Paine used Common Sense to convince the American colonists that to be fully independent and free, the King and what he stood for had to be discarded. A republican form of government had to replace monarchy and nobility.
Paine means to rouse the emotions; but unlike many a Romantic, he means to stir us to accept and act primarily upon rational principles and historic evidence. Paine does not represent simply a transition between politico-religious and politico-economic theory: he combines them.
Paine’s ideas about his own national consciousness evolved from this time onward in ways that paralleled the way in which Americans were thinking about themselves. In 1776, he understood that a true national consciousness had to move beyond politics and constitution making.
The correspondence between Colonel Roosevelt and myself on the subject of Thomas Paine is in the main so directly to the point that an explanatory foreword is hardly necessary. There are nevertheless some matters touched upon in these letters concerning which a few additional words will be of value.
If Paine would feel at home there, he would also fight to protect this nascent medium. Learning what had happened to the media he founded as corporations moved in, he would spot commercialization as Danger Number One.
If ever an individual deserved a place of prominence as a preeminent American it is Thomas Paine. If we had to point to one person who invented the language of the Revolution, it was Thomas Paine.
The Rights of Man won an audience in the 1790’s because the Federalists in power moved away from accommodation towards coercion. Federalists strung the “strings” which Rights of Man could “vibrate”.
Succeeding generations have seen the smoke screen of personal abuse around Paine gradually disappear, allowing him to stand forth as the greatest advocate of democracy, social security and freedom of thought the world has yet seen.
Paine, though prominent in two revolutions and almost hanged for attempting to raise a third, is grown, in our day, somewhat dim. To our great grandfathers, he seemed a kind of earthly Satan, a subversive infidel rebellious alike against his God and his King.
![“Reason against unreason” a 1882 illustration by Joseph Keppler and Adolph Schwarzmann shows the “Light of Reason”, containing bust portraits of “Johannes Kepler, I. Kant, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, B. de Spinoza, Franklin, Voltaire, E.H. Haeckel, Tyndall, Huxley, [and] Darwin”, beaming against a large umbrella labeled “Bigotry, Supernaturalism, [and] Fanaticism” – Library of Congress](https://thomaspaine.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Reason-against-unreason.jpg)
Paine frequently stated that he was not a member of any political party, but it is apparent from the following letters and the anonymous articles, that he took a more active part than has hitherto been known in helping the Republican (Jeffersonian) Party.
Paine’s talents were based on another quality: he was a revolutionary thinker, honest, courageous, and prepared to go to the root of things. As he put it: “When precedents fail to assist us, we must return to the first principles of things for information, and think as if we were the first men that thought.”
Questions of citizenship, naturalization, domicile and even residence do present perplexing problems in the field of law. But the soundness of Ward’s challenge may be determined today by marshaling the facts on the one hand and then applying the law as it then existed.
