Thomas Paine (born Thomas Pain, February 9, 1737 [O.S. January 29, 1736] – June 8, 1809; ) was an English-born American Founding Father, inventor, political philosopher, and statesman. He authored Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis (1776–1783), two of the most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he helped to inspire the colonial era patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Great Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era ideals of human rights.
Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk, and immigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin, arriving in time to participate in the American Revolution. Virtually every American Patriot read his 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, which catalyzed the call for independence from Great Britain. He then wrote The American Crisis, a pro-independence pamphlet series. He returned to Britain in 1787, where he wrote Rights of Man (1791), in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics, particularly the Anglo-Irish conservative writer Edmund Burke. His authorship of the tract led to a trial and conviction in absentia in England in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel. Paine was also a staunch critic of fiat currency, arguing in his 1786 essay Dissertations on Government that paper money was a form of state counterfeiting that undermined republican principles and public morality.
The British government of William Pitt the Younger was worried by the possibility that the French Revolution might spread to Britain and had begun suppressing works that espoused radical philosophies. Paine's work advocated the right of the people to overthrow their government and was therefore targeted with a writ for his arrest issued in early 1792. In September, Paine fled to France, where he was quickly elected to the French National Convention, despite not being able to speak French. The Girondins regarded him as an ally; consequently, the Montagnards regarded him as an enemy, especially Marc-Guillaume Alexis Vadier, the powerful president of the Committee of General Security. In December 1793, Vadier arrested Paine and took him to Luxembourg Prison in Paris. He completed the first part of The Age of Reason just before he was arrested. Mark Philp notes that "In prison Paine managed to produce (and to convey to Daniel Isaac Eaton, the radical London publisher) a dedication for The Age of Reason and a new edition of the Rights of Man with a new preface." James Monroe used his diplomatic connections to get Paine released in November 1794.
Paine became notorious because of his pamphlets and attacks on his former allies, who he felt had betrayed him. In The Age of Reason and other writings, he advocated Deism, promoted reason and freethought, and argued against religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. In 1796, he published a bitter open letter to George Washington, whom he denounced as an incompetent general and a hypocrite. He published the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1797), discussing the origins of property and introducing the concept of a guaranteed minimum income through a one-time inheritance tax on landowners. Having returned to the U.S. in 1802, Paine was broadly ostracized for his ridicule of Christianity and his attacks on the nation's leaders. Following his death on June 8, 1809, only six mourners attended Paine's funeral.
Paine was born on January 29, 1736 (NS February 9, 1737), the son of Joseph Pain (1708–1787), a tenant farmer and stay-maker, and Frances (née Cocke) Pain, in Thetford, Norfolk, England. Joseph was a Quaker and Frances an Anglican. Despite claims that Paine changed the spelling of his family name upon his emigration to America in 1774, he was using "Paine" in 1769, while still in Lewes, Sussex.
He attended Thetford Grammar School (1744–1749), at a time when there was no compulsory education. At the age of 13, he was apprenticed to his father. Following his apprenticeship, aged 19, Paine enlisted and served as a privateer, aboard the ship King of Prussia. Upon returning to Britain in 1759, he became a master staymaker, establishing a shop in Sandwich, Kent.
On September 27, 1759, 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, also in Lincolnshire, at a salary of £50 per annum. On August 27, 1765, he was dismissed 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 staymaker.
In 1767, he was appointed to a position in Grampound, Cornwall. Later he asked to leave this post to await a vacancy, and he became a school teacher in London.
On February 19, 1768, he was appointed to Lewes in Sussex, a town with a tradition of opposition to the monarchy and pro-republican sentiments since the revolutionary decades of the 17th century. Here he lived above the 15th-century Bull House, the tobacco shop of Samuel Ollive and Esther Ollive.
Paine first became involved in civic matters when he was based in Lewes. He appears in the Town Book as a member of the Court Leet, the governing body for the town. He was also a member of the parish vestry, an influential local Anglican church group whose responsibilities for parish business would include collecting taxes and tithes to distribute among the poor. On March 26, 1771, at age 34, Paine married Elizabeth Ollive, the daughter of his recently deceased landlord, whose business as a grocer and tobacconist he then entered into.
In Danielle Allen's 2026 biography of Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, she identifies "the radical Duke" as Thomas Paine's first political patron. The two likely first met in London at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers, and Commerce. Paine's appointment as a tax collector in Lewes was in the Sussex jurisdiction of the Duke; the office gave Paine a stable income. Allen contends that the Duke created a consortium of radical thinkers and gifted writers who published anti-government criticism pseudonymously as "Junius" and that Paine was one of the major contributors to the Letters of Junius. Allen also identifies Paine as the author of a 95-page essay in pamphlet form entitled The Journeyman's Touch-stone published under the pen name "Censor-General" in 1771. It offered a defense of the rights of jurors in support of the publisher Henry Woodfall who faced criminal prosecution by the Crown for printing and distributing the Letters of Junius.
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 12-page article, and his first political work, spending the London winter distributing the 4,000 copies printed to the Parliament and others. In spring 1774, he was again dismissed from the excise service for being absent from his post without permission. The tobacco shop failed. On April 14, to avoid debtors' prison, he sold his household possessions to pay debts. He formally separated from his wife Elizabeth on June 4, 1774, and moved to London. In September, mathematician, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Commissioner of the Excise George Lewis Scott introduced him to Benjamin Franklin, who was there as a voice for colonial opposition to British colonial rule, especially as it related to the Stamp Act, and the Townshend Acts. He was publisher and editor of the largest American newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette and suggested emigration to Philadelphia. He gave a letter of recommendation to Paine, who emigrated in October to the American colonies, arriving in Philadelphia on November 30, 1774.