Accounts differ, but sometime between late November and the middle of December 1774, a terribly sick man was carried off a ship in colonial Philadelphia. Riddled with typhus, the middle-aged Brit was too weak to walk after his long voyage from London. But in his pocket were life preservers, notes of introduction from none other than Philadelphia’s favorite son, Benjamin Franklin, in London lobbying on behalf of the colonies.
The bearer Mr Thomas Pain is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man. He goes to Pennsylvania with a view of settling there. If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor, of all which I think him very capable, so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country …
If the British had any idea of who this Thomas Pain would become—he wouldn’t add the “e” until later—they may never have let him set sail to the New World to begin with. In little more than a year, this impoverished 37-year-old, who had known only heartache and failure in Britain, would find his voice as a successful editor and journalist in America’s largest city. And with his newfound purpose and confidence, he would write one of the great world-changing pieces of political propaganda ever published and help birth a free and independent United States of America.
On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine unleashed Common Sense on the colonial public. In an economical 47 pages, which he wrote in the fall of 1775, Paine’s anonymous pamphlet articulated in plain English the rising sentiment that there could be no reconciliation with the mother country. Brimming with rage after the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord—“No man was a warmer wisher for reconciliation than myself, before the fatal nineteenth of April 1775”—Paine argued for complete independence from Great Britain and attacked hereditary monarchy with a populist and democratic fire.
King George III, according to Paine, was “an inveterate enemy of liberty” with a “thirst for arbitrary power.” But Paine didn’t just attack this king—he attacked hereditary monarchy in all its perniciousness and absurdity. He told his fellow colonists of how absolute power corrupted absolutely, tracing the rise of monarchy not to “an honorable origin,” but to one “principal ruffian of some restless gang” who made himself “chief among plunderers.” He wrote of how an accident of birth could mean a child ascending to the crown or a king “worn out with age and infirmity” remaining on the throne, exposing the public “to every miscreant, who can tamper successfully with the follies either of age or infancy.” With his acid pen, Paine appealed to the intelligence of anyone who could believe a mortal was “born to reign” and delivered one of the pithiest lines against monarchy ever: “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion.”
Sometimes Paine’s arguments for independence were practical. “[T]here is something very absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” he wrote, noting how ridiculous it was to petition a government 3,000 miles away that didn’t know, much less care, about the colonists. Paine declared now was the time to strike. Otherwise, like cowards, colonial men would be “leaving the sword to our children.” And for those who thought reconciliation still possible, he had nothing but scorn: “But if you have, and still can shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend, or lover.”
But Paine went farther than just arguing for independence—he wrote of a social revolution, too. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” didn’t just mean breaking from England. It meant representative democracy. It meant the rule of law. It meant respect for common people. “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God,” Paine wrote, “than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”
Maybe Paine had the temerity to write such stirring and nakedly seditious words because he had nothing to lose—aside from his life, of course. Before coming to America, Paine was a failed corset maker and excise officer with minimal formal education whose first wife died in childbirth, along with their child. He had to sell his belongings to avoid debtor’s prison before skipping London for Philadelphia. As eminent historian of the American Revolution Bernard Bailyn wrote, “One had to be a fool or a fanatic in early January 1776 to advocate American independence.”
Paine’s brazenness was rewarded. Common Sense immediately became a blockbuster. The first run of 1,000 pamphlets sold out in days—the author known only as an “Englishman” on its cover. After a dispute with the original publisher, Paine paid for another run of 6,000 himself, priced it to undercut the first publisher, included his responses to loyalist criticism in the new edition, and forswore all royalties, donating the proceeds to Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army. Known as the Bradford edition, the author’s name was displayed clearly: “Thomas Paine.” The now-39-year-old failure from Thetford, England, had stepped out of obscurity and into history.
The impact of Common Sense cannot be overstated. Within three months, printers sold 120,000 copies—a runaway bestseller in a population of 2.5 million colonists. Those who could not read had it read aloud to them. It wasn’t just popular, it was persuasive—to both commoners and the colonial rebel elite. A fan from Connecticut gushed that Paine had “declared the sentiments of millions.” He continued, “The doctrine of independence hath been in times past, greatly disgustful; we abhorred the principle—it is now become our delightful theme, and commands our purest affections.” Another reader from Massachusetts declared, “Nothing else is now talked of, and I know not what can be done by Great Britain to prevent it.”
“But Paine went farther than just arguing for independence—he wrote of a social revolution, too. ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again’ didn’t just mean breaking from England. It meant representative democracy. It meant the rule of law. It meant respect for common people.”
Writing to Washington, Gen. Charles Lee believed it would “give the coup-de-grace to Great Britain.” Washington, in turn, would write in an April 1776 letter that the pamphlet was “working a wonderful change in the minds of many men” in Virginia. Maybe the best evidence of Thomas Paine’s outsized impact on the founding comes from none other than John Adams. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Paine lived rent-free in the irascible and petty Founding Father’s head. The more hierarchical-minded Adams detested Paine and his democratic principles. By the end of his life, Adams described the pamphlet as “a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.” Yet Adams would also write, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” Always worried about his legacy, an exasperated John Adams admitted to Thomas Jefferson in an 1819 letter: “History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Pain.”
Historian Jill Lepore puts it bluntly: “Common Sense made declaring independence possible.” Less than six months later, the Second Continental Congress officially separated from Great Britain—the road to independence paved by Paine’s pen.
If we were to stop at Common Sense, that work alone should have cemented Paine’s place beside Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin in the nation’s true pantheon of Founding Fathers. But when American patriots needed another jolt in defense of the Cause, he wielded his pen again to save the infant nation from being strangled in its crib.
The months after independence were a military disaster. Washington and his army were on the run, abandoning New York City and retreating across New Jersey. Morale withered. Desertions spiked. Enlistment contracts were on the verge of expiring. Congress evacuated Philadelphia for Baltimore. The stench of defeat was everywhere.
After Congress declared independence, Paine enlisted, eventually becoming an aide to Gen. Nathanael Greene. But Paine was no military man; he was a writer and journalist. With the war almost over before it ever began, Paine started to write the first of his 13 Crisis essays—one for each colony—which were rousing defenses of the Cause to keep morale up and public opinion behind the war.
The first American Crisis hit Philadelphia streets a week before Christmas 1776, signed “Common Sense.” Paine once again gave the work away for free to keep the costs down, with printers rushing out 18,000 copies. Washington, now camping just north of British-occupied Trenton on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware, obtained a copy. The commander-in-chief ordered Paine’s words read to the remaining troops, freezing and ill-provisioned, as they prepared for their Christmas crossing of the river—a Hail Mary if there ever was one to save the Cause. It began:
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 their country; but he that stands by 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 every thing its value.
On the morning of December 26, the inspired Continental Army routed the Hessian mercenaries hired by the British to augment the redcoats. According to historian Harvey Kaye, author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, the first Crisis “served both to recruit militiamen back to their units and to persuade locals to volunteer aid and assistance.”
Disaster averted. The war continued.
If you walk through the visitor’s center in Washington’s Crossing, Pennsylvania, you’ll naturally be surrounded by art and exhibits celebrating the genius and heroism of Gen. Washington and his mythical nighttime crossing of the Delaware. But off in a corner next to the bathrooms, almost as an afterthought, sits a small sculpture of Thomas Paine, emblazoned with arguably his most famous line: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”
Time hasn’t proven kind to the radical British ex-pat. “Thomas Paine is, at best, a lesser founder,” Lepore notes in her wry fashion. “In the comic-book version of history that serves as our national heritage, where the Founding Fathers are like the Hanna-Barbera SuperFriends, Paine is Aquaman to Washington’s Superman and Jefferson’s Batman.”
Temperamental and argumentative in person, Paine could be difficult to like. Historians of Paine have speculated that he suffered serious bouts of depression and may have been bipolar. As Franklin’s daughter Sarah Bache would write to him in France from Philadelphia in 1781:
“There never was a man less beloved in a place than Paine is in this, having at different times disputed with everybody. The most rational thing he could have done would have been to have died the instant he had finished his Common Sense, for he ever again will have it in his power to leave the world with so much credit.”
It also didn’t help that he was a nobody before emigrating to America—flotsam and jetsam from the Old World washing on the New World’s shores. Paine was common rabble to the well-born members of America’s founding generation.
His later writings from Europe, particularly The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, however, would make him despised. In The Rights of Man, Paine took up the cause of the French Revolution. It was a full-throated defense of humanity’s natural rights and democratic republicanism against Edmund Burke’s conservative denunciation of the revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Then to hit the trifecta, Paine published The Age of Reason, a rationalist attack on all organized religions, punctuated by his declaration: “My own mind is my own church.” Benjamin Franklin told him not to publish it, writing, “He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face.” Paine did it anyway. Franklin was proven correct—its publication destroyed whatever reputation he had left.
The Age of Reason would end Paine’s friendship with Samuel Adams, who asked him contemptuously: “Do you think that your pen … can unchristianize the mass of our citizens?” Even Teddy Roosevelt would get in on the hate generations later, calling Paine “a filthy little atheist.” (Paine, similar to other Founding Fathers like Jefferson, was a deist.)
John Adams, ever ready to pounce on his enemy, summarized the elite’s disdain for Paine and all his free-thinking mischief in an 1805 letter. “For such a mongrel between pigs and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.”
He didn’t mean it as a compliment.
Paine remains in the popular wilderness 250 years after the publication of Common Sense. No monument graces his name in Washington, D.C., or Philadelphia. No movie or limited series tells his story. The writers of HBO’s John Adams leave him out entirely—the Rodney Dangerfield of the American Revolution. But if that 37-year-old immigrant never had set sail for Philadelphia in the fall of 1774, we might not be here at all.
