Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an intellectual scholar and idealist, widely recognized as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A radical pamphleteer, Paine anticipated and helped foment the American Revolution through his powerful writings, most notably Common Sense, an incendiary tract advocating independence from Great Britain. Paine was also noteworthy for his defense of deism as well as his eye-witness accounts of the both the French Revolution and American Revolution
Biography
Paine was born January 29 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk in eastern England to Joseph Paine, a Quaker and Frances "Cocke" Paine, an Anglican. A sister, Elizabeth, died in infancy. Paine, who grew up around farmers and other uneducated people, failed out of school at twelve. He apprenticed to his father, a corseter at thirteen, apparently failing at this as well. At 19, Paine became a merchant seaman, serving a short time before returning to England in April 1759. There he set up a corset shop in Sandwich, Kent. In September of that year, Paine married; Following a move to Margate, his wife died the following year.
In July 1761, Paine returned to Thetford where he worked as a supernumerary officer. In December 1762, he became an excise officer in Grantham, Lincolnshire; in August 1764 he was again transfered, this time to Alford, where his salary was £50 a year. On August 27, 1765, Paine was discharged from his post for claiming to have inspected goods when in fact he had only seen the documentation. On July 3, 1766, he wrote a letter to the board of excise asking to be reinstated, and the next day the board granted his request to be filled upon vacancy. While waiting for an opening, Paine worked as a staymaker in Diss, Norfolk, and later as a servant (records show he worked for a Mr. Noble of Goodman's Fields and then a Mr. Gardiner at Kensington). He also applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England, and according to some accounts preached in Moorfields.
On May 15, 1767, Paine was appointed to a position in Grampound , Cornwall. He later was asked to leave to await another vacancy, and was a schoolteacher in London at this time. On February 19, 1768, Paine was appointed to Lewes, East Sussex; he moved into the room above the 15th century Bull House, a building which held the snuff and tobacco shop of Samuel and Esther Ollive. Here Paine first became involved in civic matters, with Samuel Ollive introducing him into the Society of Twelve, a group of town elites who met twice a year to discuss town issues. In addition, Paine participated in the Vestry, the influential church group that collected taxes and tithes and distributed them to the poor.
He married his landlord's daughter, Elizabeth Ollive, on March 26, 1771.
Paine lobbied Parliament for better pay and working conditions for excisemen, and in 1772 published The Case of the Officers of Excise, a 21-page article and his first political work. In September 1774, Paine met Benjamin Franklin in London. Franklin advised Paine to emigrate to the British colonies in America, and wrote him letters of recommendation. Paine left England in October, arriving in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on November 30. Just before he left, Paine and his second wife, with whom he did not get along, were legally separated.
Paine was also an inventor, receiving a patent in Europe for the single span iron bridge. He developed a smokeless candle, and worked with John Fitch on the early development of steam engines. This inventiveness, coupled with his originality of thought, found a firm advocate more than a century later in Edison who championed Paine and helped rescue him from his relative obscurity.
Some believe Paine may have begun to form his early views on natural justice whilst listening to the Puritan mob jeering and attacking the unfortunates punished in the stocks. Others have argued that he was influenced by his Quaker father. In The Age of Reason, Paine's defense of deism, he writes:
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.
A proto-anarchist, Paine advocated a liberal world view, considered radical for his time. He dismissed royalty, and viewed all government as, at best, a necessary evil. He opposed slavery and was amongst the earliest proponents of social security, universal free public education, guaranteed minimum wages and many other radical ideas now in common practice in most western democracies.
Paine was a deist and fervent critic of organized religion, which led to social ostracism much of his life. Paine published an early anti-slavery tract and was co-editor of Pennsylvania Magazine. A republican, Paine became an articulate spokesman for the American independence movement.
Paine is said to have been tarred and feathered in New Jersey, but no proof exists of this. Due to his unorthodox and unpopular opinions, scurrilous tales were circulated about Paine, first by the British, (during the time of the American Revolution), and later by his political opponents on both sides of the Atlantic.
Common Sense, Paine's pro-independence monograph published anonymously in January 1776, spread quickly throughout literate colonists. As many as a half million copies are alleged to have been distributed throughout colonies which themselves totalled only a few million free inhabitants. This work convinced many average colonists, including George Washington, to seek redress in political independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. It was instrumental in bringing about the Declaration of Independence. The work (including its name), was greatly influenced by the equally controversial pro-independence writer Benjamin Rush (Paine had originally proposed the title Plain Truth).
Paine's importance was his ability to present complex ideas in clear and concise form, as opposed to the more rhetorical philosophical approaches of his Enlightenment contemporaries in Europe. He also proposed the name United States of America for the new nation. When the war arrived, Paine published a series of critically important pamphlets, The Crisis credited with inspiring the early colonists during the ordeals faced in their long struggle with the British. The first Crisis paper, published December 23, 1776, commenced with the now-immortal line, "These are the times that try men's souls". General Washington himself found it so uplifting he ordered it read to all his troops.
Returning to Europe, Paine finished his Rights of Man on 29 January 1791. On 31 January he passed the manuscript to publisher Joseph Johnson, who intended to have it ready for Washington's birthday on 22 February. Johnson was visited on a number of occasions by agents of the government; sensing that Paine's book would be controversial, he decided not to release it on the day it was due to be published. Paine quickly began to negotiate with another publisher, J.S. Jordan. Once the deal was secured, Paine left for Paris, leaving three good friends, William Godwin, Thomas Brand Hollis and Thomas Holcroft, in charge of the final arrangements. The book appeared on 13 March, 3 weeks later than planned. It was an abstract political tract published in support of the French Revolution, written as a reply to Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke. The book—which was highly critical of monarchies and European social institutions—was so controversial that the British government put Paine on trial in absentia for seditious libel. Paine had already (prudently) left for Paris.
Although Paine was an enthusiatic supporter of the French Revolution, and despite being a foreigner was elected to the National Convention, he opposed the execution of Louis XVI and advocated he be exiled to the USA instead. That was enough to bring Paine—who was never noted for his diplomacy—into conflict with the increasingly out-of-control revolutionary leaders. Imprisoned and sentenced to death by Robespierre, Paine escaped beheading apparently by chance. A guard walked through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the condemned prisoners. He placed one on Paine's door — but because a doctor was treating Paine at that moment, the cell door was open. When the doctor left, the door was swung closed, such that the chalk mark faced into the cell. Later, when the condemned prisoners were rounded up for execution, Paine was spared because there was no apparent chalk mark on his cell door.
In prison, convinced he would soon be dead, Paine wrote The Age of Reason, an assault on organized religion. A second part was written and published after his release from prison. The content of the work can be briefly summarized in this quotation:
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.
Paine published his last great pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, in the winter of 1795-1796. In this pamphlet, Paine further developed ideas proposed in the Rights of Man as to how the institution of land ownership separated the great majority of persons from their rightful natural inheritance and means of independent survival. The U.S. Social Security Administration recognizes Agrarian Justice as the first American proposal for an old-age pension . In Agrarian Justice Paine writes:
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.
Purportedly in 1800, Napoleon met with Paine, and stated that "a statue of gold should be erected to him in every city of the earth". Paine did not like Napoleon, by all accounts. Paine remained in France until 1802 when he returned to America on an invitation from Thomas Jefferson.
Derided by the public and abandoned by his friends due to his religious views, Paine died at 59 Grove Street in Greenwich Village, in New York City on June 8, 1809. At the time of his death, most U.S. 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. A few years later the agrarian radical William Cobbett would ship his bones back to England, only to lose them in transit.
Legacy
Thomas Paine's writings have greatly affected Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, as well as his other contemporaries such as George Washington. There is a museum in New Rochelle, New York in his honor, and a statue of him stands in King Street in Thetford, Norfolk, his place of birth.
See also
External links
Last updated: 10-12-2005 19:08:23
