Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

• Paine was originally from England, from a poor family. He tried several jobs, including the family business of corsetmaking, as well as schoolmaster, preacher, and customs inspector.
• He was dismissed from this last job on a trumped-up charge of smuggling, after he wrote a pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise; with Remarks on the Qualification of Officers, and on the numerous Evils arising to the Revenue, from the Insufficiency of the present Salary, humbly addressed to the Members of both Houses of Parliament. Shortly after this his wife left him.
• He was a religious man, and was originally a Quaker. He described himself as a "Deist."
• He met Benjamin Franklin in London, and emigrated to America in 1774. There he worked as a journalist. He was the editor of Pennsylvania Magazine for 18 months, published in Philadelphia.
• In 1776, he published Common Sense, a pamphlet calling for independence of America from Britain. It sold over 100,000 copies.
• He thought that the best form of government was a republican democracy.
• He actively supported women’s equality and women’s rights.
• He became secretary to the Congressional Committee of Foreign Affairs in 1777, but had to resign in 1779 when he divulged state secrets in a newspaper controversy.
• From 1782-1785 he was given money and land by Pennsylvania, New York, and Congress, when enabled him to be financially independent.
• He returned to Europe from 1787 to 1802, supporting the revolution in France against the monarchy there.
• He believed that people had innate rights, as he explained in The Rights of Man (1791).
• England declared Paine a traitor.
• He became a French citizen in 1792. He was imprisoned for a year there during the Reign of Terror. He narrowly escaped execution. In prison, he wrote continued writing The Age of Reason, an attack on the Bible and Christianity.
• He returned to America, but people forgot their former admiration of his earlier writings such as Common Sense, rejected him because of ideas in The Age of Reason. He died in poverty on his farm in New Rochelle.