Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I have to say,
looking at the stack of documents and research
we have on the desk today, it feels like we're
about to open a cold case file that's been sitting
dusty in the archives of American history for
way, way too long. It really does feel like a
cold case or, you know, maybe a missing persons
case, considering how this story ends up. Exactly.
We are tackling a figure today who is. quite
frankly, a walking contradiction. He's a man
who you could argue is the single most important
founding father in terms of, you know, actually
getting the revolution off the ground. He's the
guy who provided the spark. Right. Without him,
that whole powder keg might never have exploded,
or at least not in the way that it did. Right.
But here is the kicker, and this is the statistic
that just blew my mind when I started reading
the prep material. This man was the best -selling
author of the entire 18th century. He was, for
a time, probably the most famous American in
the world. And yet when he died, do you know
how many people showed up to his funeral? It's
a heartbreaking number. It's six. Six people.
And we're not talking about some private, you
know, family only ceremony. We're talking about
a man who was essentially ostracized by the very
nation he helped create. The contrast is just
so stark. We are, of course, talking about Thomas
Paine, the man who. Historians think likely coined
the name United States of America, the man whose
words were read to the troops at Valley Forge
to stop them from deserting. And yet by the end
of his life, he was a pariah. So our mission
today is to unpack this radical life. And radical
is absolutely the right word. His life reads
less like a history textbook and more like a
tragedy mixed with some kind of wild adventure
novel. I mean, looking at the outline, we have
failed corset making. We have escapes from execution
by a chalk mark. We have. Pirates. Well, privateers.
We have a feud with George Washington and we
have this very, very bizarre, almost gothic horror
story about his stolen bones. The saga of the
bones is the perfect, weird ending to a life
that just refused to fit into any neat box. But
you're right. To understand pain is to understand
the power of words and the price of sticking
to your principles when the world changes around
you. So let's dive in. And we have to start at
the beginning. And the beginning is surprisingly...
Well, ordinary. Actually, ordinary might be a
bit generous. It was kind of a disaster. It was
a real struggle. Thomas Paine was born in Thetford,
England in 1737. And if you have a picture in
your head of a founding father, you know, the
marble statue, the wealthy Virginia plant, or
the Harvard -educated lawyer, you just have to
delete that image completely. Paine was none
of those things. He was working class. Deeply
working class. His father, Joseph Paine... And
it's worth noting the spelling in the early records
is P -A -I -N, without the E, was a tenant farmer
and a staymaker. Okay, we need to pause on staymaker,
because I saw this in the notes and I had to
look up what that actually meant. It's not just
making clothes, is it? No, no, it's industrial
labor. Stays are the stiffening structures that
go inside women's corsets. In the 18th century,
that meant working with whalebone. You'd have
to heat it, bend it, stitch it into this heavy
canvas. It was physically demanding, smelly.
Really repetitive work. It was a trade, but not
a glamorous one at all. And his mother, Frances,
was Anglican, but his father was a Quaker. That
religious mix seems really important. given Paine's
later reputation. It's crucial. Quakers in that
era were, you know, very distinct. They believed
in the inner light, this idea that God communicates
directly to every individual, not through a priest
or a bishop or some church hierarchy. So anti
-authority from the start. Very anti -hierarchy.
They were often pacifists and they believed in
a kind of spiritual equality that was incredibly
radical for the class stratified society of England.
And you see that DNA all over Paine's writing.
He had this natural DNA. But he wasn't spending
his youth debating theology. He was pulled out
of school pretty young, wasn't he? Very young.
He attended Thetford Grammar School, but his
formal education ended when he was 13. 13, that's
it. That's it. At 13 years old, he was apprenticed
to his father. He was in the shop bending whalebone.
I mean, can you imagine? He was looking at a
future of just grinding manual labor, and he
clearly hated every minute of it. He must have,
because at age 19, the notes say he did something
completely out of left field. He ran away to
sea. He did. He enlisted on a ship called the
King of Prussia. And this wasn't the Royal Navy.
This was a privateer. Yes. And we should probably
explain what that means because privateer sounds
sort of dashing and romantic. It sounds like
a gentleman pirate, right? Right. But it was
essentially a state -sanctioned pirate. Britain
was on the brink of the Seven Years' War, so
the government would issue what they called letters
of marquee to private ship owners. These letters
gave them legal permission to attack enemy merchant
ships, mostly French ships, and steal their cargo.
So he was signing up for legalized armed robbery
on the high seas. That's a great way to put it.
It was incredibly dangerous work. I mean, disease,
storms, combat. For a boy raised in a pacifist
Quaker household, this was just a massive rebellion.
It really shows you he had this wild streak,
or at least a desperate, desperate need to escape
the crushing boredom of Thetford. But he didn't
stick with the pirate life for long. He came
back to Britain in 1759. He did. He tried to
settle down. He became a master staymaker himself.
And he set up a shop in Sandwich in Kent. He
was, you know, trying to do the respectable thing.
And this is where the tragedy really starts to
creep in. Yeah. Because looking at this timeline,
he just cannot catch a break. No, he really can't.
He married a woman named Mary Lambert in 1759.
But his business collapsed almost immediately.
The economy was bad. They had to move to Margate
to try to find work. Mary went into early labor.
And in the 18th century, without modern medicine,
well, both she and the child died. That is just
devastating. He's in his early 20s. His business
has failed. He's completely broke. And he's just
lost his wife and his child. It's the kind of
trauma that either breaks you or it radicalizes
you. For Payne, it really seems to have left
him adrift. He was just looking for a purpose.
He eventually left the corset trade for good
and got a job as an excise officer. The tax man.
The most hated man in England. Which is deeply,
deeply ironic considering he becomes the voice
of the American Revolution against British taxes.
The irony is profound. But you have to understand
the job. He was stationed in places like Grantham
and Alford. His job was to patrol for smugglers
and collect duties on goods like brandy, tea,
and tobacco. But he wasn't very good at playing
the bureaucratic game. I saw in the notes he
was fired. What happened there? He was dismissed
in 1765 for claiming to have inspected goods
he did not inspect. So he was just rubber -standing
the paperwork. Exactly. He was stamping the goods
without actually doing the physical inspection.
Maybe he was lazy. Maybe he thought the rules
were stupid. Or maybe he was just trying to be
efficient. But whatever the reason, he got caught.
He begged for his job back, though, right? He
did. He wrote a petition to the Board of Excise
and was eventually reinstated. But it really
shows a pattern. He did not respect authority
just because it was authority. He drifted around
a bit. He even taught school in London for a
while. And then he got posted to Lewis in Sussex.
And it seems like Lewis is where he starts to
become Thomas Paine. political thinker. Lewis
was a unique town. It had this strong tradition
of debate and even anti -monarchist sentiment.
Payne got involved in local civic matters. He
served on the town's governing body. But most
importantly, he started organizing his fellow
workers. This is the case of the officers of
excise, his first real political writing. Published
in 1772. And it wasn't a call for revolution,
not at all. It was a labor dispute. He was arguing
that excise officers like him were severely underpaid.
Here's this really detailed pamphlet explaining
that if you pay tax collectors starvation wages,
you're practically forcing them to take bribes
from smugglers just to survive. That's actually
a very sophisticated argument for a guy with
just a grammar school education. He's talking
about systemic incentives. It is. He printed
4 ,000 copies. He spent a whole winter in London
standing outside Parliament handing them out
to MPs. He was lobbying. He was trying to work
within the system to fix a real grievance. And
how did the system respond? The system crushed
him. Parliament ignored him completely. And because
he had spent all that time in London lobbying
instead of doing his job, he was fired from the
Excise Service again in April 1774. So let's
just take Sakhir for a minute. He's 37 years
old. He's been fired twice. He failed as a corset
maker. He tried to run a tobacco shop in Lewis,
and that failed too. He's separated from his
second wife, Elizabeth Olive, and he has to sell
all of his household possessions just to avoid
debtor's prison. By every single standard of
his society, Thomas Paine was a total failure.
He was destitute. He was a nobody. If he had
died in 1774, he would have been buried in a
pauper's grave and we would never, ever have
heard his name. But he makes one connection,
one handshake that changes everything. In London,
through his interest in science, he'd met a mathematician
named George Lewis Scott. And Scott introduced
him to a man who was in London representing the
American colonies. Benjamin Franklin. The doctor
himself. Franklin was the most famous American
in the world at that point. A total celebrity.
And he meets this scruffy, angry... but incredibly
articulate Englishman. And for some reason, Franklin
saw potential in him. Franklin was the ultimate
talent scout. He really was. He saw a spark in
Payne. Maybe he liked his bluntness, his lack
of deference. Franklin wrote a letter of recommendation
for Payne. He suggested he move to Philadelphia.
He wrote to his son -in -law in America, The
bearer, Mr. Thomas Payne, is very well recommended
to me as an ingenious, worthy young man. That
letter was basically a golden ticket. It was
a lifeline. Payne got on a ship in October 1774.
But even the journey was a complete disaster.
The ship's water was contaminated. Typhoid fever
broke out. Five passengers died on the crossing.
When they docked in Philadelphia that November,
Payne was so sick he couldn't walk. He had to
be carried off on a stretcher. It's just amazing
to think how fragile history is. If that fever
had been just a little bit worse, there's no
common sense. It hangs by a thread. But he survived.
He was nursed back to health, partly thanks to
Franklin's connections. And once he was on his
feet, he looked around in America and he found
a place where a guy like him could finally fit
in. He becomes an editor pretty quickly. Yes.
In early 1775, he became the editor of the Pennsylvania
Magazine. And he turned out to be brilliant at
it. He grew the readership massively. He wrote
about everything, science, marriage, politics,
you name it. And he didn't waste any time getting
radical. I saw a note about an essay called African
Slavery in America. Yes. Published in March 1775.
It wasn't signed, but Benjamin Rush, another
key founding father, attributed it to pain. It
called slavery an execrable commerce. Execrable.
That's a strong word. It means attestable. He
called it an outrage against humanity and justice.
And this is so important because, well. Many
founders were slave owners who talked a good
game about liberty. Paine was a dedicated abolitionist
from the very start. He believed rights were
universal. If they applied to him, they applied
to everyone. So he is establishing himself as
a powerful voice. But then comes January 1776,
the moment everything changes. Common sense.
The pamphlet that sparked the fire. Now, we all
learn about common sense in school, but I feel
like we gloss over just how radical it was for
its time. Can you set the scene for us? What
was the mood in the colonies in early 1776? This
is the crucial context. The war had actually
already started. The battles of Lexington and
Concord happened in April 1775. The Battle of
Bunker Hill happened in June, so people were
already shooting at each other. But, and this
is a huge but, Most colonists were not fighting
for independence. What were they fighting for
then? They were fighting for their rights as
Englishmen. They wanted a return to the status
quo. They blamed Parliament and the King's ministers
for the bad taxes, but they still toasted King
George III at dinner. The prevailing hope was
that the king would step in and fix things. They
saw themselves as loyal subjects who were just
being mistreated by some corrupt bureaucrats.
So the idea of breaking away completely was...
Well, it was a fringe idea. It was terrifying.
It was treason. And practically speaking, it
seemed impossible. Britain was the greatest superpower
on Earth. And then Paine publishes Common Sense.
And he just shatters that entire illusion. He
attacks the king directly. He calls George III
the royal brute of Britain. I love that insult.
The royal brute. It's so direct. It's brilliant
branding, isn't it? It just strips away all the
majesty. He argued that the whole idea of hereditary
monarchy was absurd. He famously said that having
a hereditary ruler is as ridiculous as having
a hereditary mathematician. Just because your
dad was smart doesn't mean you are. And he used
the Bible to do it, which was genius. He knew
his audience. Americans at the time were a deeply
religious people. So he used the Old Testament
to show that when the ancient Israelites asked
for a king, it was considered a sin against God.
He turned the king from a benevolent father figure
into a usurper, an enemy of God's will. But it
wasn't just the argument, was it? It was the
style. Our mission for this deep dive mentioned
his plain writing style. That was the revolution
within the revolution. Before Paine, political
pamphlets were written by lawyers for lawyers.
They were dense. They were full of Latin phrases,
full of complex legal precedents. You basically
needed a degree to understand them. Paine wrote
for the guy in the tavern. He wrote for the farmer
in the field. He used short sentences. He used
metaphors people actually understood. He democratized
the debate. He did. He took politics out of the
elite drawing room and put it right in the street.
And the sales were just insane. Give us the numbers.
He estimated it sold around 100 ,000 copies in
the first three months. Some biographers think
it eventually reached half a million copies by
the end of the war. And the population of the
colonies was only about two and a half million
people at the time. Exactly. Proportionally,
that would be like a book selling tens of millions
of copies today. It was everywhere. If you couldn't
read, someone read it to you out loud. It completely
crystallized public opinion. It shifted the entire
conversation from Redress of grievances to independence.
It's interesting, though, that not all the founders
loved it. John Adams really had a problem with
Paine. Oh, Adams. Adams hated Paine's populism.
Adams wanted independence, absolutely. But Adams
was a conservative at heart. He believed in order,
hierarchy, checks and balances. Paine was arguing
for a radical democracy, universal manhood suffrage,
no property requirements to vote. To a guy like
Adams, that sounded like mob rule. What did he
call it? A crappulous mask. A crappulous mask.
Adams famously said, without the pen of the author
of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would
have been raised in vain. So he admitted pain
was necessary, but he really did not like him.
He thought he was too dangerous, too democratic.
But Washington saw its value. Washington found
it incredibly useful. It gave his soldiers a
reason to fight. Suddenly, it wasn't just about
taxes anymore. It was about building a whole
new world. Speaking of building a new world,
let's talk about the name, the United States
of America. This is a detail I absolutely love.
Before Paine, people would say the United Colonies
or just America. But in June of 1776, Paine wrote
a letter in the Pennsylvania Evening Post under
the pseudonym Republicus. He did love a pseudonym.
He did. Common sense was just signed by an Englishman.
In this Republicans letter, he argued that to
get foreign aid from France and Spain, they needed
to be a real nation, not just a bunch of rebellious
colonies. And he wrote, I shall rejoice to hear
the title of the United States of America. He
wrote it in all caps. He emphasized it. He was
branding the new nation. He understood that words
create reality. If you start calling yourself
a United States, you start acting like one. That
brings us to late 1776. The branding is great.
The Declaration of Independence is signed. But
the war itself is going terribly. It's a complete
disaster. Washington has been kicked out of New
York. He's retreating across New Jersey. The
army is shrinking by the day. Disease is rampant.
Morale is at zero. It really looks like the revolution
is going to be crushed before the first winter
is even over. And pain is there, on the ground.
He's traveling with the army. He's serving as
an aide -de -camp to General Nathaniel Greene.
He sees the retreat firsthand. He sees the footprints
in the snow stained with blood from soldiers
who don't have proper boots. And he starts writing
again. He writes The American Crisis. The story
is he wrote it on a drumhead by the light of
a campfire. And the opening line is just iconic.
These are the times that try men's souls. The
summer soldier in the Sunshine Patriot will,
in this crisis, shrink from the service of their
country. It's a challenge. He's calling them
out. He's saying it's easy to be a patriot when
it's sunny and things are going well. But who
are you when it's dark? Washington was so moved
by it that he ordered it to be read to all the
troops before they crossed the Delaware to attack
Trenton. And that was the turning point of the
war. It really was. And Paine's words were the
soundtrack to that victory. So we have Paine
as the voice of the revolution. But then, as
seems to be the pattern with him, things get
messy. We move into part three, diplomat and
troublemaker. Paine was never, ever good at playing
politics. He was a truth teller. And that is
a very dangerous thing to be in any government.
This is the Silas Dean affair. This seems complicated,
but can you boil it down for us? OK, the simple
version is this. Silas Dean was an American diplomat
in France. His job was to get supplies for the
war. Paine, who was the secretary to the Committee
on Foreign Affairs, which was a big job, he discovered
that Dean was charging Congress for supplies
that the French king had actually intended as
secret gifts. So Dean was basically pocketing
the money. War profiteering. That's what Paine
concluded. And Paine, being Paine, couldn't just
stay quiet. He saw this as corruption, as a betrayal
of the revolution. So he published all the details
in the newspaper. There was a catch. A big one.
A huge catch. In the process of proving that
Dean was a crook, Payne cited secret documents
that revealed France was sending aid before they
had officially signed a treaty of alliance. France
was still technically neutral. Payne just outed
their entire secret operation to the world. Whoops.
Yeah. Big whoops. The French minister was furious.
Congress was deeply embarrassed. They had to
fire Payne to save face and preserve the alliance.
He went from being a high -ranking government
official to being completely disgraced. He was
even physically assaulted in the street by some
of Dean's merchant friends. He just couldn't
help himself, could he? He valued the truth more
than the diplomatic game. And the really tragic
part is later evidence showed that Payne was
right all along. Dean was corrupt, but Payne
was the one who paid the price. He ended up broke
again and out of a job. But he keeps going. He
goes back to France in 1781 with John Lawrence
to help get more money. He helps set up the Bank
of North America. He's always trying to be useful
to the cause. And eventually, he does get some
recognition. When the war finally ends, the state
of New York gives him a farm in New Rochelle.
Congress gives him $3 ,000. He finally has a
home and some security. He could have retired
right then. He could have just been a gentleman
farmer. He absolutely could have. but his brain
just would not turn off. And this brings us to
what the outline calls the scientific interlude.
I love this part. He decides he's going to build
bridges. Literally. He became obsessed with the
idea of single span iron bridges. At the time,
bridges were either wood or stone. Stone was
incredibly expensive. Wood rotted and needed
constant repair. Payne designed this innovative
single span iron bridge that could cross the
Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. That was incredibly
high tech for the 1780s. It was cutting edge
engineering. He couldn't get the funding for
it in America. So in 1787, he sailed back to
Europe, first to France. then to England to find
investors for his bridge project. He was showing
off his models to the Royal Society. He was hanging
out with scientists. He also invented a smokeless
candle and worked on early steam engines. He
was a true Enlightenment man. But while he is
in Europe trying to sell his bridge idea, history
intervenes again. The French Revolution. 1789,
the Bastille falls. And Paine, who was right
there, is pulled back into the political vortex.
And this leads to his next great work, Rights
of Man. This was a direct response to Edmund
Burke. Burke, who was a famous British politician,
wrote a book called Reflections on the Revolution
in France, which was a scathing attack on what
was happening, calling it chaos and anarchy.
Paine read it and was absolutely furious. He
wrote Rights of Man in 1791 as a direct rebuttal
and a defense of the revolution. And if common
sense was radical, Rights of Man was. I mean,
it was on another level entirely. It went so
much further. In common sense, he attacked a
specific king. In Rights of Man, he attacked
the entire concept of the past having any right
to rule the present. He wrote, and this is a
key line, He's basically saying tradition doesn't
matter. He's saying the dead have no rights.
Only the living have rights. He advocated for
a republic, a written constitution, social welfare
programs. The book sold nearly a million copies.
And the British government was not. happy about
they were terrified they were convinced a revolution
was going to start in london they indicted him
for a seditious libel they hired spies to follow
him everywhere he went mobs were organized to
burn him in effigy in towns all across england
this is where the poet william blake comes into
the story yes the famous poet and artist the
story goes that blake met pain at a dinner party
and warned him do not go home tonight they are
coming to arrest you Paine took the advice, and
in September 1792, he got on a boat and fled
to France. He escaped by the skin of his teeth.
By mere hours. He was tried in absentia in England
and convicted of treason. He was now an outlaw
in his own birth country. He could never go back.
But in France, he's a hero. A total superstar.
He was made an honorary citizen, and despite
not speaking a word of French, he was elected
to the National Convention. That is just wild.
He is a member of parliament in a country where
you can't speak the language. He had to have
his speeches translated and read aloud by other
delegates. But his presence was hugely symbolic.
He was the author of Common Sense, the man who
helped create the American Republic. But the
French Revolution wasn't the American Revolution.
It got dark. Very, very quickly. It got very
dark. The Jacobins, the radicals led by Maximilian
Robespierre, started to take over. They wanted
blood. They put the king, Louis XVI, on trial
for his life. And this is the moment where Paine
proves his integrity again, doesn't he? The man
who hates kings with a passion votes to save
the king's life. It stunned everyone. Paine argued
that execution was immoral. He was fundamentally
against the death penalty. And he made a practical
point as well. Louis XVI had helped the American
Revolution. He was an ally. Paine stood up and
said, let's not kill him. Let's exile him to
America. He wanted to send the king of France
to live in Philadelphia. He thought he could
live there as a private citizen, maybe learn
how to be a Democrat. That is wildly optimistic,
to say the least. It absolutely infuriated the
Jacobins. Jean -Paul Marat interrupted the reading
of Paine's speech, shouting that the translator
was lying because he couldn't believe Paine would
say such a thing. But Paine stood his ground.
And that single vote put a massive target on
his back. It did. The king was executed. The
reign of terror began. The Jacobins started rounding
up and executing all of their political enemies.
Paine was a foreigner, and he was allied with
a moderate faction, the Girondins. In December
of 1793, he was arrested. This brings us to part
five, the chalk mark. This has to be the lowest
point of his entire life. He was thrown into
Luxembourg prison. It was basically a waiting
room for the guillotine. People were being taken
out in batches every single day and beheaded.
Payne was 56. He was sick with a fever and he
was watching his friends die one by one. And
while he's in there, what is the United States
doing, the country he helped create? Nothing.
This is the great betrayal. The U .S. ambassador
at the time was a man named Gouverneur Morris.
Morris was a federalist who hated Paine's radical
ideas. He thought Paine was a dangerous anarchist.
And Morris essentially just let him rot in that
prison. He made no effort to claim him as an
American citizen. And Washington. Washington
stayed silent. Washington was president. He was
trying to keep the U .S. neutral in the wars
between Britain and France. He didn't want to
anchor either side. So he sacrificed Paine for
diplomatic convenience. Payne sat in that cell
for months, waiting for a letter from his old
friend George Washington that never came. That
must have just broken his heart. It broke his
heart and it filled him with a rage that would
fester for years. But first, he had to survive.
And this brings us to the famous chalk mark story.
Tell us this. It feels like something straight
out of a movie script. So at the height of the
terror, the jailers would come around at night
with a list of who was scheduled to be executed
the next morning. They would mark the cell door
of the condemned with chalk, usually a cross
or a number. It was a mark of death. Right. Payne
was in a cell with a few other men and he was
very sick with a fever. His cell door had been
left open to let some air in. Now, the door was
heavy. and it opened outwards into the corridor,
pressing flat against the outer wall. Okay, I'm
visualizing this. The jailer came by, checked
his list, and he chalked Payne's door. But because
the door was open, he put the mark on the side
of the door that was facing the corridor, which
was actually the inside face of the door when
it was closed. So when they shut the door for
the night? The mark was on the inside of the
cell, hidden from view. So the next morning,
the execution squad comes down the hall. They
walk down the hall. They look at all the closed
doors. They don't see a mark on Payne's door.
They walk right past him and take the men from
the other cells. He slept through his own execution
because of a simple geometry error. It was a
miracle, pure chance. And a few days later, Robespierre
fell from power. The terror ended. Payne survived.
Eventually, James Monroe, the future president,
became a new ambassador and got him released.
But Payne was a changed man. He was deeply bitter.
And he was also angry at organized religion,
which he felt had enabled so much tyranny. And
while he was in prison, he wrote his most controversial
book, The Age of Reason. This is part six, Controversial
Ideas. And this is the book that really destroyed
his reputation in America. Why? Because it was
a frontal assault on the Bible. Paine was a deist.
He believed in God. He would look at the stars
in the universe and see evidence of a creator.
But he rejected organized religion. He rejected
miracles, prophecies, and the divinity of Jesus.
He called the Bible the word of a demon. He did.
He went through it and pointed out all the violence,
the contradictions, the obscene stories in the
Old Testament. And in the 1790s, America was
going through a major religious revival, the
Second Great Awakening. So this book was just
shocking. He was immediately branded an atheist,
which he wasn't, but the label stuck. People
who had loved common sense were now publicly
burning the age of reason. He just could not
read The Room, could he? He didn't care about
The Room. He only cared about what he thought
was the truth. And then on top of that, he wrote
Agrarian Justice in 1797. This is his big economic
proposal. This is my favorite of his later works.
It is so unbelievably ahead of its time. Payne
argued that poverty was not a natural state.
He said it was created by civilization and specifically
by the concept of private property. He said the
earth belongs to everyone in common. Exactly.
He said that when an individual owns a piece
of land, they are excluding everyone else from
their natural inheritance. So they owe a kind
of ground rent back to society for that privilege.
And what do you want to do with that money? He
proposed creating a national fund and he wanted
to use that fund to give every single person,
man or woman, Rich or poor, a lump sum of 15
pounds sterling when they turn 21. A capital
grant to get started in life. A nest egg for
everyone. And on top of that, he wanted to give
every person over the age of 50 an annual pension
of 10 pounds for the rest of their life. He basically
invented Social Security. And universal basic
income in 1797. But of course, the wealthy elite
thought this was absolute madness. They called
it leveling. They called it theft. It was just
too radical. So he has alienated the church.
He has alienated the church. alienated the wealthy,
and then he decides to go after the most popular
man in America. The letter to George Washington.
In 1796, still furious about being abandoned
in that French prison, he finally let all of
his anger out. He published a scathing open letter
accusing Washington of being incompetent as a
general and treacherous as a friend. We told
him a hypocrite, an imposter. He wrote, the world
will be puzzled to decide whether you are an
apostate or an imposter. You just do not talk
about George Washington that way in 1790s America.
Not if you want to have any friends left. That
letter was the final nail in the coffin. When
Payne finally returned to the United States in
1802, invited by President Jefferson, he was
a pariah. How bad was the reception? It was brutal.
The Federalist newspapers attacked him mercilessly.
They called him a loathsome reptile and a drunken
infidel. Old friends shunned him. People wouldn't
shake his hand on the street. He was old, he
was in poor health, and he was drinking far too
much. And the final insult came a new Rochelle
on his own farm. In 1806, he went to vote in
a local election. And the officials at the polling
place turned him away. They said he wasn't a
citizen. The man who named the country. They
argued that because he had accepted honorary
French citizenship, he had forfeited his American
status. And Gouverneur Morris, his old enemy
from Paris, was there and just let it happen.
It was a complete and utter humiliation. And
he dies in 1809. In Greenwich Village, New York
City. on june 8th the obituary was just cold
he had lived long did some good and much harm
that was it and the funeral this brings us right
back to where we started he had wished to be
buried in the quaker cemetery but because of
his writings against the bible they refused him
so he was buried in a corner of his farm in new
rochelle and six people came two were black freedmen
paying their respects to his abolitionist views
a french woman named marguerite de bonneville
who had cared for him and her children That was
it. No state funeral. No cannons. No eulogies
from famous men. It's a silence. But the story
doesn't end there, does it? We have to talk about
the bones. The bones. So in 1819, a British radical
journalist named William Cobbett, who used to
hate pain but then became a huge admirer, decided
that pain was being neglected and that his proper
resting place should be England. So he just...
He went to the farm in New Rochelle in the middle
of the night, dug up the coffin, and took Payne's
bones. He packed them in a box and sailed back
to Liverpool. What on earth was the plan? He
wanted to build a massive memorial, a shrine,
to Payne. He thought the British working class
would flock to it and be inspired to revolution.
But it completely backfired. People just thought
it was ghoulish and creepy. The town crier in
Thetford, Payne's birthplace, refused to even
announce the arrival of the bones. So Cobbett
is now stuck with a skeleton in his attic. Literally.
He kept the bones in a trunk until he died in
1835. And then his estate was auctioned off.
And in the chaos, the bones were separated. Separated.
You mean lost. They were lost. They just vanished.
Over the years, people have popped up claiming
to have his skull or hand or his jawbone. There
are bizarre rumors that they were made into buttons.
But the truth is, nobody knows. There is no grave.
Thomas Paine is scattered to the winds. My country
is the world. It's weirdly fitting for him, isn't
it? He couldn't be contained by one plot of land,
even in death. So what is the legacy then? Because
despite the lost bones, his ideas, so many of
them, they won in the end. They absolutely did.
Abraham Lincoln was a huge fan. His direct, plain
writing style was heavily influenced by pain.
Thomas Edison called him one of the greatest
Americans. His ideas on social security, on secular
government, on universal human rights, they are
the bedrock of modern democracy, even if we don't
always credit him for them. He was the guy who
could tear down the old house, even if he didn't
quite know how to live in the new one he'd designed.
He was a perpetual revolutionary. He was uncomfortable
in peacetime. He needed a crisis to fight, a
tyrant to overthrow. So here's a final thought
for you, for the listener. Paine wrote that his
generation would be the atom of a new world.
He really thought they were building a kind of
utopia. If you walked into America today, what
would you think? He'd love the technology. He
would adore the Internet. It's the ultimate common
sense distribution method. But I think he'd look
at the massive income inequality, the worship
of political figures, the fact that we still
haven't solved poverty, and he'd grab a pen.
He'd start writing Common Sense Part 2. And he'd
probably get himself canceled for it within a
week. He absolutely would. But maybe we need
a little bit of that energy now and then. We
always do. thanks for joining us on this deep
dive into the incredible radical life of Thomas
Paine it has been a wild ride from start to finish
keep asking questions we'll see you next time