A Canadian who grew up outside Toronto, I first heard of Thomas Paine very briefly in high school when my Canadian history classes spent as little time as possible on the American Revolution. That was more about the Loyalist expulsion to Canada than the achievement of American independence. 

My next encounter with Paine came about 20 years ago when I applied for my current job as a professor of English at the university in New Rochelle. I had earned my Ph.D. in 18th-century literature, so I was applying for the 18th-century literature job at a university in New Rochelle. I noticed the Thomas Paine Cottage and museum were fairly close to campus. In my job interview, I asked about the relationship between the Paine sites and school. They replied that there was no relationship, and I noted to myself that if I got the job, I would like to try to build that relationship. 

Fast forward to 2009 and the first stirrings for transferring archival materials from the TPHA Memorial Building to the university library. I met Gary Berton then. His knowledge and passion about Paine was contagious. We helped start the Institute for Thomas Paine Studies at Iona and we organized in 2012 the first International Conference of Thomas Paine Studies. 

This was a real watershed for me. In so many ways, it launched me fully into my Thomas Paine research. That conference allowed me to edit New Directions in Thomas Paine Studies (Palgrave, 2016), the collection of essays arising from that conference. 

At that 2012 conference, over lunches and coffee, we began to work and plan for what’s become Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Princeton, 2026), the six-volume scholarly edition of Paine’s works and correspondence, which will definitively re-write the conventional early-American narratives about Paine. Historians have so much wrong, and we are about to correct the record, which is exactly the original goal of the TPHA. 

I will never forget the day after the conference when I looked at the table of contents in Philip Foner’s two-volume edition of Paine’s works. One section listed Paine’s “songs and poems,” and I knew I had a unique connection to Paine. My academic specialty is poetry, so I decided to write a book on Paine and his poetry, which I’ve done, “The Field of Imagination: Thomas Paine and Eighteenth-Century Poetry” (Virginia, 2019). 

Paine used poetry throughout his life — in print and manuscripts — to explore political ideology as well as human feelings. That’s what makes Paine so interesting, compelling and fascinating to me. 

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A response to Dr. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho 

Growing up in New Rochelle, I’ve always been intrigued by Thomas Paine.  As a young student in New Rochelle’s Catholic schools, I enjoyed educational class trips to the Thomas Paine Cottage. These trips reinforced what we were being taught in school that Thomas Paine’s writing of Common Sense  played an important role in the American revolution.   

As I grew older, I wondered why this national historical site did not seem very popular. The cottage grounds were usually empty, and the museum building felt off limits, unlike my childhood tours. I’d recall childhood play on the Paine property beside the stream and lake. I’d ponder why this national historical site wasn’t getting the attention Paine deserved. 

In recent years, I’m delighted to see public interest in Thomas Paine and his contributions to America’s founding is gaining traction.  

I’m also delighted with the academic presentations by the Paine Association, such as the talk by Dr. Carvalho, which stimulated this essay. 

When I heard Carvalho’s ideas, my first impression was that Thomas Paine’s writings remain as pertinent today as in the revolutionary era. Most assuredly, the administration in the White House now would have had Paine arrested for his writings as a foreigner. It seems we have come full circle from the days of the revolution to the modern presidency.  

For instance, many of the debates on voting rights in Paine’s day are relevant in America today.  The same can be said about conversations around the criteria or qualifications to be a citizen.  

Paine says that aristocracy and oligarchy should be rejected.  Likewise, Paine says the worst kind of government is one where decisions are subject to the passions of a single individual.  I advise those in the White House to study Paine’s writings on what a democratic republic should looks like.  

Borrowing from Paul Simon, one might be tempted to ask, where have you gone, Thomas Paine?  

Dr. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, Professor of Modern History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, on February 15 spoke at the Paine Building on The Age of Reason. 

“By criticizing the adulterous connection between the church and state,” he said, “by demonstrating the impossibility of the Bible being the word of God, and by proposing the equality of all creatures before God, Paine had devastating effects on the governments using religion to maintain hierarchies and oppression.” As a consequence, “the question of democracy was at the heart of religious debate at the time.” 

The debate continues. 

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Thomas Paine’s words leap from the written page. How did Paine sound when speaking? Raised in Norfolk, Paine lived in England until age 37 when he sailed to America in 1774. One may assume he spoke with a British accent distinctly different than how English was spoken in the American colonies. That assumption, like other assumptions about Paine, calls for deeper inquiry. Upon inspection, the evidence is that Paine sounded as if he was born in America. 

Despite a general belief among English speakers in Britain that it was Americans who rejected traditional rules for speaking, the contrary is true. This is confirmed in a 2018 article by BBC commentator Christine Ro, “How Americans preserved British English.” 

Contemporary observers expressed surprise at how well English was spoken in America in the late 18th century. A visitor to Philadelphia in the 1760s was startled that “‘the English tongue’” was “‘spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection surpassing any but the polite part of London.’” 

An Englishman visiting during the Revolution observed in his diary that, although “‘the inhabitants of this Country are composed of different Nations and different languages, yet it is very remarkable that they in general speak better English than the English do.’” 

Until the end of the 18th century, English was spoken virtually the same way in England and America, asserts Patricia T. O’Connor and Stewart Kellerman in Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language (Random House, 2009). 

Today’s British accent emerged in the 19th century. As the century progressed, Americans largely retained traditional ways of speaking English while England radically deviated from those linguistic roots. Spoken British English and American English diverged. 

On the cusp of the 19th century, the English began dropping the final “r” sound from words like “mother” and “far” to say “mothah” and “fah.” By the early 1800s, educated Britons were saying “lahf ” and “bahth” and “dahnce” while pronouncing the “h” in “herb.” 

O’Connor and Kellerman report speakers in England began dropping whole syllables. For example, they shortened the word “secretary” to “sec- -tree,” cutting off the next to last syllable. Americans continued to pronounce “secretary” and other words in the traditional way, articulating all syllables, as England had. 

So, when Paine arrived in Philadelphia, speaking the English he’d spoken for 37 years in England, both he and those hearing him may have noticed little difference in their respective accents. We have no record of how Paine heard the speech of Americans, nor how they heard Paine’s speech. We have clues. 

Among the few surviving comments on how Paine spoke English came from the Englishman Abraham Raimbach, upon meeting Paine in Paris in 1802. He observed that Paine was “fluent in speech, of mild and gentle demeanor, clear and distinct in enunciation, and his voice exceedingly soft and agreeable.” 

While recognizing the paucity of evidence for how Paine actually spoke, it’s reasonable to extrapolate. We know that Paine, upon arriving in Philadelphia, rapidly fit into the political and social cultures he found in his new home. Since residents of England and America at that time spoke English in ways that were virtually indistinguishable, the way Paine spoke blended in well with the way Americans spoke.

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Thomas Edison, among the most famous men of the early 20th century, played a vital role in restoring the public reputation of Thomas Paine. A great admirer of Paine since his youth, Edison attended the 1925 groundbreaking ceremony for the Thomas Paine Memorial Building in New Rochelle. 

Pulitzer Prize winning political biographer Edmund Morris, in his 2019 Edison, tells how Edison found Paine as a child in Michigan before the Civil War. Edison’s father, a “radical, randy, secessionist,” Morris writes, “had ‘larned’ him the complete works of Thomas Paine when he was still a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railroad.” 

Edison’s affinity for Paine led him to befriend William van der Weyde at the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. To introduce van der Weyde’s 1925 biography, The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, he wrote: 

“I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine’s books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was thirteen. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which showed from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us…. 

“Many a person who could not understand Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp…. 

“He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea by which other men often express the name of deity…. 

“He conceived and designed the iron bridge and the hollow candle, the principle of the modern central draught burner. The man had a sort of universal genius. He was interested in the diversity of things.”

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The Federalist Party, anointed by most historians as the founding party of the new United States, shaped the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1787. Their conservative and nationalist ideas were voiced in 85 newspaper essays, collected in “The Federalist Papers,” to counter arguments against the plan from those who wanted more democracy in the new government. 

America’s first official political party, Federalists dominated the government from 1789 to 1801. Founded by Alexander Hamilton, fronted by President John Adams, The Federalist Party favored plutocracy, a strong central government ruled by a few rich power brokers. Their 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts legalized deporting immigrants and stifling free speech. 

Drawing on deep Tory sympathies in New England, the Federalists advocated London’s agenda in America. They blocked Paris interests after the French Revolution. British leaders called the Federalists the “English Party” and “Oligarch Party.” Adams was seen as a monarchist after proposing hereditary succession for the U.S. presidency. 

The Federalist Party lost the 1800 election to the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson, who won votes by upholding states’ rights over Hamilton’s federal power, as with the central bank. Jefferson fought Hamilton’s autocratic claim of “implied powers” not granted in the Constitution. President Jefferson in 1802 invited Thomas Paine to return to America after his imprisonment in France by Robespierre, urged on by the American minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, a Federalist. 

Writing letters to the nation from New Rochelle and then Greenwich Village, Paine waged war against the Federalist usurpation of the American Revolution. He championed the principles of democracy. Federalists were his enemy as much as the British lords. Here are some of Paine’s analyses. 

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