Timeline

Birth

Thetford, Norfolk, England

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.

Apprenticed to His Father

Thetford, Norfolk

At thirteen Paine leaves the Thetford grammar school and is apprenticed to his father's corset-making shop. He will later say his father was a tradesman, his mother a churchgoer, and that he was made by the men in the Quaker meeting who told him exactly what they thought.

Runs Away to Sea

Paine slips his apprenticeship and signs aboard the privateer *Terrible*, captained by William Death; his father retrieves him from the dock at the last possible moment. Months later he tries again on the *King of Prussia*, sailing for nearly a year. The privateering run leaves him with prize money and a permanent contempt for the merchant class that organized it.

Marries Mary Lambert

Sandwich, Kent

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.

Becomes an Excise Officer

Paine sits the Excise Office examinations and is appointed officer at Alford in Lincolnshire, then Grantham, then Lewes. The job is policing the duty on tea, sugar, candles, and spirits -- an education in bureaucratic injustice he carries into every later argument about taxation.

Settles in Lewes, Sussex

Lewes, Sussex

Posted to the excise at Lewes, Paine takes lodgings above the tobacconist Samuel Ollive. He joins the Headstrong Club at the White Hart Inn, where they award a nightly Plumed Hat to whoever argues the most stubborn case. He takes home the Hat often. Lewes is where he learns the trick of writing the way he speaks.

Marries Elizabeth Ollive

Lewes, Sussex

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.

Writes *The Case of the Officers of Excise*

Paine drafts a pamphlet for the excisemen of England petitioning Parliament for a pay raise. It is his first published prose, four thousand copies printed at the officers' expense, and it is sharper than the cause deserved. The petition fails. The Treasury notices.

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.

Meets Franklin in London

London, England

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.

Lands at Philadelphia

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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.

Edits *The Pennsylvania Magazine*

Philadelphia

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.

*Common Sense* Published

Philadelphia

*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.

*The American Crisis* No. I

Newark, New Jersey

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.

Secretary, Committee of Foreign Affairs

Philadelphia

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.

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.

Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act

Philadelphia

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.'

Mission to France with John Laurens

Brest, France

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.

*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.

Awarded a New York State Farm

New Rochelle, New York

New York State, embarrassed at how little Congress has paid the man who wrote *Common Sense* and the *Crisis*, awards Paine the confiscated Loyalist farm at New Rochelle -- 277 acres on the Bronx side of the village. He does not live there for long stretches but it is his American home for the rest of his life.

Returns to Europe

Paris, France

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.

Witnesses the Fall of the Bastille

Paris, France

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.

*Rights of Man* Part I

London, England

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.

*Rights of Man* Part II

London, England

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.

Flees England

Calais, France

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.

Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI

Paris, France

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.

Imprisoned in the Luxembourg

Luxembourg Prison, Paris

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.

*The Age of Reason* Part I

Published in Paris and London while Paine sits in the Luxembourg under sentence of death. *The Age of Reason* Part I is the bluntest deistic argument in English -- the case for one universal Creator and against every revealed religion that had ever claimed Him. The book makes Paine permanently unreadable to half the audience that loved *Rights of Man*.

Released from the Luxembourg

Paris, France

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.

*The Age of Reason* Part II & *Dissertation on First Principles of Government*

From his recovery bed Paine writes Part II of *The Age of Reason* and the *Dissertation on First Principles of Government*, his most radical sustained essay on representation and the franchise. The *Dissertation* argues that the franchise should not depend on property -- a position that puts him a generation ahead of every existing democracy.

*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.

*Agrarian Justice*

Paine writes *Agrarian Justice*, the most original short essay he ever produced -- the first sustained argument for a national fund to pay every adult a one-time stake at twenty-one and a pension after fifty. The argument is moral (the earth is a common inheritance), the mechanism is fiscal (a ten percent estate tax), and the conclusion is the modern welfare state. It is published in 1797 in French and English and ignored on both sides of the Channel.

Returns to America

Baltimore, Maryland

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*.

Settles at New Rochelle

New Rochelle, New York

Paine takes up residence on the New Rochelle farm New York gave him eighteen years earlier. He is sixty-six, increasingly frail, increasingly drunk in the afternoons, increasingly forgotten. His neighbors are mostly hostile. The Quaker meeting at New Rochelle votes against admitting him to membership; the Anglican parish of Trinity refuses him communion in advance.

Refused His Vote

New Rochelle, New York

On Election Day, 1806, the New Rochelle election inspector Elisha Ward refuses to let Paine vote on the grounds that he is not a citizen of the United States. Paine, who is among the people for whom the question of American citizenship was invented, sues. He loses. The decision is reversed posthumously.

Death in Greenwich Village

Greenwich Village, New York City

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.

William Cobbett Disinters Him

New Rochelle, New York

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.