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Thomas Paine: Common Sense

Introduction

Thomas Paine was a popular writer who did more to foster the Revolutionary War than any other publicist. He also, with much less success, tried to spread the principles of the American Revolutionary War in Europe. Paine was born on January 29, 1737, at Thetford, Norfolk County, England, a son of a Quaker. After a brief formal education, he started working for his father. Later he was appointed an excise officer, but he was fired for organizing the other excise officers to fight for higher salaries in 1772.

In 1774, Paine made the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin, who was visiting London. Franklin urged him to move to America and gave him letters of recommendation. By November of that year, Paine was in Philadelphia, and he first published an attack on slavery in the spring of 1775. He was caught up in the revolutionary fervor surrounding the Boston Tea Party and the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord. In January 1776, he published Common Sense, a small book in which he asserted that the colonies were too large for continued British domination and called for their independence. In short order, he sold a half million copies of this pamphlet, showing how widespread the agitation was for independence even prior to the acceptance of the Declaration of Independence (Kaye, pp. 125).

In December 1776, Paine started a series of pamphlets called The Crisis (also known as the American Crisis Papers), which he continued to publish until 1783, again encouraging the revolutionary cause and being widely read. Paine volunteered in the Continental Army, but he quickly returned to politics. In 1777, he became the secretary of the Continental Congress's Committee of Foreign Affairs, but he was forced to resign in 1779 because he gave out secret information. In the years to follow, Thomas Paine worked in the Pennsylvania Assembly as a clerk and continued publishing his pamphlets.

In 1787, Paine returned to England and wrote The Rights of Man (the first part in 1791 and the second in 1792), in which he attacked Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and defended the French Revolution. This book also attacked English institutions, and he fled to Paris in 1792 to avoid prosecution for treason (Paine, pp.231).

In France, Paine was elected a member of the French National Convention and jumped into French politics. He voted against the execution of the dethroned French King Louis XVI, and the radical Jacobins threw him into prison for almost a year from December 1793 to November 1794. While in prison, he wrote the antireligious The Age of Reason, published in two parts in 1794 and 1795. In terms of U.S. public opinion, he made his situation worse in 1794 by writing a highly critical Letter to Washington, which spoke out against the first U.S. president.

In 1802, President Thomas Jefferson invited Paine to the United States. When he returned that year, he wrote more essays against the Federalist Party and religion, but he was ...