'Common Sense' anniversary: The life and times of Thomas Paine (Part 2 of 7)

Thomas Paine

Early Life

Born 29 January 1737 in Thetford, England, Thomas Paine was the son of a Quaker stay maker unhappily wed to an Anglican attorney's daughter. After grammar school, young Tom apprenticed at age 13 into his father's occupation.* Stay-making was hard work and paid little. The youth felt doomed to poverty.

When war with between England and France broke out in 1756, Paine left home at age 19 for a brief career on the open sea as a privateer. His ship engaged in some battles, but it's unknown whether he ever killed anyone.

Paine did not abide by his father's Quaker doctrines of absolute non-resistance to force, so he never declared himself a member of the Society of Friends. His pious aunt failed in persuading him to side with the Anglicans. The young man was too curious to take any dictums for granted.

Despite being barely educated in youth (his grammar was never perfect), Paine loved ideas, absorbing eclectic authors. His Quaker training, for instance, inspired his views on the sanctity of the "inner citadel of consciousness."

While he was apprenticed in his father's low-paying trade of making rope stays for ships, Paine devoted his free time to abstract learning, spending his spare cash on books, lectures and scientific apparatus. A voracious reader, he worked his way into science and mathematics, developing his own "mechanical contrivances" of various kinds. He also began to attend meetings of scientists and inventors, though which he'd meet many of the brightest minds of his age.

Historians note how Paine's self-directed learning patterns immersed him in the ideas and issues of his age without his intelligence being filtered or routed by the rigors of a "classical education." He could think outside the box.

Paine was intrigued by the philosophes, the French social thinkers and encyclopedae publishers who favored scientific reasoning over irrational religious dogma. They asserted that the human mind is great, capable of knowing anything through diligent research. They saw the cosmos as the creation of one rational God who set the universe in motion with natural laws, like winding up a precision clockwork, who then turned humanity loose to govern their human free will with moral self rule.

The Enlightenment, as historians named it, swept through 18th century intellectual culture much like the peace movement swept through the youth culture in the 1960s, much like global thinking is sweeping though society today.

Many of these spiritual but non-religious freethinkers called themselves "deists." A deist is defined by Webster's dictionary as "One who believes in the existence of a God or supreme being but who denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason."

Desists in England and the Americas ofter were freemasons or members of other pro-democracy secret societies. Some deists in the American colonies actively participated in the "committtees of correspondences" and anti-monarchial resistance groups, such as the Sons of Liberty.

Deism in England was not widely welcomed by the church or the state, but the ideas appealed to Thomas Paine, who was in tune with the spirit of his times.

High ideas do not feed, clothe or house the body, Paine soon realized. From 1757 to 1774, Paine successively worked in various towns as an excise tax assessor, school teacher, and again as an excise man, with side ventures as a tobacconist and grocer.

Paine's career as a tax assessor is noteworthy. He initially lost his excise job after admittedly stamping goods as examined that he'd not inspected. After a stint at teaching, he apologized, suffered chastisement and gained re-admission as an excise officer. However, Paine subsequently was dismissed for returning late from a leave of absence.

Was Paine's dismissal based on trumped up charges? Perhaps.  Paine was seen as a troublemaker after lobbying Parliament to increase the wages for all excise men. His 1772 brief, The Case of the Officers of Excise, exhibited early the logic and clear writing that would appear in his later works.

As for his personal life, Paine married twice, both of his marriages childless.

On 27 September 1759 in Sandwich, he married Mary Lambert, who died. On 26 March 1771, while stationed as an excise man at Lewes, he married Elizabeth Ollive. After he was fired, the couple legally separated in 1774, citing temperamental differences. His separation without a divorce later would be used by his political foes to discredit him.

Cut off from income, sinking deeper in debt, Paine declared bankruptcy. Surviving letters indicate he keenly felt a wide gap between his bright abilities and his dark circumstances. Loneliness surely plagued him, but life without a mate give Paine the liberty to pursue his destiny.

Nothing now bound Thomas Paine to England. 

* Neither Paine's father nor his apprenticed son were corset makers, as many biographies of Thomas Paine have mistakenly said. Thetford's main industy was supporting the sailing trade downriver, so the "stays" they made were the hefty rope rigging on sailing vessels that secure the masts to the hull, usually fore-and-aft along the centerline of the vessel. Rope stays in some cases control the angle of the sails to tack or jibe in the wind. Claiming Paine made corsets is one of the many lies told to denigrate him.

© 2009 by Judah Freed. All rights reserved. Please post links to this article, but you may not re-publish it without written permission. See contact link for Judah Freed below.

© 2009 by Judah Freed. All rights reserved. Please post links to this article, but you may not re-publish it without written permission. See contact link for Judah Freed below.

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