Summaries and E-texts of Paine's Works

• Common Sense -- February 14, 1776
• The First American Crisis -- December 19, 1776
• Rights of Man -- 1791-92
• The Age of Reason -- 1794-95
• Letter to George Washington -- 1796
• Agrarian Justice -- 1797
• Letters, Speeches, Etc.

Biography
Thomas Paine was born Thomas Pain on January 29, 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk. His father, Joseph Pain, was a Quaker and his mother, Frances Cocke, was a protestant daughter of an attorney, eleven years her husbands senior. The "e" at the end of Paine was added in Paine's adulthood, although the reason is unknown. Paine was educated in rural schools as a young child and at the age of 19 left Thetford forever to serve in the navy. After leaving the navy, Paine returned to England and served for several years for the local government at Lewes. It was at Lewes that he first experienced the inequalities of parliamentary representation in England. Also during this time he married Mary Lambert, who died only a year after their marriage, of circumstances unknown. Eleven years later, Paine married Elizabeth Ollive. This marriage, however, was also unsuccessful, and Paine and Ollive separated for unknown reasons after two years.

Soon after his separation from Elizabeth, Paine journeyed to America and threw himself into politics. Although he opposed such violent practices as tarring and feathering, he believed wholeheartedly in the American Revolutionary cause. While in America, he not only wrote Common Sense and The American Crisis but also served in the Revolutionary army, met General George Washington, and was appointed the Secretary of the Committee for Foreign Affairs. During this time he also worked diligently on plans for an iron bridge that has provided a model for many of the major bridges in existence today. In 1779, Paine resigned from his governmental position over a scandal involving Silas Deane, and soon after returned to England.

Back in England, Paine focused on plans for his bridge, and did not return to the political scene until 1791, when he published Part One of Rights of Man. A year later, Part Two came out, for which Paine was charged and convicted of Seditious Libel. Exiled, Paine fled to revolutionary France. In France, he made friends with the Marquis de Lafayette and other revolutionaries and became a member of the French National Assembly. While he served in the Assembly, he remained a staunch republican but was morally opposed the beheading of Louis Capet and the ensuing terror. This opposition, coupled with his English heritage caused him to be imprisoned in Paris in the mid-1790s.

When he was finally released from prison, Paine wrote his radical religious text, The Age of Reason, in which he argued against the Christian church. Not surprisingly, this book made him an outcast both in England and America. Throughout the rest of his life, he would only write one more significant work, Agrarian Justice, which set forth Paine's plan for a more equal distribution of property in England. Paine finally returned to America in 1802, where he was reviled by most people for his radical beliefs. However, two friends, Thomas Jefferson and Madame de Bonneville, remained true and took care of him in his declining days. He died at the age of 82 on June 8, 1809.

Role in the Conversation
Of all the noteworthy radical thinkers in the 1790s, it is not surprising that Thomas Paine was the most infamous in his own time and the most famous in ours. Paine's writing style was always grounded and practical and has remained accessible to the average reader and casual student of politics. In this respect, he differs from many of his contemporaries. William Godwin, for example, managed to escape prosecution for treason or seditious libel largely because his work was almost completely unaccessible to the common man, both in price and argumentation. For this reason, both the political conversation in the 1790s and the contents of this particular project tend to concentrate on the politics and writings of Thomas Paine, to a much greater extent than those figures that surrounded him.

Despite his prominence, however, it is important to remember that Paine did not write in a vacuum -- he was, in fact, part of a close group of liberal thinkers in England, France, and America at the time. In addition to debating and sharing ideas, these people were often quite close friends with each other. Paine, for example, maintained a steady correspondence with Thomas Jefferson throughout his life. In 1791, Paine attended a famous dinner party with several other radical leaders, including Joseph Horne Tooke, Joseph Priestley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Godwin. (It was here where Godwin first met Wollstonecraft and strongly disliked her for talking too much.) When Paine was arrested and tried for seditious libel for Rights of Man in 1792, it was fellow radical Thomas Erskine who brilliantly but unsuccessfully defended him in the court room.

In addition to these more general contacts with fellow political thinkers, Paine's books, pamphlets, speeches, and letters also fit intricately within the political conversation of the time. Paine's first major work, Common Sense, despite its fame in America, is relatively little known in the rest of the world. The same is true of his slightly later work, The American Crisis. It was not until 1791, with the publishing of Rights of Man, that Paine fully achieved international immortality. Like Wollstonecraft's, Godwin's, Priestley's similar works, Rights of Man was written in response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. After the publication of Rights of Man, Paine was charged and convicted of seditious libel and forced to flee England for France. There, he wrote Age of Reason, his most controversial book, which remains divisive to this day. Also while in France, Paine wrote his public letter to George Washington, in which he expresses his anger and disappointment that America did not help him out of prison during the Terror of the French Revolution. It was this letter, more than any of Paine's other writings that completely destroyed his reputation in America for the rest of his lifetime. A year after Paine's letter to Washington, he wrote Agrarian Justice, which capitalized on his more socialist and radical impulses.