Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine The man of the people

Picture it, we are in Philadelphia, the time is January 1776, George III is on the throne in England and there’s trouble in the colonies. 

Talk of revolutionary sentiment is rife, a young forty-year-old comparatively unknown Englishman going by the name of Thomas Paine has just written a pamphlet called “Common Sense” he published it anonymously because, and I quote:-

"As my wish was to serve an oppressed people, and assist in a just and good cause, I conceived that the honour of it would be promoted by my declining to make even the usual profits of an author”

A man of many talents from a woman's undergarments, tax man to a man of the cloth.

Whilst in England, Paine’s many professions included a master stay-maker, an excise officer, he even applied to become an ordained minister of the Church of England and a schoolteacher. Working as an excise officer he published, in the summer of 1772, “The Case of the Officers of

Excise”, a twenty-one-page article, his first political work.

Benjamin Franklin

While in London distributing his pamphlet he was sacked from his job “Being absent without leave” a friend introduced him to Benjamin Franklin, who suggested emigration to the British colonial America, Tom Paine was known as "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination, immigrated to America from the sleepy town of Lewis in Sussex England arriving in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774.

Very much NOT a royalist

The pamphlet “Common Sense” was an instant best-seller, both in the colonies and in Europe, it was called “the most influential tract of the American Revolution” and because of this, Paine swiftly moved from that comparatively unknown Englishman into an international famous one, becoming one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His work “Common Sense” quoted from James Thomson’s “Liberty”

"Man knows no master save creating Heaven,

Or those whom choice and common good ordain".

Another powerful quote encapsulates the gist perfectly.

Thomas Paine

“In England, a king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms, is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears. A pretty business indeed for a man to be allowed eight hundred thousand sterling a year for and worshipped into the bargain! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.”

“The Age of Reason"

Plaque at the White Hart Hotel,Lewes, East Sussex, south east England

Thomas Paine went on to write “The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology” this criticizes institutionalized religion and challenges the legitimacy of the Bible, 

Thomas Paine died on June 8, 1809, aged 72 in New York, NY, US.