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Thomas "Tom" Paine (February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736] – June 8, 1809) was an author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He has been called "a corset maker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination." Born in Thetford, in the English county of Norfolk, 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. His writing of "Common Sense" was so influential in spurring on the Revolutionary War that John Adams reportedly said, "Without the pen of the author of 'Common Sense,' the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” In 1789 Paine visited France, and lived there for much of the following decade. He was deeply involved in the early stages of the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), in part a defence of the French Revolution against its critics, in particular the British statesman Edmund Burke. 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 that advocates deism, promotes reason and freethinking, argues 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 on June 8, 1809. Only six people attended his funeral as he had been ostracized due to his criticism and ridicule of Christianity.
Paine was born February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736] the son of Joseph Pain, or Paine, a Quaker, and Frances (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 school teacher 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, the mathematician,
Fellow of the Royal Society, and Commissioner of the Excise George
Lewis Scott 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. The ship's water supplies were bad, and typhoid fever killed
five passengers. On arriving at 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. Paine designed the Sunderland Bridge of 1796 over the Wear River at Wearmouth, England. It was patterned after the model he had 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 smokeless candle, and worked with inventor John Fitch in developing steam engines. 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. The
pamphlet appeared in January 1776, after the Revolution had started. It
was passed around, and often read aloud in taverns, contributing
significantly to spreading the idea of republicanism, bolstering
enthusiasm for separation from Britain, and encouraging recruitment for
the Continental Army. Paine provided a new and convincing argument for
independence by advocating a complete break with history. Common Sense is
oriented to the future in a way that compels the reader to make an
immediate choice. It offers a solution for Americans disgusted and
alarmed at the threat of tyranny. 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. Scholars
have put forward various explanations to account for its success,
including the historic moment, Paine's easy to understand style, his
democratic ethos, and his use of psychology and ideology. Common Sense was
immensely popular in disseminating to a very wide audience ideas that
were already in common use among the elite who comprised Congress and
the leadership cadre of the emerging nation. They rarely cited Paine's
arguments in their public calls for independence. 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 late 1776 Paine published The Crisis pamphlet
series, to inspire the Americans in their battles against the British
army. He juxtaposed the conflict between the good American devoted to
civic virtue and the selfish provincial man. To inspire his soldiers, General George Washington had The American Crisis, first Crisis pamphlet, read aloud to them. It begins: These
are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine
patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country;
but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and
woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this
consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious
the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is
dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put
a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so
celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated. 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 by presenting him with an
estate, at New Rochelle, New York, and Paine received money from Pennsylvania and from the US Congress at George Washington's suggestion. During the Revolutionary War, Paine served as an aide to the important general, Nathanael Greene. Paine's later years established him as "a missionary of world revolution." 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 million 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 returning 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."
Paine made influential acquaintances in Paris, and helped organize the
Bank of North America to raise money to supply the army. In 1785, he was given $3,000 by the U.S. Congress in recognition of his service to the nation. Henry Laurens (the father of Col. John Laurens) had been the ambassador to the Netherlands, but he was captured by the British on his return trip there. When he was later exchanged for the prisoner Lord Cornwallis (in
late 1781), Paine proceeded to the Netherlands to continue the loan
negotiations. There remains some question as to the relationship of
Henry Laurens and Thomas Paine to Robert Morris as the Superintendent
of Finance and his business associate Thomas Willing who became the
first president of the Bank of North America (in 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 he lived in it periodically until his death in 1809. This is the
only place in the world where Paine purchased real estate. 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 1790. Edmund Burke, who had supported the American Revolution, did not likewise support the events taking place in France, 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. He participated to the Constitution Committee that drafted
the Girondin constitutional project. 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. 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 the next day. 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 députées
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 1797, Tom Paine lived in Paris with Nicholas Bonneville and his wife, Margaret. Paine, as well as Bonneville's other controversial guests, aroused the suspicions of authorities. Bonneville hid the Royalist Antoine Joseph Barruel - Beauvert at his home and employed him as a proofreader. Beauvert had been outlawed following the coup of 18 Fructidor on
September 4, 1797. Paine believed that America, under John Adams, had
betrayed revolutionary France and so in September 1798 he wrote an
article for Le Bien Informé, advising the French government on how best to conquer America. Bonneville was then briefly jailed for comparing Napoleon Bonaparte to Oliver Cromwell, in his publication 'The Well Informed of 19 Brumaire Year VIII,' and his presses were confiscated, which meant financial ruin. In 1800, still under police surveillance, Bonneville took refuge with his father in Evreux. Paine stayed on with him, helping Bonneville with the burden of translating the Covenant Sea. The same year, 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 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 United States only at President Jefferson's invitation. In 1802 or 1803, Tom Paine left France for the United States, paying passage also for Bonneville's wife, Marguerite Brazier and their three sons, seven year old Benjamin, Louis, and Thomas, of which Paine was godfather. Paine returned to the US 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. Upon
his return to America, Paine penned 'On the Origins of Freemasonry.'
Nicholas Bonneville printed the essay in French. It was not printed in
English until 1810, when Marguerite posthumously published his essay,
which she had culled from among his papers, as a pamphlet containing an
edited version wherein she omitted his references to the Christian
religion. The document was published in English in its entirety in New
York in 1918. Brazier
took care of Paine at the end of his life and buried him on his death
on June 8, 1809. In his will, Paine left the bulk of his estate to
Marguerite, including 100 acres (40.5 ha) of his farm so she could
maintain and educate Benjamin and his brother Thomas. In 1810, the fall
of Napoleon finally allowed Bonneville to rejoin his wife in the United
States where he remained for four years before returning to Paris to
open a bookshop. 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. After his death, Paine's body was brought to New Rochelle,
but no Christian church would receive it for burial, so his remains
were buried under a walnut tree on his farm. In 1819, the English
agrarian radical journalist William Cobbett dug
up his bones and transported them back to England, with plans for
English democrats to give Paine a heroic reburial on his native soil,
but this never came to pass. The bones were still among Cobbett's
effects when he died over twenty years later, but were later lost.
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. 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 writer and orator 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.
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 Indigenous peoples of the Americas 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. 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. Paine
is 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. Others believe it bears the hallmarks of Paine's rhetorical style with its Biblical cadences and plain language. 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 US 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. Note that £10 and £15 would be worth about £800 and £1,200 when adjusted for inflation.
About religion,
The Age of Reason says: All
national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or
Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify
and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. Though there is no evidence he was himself a Freemason, Paine
also wrote "An Essay on the Origin of Free - Masonry" (1803 - 1805),
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. Thomas
Paine's writing greatly influenced his contemporaries and, especially,
the American revolutionaries. His books provoked only a brief upsurge
in Deism in America, but in the long term inspired philosophic and working class radicals in the UK, and US liberals, libertarians, feminists, democratic socialists, social democrats, anarchists, freethinkers, and progressives often
claim him as an intellectual ancestor. Paine's critique on
institutionalized religion and advocation of rational thinking
influenced many British freethinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, such as William Cobbett, George Holyoake, Charles Bradlaugh and Bertrand Russell. Many of Paine's works have also been an inspiration for rapidly expanding secular humanism. His Deism and his writings on Deism have inspired the creation of the World Union of Deists and the writing of the book Deism: A Revolution in Religion, A Revolution in You. Abraham Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon,
reports that Lincoln wrote a defense of Paine's deism in 1835, and
friend Samuel Hill burned it to save Lincoln's political career. Historian Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's papers, said Paine had a strong influence on Lincoln's style: The inventor 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. The
first and longest standing memorial to Thomas Paine is the carved and
inscribed 12 foot marble column in New Rochelle, New York, organized and
funded by publisher, educator and reformer Gilbert Vale (1791 - 1866) and
raised in 1839 by the American sculptor and architect James Frazee --
The Thomas Paine Monument. New
Rochelle is also the original site of Paine's 300 acre farm,
confiscated by the State of New York from the Tory and monarchist
Frederick Davoe and awarded to Paine for his services in the American Revolution. The
same site is the home of the Thomas Paine Museum, whose holdings -- the
subject of a sell-off controversy -- were temporarily relocated to the
New York Historical Society and are now safely and more permanently
archived in the Iona College Library. In England a statue of 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. Bronx Community College includes Paine in its 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. Also
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. In the early 1990s, largely through the efforts of citizen activist David Henley of Virginia, legislation (S.Con.Res 110, and H.R. 1628) was introduced in the 102nd Congress by ideological opposites Sen. Steve Symms (R-ID) and Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY).
With over 100 formal letters of endorsement by US and foreign
historians, philosophers, and organizations, including the Thomas Paine
National Historical Society, the legislation garnered 78 original
co-sponsors in the Senate and 230 original co-sponsors in the House of
Representatives, and was consequently passed by both houses unanimous
consent. In October, 1992 the legislation was signed into law (PL102-407 & PL102-459) by President George H.W. Bush authorizing the construction, using private funds, of a memorial to Thomas Paine in "Area 1" of the grounds of the US Capitol. As of January 2011, the memorial has not yet been built. |