Thomas Paine ( June 8, 1809)
was an author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual,
revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of
the United
States
. Born in England
, Paine
emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 in time to
participate in the American
Revolution. His principal contributions were the
powerful, widely-read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), advocating
colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great
Britain
, and The
American Crisis (1776–1783), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet
series. The
historian Saul K. Padover in the
biography Jefferson: A Great American's Life and
Ideas, refers to Paine as "a corsetmaker by trade, a
journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination."
Later, Paine greatly influenced the
French Revolution. He wrote the
Rights of Man (1791), a guide
to
Enlightenment ideas. Despite
not speaking French, he was elected to the French
National Convention in 1792. The
Girondists regarded him as an ally, so,
the
Montagnards, especially
Robespierre, regarded him as an
enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in
Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of
The Age of Reason
(1793–94), his book advocating
deism,
promoting reason and
freethinking, and
arguing against institutionalized religion and Christian doctrines.
He also wrote the pamphlet
Agrarian
Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and
introduced the concept of a
guaranteed minimum income.
Paine remained in France during the early
Napoleonic era, but condemned Napoleon's
dictatorship, calling him "the completest
charlatan that ever existed". In 1802, at
President
Jefferson's invitation,
he returned to America where he died in 1809. Only six people
attended his funeral as he had been ostracized for his criticisms
and ridicule of Christianity.
Early life
Paine was
born the son of Joseph Pain, or Paine, a Quaker, and Frances Pain(e) (née Cocke), an Anglican, in Thetford
, an
important market town and coach stage-post, in rural Norfolk, England
. Born
Thomas Pain, despite claims that he changed his family name upon
his emigration to America in 1774,
he was using Paine in 1769, whilst still
in Lewes
,
Sussex.
He
attended Thetford
Grammar School
(1744-1749), at a time when there was no compulsory
education. At age thirteen, he was apprenticed to his
stay-maker father; in late adolescence,
he enlisted and briefly served as a
privateer, before returning to Britain in 1759.
There, he
became a master stay-maker, establishing a shop in Sandwich, Kent
. On September 27, 1759, Thomas Paine married
Mary Lambert. His business collapsed soon after.
Mary became pregnant,
and, after they moved to Margate
, she went
into early labour, in which she and their child died.
In July 1761, Paine returned to Thetford to work as a
supernumerary officer.
In December 1762, he
became an excise
officer in Grantham
, Lincolnshire
; in August 1764, he was transferred to Alford, at a
salary of £50 per annum. On August 27, 1765, he was fired as
an Excise Officer for "claiming to have inspected goods he did not
inspect." On July 31, 1766, he requested his reinstatement from the
Board of Excise, which they granted the next day, upon vacancy.
While awaiting that, he worked as a stay maker in Diss, Norfolk,
and later as a servant (per the records, for a Mr. Noble, of
Goodman's Fields, and for a Mr. Gardiner, at Kensington). He also
applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England
and, per some accounts, he preached in Moorfields.
In 1767, he was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall;
subsequently, he asked to leave this post to await a vacancy, thus,
he became a schoolteacher in London.
On February 19, 1768,
he was appointed to Lewes
, East
Sussex, living above the fifteenth-century Bull House, the tobacco
shop of Samuel Ollive and Esther Ollive. There, Paine first
became involved in civic matters, when Samuel Ollive introduced him
to the Society of Twelve, a local, élite intellectual group that
met semestrally, to discuss town politics. He also was in the
influential
Vestry church group that
collected taxes and tithes to distribute among the poor. On March
26, 1771, at age 34, he married Elizabeth Ollive, his landlord's
daughter.
From 1772 to 1773, Paine joined excise officers asking Parliament
for better pay and working conditions, publishing, in summer of
1772,
The Case of the Officers of Excise, a
twenty-one-page article, and his first political work, spending the
London winter distributing the 4,000 copies printed to the
Parliament and others. In spring of 1774, he was fired from the
excise service for being absent from his post without permission;
his tobacco shop failed, too. On April 14, to avoid debtor's
prison, he sold his household possessions to pay debts. On June 4,
he formally separated from wife Elizabeth and moved to London,
where, in September, a friend introduced him to
Benjamin Franklin, who suggested
emigration to British colonial America, and gave him a letter of
recommendation.
In October, Thomas Paine emigrated from
Great Britain to the American colonies, arriving in Philadelphia
on November 30, 1774.
He barely survived the transatlantic voyage, because the ship's
water supplies were bad, and
typhoid
fever had killed five passengers. On arriving to Philadelphia,
he was too sick to debark. Benjamin Franklin's physician, there to
welcome Paine to America, had him carried off ship; Paine took six
weeks to recover his health. He became a citizen of Pennsylvania
"by taking the oath of allegiance at a very early period."
In January, 1775, he became editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, a
position he conducted with considerable ability.
Moreover, Thomas Paine was an inventor and civil engineer.
He
designed the Sunderland Bridge over the
Wear River at Wearmouth
, England
. It
was patterned after the model he made for the Schuylkill River
Bridge at Philadelphia in 1787, and the Sunderland arch became the
prototype for many subsequent
voussoir
arches made in iron and steel.
He also received a British
patent for a single-span iron bridge, developed a
smoke-less candle, and worked with inventor John Fitch in developing steam
engines.
American Revolution
Thomas Paine has a claim to the title
The Father of the
American Revolution because of
Common Sense, the
pro-independence
monograph pamphlet he
anonymously published on January 10, 1776; signed
"Written by
an Englishman", the pamphlet became an immediate success., it
quickly spread among the literate, and, in three months, 100,000
copies sold throughout the American British colonies (with only two
million free inhabitants), making it a best-selling work in
eighteenth-century America. Paine's original title for the pamphlet
was
Plain Truth; Paine's friend, pro-independence advocate
Benjamin Rush, suggested
Common
Sense instead.
Paine was not expressing original ideas in
Common Sense,
but rather employing rhetoric as a means to arouse resentment of
the Crown. To achieve these ends, he pioneered a style of political
writing suited to the democratic society he envisioned, with
Common Sense serving as a primary example. Part of Paine's
work was to render complex ideas intelligible to average readers of
the day, with clear, concise writing unlike the formal, learned
style favored by many of Paine's contemporaries.
Common Sense was immensely popular, but how many people
were converted to the cause of independence by the pamphlet is
unknown. Paine's arguments were rarely cited in public calls for
independence, which suggests that
Common Sense may have
had a more limited impact on the public's thinking about
independence than is sometimes believed. The pamphlet probably had
little direct influence on the
Continental Congress's decision
to issue a
Declaration of
Independence, since that body was more concerned with how
declaring independence would affect the war effort. Paine's great
contribution was in initiating a public debate about independence,
which had previously been rather muted.
Loyalists vigorously
attacked
Common Sense; one attack, titled
Plain
Truth (1776), by Marylander
James Chalmers, said Paine was a
political quack and warned that without monarchy, the government
would "degenerate into democracy". Even some American
revolutionaries objected to
Common Sense; late in life
John Adams called it a "crapulous mass."
Adams disagreed with the type of radical democracy promoted by
Paine, and published
Thoughts
on Government in 1776 to advocate a more conservative
approach to republicanism.
In the early months of the war Paine published
The Crisis pamphlet series, to
inspire the colonists in their resistance to the British army. To
inspire the enlisted men, General
George Washington had
The American
Crisis read aloud to them. The first
Crisis pamphlet
begins:
In 1777, Paine became secretary of the Congressional Committee on
Foreign Affairs. The following year, he alluded to continuing
secret negotiation with France in his pamphlets; the resultant
scandal and Paine's conflict with Robert Morris eventually led to
Paine's expulsion from the Committee in 1779. However, in 1781, he
accompanied
John Laurens on his mission
to France. Eventually, after much pleading from Paine, New York
State recognised his political services with an estate, at New
Rochelle, and money from Pennsylvania and from the Congress, at
Washington's suggestion. In the Revolutionary War, he served as an
aide to General
Nathanael Greene.
His later years established him as "a missionary of world
revolution."
Funding the American Revolution with Henry and John Laurens:
According to Daniel Wheeler's "Life and Writings of Thomas Paine,"
Volume 1 (of 10, Vincent & Parke, 1908) p. 26-27: Thomas
Paine accompanied Col. John Laurens to France and is credited with
initiating the mission. It landed in France in March 1781 and
returned to America in August with 2.5 livres in silver, as part of
a "present" of 6 million and a loan of 10 million. The meetings
with the French king were most likely conducted in the company and
under the influence of Benjamin Franklin. Upon return to the United
States with this highly welcomed cargo, Thomas Paine and probably
Col. Laurens, "positively objected" that General Washington should
propose that Congress remunerate him for his services, for fear of
setting "a bad precedent and an improper mode."
Thomas Paine statue erected on Prince Street in Bordentown City by
the Bordentown Historical Society, New Jersey.
In addition, according to an appreciation by Elbert Hubbard in the
same volume (p. 314) "In 1781 Paine was sent to France with
Colonel Laurens to negotiate a loan. The errand was successful, and
Paine then made influential acquaintances, which were later to be
renewed. He organized the Bank of North America to raise money to
feed and clothe the army, and performed sundry and various services
for the colonies."
Henry Laurens (father of Col. John Laurens) had been the ambassador
to the Netherlands but was captured by the British on his return
trip there. When he was later exchanged for Cornwallis (late 1781)
he proceeded to the Netherlands to continue loan negotiations.
There remains some question as to the relationship of Henry Laurens
and Thomas Paine to Robert Morris as Superintendent of Finance and
his business associate Thomas Willing who became the first
president of the Bank of North America (Jan. 1782). They had
accused Morris of profiteering in 1779 and Willing had voted
against the Declaration of Independence. Although Morris did much
to restore his reputation in 1780 and 1781, the credit for
obtaining these critical loans to "organize" the Bank of North
America for approval by Congress in December 1781 should go to
Henry or John Laurens and Thomas Paine more than to Robert
Morris.
Paine
bought his only house in 1783 on the corner of Farnsworth Avenue
and Church Streets in Bordentown City, New Jersey
and lived in it periodically until his death in
1809. This is the only place in the world that he purchased
property.
Rights of Man
Having
taken work as a clerk after his expulsion by Congress, Paine
eventually returned to London
in 1787,
living a largely private life. However, his passion was
again sparked by revolution, this time in France, which he visited
in December 1790.
Edmund Burke,
who had supported the American Revolution, changed his views within
the decade, and wrote the critical Reflections on the
Revolution in France, partially in response to a sermon by
Richard Price, the radical minister of
Newington
Green Unitarian Church
. Many pens rushed to defend the Revolution
and the
Dissenting clergyman, including
Mary Wollstonecraft, who
published
A
Vindication of the Rights of Men only weeks after the
Reflections. Paine wrote
Rights of Man, an abstract political
tract critical of monarchies and European social institutions. He
completed the text on January 29, 1791. On January 31, he gave the
manuscript to publisher
Joseph Johnson for publication on
February 22. Meanwhile, government agents visited him, and, sensing
dangerous political controversy, he reneged on his promise to sell
the book on publication day; Paine quickly negotiated with
publisher J.S. Jordan, then went to Paris, per
William Blake's advice, leaving three good
friends,
William Godwin,
Thomas Brand Hollis, and
Thomas Holcroft, charged with concluding
publication in Britain. The book appeared on March 13, three weeks
later than scheduled, and sold well.
Undeterred by the government campaign to discredit him, Paine
issued his
Rights of Man, Part the Second, Combining Principle
and Practice in February 1792. It detailed a representative
government with enumerated social programs to remedy the numbing
poverty of commoners through progressive tax measures. Radically
reduced in price to ensure unprecedented circulation, it was
sensational in its impact and gave birth to reform societies. An
indictment for
seditious libel
followed while government agents followed Paine and instigated
mobs, hate meetings, and burnings in effigy.
The authorities
aimed, with ultimate success, to chase Paine out of Great Britain
and then try him in
absentia.
In summer of 1792, he answered the sedition and libel charges thus:
"If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy . . . to
promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break
the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his
proper rank; if these things be libellous . . . let the name of
libeller be engraved on my tomb".
Paine was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, and
was granted, along with
Alexander
Hamilton,
George Washington,
Benjamin Franklin and others,
honorary French
citizenship. Despite his
inability to speak French, he was elected to the
National Convention, representing the
district of
Pas-de-Calais.
He voted
for the French
Republic
; but argued against the execution of Louis XVI, saying that he should instead
be exiled to the United States: firstly,
because of the way royalist France had come to the aid of the
American Revolution; and secondly because of a moral objection to
capital punishment in general and to revenge killings in
particular.
Regarded as an ally of the
Girondins, he
was seen with increasing disfavour by the
Montagnards who were now in power, and in
particular by
Robespierre. A
decree was passed at the end of 1793 excluding foreigners from
their places in the Convention (
Anacharsis
Cloots was also deprived of his place). Paine was arrested and
imprisoned in December 1793.
The Age of Reason

Title page from the first English
edition of Part I
Before his arrest and imprisonment in France, knowing that he would
probably be arrested and executed, Paine, following in the
tradition of
early
eighteenth-century British deism, wrote the first part of
The Age of Reason, an assault on organized "revealed"
religion combining a compilation of inconsistencies he found in the
Bible with his own advocacy of deism, calling for "free rational
inquiry" into all subjects, especially religion.
The Age of
Reason critique on institutionalized religion resulted in only
a brief upsurge in deistic thought in America, but would later
result in Paine being derided by the public and abandoned by his
friends. In his "Autobiographical Interlude," which is found in
The Age of Reason between the first and second parts,
Paine writes, "Thus far I had written on the 28th of December,
1793. In the evening I went to the Hotel Philadelphia . . . About
four in the morning I was awakened by a rapping at my chamber door;
when I opened it, I saw a guard and the master of the hotel with
them. The guard told me they came to put me under arrestation and
to demand the key of my papers. I desired them to walk in, and I
would dress myself and go with them immediately."
Being held in France, Paine protested and claimed that he was a
citizen of America, which was an ally of Revolutionary France,
rather than of Great Britain, which was by that time at war with
France. However,
Gouverneur
Morris, the American ambassador to France, did not press his
claim, and Paine later wrote that Morris had connived at his
imprisonment. Paine thought that George Washington had abandoned
him, and he was to quarrel with Washington for the rest of his
life. Years later he wrote a scathing open letter to Washington,
accusing him of private betrayal of their friendship and public
hypocrisy as general and president, and concluding the letter by
saying "the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an
apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles
or whether you ever had any."
While in prison, Paine narrowly escaped execution. A guard walked
through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the
prisoners who were due to be sent to the guillotine on the morrow.
He placed a 4 on the door of Paine's cell, but Paine's door had
been left open to let a breeze in, because Paine was seriously ill
at the time. That night, his other three cell mates closed the
door, thus hiding the mark inside the cell. The next day their cell
was overlooked. "The Angel of Death" had passed over Paine. He kept
his head and survived the few vital days needed to be spared by the
fall of Robespierre on
9
Thermidor (July 27, 1794).
Paine was released in November 1794 largely because of the work of
the new American Minister to France,
James
Monroe, who successfully argued the case for Paine's American
citizenship. In July 1795, he was re-admitted into the Convention,
as were other surviving Girondins. Paine was one of only three
deputees to oppose the adoption of the new
1795 constitution, because it
eliminated
universal suffrage,
which had been proclaimed by the
Montagnard Constitution of
1793.
In 1800, Paine purportedly had a meeting with
Napoleon. Napoleon claimed he slept
with a copy of
Rights of Man under his pillow and went so
far as to say to Paine that "a statue of gold should be erected to
you in every city in the universe." Paine discussed with Napoleon
on how best to invade England and in December 1797 wrote two
essays, one of which was pointedly named
Observations on the
Construction and Operation of Navies with a Plan for an Invasion of
England and the Final Overthrow of the English Government, in
which he promoted the idea to finance 1000 gunboats to carry a
French invading army across the English Channel. In 1804 Paine
returned to the subject, writing
To the People of England on
the Invasion of England advocating the idea.
On noting Napoleon's progress towards dictatorship, he condemned
him as: "the completest charlatan that ever existed". Thomas Paine
remained in France until 1802, returning to the USA only at
President Jefferson's invitation.
Later years
Paine returned to the USA in the early stages of the
Second Great Awakening and a time of
great political partisanship. The
Age of Reason gave ample
excuse for the religiously devout to dislike him, and the
Federalists attacked him for his ideas of government stated in
Common Sense, for his association with the French
Revolution, and for his friendship with President Jefferson. Also
still fresh in the minds of the public was his
Letter to
Washington, published six years before his return.
Paine
died at the age of 72, at 59 Grove Street in Greenwich
Village
, New York
City
on the morning of June 8, 1809. Although the
original building is no longer there, the present building has a
plaque noting that Paine died at this location. At the time of his
death, most American newspapers reprinted the obituary notice from
the
New York Citizen,
which read in part: "He had lived long, did some good and much
harm." Only six mourners came to his funeral, two of whom were
black, most likely
freedmen. The great
orator and writer
Robert G.
Ingersoll wrote:
Thomas Paine had passed the legendary limit of
life.
One by one most of his old friends and acquaintances
had deserted him.
Maligned on every side, execrated, shunned and abhorred
– his virtues denounced as vices – his services forgotten – his
character blackened, he preserved the poise and balance of his
soul.
He was a victim of the people, but his convictions
remained unshaken.
He was still a soldier in the army of freedom, and
still tried to enlighten and civilize those who were impatiently
waiting for his death.
Even those who loved their enemies hated him, their
friend – the friend of the whole world – with all their
hearts.
On the 8th of June, 1809, death came – Death, almost
his only friend.
At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic
procession, no military display.
In a carriage, a woman and her son who had lived on the
bounty of the dead – on horseback, a Quaker, the humanity of whose
heart dominated the creed of his head – and, following on foot, two
negroes filled with gratitude – constituted the funeral cortege of
Thomas Paine.
"In the summer of 1803 the political atmosphere was in a
tempestuous condition, owing to the widespread accusation that
Aaron Burr had intrigued with the
Federalists against Jefferson to gain the presidency. There was a
Society in New York called "Republican Greens," who, on
Independence Day, had for a toast "Thomas Paine, the Man of the
People", and who seem to have had a piece of music called the
"Rights of Man". Paine was also apparently the hero of that day at
White Plains, where a vast crowd assembled".

The original burial location of Thomas
Paine in New Rochelle, New York.
A few years later, the agrarian radical
William Cobbett dug up his bones and
transported them back to the UK. The plan was to give Paine a
heroic reburial on his native soil, but the bones were still among
Cobbett's effects when he died over twenty years later. There is no
confirmed story about what happened to them after that, although
down the years various people have claimed to own parts of Paine's
remains, such as his skull and right hand.
Political views
Thomas Paine developed his
natural
justice beliefs in childhood, while listening to a mob jeering
and attacking the town folk being punished in the Thetford
stocks. He may also have been influenced by his
Quaker father. In
The Age of
Reason the treatise supporting deism he says:
The religion that approaches the nearest of all others
to true deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that
professed by the Quakers .
.
. though I revere their philanthropy, I cannot help
smiling at [their] conceit; .
.
. if the taste of a Quaker [had] been consulted at the
Creation, what a silent and drab-colored Creation it would have
been!
Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a
bird been permitted to sing.
Later, his encounters with the Indians of America made a deep
impression. The ability of the Iroquois to live in harmony with
nature while achieving a democratic decision making process, helped
him refine his thinking on how to organize society.
He was an early advocate of
republicanism and
liberalism, dismissing
monarchy, and viewing government as a necessary
evil. He opposed
slavery, proposed
universal, free
public education,
progressive taxation,
guaranteed minimum income, and
other ideas then considered radical.
In the second part of
The Age of Reason, about his
sickness in prison, he says: ". . . I was seized with a fever,
that, in its progress, had every symptom of becoming mortal, and
from the effects of which I am not recovered. It was then that I
remembered, with renewed satisfaction, and congratulated myself
most sincerely, on having written the former part of 'The Age of
Reason'". This quotation encapsulates its gist:
The opinions I have advanced .
.
. are the effect of the most clear and long-established
conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon
the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being
the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and
of salvation, by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions,
dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only
true religion is Deism, by which I then meant,
and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral
character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues and
that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I
rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter.
So say I now and so help me God.
About religion,
The Age of
Reason says:
He also wrote
An Essay on
the Origin of Free-Masonry , about the Bible being
allegorical myth describing astrology:
He described himself as
deist, saying:
How different is [Christianity] to the pure and simple
profession of Deism!
The true Deist has but one Deity, and his religion
consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the
Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in everything
moral, scientifical, and mechanical.
Paine was once often credited with writing "African Slavery in
America", the first article proposing the emancipation of African
slaves and the
abolition of slavery. It
was published on March 8, 1775 in the
Postscript to the
Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser (aka
The
Pennsylvania Magazine and
American Museum). Citing a
lack of evidence that Paine was the author of this anonymously
published essay, some scholars (
Eric
Foner and
Alfred Owen
Aldridge) no longer consider this one of his works. By
contrast, John Nichols speculates that his "fervent objections to
slavery" led to his
exclusion from power during the early years of the Republic.
His last, great pamphlet,
Agrarian Justice, he published
in winter of 1795, further developing the ideas in the
Rights
of Man, about how land ownership separated the majority of
people from their rightful, natural inheritance, and means of
independent survival. Contemporarily, his proposal is deemed a form
of basic Income Guarantee. The U.S.
Social Security
Administration recognizes
Agrarian Justice as the
first American proposal for an
old-age
pension; per
Agrarian Justice:
In advocating the case of the persons thus
dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity .
.
.
[Government must] create a national fund, out of which
there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of
twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a
compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural
inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed
property.
And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life,
to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all
others as they shall arrive at that age.
Legacy
Thomas Paine's writing greatly influenced his contemporaries and,
especially, the American revolutionaries. His books inspired
philosophic and working-class
radicals in the U.K., and
U.S.
liberals,
libertarians,
feminists,
democratic socialists,
social democrats,
anarchists,
freethinkers, and
progressives often claim him as an
intellectual ancestor. Many of his works have also been an
inspiration for rapidly expanding
secular humanism.
Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison respectfully read his
works.
Transcript of an address delivered February 17, 1957 on radio
station WMIE-FM
, Miami, Florida. Lincoln's law partner,
William Herndon, reports
that he (Lincoln) wrote a defence of Paine's deism in 1835, and
friend Samuel Hill burned it to save Lincoln's political career;
and of him, Thomas Edison said:
I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of
all Americans.
Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this
republic .
.
.
It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's
works in my boyhood .
.
. it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great
thinker's views on political and theological subjects.
Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I
had never before thought.
I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment
that shone from Paine's writings, and I recall thinking, at that
time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for
all children!'
My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first
reading of his works.
I went back to them time and again, just as I have done
since my boyhood days.
At war's end, the Congress gave Thomas Paine a farm in New
Rochelle, New York, for services rendered. On it are the Thomas
Paine Cottage and the Thomas Paine Historical Society museum.
In the
United
Kingdom
a statue of Thomas Paine (quill pen and inverted
copy of Rights of Man in hand), stands in King Street,
Thetford, Norfolk, his birth place. Moreover, in Thetford,
the
Sixth form is named after him. Thomas
Paine was ranked #34 in the
100
Greatest Britons 2002 extensive Nationwide poll conducted
by the
BBC
At
Bronx Community College,
there is a bust of Thomas Paine in their Hall of Fame of Great
Americans, and there are statues of Paine in Morristown and
Bordentown, New Jersey, and in the Parc Montsouris, in Paris. The
town of Diss has a Thomas Paine Street. In Paris, there is a plaque
in the street where he lived from 1797 to 1802, that says: "Thomas
PAINE / 1737–1809 / Englishman by birth / American by adoption /
French by decree".
Yearly, between 4 and 14 July, the Lewes
Town Council in the United Kingdom
celebrates the life and work of Thomas
Paine.

The Thomas Paine Museum, 983 North
Avenue, New Rochelle, New York.
Though
Age of Reason resulted in only a brief upsurge in deistic
thought in America, Paine's critique on institutionalized religion
advocating rational thinking inspired and guided many British
freethinkers of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as William Cobbett, George Holyoake, Charles Bradlaugh and Bertrand Russell, judging by the works of
contemporary British writers like Christopher Hitchens, his influence and
spirit endures.
Paine's words were quoted by President
Barack Obama in his inaugural address: "Let it
be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when
nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the
country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."
Also in
2009, the bicentenary of his death was marked by the premiere of
the biographical play A New World: A Life of
Thomas Paine at Shakespeare's Globe
.
See also
References
<1—35. Henry="" Yorke,=""
Letters From France, 2 vols
(London: Symonds, 1804), 2:396. This the original primary reference
for this quotation.
Bibliography
- Aldridge, A. Owen, 1959. Man of Reason: The Life of
Thomas Paine. Lippincott. Regarded by British authorities as
the standard biography.
- Aldridge, A. Owen, 1984. Thomas Paine's American Ideology. University of Delaware
Press.
- Ayer, A. J., 1988. Thomas Paine. University of Chicago
Press.
- Bailyn, Bernard, 1990. "Common
Sense", in Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: Personalities and
Themes in the Struggle for American Independence. Alfred A.
Knopf.
- Bernstein, R. B. "Review Essay: Rediscovering Thomas
Paine." New York Law School Law Review, 1994 valuable
blend of historiographical essay and biographical/analytical
treatment.
- Butler, Marilyn, 1984. Burke
Paine and Godwin and the Revolution Controversy.
- Claeys, Gregory, 1989.
Thomas Paine, Social and Political
Thought. Unwin Hyman. Excellent analysis of Paine's
thought.
- Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1892.
The Life of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Facsimile. Long hailed as the definitive biography,
and still valuable.
- Fast, Howard, 1946. Citizen Tom
Paine (historical novel, though sometimes taken as
biography).
- Foner, Eric, 1976. Tom Paine and
Revolutionary America. Oxford University Press. The
standard monograph treating Paine's thought and work with regard to
America.
- Foot, Michael, and Kramnick, Isaac,
1987. The Thomas Paine Reader. Penguin Classics.
- Hawke, David Freeman, 1974. Paine. Regarded by many
American authorities as the standard biography.
- Hitchens, Christopher,
2006. Thomas Paine's "Rights of
Man": A Biography.
- Ingersoll, Robert G., 1892,
" Thomas Paine," North American Review.
- Kates, Gary, 1989, "From Liberalism to Radicalism: Tom Paine's
Rights of Man," Journal of the History of Ideas:
569-87.
- Kaye, Harvey J., 2005. Thomas
Paine and the Promise of America. Hill and Wang.
- Keane, John,
1995. Tom Paine: A Political Life. London. One of the most
valuable recent studies.
- Larkin, Edward, 2005. Thomas Paine and the Literature of
Revolution. Cambridge University Press.
- Lessay, Jean. L'américain de la Convention, Thomas Paine:
Professeur de révolutions. Paris, éditions Perrin, 1987, 241
p.
- Nelson, Craig, 2006. Thomas
Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern
Nations. Viking. ISBN 0670037885.
- Paine, Thomas (Foner, Eric, editor),
1993. Writings. Library of America. Authoritative and
scholarly edition containing Common Sense, the essays
comprising the American Crisis series, Rights of
Man, The Age of Reason, Agrarian Justice,
and selected briefer writings, with authoritative texts and careful
annotation.
- Paine, Thomas (Foner, Philip S.,
editor), 1944. The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, 2
volumes. Citadel Press. We badly need a complete edition of Paine's
writings on the model of Eric Foner's edition for the Library of
America, but until that goal is achieved, Philip Foner's two-volume
edition is a serviceable substitute. Volume I contains the major
works, and volume II contains shorter writings, both published
essays and a selection of letters, but confusingly organized; in
addition, Foner's attributions of writings to Paine have come in
for some criticism in that Foner may have included writings that
Paine edited but did not write and omitted some writings that later
scholars have attributed to Paine.
- Powell, David, 1985. Tom Paine, The Greatest Exile.
Hutchinson.
- Vincent, Bernard, 2005. The Transatlantic Republican: Thomas Paine and the
age of revolutions.
- Wheeler, Daniel, Life and Writings of Thomas Paine,
Vincent & Parke, 1908.
External links
`