Thomas Paine helped spark two revolutions, yet only six mourners attended his funeral
Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet published anonymously in January 1776, was read aloud in taverns across the colonies and pushed Americans toward independence. Its author, Thomas Paine, later sat in France's revolutionary assembly without speaking French and was jailed there. He died in 1809 so unpopular that six people came to bury him.
Paine was born in Thetford, Norfolk, in 1737, the son of a Quaker corset-maker. He left school at 13 to learn his father's trade, sailed on a privateer at 19, and opened a shop that soon failed. His first wife died in childbirth along with their baby. As an excise officer he was dismissed in 1765 for claiming inspections he had not made, reinstated, then sacked again in 1774 for absence; he sold his belongings to escape debtors' prison.
In Lewes he joined local government and wrote his first political work, a 12-page plea for better pay for excise men, of which 4,000 copies were printed. A 2026 biography by Danielle Allen names the radical Duke of Richmond as his first patron. In London he met Benjamin Franklin, whose help got him to Philadelphia in 1774, though typhoid nearly killed him on the crossing. As editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine he pushed its circulation beyond any earlier colonial magazine.
His friend Benjamin Rush suggested the title Common Sense, replacing Plain Truth. Paine claimed 100,000 sales in three months among roughly two million colonists; some historians doubt such figures. Back in Britain he defended the French Revolution against Edmund Burke in Rights of Man and was convicted of seditious libel in absentia in 1792, by which time he had fled to France. Arrested in December 1793, he had just finished the first part of The Age of Reason.
That book's attack on Christian doctrine, and a savage 1796 letter calling George Washington incompetent and hypocritical, alienated former allies. He also proposed, in Agrarian Justice, a guaranteed payment to citizens funded by an inheritance tax on landowners. After returning to America in 1802 he was widely shunned, and he died on 8 June 1809.
Source: Thomas Paine
