Meet Thomas Paine
A Visionary Revolutionary.

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Thomas Paine: The Times That Tried His Soul
by Judah Freed

THOMAS PAINE (1737-1809), English writer and social activist, is best known for his popular essay, Common Sense, the pivotal call for American independence and democracy.

Driven by his own longing for freedom and justice, Paine's thinking was deeply influenced by English and French writers like Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, and other philosophes in the movement today called the Enlightenment.

Thomas Paine published Common Sense in January 1776. With only 2.5 million people then living in the 13 colonies, more than 125,000 copies of the pamphlet sold in the first three months, and 500,000 copies sold during Paine's lifetime. Inspired by his thinking, the colonists rallied behind the struggling American Revolution and created the world's first modern republic. Without Common Sense to sway public opinion, most historians now agree, the American rebellion would have failed from lack of popular support. Jefferson reportedly was inspired by Paine's essay when writing the Declaration of Independence.

During the war, Paine wrote The American Crisis to sustain public support for independence. After the war, he went to France to witness their revolution, defending its ideals in The Rights of Man. Honored at first, he later was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror. While in prison, he began to write The Age of Reason, a critique of religion that yielded a violent public backlash in America.

Returning to the United States in 1801, finding himself an outcast, he died eight years later in poverty and obscurity. Thomas Paine changed our world for the better. On his shoulders others stand.

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Early Life

Born 29 January 1737 in Thetford, England, Thomas Paine was the son of a Quaker stay maker unhappily wed to an Anglican attorney's daughter. After grammar school, young Tom apprenticed at age 13 into his father's occupation. Some say he made corset stays, but this is mistaken. According to the Thomas Paine National Historical Association, Paine and his father made ship stays, a key industry in the river town of Thetford. They produced the hefty rope rigging on sailing vessels that secure the masts to the hull, usually fore-and-aft along the centerline of the vessel; rope stays in some cases control the angle of the sails to tack or jibe in the wind. Stay-making was hard work and paid little. The youth felt doomed to poverty. When war with between England and France broke out in 1756, Paine left home at age 19 for a brief career on the open sea as a privateer. His ship engaged in some battles, but it's unknown whether he ever killed anyone.

Paine did not abide by his father's Quaker doctrines of absolute non-resistance to force, so he never declared himself a member of the Society of Friends. His pious aunt failed in persuading him to side with the Anglicans. The young man was too curious to take any dictums for granted.

Despite being barely educated in youth (his grammar was never perfect), Paine loved ideas, absorbing eclectic authors. His Quaker training, for instance, inspired his views on the sanctity of the "inner citadel of consciousness." While he was apprenticed in his father's low-paying trade, Paine devoted free time to abstract learning, spending his spare cash on books, lectures and scientific apparatus. A voracious reader, he worked his way into science and mathematics, developing his own "mechanical contrivances" of various kinds.

Historians note how his self-directed learning patterns immersed him in the ideas and issues of his age without his intelligence being filtered or routed by the rigors of a "classical education." He could think outside the box.

Paine was intrigued by the philosophes, the French social thinkers and encyclopedae publishers who favored scientific reasoning over irrational religious dogma. They asserted that the human mind is great, capable of knowing anything through diligent research. They saw the cosmos as the creation of one rational God who set the universe in motion with natural laws, like winding up a precision clockwork, who then turned humanity loose to govern their free will with moral self rule.

The Enlightenment, as historians named it, swept through 18th century intellectual culture much like the peace movement swept through the youth culture in the 1960s, much like global thinking is sweeping though society today. Many of these spiritual but non-religious freethinkers called themselves "deists." A deist is defined by Webster's dictionary as "One who believes in the existence of a God or supreme being but who denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason."

Usually freemasons or members of other pro-democracy secret societies, some deists in the American colonies actively participated in the "committtees of correspondences" and anti-monarchial resistance groups, such as the Sons of Liberty. Deism was not widely welcomed by the church or the state, but the ideas appealed to Thomas Paine, who was in tune with the spirit of his times.

Anyone with high ideas still must feed, clothe and house the body. From 1757 to 1774, Paine successively worked in various towns as a stay maker, excise tax assessor, school teacher, and again as an excise man, with side ventures as a tobacconist and grocer.

Paine's career as a tax assessor is noteworthy. He initially lost his excise job after admittedly stamping goods as examined that he'd not inspected. After a stint at teaching, he apologized, suffered chastisement and grained readmission as an excise officer. However, Paine subsequently was dismissed for returning late from a leave of absence. Was the charge trumped up? Perhaps, for Paine was seen as a troublemaker after lobbying Parliament to increase the wages for all excise men. His 1772 brief, The Case of the Officers of Excise, exhibited early the logic and clear writing would appear in his later works.

As for his personal life, Paine married twice, both of his marriages childless. On 27 September 1759 in Sandwich, he married Mary Lambert, who died. On 26 March 1771, while stationed as an excise man at Lewes, he married Elizabeth Ollive. After he was fired, the couple legally separated in 1774, citing temperamental differences. His separation without a divorce later would be used by his political foes to discredit him. Cut off from income, sinking deeper in debt, Paine declared bankruptcy. Surviving letters indicate he keenly felt a wide gap between his bright abilities and his dark circumstances. Loneliness surely plagued him, but life without a mate give Paine the liberty to pursue his destiny.

Nothing now bound Thomas Paine to England.   
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American Times

OUT of work and out of love, Paine looked westward to America. He'd met Benjamin Franklin in London while lobbying for the excise men, says one account, or perhaps they met at scientific society meetings. However they met, Franklin was impressed enough to write a somewhat reserved letter of introduction to his friends in Philadelphia, asking them to help this "ingenious, worthy young man."

In October 1774, at age 37, Paine sailed from England and landed in Philadelphia on 30 November. Franklin's letters led to work in journalism as an editor and contributor to Robert Aitken's Pennsylvania Magazine, which endured for years until they parted angrily over pay disputes.

For Pennsylvania, Paine specialized in the latest inventions yet he covered diverse subjects. Social issues interested him the most, such as calling for the humane treatment of animals, urging equal civil rights for women (but not yet suffrage). In an article published on 8 March 1775, he advocated the abolition of slavery. On 14 April 1775, he helped found one of the first abolitionist societies.

Encouraged by Ben Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rushto voice emerging sentiments abotu the rebellion against teh ing that had bugen the years begore in Massachusettes, Paine wrote Common Sense. Published anonymously in Philadelphia on 10 January 1776, the pamphlet said a continent could not stay tied to an island. Paine argued for an immediate declaration of independence from the British crown as a timely, practical measure that would unite the colonies, secure French and Spanish military and economic aid, and fulfill America's moral duty as a nation of free people. If the colonies would liberate themselves from the crown and declare a free republic under natural law, reflecting nature's God, he argued, America's shining example would enlighten the world.

Paine likely discussed his ideas with others, surely, but the writing was his own, published at his own risk through the good graces of printer R. Bell on Third Street. After word spread that Thomas Paine had authored Common Sense, the second edition published on February 14 bore his byline.

Priced at two shillings ($10 today), the 47-page pamphlet sold 125,000 copies in three months, reaching almost 500,000 lifetime sales. The 13 colonies then held about 2.5 million people, so the essay's "market penetration" is impressive. It was a case of the right book at the right time. Paine donated most of his proceeds to the rebel army. Imagine his feelings when independence was declared in July.

Attacked by monarchy loyalists like William Smith, Paine anonymously defended himself and his essay under the name of "Forester" in Pennsylvania Magazine. The collected "Forester Letters" offer a rare look into Paine's reasoning and zeal.

As war heated up, he enlisted in the American army before its retreat across New Jersey, serving as an aide to a general under George Washington. As the war dragged on, public support faded while the dwindling rebel troops froze in Valley Forge. The Revolution might not last through the winter.

Visiting Valley Forge, Paine sat alone in the cold leaning over a drumhead (according to the legend), writing the first in a series of essays called, The American Crisis. He began with the immortal words, "These are the times that try men's souls." First published 19 December 1776 in the Pennsylvania magazine, the essay was republished four days later as a pamphlet.

The work was read aloud before every army campfire and beside the hearth in many homes. The pamphlet again galvanized public support for the Revolution. A series of eleven more Crisis papers (plus four special editions) were published during the war. Topics ranged from stopping the Tories helping the British to the need for federal and state taxes to fund the war effort.

Paine was rewarded for his literary efforts. In April 1777, Congress appointed him as secretary of its foreign affairs committee, which included Indian Affairs. Some have criticized his role in western frontier policy.

In the Beaumarchais war supplies scandal, Paine sabotaged his own secure job by publishing confidential documents that apparently proved France had supplied American rebels despite its accord with England. Historians have since contended these documents were misleading, that Paine was hoping to induce the French into helping the American war effort by making it appear like they already were helping. Regardless, Paine was forced to resign his post by political pressure. Some assert Paine was next hired by the French at £1000 per year to write anonymous articles favoring France in American newspapers. If true, the job did not last long.

In November 1779. Pennsylvania appointed Paine as clerk of the state assembly; he contributed $500 of his $1700 annual salary to a fund for relieving Washington's weary army. In 1780, to oppose Virginia's claims on western lands, he wrote and published Public Good, expanding on the themes in Common Sense.  
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English Fare

PAINE gave up the clerk's job in 1781 to join John Laurens on a trip to France to raise more military support funds, returning with needed army stores. Paine was not paid for foreign service, but his expenses for travel were covered. When independence and peace was won in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, Thomas Paine again was a poor man. Once again he was looking for his place in the world.

Compensating a hero of the Revolution, the Congress voted to give him £3000 in thanks, Pennsylvania gave him £500, and New York gave him a confiscated Tory farm in New Rochelle.

Paine returned to England in 1887 to seek investors for constructing a prototype iron bridge, his own invention. His bridge eventually did get built, but the entrepreneur lost money in the process.Common Sense standing up (and his bridge not falling down) helped Paine enter "polite society." His proximity to Washington lent him caché, and Paine soon was caught up in European intrigues.

Paine was in Yorkshire, speaking about recent advances in modern technology, when French masses stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789. He visited Paris in late 1789 to see the new regime for himself, returning to London with a bouyant feeling of hope for French democracy. The next three years was a tale of travel between the two cities of London and Paris.

Paine viewed himself as an agent for world revolution. He spoke and debated in parlors and in print with opinion leaders like Burke, Fox, or Condorcet. They argued over the virtues and the vices of the French and American revolutions. They argued over monarchies. They asked if humanity is capable of self rule. Did such exalted sociality seem heady for a pauper's son?

In response to Burke condemning the French Revolution, Paine wrote and published his first full-length book, The Rights of Man. (He simultaneously republished the pamphlet Common Sense).Part I appeared in 1791 with Part II in 1792. Guided by ideals more than facts (such as Madame Guillotine and "The Terror" under Robespierre), Paine declared that governments exist to guard the natural rights of people unable to ensure their rights without that government's help. The four inalienable rights he named are Liberty, Property, Security, and Resistance to Oppression.

In Part I, Paine argued in The Rights of Man for the ideal of a republic governed under a constitution with a bill of rights, elected leaders serving limited terms, and a judiciary accountable to the general public. He urged equal suffrage for all men, but not yet for all women. (Paine did support women's equality in other respects.) In Part II, he called for the end of social divisions by virtue of birth, rank, economics or religion. He suggested specific social legislation for removing class inequities.

Paine wanted The Rights of Man to inspire in England the same revolutionary thirst for independence from the monarchy as Common Sense had inspired in America. Despite 200,000 copies sold by 1793, later passing 500,000 (making The Rights of Man the single most successful "bestseller" of the century), Paine's treatise did not have the desired effect. The British monarchy persists.

The Rights of Man was suppressed by the Tory government of William Pitt, who wanted to get his hands on the author, still a British citizen. Yet Paine had been safe in France since August 1792. Pitt nevertheless had him tried in absentia before loyalists, who convicted Paine of treason. England outlawed its native son in December 1792, a curse not yet removed even now. 
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French Treats

IN France, Thomas Paine earlier had joined with Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and select other Americans declared as French citizens by the Assembly. In September of 1792, four French departments elected "Citizen Paine" to the Convention, where he sat for the Pas de Calais district.

Paine soon allied with the dominant Girondist party of educated, prosperous, moderate republicans &endash; who spoke English. Paine did not speak French, so his speeches were read by translators lacking his flair for words. Rendered ineffective in the Assembly, his temperament strained his relations. Among his close friends stood the Marquis de Condorcet along with Nicolas de Bonneville, a freemason joining Paine in the Craft. Paine wrote about freemasonry favoring democracy, separating church and state.

Draconian Jacobite radicals had seized power early in the French revolution. Moderate Girondists split off and asserted restraint. Girondists fell from power by trying to avoid the beheading of King Louis XVI.

At the climactic trial, Paine recommended imprisoning the king until war with England was over, then banishing him for life. Paine was forgiven as a humanitarian Quaker who, of course, was opposed to the death penalty.

After Louis' head fell into a basket, a mob under Jean Paul Marat on 2 June 1793 circled the French National Convention, demanding swift surrender of 29 Girondists. When Charlette Corday murdered Marat, more waves of executions followed. Outside Paris, Girondists joined the royalists in a revolt that was brutally crushed by the Jacobites.

Paine ceased attending the Assembly when the Girondists fell. Retreating with friends to rural Faubourg St. Denis, he dwelled there in peace. But then the Assembly stripped away his French citizenship, which deprived him of membership in the Convention, which erased his legal immunity.

A French law allowed citizens of nations at war with France to be arrested. Since France was a war with England, outlawed Englishman Thomas Painewas arrested by the Jacobins behind the Reign of Terror. The man who inspired the American revolution that had inspired the France Revolution was imprisoned without trial in France for the crime of being British.

Scheduled for execution, Paine was saved by a fluke of fate (or divine intervention). He'd fallen ill from prison conditions, according to apocraphal reports, and a doctor was visiting him in his cell when guards passed to mark with chalk the doors of those slated to die on the busy guillotine. Since Paine's cell door was open, the harried guard placed the chalk mark on the inside panel of the door. With the door closed after the doctor's left, the execution mark was hidden from sight. The next morning, other guards bypassed his cell when collecting that day's harvest of death, so Paine survived. Somehow, the mistake was overlooked (theories abound about how or why), and Paine's accuser, Robespierre, seemed content with letting Paine endure the pain of imprisonment.

Paine suspected he was denounced at the secret behest of American minister to France G. Morris, a Tory who'd voiced personal offense at Paine's "bohemian" ways. What's documented is that Paine applied for legal protection as an American citizen. The French foreign minister received a letter from Morris denying any and all responsibility for Paine since he had became a French citizen.

Morris wrote Jefferson that even if America acknowledged Paine as a citizen, he still was liable under French law for acts done in France. Paine was safer sitting quietly in jail, he argued, rather than risking the guillotine in a boisterous public trial.

Many enemies of the Revolution never went to trial, Paine among them. Locked in Luxemborg prison, he eventually persuaded his jailers to provide pen, ink and paper. He wrote there a portion of The Age of Reason. One can imagine that his mood was bitter as a "prisoner of conscience," and this feeling likely affected the tone of his writing.

The final fall of Robespierre in November 1794 saved the Girondists from annihilation. Washington's recently appointed minister to France, James Madison, at long last claimed Paine as an American citizen, demanding his freedom.

After nearly a year in a cold and infested prison, Paine at age 57 emerged weak from illness. He again was penniless. James Monroe sheltered Paine while his health returned, but he would never recover his full vigor.

French citizenship was restored to Paine along with a seat in the Convention in July 1995. He rose in the French Assembly to declare his faith in the Rights of Man.

Living thereafter in or near Paris with moderate republican friends, Paine dedicated his free energy to organizing a society he called the "Theophilanthropists," devoted to supplanting Christian faith with an orderly deist sense of the universe.

Writing remained Paine's source of livelihood. He published Dissertation on First Principles of Government in 1795, then Agrarian Justice in 1797. Between these two, he published his Letter to George Washington, blaming Morris for plotting his imprisonment. The harsh claim of conspiracy severely damaged Paine's public reputation in America. Meanwhile, he completed and published his critique of religion, The Age of Reason, with part I in 1794 and part II in 1796. "I believe in one God, and no more," he begins, "and I hope for happiness beyond this life."

Paine was a deist, never an atheist as many modern skeptics and freethinkers mistakenly claim. The Age of Reason plainly offers Paine's metaphysical spiritual beliefs. God is the First Cause and Designer of the universe. God is knowable through the sciences and through mathematics, through human reason and natural intelligence. Knowing God directly through his heart and transcendent spirit also interested Paine, but as a man of the mind, any certainty about God had to came through his use of reason.

Christians do not attempt to know God in a reasonable way, Paine wrote. The Bible is rife with glaring inconsistencies, subject to many differing interpretations, and therefore fallible. He compared the mythology of the Trinity with the paternity of Zeus, still a provocative analogy. Having dispensed with Christianity, Paine spoke again about his deist God as the power and the wisdom anyone can witness directly in nature. He wrote that God is evident "in the immensity of the creation, ...in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible is governed."  
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Unwelcome Homecoming

THE first copy of The Age of Reason to arrive in America for U.S. publication was lent to Thomas Jefferson for a first reading. In returning the book to the printer, Jefferson scribbled a genial note to offset the tome's "dryness," he later said. In his note, he remarked that the essay was useful as an antidote for "political heresies" of the time. The quip by deist Republican Jefferson of Virginia was a slam aimed at his chief political rival, the Unitarian Federalist John Adams of Massachusetts.

Without the consent of either Paine or Jefferson, the printer published the note as a preface. The unsanctioned action was costly, and it inadvertently changed the remainder of Paine's life, perhaps the course of history.

Federalists vented their outrage at the jefferson's preface in Paine's new book. John Quincy Adams, writing as "Publicola" within the Columbian Sentinel, condemned Paine for his religious principles, then blasted rival Jefferson for his indiscretion in the "preface."

Fueled by public fervor, John Adams was elected the second U.S. President in 1796. He signed the four Alien and Sedition acts in 1798 (akin to the Patriot Acts today). Adams and teh Federalists aimed to repress the Republican party of Jefferson, who narrowly won the caustic 1800 election to become the third U.S. President.

President Jefferson offered Thomas Paine free passage home on a navy ship. Paine declined, but the offer roused his interest. Returning on a private ship, the Maryland, he landed a second time in America in October 1801. He'd later rue his return.

A mob met Paine at the docks, cursing his name.

Never an easy personality to love, now he faced real hatred. Paine's Letter to Washington and the firestorm over the unauthorized preface for The Age of Reason sadly converged to alienate most of his prior allies and patrons in the young nation.

Now a reviled figure, Paine was taunted in the streets, pelted with rocks by children. He was rejected from debates between Federalists and Republicans over centralized vs. decentralized national government. Henry Adams wrote that Paine now was "regarded by respectable society, both Federalist and Republican, as a person to be avoided, a person to be feared."

At age 64, the dejected political outcast retired alone to New Rochelle, where poor health and scant wealth kept him homebound. He later dwelled in the modest property he'd bought in nearby Bordentown. Paine wrote very little. For sociality, he associated with such New York radicals as Elihu Palmer and the "Columbian Illuminati."

Then Madame Marguerite de Bonneville with three children was stranded in America because Napoleon refused to let her husband, Nicolas, leave France. Paine supported them from the little he had, as if glad to show another the kindness not shown to him. Hints of any romance between Paine and Madame de Bonneville are unsubstantiated, and a tryst is doubtful given Paine's loyalty to his friend. Nevertheless, bonds of real sympathetic friendship are documented.

Stories of Paine eventually turning into a tavern drunk are best left to the time travel investigators, There are accounts of a rum bottle at his elbow in greeting his few visitors at home, but he always argued the issues of the day with mental vigor. According to biographer Brain McCartin, the assertions of drunkenness by Paine's detractors were distortions of his modest social drinking. This is the old fallacy of ad hominem, attacking the messenger to avoid hearing his message.
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An American Death

Paine spent his waning life in bleakness and declining health. He moved in the summer of 1808 from 309 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village (still a village then) into a first-floor room in the home of a Mr. Ryder on Herring Street, between Columbia and Reason streets (now at 59 Grove Street in Manhattan). The rent was covered by friend Walter Morton, who paid for house calls by Dr. James Manley, a Christian physician who kept his beliefs to himself, mostly. One biographer thought Paine had arteriosclerosis of the brain, but we have no reliable way of knowing now.

After a particlularly bad spell in 1806, Paine wrote to friend Andrew Dean, "I have passed through an experiment of dying, and I find death has no terrors for me. ...As I am now well enough to sit up some hours in the day, though not well enough to get up without help, I employ myself as I have always done, in endeavoring to bring man to the right use of the reason that God has given him, and to direct his mind immediately to his Creator, and not to fanciful secondary beings called mediators."

Paine tried to earn an income by preparing to publish his collected works, hoping for a revival of his fortunes as he'd enjoyed in 1791. Lacking the vigor or stamina for the venture, however, he had to let the effort lapse.

For a pittance of support, Paine applied to Congress for some reimbursement as a government representative on the mission to Europe with Laurens, who'd died during the war. The Committee of Claims responded on 1 February 1809. They rejected the claim because his connection had been with Laurens only, and so his presence was unofficial. The decision to deny Paine was purely political.

Matthew Lyon (convicted under Alien and Sedition laws) denouncing the decision, calling Paine, "the one to whom this nation is indebted for its independence more than to any living being." Such support came too little and too late. The rejection was devastating, causing apoplexy in old Tom Paine.

Sensing his death approaching, before his lucidity fled, Paine had written his last will in January 1809, requesting burial in the Quaker cemetery, noting that if he was refused, he'd ask no other churches. Even before the event, the Society of Friends declined his request.

His best alternative was a corner of the New Rochelle farm. Mrs. de Bonneville was given executrix instructions for his gravestone to state only, "Author of Common Sense." Per his will, a brick wall twelve-feet square was erected around the grave site with four trees planted on each corner, two cypresses, two willows. The headstone later would be broken by vandals and the pieces stolen by souvenir hunters. That's not all that would be taken.

Paine's last will ordered the New Rochelle farm to be sold, with half the money going to a friend in London and the other half going to Nicolas and Marguerite de Bonneville "to be held in trust for their children, their education and maintenance." He had a premonition that the farmowned by strangers, his enemies would not let his remains rest in peace.

His health failed rapidly after Congress denied his claim. The rejection apparently deflated Paine's will to live. Madame de Bonneville (working in New York as a French tutor) visited twice weekly. A gentle Quaker watchmaker, Willet Hicks, visited almost daily.

Christians, hearing about Paine's impending death, came to plead with him to repent and save his eternal soul from damnation. In one case, Paine threatened to rise from his sickbed and throw his tormentors out the door. Friends Albert Gallatin and wife reported Paine confiding to them that he regretted ever returning to America.

Paine grew bellicose if left alone for too long. The nurse hired by Mrs. de Bonneville, Mrs. Heddon, sat beside his bed near the end. Sometimes she read aloud from a Bible as he dozed off or stared silently into open air. Some days he did not speak at all.

Thomas Paine died in the Ryder home at age 72 on the morning of 8 June 1809. Stories of a deathbed repentance likely are Christian propaganda. Mrs. de Bonneville and a few friends (with two "negro" servants) placed the body in a horsecart and drove the 22 miles north to New Rochelle.

She conducted Paine's short funeral, according to her papers. "Contemplating who it was, what man it was, that we were committing to an obscure grave on an open and disregarded bit of land, I could not help feeling most acutely. Before the earth was thrown down upon the coffin, I, placing myself at the east end of the grave, said to my son Benjamin, 'stand you there, at the other end, as a witness for grateful America.' Looking about me, and beholding the small group of spectators, I exclaimed, as the earth was tumbled onto the grave, 'Oh! Mr. Paine! My son stands here in testimony of the gratitude of America, and I, for France!'" (Our tears are never too late.)

A decade later in 1819, one of Paine's harshest critics from earlier years apparently felt moved to atone for his attacks. William Cobbett had Paine's bones dug up from the New Rochelle farm and transported to England for reburial under a grand patriotic monument that Cobbett intended to construct there. But the British government refused to grant permission for the structure. Paine was still an outlaw. Cobbett died in 1835 with the memorial never erected. A British probate court finally assigned the bones to a receiver. Apart from a jawbone, the fate of Thomas Paine's mortal remains still remains a mystery.

Yet more of Paine's legacy has been lost than his bones. Accordining to biographer Craig Nelson, the scant inheritance Paine left to the de Bonnevilles. All of Paine's surviving manuscripts and letters went to Benjamin de Bonneville. He stored these papers in a St. Louis barn that later was destroyed in a fire. Paine's papers perished in the blaze. All that remained was Paine's published works plus those surviving letters and journals kept by others. Frome these elements historieans have pieced together the story of his life.

More celebrated and widely read today than during his own lifetime, Thomas Paine demonstrated the power of words to change the world. On his brave shoulders others stand. Shall we learn from his example?

 

SOURCES: Dictionary of American Biography, edited by Dumas Malone, (Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1934) at Denver Public Library, the websites listed below, my desk encyclopedia and almanacs.

A member site in the Thomas Paine Ring

BELOW are useful links for students and anyone curious about the life and works of Thomas Paine. Standard and sensible reliability and credibility disclaimers apply. Go Exploring!

• Writings by Thomas Paine. -- Major Works
• Thomas Paine Websites -- His Life & Times .
• U.S. History Archives -- Support Resources .

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Writings by Thomas Paine

Common Sense
(http://earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/commonsense/index.html)

The American Crisis
[http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1776-1800/paine/AC/crisisxx.htm]

The Rights Of Man
(http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1776-1800/paine/ROM/rofmxx.htm)

The Age of Reason (Infidels' version)
(http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/)

Letters & Essays Related to Deism
(http://www.deism.com/paine.htm)