Thomas Paine - How much did he have to do with the founding of our country?

Question

I've read many of the founding fathers including George Washington had an affection for Thomas Paine. He seems to have alot to do with some of the way this country was laid out. Many of the founding fathers got their ideas from him.

I guess my question is why did they look up to him so much, and how much influence did he have on the beginning of our country.

I read he even got to name the country.

Answer 1

Paine was a great influence on the American Revolution. His book Common Sense helped popularize the idea of American independence and government by popular soveriegnty. Paine was more of a pundit than a politican. His ideas weren't necessarily original. Like Jefferson he was influenced by John Locke and the European Englightenment. Paine just popularized these ideas and made them accessible to the average reader.

Paine's influence on the American Revolution would later be under appreciated because of his deism and his involvement with the French Revolution.

Answer 2

Thomas Paine had an impact on thhe founding of this nation, but altogether not a huge one. He came her from Scotland (if i remember correctly). He was basically broke becuase most of his business ventures failed there. He befriended some high profile characters like ben franklin and made his way over here. He was very important right around the time of the revolution. He was a pamphleteer, i.e. he wrote and published informative pamphlets. The most important was Common Sense, and the one about The Rights of Man ws also important. He articulated the outrage that most had been feeling toward Britain. Anyway, he lost favor quickly when he backed the French Revolution and published the Age of Reason, which was at best deist and at worst atheist. Anyway, I also wondered why he was not really considered a Founding Father, and it's primarily cuz he got here right before the revolution, he backed the F.Revolution, wrote Age of Reason, and then basically became broke and then bugged the heck out of George Washington by mail for a long time, and then people stopped considering that he was important.
He didn't name the country. The country is named after Amerigo Vespucci (sp?).
The founding fathers didn't get their ideas from him. He wrote, essentially, one important pamphlet (CS). Ideas came from Locke, Ancient Rome, Montesqui, Ancient Greece, etc. Paine can't honestly be mentioned in the same breath as those and other influences.
All in all, of all the "founding fathers" he had the least impact.

Answer 3

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RE:
Thomas Paine - How much did he have to do with the founding of our country?
I've read many of the founding fathers including George Washington had an affection for Thomas Paine. He seems to have alot to do with some of the way this country was laid out. Many of the founding fathers got their ideas from him.

I guess my question is why did they look up to him so...

Answer 4

Thomas Paine wrote a lot on the injustices coming down from the English crown (King George III) at the time. It is believed that his writing is what gave the ideas of equality, representation, freedom and independence. His writing is what gave the founders of America a goal to shoot for (a reason for Revolution). I've even heard it said that while Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, it was more a refining and polishing of the ideas presented by Thomas Paine.

Answer 5

Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an English-American intellectual, scholar, revolutionary, deist and political and religious thinker, who spent much of his time in America and France. A radical pamphleteer, Paine anticipated and helped foment the American Revolution through his powerful writings, most notably Common Sense, an incendiary pamphlet advocating independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain.

Common Sense, Paine's pro-independence monograph published anonymously on 10 January 1776 spread quickly among literate colonists. About 120,000 copies are alleged to have been distributed throughout the colonies which themselves totaled only four million free inhabitants, making it the best-selling work in 18th-century America. It convinced many colonists, including George Washington, to seek redress in political independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and argued strongly against any compromise short of independence. The work was greatly influenced (including in its name – Paine had originally proposed the title Plain Truth) by the equally controversial pro-independence writer Benjamin Rush and was instrumental in bringing about the Declaration of Independence.

Paine's strength lay in his ability to present complex ideas in clear and concise form, as opposed to the more philosophical approaches of his Enlightenment contemporaries in Europe, and it was Paine who proposed the name United States of America for the new nation. When the war arrived, Paine published a series of important pamphlets, The Crisis, credited with inspiring the early colonists during the ordeals faced in their long struggle with the British.

Thomas Paine's writings had great influence on his contemporaries, especially the American revolutionaries. His books inspired both philosophical and working-class Radicals in the United Kingdom; and he is often claimed as an intellectual ancestor by United States liberals, libertarians, progressives and radicals. Both Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Alva Edison read his works with respect.

Answer 6

Thankfully HE wasn't chosen to lead the Continental Army, though he was a top choice.

Steven Wolf

Answer 7

A Biography of Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

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Thomas Paine was born on the twenty-nineth of January 1737 at Thetford, Norfolk in England, as a son of a Quaker. After a short basic education, he started to work, at first for his father, later as an officer of the excise. During this occupation Thomas Paine was an unsuccesfull man, and was twice dismissed from his post. In 1774, he met Benjamin Franklin in London, who advised him to emigrate to America, giving him letters of recommandation.

Paine landed at Philadelphia on November 30, 1774. Starting over as a publicist, he first published his African Slavery in America, in the spring of 1775, criticizing slavery in America as being unjust and inhumaine. At this time he also had become co-editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine On arriving in Philadelphia, Paine had sensed the rise of tension, and the spirit of rebellion, that had steadily mounted in the Colonies after the Boston Teaparty and when the fightings had started, in April 1775, with the battles of Lexington and Concord. In Paine's view the Colonies had all the right to revolt against a government that imposed taxes on them but which did not give them the right of representation in the Parliament at Westminster. But he went even further: for him there was no reason for the Colonies to stay dependent on England. On January 10, 1776 Paine formulated his ideas on american independence in his pamphlet Common Sense.

In his Common Sense, Paine states that sooner or later independence from England must come, because America had lost touch with the mother country. In his words, all the arguments for separation of England are based on nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments and common sense. Government was necessary evil that could only become safe when it was representative and altered by frequent elections. The function of government in society ought to be only regulating and therefore as simple as possible. Not suprisingly, but nevertheless remarkable was his call for a declaration of independence. Due to the many copies sold (500.000) Paine's influence on the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 is eminent. Another sign of his great influence is the number of loyalist reactions to Common Sense.

During the War of Independence Paine volunteered in the Continental Army and started with the writing of his highly influencial sixteen American Crisis papers, which he published between 1776 and 1783. In 1777 he became Secretary of the Committee of Foreign Affairs in Congress, but already in 1779 he was forced to resign because he had disclosed secret information. In the following nine years he worked as a clerck at the Pennsylvania Assembly and published several of his writings.

In 1787 Thomas Paine left for England, innitialy to raise funds for the building of a bridge he had designed, but after the outbreak of the French Revolution he became deeply involved in it. Between March 1791 and February 1792 he published numerous editions of his Rights of Man, in which he defended the French Revolution against the attacks by Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. But it was more then a defence of the French Revolution: An analysis of the roots of the discontent in Europe, which he laid in arbitrary government, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and war. The book being banned in England because it opposed to monarchy, Paine failed to be arrested because he was already on his way to France, having been ellected in the National Convention. Though a true republicanist, he was imprisoned in 1793 under Robespierre, because he had voted against the execution of the dethroned king Louis XVI. During his imprisonment the publication of his Age of Reason started. Age of Reason was written in praise of the achievements of the Age of Enlightment, and it was om this book that he was acussed of being an atheist.

After his release he stayed in France until 1802, when he sailed back to America, after an invitation by Thomas Jefferson who had met him before when he was minister in Paris and who admirred him. Back in the United States he learned that he was seen as a great infidel, or simply forgotten for what he had done for America. He continued his critical writings, for instance against the Federalists and on religious superstition.

After his death in New York City on June 8, 1809 the newspapers read: He had lived long, did some good and much harm, which time judged to be an unworthy epitaph.