Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Anglo-American political philosopher, whose pamphlet Common Sense greatly influenced public opinion during the American War of Independence.

Born on January 29, 1737, in Thetford, Norfolk, Paine followed his father into corset-making before becoming an excise officer, a post from which he was dismissed in 1771 when he advocated a pay rise as the only means of guarding against corruption among excisemen. He also made two unsuccessful marriages in this period. He emigrated to Philadelphia in 1774, with introductions from Benjamin Franklin, who then represented the American colonies in Great Britain. Once there, he edited the Pennsylvania Magazine and published other writings, including attacks on slavery and advocacy of women's rights. On January 1, 1776, Common Sense appeared. In a dramatic, rhetorical style, it asserted that the American colonies received no advantage from their mother country, which was intent on exploiting them, and that every consideration of common sense called for the colonies to become independent of Great Britain and to establish a republican government of their own. Published anonymously, the pamphlet sold more than 500,000 copies and encouraged the writing of the Declaration of Independence six months later.

During the War of Independence Paine wrote a series of pamphlets, entitled The American Crisis, that George Washington ordered to be read to his troops to improve their morale. In 1778 Congress appointed Paine secretary of the committee of foreign affairs. After losing the post during a political dispute, he became clerk of the Pennsylvania legislature. Acknowledging that much of Paine's public service had been at his own expense, in 1785 Congress awarded him $3,000 and New York State gave him a confiscated loyalist farm in New Rochelle.

Paine returned to Great Britain in 1787, and in 1791-1792 he published The Rights of Man, in two parts. The most famous of all replies to the condemnatory Reflections Upon the French Revolution by the British statesman Edmund Burke, it was also an analysis of the weaknesses of European society, proposing such remedies as republican government and progressive income taxes; a million and a half copies were sold in Britain alone. The British government indicted Paine for treason, and he fled to France.

In France Paine was elected a deputy to the National Convention, and he generally voted with the Girondins. By favouring the exile, rather than the execution, of King Louis XVI, however, he offended Maximilien de Robespierre, the leader of the radical faction, and he was imprisoned for 11 months until Robespierre's downfall in 1794; he then regained his National Convention seat. That year Part I of his book The Age of Reason was published; Part II appeared in 1795 and a portion of Part III in 1807. Although it favours deism while opposing both atheism and Christianity, the book gained him a reputation as an atheist and alienated most of his old friends. Paine eventually became disgusted with French politics and concentrated on the study of finance until 1802, when he returned to the United States in a ship placed at his disposal by President Thomas Jefferson. He died in New York on June 8, 1809, having been largely shunned or ignored during his final years.