Thomas Paine arrived in America on November 30, 1774. He had to be carried ashore in Philadelphia half-dead from a shipboard fever. He left behind in England a life of poverty and failure, and he came to America with anger and resentment at the good and great who lived so well when he lived so poorly. Mr. Tom Paine was a Caliban, who came to the cause of liberty.
Paine was born in 1737 a small town, Thetford in Norfolk. His father was a Quaker, and his mother was a Church of England. He got no more schooling than the Thetford Grammar School before he was apprenticed to his father as a staymaker—a maker of corsets. He seems to have had no love for the trade, and he worked variously as a privateer, an exciseman—a collector of taxes—a schoolteacher, a grocer, and even on occasion made good his training by selling corsets. He spent some time in different small towns of southern England and some time, increasing time, in London. His first wife died in childbirth, as did their child. He separated from his second wife in June 1774, shortly after he was dismissed from the excise service for leaving his post without leave. He had to sell his household possessions to pay his debts.
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He wasn’t entirely a ne’er-do-well. When he lived in Lewes, in Suffolk, he was a member of the Court Leet—the town council—and the parish vestry. He attended science lectures, and he was part of the world of tradesmen interested in discussing poetry, politics, and every topic under the sun. And he had become a writer. Excisemen were underpaid, and Paine’s fellows subscribed to send him to London to lobby Parliament to raise their wages. To make their case, he wrote the Case of the Officers of Excise (1772), a rather good pamphlet, lucid and punchy, and muckraking as it exposed corruption in the Excise Service. Paine was let go from the Excise not just because he was absent from his post but because he was an all too effective polemicist, speaking far too many embarrassing truths.
And then, deus ex machina, Paine meets Benjamin Franklin in London—although Paine’s biography is sufficiently sketchy that we cannot tell if they met then for the first time—and Franklin recommends that Paine go to America and gives him a letter of introduction. Exeunt Thomas Paine of England in October 1774, and enter Tom Paine of America, of Philadelphia, the worse for wear for typhoid fever suffered on the bounding main, but soon to recover his health and start a new career as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine.
Paine wasn’t the only Englishman seeking a new life in America in the last years before the Revolution. Bernard Bailyn’s Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (1986). There were farmer families from northern England and Scotland, slipping from prosperity and emigrating before they were reduced to poverty. There were single young men from London, off to become indentured servants in America and see what providence and moxie offered when their term was up. America was still filling up with Englishmen and Scotsmen for whom the old world offered poverty and degradation, and the new world offered hope for a new beginning. America had many Paines who wanted nothing more than to leave England and all its misery behind for good.
We have our Tom Paines now—some refugees from tyranny abroad who hear clearly the totalitarian clang of our new would-be masters. But more of our Tom Paines are native-born. They are the inhabitants of the rusting factory towns of America, those who have lost their jobs and those more fortunate who care that their neighbors have lost their jobs. They are rootless, intemperate, with broken homes, and sometimes, they are sinners as well as sinned against. They are the uncredentialed writers and readers of blogs and tweets, the rough-hewn podcasters and their audiences, the autodidact, and the cranky lovers of liberty. They are people who have failed in one career, or two, or three, and had to start again in middle age. They are not respectable. Their self-appointed betters call them garbage and treat them so. They are angry and resentful, they are outraged, and they have good cause to be.
The great English folk singer Peter Bellamy wrote his ballad opera the Transports about the first fleet of convicts to Australia—the Tom Paines born one generation too late. In “The Green Fields of England,” the convicts sing of who they are.
From Devon, from Derby, from Wiltshire and Wales,
From Norwich, from Newark and Frome,
We are herded together from verminous jails
And like vermin are forced from our homes.
There’s cheats and cut-purses and rogues with no name,
There’s swindlers and sheep-stealers bold.
There’s poor poaching fellows took nothing but game
And there’s footpads took nothing but gold.
There’s coiners and clippers and ladies of pleasure,
There’s dicers and drunkards and whores.
There’s butchers and bakers who dealt in short measures
And a few who have broken no laws.
Calibans by the millions, resentful and sinning and dispossessed, and shouting for liberty with barbaric yawps. God bless them; those are the Tom Paines of America, then and now.
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Don’t forget the Scotch-Irish, who also came to America in significant numbers in the 18th Century.
One thing I found in my research on Revolutionary-era Massachusetts was that it was the “new money” folk who supported the Patriot cause, while the “old money” remained loyal to the Crown. For example, Thomas Hutchinson, the last civilian Governor of Massachusetts, was a descendant of Anne Hutchinson.
Don’t forget the Scotch-Irish, who also came to America in significant numbers in the 18th Century.
One thing I found in my research on Revolutionary-era Massachusetts was that it was the “new money” folk who supported the Patriot cause, while the “old money” remained loyal to the Crown. For example, Thomas Hutchinson, the last civilianian Governor of Massachusetts, was a descendant of Anne Hutchinson.