Arriving in Philadelphia as a broke, typhus-ridden nobody, Thomas Paine found his voice fast, publishing Common Sense in January 1776 and helping turn colonial grievance into a readable, comprehensive argument for independence. “Maybe Paine had the temerity to write such stirring and nakedly seditious words because he had nothing to lose,” Matthew Harwood, vice president of communications at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, writes. “Before coming to America, Paine was a failed corset maker and excise officer with minimal formal education whose first wife died in childbirth, along with their child. He had to sell his belongings to avoid debtor’s prison before skipping London for Philadelphia. As eminent historian of the American Revolution Bernard Bailyn wrote, ‘One had to be a fool or a fanatic in early January 1776 to advocate American independence.’” And though Paine remains in “the popular wilderness,” Harwood explains that “if that 37-year-old immigrant never had set sail for Philadelphia in the fall of 1774, we might not be here at all.”
