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The American dream was made in Britain, largely thanks to Thomas Paine, a polemicist from the East of England who helped save the Revolutionary War from failure. He emboldened George Washington, possibly came up with the name USA, and inspired Thomas Jefferson’s phrase ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.
Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1737, in Thetford, Norfolk, the son of a Quaker corset maker and his older Anglican wife. He was educated at Thetford Grammar School.
Paine apprenticed for his father but wanted a naval career. Aged 16, he tried to sign onto a ship called The Terrible, captained by a Captain Death. Perhaps fortuitously, his father intervened, but Paine did join the crew of a privateer ship King of Prussia for a year in the Seven Year’s War.
In 1774, Paine met Benjamin Franklin who is believed to have persuaded him to emigrate to America, providing Paine with a letter of introduction.
He arrived in Philadelphia three months later, after also corresponding with Thomas Jefferson, and on January 10, 1776, published a 47-page pamphlet, Common Sense, which sold 150,000 copies in three months. It argued in simple and incendiary terms for American rebellion – the first writing to do so.
Paine’s words, arguing that representational government is superior to a monarchy or government based on aristocracy and heredity, gave ordinary people a sense of what was at stake.
Discover more about Thomas Paine at Thetford’s timber-framed Ancient House Museum.
The pamphlet was so influential that John Adams, Founding Father and second President of the United States, declared, ‘Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain’.
In August 1776 General George Washington lost New York to British troops. This was followed by 11,000 American volunteers giving up the fight and returning to their families and Washington knew that on December 31 the service contracts of the remainder of his men expired and they would be gone too. The War of Independence would be over.
In the Winter of 1776 Paine published a series of inspirational pamphlets, known as The American Crisis, that opened with the famous line, ‘These are the times that try men’s souls’. They were the words that Washington needed for inspiration.
‘These are the times that try men’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious triumph.’
Washington commanded that it be read aloud to his beleaguered troops – and the rousing prose had its intended impact.
On Christmas night Washington and his men famously crossed the icy Delaware River to defeat hung-over Hessian mercenaries and on January 2nd beat the British Army’s best general, Earl Cornwallis, at the Battle of Princeton. The tide had been turned in favour of the American Revolutionaries and they didn’t lose another battle – thanks to a writer from Thetford, Norfolk in the East of England.
It’s believed Paine was also the man who came up with the name The United States of America for the newly-independent country.
Paine, now an outlaw in his own land, went on to support the French Revolution, living in France through the 1790s, where he was imprisoned in the Bastille for almost a year, and narrowly avoided execution during the revolutionary Terror. Only American diplomatic pressure prevented him from a meeting with Mademoiselle Guillotine.
Paine returned to America and died at Greenwich Village, New York, on June 8, 1809 having also completed The Age of Reason and The Rights of Man, regarded now as a liberal classic, but at the time considered controversial and dangerous. Only six people attended his funeral, a result of Paine’s criticism of Christianity.
Paine condemned Napoleon’s moves towards dictatorship and advocated the abolishment of slavery, but nonetheless, after his death, Napoleon is said to have suggested that every ‘free-thinking city’ should have a gold-plated statue of Paine.
Instead, he is commemorated with a gilded bronze statue outside Thetford Town Hall commissioned by American philanthropist Joseph Lewis, who believed Paine was the true author of the American Declaration of Independence.
The statue has Paine portrayed in wig and period dress, holding a quill and a copy of Rights of Man. It was sculpted by Charles Wheeler RA, unveiled in 1964, and bears the inscription: ‘World Citizen, Englishman by birth, French citizen by decree, American by adoption’.
Wonder why Paine is holding his book upside down? Apparently it was a conceit of Wheeler’s to get us talking about the statue. So… it worked!
During the Second World War historically minded American airmen based at Knettishall, near Thetford, named their B-17 bomber after him, bearing his quote: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered”. They also put up a plaque at what is now The Thomas Paine Hotel, supposedly his birthplace.
In 2002 he was voted Number 34 in the 100 Greatest Britons poll conducted by the BBC.
