A Biography of Thomas Paine
(1737-1809)
Thomas Paine was born on the twenty-ninth of January 1737 at Thetford, Norfolk in England, as a
son of a Quaker. After a short basic education, he started to work, at first for his father, later as an
officer of the excise. During this occupation Thomas Paine was an unsuccesfull man, and was twice
dismissed from his post. In 1774, he met Benjamin Franklin in London, who advised him to emigrate
to America, giving him letters of recommandation.
Paine landed at Philadelphia on November 30, 1774. Starting over as a publicist, he first published
his African Slavery in America, in the spring of 1775, criticizing slavery in America as being unjust and
inhumane. At this time he also had become co-editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine On arriving in
Philadelphia, Paine had sensed the rise of tension, and the spirit of rebellion, that had steadily
mounted in the Colonies after the Boston Teaparty and when the fightings had started, in April 1775,
with the battles of Lexington and Concord. In Paine’s view the Colonies had all the right to revolt
against a government that imposed taxes on them but which did not give them the right of
representation in the Parliament at Westminster. But he went even further: for him there was no
reason for the Colonies to stay dependent on England. On January 10, 1776 Paine formulated his
ideas on american independence in his pamphlet Common Sense.
In his Common Sense, Paine states that sooner or later independence from England must come,
because America had lost touch with the mother country. In his words, all the arguments for
separation of England are based on nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments and common
sense. Government was necessary evil that could only become safe when it was representative and
altered by frequent elections. The function of government in society ought to be only regulating and
therefore as simple as possible. Not suprisingly, but nevertheless remarkable was his call for a
declaration of independence. Due to the many copies sold (500.000) Paine’s influence on the
Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 is eminent. Another sign of his great influence is the
number of loyalist reactions to Common Sense.
During the War of Independence Paine volunteered in the Continental Army and started with the
writing of his highly influencial sixteen American Crisis papers, which he published between 1776
and 1783. In 1777 he became Secretary of the Committee of Foreign Affairs in Congress, but already
in 1779 he was forced to resign because he had disclosed secret information. In the following nine
years he worked as a clerck at the Pennsylvania Assembly and published several of his writings.
In 1787 Thomas Paine left for England, innitialy to raise funds for the building of a bridge he had
designed, but after the outbreak of the French Revolution he became deeply involved in it. Between
March 1791 and February 1792 he published numerous editions of his Rights of Man, in which he
defended the French Revolution against the attacks by Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the
