Origins: a Quaker stays-maker’s son
Thomas Pain (the e was added later) was born on January 29, 1737 (Old Style; February 9 New Style) in Thetford, Norfolk, a market town on the Norfolk-Suffolk border that returned two MPs from a few hundred eligible voters. His father, Joseph Pain, was a Quaker stays-maker; his mother, Frances Cocke, was an Anglican attorney’s daughter. The mixed marriage meant he was christened into the Church of England but raised in the Quaker meeting -- both traditions stayed with him for life.
His childhood was straitened. The Quaker meeting taught him plainness, the suspicion of priestcraft, and the right of any conscience to read the world for itself. The grammar school he left at thirteen taught him Latin enough to read it. Apprenticed to his father, he ran away to sea at nineteen, signed on the privateer King of Prussia, and came home with prize money and a permanent contempt for the merchant class that organized it.
“My father being of the Quaker profession, it was my good fortune to have an exceeding good moral education, and a tolerable stock of useful learning.”
For most of his thirties he was an excise officer in Lincolnshire and Sussex -- policing the duty on tea, sugar, candles, and spirits. The job was dull, badly paid, and an education in bureaucratic injustice he carried into every later argument about taxation.
Lewes: the Headstrong Club
Posted to Lewes in 1768, Paine took lodgings above the tobacconist Samuel Ollive and joined the Headstrong Club at the White Hart Inn, a debating society that awarded a nightly Plumed Hat to whoever argued the most stubborn case. He took home the Hat often. In 1771 he married Ollive’s daughter Elizabeth; the marriage was unhappy, apparently unconsummated, and they formally separated in 1774.
In 1772 he wrote his first published pamphlet -- The Case of the Officers of Excise -- petitioning Parliament for an excisemen’s pay raise. Four thousand copies were printed at the officers’ expense. The petition failed. The Treasury noticed. He was dismissed in 1774, ostensibly for having been absent without leave. His grocer’s shop in Lewes had failed. His marriage was over. He sold his household goods at auction and walked away from England with no prospects.
Philadelphia: Common Sense
In London that summer he was introduced to Benjamin Franklin, agent for several colonies and watchful for talent. Franklin’s letters of introduction to his son-in-law Richard Bache and others in Philadelphia were the only useful thing Paine carried west. After a six-week passage on the London Packet during which typhoid killed five passengers and very nearly killed him, he was carried ashore at Philadelphia on a stretcher on November 30, 1774. He was thirty-seven.
Within fourteen months he had written the most widely-read political pamphlet in American history. Common Sense, published anonymously on January 10, 1776, sold over a hundred thousand copies in three months in a colonial population of two and a half million. Until Common Sense, independence was unthinkable; after it, the question was when. Paine refused all royalties; the proceeds went to buy mittens for the Continental Army.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
The American Crisis
By December 1776, Washington’s army had been driven from New York and across New Jersey. Paine sat down at a drumhead in Newark and wrote The American Crisis No. I. On December 23, with the army camped at McKonkey’s Ferry on the Delaware, Washington ordered the pamphlet read aloud to the troops. They crossed the river the next night and took Trenton on the morning of the 26th. The Crisis ran to thirteen numbers, written wherever Paine happened to be standing, until 1783.
He served as secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs (effectively the United States’ first foreign-relations clerk), drafted the preamble to Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 -- the first abolition law in the English-speaking world -- and sailed with John Laurens to France in 1781 to negotiate the silver and arms shipment that arrived in time for Yorktown.
Europe: Rights of Man
Paine sailed for Europe in 1787 carrying a model of an iron-arch bridge -- his single great engineering project. He intended to be away for a year. He stayed for fifteen.
When the Bastille fell in July 1789 he was in Paris. Lafayette gave him the main key to the prison with instructions to deliver it to Washington as “a missing tribute due as a Trophy to America.” The key still hangs at Mount Vernon.
In November 1790 Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France, the founding text of modern conservatism. Paine answered with Rights of Man Part I in March 1791. It sold fifty thousand copies in three months. Part II, in February 1792, went much further: progressive taxation, child allowances, old-age pensions, public education, public works for the unemployed -- the first program of what would later be called the welfare state. The British government opened the mail; cheap editions were seized; magistrates burned copies in market squares. Paine was indicted for seditious libel.
The Luxembourg: The Age of Reason
Hours before Pitt’s warrant arrived (according to Gilchrist, William Blake himself tipped him off), Paine sailed from Dover for Calais on September 13, 1792. He never saw England again. The trial proceeded in absentia; he was convicted and outlawed. Calais elected him to the National Convention.
In January 1793 he argued in the Convention against the execution of Louis XVI -- not from sentiment but from policy: send him to America, let the world see a republic that does not retaliate. The Convention voted for the guillotine by a margin of one. Paine had marked himself.
The Committee of Public Safety arrested him on the night of December 27-28, 1793. He spent ten months in the Luxembourg, half of them under sentence of death; the chalk-mark that should have sent him to the tumbrils was drawn on the inside of his cell door, which was open at the wrong moment. The afternoon before his arrest he had handed the manuscript of The Age of Reason Part I to Joel Barlow, who saw it through the press.
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
James Monroe, newly arrived as American minister to France, finally insisted on Paine’s release as an American citizen in November 1794. Paine emerged from prison into a year of bedridden recovery in Monroe’s house. He was fifty-seven and not a young fifty-seven.
Agrarian Justice and The Letter to Washington
From his recovery bed Paine wrote Rights of Man and Citizen Part II of The Age of Reason, the Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795), and Agrarian Justice (1797) -- the most original short essay he ever produced and the first sustained argument in English for a national fund paying every adult a stake at twenty-one and a pension after fifty. The argument is moral, the mechanism fiscal, the conclusion the modern welfare state. It was published in 1797 in French and English and ignored on both sides of the Channel.
Convinced Washington had let him rot in the Luxembourg as a Federalist favor, Paine wrote a public Letter to George Washington in 1796 that crossed the line from grievance to disownment. The letter was shocking even to Paine’s friends. Washington never replied. They never reconciled. Both men lost in the exchange.
America again: New Rochelle
Jefferson, the new president, sent the U.S. warship Maryland to Le Havre in 1802 to bring Paine home. Paine landed at Baltimore on October 30 after fifteen years away. The Federalist press was waiting; the parsons preached against him from the pulpit before he had stepped off the gangplank. He travelled south to Washington, dined with Jefferson at the White House several times, and wrote the eight Letters to the Citizens of the United States.
From 1803 he lived on the New Rochelle farm New York had granted him eighteen years earlier. He was sixty-six, increasingly frail, increasingly drunk in the afternoons, increasingly forgotten. The Quaker meeting at New Rochelle voted against admitting him to membership. The Anglican parish refused him communion in advance. On Election Day 1806 the New Rochelle election inspector refused to let him vote on the grounds that he was not a citizen of the United States. He sued. He lost.
Death and the bones
Paine died at his Bleecker Street lodgings in Greenwich Village on June 8, 1809, attended by Madame Bonneville, two physicians, and the Quaker who refused him burial in the meeting graveyard. Six people came to his funeral on the New Rochelle farm. The Quakers refused him burial; the Anglicans refused him burial; he was buried under an apple tree on his own land.
Ten years later the English radical William Cobbett, having recanted his earlier hatred of Paine, sailed to America, dug up the bones, and shipped them to England with the announced intention of building a public monument. The monument was never built. Cobbett died in 1835 and the bones disappeared. Their location is one of the genuine unsolved problems of nineteenth-century history.
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”