Celebrating Thomas Paine, the Radical Founder

My recent reading of Rafael Sabatini’s popular swashbuckler Scaramouche (1921) caused me to brush up on history of the French Revolution, where I encountered repeated stories of Thomas Paine, the autodidact who wrote Common Sense, the pamphlet that convinced colonists that independence from Britain was imperative. The experience sent me on a multi-week journey to learn more about Thomas Paine (only his enemies called him Tom) and the impact he had on the United States of America (a name he coined!) and the world. On this July 4, it’s appropriate that we celebrate the most radical of the Founders, a man who had his hand in two revolutions.

During his lifetime and even afterward, Paine was a victim of character assassination; his reputation was sullied by partisan political operatives with suspect motives. He inhabited a world very much like our own, where truth often is obscured by disinformation, propaganda, and outright lies.

A Superb Biography of Paine

The first place to start on my Paine journey was a good biography. After a quick search of the Seattle Public Library catalog, I chose Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations by Craig Nelson. Nelson’s book is long (432 pages) but consistently interesting, and it provides adequate coverage of Paine’s involvement in the French revolution, a part of Paine’s life that U.S. biographers often give short shrift.

Paine became an honorary French citizen and a member of the National Convention even though he couldn’t speak French. Since he was Quaker-born, Paine opposed the death penalty, which quickly put him at odds with radical Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre, who sent hundreds of people to the guillotine. Robespierre had Paine arrested and thrown in Luxembourg Prison to await his execution, which he narrowly avoided. While in prison, Paine composed his anti-religion pamphlet Age of Reason in 1794. After the Reign of Terror ended, Paine was released from prison and he subsequently published Age of Reason, Part II. What a remarkable man to have had his hand in two revolutions!

During his lifetime, Paine was the world’s bestselling author, although he received little money for his writings in copyright-free America and later died a pauper. Unlike other Founders, Paine never owned slaves or profited from the slave trade. To 21st Century Americans, Paine not only was right about everything he argued—he presciently predicted the rise of democratic republics worldwide—he was also morally right.

Paine was well-educated and the grandson of a lawyer, but he didn’t attend college. He had various jobs, including staymaker (corset maker) and excise officer before achieving notoriety as a writer in middle age (he was 37 when he wrote Common Sense). Many of his early works were published anonymously to avoid arrest and imprisonment.

Paine married twice. His first wife died in childbirth. He separated from his second wife after only three years. Little is known about them, weakening the private, personal story of Paine’s life.

He met Benjamin Franklin in London in 1774, and Franklin suggested he emigrate to the colonies. Paine arrived in Philadelphia in November of that year, barely surviving typhoid fever contracted during the voyage. (Nelson makes it clear that transatlantic passage at that time was extremely risky; many passengers died from disease or starvation.)

Once in the colonies, Paine quickly embarked on a career as a pamphleteer, and the rest, as they say, is history. Although he never attended college, Paine’s writing demonstrates an autodidact’s understanding of law, government, economics, history, and current events. His pamphlets Common Sense, The American Crisis, The Public Good, Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason are clearly-written essays that explain the core tenets of the Enlightenment for all people.

In his pamphlets, Paine never cites sources for his ideas, presenting them as his own. He also demonstrates rhetorical genius in his arguments, which resulted in such memorable phrases as, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” written during the Continental Army’s retreat from New York. General George Washington had Paine’s pamphlet read aloud to his troops, rousing them to victory in the Battle of Trenton, a turning point in the war.

Like Franklin, Paine was also an inventor. In 1787, he submitted a design for a single-arch iron bridge across the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania. The bridge was never built, but Paine patented its design.

Unfortunately, biographers have scant documentary evidence of Paine’s life, so Nelson’s book isn’t an intimate biography. However, readers can glean aspects of Paine’s personality from his writing, where there is abundant evidence of his wit, wisdom, and biting sarcasm.

Paine’s Complete Works

Good news! Writings of Thomas Paine are freely available at the Project Gutenberg site, with many different formats for download. Common Sense is only 79 pages, so best to start there. As Nelson says, it’s had “the greatest public impact on American history of any piece of writing,” and it’s surprisingly fresh writing for a pamphlet that was published almost 250 years ago.

Web Links:

If you prefer to read physical books, check with your local library.

Contemporaneous Counter Arguments to Paine’s Work

If you choose to read Paine, it helps to also read contemporaneous opposing points of view. Doing so only makes Paine’s writing shine brighter.

For the counter argument to Common Sense, try Plain Truth (1976) by James Chalmers, who articulates the arguments against independence (basically, Chalmers argued that Britain is great, war with them would destroy international trade, and Britain, being the most powerful country, would easily defeat the colonies).

For the counter argument to Rights of Man, try Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by Edmund Burke. Burke argued that the French Revolution was a rebellion against a lawful monarch, the rights of man provide an inadequate basis for government, and that France should reform their government rather than topple it.

The Fall of Paine

Paine would be more revered today if he had avoided making the following four mistakes during his lifetime:

1. Attacking George Washington for not coming to his aid.
2. Offending Robert Morris, a major financier of the American Revolution.
3. Pushing for King Louis XVI and his family to be banished rather than executed, in opposition to the French National Convention.
4. Attacking organized religion.

It was that last mistake that cost Paine dearly. Federalists such as Sam Adams despised Paine, and even Thomas Jefferson, a fellow Deist, tread lightly around him. Before Paine’s death, gossip, disinformation, and innuendo severely tarnished his reputation; James Cheetham’s Life of Thomas Paine, published in 1809, marked him as a perverse, dissolute, drunken atheist, a characterization that persisted for two centuries.

Howard Fast’s Classic Novel About Paine

In 1943, Howard Fast published the popular historical novel Citizen Tom Paine. It’s a fast-paced, cinematic treatment of the life of Thomas Paine, the revolutionist and bestselling author of Common Sense, Rights of Man, and Age of Reason. A relatively short (341 pages), breezy book, it’s easy to finish in a day. Unlike a conventional biography, Fast’s novel humanizes Paine, providing sympathetic insight into Paine’s thoughts at key moments in his life. Given the lack of documentation of Paine’s life, that insight—and the accompanying emotion it brings—is invaluable. The story skips over Paine’s two brief marriages and much of his early life, as do most Paine biographies, and it speeds through Paine’s turbulent period in France, but the book still feels like a complete portrait of the man. It also makes more sense of the Silas Deane affair than many other historical accounts. Fast (author of Spartacus, Freedom Road, April Morning, and Max) wrote more than 80 books, including popular mysteries and historical novels, but this is his biggest bestseller, and deservedly so. He was a Communist when he wrote it, but he quit the party in 1956 after Stalin’s atrocities were exposed.

Paine Ascendant

Paine’s reputation has risen in the last two decades (thanks to Nelson’s 2007 biography and Jill Lepore’s 2006 story The Sharpened Quill in The New Yorker), but he’s not as esteemed as other Founders. That’s too bad, because Paine is right up there with Adams, Jefferson, and Madison in terms of his historical importance to the United States of America as well as to France.

Great news: On December 22, 2022, President Biden signed a congressional bill to endorse a monument dedicated to the life and work of Thomas Paine. For more information, see President Biden Signs Bill to Honor Thomas Paine. To support the memorial, go to the Thomas Paine Memorial Association to donate.

Maybe playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda should have written a musical about Paine instead of Hamilton.