Vol. 11775Essay
African Slavery in America
Paine's first major American publication: an early call for the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the colonies, written months after his...
1737–1809
Thomas Paine Filthy Little Atheist
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Citizen of the World
The pamphleteer who set fire to two revolutions.
Thomas Paine was the corset-maker’s son who walked off a Norfolk excise round, sailed to Philadelphia at thirty-seven, and within fourteen months wrote the pamphlet that argued thirteen colonies into a country.
For the next thirty years he kept doing it. Common Sense in Philadelphia, the American Crisis papers from a drumhead at Newark, the Rights of Man in London, the Age of Reason in a Luxembourg prison cell. He was loved on three continents, jailed on one, and dug up after death by an English radical who lost the bones on the way home.
His writings, collected at the end of the nineteenth century in Moncure Conway’s four-volume Writings of Thomas Paine, remain among the most consequential prose in the English language.
72Years of Life
4Conway Volumes
3Continents Lived
1737Born Thetford, Norfolk
From Thetford to Greenwich Village, by way of Paris.
Paine wrote on three continents and in two revolutions. Every pin on the map is a specific recorded event or work from his life -- from the corset-maker’s shop in Norfolk to the New Rochelle farm where six people attended his funeral.
Tiles © OpenStreetMap. Rendered with Leaflet.
His Most Celebrated Writings
From Common Sense through the Age of Reason, the writings that put two governments at war with him in his lifetime and saint-of-democracy on his statue afterwards.
Vol. 11776Pamphlet
Common Sense
The most widely read political pamphlet in American history. Sold over 100,000 copies in three months in a colonial population of 2.5 million; argued...
Vol. 11776Crisis Paper
The American Crisis, No. I
'These are the times that try men's souls.' Written at a drumhead in Newark after Washington's army had been driven across New Jersey; read to the...
Vol. 11777Crisis Paper
The American Crisis, No. II
Direct address to the British commander after Trenton: a warning that the country he intends to subdue has rediscovered itself.
Vol. 11777Crisis Paper
The American Crisis, No. III
On the moral economy of revolution: an extended argument that the American cause is not a private grievance but a universal human concern.
Vol. 11777Crisis Paper
The American Crisis, No. IV
Written on the eve of the Battle of Brandywine; a direct rallying call to the troops and the country.
We have it in our power to begin the world over again. -- Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
Friend, antagonist, prisoner, comrade.
Paine moved through the inner circles of two revolutions. Sponsored to America by Franklin, jailed in Paris by Robespierre, brought home by Jefferson, slandered for a century by Theodore Roosevelt -- a life impossible to have without making enemies.
Benjamin Franklin
1706-1790
Patron & Sponsor
George Washington
1732-1799
Commander, Then Estranged
Thomas Jefferson
1743-1826
Comrade & Returner
Marquis de Lafayette
1757-1834
Revolutionary Comrade
Essays & Commentary
Reflections on Paine’s ideas, his legacy, and the enduring relevance of writing the books the powerful most want burned.
Letter to George Washington: The Most Disputed Piece in the Canon
Conway prints it. Foner prints it. Most popular Paine anthologies cut it. The case for and against keeping the Letter in the canon turns on a question deeper...
Why Common Sense Was Anonymous
The first Bell printing said only Written by an Englishman. The second printing said the same. By the third, the secret was out, and Paine never wrote...
The Age of Reason and Modern Atheism
Hitchens read it in his teens. Dawkins put a Paine epigraph at the front of The God Delusion. Modern atheism has a Painite genealogy that runs through deism...
His Creed
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”