January 10 should be a special date in American history. On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense rolled off the press in Philadelphia and ignited a drive for independence. As Murray Rothbard wrote,“Tom Paine had, at a single blow, become the voice of the American Revolution and the greatest single force in propelling it to completion and independence.”When Thomas Paine’s ship pulled into Baltimore harbor on October 30, 1802, a large gathering of friends and admirers were waiting at dockside to welcome him back. Others stood by as well, some filled with loathing, merely to observe a famous figure. Since leaving the United States in 1787 to find a builder for his iron bridge, Paine had authored some of the most incendiary tracts of the 18th century, had been imprisoned and narrowly escaped Robespierre’s guillotine, and was widely reported to be a drunk and an atheist.When he journeyed to Federal City on November 5 to pay his respects to the country’s third president, he found that he needed an alias and help from a presidential aide to get a room at Lovell’s, the city’s only hotel. As he later wrote a friend and future biographer, Thomas Clio Rickman,You can have no idea of the agitation which my arrival occasioned. From New Hampshire to Georgia (an extent of 1,500 miles), every newspaper was filled with applause or abuse.The source of the abuse was the Federalist press, a collection of newspaper editors and writers who were the big-government allies of Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist Party. Thomas Jefferson, the new president, had unseated Federalist John Adams and many of his congressional cohorts in what Jefferson called the “Revolution of 1800.”The party of war, taxes, and privileges for the rich, coupled with a strong loyalty to England — which it sought to emulate in all its corrupt glory — had been thrown out in favor of one promising to be bound by the “chains of the Constitution.” The Democratic-Republicans (or simply the Republicans, as Jefferson’s party was called) sought to disentangle government from people’s lives, both within the country and abroad.Paine had been staying in France since his release from prison in late 1794 and had been frustrated in his wish to return to America by the possibility of capture by British warships. The English had convicted him in absentia of seditious libel for Rights of Man, Part the Second and other political writings, and they were determined to intercept and hang him if he ever set sail again. When England and France signed the Treaty of Amiens on March 25, 1802, inaugurating a year’s respite from war, it was once again safe for Paine to be at sea, and he left Le Havre on September 1.Contrary to Federalist rumors that Jefferson wanted Paine back in the states to help defend his administration from Federalist attacks, Paine himself apparently saw his return as a well-earned retirement opportunity. He had turned 65 in 1802 and still suffered lingering bouts of pain and fever from his ten-month incarceration under Robespierre. As the 18th century’s most influential political pamphleteer, Paine’s reputation was born with the American Revolution he was largely responsible for creating, and he wanted to spend his last years among people with whom he shared a passion for liberty.But there was never to be any lasting peace for a firebrand like Paine, whose immense popularity with commoners made life uncomfortable for politicians, priests, and pundits everywhere.The Struggle to Find HomePaine grew up in mid-18th century England under “a criminal code that would hang a ten-year-old boy for stealing a penknife or permit women to be stoned to death in the pillory.” The thatched cottage in Thetford, where he was born in 1737, stood near one of the execution sites, a wind-swept hill known locally as the Wilderness. There, each spring, convicted peasants were hung with great ceremony under the direction of a pompous hypocrite from Cambridge known as the Lord Chief Justice.Murder among the poor was uncommon; the offenses usually involved crimes against property, such as stealing a bushel of wheat or purchasing a stolen horse. The courts viewed the well-to-do quite differently. Even in cases of homicide, they were often acquitted or given nominal sentences. One of Paine’s first written works was a poem satirizing the decision of a Sussex court to hang a dog named Porter because its owner had voted for a member of Parliament the judges didn’t like.Enclosure laws had long since driven small farmers off their land and into the cities, where the more-adaptable ones became factory workers. Others turned to begging, thievery, or worse, all of which Paine witnessed in the first half of his life.The son of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother, Paine attended school until he was 12, never learned Latin or any language other than English, worked at various odd jobs in his youth, was married twice, and finally during a period of utter despair met Benjamin Franklin in London, who was so impressed with Paine’s intellectual fire that he recommended Paine seek deliverance in the American colonies.Paine had recently been dismissed as a tax collector, for leaving his post for three months to petition Parliament for better pay for his fellow excise officers. The loss of his job led to the breakup of his second marriage. At 37, with little left to lose, Paine took Franklin’s letter of recommendation to Philadelphia in late 1774 and found work writing for and editing a new magazine.His first published article, “The Magazine in America,” appeared on January 24, 1775, and included a special tribute. Foreign vices, he wrote, engaging his poetic flair, should they survive the voyage from Europe,either expire on their arrival, or linger away in an incurable consumption. There is a happy something in the climate of America, which disarms them of all their power both of infection and attraction.As Paine biographer Jack Fruchtman, Jr. observes, “This was the beginning of Paine’s long love affair with America.”On March 8, 1775 Paine published “African Slavery in America,” in which he not only condemned slavery (“Certainly one may, with as much reason and decency, plead for murder, robbery, lewdness, and barbarity, as for this practice”) but offered his thoughts on how to abolish it humanely. In a much shorter piece (“A Serious Thought”), published on October 18, Paine again expressed his hatred of slavery along with the manner in which so-called Christians treated American Indians, and concluded thatWhen I reflect on these [injustices], I hesitate not for a moment to believe that the Almighty will finally separate America from Britain. Call it independence or what you will, if it is the cause of God and humanity it will go on.Though the seeds of American independence were imported “with the troops from Britain,” as one contemporary writer observed, it was Paine’s 77-page pamphlet Common Sense, published anonymously on January 10, 1776, that imparted passion and urgency to the movement. It argued persuasively that the choice for Americans was independence or slavery, that King George, far from deserving unconditional loyalty, was in truth “the Royal Brute of Great Britain” and the one chiefly responsible for the oppressive measures imposed on the colonists.Paine’s irreverent polemics made the pamphlet a huge success, with an estimated 120,000 copies sold in three months, reaching tradesmen and statesmen alike. Later editions featured his name on the cover to dispel rumors that John Adams had written it. He asked printers to sell it for an affordable two shillings and, in a futile gesture, directed his share of the profits to the American military cause. With the publication of Common Sense, Rothbard tells us thatTom Paine had, at a single blow, become the voice of the American Revolution and the greatest single force in propelling it to completion and independence.John Adams, whose hatred for Paine grew stronger with each passing year, later conceded that “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” He described the pamphlet as “a poor, ignorant, Malicious, short-sighted, Crapulous Mass.”Sometime after July 4, 1776, Paine joined the Continental Army and served as General Nathaniel Greene’s aide-de-camp. Shortly before Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas night for an early morning attack on a Hessian garrison at Trenton, Paine penned the first of a series of essays known as “The American Crisis.” It is said that Washington ordered the essay read to his demoralized and ill-clad troops during a sleet storm before making the crossing. The essay, immortalized in American history with its opening words — “These are the times that try men’s souls” — may or may not have inspired the men, but it did boost the spirits of patriot civilians when they heard news of the Americans’ decisive victory.When the war ended, Paine had time to pursue his interests in natural science and designed a single-span iron bridge that he tried to get constructed. When no one in Philadelphia would build it, he left the country on April 26, 1787, at age 50, to present a model of his design to the French Academy of Sciences. The Academy liked it, but the country was too much in debt to build it, so Paine took his model to Britain’s Royal Society. Again, no one was interested in constructing it.As biographer Craig Nelson writes, over the following years Paine “would migrate constantly between London and Paris, enjoying the company and admiration of some of Europe’s most charismatic figures,” as he looked for someone to build his bridge. In England he came to know such people as Whig leader Charles James Fox, playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, preacher Richard Price, educator William Godwin, and author Mary Wollstonecraft.Though surrounded by such illustrious figures, Paine had mixed feelings about leaving America, as he explained in a letter to a newly married friend, Kitty Nicholson Few, in January 1789:Though I am in as elegant style of acquaintance here as any American that ever came over, my heart and myself are 3,000 miles apart; and I had rather see my horse Button in his own stable … than see all the pomp and show of Europe.A thousand years hence (for I must indulge in a few thoughts), perhaps in less, America may be what England now is! The innocence of her character that won the hearts of all nations in her favor may sound like a romance, and her inimitable virtue as if it had never been. The ruins of that liberty which thousands bled for, or suffered to obtain, may just furnish materials for a village tale or extort a sigh from rustic sensibility, while the fashionable of that day, enveloped in dissipation, shall deride the principle and deny the fact.Paine managed to get a 90-foot experimental version of his bridge erected across the Don River in England, and one of the visitors to the site was the liberal Whig and member of Parliament, Edmund Burke. Paine and Burke became friends, and while living within a short stroll of each other in London found numerous occasions to engage in lengthy political discussions.Revolutionary Fever in FranceWhile in London, Paine would receive letters from Jefferson in France telling himhow firmly the American experiment [the French Revolution] was taking root in Paris …. He shared each of Jefferson’s letters with Edmund Burke, expecting that the Whig deputy would also be pleased. Burke, however, was very much not pleased.(Please continue reading at Barbarous Relic)The post Thomas Paine, Liberty’s Hated Torchbearer appeared first on LewRockwell.