Longform
Thomas Paine came. He wrote. And nothing was ever the same again.
Thomas Paine / Illustration by Diego Mallo
This is it? On a lovely morning in early spring I’m standing on 3rd Street in Society Hill, staring up, perhaps a bit forlornly, at a sign. The sign is one of those blue and yellow cast-aluminum historical markers you see in random places all over Pennsylvania. This one says the following:
“Common Sense”
At his print shop here, Robert Bell published the first edition of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet in January 1776. Arguing for a republican form of government under a written constitution, it played a key role in rallying American support for independence.
I can feel my forehead wrinkle as I puzzle over a couple of things. One is the somewhat unspectacular location of this marker, which is attached to a post near the corner of 3rd and what’s officially called Thomas Paine Place — but which, unofficially, is really just the block-long alley behind the restaurant Zahav. A hulking Julius Silvert food distribution truck is double-parked a few yards away from me. If the driver knows anything about Thomas Paine or Common Sense, he’s keeping it to himself.
The other thing puzzling me is the wording of this particular sign, which at least in my reading seems to give as much billing to the printer of America’s most historically significant pamphlet as it does to, you know, the brave and brilliant author. It’s possible my view on this is skewed because I’m a writer, but isn’t it a little like crediting the maker of Abe Lincoln’s fountain pen for the Gettysburg Address?
Alas, the 3rd Street sign is one of the few places in Philadelphia where brave and brilliant Tom Paine is publicly celebrated at all. Another is Thomas Paine Plaza — probably better known to you as the sidewalk outside the Municipal Services Building across from City Hall, or maybe just as the spot where the Frank Rizzo statue stood, ingloriously, for decades. The plaza recently underwent a spiffy $18 million renovation, which is why it’s so strange that I couldn’t find a single word about Paine anywhere on the grounds. In fact, there isn’t even a sign telling you the place is, in fact, called Thomas Paine Plaza.
Paine, as we shall see, deserves better than all this. Because without him — without, more specifically, his years in Philadelphia — we’d likely not be celebrating America’s 250th birthday this summer; instead we might be quietly noting the compromise that was worked out with King George III in that long ago summer of 1776, one that reduced all those ghastly taxes we were paying but kept us — pip pip cheerio Bob’s your uncle and all that — as subjects of the British Empire. That’s the difference Paine made.
Among the founders — and let’s be clear, he’s one of the greatest of them — Paine stands out in several ways. He was a Brit, for starters, arriving in America less than two years before we broke away from the king, but exerting a profound influence nonetheless. Even more significantly, Paine was without question the most modern of America’s originators, a man who not only championed democracy but vehemently opposed slavery, believed in universal suffrage, and proposed a social safety net 150 years before America actually had one. (Honestly, if Paine were exhumed and ran for Congress today, I don’t think he’d have to walk back or explain away a single thing — other than, you know, being exhumed.)
Finally, there’s this: In contrast to the other founders, most of whom either inherited big fortunes or made their own, Paine was a pretty regular guy — lacking formal education and often broke, but more than comfortable chatting it up in a pub with his fellow citizens. Maybe that explains why his greatest contribution to the revolutionary cause was the way he connected with the masses, making them understand that an independent republic wasn’t just a fantasy; it was their right.
Paine didn’t live an easy life, though he did live an extraordinary one. He was born poor and died alone. In between he played an essential role in not one but two revolutions — transformations that both reinvented how we govern ourselves and stood on its head the way human beings actually see their place in the world. Oh, and then he got canceled.
All of it, I’d argue, makes Thomas Paine not just relevant but more essential than ever — the founder we might not be here without, the ultimate Enlightenment Man still talking to us two and a half centuries later, in a moment when America itself feels particularly unenlightened.
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They had to carry him off the boat.
Paine was 37 years old when he came to Philadelphia from England in late 1774, though his arrival here was hardly auspicious. The nine-week crossing was arduous, with Paine and most of the other passengers contracting typhus along the way. Paine’s fever raged, and he’d later write that he had “very little hope” of ever seeing America. (In fact, five of his shipmates did die.) What ultimately saved him was a letter of introduction he carried from Benjamin Franklin, whom Paine had met in London. After docking at Philadelphia’s busy waterfront, the ship’s captain — aware that Paine had a connection to Franklin — arranged for a couple of men to carry Paine ashore on a stretcher and take him to the captain’s brother’s home, where he slowly recovered over the next few weeks.
Paine stood five feet, nine inches tall, with a slender face, prominent nose, and ruddy complexion one commenter described as being “thoroughly English.” While later portraits would show him neatly dressed, in day-to-day life he was known to be untidy, but with a quick smile and an easy laugh. He loved snuff (ever more as he grew older) and certainly enjoyed a cup of rum or brandy.
The Philadelphia in which Paine landed was not just the largest city in the American colonies; it was the most cosmopolitan and commercially bustling — a vital cog in a transcontinental, trade-driven economic boom linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Big money was being made — and the city’s architecture reflected it. When delegates to the First Continental Congress arrived in Philadelphia a few months before Paine, many were “stunned by the magnificence they found here,” Temple historian Harry S. Tinkum wrote in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, arguably the greatest single volume about our city’s past. Magnificence, I should mention, was pretty foreign to Paine, who’d grown up in meager surroundings in the east of England, the son of a tradesman who shaped whalebone for use in sails as well as women’s corsets.
Paine himself spent time at sea and in London as a young man, before settling down, opening his own shop on the southeast coast of England, and, at age 22, getting married. Unfortunately, darkness soon descended on him. His business failed, and a year after the wedding Paine’s wife, Mary, and their baby died in childbirth. Over the next several years Paine was employed mostly as an excise officer — a tax collector — though he also got involved in his town’s politics and other affairs of the day. Still, those interests only seemed to lead to more trouble. Not long after publishing his first known pamphlet — a bold essay about why excise officers deserved a raise — Paine got canned. He returned to London, where he was introduced to Franklin. Ben was impressed enough that he offered to write Paine a letter of recommendation for what amounted to a new life in America, calling him “an ingenious worthy young man” who might be equipped for a job as a clerk, tutor, or assistant surveyor.
All of that, I should say, is the traditional telling of Paine’s story — a telling that’s now being challenged by new scholarship. This summer Princeton University Press is publishing a fresh collection of Paine’s writing that nearly doubles the number of works credited to him; using software that analyzes content and writing style, a group of scholars are making the case that a number of unsigned political pieces published in England as early as the 1750s were actually penned by Paine. What’s more, their research suggests that Paine and Franklin were not just random acquaintances. “Paine and Franklin worked together tightly, closely,” says Gary Berton, longtime president of the Thomas Paine Historical Association and one of the editors of the new collection. In fact, Berton says, Paine and Franklin were fellow “underground revolutionaries” in London.
If the new scholarship is correct, it upends our understanding of Paine’s move to America. In the old version, Paine was a hard-luck guy who needed a fresh start in life. In the new one, he’s a radical agent crossing the ocean to cause trouble.
Which he slowly began to do. After recovering from his illness, Paine rented a dwelling at the corner of Front and Market streets. One of his neighbors was the printer Robert Aiken, who was launching a new periodical called the Pennsylvania Magazine. Though the owner imagined a nonpartisan publication, over the course of 1775 Paine — first as a writer, then as the magazine’s editor — pushed it in a more political direction. Meanwhile, he was spending his evenings in conversation — Philadelphia teemed with coffeehouses and taverns, like the Old Plough Tavern on 2nd Street and London Coffee House across from Paine’s own home — with a cadre of politically aware new friends, among them physician Benjamin Rush and radical thinkers David Rittenhouse and Charles Willson Peale.
By December, Paine was putting his own radical thoughts about politics — particularly as they applied to the American Question, as it was known — into a pamphlet. He certainly wasn’t alone in doing this. Over the previous decade more than 600 pamphlets had been printed on the subject.
As for where Paine’s ideas came from: Well, it’s hard to say precisely. Paine’s father was a Quaker, which might have ingrained in him some egalitarian views. Paine’s formal education ended at age 12, but he worked to educate himself, showing a particular interest in science and the ideas of the Enlightenment that were taking hold on both sides of the Atlantic. And then there was his experience of the world — the hard reality he faced over and over again that some men were simply assumed, without any reason, to be superior to others.
Paine intended to call this forthcoming work Plain Truth. But his friend Dr. Rush, who helped find Paine a printer (looking at you, Robert Bell), suggested an alternative title: Common Sense.
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Two hundred and fifty years after the fact, it’s easy to look at the American Revolution — in less official terms, the audacious revolt by a group of American subjects against King George III — as somehow preordained, predestined. Of course we’d declare our independence and establish the modern world’s first republic.
In truth, there was nothing inevitable about what happened. In fact, if today’s prediction markets had existed in early 1776, the bulk of the betting would have been on reconciliation with the British, not revolution. Yes, we had plenty of differences with the king and his government, mostly around money, and for nine months there had been skirmishes between a few colonial militias and British troops. But the consensus in the colonies was around caution: All this unpleasantness could be worked out.
Common Sense is remarkable in many ways, but the most obvious is this: At a time when the prevailing mood was for a deal, Thomas Paine — or “An Englishman,” as he signed the first printing — was adamant that reconciliation should not even be considered. For America, there was only one way forward. “Until an independance [sic] is declared,” Paine wrote, “the Continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity.”
In part, Paine’s argument was practical. Being connected to Great Britain offered no great advantages to the American colonies, only great disadvantages. It potentially got us caught up in England’s “European wars and quarrels,” setting us in opposition to nations “against whom we have neither anger nor complaint.” Just as important, being subject to the king was bad for business in America, and it was business and trade that had the colonies — in some ways the Silicon Valley of the day — thriving. As Paine wrote, “Our plan is commerce.” And this was to say nothing of distance and size. England was a small island thousands of miles away. What was it doing governing an entire continent?
But Paine’s case was also based on principle, on natural law. If you believed in the Enlightenment ideal of all men being born equal — which he most surely did — then the idea of a king, of one person being above all others, was simply absurd.
Indeed, the only thing more absurd than monarchy was hereditary monarchy, with that special status being handed down from one family member to another. “To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession,” Paine wrote, “and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and an imposition on posterity. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others.”
So if not a monarchy, what kind of government did make sense? Paine believed that power resided with the public, whose opinions should be voiced through elected representatives who would debate and approve the laws that would be followed by everyone. “For as in absolute governments the King is law,” he wrote, “so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”
The arguments Paine makes in Common Sense were not necessarily unique to him. Others were thinking about independence, with some seeing it as inevitable at some point. What was extraordinary about Paine’s pamphlet was its urgency — separation had to happen now — and, even more, its language. Other writers of the period wrote for an educated elite, adopting a formal style, citing one classical reference after another. Paine wanted nothing to do with that.
After it was published in January, Common Sense became, in a sense, the massive hit single of 1776, the hook you couldn’t resist, the record you heard everywhere, the song even your grandparents knew.”
“He doesn’t follow any of the rules of rhetoric,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood told me this spring. (The 92-year-old Wood, who wrote the introduction to a new edition of Common Sense, was tragically hit by a car and killed in early June.) “He has no classical references. There’s none of the formalities that you would get from other writers of the time. He didn’t expect any of his readers to know anything more than the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer. And he uses really vivid images — barnyard images that appalled the gentry.” (The hereditary right of kings, Paine noted, frequently produced “an ass for a lion.”)
To put all this another way: While most writers of the age were attempting to compose precious arias, Paine was penning a powerful pop song for the masses, equal parts Bruce Springsteen, Jay-Z, and Taylor Swift. And perhaps that music industry metaphor is the best way to understand the phenomenon that followed. After it was published in January, Common Sense became, in a sense, the massive hit single of 1776, the hook you couldn’t resist, the record you heard everywhere, the song even your grandparents knew. To put some numbers around its success: At the time Paine was writing, the average pamphlet sold a few hundred copies. In its first three months, Common Sense sold 120,000.
And the people who purchased it were not the only ones exposed to Common Sense’s arguments. Newspapers around the colonies reprinted it; for those who weren’t literate, there were public readings of Paine’s words in taverns and public squares. Its appeal wasn’t just to the masses. The delegates who’d gathered in Philadelphia were equally captivated by it, including John Adams. While Adams would soon clash with Paine — he considered the call for such a raw form of democracy dangerous — he believed in breaking from England and acknowledged the power of Common Sense. “I could not,” he wrote to his wife, Abigail, “have written any thing in so manly and striking a style.”
In terms of impact, there was essentially life in the colonies before Common Sense, and life after. In the before times, a negotiated settlement with the British was the most likely outcome. After, the notion of independence caught fire. In the months that followed Common Sense’s publication, 60 towns, counties, and colonies in America adopted their own declarations of independence from England. Now, we should be careful here. While some patriots were, like Paine, moved by high ideals, others were motivated by commerce, including, in some Southern colonies, the preservation of slavery.
In any event, the mood shifted. In June, the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress introduced a motion that the colonies break away from England, and a committee of four people — including Franklin and Thomas Jefferson — was appointed to draft the formal document.
At noon on July 8th, the Declaration of Independence for these new United States of America, at that point four days old, was read aloud in the yard outside the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall to you and me). Among those standing in the crowd — which had been summoned by the ringing of the State House bell — was Tom Paine. He no doubt felt a sense of pride — there’s evidence he weighed in on drafts of the Declaration — and perhaps even took that moment to reflect back on a particularly stirring line he’d written in Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
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Let’s pause here for a moment and consider all this even more from Paine’s point of view. He was 39 years old at that point and had been an American less than 24 months. But in that short time he’d become a celebrity in his new country (subsequent editions of Common Sense included his name), and his ideas and words played a consequential role in the creation of not just a new nation, but a new type of nation.
Little wonder that he leaned in even more. In the summer of ’76 Paine worked alongside Franklin and several others to draft a new constitution for Pennsylvania — the most radically democratic governing document yet written, one that called for a single, broadly elected legislature (as Paine had laid out in Common Sense) and included a bill of rights (13 years before one was added to the new U.S. Constitution).
When it came to America more broadly, Paine was cognizant that declaring our independence and securing it permanently were not the same thing — given the British opposition, the latter would require a fight. And so in the late summer of 1776, he joined the army, serving as an aide to two generals. It’s worth remembering here that America’s prospects for victory in those early months looked dim. British forces defeated George Washington and his troops in New York and New Jersey, pushing them back across the Delaware. Morale was low, and the calls for reconciliation among those loyal to the king grew louder. In early December, seated by a campfire in Newark, New Jersey, Paine was moved to write an exhortation to the troops and his fellow patriots to not let up. It would be published in the Pennsylvania Journal on December 19th.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” he famously began. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from service to their country, but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” He continued on, criticizing the loyalists while urging everyone else to stand tall, be large. “I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ’Tis the business of little men to shrink; but he whose head is firm and whose conscience approves his conduct will pursue his principles until death.”
Washington was so taken by what Paine wrote that, at least according to one account, he had the essay read to his beleaguered troops. On Christmas Eve they recrossed the Delaware and won a battle at Trenton. Massive challenges remained — the British would occupy Philadelphia the following year — but at least the revolution hadn’t ended just months after it began.
Over the next seven years — even as he played various roles in government — Paine continued to write about the battle for independence in works published in numerous American newspapers, essays collectively known as The American Crisis. He was, in a sense, an influencer and a public intellectual rolled into one, and when the war finally came to an end in the early 1780s, his contributions were well-recognized.
If Paine had stepped away from public affairs at that point and retired from writing, it’s possible his status today might be grander. Perhaps Broadway would have a hit musical called Paine. Perhaps Philly’s Ben Franklin Parkway would be the Thomas Paine Parkway. But, in fact, he wasn’t nearly done.
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For Paine, the decades after the American Revolution were filled with no end of action, brilliance, drama, and tragedy — his life really would make a helluva musical — but we’ll limit ourselves here to the condensed version:
In 1787, Paine went back to England, intending to stay only briefly. But while he was there he found himself excited by the budding revolution in France, and in support of it he wrote Rights of Man, a two-part work “meant for all people everywhere struggling to overthrow oppression,” scholar Philip S. Foner would write in a collection of Paine’s work published in the 1940s. Paine not only railed against monarchy, he sketched out an expansive role for government including public money for the young, the indigent, and the elderly. Meanwhile, he also argued for better wages for working people. None of this was charity, he said, but simply what humans were owed based on the fact that the world had been given to all of us. Once again he found a mass audience for his ideas — Rights of Man sold tens of thousands of copies — but the British ruling class was so threatened by his attacks on them that Paine was put on trial, and ultimately convicted, for seditious libel.
By that point he’d fled across the channel to France, where he was greeted as a hero. (He was elected to Convention Nationale, even though he didn’t speak a word of French.) But again there were … complications. When Robespierre and the Jacobins called for the beheading of Louis XVI, Paine publicly opposed it, recalling the support France had given America. For his transgressions Paine was thrown into a French prison, where he stayed for nine months.
I am happy in the continual contemplation of what I have done, and I thank God that he gave me talents for the purpose and the fortitude to do it.” — Thomas Paine
Around this time Paine wrote two things that would ultimately cause him trouble in America. One was an open-letter screed against George Washington, whom Paine mistakenly held responsible for not getting him freed from that French jail. (In fact, the real villain was the U.S. minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, a fellow founding father — he wrote the preamble to the Constitution — who nonetheless saw Paine as a dangerous radical.) Even more damaging was The Age of Reason, a full-on takedown of organized religion, with particular disdain for Christianity. To be clear: Paine was a deist, not an atheist; his work is filled with references to God and a higher power. But he viewed the priestly class in the same way he viewed monarchs: as oppressors, men who lorded themselves over and above others. They were the definition of unholy.
Paine was finally released from jail and returned to America in the early 1800s, but his writings about the wildly popular Washington and Christianity had destroyed his reputation. Despite that hit single of 1776, despite his significant role in the creation of the United States, newspapers mocked him and many of his friends refused to associate with him. The shunning would largely continue for another 150 years. Teddy Roosevelt disparaged him as “a filthy little atheist,” and Paine’s work was banned during the McCarthy era.
If Paine felt bitterness about the way he was received in the final years of his life, it would be understandable. But a letter he wrote in 1806 to the mayor of Philadelphia, where his voice had first truly been heard, shows none of that. Instead, the words are simply those of a 70-year-old man trying to explain his life’s purpose.
“My motive and object in all my political works, beginning with Common Sense … have been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free and establish government for himself.” As for his works on religion, he stated that his goal was “to bring man to a right reason that God has given him; to impress on him the great principles of divine morality, justice, mercy, and a benevolent disposition to all men and all creatures.”
“I am happy in the continual contemplation of what I have done,” he wrote, “and I thank God that he gave me talents for the purpose and the fortitude to do it.”
Three years later, Paine died in a Greenwich Village boardinghouse, broke and all but alone.
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A couple of weeks after perusing the Common Sense sign in Society Hill, I’m in another spot that honors Thomas Paine, this one in Bordentown, New Jersey. Paine lived in Bordentown during the 1780s — it was the only place he ever owned property — and 19 years ago the town’s leaders created the Thomas Paine Monument and Plaza on a small, quiet plot of land that overlooks the Delaware.
There are a smattering of Paine memorials elsewhere in the U.S. — and a handful in England and France — but no official national monument. Gary Berton of the Thomas Paine Historical Association believes that Paine was — and perhaps still is — too radical for such recognition. He notes that Paine opposed the ratified version of the U.S. Constitution because it wasn’t democratic enough. Two legislative chambers was one too many; the office of the executive was too strong; the document in general didn’t do enough to promote the egalitarian underpinnings of the revolution.
Photograph by Colin Lenton
Paine has long been seen, correctly, as a man of the left. But I think plenty of his ideas would appeal equally to today’s populist right. He spent his career championing the common man against the elites, and he was a great defender of free speech — as one who was ostracized for expressing unpopular views might be.
All of this raises a question: What would Paine think of America in 2026? My own guess is that he’d take pride in the fact that the republic still exists 250 years after its founding, even as he felt disappointment, or perhaps something stronger, at the influence (growing) of people with money and privilege. As for his thoughts on Donald Trump? Well, one can imagine Paine respecting the fact that Trump was, in fact, elected by a majority of the voters, even while loathing so much of what Trump, who surely wouldn’t mind being king, believes.
“We live in a world, the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Trump henchman Stephen Miller said not long ago, perhaps inadvertently summing up the administration’s entire operating philosophy. “These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
It would be silly to deny the role that force has played in the history of the world. But it’s also fair to note here that the very point of America was to move us beyond that — to instead elevate reason and the will of the people and the common good.
Paine — his words, his life — is a reminder that there’s something stronger, and more unrelenting, than physical might. He had no army. He had no money. Tom Paine had only ideas that couldn’t be denied and a gift for expressing them. But maybe that’s all we need to begin the world over again — again.
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Published as “Thomas Paine: The Philadelphia Years” in the July 2026 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
