Common Sense (with a Biographical Introduction by John M. Robertson)

COMMON SENSE

By THOMAS PAINE

Biographical introduction by

JOHN M. ROBERTSON

Common Sense

By Thomas Paine

Biographical introduction by John M. Robertson

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5456-2

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5457-9

This edition copyright © 2017. Digireads.com Publishing.

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Cover Image: a detail of a Portrait of Thomas Paine (1737-1809) (oil on canvas), A. Easton (fl.c.1800) / Labour Society, London, UK / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

APPENDIX

Biographical Introduction

The enduring popularity of the chief works of Thomas Paine is not the least remarkable fact in the history of opinion. It is given to few controversial writers to keep a large audience during a hundred years; and there must be a commanding element in the personality of one who does. In the case of Paine, this has been revealed with signal success by his biographer, Dr. Moncure Conway, who has put forth the definitive edition of his works; and it has been thought that a brief survey of Paine’s career and performance, in the light of Mr. Conway’s researches, may not unfitly accompany a fresh reprint.

I.

It is noteworthy that the protagonist of modern democratic freethought was on his father’s side born (January 29th, 1737) in that sect which has above all others sought to act upon what passes for the doctrine of Christianity. He seems to have been baptized of his mother’s church, the Church of England, despite the common statement that he was never christened; and he was certainly confirmed, as the phrase goes; but though his father, Joseph Paine, is said to have been disowned by the Society of Friends for getting married by a priest, he seems to have remained a Quaker, and was so registered at burial. All along, as was natural, Thomas Paine retained some Quaker sympathies, though he was one day to find Quakerism as far astray in politics as in religion.

Of his home life we have now a few ascertained particulars. His father was a lovable parent; his mother less so, though to her he was a dutiful as to his father an affectionate son; and though it is not impossible that she may have written on his leaving England the letter of mingled anxiety and vituperation which was published by his venal enemy Oldys (pseudonym of Chalmers), he carefully supported her, and behaved filially by her on his visit home in her extreme old age. The Paines were poor, and their son’s early life was hard and unlucky. Bred to his father’s trade of stay-making, he ran away at seventeen to join the privateer Terrible, Captain Death—so the names oddly run. From this adventure, as he himself tells in the second part of the Rights of Man, he was happily prevented by the affectionate and moral remonstrances of a good father. But where there is not a kind mother, even a good father cannot make a happy home; and Paine again ran away, this time going to sea on the privateer King of Prussia, Captain Mendez. It was after this cruise that, in 1756, at the age of twenty, he found employment in London as a stay-maker, and remained there for two years, in which time he zealously studied astronomy and attended the lectures of Martin and Ferguson. For a good many years thenceforward, Paine’s life was a struggling one. In 1758 we find him working at his trade at Dover. Next year he set up in business for himself at Sandwich, where he soon married; but the business did not prosper, and his wife died in 1760. After this he crammed to qualify himself as an exciseman; and in 1762 he became a gauger at Grantham, from which place he was sent in 1764 to watch smugglers in Alford. There he got into trouble by doing what so many excisemen did who wished to be on good terms with their neighbors: he passed stocks without examining them. Frankly confessing his fault on challenge, he was dismissed. Again, at twenty-eight, he took to stay-making; but in 1766 we find him an usher in an academy at Goodman’s Fields, London, at a salary at £25; and it seems probable that he tried at that time to secure ordination in the English Church, and that he even preached in Moorfields. He was certainly not a freethinker at this stage. On petition for reinstatement in the excise, however, he was nominally reinstated, and in 1768 reappointed, getting a post at Lewes; and here he remained till 1774, with a fair amount of happiness.

Again, however, he fell into ill luck, being in truth not the kind of man to make money. He married again in 1771, wedding the daughter of a man with whom he had lodged. The father died, leaving his widow and daughter badly provided for, and in 1769 Paine opened a shop on their behalf, he himself running a tobacco-mill, on what scale of production does not appear. After the shop came the marriage; and the wife, who was ten years her husband’s junior, does not seem to have been a suitable mate. Perhaps Paine on his side spent a little more time in the convivial and controversial club at the local White Hart Tavern than was strictly justifiable. It is remarkable that in this local circle he had already a high reputation as a reasoner; and he even wrote some tolerable verses; but his only prose work thus far was a pamphlet pleading the cause of his fellow-excisemen in the matter of wages. It is suggestive of his taste in literature that he sent this pamphlet to Goldsmith, the master of the purest English style then written; and he seems even to have made the poet’s acquaintance when he went to London to push the excisemen’s cause. They were organized into a kind of trade union, a fact which in those days sufficed to defeat them. Paine’s advocacy was not successful; he was discharged for being absent without leave; and to crown all, the shop and tobacco-business did not pay, and had to be sold up. At the same time Paine and his wife, who seem never to have cohabited, formally separated by mutual consent, he renouncing all his legal claims.

Later he sent money help to her anonymously; but they were never reunited, and their ground of quarrel remains unknown. All that is clear is that there was no question of infidelity on Paine’s part, and that he in after years spoke of his wife kindly. And now, at the age of thirty-seven, penniless, and in a manner stamped with failure, Paine decided to begin life afresh in that new world beyond the seas whose history he was destined so profoundly to affect. Seldom has there been a more inauspicious prelude to a great career.

II.

The change which came over Paine’s life when he landed in the New World is a measure of the obstacles which in England barred poor men of ability from the use of their powers. He was a born publicist; a born teacher in matters of public conduct and public morals; a born writer; but he had lived till thirty-seven in England without finding his way to writing anything more important than a plea for better treatment for his fellow-excisemen. In the colonies, he at once found openings for his faculty. A letter of introduction from Franklin (then in England) got him employment in Philadelphia as a tutor; and what was better, a printer who had started a magazine got him to edit it.

This he did with immediate success; probably there never was, says Mr. Conway, an equal amount of good literary work done on a salary of fifty pounds a year. Like a true American, he commenced by predicting a more than European development for American literature. But it is notable that, while Paine had during his stay at Lewes begun not only to put out his powers of controversy but to attempt light literary composition in his social circle, one of the first features of the Pennsylvania Magazine under his control was the description of recent English inventions. Thus at the very outset he seemed to strike the keynotes of the civilization of his adopted country. He anticipated American inventiveness no less than American democracy.

What is still more memorable for us today, however, is the fact that in the first months of his new work he laid down principles far in advance of the American democracy of his