Pamphleteer whose Common Sense convinced ordinary colonists to demand independence and a republic.
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Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1737, in Thetford, England, the son of a corset-maker. He left school at thirteen, failed at his father's trade, at teaching, and at collecting excise taxes, and was fired twice from the last job, once after writing a pamphlet asking for higher pay. In London in 1774 he met Benjamin Franklin, who gave him a letter of introduction to Philadelphia. Paine arrived that November, nearly dead of typhus, with nothing but the letter and a gift for plain, furious prose.
Fourteen months later he changed the argument of the Revolution. Common Sense, published anonymously on January 10, 1776, said what the delegates in Congress were still afraid to say: that kings were a ridiculous idea, that a small island had no business ruling a continent, and that the colonies should declare independence at once and build a republic. Written for ordinary readers rather than lawyers, it sold in the tens of thousands within months, an astonishing number in a population of two and a half million, and it was read aloud in taverns and army camps. Six months later Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.
Paine then served with the army through the disastrous retreat across New Jersey in late 1776 and wrote The American Crisis by campfire light. Its opening line, that these are the times that try men's souls, was read to George Washington's troops before the surprise crossing of the Delaware that won Trenton. He kept writing through the war, gave his profits to the cause, and lived poor. After the war he went back to Europe, defended the French Revolution in Rights of Man, was elected to the French National Convention, and was jailed there during the Terror, narrowly escaping the guillotine. His attack on organized religion in The Age of Reason cost him most of his American friends. He returned to the United States in 1802 and died in New York on June 8, 1809; only a handful of people attended his funeral. His reputation has risen ever since, because the words he wrote for the moment turned out to be the ones that lasted. Read the story he helped set in motion in the American Revolution journey.
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