This blog is presented in conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s special exhibit tied to the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On display now, Declarations: 250 Years of Writing Toward Independence includes an 1823 printing of the Declaration, as well as colonial-era legal documents signed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Philip Livingston, and Roger Sherman. Declarations also invites visitors to reflect on works by writers throughout American history that reference the Declaration to advocate for human rights, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Harvey Milk, and more.
Learn more about this important piece of writing, what it meant in 1776 and what it means today, and reflect on the immense power of the written word to shape a society, a culture, and a nation. Declarations: 250 Years of Writing Toward Independence is on display now at the American Writers Museum. Plan your visit here.
How an immigrant to the American colonies stoked revolution with his words
by Gabriel Bell
Born in the humble town of Thetford, England, floating thirty-some miles away from the nearest major city, Thomas Paine was nothing if not a product of providence—one happenstance meeting, one job taken too late or dropped too early—was all that stood between him and eternal obscurity. His status today as one of America’s founding ideologues and influencers speaks both to the political chaos of revolutionary America and to Paine’s unique ability to channel that chaos into uncharted political frontiers. That very tendency toward what was “next” for America would also prove his undoing, carrying him from the heights of national fame in the late-18th century to a death in comparative isolation in June 1809.
In conjunction with the American Writers Museum’s Declarations: 250 Years of Writing Toward Independence pop-up exhibit, the following is a brief overview of the life and exploits of Thomas Paine. From his departure from England, to his meteoric rise to literary fame, to his later slip into political obscurity, Paine’s life is utterly emblematic of the dramatic political spontaneity of early America, and the limits of the radical political project of the day.
1749-1774: Paine and Hardship
In 1749, a thirteen-year-old Paine was withdrawn from Thetford Grammar School to work for his father as a staymaker (an artisan who made corsets). Between 1749 and 1772, Paine oscillated between jobs which he struggled to hold down, and contracted voyages to the New World which never seemed to materialize. Paine’s attempt at opening a shop in Sandwich went belly-up in 1759, and around 1760 he lost both his wife and child during childbirth. Indeed, this era of Paine’s life, per a succinct description by Britannica, ‘was marked by repeated failures.”
“The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.”
—Thomas Paine, “The Writings of Thomas Paine, Vol. I” (1774-1779)
As he regained his footing in the early-1770s, taking up work in England’s excise office collecting liquor and tobacco taxes, he first began to dip his toe into more abjectly political writing projects. In 1772, he published his first major political piece, The Case of the Officers of Excise, a brief pamphlet arguing that the only way to eradicate corruption in his office was to raise the pay of the officers. This was a radical enough opinion in Paine’s day to have him dismissed for it, and he struggled to find stable employment for a further two years. When his tobacco business fell into bankruptcy and his second marriage ended in divorce in late 1774, his fortune finally turned around after a chance introduction to Benjamin Franklin. With a letter of introduction from Franklin and nothing left to lose, Paine left for Pennsylvania later that year.
1775-1786: Common Sense and The American Crisis
After arriving in America at the end of 1774, Paine took up work as the editor of Pennsylvania Magazine in January 1775. During this time, he published his next major work, a sweeping criticism of slavery titled “African Slavery in America,” alongside several poems and articles under a myriad of aliases. Three months after his arrival, when the Battles of Lexington and Concord threw the thirteen colonies into new and profound political uncertainty, Paine put forth his most acclaimed piece—the forty-seven page pamphlet Common Sense. Read aloud in taverns and town squares from Savannah to Salem, few texts were as singularly responsible for popularizing the idea of revolution among the colonists (20% of which owned a personal copy of the pamphlet within a year of its publication).
Riding the publicity high which Common Sense produced, Paine went on to pen sixteen further pamphlets between 1776 and 1783, each titled The American Crisis and signed as the work of “Common Sense.” The first of these pamphlets, published on December 19, 1776, was read on the orders of George Washington to his shivering, near-disintegrated army on the banks of the Delaware River only days before their harrowing Christmas Day passage. Throughout the revolution, Paine intentionally waved or resigned copyright protection of his pamphlets to guarantee that they’d reach as many eyes as possible for as low a cost to the producer and reader as possible. As he wrote in the third American Crisis pamphlet, “[i]t was the cause of America which made [him] an author,” and it was a cause he intended to popularize at any cost.
1787-1808: The European Years
After floating between administerial jobs in the newly-founded United States of America, Paine returned to England in 1787 just in time to witness the French Revolution just across the channel. When Edmund Burke, a contemporary of Paine’s, published a scathing rebuke of the revolution in 1790, Paine flew into a writerly fury, publishing Rights of Man in 1791 and following it up with a second part not even a year later. Though Rights of Man was only intended to be a response to Burke, the second part stands today as one of the first articulations of human rights in the modern era, inspiring revolutionaries and political theorists ever since.
From 1792-1802, Paine resided in revolutionary France, first as an elected member of the National Convention, and then as a political prisoner. During this time, he published his two most controversial works. The Age of Reason (1794/96), in which he decried organized religion as superstition and called for belief in a more general “Supreme Being” rather than any given god. And Agrarian Justice (1797), in which he denounced private property as theft from the common man and advocated for an early form of social security. When he returned to the U.S. in 1802, he did so penniless and alone, having alienated nearly all his revolutionary friends with these most recent publications.
1809: Death and Reflection
“On the 8th of June 1809,” as 19th-century writer and lawyer Robert G. Ingersoll writes, “death came – Death, almost [Paine’s] only friend. At his funeral no pomp, no pageantry, no civic procession, no military display.” Ever the revolutionary, the very thing which first propelled Paine to international fame—his propensity for poking the ideological bear, for pushing any and every button in his reach, and for eternally imagining a better world—proved to be his undoing. Even so, Paine’s influence is felt all around the world today. We see his hand in the idea of intrinsic human rights; in the evolution of ideas around property, poverty, and social security; and in the very shape and substance of American political identity as we see it today. The United States does not belong to any one man—yet on a list of claimants, Paine surely deserves a spot.
Gabriel Bell is a history student at the University of British Columbia with a focus on international relations and modern American politics. A published author and regular contributor to his university’s music newspaper “The Discorder”, he has a passion for both writing and teaching, and strives to keep his explanations of the world entertaining and engaging without sacrificing an inch of information.