Born in Thetford, county of Suffolk, England of a Quaker father and Anglican mother, Paine seemed especially affectionate toward his father and at least the radical spirit of his father's religion. His father was a staymaker (maker of corsets) and the family therefore lived in the rather modest circumstances of an artisan. Thomas was largely self-educated, since his formal grammar school education was cut short at age thirteen when he began a three-year apprenticeship to become a staymaker, too. Tom lacked enthusiasm and success in that work. As one commentator waggishly suggests, "he doubtless found the trade constricting" (Claeys, 1989, 21).

During the Seven Years War he enlisted as a sailor aboard a privateer, which is unlike a pirate ship in being licensed by a government to attack shipping of a specific enemy nation, and he apparently saw battle in that role. Afterwards, he worked two periods as an minor customs collection official, but he was twice dismissed. While the first dismissal alleged improprieties (collectors then often bolstered low wages by looking the other way when a shipment of rum went past untaxed), the second see ms due to his leadership of a 1772 petition before Parliament for wage hikes. Having tried seafaring and excise collection without success, Paine also failed as a tutor and tobacconist before emigrating to America at age 37.

He had no family obligations to hold him back. He had married twice, but his first wife had died in 1759 within a year of marriage. His second wife, married when Paine was thirty-four, was abandoned by him in a legal separation before he went to America. While Paine did leave her some money, he left us no explanation of the divorce, unless in his lost autobiography. Perhaps his second wife did not much care, since Paine was a poor provider, physically unkempt, and often inclined to drink. In passing, Paine was unlike Wollstonecraft in being undisturbed by the denial of the vote to women.

On his voyage to America in 1774, Paine survived typhus. He had met Benjamin Franklin through a friend back in England, and he carried Franklin's letter of introduction with him. Making his home in the area of Philadelphia or the New Jersey shore across the Delaware, he became employed as editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine. Among other things, in 1775 he penned his first denunciation of slavery, and often thought of doing a whole book against it. He became friends with others sharing hi s outlooks, including Joel Barlow and the artist Benjamin Rush. By April 1775 the shooting war with Britain had begun at Lexington. As Paine later wrote to Ben Franklin, "I thought it very hard to have the country set on fire about my ears almost the mo ment I got into it" (Aldridge, 1959, 33). Paine readily embraced the cause of liberty, having long detested the nobilities and monarchies of Europe. While Paine early busied himself with a scheme to hide gunpowder shops in private homes, his more import ant work was his initially anonymous authorship of Common Sense. The first vigorously written disavowal of the authority of the King as well as Parliament in the colonies, it claimed that the colonies had reached maturity and should separat e from the parental country. It appeared in January 1776 and sold nearly a half million copies when the colonies contained but three million people. But although Paine himself paid the L 40 for its publication, the royalties were given to the army to bu y mittens for Patriot soldiers. As the most effective propagandist for the Patriot cause, Paine called himself "Cato" when writing The Forester letters against Loyalists, and then his Crisis papers 1776-83 denouncing "summer soldier and sun shine patriots." While those papers, the early ones of which George Washington had read to the soldiers, were secretly subsidized by public money, Paine would eventually demand personal recompense for his labors. Paine joined the army of George Washingt on, serving as aide-de-camp to General Nathaniel Greene and attaining the rank of brigade major, seeing a little combat and performing liaison roles. During the struggle for independence, Paine proved intolerant in wanting to force oaths of allegiance to the Continental Congress from all taxpayers to smoke out Loyalists.

In Philadelphia, he became in 1777 Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs in the Continental Congress. He was nominated by John Adams, who would much later denounce "Paine's yellow fever of egalitarianism." Adams, in his 1805 letter to Ben jamin Waterhouse, even called Paine "a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf" (in Kramnick, 1981, 138). With the exception of the relatively conservative George Washington, most of Paine's friends (e.g., Barlow, Franklin, Jefferson) leaned toward the left rather than the right, and most of his harsh critics (e.g., Adams, Hamilton, Robert Morris) leaned toward the right.

While by no means drawn to any socialist or complete leveling ideas, Paine believed that everyone had a birthright to land, and his late essay, Agrarian Justice (1797) would argue that those without property had a natural birthright to a sha re of the value of those who owned the land. Hence he advocated a 10% levy on all inheritances of land, with the revenue earmarked to provide a grant (L 15) to each landless person (apparently only males) upon coming of age. In addition, like Jefferson, he favored a generous homestead policy to provide farmland for the landless, advocating in his essay "Public Good" federal rather than state ownership of lands secured from the Indians on the American frontier.

While more willing than Jefferson to tolerate a national bank, Paine distrusted high rolling urban financial interests, identifying with the artisanal stratum and favoring the kinds of tax and welfare measures one would expect. In his Rights of Man Paine suggested a progressive inheritance tax which would reach 100% for wealth over L 23,000, which would equate to a multimillion dollar inheritance in terms of modern American currency. He wanted American legislatures to also levy progressive taxes such as an income tax according to ability to pay. Paine defended labor unions and collective bargaining and denounced maximum wage rates. He also favored elements of the welfare state, such as public assistance to the poor for the sake of their children, public works for the unemployed, maternity benefits and even marriage bonuses, free public elementary education, old age pensions, public provision for funerals for the poor, and the like (see Foner, Eric, 1976; and Foner, Philip, 1976). Perhaps his most redistributive measures were meant more to correct the more inegalitarian conditions of Europe than to apply to the somewhat more egalitarian United States (cf. Claeys, 1989, 95-96).

Yet apart from accepting some protective tariffs for infant industries, Paine almost sounds like a modern conservative in insisting on free trade and frugal government, since high expenditures by European governments often went to affluent sinecuri sts or pensioners favored by monarchs (even Edmund Burke got a large pension as an apparent reward for his attack on the French revolution).

After losing his post with the Continental Congress in 1779 for leaking the secret that France had been sending assistance before any public declaration of the alliance, Paine switched eventually to the role of Clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly. After toying with the dangerous idea of returning to England to propagandize for a peace treaty, he went to France at his own expense in 1781, where he visited Franklin. Upon return to Philadelphia, he was a regular at Franklin's home, where the Society for Political Inquiries met.

With earnings from public subsidies for his past work and from the gift of a confiscated Loyalist farm, he invented an iron bridge which he unsuccessfully sought to market in England and France. From his base in England, Paine visited France after its 1789 Revolution, where he had quickly won the confidence of the moderate Girondin faction which included the Marquis de Lafayette, a friend from the time of the American struggle, as well as the mathematician Marquis de Condorcet. Paine helped the F rench draft their Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen as well as their Constitution. They gave him the key to the outer gate of the Bastille, which he sent to Washington as "an early trophy of the spoils of despotism and the first ripe fr uits of American principles transplanted to Europe." He was sure that "the principles of America opened the Bastille" (Aldridge, 1959, 126).

While in England, Paine had socialized from 1788 with Edmund Burke, who had much earlier sympathized with the Patriot grievances against Britain. From France, Paine wrote Burke urging him to encourage revolution in England, too, but under the name of reform. The self-described "old Whig" Burke not only personally rebuked Paine but published his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, an almost Tory work which denigrates "the swinish multitude." Like Wollstoncraft, Paine responded , writing his two-volume chief political work, The Rights of Man (1791). While Burke's book had sold some thirty thousand copies with about fifty responses, Paine's sold hundreds of thousands with perhaps five hundred replies (Claeys, 1989, 3-4). Paine's royalties were given to the Society for Constitutional Information and other such popular societies. Frantic British authorities feared a revolution there, and their outlawry of Paine for "seditious libel" forced Paine to flee back to the contin ent to escape imprisonment.

While Paine was made a citizen of France for his services to liberty, and while he was elected by four jurisdictions to the French Convention, the French Revolution turned to extremes with the rise to power of the Jacobins. As Paine complained of the new excesses, "The intolerant spirit of the Church persecutions had transferred itself into politics; the tribunal styled revolutionary supplied the place of an inquisition; and the guillotine of the stake" (The Age of Reason, in Paine, Comp lete Writings, Vol. I, 514). Yet for daring to publicly argue against the execution of Louis XVI, Paine was put into the Luxemburg prison for ten months, notwithstanding efforts of Joel Barlow and other friends to free him. During the 1793-94 Reign of Terror, Paine came close to being guillotined, once spared only because while he was sick the door to his cell was left open for air, concealing the fatal chalk mark on it which designated just another condemned inmate. Paine became embittered with la ck of any apparent help from President Washington or ambassador Gouverneur Morris, the latter a political enemy who assured the French that Paine was an English citizen, not an American. Paine was finally released because of the fall of Robespierre and J ames Monroe's prodding of French authorities. While thus disenchanted with the French Revolution, Paine was restored to his Convention seat and stayed on in France when authority passed to the Directory and then to Napoleon Bonaparte. He was then on fai rly close terms with Napoleon, even conspiring with him on an aborted plan to invade England to establish republicanism.

Paine returned to America in 1802, only to find that his publication of his prison-drafted The Age of Reason (1794-95) caused many to incorrectly accuse him of being an atheist. While in France he had opposed atheism by forming a The ophilanthropy society, but Napoleon dissolved the organization in deference to the Vatican in 1801. Paine was by personal avowal a "Deist," meaning that he did believe in God (he was not a "filthy little atheist," as Teddy Roosevelt would call him). His God was even providential and provided for a likely afterlife for at least the soul, and there would be reward for the good, punishment for the evil. Paine also believed that Christ existed, but that he was not the "son of God" and the Biblical story of his miraculous resurrection from the dead was implausible to him. Writing in a way not dissimilar from Ethan Allen's The Only Oracle of Man (1784), Paine's The Age of Reason spoke of the Bible as a whole as "mythology," "fable," "fraud." It could not possibly be the word of God since unworthy of Him: It contained too many revolting things and was riddled with internal inconsistencies among its books, as well as revealing inconsistencies with scientific evidence. The Bible, he maintained , was written by mere human beings, and none should accept it as otherwise on hearsay evidence, or on the arbitrary decisions of church councils as to which of the forgeries would be viewed as authentic. He also there argued that to believe in Scripture would encourage people in violent fanaticism, repression of scientific inquiry, and support for despotic governments. In a later letter to Thomas Erskine, an English prosecutor for blasphemy of Paine's English publisher, Paine added, "My belief in the pe rfection of the Deity will not permit me to believe that a book so manifestly obscure, disorderly, and contradictory can be His work. I can write a better book myself" (Paine, Complete Writings, Vol. II, 737).

Paine was opposed to any public establishment of a religion, especially if it also censored any rival religious views. As Paine put it in his Rights of Man, he wanted the fullest freedom of expression in matters concerning religion. In one of his most memorable remarks, Paine famously wrote: "Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of grantin g it. The one is the Pope, armed with fire and faggot, and the other is the Pope selling or granting indulgences" (The Rights of Man, p. 291). Neither a Pope nor any political authority replacing the Pope can presume to say what is not to tolerated in religious expression, nor is there any right to say what will be tolerated. For Paine, the rights to freedom of thought and speech belong to individuals. If everyone claimed the right to censor the different religion of other individ uals, every religion would be called wrong and thus silenced!

While Paine disliked religious meddling in political matters, and he would not himself censor anyone, confident that the guidance of our shared conscience and reason could mean that with free expression the truth would be "ultimately victorious" (< B>Rights of Man, I, p. 247). For him such truth would clearly include deism in religion and republicanism in politics.

Back in America, at his farm home at New Rochelle, New York, Paine found himself harassed for his religious heresy, his house once coming under gunfire. But he otherwise lived the rest of his life quietly, bolstered by whiskey. Against his expres sed wish to be buried in a Quaker cemetery, even the usually tolerant Quakers refused his burial in consecretated ground upon his death in 1809. He was then buried in his own farm orchard. His bones were later unearthed and taken to London, where they w ere eventually lost, when the radical convert William Cobbett and other British left-liberals sought to restore them to England. Paine liked to make these toasts: "To the Republic of the World" and "The Revolution of the World." Not surprisingly , many later American radicals such as the early 19th century socialist Eugene Debs would admire Paine, an admiration much later shared by civil rights and antiwar activists of the 1960's. With rare lapses, such as his demand for revolutionary war loyal ty oaths, Paine vigorously defended freedom of speech and press, and his own vigorous recourse to both made him both famous and infamous in his time.

Claeys, Gregory. 1989. Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Kramnick, Isaac. 1981. "Tom Paine: Radical Democrat."

Democracy. Vol. 1, No. 1.