807)

Paine’s critique of organised religion — written while he was imprisoned in Luxembourg Palace and expecting execution — is a defence of deism (belief in God without revelation or organised church) and an attack on the Bible as the word of God. The book destroyed Paine’s reputation in America, where he was denounced as an atheist and a blasphemer. Theodore Roosevelt later called him “a filthy little atheist” — an epithet that is inaccurate on all three counts.

Death and Legacy

Paine returned to America in 1802 at the invitation of Thomas Jefferson, but the damage done by The Age of Reason was irreparable. He was shunned by former allies, denied the right to vote in New Rochelle on the grounds that he was not an American citizen, and died in poverty and obscurity on 8 June 1809 in Greenwich Village, New York. Only six people attended his funeral. William Cobbett later dug up his bones and took them to England, intending to build a memorial; the bones were lost after Cobbett’s death and have never been found.

Paine’s rehabilitation has been slow but comprehensive. Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, and Bertrand Russell all championed him. He is now recognised as one of the most important political writers in the English language — a man whose ideas about democracy, human rights, social welfare, and the separation of church and state were ahead of his time by decades or centuries, and whose prose remains a model of democratic persuasion.

Collecting Paine

Common Sense (1776, Robert Bell, Philadelphia) in first edition is one of the rarest and most valuable items in American book collecting: copies bring $100,000+. Rights of Man (1791, J. Johnson) in first edition brings $2,000–$8,000. The Age of Reason (1794–1795) brings $500–$2,000. Later editions and modern reprints are widely available.