Thomas Paine

Born Thomas Pain on February 9, 1737, in Thetford, Norfolk, the son of a Quaker corset-maker and an Anglican mother, Thomas Paine spent the first thirty-seven years of his life in relative obscurity , failed staymaker, failed excise officer, twice dismissed from government service, twice married with little success. In 1774, having met Benjamin Franklin in London, he emigrated to Philadelphia with a letter of introduction and within two years had written the most consequential pamphlet in American history. Common Sense (January 1776), with its plain-spoken argument that hereditary monarchy was absurd and American independence a matter of common sense, sold an estimated 500,000 copies in a nation of two and a half million people, making it the best-selling American title of the eighteenth century relative to population. During the darkest hours of the Revolution, his series The American Crisis (1776–1783) , opening with the immortal line “These are the times that try men’s souls” , was read aloud to Washington’s troops at Valley Forge. Paine then returned to Europe and threw himself into the French Revolution, writing Rights of Man (1791–1792) in defense of revolutionary principles against Edmund Burke. He was elected to the French National Convention but was imprisoned during the Terror and narrowly escaped the guillotine. While in prison he composed The Age of Reason (1794–1807), a deist critique of organized religion that destroyed his reputation in the country he had helped create. He returned to America in 1802 to find himself shunned and impoverished. He died on June 8, 1809, in New York City; only six mourners attended his funeral.

In the summer of 1794, in a Paris prison during the Terror, a guard chalked Paine's cell door to mark him for the guillotine the next morning. His door happened to be swung open flat against the wall, so the mark faced inward. When it was shut, the sign was hidden, and the executioners passed him by.