Thomas Paine: The "First Man" of The Revolution

On this episode of Our American Stories, Thomas Paine’s powerful words inspired revolution across the world—rallying George Washington’s troops on the battlefield, fueling the French Revolution, and provoking British disdain for America’s fight for independence. In Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call of American Independence, historian Harlow Giles Unger explores the life of the man John Adams called "the first man of the revolution.". Here's the author himself with the story—audio courtesy of the U.S. National Archives. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, the
story of a man John Adams referred to as the
First Man of the Revolution, the author of Common Sense,
Thomas Paine. You're to tell the story is the best
selling author of Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for Independence,
Harlowe Giles Hunger. We'd like to thank the National Archives

(00:33):
for allowing us to use its remarkable audio. Let's get
into the story.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
As much as any hero of our American Revolution, Thomas
Paine embraced both the revolution and its leader, George Washington.
Of the Revolution, Pain said, the sun never shined on
a cause of greater worth, and of Washington, he pledged,
I shall never suffer a hint of this honor or

(01:00):
disrespect to you to pass unnotice. Washington felt the same
way about Pain, and ordered his officers to read Pain's
words to the troops on the banks of the Delaware
River on Christmas seventeen seventy six. Pain's words rang out
through the darkness. These are the times that trimend's souls.

(01:25):
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink from
this crisis and service to his country. But he that
stands now deserves the thanks of all mankind. With Pain's
explosive words in every soldier's mind and heart, Washington's troops
rose as one. That night. They bordered rafts, crossed the

(01:47):
Delaware River through huge chunks of ice, and stormed into Trenton,
New Jersey. Pain landed with them, firing his musket in
concert with theirs. Months of humiliating defeats, the victory at
Trenton that Paine inspired lifted the morale of an entire people,

(02:09):
and it convinced the American army that it could win
the War of Independence against a much stronger, better equipped
British army. George Washington hailed Pain as a hero. He
said Paine's words had convinced Americans of the righteousness of
separating from Britain. Pain became the most widely read author

(02:35):
in America. He wrote dozens of essays, earning tens of
thousands of dollars, of which he kept not a penny
for himself. He ordered his printers to give every cent
he earned to Congress to buy war supplies for George
Washington and the Continental Army. The net result was that
by war's end, we won the war. But Thomas Paine

(02:59):
was it broke. When Washington learned of Paine's distress, he
wrote to Pain immediately. He said, if you will come
to this encampment and partake with me, I shall be
exceedingly happy to see you. Payne accepted Washington's invitation, but

(03:20):
he was so broke he had to borrow a dollar
to get there. Let's go back a lot of years
to Payne's origins. He was the son of an English
tradesman who made Corset stays for a living in a
small English town seventy five miles north of London. Paine
was headed for the same life, except for his father's

(03:43):
insistent that he attend Quaker meetings every Sunday. Well his
congregants sat silently in the Quaker meetinghouse, awaiting a signal
from God. All young Tom Payne heard were the shrieks
from the whipping post. He was unwilling to believe those

(04:03):
shrieks were the voice of God. He quit the church.
He left home and decided what he needed was an education.
I do not believe in any church, he said. All
churches appeared to be nothing but human inventions. Although England
had no free schools, King Charles the second had founded

(04:25):
the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. It
offered free lectures by noted scholars and scientists and access
to one of the world's largest libraries at the time.
Like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and many other great
men in those times, Tom Payne educated himself. He devoured

(04:49):
books on philosophy, Greek and Roman history, mythology, sciences such
as electricity, hydrostatics, mechanics and astronomy. It was brilliant. He
absorbed enough for the equivalent of two or three university
educations by himself. To support himself, he got a steady

(05:10):
but low paying job as a tax collector, and he
also wrote newspaper articles. He was a freelance writer and
he submitted articles for a little money to local newspapers
and publications. He became quite skilled as a writer, and
because of those skills, his fellow tax collectors asked him

(05:32):
to write a petition to Parliament for higher wages. The
petition was a beautifully written work, and it got him fired.
It left him bankrupt and facing debtor's prison. Some of
his writings, though, had caught the eye of Benjamin Franklin,

(05:53):
Franklin was in London at the time. He was serving
Pennsylvania and several other states as their agent in parliament.
He in Pain became close friends. As the law closed
in on Pain, Franklin gave him the money to flee
to America, and he gave him letters of introduction to
important figures there, including his brother, who was governor of

(06:14):
New Jersey. But one of those letters got Paining a
job as editor of a startup magazine, and one of
the essays he wrote captured the attention of readers across America, England,
and the Western world. In it, he declared that Britain,
which claimed to be a free country, owed all its

(06:37):
subjects freedom, owed all its subjects sanctity of their property,
and free exercise of religion. In absolute governments, the king
is law, Pain wrote, But in free countries the law
ought to be king, and there ought to be no

(06:57):
other law than the rights of mankind. He urged Americans
to overthrow the king. He asked, why should someone rule
over us simply because he's someone else's child. He called
it absurd, after all, there had once been no kings.
Hereditary rule defied common sense, which is what he called

(07:21):
his essay Common Sense, shocked the Western world. It universalized
the War of Independence in America by claiming the cause
of America is the cause of all mankind. It was heresy.
Church leaders and royals across the world insisted that God

(07:44):
had appointed them to power, and most people they governed
were too ignorant not to believe them. Thomas Paine did
not believe them, and his words convinced tens of thousands
of ordinary Americans to agree. They and their forbear had
crossed oceans and tamed the wilderness with their bare hands

(08:04):
and the help of God. No noblemen, no churchmen, no
kings had helped them clear their lands and grow their crops.
So when tax collectors showed up demanding that they give
the King and Parliament part of what they earned, they
echoed Thomas Paine's words of defiance. They picked up their

(08:24):
muskets and rebelled against royal rule. Common Sense became the
most widely read work in the Western world, after only
the Bible. Someone said that without the pen of pain,
the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain,
and John Adams said, I know not whether any man

(08:47):
in the world has had more influence in the inhabitants
or its affairs than Tom Paine. Call it the Age
of Pain.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
And you've been listening to Harlow Giles Hunger tell the
story of Thomas Pain. By the way, if you haven't
read Common Sense in a long time, read it. It
is just spectacular rhetoric. And it was indeed the most
widely read book in the West by far, two hundred
and fifty thousand copies sold, unimaginable in the Nation of

(09:18):
at the time just a few million. Payne embraced the
revolution Ann Washington right from the go, having come from
London and fled London thanks to Benjamin Franklin. In that
essay Common Sense, in which he urged Americans to overthrow
the king, he said, why should someone rule over us?
Because he was born someone's son, And indeed without him,

(09:43):
the revolutionary war is not possible. That's how powerful the
words were. When we come back more of the remarkable
story of Thomas Paine, the father of the American Revolution,
here on our American stories, and we returned to our

(10:10):
American stories and the story of Thomas Pain telling it
is Harlow Giles Hunger, the author of Thomas Pain and
the clarion call for independence. When we last left off,
Hunger was discussing Pain's most widely praised work, Common Sense.
Hunger now discusses Pain's revolutionary war, writing the American Crisis.

(10:32):
Let's get back to the story.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
The essay that began. These are the times that Triman
Souls was only the first of fourteen, each of them
called American Crisis and numbered American Crisis one, American Crisis two,
and so forth. All fourteen continued to feed the fires
of the American revolution that he had lit with Common Sense.

(10:57):
He wrote several crisis essays as letters addressed to British
military commanders, asking Lord, how how do you expect to
conquer America? He said the war was like a game
of checkers. We can move out of one square to
let you come in. Well, we take two or three

(11:17):
of yours for one of ours. We can always prevent defeat.
How do you expect to conquer us? In another crisis essays,
he mocked Parliament, asking why haven't you conquered us? Who
and what has prevented you? Your armies are the world's largest.

(11:38):
They arrived in America without incident. No uncommon fortune has intervened,
and then in a letter to the people of England,
he said he couldn't understand Britain's motives for going to war.
You enjoyed America's whole commerce before you began to try
to conquer us the country. The commerce were both your own,

(12:02):
as they had been for a hundred years. What then,
in the name of Heaven would you go to war? For?
It was the kind of indisputable logic that Pain offered
the world. It infuriated the British, who had no answers,
of course, and made Americans double over with laughter while

(12:23):
firing up their spirits. It was all common sense. Well,
I think you all know we won the War of Independence,
but as I said, it left Tom Payne a pauper.
By then, George Washington loved Pain like a brother, invited
him to live with him at his encampment, and Washington

(12:44):
then worked furiously to get the great writer his just compensation.
He convinced a few state leaders and Congress to award
Pain some money, and New York gave Pain a farm
of several hundred acres that had seen from a tory
just north of New York City in New Rochelle Paine

(13:05):
thanked Washington in his words, the friendship you have shown
me and the pains you have taken to promote my interests.
Paine was an accomplished poet as well as essayist, and
he gave Washington a song whose lyrics he wrote for
the General to the Melody of Rule Britannia. The money

(13:30):
and land that Washington secured for him gave pain enough
security to settle on his farm and began practicing self
taught engineering skills. Like Franklin, he was a great tinkerer
and inventor, which is another aspect that drew them together
as friends. The greatest and most famous of Paine's inventions

(13:55):
was a self supporting, single span, arched iron bridge that
helped revolutionize bridge building. He and his bridge designs are
in every engineering work on the history of bridges in
the world. Franklin thought it was great, and he urged

(14:17):
Payne to take it to a model of it to
France and England, where legislators were more enthusiastic about industrial
advances than we were here in America. But while he
was in Philadelphia, Paine got involved in politics there. Independence
had left Congress conducting foreign affairs and every other aspect

(14:42):
of government by committee, but Congress only met for a
few weeks every year, and most members spent most of
their time at home. The Committee on Foreign Affairs needed
a full time secretary to correspond continually with foreign leaders.
Franklin turned down the job. He was the obvious choice,

(15:05):
he cited his age and his ailments, so John Adams
moved to appoint Thomas Payne. Franklin seconded the appointment, and
Congress named Thomas Payne, the Staymaker refugee from England, Secretary
to the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Although he was only

(15:27):
responsible for keeping committee records and drafting member correspondents, long
member absences left him without instructions and forced him to
write his own replies to many of these leaders from overseas.
To insure the attention of the people he wrote to,

(15:48):
he inflated his title a bit to Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
In fact, he appointed himself America's first Secretary of State.
The absence of Congress also allowed him to organize official documents.
Many showed that merchants in Congress had profited from the

(16:10):
war by charging the army more for supplies than they
charged civilian customers. He had contributed all his own earnings
to the war effort, and he was outraged when he
learned what members of Congress were doing. He wrote to
the newspapers, charging congressional leaders with plundering public money, and

(16:31):
he called them unfit for duty in Congress. It was
a bad move. War profiteering by public officials was not
against the law then, and merchant banker Robert Morris, who
had profited most from the war, was furious by becoming

(16:54):
a delegate in Congress. Morris argued, I did not relinquish
my right of forming mercantile connections. And Gouverneur Morris, and
unrelated partner of Robert Morris, was even angrier. He vowed
revenge and demanded Payne's ouster. He got it, and Paine

(17:17):
was out. So he took Benjamin Franklin's advice and took
his sketches and a small iron bridge model to Europe.
In contrast to the bad feelings he left behind in Philadelphia,
France cheered Thomas Paine as a celebrated author of common sense,
and when Payne displayed the model of his iron bridge,

(17:38):
the French Academy of Sciences hailed it as an engineering marvel.
But the people of Paris were in no mood to
build bridges. They were hungry, even starving. Too many foreign
wars had bankrupted the nation. Uncontrolled rioting erupted in Paris
and across France, and Payne, who couldn't speak a word

(17:59):
of French, wisely left for England with his bridge model.
He arrived there just after a major bridge had collapsed
across the Thames, so British civic officials besieged him with
requests to see his sketches of his iron bridge. It
was so popular a British ironworks built a scale model

(18:23):
in a field outside London, and thousands visited it. Officials
promised dozens of orders, but the orders were not issued
very promptly. They had to get subsidies to finance these bridges.
Payne got tired of waiting when he learned that the
Bastille prison in Paris had fallen, and that his friends

(18:46):
from the Revolution, Lafayette and American ambassador Thomas Jefferson, were
trying to help establish a French constitutional monarchy. Payne decided
to join them. He wrote to Washington, boasting that a
share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.

Speaker 1 (19:06):
Off to Paris, then to London, and back to Paris.
When we come back more of the story of the
founder of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine. Here on our
American stories, and we return to our American stories and

(19:41):
the final portion of our story on Thomas Paine telling
the story is best selling author of Thomas Paine and
the Clarion Call for Independence All o'gile's Hunger. When we
last left off, Paine had decided to get involved in
the French Revolution alongside Thomas Jefferson. Let's return to the story.

Speaker 2 (20:01):
So for the second time in a dozen years, Payne
wrote off like Don Quixote, to change the course of
world history. He joined Lafayette and Jefferson and helped write
the great Preamble to the first constitution in French history,
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.

(20:22):
It anticipated America's Bill of Rights, granted French citizens freedom
of speech, freedom of assembly, and others so called natural rights.
With another revolution under his belt, Payne then wrote a
book he called The Rights of Man. He dedicated part
one to Washington and part two to Lafayette. Like common Sense,

(20:47):
it proved outrageous for the times. He wrote that every
history of the creation agrees that all men are born equal.
And then he quoted the Bible, and God said, let
us make man in our own image. From that paint
concluded man existed before governments, before religions, so that men

(21:11):
like William the Conqueror who invaded England seized power and
declared himself king, a frenchman of all places. Men like
that were nothing more than thugs, who then united with
priests to create the myth of divine right and get
rich by enslaving the people and exploiting the natural resources

(21:31):
of the countries. They ruled like common sense, the Rights
of Man flew off the printing presses. London's printer alone
sold sixty thousand copies. The Irish bought more than forty thousand,
Europe absorbed another thirty thousand, and in America the Secretary
of State Thomas Jefferson, who had returned from France by then,

(21:54):
paid for the printing of an American edition. But, as
you probably guess, Pains Right Rights of Man enraged King
George and England's parliament. They banned it, ordered all copies
seized and burned. They considered Pain still a British subject
and ordered his arrest for treason, a crime punishable by

(22:15):
an especially cruel death of being drawn and quartered by
four horses. Payne's friend, the great poet William Blake, helped
Paine escape from London, and he barely avoided capture at Dover,
jumping aboard a vote for France, just as British police
approached the Peer. But when he arrived in France the

(22:36):
next day, thousands cheered him and his rights of man.
Four towns elected him to the French National Assembly, which
voted him honorary French met citizenship, even though he still
couldn't speak a word of French. But the cheers of
entry faded away a few months later when the radical

(22:59):
lawyer Maximilian Robespierre organized radicals in the National Assembly and
moved to execute the French king for treason. With a
translator at his side, Pain stood in the National Assembly,
defying Robespeer, calling execution in humane, he urged exactly the
king to America, where he said the king was a

(23:21):
hero for having supported American independence. Ironically, as the French
National Assembly debated the French King's fate in Paris, a
court was debating Paine's fate in London. Both verdicts were
the same guilty. Pain tried and almost succeeded in saving

(23:43):
the King's life, and only lost the final ballot by
one vote. The king died on the guillotine a month later.
Pain's effort to save the king cost him dearly. Infuriated
by Pain's opposition, rose Pierre ordered Pain's arrest and imprisonment,
but he didn't dare send him to the guillotine yet.

(24:05):
By then, all Europe had gone to war with France,
and rose Peer held off executing Pain for fear of
alienating France's only remaining military ally, the United States. So
French police dragged Paine to prison but didn't kill him,
and Payne wrote to the American ambassador for help. The

(24:27):
ambassador turned out to be Gouverneur Morris, the former member
of Congress who had sworn to avenge Paine's exposure of
his wartime profiteering. Mars not only left Paine's letters unanswered,
he tried to get Pain killed on the guillotine. He

(24:49):
told roes Peer that Paine had been born in England
and was not an American. Fortunately for Pain, ropes Paer's
enemies had grown numerous enough to have him arrested and
sent to the gaillotine, thus delaying Paine's execution indefinitely. In
the weeks that followed, Paine used much of his time

(25:12):
in prison writing a new book that raged and organized
religion for supporting the cruelties of royalist rule around the world.
Payne also wrote a letter to the friend he loved most,
George Washington, by then President of the United States. When
Washington failed to reply, Payne concluded that Washington had abandoned him.

(25:39):
Ten months after his imprisonment, a new American ambassador, James Monroe,
arrived in Paris. When he learned of Paine's imprisonment, he
badgered French officials to release Pain, and the French let
him go. It was then that Payne wrote the blistering
letter to Washington, accusing Washington of treachery, reviling Washington as

(26:01):
a cold blooded trader. And those are Pain's words, a
cold blooded trader. Washington, of course, had never received any
of Payne's letters. Translantic mail service was not very predictable
in those days, and the jailers probably seized most, if
not all, of Pain's letters. Washington, meanwhile, assumed the reason

(26:26):
he hadn't heard from Pain was that Pain was too
busy steering the French Revolution to write letters. Even Monroe
didn't know of Payne's whereabouts when he arrived in Paris,
and only learned accidentally a few weeks later. So Payne's
angry letter to Washington, while understandable from his point of view,

(26:48):
he was actually unjustified, and because he sent copies to
the newspapers for publication, it cost Pain much of his
popularity when he later rea turned to America. Adding to
public indignation was the book he had written in prison,
attacking every national church and religion. He called it Age

(27:09):
of Reason and an infuriated churchmen and the church going
public across America. Every national church and religion, he wrote,
established itself by pretending some mission from God. Each accuses
the others of disbelief. I disbelieve them all. Pain didn't
stop there. Every church. Again, these are Pain's words. Every

(27:33):
church claims its books reveal the word of God. But
when anyone claims a revelation and repeats it to someone else,
it is hearsaying and ceases to be a revelation. If
it was not a revelation to me, I have only
someone else's word that it existed, and I have no
reason to believe it. Pain insisted that Adam, if ever

(27:57):
there was such a man, had to have lived a deist,
simply because he was the first man on earth before
the founding of any religion. Well, only Thomas Jefferson and
New York Governor Clinton, both of them deists. Like Pain,
welcomed Paine's return to America. Other figures and much of

(28:19):
the general public rejected him, And as he sat reading
by himself in his farmhouse one evening north of New York,
a would be assassin lay in wait in the bushes
and fired a bullet through Pain's living room window. Pain
only barely missed death. When Pain finally did die, no

(28:41):
one of consequence attended his funeral or noted his death,
and later craged. The Englishman even prevented Pain from resting
in peace. He sneaked onto Pain's farm one night, dug
up Pain's moans, and destroyed all traces of Thomas Paine's body.
Since then, many publishers of history books, especially high school

(29:05):
and elementary school history books, have sought to make Thomas
Pain a virtual non person by omitting much of his
written work from such books. In doing so, of course,
they hope to avoid antagonizing public officials. But truths, like water,
always seeks its own level. And that's why Thomas Paine's

(29:28):
truth still inspire those who embrace the rights of humankind.
More than the clarion call for American independence. Thomas Paine
sounded the clarion call for abolition, for women's rights, for
free public education, and for the rights of all men

(29:49):
and women to govern themselves and live free.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
And what a story the founder of the Father in
the end of our revolution without common sense in the
American crisis, George Washington noted again and again, the Revolutionary
War could not have been fought. That's what common sense did,
and then could not have been won. And that's what
the American Crisis did. The story of Thomas Paine here

(30:15):
on our American Stories.