Happy Thomas Paine Day (1737-1809)

January 29th is Thomas Paine Day. He was born this day in 1737 (though some sources say it was Feb. 9th) in Thetford, England. This is a biography of America's least-known and most neglected founding father. It is taken from a talk I've given at schools, churchs and civic groups. I've divided it into 3 parts for convenience. Part 2 is here and part 3 here.

CITIZEN PAINE

"The most formidable weapon against errors of any kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall."

-Thomas Paine

My name is Hugh Kramer. I am a graduate of James Madison Junior High School. Friends of mine attended schools named for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin; yet no one I know has attended a school named for Thomas Paine and there are more statues and monuments dedicated to him outside this country than in it. No US coin or currency bears his portrait and school books mention him only briefly. Yet this man was a driving force in not one, but two revolutions and he defined the principles we were fighting for in language that could be understood by everyone. So, why has his role been downplayed in history books and the man himself nearly forgotten? Who was Thomas Paine?

He wasn't an aristocrat like Jefferson or Washington, nor a careful lawyer like Adams or a sage elder like Franklin. He was a working man with a working man's rough hands and a working man's acquaintance with poverty and despair. His education was in the harsh world of the low-born English commoner and his experience with injustice was first-hand and not drawn from newspapers or books.

Paine did not write in the flowery and obscure style that was the fashion of the day. Right from his first work and his first call for America to declare its independance, his language was almost brutally common and its sense and its power and its immediacy could be felt by everyone no matter their station in life. Listen:

The sun never set on a cause of greater worth. 'Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent - of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe. 'Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed-time of continental union, faith and honor. The least infraction now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree and posterity read it in full grown characters...

O ye that love Mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! recieve the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

This was Thomas Paine and this was Common Sense.

***

There was a story told of two friends in Philadelphia who were talking together not long after the war for independance had ended. One of them was Benjamin Franklin. The other was Thomas Paine. When Franklin quipped, "Where liberty is, there is my country," Paine replied, "Where liberty is not, there is my country!" This is one of those stories where, even if it might not be true, it ought to be. "Independance," as Paine once wrote, "is my happiness, and I view things as they are without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good."

He put this principle into practice and for much of his life was practically stateless, travelling between England, France and America; working and writing; agitating against despotism and for constitutional governments that maximized civil and political freedoms.

Born in Thetford, an undistinguished market town in Norfolk county. Paine was already 37 years old in 1774 when he first set foot in America. He'd held a wide variety of jobs including dressmaker, privateer and tax collector but found little security in any of them. He never developed any facility for hanging onto money and had to leave England to avoid being imprisoned for debt. Armed with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin whom he'd met in London, Paine quickly found employment as the editor of the new Pennsylvania Magazine. In this position he published numerous essays and articles on all manner of subjects from the sciences to his social views. An early article entitled African Slavery in America was one of the first attacks on the institution of slavery ever published in the colonies and it established his reputation as a man of liberal principles.

The America that Thomas Paine had just arrived in was already simmering with discontent over England's high-handed way of governing her colonies and, when the battles of Lexington and Concord were fought in April of 1775, Paine became convinced that all hope for reconciliation with the government had ended. Articles, essays and even poems in support of the revolutionary movement began flowing from his pen. Nothing, however, had as much impact as a 50 page pamphlet he published on January 10, 1776. It was entitled Common Sense. The effect of this little tract was immediate and electric. Written in plain and simple language, it made the case for an independant American nation in the most compelling terms. It condemned the British upper classes for the exploitation of the common people of Britain and America, and held the idea of monarchy itself up to ridicule.

It made the point that monarchy is government based on blindness. "The state of a king," Paine wrote, "shuts him from the world, yet the business of the world requires him to know it thoroughly." In other words, a king is kept separate from knowledge of the people he governs and the mechanics of government by a court, by ceremony, by pomp and by royal dignity. Common Sense made it obvious that the idea that someone so immured from the world could be expert in governing it, was ludicrous.

At the same time, Paine offered some startling ideas about the role of government. He drew a distinction between civil society and the state. Civil society, the cooperation between individuals within a group for mutual benefit, was the natural state of affairs and an obvious good. Government, on the other hand, was an evil made necessary to protect society from outside threats and those within it who would trespass against the rights of their fellow citizens. "Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows, that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others."

Paine made it clear that the British monarchy, with it's complex and confusing parliamentary constitution, was hardly the ideal government to ensure the greatest benefits to all. It was representitive only of the upper classes that manned its parliament and offices. It was otherwise distant from the bulk of its people, and, in the case of its colonies, distant from them in time and space as well. Paine scoffed at the picture of 3 million colonists flocking the shores and waiting for a ship to arrive with an official answer to some problem submitted months if not, as in some cases,  years before... and then receiving an answer which was not merely tardy, but which often displayed the greatest ignorance of the conditions and people it was intended to address. The grievances of the Americans were not resolvable under their current rulers because, as he pointed out, they were the inevitable result of a system that would not and could not be representitive of them. The only solution therefore, was independance and a continental union of all the colonies.

These ideas exploded like a bombshell in the minds of readers. Most of the revolutionaries had still been thinking in terms of an eventual reconciliation with the mother country but the logic of Common Sense seemed irresistable. Within six months half a million copies had been sold with seven editions released in Philadelphia alone. People all over America and from all walks of life were reading it and debating the contents. Editions began showing up in England and France where it horrified some but encouraged others. Wherever it was read, no one was indifferent to it and even its enemies acknowledged the power of its arguments.

It is impossible to quantify just how powerful the effects of Common Sense were on the course of the revolution, but it changed the nature of the debate in the colonies and it is probably fair to say that the declaration of independance on July 4th would not have come nearly so soon if Common Sense and its author had never appeared.

This was hardly Thomas Paine's only contribution to the cause of American liberty. He was constantly writing new articles and sparring in the press with opponents. He re-edited new editions of Common Sense and sometimes used the profits from one to subsidize the cost of the next so it could reach a wider audience. He pressured members of the Continental Congress to vote "yes" on independance and ridiculed the Pennsylvania Assembly for its inability to make up its mind on the issue. Once it was finally signed, he became an aide-de-camp to the American general Nathaniel Greene and acted as a war correspondant for the Pennsylvania press as well.

End Part 1

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Photo credit: 1) Portrait in oil inspired by a print. 2) Front pages from an early edition of Common Sense.