Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine an English-born political writer, pamphleteer and revolutionary (1737-1809), whose plain and forceful arguments for American independence, for the rights of man and for religious liberty made him one of the most widely read authors of his age and a leading voice of the Atlantic revolutions.

Early Life and Arrival in America

Thomas Paine was born on 29 January 1737 at Thetford in Norfolk, the son of a Quaker staymaker and an Anglican mother, and the mixed inheritance of his parents gave him early experience of the disputes between Protestant sects that coloured his later attitude to established religion. He was apprenticed to his father's trade and tried various occupations, serving for a time as a seaman, then as a staymaker, an excise officer and a schoolmaster. He married twice, was widowed once, and struggled for years in modest and unsettled circumstances that taught him the hardships of ordinary working people.

In 1774 he met Benjamin Franklin in London, and with Franklin's encouragement and a letter of introduction he emigrated to the American colonies, arriving in Philadelphia late in the same year after a miserable passage in which many of his fellow passengers died of disease. He found work as a journalist and soon became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, where his articles on politics, on the rights of women and on the wrongs of slavery attracted attention and marked him out as a writer of vigour and independent judgement.

His experiences in England had made him a critic of inherited privilege and of a political system that rewarded birth over merit, and he brought this outlook with him to America, where the absence of an established aristocracy confirmed his belief that a society could be governed upon rational and republican principles. He was, by temperament and conviction, a man of the Enlightenment who believed that reason, once freed from superstition and tyranny, would steadily improve the condition of humanity and spread the blessings of peace and freedom among all nations.

Common Sense and the Revolution

Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, published anonymously in Philadelphia in January 1776, was the most effective piece of political writing of the American Revolution. In clear and vigorous language it argued that the colonies should break with Britain at once and establish an independent republic, and it dismissed monarchy as a corrupt and irrational form of government whose origin lay in force and superstition rather than in reason. It appealed directly to the plain sense of ordinary readers and avoided the ornaments of classical learning that might have narrowed its audience.

The pamphlet sold in enormous numbers, running through edition after edition and circulating throughout the thirteen colonies, and it was read aloud in taverns, meeting houses and army camps to audiences of every degree. It helped to turn a dispute over taxation and representation into a demand for complete independence, and it prepared public opinion for the Declaration of Independence issued in July 1776. Washington and many other leaders testified to its powerful effect upon the popular mind and its part in making the cause of separation respectable and urgent.

During the war Paine served with the army as an aide and wrote a series of pamphlets called The American Crisis to sustain the morale of the troops and the public in the darkest moments of the conflict. The first of these, with its famous opening about the times that try men's souls, was read to the soldiers on the eve of the crossing of the Delaware, and it did much to rally a wavering cause at a moment when defeat seemed almost certain and the spirit of the army was near to breaking under the weight of successive reverses.

Rights of Man and Revolution in Europe

Paine returned to Europe and in 1791 published the first part of Rights of Man, a reply to Burke's attack upon the French Revolution. He defended the principles of 1789, maintained that men possess natural and equal rights that are antecedent to government, and argued that government should be judged by its utility to the governed and should be reformed when it ceased to serve their happiness. The book was a huge success and was widely circulated in cheap editions that reached working people who had never before read a political treatise.

In 1792 he published the second part, which went further and proposed a programme of social reform, including relief for the poor, pensions for the aged, education for the children of the poor and a fairer system of taxation that would fall most heavily on great landed estates. These proposals were far in advance of his time and anticipated the welfare arrangements of later centuries, and they showed how readily he moved from the assertion of rights to the practical business of social legislation and to detailed plans for the relief of human want.

He was tried in absentia in England for seditious libel and, on the day that a verdict of guilty was returned, was elected to the French National Convention, from which he was recalled while on the way to his trial. He took his seat amid the turmoil of the Revolution, but he opposed the execution of Louis XVI and was consequently imprisoned during the Terror. He escaped the guillotine narrowly, and the fall of Robespierre saved his life, an experience that deepened his suspicion of fanaticism and of the misuse of power in every form.

The Age of Reason and Religious Liberty

In 1794 and 1795 Paine published The Age of Reason, a defence of deism and an attack upon organised religion and the authority of the Bible. He affirmed his belief in a single Creator and in the moral duties of humanity, but he rejected revelation, miracle and the claims of the established churches, and he argued that true religion consists not in belief in a particular history of divine intervention but in the practice of justice, mercy and benevolence toward one's fellow creatures and in a devout attention to the works of God in nature.

The book provoked widespread hostility, especially in America, and cost Paine much of the popularity he had once enjoyed. He was reviled as an infidel and an enemy of religion, and his old comrades in the revolutionary cause turned from him, yet his argument for freedom of conscience and for the separation of church and state influenced later advocates of religious liberty and of a secular public order and gave shape to the American tradition of a free church in a free state where no sect could claim the support of the law.

His religious and political writings were closely connected in his mind. Both rested upon the conviction that every human being possesses the capacity to reason and the right to judge for himself in matters of belief and of government, and he opposed all systems that relied upon mystery, tradition or force to command obedience. He trusted instead in the power of plain argument addressed to ordinary people, and he regarded the spread of knowledge and of free discussion as the surest safeguard of human happiness and of lasting peace.

Later Years and Legacy

Paine returned to the United States in 1802 at the invitation of President Jefferson, but he found his reputation damaged by his religious views and his last years were marked by poverty, illness and neglect. He lived in New Rochelle and later in New York, quarrelled with old friends and was shunned by many who had once admired him, and he died on 8 June 1809 in a small house in Greenwich Village. Only a handful of mourners attended his funeral, and his remains were later removed and lost to history.

His reputation recovered slowly, and he came to be honoured as a pioneer of democratic and republican ideas. Abraham Lincoln and later reformers drew upon his arguments, and his pamphlets were invoked in the cause of labour, of universal suffrage, of free public education and of the rights of the common citizen. His plain style, addressed to the reader with no pretensions to learning, became a model for political writing in a democratic age and helped to establish the essay as a weapon of popular persuasion.

He stands as one of the great radical thinkers of the eighteenth century, a man whose writings carried the ideas of the Enlightenment to a mass audience on two continents. His insistence upon the rights of the individual, the accountability of government and the freedom of conscience has left a lasting mark upon modern political life, and his voice remains a summons to a free and equal society in which reason and humanity are the measures of all institutions and the guides of all reform, a vision that has lost none of its power with the passing of the centuries.

See also

• Common Sense
• Rights of Man
• The Age of Reason
• American Revolution