Things you may not know about Thomas Paine
He took great pains to educate himself and read widely.
MoreHe read all the latest scientific publications; whilst in London, awaiting a new position, he attended evening lectures, joined a group of scientists, inventors and thinkers. In the evening, he would get together with like-minded people to question current wisdom, experiment with science and debate new ideas.
He refused to take any money for his revolutionary writings.
MoreHe felt it would compromise their worth. The proceeds went to good causes or were used to enable the works to be sold more cheaply. His share of the proceeds from Common Sense was used to buy the Continental Army its mittens. Profits from his work, the Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, went to relieve the plight of debtors in the Newgate Prison.
He counted on well-to-do friends to provide grants or board.
MoreHe was not good with money. He was granted $3,000 by Congress for his role in the American Revolutionary War, £500 by Pennsylvania and, from the New York Senate, a 300-acre farm, but he rarely lived there, instead renting it out (not always successfully). However, for most of his life he relied on friends. After James Monroe, whom he stayed with on his release from prison in France, was recalled to America, Paine went to stay with the De Bonnevilles in Paris for a few weeks. He stayed for five years!
His books were instant bestsellers.
MoreIn America, Common Sense sold 500,000 copies to a population of only 2.5 million. Over half the citizens either read it, or had it read to them. The Rights of Man Part 1 sold 1,500,000 copies in Europe and Part 2 was one of the fastest selling books in British history, with 200,000 copies in print by the end of the first year. Over 100,000 copies of the two-part edition were sold in America. The Age of Reason became the biggest bestseller of the 18th century in the United States; 17 editions were printed (100,000 sold in 1797 alone). Despite the British government persecuting booksellers caught distributing The Age of Reason, it was an underground sensation in England.
He used money from his legal separation from his wife to pay for his ticket to America.
MoreIn the deed of separation, Elizabeth Ollive agreed to give Thomas the sum of £45. In return, Thomas would permit Elizabeth to live separate and apart from him. He also agreed that he would not slander or defame his wife.
For Thomas, like many others, America provided a second chance for success.
MoreWith a failed marriage and business behind him, with few opportunities left for him in England, he left for America, as thousands of others would, in the hope of a better more successful life.
At different times, he was a citizen of Great Britain, the United States and France (even though he couldn't speak French).
MoreHe was a supporter of the French Revolution and was granted, along with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, honorary French citizenship. Despite being unable to speak French, he was elected to the National Convention, representing the district of Pas-de-Calais.
His words helped inspire a revolution.
MoreBefore Thomas Paine published Common Sense, most colonists had not seen their quarrel with Britain as one that would lead to separation. After publication, Edmund Randolph from Virginia reported that the public feeling, which a few weeks before had shuddered at the tremendous obstacles around getting independence, in their minds, now leapt every barrier. Common Sense was hailed by George Washington as working a powerful change in feelings towards Britain. It prepared Americans for the Declaration of Independence a few months later.
Some of his more radical suggestions for democracy were opposed.
MoreMany Loyalists wrote responses strongly attacking Common Sense. These were expected, but the most notable attack was that of Republican, John Adams. In his Thoughts on Government, which disagreed with the type of radical democracy promoted by Paine, he put forward a more conservative approach to republicanism.
His book 'Rights of Man' terrified the British establishment.
MoreThe book’s success was so alarming that the English Secretary at War sent his Deputy to measure the severity of revolutionary feeling and the loyalty of the troops if civil war were to break out.
He was an engineer and inventor.
MoreHe developed a smokeless candle, a miner's lamp and worked with John Fitch on the development of steam engines. He designed the Sunderland Bridge over the Wear River at Wearmouth, England, which opened in 1796 and was a great leap forward in bridge building. The iron arch was estimated to be 15 times lighter than a similar arch in stone, and its span of 236 feet was far greater than any single-arched stone bridge then in existence.
The British government paid £500 to have a hostile biography written about him.
MoreThe Crown barristers decided that the arguments in The Rights of Man, Part 1, were too well put together for the government to take legal action. So, in 1796, the government hired Scots lawyer, George Chalmers, to write an attack in the form of a biography. He used the fictitious name of Francis Oldys, M. A., of the University of Pennsylvania. The book was entitled: The Life of Thomas Pain, Author of ‘The Rights of Man', with a Defence of his Writings.
After he published The Rights of Man, part 2, he was charged with seditious libel.
MoreHe had fled to France and was tried in his absence. The trial began on December 17th, 1792, at the Guild Hall with a jury hand-picked by the Crown. He was found guilty. If Paine ever returned to Britain, he could be summarily imprisoned, and most likely hanged. The threat was very serious. When James Monroe was recalled to Washington, in the late 1790s, his boat home was stopped by a British warship, and a boarding party searched it for signs of the criminal Thomas Paine.
The British Establishment went to great lengths to discredit him and win popular support.
MoreAfter the publication of Rights of Man Part 2, booksellers were harassed, fined or arrested. Debating clubs were shut down and sympathisers were spied on by the government. Patriotic demonstrations and licensed street festivals were arranged to celebrate royal anniversaries and victories over the French. At these events, effigies of Paine were often burnt or hung, to shouts of "God Save the King". Loyalists formed national organisations to spread the patriotic conservative message. Even a fake letter from Paine’s mother criticising her son's behaviour was circulated.
He was nearly killed by the mob in the streets of Paris.
MoreHearing the news that Louis XVI had been returned to Paris after he had fled, he rushed out onto the streets, forgetting his hat and its tricolor ribbon, worn by every Republican. The mob, assuming he must be an enemy of the Revolution, beat him to the ground, ripping his clothes. They were about to hang him from a street lantern, with cries of “Aristocrat! A la lanterné", when a friend saw what was happening and rescued him from the mob.
He did not believe in capital punishment; this nearly cost him his life.
MorePaine fell out with the leaders of the French Revolution when he argued against the execution of Louis XVI. He said that the King 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. Paine was later arrested and sent to Luxembourg prison.
He spent a year under constant threat of death by guillotine.
MoreOn July 24th, 1794, Thomas Paine’s name appeared on the final list of those to be executed. However, he had become deathly ill with typhus and his cellmates asked permission for the door to be opened to make him more comfortable. When the trustee came along to mark the doors of those who were to die, he marked inside frame of their door. The door was later closed and when the death cart rolled by, they could no longer see the mark on the door, so saving the lives of the men inside.
Napoleon claimed he slept with a copy of Rights of Man under his pillow.
MoreHe told Paine that “a statue of gold should be erected to you in every city in the universe.” As Bonaparte became more and more dictatorial however, Paine turned against him, telling a friend that he was “the completest charlatan that ever existed.” This talk did not go unnoticed and, at a dinner in Paris, Napoleon stared at Paine whilst, in a loud voice, announcing that “The English are all alike, in every country they are rascals.”
Benjamin Franklin advised Paine not to publish his anti-Christian views.
MoreTalking of a manuscript Paine sent him, he asked him, as a friend, to think of the consequences, saying "I would advise you, therefore, not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other person… If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be without it?"
Controversy over his Age of Reason aroused great passions.
MoreIt was an out-and-out attack on organised religion. Thomas Paine was not an atheist but a Deist (a popular idea during the Enlightenment). Though he stated repeatedly in the book his Deist beliefs in one God and his hope for happiness in the afterlife, the book was interpreted by many as promoting atheism. This misunderstanding would cloud all of his other achievements and had an enormous impact on his reputation.
Returning to America he was treated as an outcast by many and refused a vote.
MoreThis was because it was alleged he was not an American citizen. America was undergoing a religious revival and many were still angry about his anti-religious writings. Benjamin Rush was so disgusted, that when Paine visited Philadelphia, he refused to see him. Others still had not forgotten Paine's vitriolic letter to Washington and the Federalists disliked him for his ties to the French Revolution. When the author attempted to get a seat on a coach to New York, he was twice turned down, and when he was smuggled aboard a third coach, a mob, hearing the news, pelted the carriage with rocks. President Jefferson remained his only friend.
He was instrumental in the United States buying the territory of Louisiana.
MoreIn 1803, Thomas Paine, knowing France’s financial difficulties, advised that the United States buy Louisiana. They acquired the entire territory for $15 million, more than doubling the country’s size. It also prevented the threat of war that had arisen after Napoleon cancelled an agreement allowing the US access to the port of New Orleans, after he acquired Louisiana from the Spanish. This would have caused a catastrophe for the area’s settlers.
Only a few people mourned his passing or attended his funeral.
MoreHis funeral was arranged by Mme de Bonneville who had travelled with him and her children from France. He was refused burial in a Quaker burial ground, so she arranged for him to be buried on his farm in New York. He said: "I have no objection to that. The farm will be sold, and they will dig my bones up before they be half rotten". He asked for his tombstone to have on it his name, date of birth and the words 'author of Common Sense.'
His bones were dug up in 1819 and brought to England. They have since been lost!
MoreWilliam Corbett, the famous British radical writer, was ridiculed for digging up Paine's bones and bringing them to England (Liverpool) from their former resting place in New York. Nobody was interested in Thomas Paine and the bones have since been lost.
All the papers and letters relating to his life were accidentally destroyed.
MorePaine left what little he had to the De Bonnevilles. The oldest son, Benjamin, inherited all of Paine’s manuscripts and letters. He stored them in a barn in St. Louis. The barn caught fire and everything inside was lost. Hence, all that is left about his early life is what was written in the anti-Paine, government-sponsored book by George Chalmers.
I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense...