‘I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine.’ So wrote John Adams in 1805. In an age of political pamphleteering, Paine had become the most influential pamphleteer of all. His writings remain classic statements of the egalitarian, democratic faith of the Age of Revolution.
Paine’s origins lay among the lower orders of eighteenth-century England. The son of a Quaker corset maker, he practiced his father’s trade and then worked as an excise tax collector. His father’s religion undoubtedly influenced Paine’s humanitarianism, and a strong interest in Newtonian science helped him develop a hatred for governments that rested on hereditary privilege.
Paine immigrated to Philadelphia in 1774 and soon became acquainted with advocates of political change. In January 1776, he published Common Sense, the first pamphlet to advocate American independence. It outlined ideas that would remain central to Paine’s thought: the superiority of republican government over a monarchical system, equality of rights among all citizens, and the world significance of the American Revolution. Paine transformed the struggle over the rights of English people into a contest with meaning for people everywhere. In a world ‘overrun with oppression,’ America would be ‘an asylum for mankind.’