Thomas Paine: The Crisis, No. 1

About the Author

Thomas Paine was born in England in 1737. He attended the competitive Thetford Grammar School and, like any student of that time, studied Latin and rhetoric together with mathematics. At age thirteen he began to work in the family business of corset making (a fact that was later used against him in British political cartoons), but he was not successful at it. Beginning in 1761 Paine worked in a number of civil service jobs, mostly as an excise officer, collecting taxes on manufactured goods. This work also proved unsteady, and he had to supplement his income by working in other professions—as a privateer (a crewman on a ship granted the right by the British government to attack and confiscate the merchant shipping of enemy nations), as a schoolteacher, and as the manager of a tobacco shop. He succeeded in none of these ventures and in 1774 declared bankruptcy. His first venture into political propaganda was a pamphlet he sent to members of parliament titled The Case of the Officers of Excise, arguing for improved working conditions for that class of civil servants. This apparently had little effect at the time. A few weeks after his bankruptcy, Paine met the American statesman Benjamin Franklin in London. Paine impressed him enough that Franklin wrote letters of introduction on Paine's behalf to contacts in Philadelphia, and Paine immigrated to America, arriving on November 30, 1774.

In Franklin's political circles Paine became part of the most radical movement, one that was calling for the independence of the American colonies from Great Britain. In January 1776 Paine published Common Sense, a book that changed the course of American history. It convinced thousands of Americans, including George Washington and John Adams, that there was no choice left, other than open rebellion, to correct what was viewed as the British misadministration of the colonies. In doing so, it laid the immediate groundwork for the Declaration of Independence, written six months later. It also made Paine one of the most successful authors in American history. At a time when the population of the colonies was about two million free adults, the book sold 120,000 copies in a few months and half a million before the end of the Revolution. Common Sense also became a best seller in France. Yet Paine dedicated the work to the cause of American freedom and never derived any income from it. He followed the same practice with all of his propagandistic writings and, for this reason, teetered on the brink of personal financial ruin throughout the Revolutionary War.

In the first years of the Revolution, Paine was given a series of minor bureaucratic jobs in the civil service meant to support his efforts at writing propaganda. He was with Washington's army through the campaigning season of 1776 and witnessed its disastrous rout at the hands of the British from New York to the outskirts of the American capital at Philadelphia. In response, Paine wrote the first issue of the pamphlet series known as The Crisis, or The American Crisis, in late December 1776, when it seemed as though the Revolution might actually fail if, as many thought likely, the British captured Philadelphia. Washington thought well enough of this tract to have it read out to his troops hours before his raid across the Delaware River. Paine published thirteen issues of The Crisis over the course of the Revolutionary War.

After the American Revolution, Paine became increasingly interested in the French Revolution, publishing The Rights of Man in 1791 to explain and justify its aim and accomplishments to the English-speaking world in both Great Britain and America. Until the dictatorship of Napoléon, he also became deeply involved in French radical politics. In 1802 he retired on grants and land provided by the states of Pennsylvania and New York as well as by the new United States (a name Paine himself coined). Paine died on June 8, 1809, in New York City.