This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
When Americans discuss the Founders, there’s always a cloud of shame hanging overhead. One might like many things about Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, but it’s impossible to forget that these men participated in the horrific system of human bondage. A few of the Founders, though, stand out for opposing it outright.
Thomas Paine was one such figure. Paine—an author and political philosopher—was born in Thetford, England. His friend Benjamin Franklin helped him get established in Philadelphia upon his arrival to the colonies in 1774. There, he wrote the 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and swept early America. The pamphlet became the defining argument for America’s independence—for many Americans, both the first and the most persuasive argument for severing allegiance to the British king, or to any king.
In many ways, Paine was a fiercer supporter of democracy than many of the more celebrated Founding Fathers, whose mistrust of the “common people” led them to put limits on voting rights and popular representation in the halls of government. Those were limits that Paine also opposed outright.
Paine wanted a government that was more representative than the one we have today.
“I think most people know him largely because of his pamphlet Common Sense, which came out in 1776 and had an impact on galvanizing Americans in favor of independence from Britain,” William Hogeland, an author and historian who focuses on the founding era, told The American Prospect. “It was dramatic because he attacked the idea of the British Constitution and said, basically, they have no constitution. Where is this constitution? Because it wasn’t written down. He attacked the idea that the Crown was part of a constitutional, balanced government.”
Paine portrayed the king as a “royal brute,” Hogeland says. This was seen as somewhat extreme at the time, because even colonists who favored independence weren’t that critical of the king. For that reason, Common Sense helped lay the groundwork for the Declaration of Independence, which also excoriated King George at length.
“The pamphlet sells extremely well, whether it’s in Charleston or Boston. Maybe … the idea is not completely alien. It’s more that he finds a way to make the case, and the case looks pretty appealing in his hands,” Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Prospect. “It’s less than six months before the Declaration of Independence becomes the actualization of what he’s proposed in his little pamphlet.”
Paine became quite influential in early America. He also seems to have had a personality that was sometimes difficult for people to accept. He knew what he believed and was not willing to waver from those beliefs. To read about him is to envision a passionate, stubborn man who might have had a hard time keeping friends.
“We gather from reading about him that he was very intense in his personality, but also he had a friendly, casual quality,” Hogeland says. “I think a lot of people see Paine as just like a very adroit propagandist for new ideas because he was such a good writer. But I disagree. I think he did have original ideas. In fact, you can sort of tell [that] from the degree to which a lot of the other Founders kind of recoil from his thinking.”
Both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton—future Federalists with a disinclination to popular democracy—regarded Paine as extreme. Adams famously wrote his pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, in response to Paine’s ideas. He wrote in favor of independence but was not comfortable with the hyper-democratic government Paine was proposing.
The country was still years away from the writing and adoption of the Constitution when these pamphlets were being released, but they did set a foundation for what would eventually go into that document.
“There’s no way Paine knew that he was setting up the mechanism for a constitution,” Rosenfeld says. “But I think in times of disorder and dismay, sometimes a text can articulate clearly the discontent people are feeling. A very similar thing happens at the start of the French Revolution, when What Is the Third Estate?, Abbé Sieyès’s little pamphlet, similarly gives an agenda to people who would go on to be revolutionaries.”
Paine wanted a government that was more representative than the one we have today. He didn’t want anything like the Senate or the Electoral College, which might act as bulwarks against popular majorities and the will of the people. He wanted judges to be elected by the public. He didn’t want a solo executive but rather something of a committee. While many of the Founders feared what might happen if you gave the people too much power, Paine (like Franklin) did not.
“He really doesn’t come from the aristocratic worlds of people like Hamilton or Madison,” Rosenfeld says. “He’s kind of anti-elitist.”
During the Revolutionary War, Paine was a volunteer for the Continental Army, and he ended up writing The American Crisis about what he was observing. He famously wrote the line “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine was essentially cheerleading the war effort and trying to convince his fellow patriots to keep fighting, and that, as difficult as the struggle appeared, it would all be worth it in the end. The American Crisis also found a wide, appreciative, and strategically important readership.
Once the war had concluded, despite his successes and his fame, Paine was broke. He ended up having to argue for compensation from individual states and the newly forming American government. He was eventually awarded $3,000 from Congress for his contributions to the American Revolution.
“He did get some money in the end from Congress, but he wasn’t making it here,” Hogeland says. “He felt he had to leave. And so then he becomes kind of a citizen of the world type.”
Paine was also becoming something of an inventor at this point, pitching an innovative bridge concept to investors and governmental officials, but to no avail. In April of 1787, he decided to take his ideas elsewhere. He returned to Britain, but he failed to raise the investment needed to fully realize his project. He eventually left for France, arriving just as the French Revolution was commencing. Once again, a revolutionary was surrounded by other revolutionaries.
“He goes on to play a pivotal role in the French Revolution,” Rosenfeld says. “He becomes perhaps the first international revolutionary, in that sense.”
In 1791, Paine authored Rights of Man, one of the most influential defenses and manifestos of the Revolution published at that time. Again, he put pen to his democratic impulses and his rejection of monarchy. Again, Paine synthesized ideas that were circulating at the time. On both sides of the Atlantic, he had a preternatural ability to put those ideas into words that resonated with the people. In Britain, Rights of Man sold some 100,000 copies in three months of publication.
“He ends up in France as a hero of the French Revolution, and they wanted him partly because he was a hero of the American Revolution,” Hogeland says. “Paine spoke across France and was even made a member of the revolutionary government.”
As anyone familiar with the French Revolution would suspect, that was not the safest place to be. Paine ended up facing condemnation for opposing the execution of the king: It was wrong, he insisted, and a mistake to turn the king into a martyr. Eventually, like many of his fellow revolutionists, he was arrested and spent ten months in prison. He almost ended up being executed by Robespierre and his lieutenants, but narrowly escaped that fate.
“He barely missed being guillotined himself in France,” Hogeland says. “Because he had such an idiosyncratic personality and such an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world and politics, he was often at odds with allies as well as with enemies.”
The American government didn’t do much of anything to assist Paine in his time of need in France. The U.S. minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, did not seem interested in securing Paine’s release from prison or helping him escape the guillotine. Later, after Paine had been released, James Monroe became the minister to France and came to his aid.
With America badly divided over the French Revolution, and the administration of John Adams resolutely set against it and its Jeffersonian allies in the States, Paine didn’t return to the United States until 1802—one year after Jefferson assumed the presidency.
“He thought, ‘Oh, now our guys are in. Now the more democratic people are in,’” Hogeland said. “But he had been writing all this stuff that was so controversial, especially The Age of Reason, which was very anti–organized religion. It became so controversial that even the Jeffersonians thought he was too hot to handle.”
He certainly didn’t return a hero. He still had those who celebrated his work and appreciated his contributions to the country’s independence, but he was now seen as a polarizing figure. Many hated him for his criticisms of organized religion.
New York had granted Paine some land in New Rochelle for his contributions to the American Revolution, so Paine decided to settle there. He continued to write and was a supporter of the Jefferson administration, but his relevance had severely dwindled. Paine died at the age of 72 in 1809. “Very few people came to his funeral, and nobody who was still around from the glory days of 1776 showed up,” Hogeland says.
His reputation, for better and worse, outlived him. Theodore Roosevelt famously called him “a filthy little atheist,” though Paine was in fact a deist. As the 20th century proceeded, however, Paine became a hero to liberals and the left, who found him to be both the most democratic and the most modern of the Founding Fathers.
“His ideas don’t seem that radical to us now, because they’ve become, in a way, our common sense,” Rosenfeld says. “His style and his ideas have become so ordinary to us that it’s hard to actually see that he was advocating for things that were rather radical in their moment, whether it was about race or religion or economics or political rights.”
Today, most of us understand the limits that the Founders placed on the democratic and egalitarian sentiments in our foundational documents. Hogeland pointed out, though, that “in 1776, the anti-democratic, elitist impulse wasn’t the only American impulse. There were radically democratic and populist ideas in play too, and Paine was maybe their most articulate and thoughtful spokesperson.”
You won’t find many statues of Thomas Paine in town squares or abutting county courthouses around the country. It was his ideas, however, that both made this country possible and tilted it, over time, toward the genuine popular democracy we still struggle to create.
This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.
