When Thomas Paine died in June 1809, only a dozen people came to his funeral. The burial service was held in Westchester County near the 250-acre farm gifted to Paine by the people of the state of New York in gratitude for his role in stirring the American Revolution. The site of Paine’s funeral wasn’t hard to find or difficult to reach, yet not a single political leader attended.
Richard Bell, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, examines Paine’s meteoric rise to celebrity status during the American Revolution and his equally dramatic fall from grace in the decades afterward. Bell illuminates Paine’s humble origins and his extraordinary gift for political argument. He explains why Paine’s Common Sense (1776) sold so many copies and why that 46-page pamphlet is credited with catalyzing a mass movement driven by the cause of independence.
Bell also explores the surprisingly bitter backlash Paine experienced when he published the 1791 manifesto The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in support of the social and political extremism of the French Revolution and The Age of Reason, his 1794 defense of deism, reason, and free thought. Once lionized as our most relatable and revolutionary founding father, according to Bell, Paine died a pariah: too radical and uncompromising for the cautious new country he had helped call into being.
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