He started as a fourteen-year-old corset-maker, and would be a sailor, tax collector, schoolteacher and Fleet Street hack. His parents’ generosity gave him eight years’ schooling; he made himself a political writer of force and eloquence comparable to Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, and wrote three of his century’s bestselling books, all of which remain in print. The most notorious radical of his time, a feminist and abolitionist, his name inspired fear, contempt, and admiration on two continents.
He held office in three different countries and was elected without his knowledge and on reputation alone to the legislature of a nation whose language he never learned to speak. He died in squalor, denied the vote by his neighbors in the country for whose sake he had marshaled the English language and sent it forth into battle. Nearly two centuries after his death in Greenwich Village, Thomas Paine is more alive through his thoughts and words than are most men and women who breathe.
At the time he became famous, Paine was about five feet, nine inches tall, slim and well proportioned, with a mass of dark, wavy hair, good skin, a high forehead, and a bold nose. Most observers noted his uncommonly large, brilliant, and animated eyes. Deeply shy, Paine was nonetheless a witty conversationalist, perhaps because he listened well.
Thomas Pain (he did not change the spelling until 1774) was born at Thetford in Norfolk, England on January 29, 1737. His father was a Quaker corset-maker, his mother an Anglican and the daughter of an attorney. His grammar school taught him history, mathematics and science. It was enough. Even then an omnivorous reader, he believed along with most intelligent people that “every person of learning is his own teacher.”
Paine began working in his father’s trade at fourteen. He loathed it and ran off to join a privateer, the Terrible, commanded by one Captain Death. Though his Quaker father caught him the first time, Paine ran off again to the King of Prussia. He jumped ship a year later to make corsets in London and Sandwich. He then joined the Excise, the equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and about as popular as the modern agencies are now. He was fired for a careless clerical error, taught school, and then finagled another exciseman’s post at Lewes, in Sussex.
Meanwhile, Paine taught himself about science, philosophy, and politics, a remarkable accomplishment in an age before free lending libraries. He read Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, and as he wanted to effectively communicate his ideas, imitated their crisp, plain style. He believed plain language could communicate complicated ideas. As John Keane noted in Tom Paine: A Political Life, Paine aspired to “avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet.” His prose became concise, rigorously excluding the superfluous, and using no more words than necessary—a simplicity not only elegant but thrillingly modern. He also argued in a local debating club, where he revealed astonishingly radical views: he denounced dueling, slavery, war, and monarchy and favored equality for women.
Taproom oratory was one thing, organizing his fellow excisemen to demand higher wages was another. The Board of Excise found an excuse to fire him.
At thirty-seven, Paine was surviving in London as a Fleet Street hack when he met Benjamin Franklin. Then the London agent for Pennsylvania, Franklin suggested Paine’s opinions might be more welcome in America and provided him with an introduction.
On November 30, 1774, Paine landed in Philadelphia. In January 1775, he became managing editor of Pennsylvania Magazine. His first article called for the abolition of slavery. However, Paine was a sound professional journalist as well as a radical: he wrote on science, commerce, trade, and literature as well as politics. Good writing attracts readers, and during his first three months as editor, he increased the magazine’s paid circulation by nearly 150 percent.
Paine’s radicalism made him a separatist almost immediately. On January 10, 1776, barely a year after his arrival, he published Common Sense at two shillings a copy. The pamphlet is short: perhaps fifteen minutes’ reading. He exposed the claims of George III (“the Royal Brute of England”) to a degree of power over the colonies that he did not possess in England, showed the necessity of breaking away from the corrupt British government, and called for a constitutional republic. The Englishman had an American grandeur of vision: “We have it in our power to begin the world all over again.” He also had a sense of the nation’s special promise: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all Mankind.”
To be sure, the pamphlet is also scurrilous, abusive, seditious, and sparkling. Paine’s sinewy prose seized the time, communicated his sense of urgency, hammered his points home:
The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. It is not the affair of a city, a country, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent… It is not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of continental union, faith, and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full-grown characters.
Common Sense sold out in its first two weeks of publication. By the first week in February an edition had been published in New York. By April, it had come out in Salem, Hartford, Newport, Lancaster, Newburyport, Albany, and Providence. Over the course of the next year, the pamphlet was brought out in England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland and reviewed in Dubrovnik and St. Petersburg. Paine wrote (and he did not exaggerate), “the number of copies printed and sold in America was not short of 150,000.” It was the greatest sale of any publication since Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. It transformed the American debate from taxation to independence and converted George Washington to the cause of independence.
Here in New York, Common Sense was wildly popular. In March 1776, Samuel Loudon, a printer, published The Deceiver Unmasked, an attack on Paine by the Rev. Charles Inglis, loyalist assistant rector of Trinity Church. Late one night, a gang of some forty revolutionaries—either Liberty Boys led by rebel leaders Isaac Sears, Capt. John Lamb, and Alexander MacDougall, or militants from the Mechanics Union led by its chairman, Peter Duyckinck—stormed the print shop, destroyed the press, seized every copy of Inglis’ pamphlet, and burned them on the Common. The Declaration of Independence, approved six months after publication of the tract, though drafted by Jefferson and revised by Congress, reflected the sea change in American politics wrought by Common Sense.
After Washington’s withdrawal from New York, Paine marched with the retreating army from Fort Lee to Trenton, New Jersey. From notes jotted down on the road, Paine composed a new pamphlet, published a week before Christmas 1776: The American Crisis. Its opening lines are immortal:
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 his 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 everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
In the late afternoon of Christmas Day, American officers assembled their troops into squads and read them the pamphlet. Then they marched for the Delaware which they crossed that night in open boats, to fall at dawn upon the Hessians at Trenton. In combination with Washington’s victory, the pamphlet’s effect was astonishing: recruits flocked to Washington’s force. (The opening lines “were in the mouths of everyone going to join the army,” Charles Biddle later wrote.)
Congress then appointed Paine secretary to the Committee on Foreign Affairs. An able administrator, he held office for two years until he publicly exposed a crooked arms deal with France, outlining the graft taken by Silas Deane, the American agent, and his partner, the rakish courtier Caron de Beaumarchais. Yet, even as the ingenious and unscrupulous Beaumarchais ripped off the Americans with one hand, he was writing The Marriage of Figaro with the other. A decade later, Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, transformed his brilliant play into the perfect opera.
Paine now learned an eternal truth: No one likes whistle-blowers. Fired by Congress, he was hired as clerk of the Pennsylvania state legislature. He either drafted or helped draft the assembly’s proclamation of the emancipation of African-American slaves. He published new issues of The American Crisis as needed and even served as a diplomat, negotiating a new loan from the French in 1781. He was not unrewarded for his services. Congress granted him $3,000 as a token of his unpaid arrears of salary as a committee secretary; New York granted him a house and farm at New Rochelle; the University of Pennsylvania granted him an honorary degree; and Pennsylvania granted him 500 pounds.
In 1787, having developed a plan for a long bridge with a single span of 400 to 500 feet (like many of the Founding Fathers, he was strongly interested in practical engineering) and finding Americans unwilling to construct it, Paine decided to visit France and England for a few months to raise money for a full-scale trial of his scheme. He sailed for Paris from New York on April 26, 1787, expecting to be away for a few months at most. He would not return for fifteen years. His adventures had only begun.
New York Press, February 6, 2001