This Day in Paine's Life
A month-by-month calendar of every dated event I have on record. The home page surfaces today's entries; this page walks the whole year.
January
5 entries- January 10, 1776
*Common Sense* Published
*Common Sense*, a pamphlet by 'an Englishman,' goes on sale in Philadelphia at two shillings. Within three months it has sold over a hundred thousand copies in a colonial population of two and a half million -- the most widely read political pamphlet in American history, then or since. Until *Common Sense*, independence was unthinkable; after it, the question was when. Paine refuses all royalties; the proceeds go to buy mittens for the Continental Army.
- January 15-19, 1793
Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI
Paine, speaking French only haltingly, has his speech read for him in the Convention. He argues against executing Louis XVI -- not from sentiment, but from policy: send him to America, let the world see a republic that does not retaliate. The Convention votes for execution by a margin of one. Paine has marked himself.
- January 1775
Edits *The Pennsylvania Magazine*
Paine takes over Robert Aitken's *Pennsylvania Magazine*. Within a year his anonymous and pseudonymous essays -- on dueling, on cruelty to animals, on monarchy, on the African slave trade -- have made it the best-read magazine in the colonies. The slave-trade essay, *African Slavery in America* (March 8, 1775), is one of the earliest American calls for abolition by a white writer.
- January 1779
The Silas Deane Affair
Paine, in a public letter, accuses Silas Deane -- the American agent in Paris -- of profiting from secret French aid to the cause. He is right, but in proving it he reveals classified correspondence. Congress forces his resignation. He is briefly destitute; the Pennsylvania Assembly appoints him clerk a few months later.
- January 29, 1737
Birth
Thomas Pain (the *e* added later) is born in Thetford, Norfolk, England, the son of Joseph Pain, a Quaker corset-maker, and Frances Cocke, an Anglican attorney's daughter. The mixed marriage means he is raised in the Quaker meeting but legally an Anglican; both traditions stay with him for life. The date is Old Style; the New Style equivalent is February 9, 1737.
February
2 entries- February 16, 1792
*Rights of Man* Part II
Part II goes much further than Part I -- proposing progressive taxation, child allowances, old-age pensions, public education, public works for the unemployed. It is the first program of what would later be called the welfare state, and it costs Paine his English liberty. The government opens the mail; cheap editions are seized; magistrates burn copies in market squares. He is indicted for seditious libel.
- February 1781
Mission to France with John Laurens
Paine sails for France with John Laurens to negotiate a desperately-needed loan and arms shipment. They return in August with two and a half million livres in silver and a convoy of supplies that arrive in time for Yorktown. Paine pays his own passage; Congress later quietly reimburses him.
March
3 entries- March 1, 1780
Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act
Paine drafts the preamble to Pennsylvania's *Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery* -- the first law of its kind in the English-speaking world. The preamble is unmistakably his prose: 'It is not for us to enquire why, in the creation of mankind, the inhabitants of the several parts of the earth were distinguished by a difference in feature or complexion.'
- March 13, 1791
*Rights of Man* Part I
Paine answers Edmund Burke's *Reflections on the Revolution in France* with *Rights of Man* Part I. Sells fifty thousand copies in three months. Burke's *Reflections* and Paine's *Rights of Man* are the founding documents of modern conservatism and modern liberalism respectively, taught in pairs ever since.
- March 26, 1771
Marries Elizabeth Ollive
Paine marries Elizabeth Ollive, daughter of his Lewes landlord. The marriage is unhappy and apparently unconsummated; they formally separate in 1774. He never marries again, and never explains the silence.
April
3 entries- April 1774
Dismissed, Bankrupt, Separated
The Excise Board dismisses Paine for being absent without leave (he was in London lobbying for the pay-raise pamphlet). His grocer's shop in Lewes fails. He sells his household goods at auction, formally separates from Elizabeth, and walks away from England with no prospects. He is thirty-seven years old.
- April 17, 1777
Secretary, Committee of Foreign Affairs
Congress appoints Paine secretary of its Committee of Foreign Affairs (effectively the United States' first foreign-relations clerk). He keeps the post for two years until the Silas Deane affair forces his resignation.
- April 1787
Returns to Europe
Paine sails for Europe carrying a model of an iron-arch bridge -- his single great engineering project. He intends to be away for a year. He stays for fifteen.
May
0 entriesNo dated events recorded for May.
June
1 entry- June 8, 1809
Death in Greenwich Village
Paine dies at his Bleecker Street lodgings in Greenwich Village, attended by Madame Bonneville, two physicians, and the Quaker who refused him burial in the meeting graveyard. Six people attend his funeral on the New Rochelle farm, including Madame Bonneville and her two younger sons. The Quakers refuse him burial; the Anglicans refuse him burial; he is buried under an apple tree on his own land.
July
2 entries- July 14, 1789
Witnesses the Fall of the Bastille
Paine is in Paris when the Bastille falls. Lafayette gives him the key to the prison with instructions to deliver it to Washington as 'a missing tribute due as a Trophy to America.' Paine ships it across the Atlantic; the key still hangs at Mount Vernon.
- July 30, 1796
*Letter to George Washington*
Convinced Washington allowed him to rot in the Luxembourg as a Federalist favor, Paine writes a public *Letter to George Washington* that crosses the line from grievance to disownment. The letter is shocking even to Paine's friends; some never quite forgive him for it. Washington, for his part, never replies.
August
1 entry- August 1782
*Letter to the Abbe Raynal*
Paine answers the Abbe Raynal's *Revolution of America* (1781), which had got the causes wrong. The reply is one of his most cogent essays, the first serious philosophical defense of the American Revolution as a *moral* event rather than a constitutional dispute.
September
2 entries- September 13, 1792
Flees England
Hours, by tradition, before Pitt's warrant arrives -- according to Gilchrist, William Blake himself tipped him off -- Paine sails from Dover for Calais. He never sees England again. The trial proceeds in absentia; he is convicted and outlawed. Calais elects him to the National Convention.
- September 27, 1759
Marries Mary Lambert
Paine marries Mary Lambert, a maid in service in Sandwich, Kent. The marriage lasts barely a year; she dies in childbirth in 1760, the child with her. He never speaks of either loss in print.
October
3 entries- October 1774
Meets Franklin in London
Paine is introduced to Benjamin Franklin in London. Franklin -- agent for several colonies, watchful for talent -- writes letters of introduction recommending Paine to his son-in-law Richard Bache and others in Philadelphia. The letters are the only useful thing Paine carries west.
- October 1819
William Cobbett Disinters Him
Ten years after Paine's death the English radical William Cobbett, having recanted his earlier hatred of Paine, sails to America, digs up the bones at New Rochelle, and ships them to England with the announced intention of building a public monument. The monument is never built. Cobbett dies in 1835 and the bones disappear. Their location is one of the genuine unsolved problems of nineteenth-century history.
- October 30, 1802
Returns to America
Jefferson, the new president, sends the U.S. warship *Maryland* to Le Havre to bring Paine home. Paine lands at Baltimore after fifteen years away. The Federalist press is waiting; the parsons preach against him from the pulpit before he has stepped off the gangplank. He travels south to Washington, dines with Jefferson at the White House several times, and writes the eight *Letters to the Citizens of the United States*.
November
2 entries- November 4, 1794
Released from the Luxembourg
Three months after Robespierre's fall, James Monroe -- newly arrived as American minister to France -- finally insists on Paine's release as an American citizen. Paine emerges from prison into a year of bedridden recovery in Monroe's house. He is fifty-seven and not a young fifty-seven.
- November 30, 1774
Lands at Philadelphia
After a six-week passage on the *London Packet* during which typhoid kills five passengers and very nearly kills Paine, he is carried ashore at Philadelphia on a stretcher. Franklin's son-in-law arranges a doctor. Paine spends six weeks recovering. By January he is editing a magazine.
December
2 entries- December 19, 1776
*The American Crisis* No. I
After Washington's army has been driven from New York and across New Jersey, Paine sits down at a drumhead in Newark and writes *The American Crisis* No. I -- 'These are the times that try men's souls.' On December 23, with the army camped at McKonkey's Ferry on the Delaware, Washington orders the pamphlet read aloud to the troops. They cross the river the next night and take Trenton on the morning of December 26. The Crisis runs to thirteen numbers, written wherever Paine happens to be standing, until 1783.
- December 28, 1793
Imprisoned in the Luxembourg
The Committee of Public Safety arrests Paine on the night of December 27-28 and lodges him in the Luxembourg, the converted palace then serving as the Republic's most fashionable prison. He is forty months a citizen of France and ten months a prisoner of it. The afternoon before his arrest he hands the manuscript of *The Age of Reason* Part I to Joel Barlow, who sees it through the press.