Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with history will know of giants like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, men without whom America might not have been born. But if those men are giants, then what venerated position must we reserve for the man those same giants claim did more to ignite the American Revolution than any other? I write, of course, of Thomas Paine who, thanks to his criticism of organized religion, has largely lost his place of prominence alongside the other luminaries of 1776. I write of a man who, unlike Thomas Jefferson, had the courage to speak his convictions aloud, regardless of the condemnation their declaration would visit upon him. I write of a hero of history who did not shrink from the moment when it came.
It is one of history's sweetest ironies that a congress of British intellectuals, exiled from England for inconvenient beliefs, helped the Thirteen Colonies to throw off the shackles of empire put about them by their former homeland. Among these, Paine was not the most scientific, or the most successful; He was something of a failed businessman who relied on a government wage to stay afloat. It wasn't until 1772, when he petitioned the British government for better pay and working conditions for that country's commoners, that he found his political stride. Reprisal came swiftly. He was fired from his position, leaving him with no way to pay off the debts from a failed tobacco shop. Enter Benjamin Franklin who offered Paine a lifeline in new America. Paine accepted and emigrated there in 1774 where, after expressing some talent in engineering, he found himself perfecting his insurgent craft. In 1776, fearing that loyalist sentiment in America might defeat the Revolution and sink the opportunity for a newer and freer way, he published >Common Sense, a political pamphlet widely credited for carrying to the American colonists the cause for which men like Washington were fighting. These and other notes published by Paine, created the first sense of true unity among the Americans, expressing, at the same time, the principles of freedom for which the United States would come to be known.
As influential as Paine was in those early, heady days, he did not follow Washington into politics or Franklin into the life of a statesman. He returned to Europe where, seeing in France something of the spirit of the American Revolution, he attempted to aid that country in its own democratic birth. But a disastrous and murderous turn in French sentiment threw intellectuals like Paine into French prisons in which many died. Paine lived, however, escaping back to America where he died in New Jersey in 1809.
Though Mr. Nelson clutters his chronicle with a few too many trivialities about Paine's life and the world that shaped him, his thorough account does justice to a revolutionary who deserves far more than has been given. Paine empowered that strand of American liberalism that, today, animates the First Amendment. He believed that every subject should be open to logical scrutiny, even the Bible, that only tyranny results from a small group of people who claim to act for the whole without ever consulting the will of the whole. This deism cost Thomas Paine dearly, even though it was precisely the same deism practiced by Thomas Jefferson who was far more circumspect about his religious doubts. Battered by religious adherents, Paine's reputation suffered and he died largely in obscurity, a fate shared by precisely none of his contemporaries. Mr. Nelson captures all this and more with this edifying account of a visionary who at least died knowing that some measure of what he believed in was healthy and well. (4/5 Stars)
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